Second Terrace

For your prayers

I, weak with worry, ask your prayers for my father Paul today.

He is a Protestant, Evangelical, Church of God pastor, and a sweet shaped-notes singer.

He is in ICU today from complications from a hip fracture.

He is the best man I have ever known, or will ever know.

On thinking of the collection for Haiti tomorrow

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

I asked Dr. Hart about my broken window

On this the Eve of the Theophany
Right before the appearance of the Holy Trinity
And the revelation of the Second Adam
A guy, I'm sure a guy,
Hammered my passenger side window
And swiped my little garmin
The one with a cute aussie voice that tells me
How to go from one house to another
Blessing with the Jordan Water.

So what I am to do
With this smash and grab?

Just home from the glass repair,
Found out that it wasn't just the window
But the little motor that makes it go up and down, too

There have been many of those, "too's"

The insinuationists are hard at work in my ear:
It was a guy from the apartments next door,
They're so unkempt, migratory,
They argue and do strange incantations and deflections on the F word in my parking lot
At the witch's hour:

Gr-r-r -- there go, my heart's abhorrence!

Or it was a guy from the high school that let out today for MLK
With nothing better to do.

I know what to do,
I'll fix a zorch, vaskania, a peculiar eye on that vandal guy,
(I'm sure he doesn't know about the blue marble)

But I don't know what he looks like,
So a wish, a little curse, will have to do.

Fair is foul, and foul is fair:
Hover through the fog and filthy air.

May my garmin lead you in paths of foolishness.
May you only get ten dollars on ebay.
May it never work right.
May it get you lost and despair.

And it is night (you know where).

No. May it keep you in the day.
May it save you, despite yourself.

So instead, I think of others to complain of
Since the poor, even thieves, I must love.

Ah yes.

The rich. They are always there
For my dialectic.

Hear this, you cows of Bashan:
Why don't you get your nuvi's or tom-toms grabbed
And windows smashed?

Isn't it unjust to live behind gates
And far removed in exurban zones
With streets named for developer's daughters,
Rolled out grass, instant neighborhood (add water),
No fruit stand, no store,
no manure spreaders for sure,
too zoned.

Isn't it unjust to send the robbers
To rob, not the rich, but the less poor?

It is night again.

I asked Dr. Hart about my broken window,
And my burgled gps.

And he said I mustn't think that this was necessary,
That I, like Ivan's one little infant,
Do not need to think that my little suffering was planned
For some arbitration of a greater Plan.
There will come an End when broken windows are mended,
And no need of navigation.

Well, yes.

As usual, with philosophers pail,
The answers are less cheering than ale,
And certainly more expensive than beer.

So I looked up the thirty-seventh psalm with its usual good advice.
Be still. Commit and trust.
Take delight. Do good.
From anger refrain.
Be meek.
Better is a little that the righteous have.

It is the mind of the baptized,
I know.

But things come together and seem orchestrated from below.
The night falls damp and chill,
And its black river flows wide,
Hiding the other shore
That must I cross in the morning.

It is always thus, these days.

So I will take the mantle tomorrow,
On the bank of the Jordan.
The water will I strike
And call, "Where is the Lord God of Elijah?"

In this new dispensation
There are no more human villains,
No evil men who may be imprecated
Only the violent, they of bloody hands,
And they are not men but malevolent.

A whole cavern of broken windows and stolen compasses,
But no hand worse than mine.

No curse other than those self-imposed.

No evil eye than I.

I will come to my senses
and call on His Name
Which is written in light toward the End,
Who draws out Leviathan with a fishhook,

And laughs in the whirl of the wind.

To those who think we've paid too much to the poor on Hispaniola, the death toll is almost 144,000

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34829978/ns/world_news-haiti_earthquake/

One of these witnesses, one of the 144,000
was an eleven-year old girl
like a daughter
with glasses and curly hair.

She lay on the ground,
drinking bottled water
under the shade

of the stones that had been laid upon her
by a rock vault six miles under
shrugging its shoulders, mindlessly

crushing her leg.
She lay like a little girl
with glasses and curly hair,
as the rescue workers tugged at stone
and rebar
she touched the hand of the white newsman

a friend from a place that was prettier,
not so laden with Haitian memory
and slave blood and Indian extinction,
a friend whose voice was choked
with dust and weakness,

for all fathers understand
the weakness of a man
who could not lift off rocks from a daughter
whose fingers touched his hand

hours before she was buried
under the kinder funereal sand. 
 

