Second Terrace

A prayer for some Orthodox in a hard America

(this is from David Dutko, a friend of mine: a poignant prayer that articulates a pious homesickness that should explain certain "immigrant sensibilities" to many "convertski," of whom I am one ... the photo above pictures the Beskyd Mountains)

I came across this prayer, attributed to a Katerina Rusyn, a Lemko who was deported from Poland in 1947 and resettled in the Ukraine - a fate which befell many of our people following the second world war.

These are no doubt difficult times facing our people today - both in our little Orthodox Diocese as well as for our Greek Catholic brothers and sisters and the words of this prayer seem to resonate today as they did more than a half-century ago.

"O God, give me the strength to live through this day and help me to survive in this foreign land where they have brought me and my children.

O Lord, I pray and beseech Thee, let me not perish, nor my family, nor my people, who were late to sow the holy grain; for the corn will ripen in the summer and they know not when or how it will be gathered.

O Merciful God, may the sun rise and set each day, so that it brings light to all people and me, in the same way as it set each evening, there, far away, in the Beskyd Mountains, in my native hills and valleys; and may rye and every kind of seed grow for us, so that by winter we all have bread and hay and every grain to feed the people, the birds and the cattle.

O All-Highest Lord, let us not forget - neither today, nor tomorrow, nor ever - and help us to keep alive in our memory all the beauty of our land, of the mountains, and of the rich, healing and pure waters in our rivers: the Bystry, the Poprad, and the Syan; and let us also remember the fair and lovely country of the high pastures, and the woodland paths through the hills; let us not forget the places of plenty in the forest where the mushrooms grow, and the fragrant strawberries, blackberries, blueberries and raspberries, and the woodland clearings where the cattle graze.

O God, let us not forget our customs, the lilt of our mother tongue, our stories and our songs, our dances and our evenings together on holy days and workdays.

O Lord, give my children the wisdom to find their way back to the native land of their grandfathers and great-grandfathers to honour their graves, their churches and their faith.

O God, grant unto my children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren all the gifts of the Holy Spirit: wisdom, understanding, reason, courage, knowledge, piety, and also give them the most important of all human virtues – Faith, Hope and Love.

O Lord, bestow upon me and my children the knowledge to tell the difference between good and evil, happiness and unhappiness, and give me the wisdom to value goodness and be grateful for good!

Grant me to know how to influence an enemy, give me the generosity to help the poor, and also give me the understanding to convince the wrongdoer of the evil of his ways, and to teach those who do not know. Amen."

Christos Voskrese! Christ is Risen!

The blessing of graves

Today, under the high blue, feathered with cirrus,
and the green lawns caressed by the unseen wind,
two hours after the final blessing, the otpust prayer,
the kissing of the Cross, silver, and coroneted in ruby,

the same Cross I brought out in October, at the wedding
of my smiling little girl

after this, a visit to a parlor
where lay a man my age, virile, confident, courageous,
a face set like flint to the future,
full of promise, full of reach and plans,
a look, you know what it's like, of knowing
just how to grind a valve, set a faucet,
shingle a house, tinker a Briggs and Stratton to running again,

how to cheer at the ballgames of grandchildren,
how to comfort at a loss,
how to understand defeat in the worldview of a little world,
the world of a boy whose only aim
is to win a little game,

not to oppress or steal or aggrandize,
just to be good at play.

The face set like flint closed
and eyes were painted shut
the promise had flown off like a bird on wing,
the hardened fingers' reach was full of satin bunting,
the plans were made by others,
and grief.

This is my priesthood: I can minister to the dead.

Later this afternoon, under cerulean and a white golden blaze,
and the rather unkempt lawns (I might add)
of the place of rest,
I plodded round the fallen,
the markers, the names, the unpronounceable post-Ellis-Island names,
the names of grandparents and aunts, uncles and cousins,
of familiar seniors who sat in such and such a pew,
who sang so sweetly on the Great Fridays
of nostalgic pasts -- do you remember?
can you see her, can you see him, singing in the front pew?
they always came, they always helped

And I, a foreigner, knew some of them, their faces
juxtaposed on granite stone
as I intoned: "In blessed repose,
grant, O Lord, eternal rest to the souls of those
who lie here in these places"

I and a little band, my spouse and cantor,
my treasurer and elder, and a man who hobbled on not one but two canes,
ladies who tended the places with annuals and daffodils,
trimming the space, establishing peace and order
in a place otherwise not so kempt 

We visited every grave, spoke every name,
and prayed for repose for every soul.

