Second Terrace

Lenten Fairy Tales, Third

One of the old buddy pigs came running and found me
when I went to ground,
napping in the moldering afternoon,

and reminded me
porcine

that one cannot be in two places

at one time

"that," said he, "is the stuff of the insanity of theoretical physicists.

"At least," sniffed he, "my brethren of the Gadarenes, had the sense
to run over the cliff
when they heard such stuff," said he.

Paradise or pig.

Passion and multiverse.

Or bread and wine, water and air in the anamnesis House.

"one or the other," said he the pig

"I don't give a fig what you do,

but choose." 

Why we fast

Today is the beginning of Lent, which is more accurately called “The Great and Holy Fast.”

If I didn’t have a calendar, I would know this simply because the annual barrage of questions and anxieties come out at this time. It is almost as dependable as Punxsutawney Phil sticking his head up on February 2nd -- or, better, the crocuses poking their heads up out of the cold soil, announcing the Spring.

These questions fall into two groups. The first group is all about practical concerns: 

Q: When is the Fast?

A: It starts from this afternoon at Forgiveness Vespers and lasts until Lazarus Saturday. And then in Holy Week, it gets even more demanding. The fasting rigor for tomorrow and this week is also more demanding.

Q: What should we fast from?

A: For over a thousand years, every Orthodox Christian is generally expected to fast from meat throughout the whole Fast. Many Orthodox also fast from dairy products through the whole period. It is also just as important to fast from worldly distractions like entertainment and parties. TV and movie viewing should go way down during Lent, as well as listening to non-church music. Internet surfing and facebooking should also decrease to an “only-what-is-necessary” basis.

Q: How should we fast?

A: I said “generally fasting from meat (and dairy)” because the Church gives a lot of leeway to various situations. If there are any health or medical issues, then we always relax the demands of the Fast. This is something you need to speak about with your priest. It is interesting that I always worry about the older, frailer people who might be fasting too much, and I have to remind them that they need to be good stewards of their health.

If a person is younger or new to the Faith, we generally make the Fast easier for them as well. However, we expect that the more mature one is in his faith, then he really needs to fast more rigorously. This is true especially of clergy and the leadership of the parish. The “older” you are in the Faith, the more dangerous it is not to fast (or fail to pray or confess or receive any of the sacraments).

But then I hear deeper questions -- and these questions are of the “why” variety, which requires a deeper, more spiritual look.

Question: Why do we fast?

Answer: Not to punish ourselves. There is no such thing as “criminal punishment” in the Orthodox Faith. Sin is seen (and feared) as a putrid disease in Orthodoxy, much more so than a crime that requires punishment.

Also, we fast not because meat and dairy and entertainment are evil things. These are all good things that the Lord has provided for us. They are not unhealthy if consumed moderately. They do not cause passions by themselves, unless they become an addiction -- in which case, it is not the fault of the kielbasa and the cheese -- it is the fault of the glutton who “can’t believe he ate the whole thing.” I say this because hundreds of years ago, people believed that meat helped cause anger -- that is simply not the case, and such a belief was never the Church’s doctrine.

No, we voluntarily give up meat and dairy and entertainment for another, far more important reason.

We fast simply because we are homesick for Paradise, and we just want to go back home.

Adam and Eve ate neither meat nor dairy -- just the fruit of the trees and herbs and vegetables from the earth. And they needed no entertainment. Every moment of their life in Paradise was filled with joy -- whether taking care of the garden and the animals … whether helping each other with their work … whether breathing in the bright and pure air or drinking the cool sparkling water or feeling the soft green grasses under their feet … 

… and best of all, walking with Jesus Christ every evening, in the cool of the day, and talking with Him Face to Face.

The entire human race has been homesick ever since Adam and Eve had to leave the Garden of Eden because of their sin. Behind every beautiful scene, we perceive the original beauty of Paradise. Behind every beautiful voice and lovely phrase of music, we hear the rusting leaves of Eden, inviting us to come home again. Behind every wave at the ocean, and behind every waterfall in every stream, there is the sound of the waters of the River of Life, reminding us where we truly belong.

That is why we Fast -- so that we once again return to the diet and lifestyle of the Garden of Eden. 

That is why we do works of charity and almsgiving in this month of sweet sorrow -- so that once again, we can feel and experience the fellowship that God originally intended for the human race in Paradise. That is why we forgive and give up cursing and yelling and backbiting and gossiping and denouncing and complaining: we know, in our hearts, that such talk has no place in the Garden of Eden.

