Second Terrace

A prayer of preparation

It is better to pray than to sink into despondency. If artists know to find something other than despair, then churchmen ought, at the very least, to know this even better.

This is one reason why God sends us Feasts -- to lift our sodden perspectives out of the pragmatic points of view.

The Nativity is coming next Saturday. It should be a day when brightness is launched, as a long-awaited surprise, in the cave of our present darkness.

This week, in prayer, we do what the Church has always done in uncertain times: we become even more Marian, and we ask her for help in prayer.

I am suggesting to you, as I have to my parishioners, to pray this at least once per day, best at the end:

A Prayer for the Week before Christmas

O Lady, Bride of God, virginal, pure, immaculate, blameless, without stain or disgrace, who through your birth-giving united God the Word with our human nature, and established a link between our fallen state and the things of heaven:

O you, only hope of the hopeless, help of the oppressed, ready protection of those who flee to you and refuge of all Christians:

Despise me not a sinner, who have defiled myself with unclean thoughts, words and deeds, and in my laziness have become a slave to the passions of life.

Since you are the Mother of God, who is the only Lover of Mankind, have mercy and compassion on me, as sinner and prodigal son: accept this prayer from my impure lips, and with the power of your maternity, beg your Son, my Lord and God, that He may open for me the depths of His loving-kindness, forgive my countless sins, convert me to true repentance, and make me faithful to His commands. 

O you who are compassionate, be my constant companion: in this present life, be with me as an intercessor, as a powerful help to turn away the assaults of my enemies, and to guide me to salvation.

At the hour of death, be with me to embrace my poor soul, and to keep away the dreadful sight of Satan; on the awesome day of judgment, deliver me from eternal punishment and make me an heir of your Son's glory, through the grace and love for mankind of your Son, our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

To Him and to His Eternal Father, and to His All-Holy, Good and Life-giving Spirit, we give glory, honor and adoration, now and ever and unto ages of ages. Amen.

(Prayer of Paul the Cenobite to the Theotokos)

Home and Hexabarger

Being a preacher's kid, I come from almost everywhere ("and nowhere," a cognate army brat would hasten to add, with my nodding assent). Huntington Indiana. Kidron Ohio. Churubusco Indiana. Franklin Pennsylvania. Tulsa Oklahoma. Franklin (again) -- actually, Congress Hill above the borough. Then Kingwood Pennsylvania, the northern edge of an odd place called, oddly, "Hexie." 

Huntington is where my parents went to an evangelical college, met, married, had me and then graduated. Dan Quayle is also from Hungtington, but I left as a toddler, so we never met.

Kidron is where my Mennonite grandparents, +Carl and Lena, ran a weekly village newspaper on a linotype and a flat press ... where my polio-ridden grandfather limped with a 50lb cassette of type to the linotype everytime he wanted to change the font and where he blocked out every page with a huge rubber mallet and a score of spacers ... where my all-wise grandmother made paste out of flour and water and wrapped individuals copies for the mail, and took them all in a red wagon to the post office next door. Kidron is where Lehman Hardware has made international business news by selling Amish ware to consumers who are trying to set down roots in something more tangible than the internet. You can get a gas refrigerator there, I kid you not.

Churubusco was named after an important American victory (in 1847) in the Mexican-American War. The little Hoosier village calls itself "Turtle Town USA." I never met any turtles there. I have a much better chance now at doing so, since I live next door to a borough called "Turtle Creek." My dad's parish rented, for a rectory, the bottom floor of a big old red brick farmhouse.

Congress Hill sits on top of Bully Hill, which rises up from picturesque Franklin. It is said, though I don't believe it, that George Washington himself hiked up Bully Hill and declaimed, huffing and puffing from the climb, "That was a bully of a hill." Hence the name.

Tulsa is wellknown on the map. I loved my neighborhood there: nowadays, the magic sheen of memory has been scoured away on the images from Google Earth, through which demigodlike I swoop down from the ether and look at blasted images of shadows which are not meant for human consumption. My neighborhood is peppered by stunted shrubs and brownish grass: gone, from this angle, are the leafy catulpa trees and the buffalo grass lawns and the curbs we used to brake our bicycle tires, since we were going too fast on bikes too big to reach down our bare feet without a curb to stand on. Dad's church, on the corner of Joplin and Haskell, was a white cinderblock affair, cooled off by electric fans and hand fans with Warner Sallman's ubiquitous "Head of Christ" emblazoned on one side of the pasteboard glued to a tongue-depresser. The building belongs, now, to another denomination, another mission. But it still stands, replete with the musty smell of cinderblock in the hot south, and uprooted out of Oklahoman dirt and transfigured in memory, there I still hear the echoes of Ira Stanphill's "Unworthy" on hot summer Sunday nights.