At times, we scraped away the turf and the sod
to get at the name,

And we left each stone marked
with the scattered rain
of water blessed at the eve
of the day when He bowed His head
to the river that runs, if you let it,
to the Sea called Dead.

So much work today, so much time
for they who are not here, empty pews
and ghosts in home movies
and photographs.

I know what you think.

You think it was a waste, a waste of time,
of labor and sentimental dreaming.

But I ask you, if I do not minister to the dead,
who will?

I cannot smile and promise the blessings of comfort and success.
I have nothing practical to give, and very little pleasing advice,
I pronounce a distinctly non-corporate address.
I  will not make you feel better,
especially not about yourself,
not in isolation, not in autonomy,
not in the gospel of self-perpetuation,
self-and-wealth-protection, self-affirmation, self-rule,
self-justification, self-reflection,
redundancy, recursive echo.

Go, run to these more pleasing things.

Forget the dead. Become the dead. 

I will stay, with my little company, my Myrrhbearers
and visit every grave,
and speak resonantly through the strata
of soil, sediment, the concrete vault,
the crumbling bier, down to the very dry bones,

And I will remind them there will come a Day
when a Voice will sound:
"Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live"

Meantime, I will pour on them the riverwater of the Son's Baptism
and the rain will fall down, in the desert of their burial,
and the promise will have been given
today. 

Who else blesses graves? Who else hears the call,
the duty, the vow, the privilege, the deep obligation
to honor the dead?

Who else blesses the graves?

But One, Who on a Sabbath said,
"Lazarus, come forth." 

Union benefits

"Thy fate is the common fate of all," the hirsute Longfellow once wrote: "Into each life some rain must fall."

Here it is, Bright Week, and after our Gospel processions yesterday one of the faithful brandished a folded page from our metrop's daily, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette -- from the April 15th edition, in particular.

For a moment, I imagined that the good editors decided to run an article on Orthodoxy in honor of Pascha.

But instead of meditating on the glories of Christ descending into the center of death and revolutionizing time, the article saw fit to speculate on the dull mysteries and mind-numbing eccentricities of Orthodox ecclesiastical unity.

My wife -- who keeps herself better informed about these matters -- tells me that the article is making the rounds on the fb and tweeting circuit. It might have even appeared on Tumblr and Reddit by now. 

Now, I must say that the article is not nearly as sullen as the ray of sunshine published by the New York Times, which runs under the rather strained metaphorical title "Ripples on the Surface of Easter." Instead of saying Christos Voskrese, which would have done the Gray Lady some spiritual good, she smirks rather about a recent rant by Metropolitan Seraphim of Piraeus and about the airbrushed rapture of a Breguet Réveil du Tsar (very pretty, that: I'm obviously in the wrong jurisdiction) that had somehow perched itself on the hierarchical wrist of Patriarch Kirill I.

Here in Pittsburgh, where we are neither so cosmopolitan nor hard-bitten, we are treated to an article written by a local reporter. I must also say, here, that you can tell you live in one of the greater Orthodox communities of the Diaspora, when you have a writer of the quality of Ann Rodgers, who is so much better than the usual religion writer that, when given an Orthodox assignment and he finds to his dismay two more pieces of the Cross than the usual two, writes like a deer staring at halogen lamps on a Pennsylvania highway late at night in the mountain fog.

I don't know how she did it, but Ms. Rodgers was able to quote, in a single article, the likes of His Grace Bishop Melchisedek, layman Cal Oren of Baltimore, Charles Ajalat Esquire of Southern California, Associate Director Andrew Walsh of the Leonard Greenberg Center at Trinity College (Hartford CT), Rev. Josiah Trenham (media relations officer for the Assembly of Bishops), Executive Director George Matsoukas of the OCL (you need no legend here), His Eminence Metropolitan Savas of GOA Pittsburgh, President Rev. Radu Bordelanu of the Orthodox Theological Society in America and Duquesne professor.