That is why we Pray so much during Lent -- so that once again, we can walk with Jesus (the Second Adam and the Second Person of the Trinity) in the evening of the New Creation, and talk with Him Face to Face.

So for anyone who dreads or resists Fasting, or wants to know the “least” he can get away with, or what the “minimal” requirementss of Fasting are, I gently suggest that maybe you don’t remember, yet, the beauty of Eden, and how you and Eden were literally made for each other ...

… maybe you’re not nearly homesick enough.

Lenten Fairy Tales, Second

Along the way a spade appeared, jabbed in dirt.

I knew he was down there so I dug him up:
he looked "really good," the same

which is what you'd expect after a lifestyle of self-embalming.

"My brothers," he simpered, "one got five and the other three,
so I kept mine for me

"and dug a hole,
and just to be sure,
climbed in for safekeeping.

"Please, if you will, kindly replace the divots?
Can't stand the sun, you see."

Gee.

At least I was sanguine with my nature,

not melancholy. 

Lenten Fairy Tales, First

There is an enormous pig farm in western Ohio where I woke up at, sandwiched between two slats of slate, the jagged sky and the washed out between-snows wintered earth.

I found this notebook in the dirt when I learned to read a word.

I have these early recollections, as Adler-not-Mortimer would say. My lifescript. My romantic programme, a la Berlioz. You know how it goes. Jejune puerile restlessness, liberation exhiliration, experimentation, crisis, boredom, ennui, depression, entertainment/diversion as self-medication, long dull suicide, the bourgeoisie regime.

Must get up. Memory of substance, the images dissipate in gray. Memory persists as the shadows fade.

Does the Father welcome back errant cognoscienti?

Any cognoscienti?

Perhaps as a scrivener, an archivist, a duster, someone to run the shredder, a repairer of crumbling books.

Un-sonned, sure, but one for hire.

Counseling note, little and bright

-- Edward Hopper, "Pennsylvania Coal Town," 1947

He sat down in my office, in the oversized jet-leather club chair, nestled by the literary bookshelf (across from the two shelves of bible and theology).

He was tired. His face showed the downturned use of some years of a low-rent, on and off again shop job, punctuated by a bimonthly visit to a smoke-hazed oldies bar just blocks away from his 1950s ranch-style home, where his dog awaited him, tail wagging, every late afternoon.

He is a refugee from all the old charismatic waves that washed over the Burgh since the early 70s. He's visited about every single phase of emotion and claimed every promise. He's made a lot of positive confessions that have not worked out, and so weary he's entered our old and open doors.

Now he's gotten into difficulty again, and that's real and very hard. We will have to help him through with real practical plans. Who will take care of his loyal dog, who will wait for him every afternoon for the month that he's away? Who will watch his family home, of which he is the last of, out-surviving his mom and dad and sister and brothers? Who will cut the grass and sweep the walk these incarcerated days?

He is amazingly gentle and kind, merciful to the gruff and uncompassionate peers that surround his daily schedule. He's been scuffed, worn and torn by a lot of hard knocks, but the bitter speech, so expected, doesn't show.

He wears a coat and tie to church, sometimes threadbare, but "I want to look my best for God" he says.

I hear his narration, and I want to denounce the powers and anyone else, but he heads me off with "Whatever happens now I'll take from the Lord, as something I need to receive."

So we practice the whitelight arts of the Jesus Prayer and the Trisagion, then. I talk to him about the Liturgy and the Holy Mysteries, and about the ecclesial rehearsals of Heaven on earth.

(It is especially at a moment like this that I take refuge in old-fashioned christology, when and in Whom divine nature might meet human nature, Personally. Christology is best done, I think, on the discarded streets of the world's refugees.)

We begin to speak in tongues of angels -- or rather, the tongues of the Word made flesh. "I can do all things through Christ Who strengtheneth me." "If God be for us who can be against us?" "Greater is He that is in you than he that is in the world." "Perfect love casteth out all fear."

I swear to you all, upon the Altar and Heaven itself, that the air began to brighten at the iteration of these words. I felt the ebbing of the bleak tide.

He stood up after the prayer and smiled with a smile that the world thinks is unbecoming of the poor: but in the Kingdom, a smile such as this makes all the sense in the world.

Handshake, embrace of the meek.

He left, a small man, and I remained, just as small.

... for they shall inherit the earth.

Confessions of a Confessor

On another, and rather high-spirited, forum, a long discussion has been going on about the Holy Mystery of Confession.

