Second Terrace

Orthodox theologians do not speak in tongues

An Orthodox theologian is assumed to be traditional. He really doesn’t care about currency, or the challenges of the age. The world has never liked the Cross, and it has always complained about the difficulties of Trinitarian dogma. The ethical acerbities which stem, inexorably, from Holy Tradition the modern age has taken as “moralistic,” even “fundamentalistic.” A long time ago, when Orthodoxy got too conservative (or seemed that way), relevant philosophers who "responded" to "contemporary challenges" forged a nominalism that made Grace a far less frightening thing, and intellectualized it into something less than a phenomenon. Too, the West could now take its ethics in spoonfuls, in casuistic legerdemain.

Now, Orthodoxy must seem too conservative again, and no one likes the heady alum-tasting mix of dogmatic Trinitarianism, Christology (with a real historical and male Jesus), episcopal authority and responsibility, agrarian sensibility, creationism, anti-contraception, asceticism, familiar and terrible mystery.

Once again, the reaction is burgeoning, this time on two sides. One is a renewed attempt at caesaropapism. The other is a quasi-pentecostal celebration of Eurospeak, with eschatological hopes vested in the EU and a bi-pulmonary ecclesiology.

Apart from these new developments, an Orthodox theologian only cares about being understood in the vernacular: this is not the same as responding to challenges of the age. The world has always "challenged." But the Church has always proclaimed the Gospel instead, recognizing that under the cover of plaintive “challenges” (which are almost always chock full of impish denunciation of authority, like 7th graders acting out against a disrespected teacher), there really does exist a hunger and thirst for truth (rather than gaseous constructs like "consensus"). This is the need for the Gospel and Holy Tradition: and in this dynamic response to the impassive Uncreated, there really is, as some have said, "a deifying vision of conviction and commitment, capable of transforming the whole world." As nice as that sounds, there is also, at the same time and without contradiction, a structured system of truth and a study of doctrinal formulations. There is, dare we say it, the unavoidable, authoritative witness of exclusive, even offensive, dogma (“exclusive,” i.e., “every other theory is wrongheaded”).

Christianity is a sacred tradition, to be sure, and the fullness of liturgical contemplation should be restored to its center. But it is more obstinate than Sherrard would like, I'm afraid, and nearly approaches what he would call "intolerance" with regard to "other sacred traditions."

(It is not surprising that the word "dogma" is not treated with deference in the demesne of  Gollywood: the movie Dogma, 1999, cannot be said to be all that catechetical, not with an abortion clinic worker helping an unknown apostle named Rufus prevent 2 defrocked angels from re-entering heaven. The movie illustrates the status of the term, right about the level of used car salesmen, oil executives, and televangelists with white shoes.)

For many strange reasons, some Orthodox speakers/writers/thinkers wish to throw old-fashioned words like "dogma" and "moralism" into the dustbin of contemporaneous refuse. They think that in the very old good old days, the Fathers did not have to insist on undebatable issues like sexual morality, and complete devotion to dogmatic statements like "Jesus" (the historical One we witnessed in the Gospels) "is Lord" (the everlasting One, the Second Person of the Trinity). The entire struggle with heretics, both inside the Church and out, reflects a concern for rightness of belief -- that is, "orthodoxy" -- that today would elicit catcalls of doctrinaire patriarchalism and monocultural superiority.

Moreover, they miss the point that we are living in an age very much like that inhabited by the first patristic generation: it is filled with gnosis and anti-gnosis, denunciations of mystery, and fabrications of other worlds and entelechies and defacements of the Incarnation. This age isn't just Arian anymore, or non-Chalcedonian. Those heresies are benign by comparison to what surrounds us now. We're back to the catacombs when real Christianity was just barely tolerated, and the very air is Gnostic. Astrology is back. Alchemy is back (and some even wish it's Christian). I'm waiting for arithmancy to make its splash in pop Christian culture. Religion -- bad religion -- is plastered on the net and the checkout aisles.

Let's buck up: it's really time for Orthodox theologians to be more dogmatic, not less.

Thus, the Orthodox theologian will speak with honest rhetoric and in the vernacular (with a spattering of Greek, Latin, Russian, French). St. John of Damascus' Exposition needs translated again (Schaff is getting old), with a complete apparatus. Sermons need to be filled with Trinity and Christology: exorcise self-esteem issues to make room. Holy Tradition needs to be the standard and pattern of our speech and language. That -- not a fuzziness that sounds obliquely mystical to be amenable to the cognoscenti in New York and Brussels -- is what the world needs to hear.

An Orthodox theologian will not speak in tongues. He will not lapse into the postmodern glossolalia of Newspeak, Eurospeak, Statespeak, Darwinspeak, Femspeak, Gayspeak, Bloombergspeak, Technospeak, Emergentspeak, Fullerspeak, or Gaiaspeak.

Such a one will not replace truth with correctness, nor reality with ideology. He will neither demand to see evil, nor will he even expect it: but in his realistic appraisal he will not be surprised by evil when he sees it.

Every philosophy can be recognized by its language. The Orthodox theologian will be known by his witness to the Apostolic Vision. Others will be known by other, and lesser, visions.

Orthodox theologians speak of what they know, not of what they figure out. They believe and they lead others to belief, not intellectual struggle. At the end, belief is the certainty that nothing else makes sense. It is also the discovery that everything makes sense only in belief.

The meaning of Orthodoxy

In this year of handwringing over politics and ecclesiology, it might be helpful to ask just when and where Orthodoxy makes sense. It doesn’t make sense everywhere, you know. That doesn’t mean, of course, that Orthodoxy is at all nonsensical. It means that the occasions and settings where Orthodoxy makes little to no sense are probably places and times that simply should not be.

A good rule of thumb, therefore, is that if the Orthodox message is out of step, or doesn’t make sense, then what should be doubted is not Orthodoxy, but rather the parade itself, with which Orthodoxy is out of step. What should be critiqued is the context itself, about which Orthodoxy doesn’t make sense.

The meaning of Orthodoxy, of course, is only introduced by the content of its dogma – and that dogma, revealed by the Trinity, is everywhere revealed as the Pillar and Ground of Truth, and should be meaningful to everyone. But it is not, of course. There is, after all, the Fall.

So where does Orthodoxy make sense?

Orthodoxy, and really all of Christianity, makes sense in the country and the city. It assumes that food is grown through husbandry, in the fields, the vineyards and orchards, in flocks and herds. It understands husbandry as a constant play between human nature and the rest of nature. It assumes, too, that the marketplace is a participation of known persons with the goods they have to sell for a living and even for comfort. It knows that money is not made from money. It thinks that the city is the place of citizenship and decorum. It asks meekly, but prophetically, that the state upholds justice, promotes internal peace, and protects against the threat of invasion and oppression. The Church understands neither welfare given to sociological units for the purposes of engineering a better society, nor welfare given to corporations which act more like city-states rather than companies of like-minded businessmen. Adam is Adam, despite his socio-economic class, despite his stock certificates, his board membership or silent partnering.

Orthodoxy makes sense in a family home, and is comically amazed when children naturally proceed from desire, under the omophorion of holy mystery and sacrament, and the delight of play and wonder. The beginning of life is understandable only in a home. Children should be begat and nurtured by a man and woman, knit together in holy eros. Such a couple should not deny their nature of begetting and their telos, or mission, of legacy. This is what Orthodoxy understands: it is speechless when confronted with conception in a can, with conceptions that are thwarted or aborted. It suffers heartbreak when it sees children homeless, or fatherless, or motherless, and calls upon God, and works directly to make the irrational rational again. It is not merely opposed to sex outside of marriage: this is an easy position to take, and can be cultivated simultaneously with the very same misbehavior. More than mere and moralistic opposition, Orthodoxy finds fornication, adultery and homosexuality above all irrational, and a dalliance with the inhumane.

Orthodoxy makes sense in communities grown over time, where iron sharpens iron, where there is no anonymity, and fellowship extends beyond expediencies and conveniences. It does not understand churches that are not built on graves, that do not remember the dead, that do not commune with the saints, that do not survive on inherence with the everlasting. It does not understand religion that is not Trinitarian or Christological, that does not produce adherents who are beatitudinal. Orthodoxy makes sense in aggregates of rich and poor, black and white, english and hispanic (and maybe Greek or Russian), republican and democrat: but Orthodoxy finds homogeneity and anonymity as nihilistic terms better suited to Minas Morgul than the Tower of the Guard.

Orthodoxy makes sense only in an Apostolic polity, in a culture of Holy Tradition. It does not apprehend "church" in the presence of social chimeras fashioned from a few verses and management consultations. It is silent about five year plans, commissions and bureaucracies. It is mystified by the removal of the person from the subject-matter of politics, which is the language spoken in the Once and Future Tower -- a language that cannot abide the attachment of human nature to particulars, and the freedom inherent in that nature, and the old-fashioned and traditional design by which that freedom is expressed. Orthodoxy understands that nature, and provides that nature the only climate in which to fully grow: it does not understand environments that require unnatural mutation -- not for the survival of the person, but for the survival of the bureaucracy.

Orthodoxy makes sense in the traceries of memory, culled from the deposit of history. Good women and men, bravehearted and devoted, have painted glory in their biographies, in their artistry written on the canvas of legacy, or on works of stone, color and line. Orthodoxy understands and critiques the attempts of the world at beauty and meaning: but it does not understand the European suicide of 1968. Orthodoxy understands the art of high culture and treasures the art of the hearth: but it does not understand repudiation or meta-narrative. It is rendered almost mute and dazed by the shock that someone would take seriously Nietzsche’s funny little paradox, “there are no truths but only interpretations.” The seriousness, played out by Rorty’s pragmatism, turns out to be a narrative of meaninglessness, an ontology of jest. Orthodoxy is appalled at first, that someone created by the Word would reject the meaning of “word.” But it soon recovers: and when it discovers that none of the ontic jesters are laughing in the postmodern “world” (inverted commas are mine, for once), then it gets over being appalled and takes Nietzsche’s linguistic legacy as a joke. Someone’s gotta laugh. And in laughing, postmodernism is seen as something no longer threatening. A humbug dropped from a balloon behind the curtain. Pay attention, Scarecrow.

