Second Terrace

A short hiatus

Well, I haven't posted much recently, and I won't post at all for another week.

This state of affairs is due to two reasons.

The first is that the repose of my good friend and Reader, +Douglas, has been a sore loss.

But the second reason is a happy one. My daughter, Marisa, is getting married this Saturday (10/29).

She is marrying a fine young man, Zachary, who is presently a Sub-Deacon (who will likely go on into the higher orders). I could not have asked for a better son-in-law. Fine, pious, studious, a good shot with a musket, and deeply in love with one of the three most beautiful women I know.

I never wanted to give away my daughter, but as I must, I could do no better than to him.

So I covet your prayers for this new Orthodox family, about to be established in nuptial holy mystery.

And for us of the older generation, who want a joyous, sunny, harmonious, somewhat rambunctious feast this Saturday eve, steeped in beauty, bathed in peace.

Signing off for a few days.

Roger that.

 

Occupational questions

As a creationist and traditional moralist, why can I not protest Wall Street?

Someone like Yannaras would surely call me a pietist -- and under certain conditions, I would accept the charge. As one of those, then, and even as a "fundamentalist," can I not take a rather simple reading of the Bible and find a withering assessment of the rich and poor divide in the West?

Does not the Theotokos herself take a prophetic stand against the worldly exaltations? Are the powers, in the Magnificant, completely bodiless?

Why is there not a literalist, fundamentalist reading of the Year of Jubilee? an economic moment of the cancellation of debt? a restoration of the old property lines? A built-in systemic revulsion of servitude and slavery?

Or is at economics when right-wing fundamentalists decide to become allegorical all at once? Or when they become conveniently dispensational?

That is, when all difficult moral choices are put off to the millennium?

Why are all difficult moral choices that are put off economical? Socio-economical?

Why did the "reformation" adopt such a secularistic model of sola scriptura? Was the Calvinistic economic model of the rich getting rich off of usury so precious, that it was worth severing Christian consciousness from the Rule of the Saints? 

As a committed creationist and traditional moralist, I am forced to read history. Odd things emerge. Laissez-faire economics and hyper-capitalism used to be -- at least before the 18th Century -- the object of derision. They used to be seen as corrosions, "de-evolutions" if you will, of the civility of Christendom. 

The "religious" mores and ethics of Wall Street used to be called "liberal" by more educated conservatives.

I am wondering where conservative Christianity should take an attitude about protesters. A year ago, with the Tea Party, many, many in the right wing brandished guns and unfortunate signs, and said all kinds of anti-statist things. I should think, merely to be consistent, that they should not scruple then to take up signs and tents and sleeping bags and sit with erstwhile hippies in the streets in the cold.

After all, Wall Street has done a lot more harm than the State. You may not like to hear that, I'm sure.

Christians have always criticized the worldly powers -- especially the rich (in a literalistic reading), and held them to a prophetic critique, following after the Canticle of the Theotokos, the Epistle of James, and the Sermon on the Mount. 

The economics of the Year of Jubilee is meant for the Millennium, to be sure.

But here is where I part company with the rest of fundamentalists: 

The Millennium is now.

Let us pray to the Lord.

Lord have mercy.

A spot on prayer, or the real revolution

If you take all the concerns and subjects of the Bible -- things that the Holy Trinity wants us to do and become -- prayer comes out on top. Prayer and love are intertwined. Prayer and freedom cannot be separated. The only way to become a person (rather than a passive object, like a "consumer") is through prayer. It goes without saying that prayer and Orthodox belief are much the same. When one prays, truly, the world is transcended: the sad icy socioeconomic structures of man are surmounted. The mountain Jesus spoke of that is moved and cast into the sea is the mountain of "apparent" determinism -- all the hopelessness and inevitability of a dark age. Orthodoxy produces prayer: if it does not, than it wasn't Orthodoxy. "By their fruits ye shall know them." 

Go Fish

The Orthodox Church lost a great man this past week, but few will pay much mind. My Reader, the newly-reposed Servant of God +Douglas, was never one for celebrity and fame.