All these places meet and meld as my memories get older and continue to age in the oaken cask of my head. Memory gets older and becomes more complex.

I have learned that complexity can be good or bad. There is, of course, the bad complexity of degeneration. This is often mistaken for evolution. It seems to be more creative, but actually reveals itself as more scripted, more determined, more reprobate.

But the other complexity is beautiful, and not just in the eye of the beholder.

So memories can coruscate together in the surface waters of the consciousness, and there I hear "This is My Father's World" under the dappled gold light of a maple bower, in the limbs I climbed on Congress Hill, on Pone Lane. There, bobbing like the forlorn red and white float I used, in futility, for fishing, I see locusts waking up from a seven-year slumber in Tulsa and menacing funnel clouds glowering in the southwest sky on Palm Sunday. I see dad underhand tossing a white ball to my bat, hitting it before I could swing, just to boost my confidence, and my dog Rocky's tail wagging at the success of it by our big brick house.

But the most memory comes from Hexie, because there is where I learned to love the trees and the hills, the sky and the stars and the old roads of mystery that reached back far into the hollows and valleys.

When I turned fifty a few years back, I understood, finally, that a man must treasure and garden his memory, and that memory must be rooted in a home, a single place that is addressed in the stars, on a certain land.

For memory rooted in home makes for a beautiful kind of complexity, and the good certainty that is sometimes called faith.

I am reading now a book dad got me for Christmas about my home, a haunted placed called Hexie. The book is called, eponymously, A Place Called Hexie. At least two spectral women traipsed up and down the land generations ago, enough to set gossip wagging now for over a hundred years. We had a little vale called "Spooky Valley" that was cool on the hot muggy days in August on my bicycled newspaper route. We played basketball in barns, furnished with special rules so you didn't accidentally fall into the muck of the calves' stall. We milked cows, baled hay, picked the always-growing rocks out of fields.

Hexie grows in beauty everytime I drive back.

Hexabarger is my home that my memory flies to. It is the shore of my conscious sea.

I have written before about Hexie: a Christmas poem, rooted there; and this Halloween remembrance (that's full of legend, as opposed to the factual reporting in Sam Miller's good book).

Meanwhile, I'm reading Hexie, and I'm stuck in a time machine. It's a good way to prepare, old-fashioned, for the Julian Christmas Day.

A Merry Gregorian Christmas: the Wildwood

For those of you celebrating the Gregorian Christmas ... from my house to yours, wherever you are ... in poverty or riches ... in content or despond ... alone or en familia ... at hard labor, gainful employ or unemployed ... by the hearth or walking the earth, between sea and sky ... wherever is your heart, I pray that you will know Peace in your earth, and the God's Will that is always good and Incarnate. Merry Christmas, a full and brimming table, and wassail.

I offer you these words from my favorite carol this year, the "Wildwood Carol," sung best by John Rutter and friends.

Sing o the wild wood, the green holly 
The silent river and barren tree 
The humble creatures that no man sees 
Sing O the wild wood  

A weary journey one winter's night 
No hope of shelter, no rest in sight 
Who was the creature that bore Mary? 
A simple donkey  

And when they came into Bethl'hem town 
They found a stable to lay them down 
For their companions that Christmas night 
An ox and an ass  

And then an angel came down to earth 
To bear the news of the Saviour's birth 
The first to marvel were shepherds poor 
And sheep with their lambs 

Here is Jane Siberry's inimitable take on the Wildwood:

 

The impossibilities

This is a season for the making of lists. We pull out our stubby No. 2 pencils and Big Chief tablets, and scrawl out deep desires. 

Once upon a time, the tablet held things like a Red Rider BB Gun with a compass on the stock. Or electric race tracks and chemistry sets and Estes model rockets. Or, for the distaff side, dolls and frippery and Fisher Price paraphernalia. 

In all these things, there was no hesitation to ask for the impossible. There was a humility and a wonder, and hope, even, that on the long-awaited morning anticipations would be fulfilled.

It was easy to be childlike then, after all, because then we were real children.

I wonder, as we get less younger, whether this is a property essential to childlikeness and synonymous with wonder: that we used to know, once upon a time, that impossible things could be hoped for; and that on a following morning, that anticipations could be met with surprise, and by a fulfillment that overflowed the banks of desire.

I remember, in an indeterminate time, a very concrete moment when, in the chilly red-gold of evening, I ran into the towering pine trees, jumping and waving my arms, just because the ecstasy of joy had beamed down with the gleaming of the chortling, dusking sun.