Far as the curse is found

The net brims with theories about why Haiti quaked so badly on Tuesday.

And why children and mothers suffer on the street.

Why the already ravaged poor are ravaged even more.

Some theories cannot pull themselves away from politics long enough just to be simply appalled ... just to simply allow for pity to take its effect. That is why I would like to see the likes of Limbaugh sentenced, today, to body-recovery operations in the rubble of Port au Prince. Let him pull out the remains of "dark-skinned" infants from broken cinderblock heaps, and see if he can still claim that the administration is spinning this disaster for political gain. Let him taste the dust in the air and smell decay without the masking cover of his faux-Havana cigar.

Some theories do no more than give the advice of Job's wife, which recommends that at disaster we should "curse God and die." It's all His fault of course, since, if He exists, He could have stopped this tragedy. If you continue to follow this well-known (and worn) syllogism, you are frogmarched to a dichotomy of concluding that either God is nonexistent and there's No One to believe in, or God is cruel and you wouldn't want to believe in Him anyway.

There is a lot of such theological cursing on the internet comment boards. I have told some of these cursers to stop wasting time, and to just give money and hygiene kits, while I'll do both and pray in their stead. You cannot argue with such as these: cursing and praying utilize the same psychic apparatus -- one cannot do both at the same time.

Then there's a theory about a curse on Haiti. This is Mr. Robertson's infamous gaffe. I think he means well in his dotage, as many heretics mean well but end up doing meanly. His web site at CBN is now backpeddling on his remarks. It is emphasizing, rightly, that his organization is sending millions of dollars to the stricken island. Good.

But that odd statement of Robertson's is still floating in the air like a bad gas:

"Something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon III, or whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the Devil. They said, we will serve you if you'll get us free from the French. True story. And so, the Devil said, okay it's a deal."

The ambiguous phrase "you know, Napoleon III, or whatever" threw me off at first. I didn't know that Napoleon III had anything to do with Haiti: troops from the first Napoleon kidnapped Toussaint L'ouverture and took him away to rot in France. The "whatever" indicated the usual disregard for non-American, non-evangelical, non-recent and non-simplistic history.

What Mr. Robertson was attempting to describe was a pagan secret ceremony that set off a slave rebellion that turned into revolution. In 1791, Dutty Boukman, a Haitian slave, presided over a vodoun sacrifice of a pig (assisted by a priestess). During this ceremony, an oath was made by all the participants to kill all the whites on the island. Thus sprang forth the Haitian War of Independence – a revolutionary war that is not so well liked by today's fans of the American Founding Fathers.

Robertson suggests that there was a "pact with the Devil" somewhere in this ceremony. I take a low view, too, of voodoo, but Robertson's take on this is wrong. The Devil was not directly addressed, for one thing, and the white slaveowners -- not just the French -- were the villains.

What is more, there is no little doubt that this ceremony ever took place. The history in which this ceremony is recounted came down to us from a French doctor who participated in the torture of captured Haitian rebels.

There is more than a whiff of bigotry in this particular narrative.

It seems that there is a lot of this whiff. When it comes to Africans and African-Americans and Asians, natural disasters are frequently interpreted as divine judgment wreaked on egregious sin and/or paganism. I heard these sniggering interpretations in the aftermath of Katrina and the Sumatran tsunami in 2005.

There are not so many of this sort of interpretation, which is predicated upon curses or punishments, when it comes to Western disasters. It seems, then, that we resort to sophisticated theodicies. In which case we lapse into self-absorbed existential paradigms and worry about God not being up to snuff, or being unfair.

Or, as in Robertson's case with Hurricane Gloria in 1985, disasters can be "prayed away" (and diverted into other, ostensibly less prayerful, areas).

It seems to me that Robertson suggests that the earthquake is just part of a theme for Haiti: their pagan ritual brought down consequences that have crowded a long history of woe. Are these consequences from the Devil, or from God? Robertson does not make this clear.

Robertson needs to think this through, because the implications of his suggestion are scary. If pagan observance will bring down fire from heaven, then we had better take cover, because Washington DC is laid out in nitwit gnostic schema. Does he really want to tie natural history to religious observance? Does that mean that tornado and flood victims got what was coming to them, and that because I didn't, then I didn't deserve it?