As you might expect, interesting remarks have made the rounds, and some of these were, in baseball argot, decidedly foul.

In the interests of making clear the blessings of Confession to my students, my parishioners and my friends, I offer these simple points:

* I, too, am a sinner, and I am not worthy to witness the holy event of any Confession. But I have to, as this is my vocation and ministry.

* I take, with dread seriousness and sincerity, the terrible fact that the Confession is heard and received by Christ the Son of God, and Son of Man. The Theotokos is there, too, and all the Saints. I am utterly aware of their presence, and at times, that presence is not joyful to me.

* I want the person who is making their confession to be in their best attentive consciousness. I will help them attend more to their souls rather than getting lost in details of a past narrative, especially if it detracts into the acts of other people. I want them to attend to the “I-Thou” moment, in the here-and-now with their Lord. I want them to speak concretely and with immediacy. I will never hypnotize them in Confession or, for that matter, in any pastoral counseling. I harbor extreme ethical concerns about any such practice.

* I insist upon individual, private confession. There is no way that the necessary concerns for immediacy, concreteness and proper penance (i.e., “virtue that opposes -- and supplants -- the respective sin”) can be met in a public simultaneous confession of more than one person. The oft-quoted examples of St. John of Kronstadt's uproarious "confessions" were deficient in terms of their completeness of counsel or penance. Such "charismatic" phenomena are not meant to be followed in policy or ecclesial practice.

* I mourn with those who mourn. I cannot escape the pain that spills out of the heart of the person confessing the divorce of their soul from the communion of Christ. 

* I fight, in every confession, the demonic that seeks to incite my own passions. Freudians would call this counter-transference: I prefer the more old-fashioned terminology. My own consciousness must be in focus, and in full: “let us attend,” indeed.

* I will never divulge the contents of a confession to anyone who is not Christ Himself. I will not divulge a confession to another parishioner, to another priest, to any agent of the state, or even to my (or any) bishop. If I find it necessary to acquaint the bishop about a canonical penance, I will do this in full consultation with the person who made the confession -- and even then, it will not be me who divulges the content of the confession. Moreover, upon hearing the confession of child or domestic abuse or assault, I will withhold absolution until surrender to the proper authorities. If the perpetrator desires, I will sit with him as he makes the call.

I do not understand why the practices of hynotherapy, regression, and/or free association have made their way into the province of Orthodox pastoral counseling in general, much less in the particular holy space of Confession. I suppose hynotherapy has its function in other, secular modalities. I harbor large doubts about regression and free association. I understand that dreams get discussed in therapy, and because they have cropped up in the narratives of Scripture and Holy Tradition, I will not disallow them. But I have told not a few clients that I am no interpreter of dreams, skeptical as I am of visions in general, much less visions of the night.

I worry, these days, that pastoral counseling (and/or “spiritual direction”) has become conflated with the Holy Mystery of Repentance. There is so much rationalization that goes on, at least implicitly, in counseling, that I am afraid it blunts the poignancy that is necessary in Confession. I wonder, late at night, whether a large part of the appeal of counseling lies in its liberalizing trend: through all the conversation, interpretation and "re-framing," I wonder whether the relief felt in the immediate aftermath of counseling lay in the newly adopted, more expansive framework that permits what was once regarded as transgressive.

And what if that former regard was rational?

So no hypnotism. No loose lips. No obfuscation. No blaming of Eve, or even of the serpent. And no repainting of the foul lines.

* And lastly, I try to, and do in fact, forget what I have heard. I do not need to try hard to do this. After a few days, the specific contents of Confession mercifully make their exit from my mind. If you must know, the awareness of some of the facts that I eventually forget do cause some suffering.

It is like the heartache-suffering of a father, hearing the cry of pain emanating from his child. Perhaps the pain was self-wrought and he is only reaping the consequences of his own actions. But pain is pain, and a parent hurts worse. If he doesn't, I wonder if he can ever pronounce absolution.

So I am glad of such anguish -- or at least I want to be glad of this. Because all sin requires suffering in its cleansing.

I am glad to be of service -- to suffer, in my own minor way, with the One Who suffered infinitely for the sake of my own sins -- and, inconceivably, for the aggregate sin of all mankind.

Good Worry, part 1

Part One: Losers and Donatists

Problem Passages

I suppose that every priest can instantly come up with a few biblical passages that he would rather give a miss to.

He might be able to pass off the offending scripture with a few platitudes picked up from various other sects, who are better practiced at “happy hermeneutics” (i.e., exegeting for expedience). 