How she got around to these voices I cannot understand. One thing is clear, however: Ms. Rodgers is much better connected than I.

I will not bury my negative prejudice under a bushel: I'm gonna let it shine, as the song goes, and won't let Satan blow it out either. I have never gotten excited about unity or union. But seeing as I got this article on Bright Monday, I thought I'd give the hopeful (and jejeune, I might add) paragraphs a once-over to see if the environment's changed for the better, and if I had moved into a better mood.

All in all, I found some interesting dreams/hopes/aspirations/beliefs articulated in the various interviews. I will list these cognitions (or logismoi), in the order of their appearance in the article, under the heading, "Union Benefits."

UNION BENEFITS

... or, "Nice Things that Will Happen If Orthodox America Is Subsumed Under a Single Administrative Structure"

1.  Administrative Unity will establish the proper canonical practice of one bishop residing in and ruling from one city.

First of all, I am thrilled that there is so much concern for the canonical quality of our administration. Here in Pittsburgh we have four Orthodox bishops, I think. And in New York there are nine. This must present an insufferable problem, as most unionists quickly don their Cassandra costume and hint darkly about the creation of "unnecessary conflict." 

So I will segue quickly into the second benefit:

2.  Administrative Unity will prevent unnecessary conflict.

There: let's just let that sentence stand bleakly in the space of black and white for a second. Or, if you'd like, let's turn it around to savor the sense of the proposition: "Unnecessary conflict will be prevented by Administrative Unity." I wonder about the Apostles, in light of this assertion. No one doubts their canonicity, and they probably subsisted under a sort of Administrative Unity: was conflict prevented, even after Pentecost? Or: how about the history of unification projects in protestant America? What was the fruit of those endeavors?

3.  Administrative Unity will erase the ethnic divisions that disrupt the American Orthodox community.

This statement, too, is abrupt and looks all the worse when it just stands there, frail and twisting like a single blade of grass in the breeze.

I would like to say something about ethnicity here, if only to get it off my chest. First of all: we all talk about ethnicity but more often than not, we mean a lot of different things by this word. Some people mean by "ethnic" the rather comic and vain practice of speaking a language that is not understood well by even the speaker, and is meant to exclude undesirable outsiders and to exude a level of tribal membership that hasn't really been gained yet. Others mean, by the same term, a collection of customs that might be unnecessary, but really do help with the experience and transmission of the faith. 

Second: a person's family-of-origin (a dull term borrowed from my old family theory days) has a much greater impact on his thoughts and behaviors than does his ethnicity. His or her media immersion probably wields an even greater force. A coach has more moral authority, nowadays, in a young man's life than does a priest, especially if his locker room is housed in a multi-million dollar program.

All this to say that there is a dizzy array of many, many more ethnicities and tribal associations -- none of which are remotely benevolent or theological -- and these are the real bogeys that disrupt the American Orthodox community today.

4.  Administrative Unity will enable the American Orthodox Church "to speak with one voice."

Well, that would matter if anyone were listening. If we ever get around to unifying and setting up house on K Street in DC, then we will find out for real whether a tree falling in the forest really makes a sound.

What is this "voice" about which there is so much concern? Will this disembodied voice, thundering from Mt. Cyber and in glossy four-color zines, say stuff like "Abortion is a sin! Racism is a sin! Co-habitation and sleeping around are sins! Mountaintop-removal, pollution and environmental degradation are sinful! Wall Street hyper-finance that siphons money away from the poor is wicked! And an Orthodox blessing on homosexual marriage has the proverbial chance of a snowball in a certain eschatological state!"

No, rather, one will be more likely tasked to a long day's journey into the night of reading endless dreary moral science treatises, without a scrap of humor or immediacy. 

There will be no active voice. 

5.  Administrative Unity will standardize pastoral practice.

There are a number of reasons why pastoral practice is inconsistent in Orthodoxy, and in American Orthodoxy in particular. One is that "economia" has been practiced differently in different jurisdictions. As a result, now, we have different sets of precedents that have only gained in authority over time. 

I think this is a surmountable problem, as many of these ethnic traditions are losing their force. It used to be, in my own community, that the odd practice of "First Holy Communion" was observed (and insisted upon) with no small amount of stridency. Nowadays, the practice has the status more of a vapor than of a reality.