Ethics for Orthodoxy is not some tribal sub-cultural narrative or episteme. It is the judgment by the Church on whether a contemporary phenomenon is rational or irrational, whether a circumstance coheres with the meaning of the Church. Is a thing, a thought, an appearance or circumstance, a movement or a philosophy intelligible to the Church? It better be, if it is at all possible that the Church is the Pillar and Ground of Truth. In its own tongue, the Church asks whether it can perceive the logos of a creature. If it cannot, then it does not disbelieve in the possibility of logos (as this age is wont to do). It questions its own powers of perception, which are themselves vulnerable to the distortions of passion and spiritual ignorance. It stills itself in quietness, it breathes in discipline, fasts from the tempest of appetite and commerce: and in apatheia, in renewed discernment, it recognizes the place and the destiny of the creature, the quality of the thought, and the virtue of the polis, and it renders judgment. Patriarchal. Clarion. Prophetic. Old-fashioned. Traditional. Offensive, scandalous, and worst of all, inconvenient.

Orthodoxy, when faced with meaninglessness, is tempted by the Devil to think that it simply does not understand. Perhaps – so goes the script – it has become superannuated, relegated to the age of lost time where there were kings and slaves, patriarchs and oppressed women, white men and everyone else. This is the current experience of diabolism, and it is so rife and ubiquitous that one longs instead for the maudlin appearances of yore.

It is better today, when depressed by hell, to take up the vocation of a fool in this age, and to laugh. That is the cultural prophecy against a time where E=mc² is taken as a sexist remark.

Like it or not, Witness to the Truth

It is difficult, and will become more difficult, to teach God's Word to the world. That is the task of the entire Orthodox Church, clergy and laity alike. And that is the most important leadership task of the Bishop.

I believe two things about the episcopacy. One is that the episcopacy is absolutely essential for Orthodoxy. There is no such thing as a protestant form of Orthodoxy, for such a thing runs the risk of jumping outside of succession. Moreover, such a “congregational” pop-polity distorts the mystical vision that constitutes our ecclesial epistemology, and ends up obstructing theoria. Most of this essay is about the importance of the episcopacy.

But that episcopacy must be nothing less than an icon of Christ, and it must orient its aspirations completely toward theosis. The Beatitudes is the standard, or the ethic, of episcopal behavior and “values” (if I must use that term). There must be more meekness at the level of bishop, more hunger for righteousness, more spiritual poverty, more mercy.

This is not to say that there shouldn’t be a love for the grand spectacle, golden chalices and fine vestments. I have no problem whatsoever with the glorious apparel of the Church. I think it takes humility to become overwhelmed aesthetically by the image of heavenly worship and the glory of Liturgy: conversely, it takes pride of the first order to contemptuously glory in minimalism, and complain that the proceeds should have been given to the poor.

But it should be that the Bishop, as the successor to the Apostles, as one who is breathed upon by Christ with the Spirit, under the voice of the Father – it should be that one is a type of the Good Shepherd who is so meek that he will not discard a damaged reed.

We need such an episcopacy in a time that doesn’t like the Trinity, or the truth of man, now more than ever.

John Henry Cardinal Newman once wrote that the ministry of the Church is divided into three categories: theology, devotion, and government. The Bishop must be preeminently a theologian as he is president of the Church: and for him to know theology and to teach theology well, he must be a man of devotion and prayer. Disaster and disappointment always strike when any Christian attempts Orthodoxy without prayer: and nowhere is this more tragic than when a bishop attempts to do so.

St. Clement of Rome, in writing (about AD 85) on the necessity to appoint bishops who would directly succeed the Apostles, wrote that such men should have "ministered to the flock of Christ without blame, humbly, peaceably and with dignity, and who have for many years received the commendations of all" (Letter to the Corinthians).

In the doctrine of the Church, the Bishop -- as the successor of the Apostles -- is expected to be the keenest witness of Holy Tradition to the present generation. St. Dionysios the Areopagite made this expectation clear, and for a particular reason. He stated, without apology or reservation, that the episcopacy should have attained the highest levels of morality and spirituality. Having attained this, the episcopacy is able then—and only then—to apprehend the mystical truth of theology.

This highest stage is that of mystical union with Christ, and St. Dionysios identified this stage with the episcopacy. In this stage, the Christian is inspired by the Holy Spirit, and he experiences “theoria,” or the “vision of theology.” He is given a profound awareness of the present, ongoing voice of apostolic tradition. Indeed, this is the very reason why we recognize the episcopacy as the vessel of the unbroken, continued presence of apodosis, or the apostolic witness of Holy Tradition.

Of course, it should be said that this schema of St. Dionysios does not discount the fact that there are many Christians who have been purified, illumined, or given the grace of theoria. Neither does it discount the tragic possibility that some bishops, priests and deacons may not have attained the sanctification that is necessary to their office.

The schema of St. Dionysios leaves us with one very clear point: the leadership of the Church must experience the vision of theology, in its most mystical meaning, or else the Church will founder in "the winds of doctrine as children, vulnerable to the trickery of men and the deceit of conspiracies" (Ephesians 4.14).

The process of deification, which figures as the single, all-encompassing imperative of the undivided Church, inducts the Christian -- especially the Bishop -- into a truly ecclesial epistemology. In such an epistemology, the soul has achieved independence from the passionate distortions of the world, which so often confuse and darken discernment. The soul has been enabled to take a truly realistic view of the world and its members. It is unhindered by completing philosophies or “spirits,” whether these are consciously learned or tacitly accepted. It apprehends reality directly and accurately, and is not distressed by contemporary values that are irrational, nor is the soul conditioned or determined by contemporary forces. Finally, the sanctified soul communes with the Holy Fellowship of the Trinity and the Church, the mystical Body of Christ. It hears the contemporary voice of Holy Tradition, and the Spirit’s trenchant criticism of society at present.

In short, deification alone prepares the soul for theology. Deification -- neither mere academic achievement, nor cultural and rubrical finesse -- is what makes the Bishop the Defender and Speaker of the Truth.

For this reason, St. Maximos the Confessor called this true theology nothing less than the mystical vision of the Trinity … it is unforgettable spiritual knowledge, written into the very summa of the servant-hierarchy of the Church.

The Bishop occupies a perspective that is more perilous and terrifying that what is commonly known. He is aware of the grim realities of spiritual evil, the "roaring lion who walks about seeking whom he may devour" (1 Peter 5.8). He is painfully aware of the dark labyrinth of the human soul, and the gravity of sin and denial of Christ. He is sensitive to the allergy of the modern age to the message and the very presence of the Orthodox Church. He knows that America and Europe do not want to hear that the Bible is sacred, perfect and mysterious.

These Western nations do not want to hear that God the Father created, maintains, and will consummate the seen and unseen worlds, through the Son and in the Holy Spirit. They do not want their myths of evolution and materialism challenged, nor do they want to hear that human nature is understood only in the wisdom of Holy Tradition, and not by Freud, Jung or Maslow. They, and really all the world, do not want their behavior and opinions confronted by the demands of Natural Law and Christian charity.

The Bishop, as the Defender and Teacher of the Truth, knows first hand and more profoundly than any other, that "the house of God, which is the church of the living God, is the pillar and ground of the truth" (1 Timothy 3.15). He knows, from the experience of prayer, asceticism, study and communion, the supreme truth of the words from the Synodikon of the Seventh Ecumenical Council: “This is the faith of the Apostles. This is the faith of the Fathers. This is the faith of the Orthodox. This is the faith that upholds the universe!” This is not a mere figure of speech: the Church actualls preserves the world and illumines it, just as our Lord described His followers as "salt and light" (Matthew 5.13-14).

The Bishop knows -- because he should have experienced it, the Apostolic Vision -- the objective fact that "the grace of truth has shone forth upon us ... the Church is clothed in a beauty that surpasses all things earthly" (Vespers for the Sunday of Orthodoxy). And because of this revealed truth that surpasses the intellectual powers of philosophers, but is experienced through Orthodox sanctification, "the Church of Christ is delivered from the dark despondency of heresy: she puts on a robe of gladness, and is clothed in the light of divine grace" (Matins for the Sunday of Orthodoxy).

The Bishop knows that there is darkness in the world, and that darkness will become eternal. But far better is his confidence that there is salvation in the Church, and the darkness "will not comprehend it" or engulf it, but instead that Uncreated Light will shine supreme at the end of the age.

God desires "all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth" (1 Timothy 2.4). The bishop is ordained by God to participate in this plan of salvation. The bishop is assisted by his priests, who are the extension of his archpriestly office. He is also assisted and represented by all the faithful of the diocese, his eucharistic fellowship. The faithful Orthodox Christian not only practices the virtues that are described in the Beatitudes: he also proclaims in his testimony the contents of the Creed.

There is heartbreak all around the Church because prodigals suffer from homesickness for their Father's house. There are broken minds and broken philosophies, because pagans and heretics suffer the lack of knowledge of God.

They are all lost sheep, waiting for the Prophet, the Saint, the Apostle, the Bishop and his flock who are sanctified, to come and lead them in true knowledge through the storm and back home to the Father's House.

This is the fervent plea, written in the ancient prayer of Consecration to the Episcopacy. The bishop-elect kneels before the consecrating bishops, holding the pastoral staff in his hand, and with his hand upon the candidate's head, the chief consecrating bishop prays these words: "O Lord, make this, Your servant, who has been declared a steward of episcopal grace, to be an imitator of You, the True Shepherd, Who laid down Your life for Your sheep; to be a leader of the blind, a light to those who are in darkness, an instructor of the unwise, a teacher of the young, a lamp to the world; that having perfected the souls entrusted to him in the present life, he may stand unashamed before Your Throne and receive the great reward which You have prepared for those who have contended valiantly for the preaching of the Gospel ..."

Chesterton reveals the reason why Orthodoxy will never be a mega-church

Here are two quotes (and a minor middle one). The first is from GK's sharp little book entitled, scandalously and simply, Heretics. The second (and less English) quote is more recent: Alan Wolfe's latest offering in the March issue of The Atlantic, entitled "And the Winner Is ..."