Or, he might dip his toe willy-nilly in the sargasso sea of allegory -- under the hypermodern rubric of dressing up, with no scruple about any incongruity, every crabby verse from the Bible as a soupy friendly Disney fish crooning “Under the Sea.”

This, by the way, has become quite the customary thing in the salvation-as-self-improvement movement. A movement, as it were, like all other movements: something to be voided.

For my part, I can come up with more than a few such passages. And I worry about them with an anxiety that is probably not so bad. It is not the kind of anxiety that falls under the prohibition of “Have no anxiety about anything” or “Do not be anxious about your life.” It is, rather, the anxiety that is cognate to “Work out your salvation in fear and trembling.”

One passage is probably on everyone’s list -- or it should be: “The hour is coming when all who are in the tombs will hear His voice and come forth, those who have done good, to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil, to the resurrection of judgment.” This one verse blows the whole “grace only” concept to smithereens: we all know that Pelagius was a dope to suggest that one is ever in a position to not rely, utterly, upon Grace -- but we know, too, that works are as necessary as grace. Works are never sufficient, to be sure. They are not necessary to God, but they are necessary to us. We have always known this in our heart of hearts, despite the rather deterministic over-corrections of that british Culdee monk (whose trinitarian christology was never in doubt).

I worry, thus, about my works. I will not stop worrying. In the same way, I do not shy away from that self-imposed, self-referential term “sinner.”

I wonder, sometimes, whether we say words so much that the poignancy of the word is dulled by sheer routine. Perhaps, once in a while, we should switch out the word “sinner” with something of more marked scandal. What if we say “loser” instead of “sinner”? Surely, “loser” has a much more status-corrosive effect, these days, than does “sinner.” “Sinner” has a cachet in religious communities, and in the argot of not a few popular minstrelsies, “sinner” is something to be proud of.

But this is never the case with “loser.” Imagine: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a loser.”

You can tell that John 5.28-29 is a problem for me. I’m glad it is. And I cannot avoid this verse, because I read it at every funeral -- and every single funeral is one too many for me, despite my certainty of the Resurrection.

An Availing Correlation

But there, too, is another verse that poses a problem. And this one is just as unavoidable, because it must be read at every unction, every anointing of the sick. 

You are probably familiar with the passage. It is from that biblical book that Martin Luther, in a fit of protestant pique, denounced as an “epistle full of straw.”

It is, of course, James 5.13-18. The rubrical instructions for unction are well known. Most of the time, they are not given careful reading. Most people do not appreciate the terse command that prayer is the only effective response to suffering. And the singing of praise is a more profitable thing to do when one is cheerful than the iron discipline of the modern dionysiac ecstasies. And, too, the thing to do when one is ill is to seek, actively, the sacramental ministry of the church, instead of suffering in secrecy and privation (and/or in prideful despair -- which usually leads to the atheism of self-pity).

However they are taken carelessly, these are not difficult verses. I am comforted by these words. They do not keep me up at night.

But this verse does, in fact: “The prayer of a righteous man has great power in its effects.” The KJV sounds even more forceful: “The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much.”

Priests are not only called to be priests, they are called, moreover, to avail. And there is no denying here in this troubling verse a terrifying cause-and-effect relationship:

The righteousness of the one who prays affects his availing.

You will probably chide me here with the history of Augustine and the Donatist schism. I think that it is always helpful to look carefully at the Donatist claims, and their intentions, no matter how misguided they ultimately were. Please do not mistake me. I could never countenance the notion that sacraments are invalidated by the moral failings of clergy.

However, I am quite attracted to the idea that if clergy were ever guilty of apostasy, that they should never be clergy again. After penance they can be admitted to communion, certainly (and here I part ways with Novatian). But surely, if one hands over the Bible, or the holy things, or, worst of all, the Eucharist to the Romans for defilement and destruction, then no, one cannot administer any sacrament again.

I think that we should, without embracing the heresy, sympathize with the intentions of the Donatists, even the Novatians. There is probably too much shrugging off misbehaviors and passions and bad thinking these days. And what’s more, there is that sophisticated penchant of dismissing any prophetic critique as the stuff of just another tiresome Savonarola: we have new names, now, to call any such critique -- “fundamentalist” is a common one, but also “moralist,” and “pietist” has become vogue.

Who can tell what contemporary activities today correspond to the pre-constantinian apostasies of the “traditores”? There are, indeed, some of these.