But another problem remains; and it is the very old problem of church members whose money or social standing gives them an authority that is completely at odds with their spiritual state. This is probably the main reason why the real catechumenate evaporated from history, and why second and third divorces were ever countenanced. 

The first task in any pastoral practice is not to look for consistence or standardization. It is to establish faithfulness. It is to root pastoral practice in deification. The priesthood without deification is a scary, depressing and haunted thing.

Pastoral practice has meaning only in terms of Holy Tradition, the fidelity of the clergy and the penitence of the faithful. Any other rubric will produce only digression and degeneracy.

And Administrative Unity is powerless to fix that.

6.  Administrative Unity will save us money.

O. M. G. 

My sardonic reading of Western Religious History -- particularly American Religious History -- makes me suspect that the opposite is true. Administrative unity will end up being much more expensive than the inefficient structures we have now. 

Permit me merely to quote a passage from 1 Kingdoms: This will be the custom of the king who shall reign over you. He will take your sons … and your daughters … the best of your fields … a tenth of your grain … But the people were unwilling to listen to Samuel; and they said to him, "No, rather it is that we want a king to be over us. Then we will be like all the other nations, and our king will judge us and go out before us and fight our battles" (1 Kingdoms viii.11-20).

A good friend was airily wandering in his thoughts about union, dreaming about the day: "Just think, Jonathan, if we all got together we wouldn't need so many camps or seminaries or chanceries. Think of the money we'd save."

Just ask the Catholics how the wholesale closure of elementary and secondary schools is working out for them on the long term.

By contrast, I suggest to you that we don't have nearly enough seminaries or camps or monasteries (perhaps there are enough chanceries). But if seminaries would leave off the professionalization standard as dangled in front of them by the mainline protestants, then every single metropolis ought to have a pragmatic seminary that is semi-monastic in practice. 

In the tragic-comic history of administration culture, money is never saved by unification. "Unification," in the understanding of administration, can only be meant as "aggrandizement."

7.  Administrative Unity will save us.

This statement was never said out loud, but it was sure intended. It lurked as the rather neurotic insecurity at the nearly-unconscious edges of the interviewed speech. 

I bear honest pity toward this position. I have no patience, whatsoever, for any agenda that has anything to do with power or domination. If anyone is attempting hegemony or aggrandizement under the sign of unity (for the sake of the hoi polloi), then they will find out the hard way that nominalism is the only universal that does not exist.

But some people worry that American Orthodoxy, to survive, must unify.

I always wanted my daughters to never have to worry about survival. I am happy that my wife and I probably succeeded in this regard, because childhood should not be burdened with this worry.

Well. Permit me to quote another verse: If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?  (Matthew vii.11)

Since when did God permit us to worry about survival? Even the survival of His Church in this time, in this place?

REAL BENEFITS

I do not oppose unity in the least. I pray the petition, "… and for the union of them all" with gusto.

But this sort of union we pray for is already present. It is the union of koinonia, rooted in the Eucharist.

It is a pragmatic, practical union that permits me to serve at other Orthodox temples. It encourages my parish to cooperate with our neighborhood GOA parish in providing a summer church school to the community. 

I am willing to stipulate that an administrative unity would be convenient, but it is not a necessary objective that must be achieved before the realization of its organic manifestation. 

In fact, premature administrative unity might turn out to be injurious, and just might end up producing disunity and even alienation. It is not difficult for me to imagine that a single administration might founder itself in the bubonic mud of our present, and very stupid, national political discourse.

(I will tell you this despondent news, if it is any news at all: the ranks of the Orthodox priesthood are now dividing up into clumps of political partisans, in dilineations very similar to the junior high cafeteria quality of rhetoric one meets in the protestant clergy as a whole. I have seen too many shrill alarums, too many recitations of talking points, too many epithets, too much wealth-and-power protection, too much affiliation with political thinking that derives from patently antichristian thinking.)

I can see, in my spotty crystal ball, a statement by an American Patriarch on economic justice (with which I would completely agree) exciting choirs of Facebook sacerdotal refutations, some of which might turn positively scatological. The raspberries and catcalls would be breathtaking.

I can see, even more clearly (from the patterns of American religious history) the usual institutional degeneration in dogma and morals. In American history, religious unions have always tended toward doctrinal ambiguity and moral laxity.