That meekness, that openness to joyful ecstasy, is the property of childhood.

I have the title deed to that property somewhere, I am sure. But it is surely one sign of the times that we have mislaid it so.

At Christmastime, I would like again to ask for impossible things.

In recent Christmas lists for Santa, I took great care to appear adult and virtuous (and, truth be told, witty and educated -- sometimes, I know, the two do not go together).

But this year, having re-adopted the rubric of willfully breaching impossibility, I’m throwing caution down the storm drain (like the one that gurgles in the street by the rectory).

First off, I wish for a righteous new bishop, one who would follow the footsteps of my missing master, +Metropolitan Nicholas, thrice and nice blessed. I have written much about this missing and I’m sure you think it maudlin already. So I’ll simply say this is an impossible wish, and thus I open my hands and let it ascend, like incense, to the stars. E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.

Second. I wish for peace at the hearth. I do not wish for peace on earth, because I do not know what this means, or what it would ever look like. I have been disappointed by every historical armistice. At every one, there was always someone who exploited and distorted the terms of the treaty. There were always carpetbaggers who took advantage of the soldiers and civilians, both victor and defeated. I am deeply cynical about war: that is the main reason why I do not define peace negatively, by the absence of war -- which, you must admit, is not nearly a proper opposite of peace.

Do not mistake me. I am happy at war’s absence: anyone who likes war, who rattles sabres, has not been there enough to dream traumatic dreams. 

No: I wish for peace at the hearth. I want twentysomething young men to grow out of their elongated adolescence. I want children to grow up under the roofs of married parents, and to listen to stories from grandparents who are not lurching from one entertainment (or complaint) to another. I want arguments to be settled by reason and forbearance instead of demands percolating from les enfants terrible, or simply surrender by one party to the willingness of the other to elect the nuclear option. I want people to stay and grow, pray and forgive, rather than to abandon and tumbleweed from one place (or relationship) to another.

I wish for peace in the church. At the risk of sounding naive and childish, I must say that it is melancholy, to say the least, to have journeyed from a Billy-Graham-and-bible-school setting to one where ecclesial denunciation has become such sport. Truth be told: it’s not our ethnicity that’s the problem, it’s our damned crabbiness -- and in that, I wish for peace. This old former evangelical wishes for that first love again, for that enthusiastic awareness that Orthodoxy is the completion of evangelicalism, the resolution of all good religion … that the episcopacy is apostolicity, that Santa is Nicholas and rides again.

Do we, in our demotic quotidian, show Christ as really born?

For that matter: really crucified?

Really risen again?

Did the Prince of Peace really show up? Counselor? Everlasting Father?

Mighty God? Ischyros? Kripkyj?

I wax childish here, I know. It’s the real world and all that. We’re grownups, having grown accustomed to the news that there’s no such thing as Santa.

But did not God, for the love of it, send His Only-Begotten to one such cynical world as this one? To such a heart of disappointment as this?

On Christmas Eve, I will go out before the showing of the First Star, and I will feed the small animals. I’ll pour seed and dried fruit into the feeder and suet in the little wire cage. I’ll throw crusts on the rose bush bed, right in front of the ground hog tunnel under the wooden fence. I’ll make sure my Yorkie and Aberdeen terriers get their little biscuits that they treasure. 

Then, our Holy Night Supper, with the straw at the corners, the Nativity Icon, and the tropar. The bean soup, the bobalki, the fish, the warm unabashedly sentimental expectation and the candlelight.

Then, later, “God with us.” S’nami Boh.

We have walked in the darkness of disappointment, and that darkness is the touching of  our soul to the iron cold of determined impossibilities.

We have walked in the darkness.

It is time, brothers and sisters, to see the Great Light.

Coordinates for the Bethlehem Star

The Magi’s Star: declination and right ascension

Blessed are the poor in spirit.

These are the ones who know the truth of tomorrow, who have felt the night.

Who look at the red kettles, the ringing of the hand bell, with their little girl perched in the shopping cart, knowing that they are one check away from needing that ministry of the bell, who put in a dollar anyways.

These are the ones who are invited by every revolution, every liberation and movement, every march on the streets and radio blast right and left, who are called to rage at conspiracies and alien involvements, but still, remember that even the privileged have children and feeble aunts, and even the rich too know the cold ache of empty plates, set for children who looked once upon a time for Santa, and who are now, simply, looked for.

These are the ones who are grown up enough to know that the worst is the next bare moment, alone, uncoated before the winter cold weight of the abyss.

Who are child enough to recognize the Friend, in that very moment.

For theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.

Blessed are they that mourn.