G. K. Chesterton, Heretics:

The truth is that it is quite an error to suppose that absence of definite convictions gives the mind freedom and agility. A man who believes something is ready and witty, because he has all his weapons about him. He can apply his test in an instant ... a man with a definite belief always appears bizarre, because he does not change with the world; he has climbed into a fixed star, and the earth whizzes below him like a zoetrope. Millions of mild black-coated men call themselves sane and sensible merely because they always catch the fashionable insanity, because they are hurried into madness after madness by the maelstrom of the world ... Truth, of course, must of necessity be stranger than fiction, for we have made fiction to suit ourselves.

Orthodox Christianity, in its Trinitarian and Christological society, is the fixed star in a whizzing world. It is not fashionable, and it is strange. And it will not win. In Philip Jenkins' spooky book, The Next Christendom: the Coming of Global Christianity, Orthodoxy is a sure-fire failure in the polling stations:

Falling birth rates will ultimately be more destructive to Orthodox fortunes than Muslim or communist persecutions ever were. Taking an optimistic population projection, Orthodox believers will be 2050 have shrunk to less than 3 per cent of the world's population, pathetically smaller than the early twentieth-century figure. In the worst-case scenario, the total number of Orthodox believers in the world by 2050 might actually be less than the Christian population of a single nation like Mexico or Brazil (p. 96).

(I should note that the new U.S. Religious Landscape Survey (2008) from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life finds that the Orthodox Church accounts for 0.6% of the American adult population. I was interested to look at these numbers to see how the influx of converts may have affected the population size of the American Orthodox community. The answer is not much. Less than 0.3% of American adults "converted into" Orthodoxy: the very same percentage "converted out.")

"Put not your trust in mortal princes," David tells us in the Psalms. Put not your faith in numbers either. Programming for attendance brings down curses, as David himself discovered in his disastrous census. Besides, Orthodoxy should not worry about census so much, as churches to do have to pay a prize in what G.K. would call "fashionable insanity."

Check out what "wins" in the numbers game of American religion ...

Alan Wolfe, "And the Winner Is ...", from The Atlantic:

The most important religious phenomenon in the United States ... has nothing to do with the number of atheists. It concerns another trend that, like modernization, is changing the trajectories of religion worldwide: the creation and spread of a free religious marketplace, which partly (though by no means completely) revives religious devotion wherever it reaches, but also tends to moderate the religions offered within it.

Religious monopolies or near-monopolies, such as state-sponsored churches, generally throttle religious practice over time, especially as a country becomes wealthier; the European experience amply demonstrates this. Lacking any incentive to innovate, churches atrophy, and their congregations dwindle. But places with a free religious marketplace witness something very different: entrepreneurs of the spirit compete to save souls, honing their messages and modulating many of their beliefs so as to appeal to the consumer. With more options to choose from, more consumers find something they like, and the ranks of the religious grow.

The key precondition for this sort of marketplace is the presence of rudimentary secular values. (emphases added)

Alan Wolfe is writing, tragically, with the assumption that he has something to say about religion. He may be describing a sociological phenomenon. But phrases like "entrepreneurs of the spirit" who "modulate many of their beliefs so as to appeal to the consumer" indicate an absence of religion, and the presence of something rather else.

An album of Christmas readings

No, Christmas is not yet over, if it can be said that a Feast is ever "over." We julianites still have Monday for the Feast, and you're all invited to St. John's on Christmas Eve (Sunday at 8 pm) for Compline, and Christmas morning at 10 am.

Or, come along in your reading these little spots of plum pudding:

First of all, there are three (so far) snippets from W. H. Auden wonderwork, For the Time Being. There is this "motto" from the Summons. Then there is this Christmas narration, also from the Summons.

A blue note sounds in Porphyry Field: but it's bright, at least, in surmising that the end of us yearns, as does all broken nature, for the advent of the Son of Man.

Just to show I'm fairminded to the gregorians, I sent this Trinitarian Noel on their Feast, which, for me, was really the twelfth of December. I couldn't miss the chance to quote my favorite Marian epigraph: "O Daughter of thy Son."

Then there is this re-telling of an old Russian Christmas story, of an old woman who tries to follow the Magi.

What is a blog without a rant? Here's this on the ethics of putting on a multi-million dollar Broadway-production of a Christmas pageant. There is also an intriguing suggestion that the Peanuts cast might be better witnesses to the Trinity and the Incarnation than the megachurches. But you would expect a smarmy remark like that from me, who found more Christian edification at a Bruce Springsteen concert than any and all of Joel Osteen's remarks.

An old Christmas Baba story, revised

It was hard for her to remember many things, especially what she had for lunch that day, and maybe, once in a while, just where she was going in the hall. Sometimes – maybe it was yesterday? – she didn’t even know which hall she was in.

For years, she had no difficulty remembering the old Christmases with her mother, her father, her grandparents, aunts and uncles, and her ten brothers and sisters. What a big family she had. That was just the way back then. Families had lots of children. They don’t do that anymore.

Memory after memory unveiled scenes of brightness and magic. She and her brothers and sisters, huddled by the window, looking carefully for the first star of the Holy Night. “There, there it is!” she remembered, her own little girl pudgy finger pointing at the joyous glimmer in the cerulean night.

That was the signal for Christmas Eve to begin, and the mystical, magical Holy Supper. How the scenes of those Holy Nights gleamed brightly, like picture slides on a screen, in her mind. Straw tied in bunches and strewn on the table. Candles and wine, honeyed fruit and delicacies prepared just once a year.

She closed her eyes, so she could see and hear. Yes, there was her mother, dipping her finger into the honey, tracing a cross on each forehead. There was her father, with his words of the toast every year, “And above all, my Little Jesus, born this day, bring peace, health and happiness!”

But one day, the picture was not complete. She could not see the other faces – the faces of her aunts and uncles. This time, the carols were not sung. She could not taste the dishes. And she could not remember her brothers and sisters’ names.

She opened her eyes to the harsh fluorescent light of the nursing home where she stayed, where everything was clinical and made to look like a store, where every hall and every room and every meal looked the same.

For the next few times, when she tried to remember, another detail would be lost. More faces would be nameless, more voices fell into silence. The last thing left was the evening star, her finger still pointing, her voice still whispering, “There it is!”

It was the holidays at the Fern Manor Rest Home, with the tree decorated in the lobby, and “Happy Holidays” splashed on the walls and bulletin boards. The sound system was set to “Christmas Mix” – a repeating loop of “soothing stringed orchestrations of sentimental holiday favorites.” Santa and his elves had already decked the halls. Church groups came in occasionally, singing carols and handing out poinsettias.

This group, tonight, was different. They were bringing children to act out the Nativity Scene, complete with Mary and Joseph, the Baby Jesus, the Angels and the Shepherds and toddlers as Sheep, and the Three Wise Men.

It was beautiful, to be sure, and the children sang the carols sweetly: Away in a Manger; Silent Night; Joy to the World; and We Three Kings. The residents of Fern Manor sang along and clapped.

She clapped, too, especially at the Wise Men. They looked so regal, so mysterious, wise and powerful. Their clothes were darkly strange and beautiful, with that deep appearance of having come from far away. They carried gifts for the Baby Jesus. They were on their way to Bethlehem.

“O come, let us adore Him,” they sang at the end. Maybe I should go with them, she thought: the Wise Men know where to go, don’t they? The Star leads them to the Baby Jesus, doesn’t it? And maybe then, if she could see the Star, she would see them all again, and remember.

The Wise Men passed by, following the Star, but she did not rise from her wheelchair. She felt tired and worn and more than a little drowsy. She could stay awake for only so long, nowadays. And in a blurry swoon, she sank quickly into slumber.

She woke in the darkness of her room, and sat up with a start. The Wise Men had called her from the street in the night. They had invited her to come with them, to follow the Star. “We bring gifts for the Newborn King, the Little Jesus!” they announced, “Come with us, and bring your offerings to the Prince of Peace, Health and Happiness!”

“Wait!” she called out in a voice that was strangely silent. “I’m coming with you! I need to find presents for the Baby!”

What to take? What to bring? she repeated to herself, in a wash of energy she hadn’t felt for ages. Her eyes alighted on the macramé lap blanket on her chair: “He needs a blanket in the Manger, the Baby must be cold.” She folded it carefully, as she called out, “Don’t leave without me!”

“A music box to make Him smile,” she announced, as she picked up her disc player, with the only disc she ever played of old-country Christmas carols.

“I’m almost ready,” she said to the door, and to herself she added, “I better hurry … now, for one last thing.”

She reached for her battery table lamp, the kind that turns on with a clap. “Perfect … light for the night, when it gets too dark.”

She bundled the lamp and the player into the blanket, and shuffled toward the door. “I’m coming out,” she called, as she stepped through the threshold.

There was no one. Only a brick street angling between the strangely familiar rowhouses. Familiar, yes, and so was the tang of coal smoke that touched her nose. It was nighttime, but even the shadows told her she was on familiar ground. “They’re going through my town,” she breathed to herself, “The Star is over my town … I must catch up to the Wise Men.”

To anyone else, she ambled slowly in her slippers over the waxed floor of the Fern Manor west wing hall, tottering feebly toward the atrium. But to her, she walked steadily on the sidewalk of her childhood, toward a light just ahead.

It was only a lamppost, not the Star. Behind the door of the rowhouse, she could hear a soft whimper. “Could it be?” she wondered as she pushed through the doorway. In the pale shadows, she knew that this was no place for the Baby Jesus. But there was a tiny child here, who was sitting in the corner, her arms wrapped around her knees, with white woolen slippers on her feet, tears tracing lines down her face.

“What’s wrong, little girl?” she asked.

“I don’t like it dark,” came the stuttered reply, “I get so afraid.”

The tiny girl looked like one of the sheep in a Christmas play she had seen so long ago. There was a light for someone who was afraid of the dark, and she held it in her bundle. “But it is for the Baby Jesus,” she told herself.

Another choked sob and a whimper came from the corner, and she knew exactly what she had to do. “The Baby Jesus will have just two gifts instead of three,” she whispered, “It seems that this little girl needs His light so very much.”