We cannot assume that we would escape this sinkhole.

We will not.

I can see this because I do not see, in unionist statements, much mention of repentance or deification. I see all sorts of reference to self-rule and autonomy and independence, which are sort of embarrassing terms in the context of Holy Tradition.

It is entirely possible that culture demands of us a single organization. We are, as one of the experts in the article opined, "hard to understand." Our Greekness and Russianness get mistaken for denominations. Or so he said.

The marketplace, perhaps, wants our institutional unification and our "tidying up" more than the Spirit does. We would become, then, a more manageable population, and the potential market would be much easier to tap. Think of the publishing and trinketing opportunities. The prospect of producing conferences and retreats under the rubric of a unified administration might by itself make all this "worth" while.

But I really do not care what the world thinks about the Church. The Body of Christ has ever been confusing to people who would rather see institutions than fellowship.

Real unity will prevail in America after prayer and fasting, and the practice of Holy Tradition, and more monasteries than we have now.

An administrative union that is established before, or even apart from this condition, is a union that will, unfortunately, not be real.

Unfortunately, that is precisely where we are headed. Gravity has ordained it so.

The Day the Lord has Made

This is the Day the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it.

-- Psalm cxvii.24

Things are different today. 

Gone are the sad, minor Lenten melodies. Gone are the dark vestments, the hushed penitential and even funereal feeling. Gone are the prostrations and the repetitions of St. Ephraim’s Prayer. Gone are the seemingly endless readings about those terrible, tragic hours, the days and nights of Our Lord’s unswerving approach to Golgotha. Gone are the painful stories of no one understanding Him. Gone are the horrible depictions of Judas’ betrayal and Peter’s denial, and everyone else’s abandonment. Gone are the terrible recitations of the moment when the earth stood still in anguish, when the sun hid its face and the mountains trembled, and the curtains of the Temple tore down the middle, and the graves around Jerusalem cracked open and the ghosts of the Righteous Dead walked the streets of the City.

Gone … at least for now.

Now in place of the darkness is the Light. In place of the nightfall it is now Day. In place of penance, there is Joy. In place of sorrow, there is Peace. In place of death, there is Life in Christ.

It is for this reason that we Christians of the Apostolic Church call the Resurrection the “Eighth Day.” It is a Day that leaps above the rest of the days of the week. It is a Day beyond all reckoning, exceeding every expectation. It is undefinable, unconfinable. It explodes every concept, every idea and formulae.

It is the Day of New Creation. It is the Day the Lord has made, and calls anyone who wants to live and to love, to enter into its everlasting Dawn.

This Feast today is the larger, more massive and expansive, than the rest of the year put together. As St. Gregory the Theologian proclaimed in his Paschal Oration:

This is the Feast of Feasts, the Holiday of Holidays, which surpasses not only human feasts, but even feasts of Christ, as the light of the sun is brighter than that of the stars. It is the Day of Resurrection and the beginning of True Life.

Every Christian Feast is rooted in this Feast of Feasts. Every Sunday, in particular, is a “little Pascha.” The final blessing on every Sunday begins with “May Christ our God, risen from the dead …” The Sunday Entrance Hymn calls out: “O come, let us adore, and bow down before Christ, save us O Son of God, risen from the dead we sing to You: Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!”

Pascha, the Resurrection of the Son of God, Who is also the Son of Man, is the center of every Divine Liturgy. This Paschal Light, that always streams over-abundantly from the Eighth Day, is the light that illumines every prayer, every hymn, every heart that would only open its doors to the Risen Lord.

The Lord has made This Day. Let us rejoice and be glad. Joy is not something we wait for. Joy is a free decision. Gladness is a chosen life. Darkness and despondency, the cold “liturgy” of the cynical world, is a temptation that must be rejected on this Day. On every day.

Against all odds, against the certainties of a hopeless, cynical world, against the cold dread of Death and against the enormous terror of Hell, Christ is Risen indeed. The Nicene Creed proclaims: “And the Third Day He arose again, according to the Scriptures.”

According to the Scriptures -- that is, not according to the world. The Scriptures are a radically different testament. The Bible is revolutionary speech. It could not have been imagined. The world speaks only of what it knows: Scripture speaks of glory -- something that is always above and beyond the gray clouds of unbelief.