These are the ones who know the right answer to that facile question, “Do you have any regrets? Is there anything thing that you’d do over?”

And that right answer is, of course, “Of course.”

No one who has ever lived is without regret, and no one who regrets is ever able to forget.

This is the burden of repentance, folks, and we are condemned in penance to remembrance for the rest of these days, under this sun that knows no new thing. This is the Sisyphean feeling of vanity, and the vanity of human wishes, the inescapable knowledge of oldness that waits for you at the coming of age. Man up. Courage. Gird your loins and all that. Take your place. Shoulder your burden.

Mourn for the sins of man. And for your own, for you cannot but remember at the small hours, can you not? Drink your shots. Play your games. Pursue your diversions. Employ your opiates, there are many, many.

It is time to complete the mourning. Turn your regret into repentance.

For they shall be Comforted.

Blessed are the meek.

These are those who stand outside. Outside history. Outside business plans and agenda. Outside the guarded gates. 

Who mean no harm. Who are not important. Who cannot defend themselves in an argument, who cannot remember evidence in their defense, who cannot advance their own rights and platforms, who have not the brashness to advance the prosecutions against they who oppose them and oppress them.

Who always think, only when it’s too late, the really good comebacks, the perfect bon mot, whose ship will not be coming in.

They are open-minded, open-hearted. They are willing and able to change their opinions, which as all adults know, is next to impossible. They know the way out of the dark house of doubt.

Who have not the stuff to join the oppressors, the mongers, the raiders. Who cannot exploit, for they have not the smart hardness of John Galt. Who think the only Atlas there is was suspended once on a tree -- the meek are the Bethlehem shepherds, who know that the world can be held up only on theanthropic shoulders, cruciform.

The meek are shepherds enough to know what makes a shepherd Good.

These are those who’ve missed their fifteen minutes of fame, and say that’s okay.

For they shall inherit the earth.

Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness.

These are those who know the terrible secret of the world. A secret deeper than goetia, than the darkest files, the files that will never be leaked. A secret so ubiquitous that it is hidden by its ubiquity, like the invisibility of the wind.

The signs are everywhere, like the redness of dusk. Nature is everywhere turned to tragedy. Things fall apart. The center, here and wherever, will not hold. The deer thrown to the median barrier on the interstate is just as shattering as a toxic spill, an armed incursion, a defeat by cancer.

None of this was meant to be, and yet it’s happened. Man and nature have fallen, and broken is the world. 

It may be fixed, but the secret lies in the fact that all repair points to the next world -- or rather, the Person Who mediates this transfiguring revolution. All healing is predicated upon the Resurrection. 

Every resolution is rooted in the Manger.

And in this philosophical honesty, in this confession of limits, the Wise Men followed the Star -- the mystic intimation of the beautiful infinite.

The question that remains is this:

Do we want this Manger enough? Are we hungry enough for righteousness?

In this desert of fading wishes, are we thirsty enough for the way things should have been?

The real Christ comes to those who want Him, really.

For they shall be filled.

Blessed are the merciful.

They are those who try to forget only the sins of others. At first, their inability to forget worries them, and they fear they fail to forgive.

But this is a freshman fear. Then comes the middle-aged acceptance of the persistence of memory … the middle-aged faith of believing through the night and trudging along through the valley of the shadow of death -- also known, in the less gracious english of modernity, “disappointment.”

But then comes the richness of vintage, the perfection of complexity and correlated memory, despite the weakness of age. Then comes the near-paradoxical meditation that remembrance of trespasses and injuries affords the soul another opportunity to utter the grace-filled sentence, “I forgive.”

A true revolutionary, anarchical cry. “I forgive.” Over and over. With every reminiscence. With every echo of hurt, with every new appraisal of all the implications and meanings. “I forgive, even that.”

Merciful ones have no trouble finding the right cave, the Silence, the Light. They are not sidetracked by the Herod’s along the wayside, even the raving Herod’s who are about to slaughter another Jewish population.

Mercy draws the merciful, inexorably, to the very Font of Mercy.

For they shall obtain mercy.

Blessed are the pure in heart.

No: purity of heart does not mean to will one thing. That is surely a worthy intention. But it is not the content of purity. It is the symptom of this age that “willing” is so conflated with “being.” It is like the confusion of the mind with the heart.

No, the pure in heart are those who are attached to God, and God alone. Of course the phrase “God alone” is unnecessary, because any attachment to the Holy Trinity will displace and prevent any other attachment, for God is a jealous God.

Mary, the sister of Lazarus, is pure in heart, as she beheld in wonder the One Thing Needful. She stayed in that moment and chose the good part.