But I will say this, and mark it down clear: I never knew a more Christian man. And today, I grieve that we are here to bury him ...

The first time I met him was on my very first week here in Pittsburgh. I met him in the same place that I last saw him, just days ago -- in the hospital, of course. He joked (of course): “I’m a hick.” I said, “so am I.” Then he said, “I do a lot of fishing.” I told him that was where we parted company, because the fish generally snicker when they see me coming, and wink and nudge each other with their fins when they see me cast.

On that hospital bed in Shadyside, he said, “We can fix that. Someday, we’ll go.”

I’m still waiting.

Jesus once told Peter, after a large haul of fish, “Follow Me, and I will make you fishers of men.”

Doug was like that: he followed Jesus straight-away and obeyed His Church. Consequently, God made Reader Douglas a fisher of men ... and women ... and alcoholics, drug addicts, hopeless cases, street panhandlers, failures and washed out people ...

... a fisher of just folk, people like you and me.

We are all here today as part of that great big haul of fish that Reader Douglas pulled in, in Orthodox service to the Chief Fisherman’s saving commands.

I am here today to talk about obligation -- yours and mine. We are all obliged. We are all sunk deep in debt up to our eyeballs.

Some of you here today are no longer drunks simply because of your meeting up with Doug.

Some of you here today are not in jail because Doug was faithful to his Lord.

Some of you here today still have your children, still have your house, still have a job and are still off the streets because Doug rescued you.

Some of you are even alive because Doug prayed for you late in the night when you were busy doing whatever you were doing, destroying yourself, and because this simple man was willing to go out late just to haul your drunk self back to detox, or to talk your sorry self out of a suicidal hole.

All of us here, and all of us here at St. John’s, and all the way to Alaska and back to DC -- all of us are better men and women because we met the life of Jesus Christ in the voice, and in the hands, and in the fellowship of this humble fisherman, +Reader Douglas.

I am here to talk about obligation, because any time that we are saved by the love of Jesus, we become obligated. There is now a great big debt to pay to God to make things right. There is now restitution to be made. We were given a gift in this man: it is now high time to send God a thank you note, and to show our gratitude.

How do we pay back?

We all need to live better, and to love a whole lot more.

Some of you here from AA need to get to work quickly to find a new sponsor: you know Doug wants me to tell you that. Don’t waste time just being depressed because your sponsor is getting buried today: get your Recovery back on track, and soon.

Some of you need to make amends and make restitution to people you’ve hurt. You need to forgive the people who’ve done you wrong ... you need to get your emotions and passions under control. You need to quit backstabbing and cutting people down at the dinner table.

Some of you need to get to back to Church every Sunday, and to make things right with the God Who wants to save you: after all, this is what Douglas did in spades.

You need to know that despite Doug’s increasingly weak and feeble body, he insisted on coming to this place, to worship the Holy Trinity in the apostolic way. You saw him sit on a chair in the back, and you might have wondered why. I will tell you: the only reason why he sat was simply because he could not physically stand.

Reader Douglas was the only person that I ever begged not to come to Liturgy, so sick he would be sometimes. But I guess you know how that suggestion turned out.

Many times, Doug and I talked about how Church and AA were related ... I came to think that Doug saw the Orthodox Church as a kind of “super-duper AA” ... and watching him live out the rest of his life, I came to agree with him.

The Church picks up where AA leaves off, where it cannot go ... the AA can save your body, but Jesus Christ and His Church alone can save your soul.

In AA, you introduce yourselves like this: “Hello, my name is John, and I am an alcoholic.” And you say, “We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.”

In the Orthodox Church, we say: “I believe in one God, Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth ... and in Jesus Christ His Only-Begotten Son.”

And in this Church we introduce ourselves like this: “Hello, my name is Jonathan, and I am a sinner.”

AA is good for this time and place. But the Orthodox Church is for this world, this age, and the next.