This Resurrection, the world will tell you, was certainly impossible.

And they are right, as far as the world is concerned.

But with God, all things are possible.

Even the impossible.

Even your salvation. Even mine.

For that, too, is impossible as far as the world is concerned. And that is something, in your heart of hearts, you already know for sure. In the shadows of the night, the darkness whispers foreboding tales of a grim future -- a future that rejects all hope of a Saviour. And the only energies you harvest are the deficit and toxic energies of anger, dejection, self-centeredness, comfort, entertainment and self-defense.

I must tell you this and you may not like to hear it. But those whispers are actually groaning, diabolical echoes. And those feelings are actually the experience -- even in this life -- of the smog of perdition.

Hell begins now, in every passion.

It goes without saying that passion, thus, is a bad energy. Like an acid reaction that eats through the vat. Like nuclear fission that cannot be controlled.

I only bring this up because you must know what Jesus Christ, the Saviour, has delivered you from. He has delivered you from a Hell whose Reception Room is on this world right now, in this time and generation, and its atmosphere is stinking up the place. Sin is nothing more that getting addicted to Hell and staying in its environment … and when it comes time to pass on, the sin-addicted soul is so used to the darkness that it doesn’t want to leave.

Is this not pitiful? Is this not a heartbreaking thing, that an addict will not let go of the very thing killing him?

On Holy and Great Saturday, a moment after He breathed his last tortured breath on the Cross, Jesus descended into Hell and called out the souls imprisoned there. Here He stood at the place metaphorically described by our hymnwriters as “the Gates of Brass.” Here He stood as the Good Shepherd, Who calls every sheep by its name with the loving sound of His Voice: “Come unto Me, all ye that labor and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn of Me, for I am meek and lowly of heart, and you shall find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy, and My burden is light” (Matthew xi,28-30).

And the imprisoned souls saw that the Gates collapsed into ruin at the gentle sound of the Still, Small Voice of the Son of God, and at the presentation of the Cross -- the instrument of Divine Victory. They saw their Shepherd standing, calling, with open arms and nail-scarred hands. They saw their Creator waiting, as He has been waiting under the Trees of Paradise since that sad lost day in Eden, at the Fall of Man, waiting for His friends to join Him in the walk at the cool of the day. They saw Him, the Father of the Prodigal, waiting at the very edge of His estate, waiting for the Prodigal runaway to come Home.

And so they came, like the animals that streamed into Noah’s Ark. There was John the Forerunner, who had preached to the souls and prepared them for this day. There were David and Isaiah who had foreseen this day and written of it in poetic lines, impossible-sounding words that stretched all human reckoning. There were Abraham who never stopped believing in God’s promises. There was Jacob, who recognized this Jesus as the One Who had wrestled him by the brook of Peniel, Who had tested him to see if he really wanted life from God. There was Joseph, who quickly recognized the scars in His hands as marks of betrayal and abandonment -- something he too well understood. There were the Three Holy Children, Who recognized the Good Shepherd as the One Who had stood with them in the fiery furnace of persecution.

And finally, there came Adam and Eve. They came, finally keeping their evening appointment with the Gardener of Eden, and the Good Shepherd of our souls.

They came rejoicing. They came believing, though it was a fact beyond all expectation. They came out of the Darkness and into the Light. They came freed of the chains of passion.

They were glad and rejoiced in the Day the Lord had made.

I ask you, then, won’t you be so glad, and rejoice so much, for surely you have seen indications of this Day?

Surely you have heard His call and His invitation:

“I have shattered the darkness for you: enter into My morning,” says the Risen Lord.

“I have ascended the Cross for you: take up My easy burden, for I am meek and gentle of heart.

“I have cancelled the cold sentence of unending death: step into My life of Eucharist and true freedom.

“I have descended into Hell and death for you, and have obliterated the Gates of Passion. I have broken every chain of sin, every manacle of despair.

“I have thrown open your prison doors.

“Do not remain in this present darkness. Come out into the Light. Come with Me into the Springtime of your soul. Come back into the Eden where you belong.

“Wake up to My light and grace. Breathe the air of true liberty.

“This is the Day I, the Lord, have made for you. Rejoice and be glad in it.”