“Here, little one,” she set the lamp beside the girl, “just clap your hands lightly, and the light turns on.” She clapped, and the glow chased the shadows away, the tears melted into a smile.

“Thank you, nice lady,” the girl said, “Now I’m not so scared.”

She left the girl with the light in the room, and stepped back onto the street to follow the Wise Men and the Star. She walked past what seemed like hundreds of houses, squeezed thin together and tall, and then she saw a glow around the corner.

It, too, turned out to be a lamppost. And behind the door of the house she could hear a sound … but it wasn’t whimpering. It was fragments of a song, as though someone was singing a few notes, and then stopping at broken fragments: “Hear the wonderful tidings something, something … Divnaja Nov, Nov … Viflejemi Novina, tra la la la, da de da … Why can’t I remember the words?”

Then, there was weeping. “Could it be?” she wondered, as she pushed the door open. But there was no Christ Child asleep on the hay. Instead, there was an older girl, sitting up in bed, dressed in a gown as an angel. “Angel, did you forget the songs?” she gently asked.

The angel girl in the dressing gown nodded forlornly, about ready to break into a wail. “I used to know all our Christmas songs, all the koljadij, now I can’t even get through one all the way.”

There was music, the melodies and all the words for someone who had forgotten her carols, and she held it in her bundle. “But it is for the Baby Jesus,” she told herself. But the angel girl tried to sing again, and this time, not one word came through her lips.

“The Baby Jesus will have just one gift, instead of two,” she whispered again, “It seems that this little angel needs His music to sing again.”

“Here, angel,” she set down the player beside the girl. “Press this button, and the music comes on.” Immediately, the strains of “On this bright day” filled the room: “That’s how it goes,” the girl laughed and sang, “Boh predvicnyj narodilsja … see? I didn’t forget, I just needed starting!”

She hurried back out onto the street, remembering that the Wise Men might be getting further ahead and out of view. But she could see another gleam down the street. So she quickened her pace and nearly ran past the darkened windows and locked doors of a town shut for the night.

It was another street lamp, not the Star. And it was another door into a house, through which came a sound. Not crying, not the fragments of song, but a chattering instead. A shaking sound, punctuated by short gasps and shallow breaths. “Could it be? Surely, not here,” she told herself.

It wasn’t the place of the Baby Jesus. There was only a boy, shivering in the night, with a shepherd’s robe pulled tight around his shaking frame. He didn’t notice her, as he was asleep, tired and worn from the cold.

There was warmth for someone shivering in the night, and she held the blanket in her hands. “But it is for the Baby Jesus,” she protested to herself, “it is the only thing I have left to give Him in the manger.”

Then the boy shook all the harder, and she could feel the chill through his bones. She knew, then, what she had to do. She knelt down, and wrapped her blanket around the shepherd boy, and slowly the shivering subsided, and his breathing deepened into steady calm.

“The Baby Jesus will have no gifts from me,” she sighed to herself, “instead of three. I hope He will
understand.”

Her steps were not so light and  hopeful. But still she stepped onward toward the greater light, now beaming from around the corner. She was almost there, with the thought that just seeing the Child, just watching from a distance would be enough. After all, that’s what the Shepherds did, didn’t they? They had no presents, and still they knelt down and worshiped. “That would be enough,” she whispered, as she reached the corner.

She rounded the turn of the street and the hall, and there she saw it … stopping cold, coming finally to her senses.

It was only the atrium of the Fern Manor Rest Home. It all came clear to her. This was nothing but the place  where she had been staying childless, family-less and friendless for so long that she could not remember when she came, or where she came from. The shining light was only the plastic silver star on the Christmas Tree. The picture window revealed not the streets of her childhood steel town, but the empty black parking lot of a people forgotten, severed from a friendlier, homelier world.

Her age thrust down again upon her weak frame like chains of iron, she shuffled agonized steps to the sofa under the window. She fell, slowly, into the cushions, sitting sideways so she could see out through the glass. She lingered, under the window, and remembered how, long, long ago, she was a little girl once with pudgy hands, staring up through a glass such as this, waiting for the first star of the Holy Night.

She could feel the tinges of her dementia returning, as her thoughts were getting harder to tie together. It was chilly here, dark and too quiet. “Where did I put my blanket?” she wondered, and she remembered. “Oh ... I gave to Mr. Burris, who sleeps in his bathrobe. He looked so cold … well, I hope he stays warm through the night.”

Her disc player would have been nice right now. Those voices from the old country would have driven some of the loneliness away. “But I gave it to Angela,” she remembered her bingo friend, always in her white nightgown. “She couldn’t remember the koljadij.”

A light would have helped especially here, to ward off for a while at least, the approaching gloom. But that, too, she had given away. “Rosie,” she thought of the middle-aged woman with wooly slippers, who was at Fern Manor and nobody knew exactly why. “I gave my light to Rosie.” She thought of the woman, who had long stayed up through the nights and slept through the days. “Well, I’m glad I did.”

“And so am I.”

There was a voice that rose like warmth from the sun in winter. She opened her eyes, and there was light in the room, brighter than the Christmas Tree. “I think,” the voice said, “Rosie will sleep well tonight.”

Then she perceived, through the glow, the Baby she had looked for, now grown to thirty-three. “And so strong and magnificent,” she thought, “so serious and happy all at once.”

“I know it’s You,” she said aloud, softly, “but You don’t look like a Baby.”

“I was that only once in time, I am this way now and forever – old and new, young and ancient of days.”

“I looked for You, and I gave all my gifts for You away.”

“You only made one step, Talitha, little girl, I made ninety-nine,” the Bright Man said with a barely repressed laugh, a voice ready to burst into a fountain of diamonds.

“I looked for You, but I couldn’t find You.”

“Child, when you decided to look for Me,” He said, His smile deepening into a joy beyond laughter, “It was I Who did the finding.”

“But I have nothing to give You,” she said with regret.

“You have already given Me everything you have, everything you are.”

Minutes passed at the window, but now it felt like the moments were adding life, not draining it away.
“There, can you see it?” He pointed at the joyous glimmer, in the brightening sky, through the glass darkly.

“There it is!” she whispered, pointing again with her little girl pudgy hand. His hand grasped hers, tender and strong, with the warmth of Eden radiating from His palms and fingers into her arm, her shoulders, her legs, her mind and her heart.

Then she knew, her every memory set in the right place, with nothing lost and everything gained: the faces of her aunts and uncles, the jokes her father made, the seven different smiles of her mother for seven different happinesses, the interminable rules of the games invented by her brothers, each delicate paper outfit on each cut-out doll she made with her sisters.

“No,” she whispered in the morning-dew of thankful tears, “nothing is lost … I didn’t lose a single one – I kept every gift You gave me.”

“Is it almost time?” she asked, with hope jumping from her heart to her eyes, “Is it time for Holy Night? I see the star!”

“Dear one, never again will you hear the word almost. It is always today, here and now. Come with Me,” He said, as they stepped from Fern Manor and out of the old dark streets of the past, “It is time for you to see that all your memories are really promises … promises of the Morning.”

Time passed for those still dwelling in the streets of the past, and the halls of the Fern Manor Rest Home. Rosie indeed slept all through the night, the little light glowing by her bed. Mr. Burris lay content and warm, snug in his new blanket. With the aid of her new player, Angela remembered all the words of the old songs, and even learned some new ones.

And the nursing home staff, who were looking for their mixed-up, lonely lady who wandered the halls at night, finally found her in the atrium, still … and in repose. Her eyes were closed, lips curved in a graceful smile … and her face was turned upward ... as though she were gazing, up in wonder, at the New and Morning Star.

Peace and Glory, and the Tree of the World

If I had to choose between Christmas pageants, I’d choose Linus.

There are many to choose from. This year, somewhere down in Florida, there is a production that has “real live” camels (does “real” modify “live,” or is “life” an intensifier of “real”? one can only wonder). It has a Broadway-choreographed and costumed ensemble of singers who can actually hit the high notes, with just enough mod R & B to sound pop enough. It has a set that looks a lot better than the original. Cast members lead animals through the audience and offer fruit.

There are fireworks.

The pastor, when queried about the Bethlehem glitz by the big news people on Sunday morning (while I was serving the proskomedia – the ritual of preparation), explained that the fireworks and the glam production  were perfectly appropriate.

“Our fireworks don’t come close to what it must have been like in the original,” he said.

I don’t think so. For most observers, the "original" Nativity might have been a mundane affair. A casual passerby might have seen an adolescent girl, an old man, a teenage boy and a few other creatures in a hay-strewn cave. But he might not have seen any light or heard the animals talk.

He could have been out in the midnight clear, but did not hear any choir. He probably did not see what the Wise Men were following.

The Bethlehem Star sailed across the night for the Magi, starting them years before for the thousand mile journey of a thousand desert nights, to arrive just in time at Bethlehem. The religious prophecy experts and Herod's staff couldn't go with them, because they could not see the star. The only ones who could were children and the truly wise.

No, I think the Manger and the Cave demand a “non-production.” They are, after all, something rustic, simple, almost rude. The Nativity is possessed of a tone that is quiet, passing under the notice of historians and media outlets. It has bypassed all the pathways to success and ladders to fame. It has renounced celebrity and noise.

The Nativity embraces obscurity, silence, the ground of the people who walk upon the real earth and who breathe draughts out of the cold sapphire sky, who still stub toes, who live short tragic proletarian lives and do not think about authenticity, but who, because of this poverty, can still run where angels tell them to, and with haste.

That is the simple reason why the angels came to shepherds, and why shepherds don’t go to most pageants.

There is, and can be, no stage at Christmas.

Except, maybe, a little junky one, high enough so the children can be seen, in a crowded hall that smells of chalk and pencils, Murphy’s Oil Soap and the janitor’s buffing compound. 

I think the Peanuts choir from the Charlie Brown Christmas is a lot closer to the angels than people incarcerated on that desperately tinsel spectacle called “the Living Christmas Tree.” It is certainly closer than Broadway dancers on televised holiday “spectaculars.” It is closer than church choirs who insist on doing, this month, a certain number by Handel. It is closer than fountains, doves flying terrified under auditorium lights, wiring harnesses to make young adults (who normally wouldn’t be in church but can’t pass up the chance for a rush) fly.