There are a million reasons why I will miss Doug. To be honest, I am trying to avoid the thought of all of them. Sure, I am happy for Doug right now, for he is now resting in the bright presence of Grace, and in the glory of Jesus Christ, and in the fellowship of the Virgin Mary and all the saints. I know that his meeting up with his beloved Saint Herman has been poignant, to say the least.

But two reasons remain, and I feel I must share them with you.

The first is simple. Doug was faithful. He never threatened to quit because someone had hurt his feelings. He never accumulated a list of people he no longer talked to. I never heard a discouraging word from Doug about anyone.

Honest to God, Doug never -- at least in my hearing -- complained about or slandered or maligned anyone. His speech was restrained from vulgar, bitter and swearing words: he told me that he prayed "Set a guard, O Lord, about my lips." He said that he especially tried to clean up his speech, since he was Orthodox clergy.

Mind you, he was a Reader, not even a Priest.

And Doug made it clear to me that when the doors were open here at St. John’s, he would be here if it were at all physically possible. He said that he would stay here, at this Altar, till Kingdom come. I could count on Doug showing up, in the fear of God, with faith and with love.

He could never understand quitters and tumbleweeds. He’d always say that he had no time in his own life for feeling sorry for himself.

The second reason is a little more complicated.

It started this past Lent. I think it was around the Third Sunday, when we venerate the Cross smack dab in the middle of our annual Revival that we call the Great Fast.

I remember clearly, and painfully, watching Doug come into the sacristy here. I was suiting up for the Pre-Sanctified Liturgy on Friday night, and looked up to see him shaking, tears streaming down his haggard face.

He explained: “A guy called me last night ... he was a drunk and he was going to court ... he wanted to kill himself ... I tried for half an hour to talk him down ...

“... he shot himself on the phone ... I heard the shots and the roar ...”

There are lots of things in this sinful age that human nature does not prepare you for. There are some things that you cannot recover from. There are grievous wounds that cannot be mended here in this frame, this body, under these skies.

And hearing those shots from a drunk despairing man was something that the weak body of +Reader Douglas could not stand.

Things were better for a while. The St. John’s Church helped Doug help the young wife and children of the man on the phone. After Pascha this year, Doug finally fulfilled a long dream of going up to visit Alaska, where he made his one and only pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Herman on Spruce Island.

I hear the Yupik Orthodox priests up there really liked him: I’m also sure the regular curia didn’t know what to make of him. He was always a tad unsettling to those who had to have things whitebread and regular.

But lately his body began to fail, and he could never get the sound of those gunshots out of his mind.

He began to hurt. And one day, while he was under a respirator lately at Shadyside, whilst he was lying unconscious, it came to me clear that it was time.

Time for a Sabbath rest.

Time to go home.

This faithful servant had been out laboring at night in the deep, fishing for the Lord, long enough.

I miss him because we all benefitted from him: but our benefit from Doug -- as is always true in the sharing fellowship of the Body of Christ -- usually came at a cost to him.

Doug bore his Cross for Jesus Christ: and quite often, that Cross was us.

So, I must admit to you, when Doug’s friend (and mine) Tyrone came and knocked on my office window late Thursday night and came, through a rain of tears, and told me the news, I was kind of relieved, if you must know.

Sure, I was sad. But I was glad. Because a certain grief had been lifted from a man who had carried it way too long.

A certain cross had been lifted from a long-weary back.

A certain ex-drunk had been told, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant, enter thou into the joy of thy Lord.”

I have Doug’s prize fishing pole.

I will keep it unto the day that we can make good on that Angler promise.

To go fishing in in the hick streams of the transfigured earth, where someone, even like me, can reel something in.

Anger

I would like to think about anger here for a while. Yes, about the passion of anger in particular, as opposed to a short emotion that comes and goes.

A passion becomes the subject, and the soul turns into an object. Man becomes passive in his heart -- something which is completely contrary to created nature. The anger, as passion, becomes master: the person becomes a slave -- something he should never be.

