Questions for an episcopacy

"The Good Shepherd" (in the Atlas Mountains), by Henry Ossawa Tanner

 

Will you take us into tomorrow?

Will you take our past into your present?

Will you join your future with ours?

Will you use the first person plural when you speak of us?

Will you, in a confusing environment of “countless guides in Christ,” be our father who “begets us in Christ Jesus through the gospel” (1 Co 4.15)?

Will you take our hearts, open to you (2 Co 7.2)?

Will you take us into your heart, “to die together and to live together”? (2 Co 7.3)

Will you be Carpatho-Russian with us?

Will you be American with us?

Will you show us how to love a modern America out of an old-fashioned Orthodoxy?

Will you walk into our ex-steel valleys, our second-class developments, our coal towns in abandoned lands, our northeastern empty pews?

Will you be jovial in a musty hall, with a lingering scent of a halupki supper last Thursday?

Will you show us that God’s Will is a Good Will? For that hard-to-come-by optimism can only come by personal proof.

Will you take up our plainchant and let the echoes of our fathers, in cloud-wreathed mountains far away and long ago, resonate through your voice?

Will your monasticism take you through weariness and toil, vigil and fasting, exposure to the elementals of time (2 Co 11.27)?

Will your deep concern be for all our churches, the big ones but even the little ones, kept alive by a few pirohi sales and raffles (2 Co 11.28)?

Will you be able to say, “Who is weak and I am not weak … Who is made to stumble and I do not burn” (2 Co 11.29)?

Will you know how much this thirsty post-industrial modernity needs us, keepers of the Spring, but would rather us fade into obsolescent disregard?

Will you teach us how to forgive?

Will you show us how to hope?

Will you reveal the causal reflexive relationship between those two verbs?

Will you teach our seminarians that the One Crucified is the Second Person of the Trinity?

Will you demonstrate to us all that the Trinity courses with an over-abundant co-inherence?

Will you invite us, in winsome soul, to deification, here and now?

Will you be cruciform? Will you interpret the Empty Tomb to us?

Will you lead us in paths of righteousness, beside the cool waters, so that we will follow you through the valley of shadow?

Will you knit us, by the skein of kenosis, into koinonia, sobernost, a fellowship?

Will you help us say, fearlessly, maranatha? Because right now, we, along with about everyone else, are too afraid to really mean it.

Will you guard each man’s dignity and save each man’s pride?

Will you make them know we are Christians by our love, by our love?

Will you sing, at the end of a long banquet, “zaspivajme mnohaja”? 

Over and over again?

 

Will see. 

Comments

[Fr. Jonathan]

Thank you, Sbdcn Lucas, for pointing out the dual parallel.

And Father, all the answers should be "yes," but it is, I know, superficial to say so. In order to get at the "answers," one must reframe the questions into more open-ended ones -- like changing out the phrase "will you" with "how should we."

Now the questions became a lot harder. On the particular side of the question having to do with the episcopacy, I've made a few suggestions before: http://janotec.typepad.com/terrace/2011/12/job-posting-again.html

In general -- and I think Dionysios and a few others might bear me out -- the episcopacy, for it to be faithful, must be tied tightly to theosis (if "tied" is the right word here to describe such a crucial association).

You are probably aware, already, of my agnosticism regarding administrative union. That said, our real and substantive union is necessary for our ministry in America.

[SubDn. Lucas]

"Will you reveal the causal reflexive relationship between those two verbs?"

I liked that 'those two verbs' can refer either to "teach/show" or "forgive/hope"

[Fr. Jonathan]

Thank you, Father, but I will beg off posting answers. Permit me to suggest that the only answer will be an episcopal tenure.

[www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=587422338]

WOW! These are wonderful questions. Will you post the answers?