It is closer than real, live camels.

The Peanuts Choir approximates the angels better, not because they look like the angels. The angels, being bodiless, cannot be something to “look like.” There is no material antecedent. There are certainly no wings or harps or, thank heaven, neon-flavored choir robes emblazoned with rainbows that must have escaped from blacklight velvet new-age paintings.

They do not sound like angels, either, because again, the angels were heard without benefit of sound waves, as they were seen without the mediation of photons or light waves (whichever you prefer).

The choir on the simple Gospel stage, populated by the likes of Charlie, Sally, Schroeder, Pig Pen, and even (unbelievably, and only by grace) Lucy, is closer to the angels not by sight nor by sound.

They are closer to the angelic icon only because they spoke the Word as a winsome messenger, and announced that Word of Glory in a hall shorn of pretension.

The performance is cleansed of cynical adulthood: it is still buoyed by a child’s wonder. There is no barricaded self-consciousness, no self-aggrandizing agenda that clutters up the ego so.

There is only a child, with a skimpy little Christmas Tree, who reads, rightly, the second chapter of Luke from the KJV.

And when that happens, you know that it is said right, in the right place and time, by the right voices and toward the right mind.

Because, you know, a child is poor enough to be in wonder, delighted enough to believe in the Holy Trinity before comprehension, brave enough to be noble and kind, to join in glory to God in the highest, the life of Trinitarian praise ... to apprehend, in the apophaticism of childlike surprise, the revelation of the Father as the unbegotten and principal of unity, the filiation of the Son, the procession of the Holy Spirit, ousia and hypostasis in synonymity and differentiation.

Only a child can accept the Trinity. Adult philosophers will have none of this. They prefer something textbook, nonconcrete, impersonal, a singularity which is less of a nature and more of a force. Something deducible. Something definable. Something less mysterious, less dogmatic, not salvific and thus requiring of us penance for His mirth.

The Peanuts Choir, and all humble chancel shepherds who wear bathrobes and dishtowels on their heads, and Wise Men with paper crowns wrapped in aluminum foil, and little girl angels with gold tinsel garlands ringing their coiffures do better than, are closer to, the original angelic announcement of peace and glory.

A child understands, from the heart, why a Manger was chosen as the best "stage" of all.

Peace on Earth, indeed.

Christ is our Peace, and He is on earth.

The little Peanuts tree is the Christmas Tree of the world.

The Table of the Star

I started my holidays with sad people.

Every year, my friend Pat the Funeral Director invites the families of the recently-deceased to a Christmas reception. There is a prayer (which was my job) and a little meditation. At the end, Pat reads off the names of those he helped bury over the past year, and one by one, the families come up to receive a little ornament to hang on their Christmas Tree, a bittersweet ivory and silver memento mori bearing the late name, like a tombstone, to be suspended in evergreen by the retro-50’s bulbs and winking suns of blue, gold and red.

A pair of late-middle-aged men strummed holiday chord progressions on their amplified acoustic guitars, occasionally breaking into clarified carol themes. The newly-minted widowers who dressed for Christmas in their suits without help for the first time this year, sat lost and listened, hoping that their windsors looked something like those neat knots, sculpted by those arthritic lover fingers for decades, gone.

The ladies looked less out of sorts, most of them having taken the time and thought during the pre-arrangement days to prepare for the adjustments in attention, and household management, and the halving of the refrigerator, the table, the sofa and the bed.

Daughters, the new matriarchs, walked briskly, tearfully and certain, to the front where my friend met them, ornament in hand. They know, this year, that sadness has a taste: the magical days of winter lights have passed from the sparkle of champagne to the musky burn of port, heavy, purple, the grapes of heart.

Sons, who generally do not know these things, mostly stumbled, unconvinced by reality, interrupted by pathos, shocked by the hot and salt precipitation from their own blinking eyes.

The holidays will be difficult, we told them. This Nativity Season will be the first with an empty chair that is empty, for once, for real. The emptiness of the Elijah place setting is always a happy mystery: but the emptiness that accrues from absence sounds the echo of abandonment and doubt.

The Table of the Magi Star always bridges this year to the next. It is a diachronic nexus, the agora of ghosts and a festival of sentiments. This year, we told them, your sadness will recall every other grief: it is the secret, unavoidable track of Holiday, the conference of years, the path through the leaves that must be taken, and may not be traversed without risk and change.

There is no terror from the spirits, and the bitterness is sweet. Incompetent hands, now, brandish the carving knife and cannot make the gravy in the roasting pan. The laughter, too, is shy, experimental. And the trials lead, like drama, into reminiscence and story, narrating the old lesson of time: first there is fellowship, then there is remembrance, and the memory grows like an oak out of an acorn’s dream, and the eternal memory of God is sung through the soft murmur at the Table.

The First Star will not be found in the outside sky this year, we told them, but it is the single light in your window, to tell the world that life is still, in your heart this year, by this candle flame.

“They are at another Table tonight, this year, and we miss them, but for their felicity we are glad.”

Ah, yes, Christ: He came for these sad people, and for all meetings such as these.

He came for all who have had enough of the ornaments bittersweet, and who have spent too long at the confluence of ghost and nostalgia.

There is something about the winter lights that speak of forever, wistful, a something that wrings the heart like the chill of twilit snow, but glints of the fire hearth and brandy at midnight. There is something in the air at meetings of the sad and holidays, something that strips away all the Macy’s Parades, red fur hats and the clamoring society of tinsel.

There is something, with these funereal survivors, who arrive still on the midnight clear, who wait with the flocks by night.

They wait, hushed, with the lambs for the angels, for the handing out of salvific ornaments, bestowed from the Table of the Star.

I started my holidays with the sad people, and with them I found Christmas’ end.

Prudery, Inc.

Recently, it was brought to my attention that my latest crankiness about an American Journal of Public Health article suggests at least a mild, and backward, prudery on my part.

I am not sorry for this, neither am I proud. Forlorn is more the word.

I will continue sounding prudish and moralistic. I will even risk sounding pietistic (though I am sure Yannaras errs in his estimations), not because I am offended by sin or phobic about it, but because I believe without a doubt that it kills and passion destroys. It is time to be more moralistic, not less.

In the same way, I will continue sounding exclusivistic and insensitive, and very much too dogmatic for the tastes of most gnostic ecumenicists. I do not do this to protect my worldview, which is completely unimportant and ultimately irrelevant.

I am exclusive about Orthodox Christianity because I know, and am persuaded, that any consciousness leading away from the Nicene theoria of the Holy Trinity must lead to insanity, and metaphysical anguish.

I will not, nor can I, apologize for my old-fashioned and revivalistic concern about my own people and for you, dear reader: I want you saved.

It is all because Heaven is by definition a public place. The other place is quite private, as it is the very definition of privation and despair. It is possible there to pretend disbelief forever, and to refuse the Grace that will have become, in that place, corrosive fire.

Here is a passage from the beautiful, priestly heart of +Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky), that might give a clue to the wisdom of prudery today:

If contemporary pastors dare to take upon themselves the responsibility before God of admitting them to Communion, then it is in view of the general corruption of Christian morals and the Christian way of life, which has made the struggle with sin incomparably harder for the sons of the Church than it was before, when there was a general zeal for salvation, when people stimulated each other to moral struggles and were ashamed of their sins before each other. Now society's attitude to sins and virtues is exactly the opposite, and so it is already necessary somewhat to soften the requirements of the book of penances, but only within certain limits, lest the priest should also burn in the same flames as the sinners he had unlawfully admitted to Communion.

(from Confession: a series of lectures on the mystery of repentance, 1983)

I read this with fear and trembling, but as priests generally do, we will take the risk of offering Communion when we are all unworthy. That is a much greater danger.

Compared to this mortal danger, being called a prude is nothing. Nothing at all.

Brother Our Way

We go, brother, our way into the wolves
As lambs with no purse, no bag, no sandals.
No shelters from contingencies, no bread from padded budgets,
No tunic of market surveys, no extra sandal for the dust,
No pretending that this is not difficult, that this is a career,
A romantic vision, a respectable thing, an admirable project:
Not a road to success.

We go, brother, our way through the shadows and curses,
Self-chosen perditions packaged by the therapy of sophistication
Of empty words and salutations, the delays and distances
Of ambiguities and conferences, workshops, and the winning
Of titles, badges, superlatives, expansions of the vitae.
There is to be limpid simplicity, like spring water:
Not the booze of congratulation.

We go, brother, our way in the warlands
And we look for open houses as the Son of Man has nowhere
To lay His head, to succeed with the crowds, to be elected,
To win. Ours is the journey of peace, not violence since we are called
To strive with self and the other selfish powers.
We say Peace through the door, and we stay,
Not, though, if it returns.

We go, brother, our way to find the sons of peace
Who will receive our old-fashioned preaching:
All have been called to the mystical festival, and
All have been compelled from the Law and the by-ways, but
All have not chosen Cross-comfort in the heart:
They wanted more than restoration of nature and perfection,
Not life but a shadow, rehearsal of shade.

We go, brother, our way with what is provided
In the perilous regions of contingency beyond all prediction:
We will find five loaves and two fishes, the Showbread and the Waybread,
We will drink from the Well of Bethlehem, the Dayspring and the Wine,
We will sing the Trinity and pray the Son at the hearth of the city:
The sons of peace there want the Gospel that may slay us:
Not the androgynous mantra of a lee shore.

We go, brother, our way to the sick who need physicians,
As exiled Samaritans, red-crossed, the wounded Inn-ward fetching.
In His Name we will heal them,
In His Name we will subject the nameless and drive them outward,
In His Name we will face them, and not camouflage them away from offense.
“The Kingdom of God is near you,” we will say to the dying,
Not death, for once. And the living will be glad.

We go our way, brother, through the land of unbelieving,
An overlay of shadows juxtaposed on a wide country green, gold and blue.
The land and its stories wait for our News,
The land and its dead long for Trinity, the Word and the Body,
The land and its present groan for Cross and the Day:
The Gospel explodes from our tongues, and the Eucharist burns in our hands:
Not the sinner’s prayer, but Baptism we portend.