There is much that is written already on anger. I recommend the Philokalia, or something by Metropolitan Hierotheos, or one of the new things by Fr. Alexis Trader.

But here and now, I propose something different. Let us think about the anger -- not of you -- but of someone else. What if it is the anger of passion that is afflicting your friend? your parent? your spouse? your child? your colleague at work?

Here, the responsibility is not so direct. For the self, the prescription is relatively simple. Repent. Surrender blame. Fast. Repeat the Jesus Prayer. Deliberately forgive your enemies and bless them in your mind, over and over again. Resist thoughts that are known to re-enflame the anger. Consider your own sinfulness and your need for Grace that exceeds the guilt of your enemies. Receive the mysteries of reconciliation and the Eucharist. Repent. Rejoice. Over and over again. Bear your Cross.

This is old advice, and cannot be modified, because it is perfect. It is designed for human nature, and it can be and must be effective in every moment, in every person and situation. To think otherwise is to fall to satanic deception.

That is the counsel given by the Church to angry people.

But again, what if the angry person is not you, but someone else? This advice is meaningful for the penitent, who accepts his radically free moral agency and takes complete responsibility for his actions. What if he doesn't? What if you love that person, but are exposed to his anger? What if you suffer collateral damage? What if he becomes -- at least in practice -- your enemy? An enemy who is supposed to love you? An enemy that is becoming increasingly more difficult to love?

It seems that this age is becoming more ludicrous and more incensed. Stupider, less truly educated and intellectually disciplined, and even more inflammable.

What do you do with the irrascibility of another, whom you either cannot, nor would not, choose to escape?

I wonder if the sojourn of our Lord with humanity in the world might help us in this question. Let us think about this problem in the only way a Christian can: theologically. Let us speak of what we know:

He was and is impassable, sinless, divinely obedient in His humanity, completely co-inherent.

I do not know whether the Manger and the Cave were surrounded by an angry mob of cult and society, but His persistent Mystical Body is. Right now. Like in your house.

What do you do when the tantrums flare, when the long repetitions of grievances get chanted, when the black books of past aughts get opened up to decades of carefully registered catalogs? When someone else, a brother or closer, must wring their heart in distemper?

What did, what does, Jesus do? What did, what does, Mary? Or the saints?

Prayer, of course. Even our Lord, the Second Person of the Trinity, retreated in wilderness to pray. There is no possibility of sainthood without constant prayer: it is the primary condition of "Theotokos."

In particular, pray the petition "Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil." You cannot trust the Lord without praying this. Pray the Jesus Prayer, wear your prayer rope. Pray and fast.

Why? I surmise, with more than anecdotal evidence, that evil grows like bacteria in the social presence of passion, especially anger. And I take literally the hopeful words "Resist the Devil and he will flee you."

If you do not pray, then the passionate anger of your friend will suck you into its dark vortex. You, too, will enter the fray. And while you might entertain yourself with images of romantic self-defense, of only standing up for yourself and establishing your rights, the reality remains: none of these images will be realized in the end, and the only gain will be greater ruin.

I have fallen to anger many times in my odd life, and never has it turned for good. Prayer, on the other, has never failed to turn out for good, if prayer was really done.

It establishes, for one thing, a zone of freedom. Or, if you please, a shaft of sunlight on a distant pasture in a cold afternoon of gloom and foreboding. Prayer establishes a locale in which determinism no longer obtains. Genetic predispositions might not take over here. Personalities may not give over to the iron chains of probability.

"Sin is crouching at your door: you may overcome it."

That can only be understood on a plane higher than double-election. The problem of anger has forced me to turn against not only nihilism, but also voluntaristic calvinism. One cannot lose hope for the conversion of destiny in prayer: anger can fade away.

But it doesn't have to: and, in a barbarous age, more frequently it does not. That is the problem.

Pray so that the tide of anger will ebb at the shoreline of your heart. Only prayer will accomplish this high ground.