Will you commune with Christ? Will you know the Risen Jesus? Will you run into the Eighth Day, and never stop going? Will you accept the gift of Peace that passes all understanding, and rest in the meekness of Christ, Risen from the Dead?

I pray that you may hear His sweet voice this day, and open the doors of your heart to the One Who says, “Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me” (Apocalypse iii,20).

And that supping is soon, at the Table of the Lord. Here and now. In this moment of Grace. Where Eden begins, again, and is in full bloom, waiting for the Sons and Daughters of the Second Adam to come back home.

It is the morning of the Day the Lord has made.

Let us be glad and rejoice in it.

 

Too busy saving

The Lord did not think His time with the sick was too long:
He worked long on sanctifying the oil
that would become His medicinal Hands.

He did not wonder how long it would be until the crowds would go away.

He did not fidget in the Upper Room, or schedule something else more urgent.

He did not look at His watch during the prayers at Gethsemane, agitated because His favorite TV show was starting soon.

He did not watch hockey games, baseball games, go to concerts, recitals, dinners and parties instead of being nailed to the Cross.

Any of these would have been more pleasant, for sure.

His "Liturgy," on the Cross, lasted much, much longer than a Sunday morning, with all its standing and chanting and censing and listening.

He, unlike us, was never bored.

No, not bored.

He was too busy for us to be bored.
Too busy emptying His life. Too busy suffering for every single sin. 

Too busy saving
to ever look at His watch.

Which would have been difficult, a wristwatch, kind of awkward, so to speak, on a Hand nailed ...

Nailed
for us who have more important things to do
than to stay with Him and pray

At the Cross, where all things

are made new.

A woman who did better

The woman had fallen into many sins, O Lord,
yet when she perceived Your divinity,
she joined the ranks of the Myrrhbearing Women.
In tears she brought You myrrh before Your burial.
She cried, "Woe is me!
For I live in the night of licentiousness,
shrouded in the dark and moonless love of sin.
But accept the fountain of my tears,
O You Who gathered the waters of the sea into clouds.
Bow down Your ear to the sighing of my heart,
O You Who bowed the heavens in Your ineffable condescension.
Once Eve heard Your footsteps in paradise in the cool of the day,
and in fear she ran and hid herself.
But now I will tenderly embrace those pure feet
and wipe them with the hair of my head.
Who can measure the multitude of my sins,
or the depth of Your judgments, O Saviour of my soul?
Do not despise Your servant in Your immeasurable mercy."

-- the nun Cassia, from Holy Wednesday Matins, Aposticha, tone 8 (as translated in The Feasts of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary, vol. ii, by Catherine Aslanoff).

 

The male gender did not present itself well on Holy Week.

This was contrary to the bluster and braggadocio of cheap vows like, "Though all should abandon You, not I. I am ready to go with You even to prison and death."

But it is well known what happened. Braggadocio withers and bluster evaporates in the shadow of the prince of darkness, and the Suffering Servant stands alone, with the blooded sweat drops still on His brow.

We should have known. This should not have come as a surprise. Cheap vows are the lingua franca of all mortal princes, even blue-collar fisherman types. We beer-swilling good ol' boys who shoot and fish and play on the fields, and arrange deals in sweaty locker rooms and suspect that a lot of rape accusations are just made up -- we think we know how the world turns, and we assume we speak the language of substance and realistic thinking.

But it turns out that those heads of houses fall apart when real darkness falls. Leadership, all leadership, turns into blind guides at the full prospect of the horror of death, where there is no possibility of battlefield heroics, no room for chivalry or knights-in-armor myth.

Good Friday is the blasted terrain of bare, sheer, unmitigated fear, and the self-potent male psychology falls apart.

And thus, there is only one male left standing, and He is the Son of Man.

So against the ludicrous myth of empty courage, one who loves much because she is forgiven much enters and breaks open an irreplaceable, prodigal gift. 

The males are incensed, for the trajectory of meekness always scandalizes the customs of self-esteem. One of the more intellectual males who were watching and were mightily offended -- a profound and cultured blogger had he the technology, a degreed and published academic had he the university, a utilitarian and minimalist iconoclast had he the modernism -- took the opportunity to claim the straw that broke the camel's back, and high-tailed it to the Savior-sale (30 silvers, sold).

A manly thing to do.

But there with the woman, who never had a chance in the courtroom ... the aroma of sacrifice fills the temple of feet-washing like incense. The Myrrh of Bethlehem and the Myrrh of Sepulchre reappear in the Story.

Here, there is courage of a different sort. Here there is the charism of complete openness and regard. Here there is the simplicity of heart: no mask, no false persona, no agenda, no deals, no game, no script.

Here, in the space left open by the absence of the worldly mask, there is recognition of Divinity, and the Divinity that is Love.

Here there is the sheer, bare, umitigated face-to-Face of tears, perfume, unbridaled hair ...

and the Feet of Him Who preached, and now will Become, the Good News.

Simple Sullivan

This is the cover story for Newsweek on the stands right now. Obviously, it's meant to snap, crackle and pop just in time for Easter. 

At every Easter and Christmas, we should expect a treat.

This article of Sullivan's reminds me of the old cliche that Tony Campolo and several old wannabe rock stars (e.g., Larry Norman, Steve Taylor, Rez Band) from the CCM circuit used to round out their stage acts with: "Just follow Jesus," they'd say, simplifying Christianity by swooping away the religious table all those historic complications of institution, "man-made" regulations, church politics, national politics, and other gizmo's accumulated over the centuries.

Just follow Jesus. Now Andrew Sullivan is saying it, because he is tired of the right wing having invaded pulpits and now, even, liturgical vestments. He's tired, too, of heresies like the health-and-wealth movement and clergy abuse monstrosities.

His solution? Follow Thomas Jefferson in cutting the Gospels down to a minimum. Follow Gandhi in perceiving Jesus as a prophet of simplicity and peace. Reduce Christianity into simplicities.

I'm tired, too. I'm tired of the megachurch, which I think is about as bad as secularism for the damage being done to the Church. I'm tired of clergy hunger games and political machinations that take place in places I don't think they belong. I'm tired of Senator Sarbanes getting Orthodox awards on one hand, and Tea Party speech seeping into clerical diatribes on the other. I'm tired of wealth protection that sacrifices the poor and the weak to Molech everyday. I'm tired of beauty trampled, and language falling away, constantly, from eternity.

So Sullivan's idea has long appealed to me, even before Sullivan. There is much attraction to the reductionist project.

But institutionalism is part of our nature, even our prelapsarian nature. It is an indication of the City that is deeply embedded in our soul. We attempted the Tower once, on the plains of Shinar -- but that, too, was an answer, errant as it turned out to be, to a deep urge, created by the Creator, a part of "eternity in our souls."

Institutions can not be gotten rid of without making the way for others: and in this day and age, when one sweeps away an old institution, a worse, more devilish one takes its place. 

Get rid of devil once, the "simple" Jesus said, and he'll grab seven more of his buddies to come back to the nice, clean swept-out place and set up an even bigger party.

And history -- our memory of our hike through the ages -- is full of souvenirs, concrete particularities that carry the marks of the Fall. 

Sullivan (and, it must be confessed, my own wont to stray) reveals the sad and ironic history of the wish for simplicity. "Follow Jesus," the wish says, "but leave the Church and its complications, its hard doctrine and its sinful cast and crew, behind."

Really? Jefferson's idea of simplicity excluded the miraculous, because miracles are rather complicated. Gandhi's idea of simplicity excluded -- get this -- the exclusivity of Jesus' claims: you know, "I am the Way, the Truth and the Life, no man cometh unto the Father except through Me."

"I and the Father" -- and no other man -- "are One."

It takes an institution -- or rather, the institutional manifestation of the True City, the Body of Christ -- to come up with words like "consubstantiality," "hypostasis," "union without confusion."

These are hard words. Christianity, like it or not, is complicated. And in this vale of sorrows, it cannot escape the contours and rhetoric of institutionality. God is certainly not limited by these contours, but we are.

So Andrew Sullivan has written nothing new. And some people will, every year, throw away their institutional membership cards out of frustration and despair. They will try to keep their "simple" Jesus.

But He, as Him, will not stay that way. Stumbling stones simply cannot.

It is better, on this Western Good Friday, to keep a simple silence, and to bear up under one's Cross.