We go, brother, two by two, into the city of universal calling,
Where few are chosen, as perdition is on sale these days and more are buying.
I am Orthodox because I’m American, rooted in the river hills,
I am Orthodox because I’m human, unnaturally bound to die.
I am Orthodox because we’re brothers, you and I,
And if they do not receive us, we will shake the sand, brother,
Not faith, for there is no other.

He is our Peace

On the Epistle appointed for the 24th Sunday after Pentecost: Ephesians 2.14-22.

Man was darkened in Eden, and fractured at the Dark Tower of Babel.

Israel was blessed, having been sent the Law by the Prophets, with Tablets written by the finger of God Himself. They may have wandered in the desert of Sinai and Arabia, but they were on the Way, following after pillar of cloud and fire, followed by the Rock of Everlasting Water. They were in the prophetic community of God, living in the reflected eschatological light, like the gleam of moonlight and starshine, of the fully restored humanity that was to come. It was to be a humanity no longer darkened, but full of Light. It was to be a human nature no longer fractured, but made into a family that transcended biological limitations.

Everyone else, outside of the commonwealth of Israel, was not so lucky. They were the true wanderers. They lived in fear of death, and medicated this fear with idols, drunken orgies, thick-walled cities and royal cults. Nature itself seemed to rise against them, and they fixed their attention on the demon-spirits that conspired against man. His tower of false unity fallen, and the single language shattered into tribes, he took up arms against his brother and neighbor, and fought for land, for water, for wealth and power, wine and women.

It is not pleasant to live under the baleful pall of the wrath of God. It is depressing, anxious and frustrating to be held as a sinner in the hands of an angry God. It is a headache of a hangover to be mastered by the fear of death.

Of course it is more than unpleasant, depressing, anxious and frustrating. And it is a wretched understatement to liken the fear of death to a cottonmouth morning-after hangover.

But these are the only words leftover, in our present, for spiritual pain and for the experience of darkness and fracture. There is no room for the fear of God in the modern world where everything is equal, where all religions are the same, where there is no greatness, where there are no absolutes of goodness, truth and beauty. There is no room for words that remind the world of the absence of goodness, truth and beauty: one cannot say that something is “bad,” or that a statement is a “lie,” or that a work of art is “ugly.” “Who are you to say such a thing?” is the customary response: “You’re just being judgmental, intolerant.”

For today, in the modern age, what is normal and average, and what is accepted as customary and the usual, is a life outside of the spiritual Israel, where there is no peace, where there is estrangement from the covenant of Promise and a constant feeling of hopelessness -- a 4 am in the gray morning certainty that your dark soul has not a sign of the presence of God.

“Sure, I have hope,” the modern human protests, “look at my artificial intelligence, and my redesigned human body that I will engineer for a span of 200 years. Look at my entertainments and celebrations. Look at my dances and my parties, my spectacles of excitement. Look at my works of transforming geographies and the environment. Look at my spider-web internet and my computer virtual-knowledge machine that brings the world to my fingertips and any fantasy to my eyes. Look at my secular peace, where there were very few religious wars in the secular modern twentieth century. Look at my cities, my commerce, my miracle of compounded interest that profits from the debts of smaller men. Look at my revision of old-fashioned books and my re-design of the future. Look at my hope for life in other places and intelligences from outer space: I spend a lot of money on SETI -- if that isn't faith, I don't know what is!"

“I have lots of hope,” he or she concludes, “I just call it optimism. I have sacraments: I just call it medication. I am no stranger to the gods: I just call them celebrities. I have love: I just call it living together and hooking up. I have joy: I just call it happiness. I have peace: I just call it positive thinking, self-esteem, and getting well-adjusted, individuated and self-actualized from therapy. I don’t need Christ, for I have already made him up.”

The modern human can make these mistakes of association. He/she can commit these fallacies of false definition, because he has lost sight of the things of peace, family and union, joy and love. He can make what he is ignorant of anything he wants to, because he is making nothing out of nothing.

He can say he doesn’t need Christ, only because he doesn’t know Him ... nor does he know himself ... nor does he know life.

He knows existence, but not life, for life is the commonwealth of Israel, and the anticipation of the restored human nature, which is another word for Paradise regained.

Existence without life, contrary to nature and wandering in the land of Nod, east of Eden, is a life under wrath, and in individual enmity against anyone who stands as an obstacle to your agenda.

Christ on the Cross and Christ sprung from the Grave and Christ ascended and enthroned at the Right Hand … Christ as the First-Born from the Dead, the Harrower of Hades and the Obliteration of the Gates of Brass, Christ as the One Obedient Person, the God-Man Who fulfilled the impossible demands of the Law and the Divine Fatherly expectation of the Work of Salvation … this Christ, in and only in His Body, in oneness solidarity and communion with Him … this Christ is our Peace.

It is a Peace that passes all understanding. It is the Peace of the Breath of the Risen Jesus in the upper room of last suppers, fear and dread and amazement. It is the Peace of the restored human nature, the experience of Paradise seen without the flaming sword barring the way. It is the Peace of a now possible journey, of a camel successfully passing through a needle and the Herculean movement of mountains, of mustard seeds thrown up as oaks into the sky. It is the Peace of bread and wine becoming on the Table the Body and Blood, becoming Christ formed in you and me.

It is the Peace that reestablishes humanity upon the language of Eden, and the return of magnanimous sentiment toward the welfare of all mankind. It is the peace of psychic and mystic walls torn down, like the Temple curtain, and existential hostilities brought to an end. It is the Peace of goodness, absolutely, and truth and beauty. It is founded on the Word and extended beyond the infinite horizons.

It is Peace beyond mere cease-fires and psychobabblish calmness. It is Joy beyond laughter. It is Hope beyond positive conjecture. It is Love beyond wish-fulfillment.

It is beyond words, for it is the Word.

He is our Peace, for our Peace is Jesus Christ.

Megaresy

Two things from the megachurch front:

First, there's this from the New York Times, a look into megachurch rock and roll:

“When you start a church,” said Tom Mercer, 52, the senior pastor, “you don’t decide who you’re going to reach and then pick a music style. You pick a music style, and that determines who’s going to come.”

This is the pastor/coordinator/CEO of something called the High Desert Church near LA doing the talking, and he's talking about a music style that produces lyrics like this:

Hey, hey, hey, God I love you
Hey, hey, hey, God I need you
I know there’s not anything you can’t do
I know there’s nothing you won’t see me through
Hey God!

I especially like that last dimetric iamb (or is it, God forbid, a trochee?).

Second, there's this shocking confession from Willow Creek, whose pastoral staff just had that nauseating sense of self-awareness from having discovered that megachurches may not be all that effective in producing Christians. Here's Bill Hybels, the pastor/coordinator/CEO, wringing his hands:

We made a mistake. What we should have done when people crossed the line of faith and become Christians, we should have started telling people and teaching people that they have to take responsibility to become ‘self feeders.’ We should have gotten people, taught people, how to read their bible between services, how to do the spiritual practices much more aggressively on their own.

There is a reason why Pastor Bill is resorting to "we should have's" in a tone that is none too convincing. He hasn't a clue. He was simply following the revivalist playbook handed down, in direct succession, from the likes of Charles Finney and Dwight Moody (i.e., "new measures" and electric lights on Sunday night). They didn't know, and neither did he, that it takes Holy Tradition to make holy people. It takes the the Body and Blood of Christ to make the Body of Christ, saved by His Blood. It takes Apostolic Succession to make, you guessed it, Christian Success.

If I were in a crankier, sourer mood, I would suggest that one of the many reasons why the true full gospel Church of the Apostles isn't attended as it should be is because there are so many Christian Lite enterprises out there making things quasi-simpler, more stylish, up-to-date. I offer fasting, prayer ropes, confession and intincted communion. They offer powerpoint, starbucks and healthclubs, and a very active singles' circuit. Which would you pick if you were shopping around?

The Cross is always out of date, out of style, out of worldly wisdom and sense. "He that cometh after Me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me." The Son of Man must be lifted up in the wilderness, in an evangel that offers charismata, but requires ascesis, and always involves martyrdom.

That's the old style of eternity. Try to match that to the new style of megachurchinanity: "You pick a music style, and that determines who’s going to come."

Megaresy indeed.

The New Creation in a Shape-Shifting World

For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision avails anything, but a new creation.
-- Galatians 6.15

At the end of his handwritten letter, in shaky handwriting that is obviously his own, St. Paul warns the Galatians away from the attempt to make “a good showing in the flesh” (6.12).

Other teachers were trying to tell the Galatian Christians to practice a Christianity that was more “user-friendly.” At that time, the “thing to do” was circumcision, or the practice of a Jewish-Christian mix that was popular in and around Jerusalem. The strategy, in this “user-friendly” teaching, was that if you make yourself a “Jewish Christian,” then you didn’t stand out so much and excite comment.

St. Paul said that such a modified Christianity was really motivated by a desire to escape “persecution for the Cross of Christ.”

The great Apostle pointed out the fact that this was all very wrong. The Cross of Christ is not to be avoided, stuck away in a drawer, or kept under a bushel. It is to be gloried in, to be proud of, to be bragged about. It is to be pushed into conversation and made obvious. It is worth becoming difficult about. It is worth risking – gasp – unpopularity, disrepute, even poverty. It is worth losing friends over. It should be a litmus test: where the Cross becomes embarrassing, then it is time not to move the Cross out of the conversation, but to get yourself out of the room.

“God forbid,” Paul said, “that I should glory except in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by Whom the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world” (Galatians 6.14).

Or, in other words, “Come on people, what should you care about what the world thinks of you? Give up this ‘user-friendly’ search for convenience and respectability! At the Cross, you’re at the top of the world. You’ve already won!”

And the Saint goes on: “For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision avails anything, but a new Creation” (Galatians 6.15).

This “new Creation,” St. John Chrysostom explains, is “our own new way of life, both on account of what is past and what is to come … by what is past, because our soul having grown old in sin, has been immediately renewed by baptism. It is as if recreated again that we seek a new and heavenly way of life. We are being renewed by what is to come, because the heaven and the earth and all creation will be changed into incorruption along with our own bodies” (Homily on Galatians 6.15).