Does Robertson really believe that CBN does not deserve a tsunami or hurricane?

Well, it doesn't.

But here's the thing: neither did Haiti deserve this earthquake, or the hurricanes which have scourged it. Neither did it deserve Papa Doc or Baby Doc or any of the grotesque potentates that have enriched their gorged selves while the poor citizenry lay like Lazarus at their whitewashed doors.

Mr. Robertson, Haiti did not deserve any of this.

And Mr. Limbaugh, the United States (and Europe and Brazil and China) does not deserve any of its riches.

When in the course of natural events, there are poor people who didn't deserve disaster and there are rich people who didn't deserve their riches, then there is only one thing to be done.

Get off the mike. Get off TV. Do something for once.

Pray and give.

He comes to make His blessings flow ...

What Orthodox Christians do about the earthquake in Port au Prince

This was the Presidential Palace before yesterday. 

Now ...

  

What should Orthodox Christians do about the earthquake in Port au Prince?

Pray for mercy, repeatedly, profligately. Do not wait for detailed information to give to the Lord, as He knows it already. Do not wonder whether one should pray for non-Christians or non-Orthodox. Do not try to figure out how your prayers may make a difference. Now is not a good time to be deterministic or gnostic.

Give. Repeatedly. Profligately. Give through the IOCC, through the American Red Cross, through the MCC, Friends Disaster Service, World Vision. Do not wait for detailed information. Do not wonder whether one should give to secular or Christian or Orthodox organizations. Do not try to figure out how your gifts will make a difference. Now is not a good time to be an accountant.

Do not be philosophical and think decrepit thoughts like Voltaire upon Lisbon. 

Wondering why an earthquake happened is a waste of time. For Christians it could be worse, as it takes away time from prayer.

Haiti is a sad land to begin with, with a tragic history of slavery, voodoo, poverty and deforestation. My brother and a number of friends have spent much time there in mission centers, and I always heard from them that the desperation and the need never go away. Ben told me that people in the market place in Port au Prince would get large SUV-sized crates stuffed with rejected clothing from Goodwill: once in a while, packed inside, there would be a prized toaster or radio, just needing a small repair.

And that state of affairs was before the earthquake.

The poor get poorer ... except for when the poor are blessed, in a higher state of affairs.

And that is what Orthodox Christians do.

Good for the poor

(This is a response to a fairly trenchant comment from the post Obama's dented van.)

Matt,

Please do not claim any untoward bluntness and disrespect, for there is none of that business in your good words.

You have presented a number of points in your critique. I will start with some of your ontological remarks, especially about Metropolitan John's notions on "authentic personhood." I am wary of doing so, especially because I harbor a complicated (and probably inadequate) response to him. I admire his duty toward the Fathers, Sts. Irenaeus and Maximos, but I worry that he (and others) have engendered a replicating viral distortion of dogma by the importation of Heidegger and other existentialist paradigms into Orthodox conversations. I worry when hierarchs use the language of existentialism, especially Heidegger's.

I will say, briefly, that personhood is itself a concept that is fraught with peril (witness the fourth century travail over persona and hypostasis): it is especially perilous when it is linked to praxis.

Our Lord commanded us to obey, simply. I do not think that we are to worry about authenticity, or the ontological context of our obedience. That is like trying to define (and delimit) the "make this bread the Body of Thy Christ" as "transubstantiation."

I will also say, too briefly and simplistically, that the State is not at all my concern or my worry when I think about personhood and deification. I worry about culture, yes, and the de-personalizing passions that this culture engenders. But the State is always there as a potential persecutor, just as the poor will always be with us. Herod will always go after the Christ Child and inflict collateral damage. The servant cannot be greater than his Master.

This brings me to your second assumption. GK said that coercion was an essential, though not noble, element of Government. Of course this is true, simply because of the meaning inherent in the term "govern." Government is ordained by God to impose a minimal order upon "biological" human life (to borrow Zizioulas' terminology). St. Paul's description of government goes so far as to predicate this power of coercion on the threat of death (I remember this fact upsetting Stringfellow, advocate of the Berrigan brothers, in the past, but it is a fact nonetheless). Government uses coercion, to be sure, but it is not defined, or confined, by such. More to the point, GK specifically discussed coercion in the context of punishment of crime: because we have no king, then when a criminal is executed, then we all execute him. If I wanted to take your application to its logical end, then if one poor person does not have to go to the ER for basic needs, then we have all participated in this good.