The pure in heart are the only ones in this world who can really see, really hear, really know. The only ones who perceive substance directly.

Purity of heart is only about epistemology. Not about voluntarism. This is the problem of the West, and why western wisemen get distracted by shooting starts that do not abide.

I want to abide with the One Who said Abide in Me. I want more than anything to be pure in heart -- and in the West, that statement would be a redundancy, but not in the East, where we know the dark night of the soul is not to be embraced or endured, but to be traversed to the Star. Deserts are meant to be crossed, under the Star Sign of the Cross.

I want to choose that better part, like Mary, like the Theotokos.

So that it will never be taken away.

For they shall see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers.

They are those who know peace. And they know it enough in the first instant to be something that must be given away.

And with every bequest, with every establishment of peace, the presence of Christ is amplified, magnified. The music of His Voice and the ineluctable, terrible reverberation of His Word, thunders through the fine gossamer curtains of universal substance. 

Peace is the liturgical, mystical, ascetical, charismatic, self-sacrificial, cross-bearing, compassionate, piteous, divine and humane establishment of a historical unlikelihood.

It is unlikely, in this world, that arms are ever thrown down, and the rifles on both sides are pyramided. It is unlikely that lawsuits are torn up and claims are surrendered, that denunciations are renounced and vendettas are sundered. It is unlikely that armories are emptied. It is unlikely that children will wake up one day and go through an entire day without hearing adult rages. It is unlikely that Aegisthes and Clytemnestra would ever stand, still, against the Furies -- whose existence, if not essence, cannot be doubted.

But in the unlikeliest of all possibilities, He, the singular Maker of Peace, the Son of God, stood in the prow of the boat one day and said “Peace, be still.”

Only God does the work by the saying of it.

Peacemakers are those who sail into storms all the time on little boats, and say, apostolically, “Peace, be still.” But they make peace by having communed with Peace, and by prayer having apprehended the storm.

Peacemakers will apprehend this power, this storm-stopping Peace, deep in the Bethlehem Cave.

The substance of Christmas Light is Peace. The reason why there is so much adumbration of the Cave today is that there is so much unwillingness to enter peace-making, so much war in so many hearts.

Christians are known best by making peace. This is the only way the world will know them.

For they shall be called the sons of God.

Angels of the brave

It's Christmas time and my lights are up.

We've feted Svatyj Nikolaj and dropped gold coins in the children's shoes.

The music gets better every year, maybe. We've already watched "It's a Wonderful Life," "Christmas Story," even the laugh track from National Lampoon.

The Wise Men and Shepherds are illuminated from within by 110 volt incandescent bulbs. Straw. Plastic camels. Jury-rigged stars that don't quite achieve the strange beauty that must have been.

We must every year strive to delve into the Nativity Feast deeper, underneath the Hallmark rum-soaked sheen of blurry sentimentality. We suspect, with the passing years, that peace on earth is not a matter of holding hands or wishing cheap happy thoughts.

Well, though, who am I to judge cheapness or superficiality? 

Anyone who smiles in the darkness, in the cold, is one who adds a little to the little flame.

Take, for example, the Angels in Juarez, Mexico, who fly every day to the corpse-souvenirs of the American drug consummation -- and there are, in this malodorous harvest, six or seven of these every single live-long day.

I think these angels, who are simple evangelical kids who are so emboldened by faith, and so grieved by the culture of death around them -- I think these sort of angels are the only ones God wil permit us to see any more. 

The bright shiny heavenly host angels of Luke chapter 2 are withheld from us -- at least the clear percept of them.

But we will see these more familiar ones nowadays, and we will see the paint, and the young brave faces underneath the outstretched wings.

Because God wants us to know the cost of peace.

Because God wants us to see what hunger for righteousness really means.

Because God wants us to know what America costs.

Job Posting, Again

For a number of reasons, I am offering a somewhat revised posting for an open position. 

For the same number of reasons, I am deliberately less than explicit about the position itself. I think that each of the three sections herewith (i.e., “qualifications,” “responsibilties” and “objectives”) should make clear the subject matter.

The revisions are minor, and are meant to clarify statements that were needlessly dull or obtuse.

While I entertain myself with postmodern irony and that most degenerate of rhetorical humors, I must insist that my theme is of frightful seriousness.

Qualifications:

He possesses a good grounding in the humanities, having read and understood at least some of Homer, Virgil, Chaucer, Dante and Shakespeare. Also Eliot, Dostoevsky and Frost.

He thinks logically, empirically. Thinks thoroughly, beyond superficiality. Thinks hard.

Has a library of doggy ears and broken spines. 