Theodoret wrote that the New Creation is “the transformation of all things which will occur after the resurrection of the dead. For then the creation will be freed from sin’s burden and redeemed … saving baptism is an image of things to come.”

It is baptism that is more important than any pedigree. For Paul’s Galatians, that meant that your Christian baptism made whether you were Jewish or non-Jewish completely unimportant. For us in the modern age, it means that baptism makes unimportant, even meaningless, these things: race, income, intelligence, academic achievement, where you live, what school you attended, what car you drive.

Furthermore, Paul says, it is your eternity with Christ that makes your life shine in the present darkness. The Last Day is like a Lighthouse from the future that shines into the present. And because of this, certain other things become unimportant and meaningless: winning or losing in business; preserving your rights; changing spouses or families or situations to become more “fulfilled."

There is very little sympathy in the Old or New Testaments, the Fathers, or in Christ Himself for a user-friendly, or really, world-friendly life -- a life that seems, nowadays, to be the focus of personal development gospels, health and wealth and "increasing" gospels, technophiliac and consumer/market-driven gospels. There is no sympathy for the comforts and easiness of refashioning human nature to fit anyone's druthers. One does not see in Paul, Peter, John nor the Sermon on the Mount any support for discarding or exchanging spouses and children, "trading up" to a more chic congregation (or, God forbid, less demanding denomination), gender or role shifting.

There is no sympathy for any attempt to make Christianity easier, or more palatable, or less prudish and moralistic. The "New Creation" is a new outlook, or optic, that makes it worthwhile to reject the fancies and currencies of retrofitted Christianity.

There is too much shape-shifting in this world today: shape-shifting, gender-bending, disorder and contempt for the holy are possible only when there are so many shadows that all of society has become Halloween: but we don't notice just as long as we are entertained by flashing lights, songs in our ears, and exciting games ... you know, Soma.

Ah, Soma: Swallowing half an hour before closing time, that second dose of soma had raised a quite impenetrable wall between the actual universe and their minds (Aldous Huxley, Brave New World).

I guess that's why they're called "diversions."

One sees in the Divine Word no license for any of this, but only a demand: a command to carry the Cross today, in the pilgrimage of the new Creation, toward the Heaven of the Last Day.

Paul’s logic is unbeatable here, and in many other places in his Epistles: If you have Heaven to look forward to, than can’t you carry the Cross until that Day? And since you have Heaven to look forward to, then isn’t the Life of Christ shining in your love, your dedication and discipline, your prayer and patience, your staying put in your family, your quietness and forbearing, your forgiving and blessing?

“Peace and mercy,” St. Paul concludes his letter, “be upon all who walk by this rule, upon the Israel of God” (Galatians 6.16). “Peace” is wholeness and beauty of life. “Mercy” is restoration from the condemnation of sin, and healing from the decay of death. “Peace and mercy” is the experience of Heaven in the New Creation even now, and it is experienced by the “Israel of God.”

The “Israel of God.” These are those, St. Augustine says, “who are prepared for the vision of God.”

One can only conclude that experiencing such a vision of God and His Creation, even now in a life of the New Creation, would make everything else, even a “good showing in the flesh,” of small importance indeed. Let circumcision and "world-friendliness" go, Paul says, glory instead in the Cross.

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?

If anyone ever sends me one of those craven evil eye emails that curse you if you don't send it on to 83 other people, please understand that I will not do so. I will even stand out on my porch and make it easier for the curse to find me. If it does, I will quote Scripture at it, clutch the Cross, and watch it wither into vapour for the stews of the Vestibule. I spit at the evil eye and intentionally stomp on sidewalk cracks.

But if such an email questionnaire, or tag, ever finds me that asks me who I would like to invite from history or fantasy to dinner, here is how I would answer.

First, it won't be dinner, because it is hard to talk at dinner. Talking is better done at a place like the Eagle and Child, with a roaring hearth, a complete absence of fluorescence (pseudo-light from hades that probably causes ADHD and other forms of industrialist brainwashing). There is also real darts, even though I'm a rotten player. The floor is not so clean, and we don't have to do that wretched "meta-thinking" about having a conversation that one finds oneself doing at dinners with mixed company and awkward.

Second, it won't be about sports, TV shows, video games, or unmanful subjects like the stupid things Dick or Bob is doing and what a nutter he is and did you hear about what he/she did at the conference last week? You can't blame the feminists for taking manhood away, because the men are doing that all by themselves by watching too much TV and learning to talk like the View. There can be some mention about football teams or rugby to establish kinship (baseball or cricket is okay, but only in the mystical sense). Politics, yes, but only as a necessary evil. Philosophy, certainly, but not at all in the "meta-thinking" wraith-language of academia. The American university system would be better off giving up workshops and advanced degrees, and taking up instead the noble business of  dwyle flonking, where one could, if he is lucky, in the course of four snurds, become a flonker, a girter, or even a jobonowl (better, much better, than a Ph.D.).

Poetry of course, but only the kind with a humane prosody like a ballad -- iambic tetrameter that even rhymes (and is thus rendered unfit for acceptance into the modern canon). As Belloc would say, ... bad verse, oughly verse into which a man may get his teeth. Not sloppy verse, not wasty, pappy verse; not verse blanchified, but strong, heavy, brown, bad verse; made up and knotty; twisted verse of the fools. Laughter, occasional silences. Perhaps a numinous reading framed by swirling clouds of pipe smoke punctuated by the crackling fire.

Second, it won't be any of the saints I'd invite, because I am not worthy to tie their shoelaces. I would be happy, more than happy, to simply bus their table and not be seen or heard. What in the world would we talk about as peers, simply as we are not peers? Who am I to ask them anything, or -- God forbid -- to say anything to them? Forsoothe, the nerve: "Lord, I am not worthy that Thou shouldest enter under my roof."

Third, it won't be Gandalf or anyone like him, because he might tell me something meaningful and disturbing like "All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us" (which was said, by the way, in the Shire and not in Moria). Neither will it be any hobbits or dwarves, because eating with them could lead to dancing on the table, and no one who appreciates truth or beauty would want me to do that (all the witnesses would be traumatized and end up liking top-40s music because the experience would have destroyed their good taste). I don't know about elves: I think it would be hard to sit back and rub elbows with anyone who can walk on the surface of snow and belongs to the other shore of an uncurved Sea (although I do like the idea of pointy ears and waking up trees). And neither will it be anyone who can do magic, because I would find it too spooky and unsettling for my digestion: card tricks yes, magic no.

Fourth, no politicians, not even a great one like Lincoln. Not Washington, maybe Franklin (only if he takes a bath). Not Quixote or anyone who can't rise above their gaseous quixotic vocabulary. Absolutely no Napoleons, or anyone of such secularist ilk (like Voltaire) who takes his own character seriously and reads his own biography. Accordingly, no Democrats, no Republicans. Distributists yes, agrarians yes. No Tsarists. No one who believes in the first, second or third Rome. I would prefer anyone who knows Homer more and less of focus groups, polls and surveys. Curse surveys and censuses: they are all vapors of the Vestibule.

Fifth, no one who wears a bluetooth-earwig (which burrows through gray matter, laying eggs along the way) or who carries a blackberry-amulet: such people speak constantly to the ether and communicate with strange spirits, staring blankly and schizophrenically into some vanishing point outside the room. It goes without saying that they violate all conventions of the convivium. They divinize with chill runes and necromantic glyphs on little fertility pocket gods, on which can be heard, occasionally, chants of dark Dionysian rituals. No one, either, who cannot tell the difference between reality and virtuality, or who would ever prefer the latter to the former. Orthodoxy and the wearing of the One Ring (which is the demonic sacrament of technolust) must come into sharper contradistinction.

Sixth, not Satan, neither devil, nor admirer of the darkness nor destroyer of the sacred order, nor vandals of the same. Neither Joyce nor Warhol nor Mapplethorpe nor network executives. Anathema.

Seventh, it will be my family and friends if we can all promise not to talk about people or the Today Show. It will be you dear reader. It will be some of the Inklings (maybe not Charles Williams -- I read him but can't eat with him), especially if they promise to read new stuff. It will be Bertie and some of his pals but not too many: then there would be that hobbit and dwarf problem. It will be Tom Bombadil and Farmer Maggot. Chesterbelloc. Wendell Berry. Allen Tate. Ochlophobists and Axegrinders, philosopher moms, handmaids, scriveners and minor clergy. It will be my English profs and my favorite History prof at Malone (yes, you, Mr. Oliver). Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes and Chaucer. If they come, I would have more qualified people sit with them and tell me what they're saying: put me at the back corner of the room, close enough to see the light.

We will talk about the past and the end of the world, yes. But more, we will sing the songs and tell the stories that will take us safely through to the harbor, poetry that opens the shutters of the lantern of the Last Day upon this shadowed present.

And we will discover, in our recovered language, the words to prayer that calls down miracles, and magically lightens the mundane up to the harmonious spheres. Still there, after centuries of alchemy and science.

I will not bow before the iron crown, and I will help you not to either.

A Bigger World

Never separate yourself from the Church. For nothing is stronger than the Church. Your hope is the Church alone; your salvation is inside the Church only, your refuge is the Church. She is higher than the heavens, and wider than the whole earth. She never grows old, but is always full of vigor and vitality. Holy Scripture [which would not even exist were it not for the Church], when pointing to her strength and stability, calls her an unshakable mountain ...

-- St. John Chrysostom, De capto Eutropio, n. 6

... and the pillar and ground of truth.

-- St. Paul, 1 Timothy 3.15

Can Orthodox and Muslims Get Along?

The inane complaint that “religion causes conflict and wars” is not produced by the wars themselves. The wars of the twentieth century were not produced by religion. They are the fault of radically secularist and totalitarian ideologies. This theory – if it can be called that – is produced by anti-religious rhetoric, and is shared by both those who oppose the occupation of Iraq and those who support it (e.g., Christopher Hitchens).