I take your point as a complaint that in nationalizing health care, government would somehow coerce me and you to distribute healthcare to everyone. Such coercion would at the least remove the laudability of the action, and, as you rightly point out, deprive me and you of the "radical volitional freedom" that is necessary for any commendation (or, as we would understand it in our trans-western idiom, "participation in deification").

(Before we go much further, I should note that the package that will finally make it out of Congress will not at all be the universal package for which I was hoping, so you shouldn't worry. I despair, but you don't have to.)

You should understand, Matt, that I share your dislike of the state and Leviathan. I think that 1984 has become essentially non-fiction.

But where we might part company is that I see little difference between the state and the corporate culture of high finance – a culture which has very little to do with the small marketplace freedom extolled by agrarians, red tories, and non-libertarian true conservatives. You are correct in your reference to Dostoevsky, but we already live and breathe in a socialism that is engineered not only by the government, but by Wall Street: there are now only two estates in the State -- the Church has been long kicked out; the press has been denatured into a functionary mouthpiece little more conscientious than Barney the Dinosaur; the proletariat were never, never consulted; and the aristocracy has been shorn of its noblesse oblige and its sacred commitment to land and people, and it has now become ragingly uncouth, uneducated, and undisciplined (think Rupert Murdoch).

Leviathan – the removal of property away from the common man and the inflation of the State – is being advanced by high financiers. There is a feeling of variety in personal taste and libertinism in thrill-acquisition. But this feeling amounts to the usual bait-and-switch of the Pied Piper.

I would rather there be a state mandate for healthcare, rather than healthcare reserved for those who are affiliated with some corporate tribe. I understand that my personal good will not benefit from either scheme, but more poor people will benefit from the former than from the latter. I struggle to see any -- and I mean any -- advantage of the present system over a state-run system. The present is healthcare mediated by for-profit faceless corporations.

In this consideration of healthcare, I am not at all concerned for my own goodness. I am certain that the poor gaining better access to the system will in no way accrue to my virtue. If I wanted to do that, I should myself visit the sick in the hospitals and the homes: and even then, I should not care at all about the virtue of it, but rather the person who is sick. Heavens, I should not even need to replace the sick person's face with an icon of Jesus: I am deliriously happy that Jesus, of course, says that my care for the poor ends up being care for Him -- but that ministration to my Lord cannot be my first motivation. That is not the love called for by Christ: it is almost a false piety if I have to trade out direct kindness for pretended recognition before I stoop to shake hands with the down-and-out.

I am only concerned that more poor people get access to doctors and hospitals. Too many of them are getting even poorer and sicker, and there is no way in this dispensation that the Church is ever going to be able to take care of enough of these poor. The Church was never able to do what the state-run welfare programs have done. Neither was the Church ever able to do what Social Security has been able to do. We would like to say otherwise, but in so saying, we are foolish and naively ignorant of the complexities of this age.

The Church will not take care of all the poor. Some of the poor it will, and thus it should in ways that state-run systems cannot. The Church should develop its own systems for taking care of the insane, since this secular culture seems to be doing so well at producing such. The state/corporate system wants technogeeks who can think in C++ but not real men who can think real ideas and govern their emotions and actions. The culture of Leviathan wraps the brains of functionaries and geeks in the opiate gauze of entertainment: but still, ghosts of the reality of the abyss seep through cracks of modern consciousness, and so modern men go nuts, and their little inhumane mentalities fall to pieces.

Besides the insane, the Church will have many to care for whom the State/Corporate combine will reject: children saved from infanticide … children rejected by boutique genetic pre-selection … people whose genetic profile disqualifies them from treatment … people who are lost in some persistent vegetative state: a ghastly diagnosis not dreamt up by the State, but by insurance companies, if you must know … people who require longterm care, but are warehoused miserably in some nursing "homes" that only a Dickens/Huxley partnership could describe (if not Lovecraft) ... people who have been poorly managed, poorly placed, bullied into college education but meant to work with their hands, and thus dispossessed and disenfranchised and pretty crazy.