Pray and fast. Fasting is the incarnational realization of prayer. As such, it acts as an amplification into real history. Onto the real dirt of this world. Into the real time of human speech and defecatory idiocy. 

Fasting wilts passion, and we are not talking here only of gluttony. Fasting withers the passions -- the presence of any provides fuel for the enemy fire. 

I know -- sadly, only from secondhand experience -- that the presence of a person totally surrendered to deification (i.e., a saint) seems to pacify the ragings of others. Deification is really the only response we have to demonification: which, I fear, is really the problem here. Passions elevated to a level where empathy is lost, and where also is lost all manner of self-control and voluntary decision seems to indicate a power that is completely alienated from human nature.

I am thinking here especially of the intensity of passion that violates even the rubrics of selfish self-interest. A boy that casts himself into the fire is oppressed by greater powers than his own sinfulness. A man who shakes his broken chains in the place of the dead, and rages at the Son of God, is moved by a deeper pestilential dread than his own sinful choices. He may have been a wife-beating drunk, who moved into murderous crime, who descended into deeper sins -- but now he is inhabited by a Legion of devils.

Yes, I know. Not every anger is demonic. But some are so intense that, without stopping to wonder whether it is "obsession" or "possession," if there is no humane reponse, if there is no answer to the Shepherd's Call, "Are you there? Is it you My child? Could you not tarry one hour?"

If not, and only rage remains, then I wonder how humanity may have gotten so eclipsed. 

Saints are needed. Shepherds who are not hired hands are required. 

Meantime, we remain, on the battlements, in a lonely redoubt, under an apparent siege.

For the meantime, we in the garrison (to continue this marshal trope) cannot lose hope, for to do so is to surrender. We can rightly believe that all sieges come to an end. Every martyr knows that the oppressors and tormentors can only do so much, and then the Lord calls a halt to another Friday: Crossbearing is always limited under God's severe mercy.

This open trust to Sovreignty must be maintained.

There is, too, the Sovreign Promise. We do not have to understand it as deterministic in order to receive its ministry. "If you have faith the size of a mustard seed, say to this mountain move, and it shall move."

I wonder. Perhaps our allegorization of that good verse had not gone far enough. Perhaps it needs to stretch into the reach of time and space: certainly on the Cross, the Lord moved mountains of inevitability, did He not? Sin and Death, after all, are the only answers to certain equations: but, here is Life and Love, anyways. Who could have thought?

Even so, if I pray and fast, believe and confess, and commune with the liberating, excorcizing Christ: then might not the mountains of anger move, even if they are lodged in the heart of another?

"This kind cannot come out other than by prayer and fasting."

So, beloved legionnaires, we will wait and suffer the enemy tide. We will keep safe and preserve the little ones, who do not and cannot understand: it is not our task to explain, and to burden innocent hearts.

We will fast and pray, and liturgize in our little fort.

Here the Son rises, even before the Dawn.

 

Where to Put the Cross

“If any man would come after Me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me” (Mark 8.34).

When you read this, you should remember that Jesus said these words at least one or two years before His Crucifixion. It is sad that the Cross even then had become a symbol of a martyr’s death: it is a “double symbol,” in that the Cross was the martyr’s instrument of death … but it was also the martyr’s burden on his way toward his place of execution.

Here is another important point: Jesus told His followers to take up their cross, not the Holy Cross that only the Son of God could carry. Everyone has their own particular, individual cross that the are called to carry, following after Jesus Christ and in the self-sacrificing ways of Christian love.

For “love” is what your particular cross is all about. Love -- true love -- always requires the sacrifice of self. It requires the sacrifice of comfort, security, rights and privileges, self-preservation, and self-importance.

As anyone will tell you, this kind of sacrifice is painful. It is a necessary, holy sacrifice. But it is a sacrifice made in the face of much resistance from your heart. Your heart does not want to give up its right to complain about others, or its right to insist on its own rights. Your heart rather likes anger and the energy it brings. It enjoys keeping long accounts of how you’ve been done wrong. It likes the idea of being a “victim.”

These passions (for that is what all forms of self-centeredness are) are not worthy of your soul. Your soul is God’s holy Temple, and in it reverence must grow for it to stay alive.

Many are unwilling to make such a sacrifice, given the difficulties and the cost of the Cross. Most are fully willing to play their passions on an endless repeat cycle. This is the problem of the Servant that received only one “talent.” “Many are called,” Our Lord said, “but few are chosen.” 

“God is willing that no man should perish,” St. Paul told St. Timothy. Yes, this is true, but not many are willing to deny self. Not many are willing to love God and his fellow man, to believe God and to work out his salvation with fear and trembling. 

Those who repent and deny self … those who rise above self-centeredness and love God … these are the people who are “chosen.” Everyone is called, but not everyone will repent and believe.

Not everyone will take up their Cross.

Every Cross that is carried for the sake of Christ is mystically linked to the Cross of Golgotha. There was a time in the Exodus when the entire camp of Israelites became ill. God told Moses to make a sculpture of a bronze snake, and to set it high upon a pole in the middle of the great camp. 

Whenever any looked upon the snake, they were immediately healed. 

The Cross is very much like this bronze snake: or rather, the bronze figure is very much like the Cross. “And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness,” Jesus told Nicodemus (in John 3.14), “so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in Him may have eternal life.”

There was another time in the Exodus when the Israelites were being attacked by a mob of killers called the Amalekites. This fight was a life-and-death struggle. If the Israelites lost, it was utter destruction by the evil powers.

God told Moses to stand on a cliff high above the battle. Whenever Moses raised his arms, stretched out wide, the Israelites would get the upper hand over the Amalekites. Whenever he tired and dropped his arms, the Israelites weakened and became overwhelmed by the enemy.

Moses got some help: on one side, Joshua stood, and on the other side, a man called Hur. Together, they helped Moses hold his arms out, stretched wide like a Cross. And Israel won the victory that day against the enemy -- under the sign of the Cross.

On both occasions, God early on impressed upon the world the victorious and mystical shape of the Cross. The Cross, later on Golgotha, would become the symbol of victory for all time against sin and death. Far worse than the plague in the wilderness is the total degradation of death. Far worse than the Amalekites is the total oppression of the evil powers.

The Cross is the act of Divine victory over sin and death. The Cross is the Place, and it is the infinite Moment, when the Son of God swallowed up Death in His Divinity, and when the Son of Man overcame sin by His perfect obedience to the Father. The Son of God and the Son of Man are One Person, Who died for your life … and rose again, for your life.

And when you hold the Cross -- when you bear your individual cross that reflects the True Cross -- you scatter the evil powers in fear and panic. When you bear the Cross and follow Jesus Christ, you overcome your self-centered passions. You climb up over the ruts of self-pity and complaint. You turn off the “tapes” and the broken record-players of old worn-out self-justifying myths. You, in true Christian faith, become a noble soldier of the True Cross, and you stand mightily against the ancient Enemies of Sin and Death: you prevail under the Sign of the Cross.

For it is Jesus this time, not Moses, Who holds His arms open wide on a hilltop on Good Friday afternoon. Fight under His Sign.

For it is Jesus, not the bronze snake, that is lifted up between the earth and the sky on the Holy Cross.

Instead of looking at the bronze figure, bear your own cross of self-denial, and believe. And renounce anger. Forgive. Love. Serve. Believe. Belief and selfishness are opposites: so are love and passion. So are the Cross and despair.

Take up the Cross and plant it deeply down in the depths of your soul. Plant it in the middle of your relationships. Set it deep within your marriage. Place it at the center of your home. Carry it at the very middle of all your thoughts and dreams and emotions. Look at your friend and neighbor, your children and spouse and parent, only under the shadow of the Cross: then, you can only look with self-sacrificial love, and the peace that passes all understanding.

Take up the Cross of Jesus Christ. Die to the cold world. Live for Him. Love, and live forever.

Amen.