There is a valid critique here which should be raised in the context of war. The Middle East is ablaze with turmoil mostly because of the corrupt dismantling of the Ottoman Empire – the region was redesigned with little respect for native custom, but mostly with regard for the economic advantage of a few interests. That there are conflicts, wars and “clashes” there can be no doubt. But it should be very clear that the popular idea that the strife is due to religion is vile propaganda.

The problem in the Middle East is not due to a clash of civilizations or to a conflict between religions. It is due mainly to a conflict between two political ideologies: a radical secularism that denies natural law, and a just as radical jihadism that cynically denies its own koranic humanism. Both ideologies have gone to war and have resorted to genocide for oil, and will continue to do so.

I mention this because the issue of Middle East turmoil distorts the whole issue of “Muslim/Christian relations.” It is a suspiciously useful platitude to say that the conflict is rooted in the relationship of the two religions: those who utilize this platitude are doing so to mask the real culprit. It is also useful to say that the conflict is between the West and resurgent Islam. Once again, while everyone is blaming truly religious folk on both sides, and true conservatives in the West and in the Islamic world, the real culprits are waging old fashioned war for old fashioned resources.

Imagine what it would be like if the subject of “Muslim/Christian relations” could be explored without the violent mass of opinions that have aggregated upon the Middle East. It is likely that the subject would become less difficult. The Orthodox Church would affirm love and forgiveness to Muslims in other nations and in our neighborhoods. It would affirm their civil rights in a pluralistic society. It would affirm the traditions of natural law which it shares with the Islamic world. It would affirm the rich cultural traditions of beauty, goodness and truth that are liberally strewn throughout Muslim society. Without a doubt, it would certainly affirm the indubitable fact that every Muslim is made in the image of God.

However, the Orthodox Church would also affirm that the predestination for every Muslim (as it is for all humankind) is theosis, particularly in the image of Jesus Christ. In that regard, the Orthodox Church not only does not affirm, but it crucially denies that Allah is the same as the Trinitarian God. It denies that Mohammad is any prophet at all, but instead is a heretic at best. It denies that Islam is a religion of peace, but is instead a religion of surrender to a god whose nature is not love. If there is any prayer in the Muslim world, it is prayer that is accepted by Jesus Christ, in spite of the fact that it is conditioned by a false prophet.

Talk of this sort usually invokes howls of protest, and accusations of vilification and even "demonization" from the more positive-thinking crew. But this sequence of denials regarding Islam is not at all a vilification or demonization. Demonization is appropriate only for demons, and they have surely been at work – often quite outside the expected precincts of religious conflict. Vilification occurs when my enemy has something that I want, and consequently I render my enemy less than human to make it easier to murder him and take his goods.

I am doing neither thing. I call a Muslim a heretic, but I love him as I ought to love all my fellow man. I am quite willing to converse with him, even convivially, about the rich banquet of natural law and especially Rumi, Omar Khayyam and even Orhan Pamuk (you have to give points to a Turk who publicly mentions a certain genocide).

The Muslim has, however, nothing to say to me theologically, as “theology” is particularly understood in the Orthodox Church.

While I am pleased that Mohammed was willing to categorize Christians along with the Jews as “People of the Book,” I am not at all inclined to return the favor. Both Jews and Christians posit a God Whose nature is love. The same should not be said of Islam. Christians and Jews want peace, and the peace they want is “shalom” – which connotes wholeness, freedom and servanthood. The peace of Islam is significantly conflated with “surrender” (the real meaning of “Islam”). Muslim “peace” is politically expressed as an imposed totalitarianism called sharia, established by the sword, which can now be previewed in Nigeria, other African and Indonesian regions, and in the wahhabist doctrines of al-Qaeda.

The history of those who have enjoyed “People of the Book” status is not a happy one. I mention this because we may work diligently at dialogue with our Muslim counterparts, and engage in what I think would be profitable discussions (along the lines described above). But all the while, the parties who are making the issue so violent are not talking to each other, and they probably will never talk to us. I am not speaking here of the nice imams who go out of their way to affirm the peaceableness of Islam and the humanism of Muhammad. I am speaking here, rather, of jihadists who are exploiting the decadence of the West for their own material gain. I am speaking also of Muslim clergy who pursue a well-defined koranic hermeneutic that impels the establishment of sharia in all human society.

I am speaking here, too, of so-called “neo-cons” who assume that the post-Christendom (if not anti-Christian) Western society is any better than that envisioned by the radical imam. Our problem with the Iraq War is not that our nation went to war against an enemy, but that it went to war to preserve a libertine way of life that may not have been worth the cost of blood.

There is no clash of civilizations in Western Europe or in the Middle East. Such a clash assumes the existence of civilization: there is very little of that on either side. Civility is stifled by totalitarianism and libertinism. A society built on sharia law is horrifying, and is so inhumane that “civilization” – a word whose cognate is civitas – cannot be used to describe it.  But Islam is succeeding in Europe mainly because there is so little to succeed. The reason why the concept of “clash of civilizations” is so bankrupt a concept is that Islam is simply establishing itself in a wasteland. The libertine materialism that is the aspiration of the West nowadays is impotent in the face of radical Islam. One of the reasons why Islam succeeded in its first few centuries is because much of the Byzantine population was oppressed by rife taxation and debt. It will succeed in Europe because it gives hope to an oppressed population, and it offers a meaningful worldview to significant societal segments who will not join a Europe that rejects natural law.

A fraternal, accommodating Orthodoxy that dialogues with liberal Muslim scholars will do nothing to save the West. Liberal Islam – if such a thing is possible – will be dismissed by other imams as a transient Western phenomenon.

But an Orthodoxy that calls for peace instead of “neo-con” war will save. An Orthodoxy that complains about environment-destroying economic structures, and that protests against inhumane jihadists and the demonism of sharia law, will establish justice. An Orthodoxy that identifies a science of natural law shared in common with the Muslim world will help preserve culture. An Orthodoxy that insists on the exclusive meaning of theology as Trinitarian and Christological will reaffirm truth, which is what every Muslim needs the most.

And an Orthodoxy that calls for repentance in Europe, and a return to Nicene Christianity from the miasma of transgressive materialism is the only response to the looming array of Islam, which is soon to become the principal religious culture there – the others (Orthodoxy included) are passing into virtual dhimmitude above the fortieth parallel.

The Last Words of Chrysostom

St. John Chrysostom reposed in the Lord 1600 years ago. He died from exhaustion in a small, out-of-the-way village called Comana.

Earlier that day he had collapsed, out of breath, while stumbling between two armed guards. They had been hiking on a long twisting path in the wilderness. The sixty-year-old St. John Chrysostom, Patriarch of Constantinople, had been exiled out of his cathedral, his city and his home by a jealous gang of politicians. He was forced to march the whole way, from the civilized neighborhood of Constantinople for hundreds of rocky miles into the wilds of bandits, enemies, severe weather and unfriendly land.

During that long march, he remembered years before when he had prayed outside entire nights in the wintry cold. He had been a fervent monastic in his early twenties. But he had ruined his health with severe fastings and vigils. Now, after walking for hundreds of miles, his "body of cobwebs" had reached its limit: the spirit was willing, but the flesh had become all too weak.

Now, while he was being prodded by his cruel imperial guards over the miles, he remembered his many enemies in Constantinople. He thought of the rich and the powerful whom he challenged from the great pulpit of Hagia Sophia. He had told them that God had given them riches to provide for the poor, and that God had made them powerful to protect the weak. Some of them heard his message with an open heart. Others only thought of revenge, and how they could rid the city of this voice of conscience.

He thought of the clergy of Constantinople, some of whom were corrupt. He remembered how he put a stop to the ridiculous parties that were held at such enormous expense. He remembered how he told the monastics to stay in the monasteries and priests to stay in their parishes, instead of traveling to the big city to play at politics and win fame and riches. He remembered how his many reforms made him many enemies.

He thought, too, of the Empress Eudoxia, wife of the Emperor Arcadius. It was Eudoxia who had welcomed him with open arms when he first arrived in Constantinople that February in the year 398, only nine years ago. She even presented the gift of new silver candlesticks to the cathedral soon after he came.

But then she heard of his sermons on the vanity of materialism and luxury, and she took personal offense. She did not like it when he said that “In the matter of piety, poverty serves us better than wealth, and work better than idleness.” She did not like it at all when he said that the beggars in the streets should be treated like Holy Altars, with the same dignity and care.

She, and all of John’s enemies, did not like his earnestness, his conservatism, his unyielding dedication to the Gospel of Christ, and his uncompromising moralism and fundamentalism. He preached against sin in vivid terms. He made everyone uncomfortable, especially the cultured and the cognoscenti. He condemned the pornographic theater of the day. He warned his people against sex outside of marriage. He hated gambling and conspicuous consumption. He frequently preached on the danger of damnation and hell, and he even said that the fear of hell is a necessary motivation for purity and repentance.

He preached mightily on repentance. On one hand, he was stern and frightening: “Repentance consists in no longer doing the same things. For he who reverts to the same sins is like a dog returning to its vomit, and like the person who cards wool into the fire, or pours water into a container full of holes.”

But on the other hand, he spoke of healing and promise: “Enter into the Church and wash away your sins. For here there is a hospital and not a court of law. Do not be ashamed again to enter the Church; be ashamed when you sin, but not when you repent.”

He thought of repentance much as he approached the moment of his repose. He remembered those years, long ago, when he was just a newly-ordained priest in his hometown of Antioch, under the omophorion of Bishop Flavian. There was a crisis in the city, just one year into his priesthood. The people had been protesting a tax increase earlier that year, and in a riot they tore down the statues of the Emperor and his family.

The Emperor was not amused, and the city braced itself for his anger and revenge. The frail eighty-year-old Bishop Flavian traveled to Constantinople to plead mercy for the city of Antioch. The young priest John remained to preach to the people.

Antioch was stricken by dire threat: “There is silence in the streets,” John said, “huge with terror and utter loneliness everywhere.” It was Great Lent in the year 387 while the people waited, forlorn, for the old bishop to return from his journey of eight hundred miles in the mountains and snow.

And then St. John Chrysostom preached the Gospel. He