Serves Liturgy with grace -- with enough familiarity to be less self-conscious that he is serving, and more aware of Whom he is serving, and of Whom he belongs.

He possesses an even better preparation in Patristics, especially the Cappadocians and the Damascene.

He holds a degree from an Orthodox seminary (with a few reservations). Catholic seminaries don’t count, and protestant institutions might count against. A stint at Halki would have been nice ... but one can't have everything.

He has experienced tenure at an Orthodox monastery: long enough to have learned the ways of obedience, humility and ascesis. 

He displays proficiency in thinking on one's feet. 

He can tell the East from the West (and the rest). Has met mystery, and is afraid.

He is tempted by the notion that there might be a relationship between his own righteousness and sacramental realization: "the prayer of a righteous man is effectual," after all.

 He prays. The busier he gets, the more he prays. Remembers, with fear and trembling, that there is no priesthood -- especially no episcopacy -- without prayer. He is convinced that the old monastic sound byte, "Bishops are too busy to pray," is just plain offal.

He knows, at the direct experience of reality, that prayer can arise only from belief. He knows that prayer not only can move mountains, but must move mountains. The relocation of chthonic topographies is the necessary manifestation of true prayer.

(And it would be great if he knew what “chthonic topographies” were.)

He is holy. He will not discard a bruised reed. At the same time, he is consumed by the zeal for the House of the Lord.

He does not have a history of tantrums. He has not been stuck in the slough of despond.

He does not need a psychological test to confirm his stability. He does not have a trail of pastoral disaster wending far behind him.

He can speak theologically, simply, concretely.

He can catechize the young, gently. Can catechize the old, respectfully.

He is not impressed by new shiny things (or people). Is doubly unimpressed by terms like "program," "initiative," "coalition," "conference/committee," or "consultation."

He is not a magpie, coveting a fancier nest.

He can live alone, because he will be living so. He has already lived alone. There is a reason why the Orthodox episcopacy is predicated on an actual monasticism. It is because this alone can produce a chaste celibacy that can withstand the tempers of this modern decadence. Especially on the road: and he will be on the road, like an apostle, more than he will be home.

A bishop must be chaste to pray.

And to live, a bishop must pray.

Position Responsibilities:

He will pray and serve. As has been noted, there is no episcopacy outside of prayer. If such a non-ascetic apostolicity has been tried, oxymoronic and contrary to all Tradition, then the resulting failure has resonated throughout time and space. Most of the failures of church history can be traced to such ill-begotten attempts. Non-praying and unrepentant bishops -- hospodi pomiluj.

He will not keep dossiers like the ones kept in Langley, Virginia. He will not hold information for future extortion. 

He will become aware of sin with sorrow. He will weep over the failures of his peers, his priests and his flock: "Did not my heart break for you? … And apart from other things, there is the daily pressure upon me of my anxiety for all the churches. Who is weak, and I am not weak? Who is made to fall, and I am not indignant" (2 Corinthians 11.28-29).

Now there's a real bishop.

He will not sue.

He will maintain the ceremony of his office while recognizing that the ceremonial honorifics (of vestiture, ritual and veneration) are directed at his sacramental position, not him. 

He will not produce embarrassing emails, tweets, articles or comments on regrettable blogs. 

He will speak with intelligence, grace and compassion. He will not speak with a manufactured Russian or Greek accent.

He will be American, but will know how to be pastoral in the old language.

He will fast, according to the rubrics. 

He will believe, according to the dogmas.

He will protect his priests from encroaching congregationalism. 

He will protect his parishes from encroaching secularism. 

He will discipline his clergy. Will pray with his clergy and lead them into the ways of true theology -- which is what has not been done enough. In fact, the current malaise is the way it is because theology has not been led into. He must fulfill the promise of "we too believe, and so we speak" (2 Corinthians 4.13).

He will meekly befriend the poor.

He will not pay too much attention to the rich, especially rich benefactors.

He will lead his flock, in love, into prayer and mystery.

He will keep open books. He will prohibit secret funds. 

He will not sign creeds or declarations or manifestos with the heterodox. Will not join, as a "member denomination," any "council of churches" (sic).

He will maintain a different, transcendent definition of "ecumenical" that inhibits degenerate terms like "ecumenicist."

He will demand theology and ascesis from his priests, and lead them personally into the ministry of the Good Samaritan. "You are in our hearts, to die together and to live together" (2 Corinthians 7.3) -- when will this come true?

He will oppose abortion and euthanasia. He will oppose hyper-capitalism and libertarianism. He will doubt the facile charms of socialism and warn against statism. He will die for the faith against t0talitarianism.

He will consecrate the Eucharist in the fullness of Tradition, fully aware of the world hurtling toward parousia.

He will be courageous and wise enough to preach the Gospel at the end of time.

He will recognize beauty, cherish goodness, and be at peace.

Position Objectives:

In a word, Theosis. 

That is, the preaching of the Gospel, and the teaching of the apostolic doctrine.

That is, the increased practice of fasting and almsgiving and prayer.

That is, the flowering of virtue. More love. More joy and peace (of which there is not nearly enough). More forgiveness. More goodness, gentleness, patience, courtesy, self-control.

More theology, doctrinal awareness. More knowledge of the Word. More intelligence, psychological maturity and godly culture: "everything that is true, everything that is noble, everything that is good and pure, everything that we love and honor, and everything that can be thought virtuous or worthy of praise" (Philippians 4.8). 

These are the touchstones of true culture. The bishop is personally responsible for these improvements.

More monastic vocations.

More stable, chaste and prayerful monasteries. This is a prerequisite for administrative unity.

More divorce-proof nuptial unions. More nuptial affection in marriages. More children growing safely, securely, and religiously.

More youth who stay in Liturgy beyond first confession and altar-boy years.

More new parish missions in the lands of the unchurched -- and these domains are multiplying. If the unchurched are those who do not commune with the Eucharist and the Church of Holy Tradition, then we have entered an age of complete paganism. The Gospel most certainly has not been preached to all the nations: indeed, there are newer and newer nations in this hyper-modern world of insanity, and fewer and fewer ethnoi have even heard of the Gospel. We are living in the cosmos of the unchurched.

More saints. More saintliness.

A more prayerful culture.

What is not an objective:

Numeric growth. God adds to those who are being saved, not anyone else. A true evangelist does not take a census. Every numeric figure issued by jurisdictions -- especially those that report on size and success -- are less than real and are unworthy of the word "church." 

Institutional survival. If you must worry about the survival of your ecclesial community, then repentance is the thing to be done, not institutional modification. Most jurisdictions are rearranging themselves like walnut shells, insituting new commissions and committees, until there will be left a single sullen "committee of the whole."

Doctrinal modernization and societal accommodation. Being up to date, mainstream, or Madison Avenue approved -- these are not important, and militate against prayer.

Excitement. Entertainment. Enthusiasm. Same thing.

Bons Mots for the Happy Holidays

Salvation is theosis, and is the destiny for one and all. This is what the Star says. 

Of course, this destiny -- as with all Divine Gifts -- can be refused. It can even be denounced.

The Cross is for sin. The Manger is for deification.

The Son of God is the Son of Man. That little sentence contains everything.

There is not one positive thing said about the rich in the Bible. Maybe neutral, at best. But certainly not positive.

Only the poor can understand Christmas.

Only the poor in spirit can enter into Christmas.

Animals, especially dogs, understand Christmas better than the cynic, the agnostic and especially the frenetic. Just ask the ox and ass.

Christmas is never noticed by popular, or academic, history. It is always legendary, mythic, mystic and true.

Prayer and belief converge in Natal star-gazing.

It may not be necessary to believe in the factuality of the Protevangelion, but it is less necessary to disbelieve it.

The Magnificat is a cosmic political statement that usually gets censored.

Christmas, as with all Feasts, force a renunciation of all political banners. The Biblical witness requires an acceptance of the miraculous, but also the critique of the powers and principalities. Fundamentalists and liberals are rendered mute as Zacharias.

The Suffering Servant is the King of Glory, the Child born unto us, the Son given unto us, upon Whose back the iniquities of us all were laid, and upon Whose shoulders the true and only Government is lain.

Cynicism is a rejection of any feast, especially the Nativity Feast.

There is no aristocracy at a Christmas table. 

The ghosts of Christmas past, present and future are welcome at the wassail.

Christmas is best done by kindness to the small. It is a Feast of Meekness, and Divine Kindness that is hidden in twilight and silent mystery. So you'd better feed the animals and find a poor man to help. Then learn how to cheer in the old ways. Be humble. Surrender your bitter pride and pet despondencies. Sing. Drink. Feast. Build a roaring fire in the hearth. Be human again, so that in your authentic nature you can sense the Son of Man.

There is no economic theory at the Christian Table.

Beware Herod, who (like Grendel) cannot stand the singing: he represents the passions of a darkened soul, and the cold doldrums of a Phoenician world.

Advent calls you to seek the Christ-Child with longing, as did the prophets David and Isaiah and the minors. Something was wrong, terribly wrong: they felt it, and longed for One to make things right. What was this rightness, this righteousness, they hungered for? Figure this out, and you'll be happy on Christmas Day.

Wear the right wedding garment at all Christian feasts, for every single one is nuptial. Mis-clothed, or un-clothed, at the Nativity, means that one did not attend to the preparations, that one is self-absorbed, judgmental, bitter, unfasted, unshriven, unprayed.

Decorate yourself with light.

 

The most important essay of the year

I'll go out on a limb here, knowing full well that raspberries will be sputtered by my marxist friends, but here goes.

This is the most important essay of the year, and the next. It is without peer. I cannot believe that the New Criterion folk framed this as a fourth part of an otherwise forgetable series called, annoyingly, "Future Tense Part IV."

Here is a paragraph, a sample:

After all -- and this is a truth so certain that only the most doctrinaire Marxist or lumpen British atheist could deny it -- the structure of a culture is essentially an idealist one, and a living culture is a spiritual dispensation. A civilization's values, symbols, ideals, and imaginative capacities flow down from above, from the most exalted objects of its transcendent desires, and a people's greatest collective achivements are always in some sense attempts to translate eternal into temporal order.

(I break the paragraph into more manageable bits)

This will always be especially obvious in places of worship. To wax vaguely Heideggerean, temples are built to summon the gods, but oly because the gods have first called out to mortals.

There are invisible powers (whether truly divine powers or only powers of the imagination) that seek to become manifest, to emerge from their invisibility, and they can do this only by inspiring human beings to wrest beautiful forms out of intractable elemtns.

They disclose their unseen world (!!!) by transforming this world into its concrete image, allegory, or reflection, in a few privleged places where divine and human gazes breifly meet.

Well, then. I'm glad to be alive in 2011, and to see this on a page printed for the first time.

Out of sorts

For a number of good reasons, sort of out of sorts this evening (sorta palindromic, that).

I was working up another of my usual lists, which I am beginning to suspect is a curious evasion of propositional and essayist duty.

This one would have been a Checklist to Determine if You're Around Difficult People. 

One of the items would have been this:

"You know you're around difficult people if, when emerging into consciousness, someone is standing over you demanding an apology for your hard cheekbone having injured their hand."

But. Sigh. I won't. 

Except that single snarky item, of course.

It was, if you must know, a rather entertaining psychological inventory. Much more plaudit-inviting than anything the DSM folk would countenance. But I digress.

I am listening to Ralph Vaughn Williams, for that beast-calming effect. I rather like the Sarabande movement from his Concerto Grosso. Of course, too, the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis (which my rather ascerbic younger daughter epithetizes as "drowning music" after watching Master and Commander). And The Lark Ascending.

Of course, of course. Williams wrote this as a musical meditation on George Meredith's eponymous poem, it is said, on the cliffs of Dover, watching an entire English generation steam over the Channel, hurtling toward hell's gaping jaws in a tragi-comic irony of war (i.e., the Great War, WWI, aka the "War to End All Wars").

Next time you listen to The Lark Ascending, think of the Dead Marshes: it gives bouyancy to the wings of the little bird.

At the same time, I read this for Vespers, from the appropriate kathisma:

Let them be before the Lord continually,
  and may their memory be destroyed from earth,
since he did not remember to do mercy
  and pursued to death a person
  needy and poor and stunned in heart.
And he loved cursing, and it shall come on him.
  And he did not want blessing, and it shall be put far away from him.
And he clothed himself with cursing as his coat,
  and it entered into his inwards like water
  and like oil in his bones.

This is Psalm 108.15-18 (LXX), from the inestimable New English translation from the goodly offices of Oxford University Press. I know there are some complaints, but the phrase "stunned in heart" covers many sins.

This is an imprecation, so of course we do not wage it against any human being, no matter how tempting such waging might be.

No, we cannot move in the passion of anger against any creature. We must reserve anger only for the powers that prompt humans into such culpable puppetry -- fools though they be.

And the frequencies, and bandwidths, are full of fools.

We cannot be angry against fools, no matter how many boundary stones they move to build extra barns. 

Gee, hasn't anyone noticed that the economic chaos may be due to judgment, rather than the inability of one party or another ... that the drought in Texas and the melting of the polar ice, that the tumult in the Middle East and the morass in Europe, may have more to do with the rejection of prophetic righteousness:

... for on account of their lawless acts they were brought low. (Psalm 106.17).

But there is this:

And they cried out to the Lord when they were afflicted,
  and from their anguish he saved them;
he sent out his word and healed them
  and rescued them from their corruption. (Psalm 106.19-20) 

I recommend, in such times, a view of that excellent series, Brother Cadfael of all things. Netflix it if you must. I must.