But enough of Donatism. The controversial discussion of the validity, or “effectiveness,” of the sacrament is a convenient detour that mitigates the suffering imposed by James 5.16b -- a “suffering” that is -- shall we say it? -- patently “existential” for a priest:

The effectiveness of my prayer depends, at least in part, on my righteousness.

This is a hard note for sure. It suggests -- and I shudder to say this -- that a certain “success” or effectiveness of my pastoral prayers correlate with my “righteousness.”

Next: a closer look at the two terms of this scary correlation: “effectuality” and “righteousness”

Vesper Hill

There is an old rugged cross on top of Vesper Hill,

at a place in the unimportant hills around the Youghiogheny,
a church camp -- everything you thought a place like that should be:
fires in the nightwoods, fervent altar calls, intensities
counterpointed with softball games and furtive explorations.

One late evening, in 1977 by the two by six white cross,
perched up from a pile of the ubiquitous sandstone that lay
strewn in the third-growth tangle of laurel and adolescent maple,

The dark solitude hoped for was attained,
and beauty was apophasis,
the zodiac and a pious congregation of fireflies
mingled enlightened, catephatically.

I go there, time travelling, now on the green bare knoll.

My old friends are lesser now, the old caretaker long dead
and his replacement we just buried.
The new mown grass they just cut and the river mist,
the fields at rest, exhaling from the sunwork of the day,
the touch of fires long gone out and the nightwind murmuring
the song the surf on ocean sound:

breathe, urban chest and sedentary, breathe
the anodyne air.

Here, high and dark, but for the silver gleaming. 

You, there and everywhere:
the finding at the cross,
always, at every loss,

I have thirty five years of new memory and new friends,
but they are older than the old ones, frailer, windblown
weathered, time torn.

Thou, Lifegiver on Vesper Hill
transmute the past
and change this time,

Take these determined libertines,
these darkened trends of passionate ends,
these wonted ires of dialectical fires,
these political thrusts of childish distrusts,
these unwitting tools of rich young fools,
these teenage passions for old transgressions,
these  alarums, these turmoils, these alacrities to portend

a foreigner, when in the eastern light
it was a Friend.

These determinations
are obeisances to the Iron Crown,
post-structural, post-industrial.

They are mountainous, lugubrious
in a Gnostic, post-Constantinian vein.

What about the older canons, before the cassocks
and the boundary lines, the tutelage of the Borgia rhymes,
before the habits of The Prince:

What about the canon of the cross and wind,
the arched paternity of sabbath rest,
the one that goes Let us love each other
so that with one accord we may confess?

What about that canon,
forgotten in time
buried by the rest? 

Satan, get thee behind me,
This gray mountain to the sea. 

Thou, Vesper Wind, whisper peace again amongst the leaves,
wend and waft where You wish,
make us born again.

Here, at the real Vesper Hill, 

I pray and stay.

On thinking of the collection for Haiti tomorrow

We are not the soldiers who stand brave,
We are not the doctors who operate with
headlamps and vodka,
nurses who hold babies calling
for mothers who cannot answer.
We are not the rescuers who clear the rubble
and find, after days,
living, breathing wives & grandfathers.
We are not the politicians who forgive loans
and rebuild countries.
Or talented stars.
But we are
the people who can see a brother in the dust,
a mother in the waste.
We will give our poor silver and gold,
but what we are rich in we give all away,
For you, bene ou,
We Give & We Pray.

A Julian Nativity Prayer

O Lord Jesus the Christ, 
You are the Son of God,
 Second Person of the Trinity,
 with the Father and the Holy Spirit

You are God.

Through You were All Things made,
 and so was I made by You. 
All that I have, All that I am,
All that is Beautiful around me 
is from Your Divine and Glorious Hands.

You came to the Earth
and were Born of the Virgin and the Holy Spirit
so that I and all Mankind might become like You.

And because of My Sin
You took upon Yourself 
the Burden of the Cross, the Weight of Death,
and You were Exalted in Resurrection.

All this You Knew Before You ever Came,
Before You ever Brought the Gift of Your Divinity
and Touched its Godly Flame
to my Weak and Dying Humanity.

I Love You, Dearest, Sweetest Jesus,
Lying in the Manger,
Looking already toward the Cross,
and Celebrating the Day when I,
and My Brothers and Sisters
will Live Forever with You.

Glory to Your Holy Nativity.
Glory to You, of One Essence with the Father,
of One Nature with Man.
Glory to You, Son of God, Son of Man,
Infant Sun of Righteousness,
the One of Love
and Nail Stained Hands.  

Amen.