Do not imagine that cesspool cult of libertarian "greed-is-good" insurance-run healthcare system would do any better: it does not, and has proven so in spades. Americans are dead now because "greed is good."

We will have more than enough of the poor and the sick left over from the Combine (or "Leviathan," take your pick).

Of course, there will be no such thing as a nationalized healthcare plan, where the poor are really dealt with.

And of course, there will be no such preparation forthcoming from the Church, as mixed up as we are about jurisdiction and how we are to function in culture. The very segments of the Christian community who are most likely to give a damn about the marginalized are those who are also most likely to swallow crap about abortion being a "right" and about homosexuality being a "civil right" and how fetal stem cells must be used for the salvation of others (I cannot believe how many of these are climbing, or have climbed, on the gay marriage wagon).

I should think that a strong fidelity to the Rule of Faith and a brief immersion, even, in asceticism should produce tidal waves of Amos-like prophecies against Leviathan, of Jesus-like pity for the widow, the orphan and the alien. How is it possible that in Orthodoxy, religious fidelity could ever produce right wingism or left wingism?

Thanks for your patience, Matt, as I reach the cadence of this, another stanza in my customary Delphic rant. 

I think all this will be moot. Port au Prince is in ruins this morning, and really, surely, they are poorer than we.

Nativity Catechesis of St. Theodore

Catechesis of St. Theodore:
On the Nativity of the Saviour and the vigorous pursuit of our ascetic life.

Brethren and Fathers, already the Manifestation of God is near and the day of joy is at the doors; for it is a great joy, such as has not been since time began, that the Son of God has come to us, not through riddles and symbols, as He appeared of old to the fathers, but by coming to live with us and manifesting himself in His own person through His birth from a Virgin. There has been nothing more blest than this in generations of generations, nothing more wonderful among all the wonders that God has done since time began. For this reason Angels are proclaiming the good tidings of the mystery and a star revealing that the heavenly has been brought to birth on earth; for this reason Shepherds are running to see the salvation that has been proclaimed, and Magi are bringing gifts fit for a king; for this reason a new song is being sung for new events, because God, who is glorified in the highest, has appeared as peace on earth. And the Apostle bears witness when he says, For He is our peace, Who has made both one, breaking down the middle wall of partition, the hostility between us, in His flesh. He has abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances, that He might create in himself one new humanity in place of two, thus making peace, and might reconcile both to God in one body through the Cross, thus putting to death that hostility through it. This is what the prophets and the just since time began desired to see, but did not see except through faith; while we have both seen and our hands have touched, as it is written, concerning the Word of life, and this life has been revealed, and we have received sonship. But what shall we give in return for all that the Lord has given to us? Already holy David anticipated and cried out the answer. I shall take the cup of salvation and call on the name of the Lord. So then let us rejoice, O faithful, because we have been granted to give the Lord a return for all that he has given us. And what is this return? The cross-bearing way of life that we have taken on, and the confession in which we stand and we boast in our hope of the glory of God. And this is confessedly a witness. Meanwhile it is not for us to feast for just one day, but throughout our life; just as those who are governed by the flesh and in thrall to the passions are unable to feast, even if they seem to feast, nor are they at liberty, for they are slaves of the passions sold under sin. Indeed it is written, Everyone who sins is a slave of sin; but the slave does not abide in the house for ever. The son abides for ever. Since then we too have been granted to have been called sons according to grace, we remain in the house for ever, if we hold firm the beginning of our undertaking to the end. And so, empowered by the Holy Spirit, let us still hold to our spiritual state, and let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, to obedience, to humility, to meekness, and let us be eager for everything which is of the best, not weakening in our resolve, but straining ever more and more, and the more so as we see the day drawing near. For the great and manifest day of the Lord is drawing near, on which the judge of all will be revealed and will appear in the glory in which He appeared to the Apostles at His divine Transfiguration, as he brings and judges every creature and rewards each according to its work. But may it be given to us too, with all the saints, to see him looking upon us with a kindly face and taking us into the kingdom of heaven, by the grace and pity and love for mankind of our Lord Jesus Christ, to whom are due glory, honor and worship with the Father and the Holy Spirit, now and always and to the ages of ages. Amen.

A Julian Nativity Prayer

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

You are God.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen.