Second Terrace

A letter to the brothers

Be kindly affectionate to one another with brotherly love, in honor giving preference to one another (Romans 12.10).

Summertime has been trumped up as a lazy hazy interval -- slower, lackadaisical, pleasantly humdrum. There is a song that Nat King Cole use to sing, at this time of year: "Roll out those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer, those days of soda, and pretzels, and beer."

I haven't heard this played yet in 2012.

Because this summer has been anything but lazy.

In the Orthodox American community, there has been nothing humdrum since the heat wave has rolled in. The weather has blistered the fields a sodden brown with solar flares, and towering storm cells (some at 30,000 feet) have bombed acres of golfball hailstones on little Pennsylvania towns.

Before you think these are the end times, look more immediately. The times, as a secular prophet once averred, they are a changin’.

I’m not going to launch into an eschatological assay (and I mean that word) here. That subject is grist for a lot of mills. What I will do is to suggest, kindly, that we should draw a line from the heatwave and the stormwave to conditions in our community, and in ourselves.

Let us focus even more onto what “community” means. We will set aside some rather scary hermeneutical possibilities about national and global-humanitarian meanings that roil under the thunder front.

We will consider, instead, our own distinct community: our Orthodox pastoral brotherhood.

Friends, I think in crisis especially we must be friends. For crisis is what we’re in as an American Orthodox community. For us in particular, it is a good crisis -- but “crisis” nonetheless, as it is a period of profound change and challenge. For others of our brethren in other communities, it is a toxic crisis.

Moments of stress do not, normally, bring out the best in people. There were probably more acts of cowardice on the decks of the Titanic than there were acts of courage -- this is so simply because normally, fallen human nature falls apart when things are tough.

A good leader is someone who can stand up against the tidal wave of normalcy. A good clergyman is someone who can resist the craven urge to fall apart and run away, and surrender his better mind to pessimism, backbiting and despair.

A good man speaks -- by how he thinks -- well of his brotherhood.

And I will tell you this -- something that you need to know … and you may as well hear it now, sooner than later. This free and Christian choice of “love without hypocrisy” … this choice of “kindly affection and brotherly love” … this choice of “giving preference to one another” …

… this patently Orthodox Christian choice is a choice you’ll have to make in seminary, both in and out of class, both in and out of the academic year, both at seminary, at home and out and about whatever you do in the summer.

Let me go further. The choice will only grow more challenging after ordination. For the forces that array against love, and against the Peace of the Body of Christ, grow even more appalling once you get parachuted into the parish.

It is not for nothing that St. John Chrysostom himself feared the psychic winds that buffet the soul of every priest (in his book, On the Priesthood). 

It is not for nothing that St. Paul himself wrote these rightly terrifying words:

“And apart from these other things [which is itself a dizzying understatement], there is the daily pressure upon me of my anxiety for all the churches. Who is weak, and I am not weak? Who is made to fall, and I am not indignant?” (2 Corinthians 11.28-29)

THESE WORDS should be read by any man who hears and is considering a priestly vocation.

I have never used all caps in my essays before -- but I do now (probably for the last time) only to make sure that they scare the hell out of you.

In a way, friends, the Titanic is always going down, but it never sinks completely. There are always lifeboats but they must be found. There is, after all (and I cannot resist this), the RMS Carpathia that may be reached, with room enough and to spare for all the weary and heavy laden … especially, to put a severely ironic twist on Emma Lazarus’ words:

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free ...

Who do you think, brothers, the huddled masses in the lifeboats are?

Americans.

Our own people.

Our Orthodox community is confronted by a sea-change, a climatic revolution, even a polar shift. History is turning before our eyes.

You have heard this before, and others rightly are saying, “Calm down. Be at peace. Hold fast. Do not abandon your post.” Listen to them because they are right.

But I will tell you exactly what that means for you and me, in this specific, concrete pastoral brotherhood.

There are two simple headings -- actions to stop immediately, and actions to start (and sustain): and they are all applications of Romans 12.9-13.

Actions to stop:

* Speculating on the motives of other people

* Speaking of others in derogatory, demeaning terms

* Pointing to the faults of others as soon as you feel your own faults pointed to

* Feeling sorry more for yourself than for the distress of others

* Talking more about people than about ideas and beautiful things

* Rehearsing memories of injury, insult and offense

* Practicing the art of victimhood

* Practicing the darker art of reviewing a guy's social standing and political value before engaging in conversaton

* Giving yourself permission, and rationales, for seething in anger & soaking in despair

* Finding an audience for denunciation, and playing to the crowd

* Considering yourself and your pals as a "spin-free zone"

* Making the Church indistinguishable from just another Reality TV Show

* Beating the hell out of Jesus

Actions to start and sustain:

* Thinking of others -- especially the difficult ones -- as icons of Christ

* Making the distinction between irritations and sins

* Forbearing mere irritations

* Forgiving sins

* Blessing enemies -- what does this mean? It means that whenever you think of someone you're mad at (or you feel hurt by -- and, by the way, quit conflating the feelings of anger and "feeling hurt" -- they are the same damn thing), you're 'sposed to bless them right then and think "I forgive him/her ... Lord, bless him/her." And it means doing this seventy times seven, with the product divided by zero (which represents the value of your prosecutorial claims)

* Considering gossip as just another word for revenge

* Combing thoughts with a fine-tooth comb for the lice of denunciation

* Fearing idle talk as the breeding ground for judgmentalism

* Considering the phone and the keyboard as more perilous than a matchstick in the Colorado forests, more grievous the next killer flu

* Repeating to yourself this magical phrase: "I am only a man ... I am lesser the second I try to be greater"

* Making the dinner table and living room a “denunciation-free zone,” or -- to use the old word -- a place of peace

* Washing Jesus’ feet, and letting Him ascend to Heaven -- where you and I belong

 

After all ...

Vesper Hill

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here, at the real Vesper Hill, 

I pray and stay.

Lessons from an abdication

-- the chapel of Pope Sixtus, at the dying of a certain plant

What can a Trinitarian, anti-laissez-faire, anti-abortion, anti-anti-obamacare, amateur lecturer/writer of doggerel, teaparty persona non grata, self-styled traditionalist-in-theory-only, patristic fan (up to the point where the Fathers bother me) and convivial Philistine learn from the latest abdication?

1.  I learned that there are certain clerics and movers and shakers that one must not offend. Ever. There are nephew-crushers in this world, as Lord Yaxley might say. Or,à le Carré, there are some guys who really miss the Cold War, and therefore re-create its good old psychic conditions to gin up the adrenaline. So give these guys a miss, I say. Wide latitude. A ten-foot pole, at least. 

2.  I learned that bad things happen when an institutional culture starts degenerating along linguistic lines. My old partner on my psych unit used to tell me that she could detect the presence, in a family system, of borderline personality disorder by the onset of her own nausea. Well, I experience similiar gastric distress when I hear echoes (you could read "echolalia" here if you want to) of two distinct speech patterns.

 2a.  One pattern is the attempt to reframe problems in the terms of "psychobabble." This pattern is manifested by the frequent pronunciation of big words like (my favorite, wait for it) "dysfunction" ... or "scapegoat" or even "identified problem" ... or "issues" and "stress" and "responsibility."

2b.  Another pattern is the even more degenerate attempt to reframe problems under the rubric of the God-Almighty-Important-Theme of "management" (blow horns, tubas, clang cymbals, play zithers, all the liturgical paraphenalia for golden statues). You can tell you have had the bad luck to find yourself under this hyper-capitalistic cultural umbrella (that keeps out the rain that falls on the just and the unjust), by examining the stuff you're stepping on. I.e., words like "management" ... or "accountability" ... or "leadership" ... or (my very special personal favorite) "vision for the future."

2bi.  There is a depressing corollary to this note. How is it that the "management idiom" is so efficient at picking up a generally okay word like "leadership," and using it in such a cold, clammy manner that it tricks out the word with a malaise that only Robert Burton could write about? Take, for example, the phrase "we are a team." I recently read this remark that was bandied about in a certain ecclesial discussion. I learned this one simple lesson that my seminarians are probably going to have to memorize: 

2bii.  The moment you hear someone wearing black sheets and a scraggly beard speak in wall street tongues and say "we are a team," start packing your bags and look for the plank you're walking on.

3.  I learned that neo-cons and progressives alike yearn for management language. It seems to be the new structure in our post-structural moment. What's more -- both sides (who usually cannot breathe the same air in an enclosed space) use the same damned language against each other. There are many depressing things that one can choose from for a good note before jumping off the bridge -- it is rather like Aragorn being greeted by the chummy crowd of the blue-green undead army in the regrettable third installment of LOTR: but chiefest of the shades must be the distinctly despairing vision of a dull, black and white image of a monastic incanting business jargon, and using that greatest undead necromantic invocation of all time: "brainstorming."

3a.  Brainstorming does not belong in a culture that holds to wisdom.

4.  I learned that no one reads the Epistle of James anymore. Or if they did, they exegeted in such a way that it no longer offends, as it once offended Luther. At least he took James straight up, with no fruit juice or fancy umbrellas. He knew right off the bat that James could never fit it in with his bourgeois slash ur-existential "close reading" of Scripture.

4a.  For if one really did read the book of James -- and maybe just a few other prickly verses from Holy Writ -- than one would know that what happened, in all the speeches and meetings and furtive secret-agent (with coder rings) telephone calls that led up to this abdication, was just a bunch of swearing (James 5.12).

4b.  "Do not grumble against one another, brethren, lest you be condemned. Behold, the Judge is standing at the door!" (James 5.9). Now, that verse is really uncalled-for. It is patently offensive to those who need to make hierarchs do what they want ... to those who want to reduce Holy Tradition to the structures that emanate from the recesses of old cerebral tissues ... to those who would rather have the Church look like a mirror than like a window to heaven.

5.  Self-embraced self-elucidated self-headship (or, in a nicer translation, "autocephaly") is probably cursed. It is certainly haunted like Disney's Mansion, at the least. Spooky, in a cardboard way.

6.  1970 echoes, dimly, in doppler.

7.  This was no victory for progressives, neither for neo-cons or cons. Institutionalists, yes, by all means rejoice. Your day has come.

On today's Gospel reading

 

Rabbi, we Gadarenes
Are not ascetics; we are fond of wealth and possessions.
Love, as you call it, we obviate by means
Of the planned release of aggressions.

We have deep faith in prosperity.
Soon, it is hoped, we will reach our full potential.
In the light of our gross product, the practice of charity
Is palpably inessential.

It is true that we go insane
That for no good reason we are possessed by devils;
That we suffer, despite the amenities which obtain
At all but the lowest levels.

We shall not, however, resign
Our trust in the high-heaped table and the full trough.
If you cannot cure us without destroying our swine,
We had rather you shoved off.

-- "Matthew VIII, 28 ff.", by Richard Wilbur

Hmmm. Who was better off, the "swineherds" (which is meant to be taken allegorically), or the demoniacs (which is meant to be taken literally, in a post-modern idiom)?

"... for no good reason we are possessed by devils"

Hmmm.

"If you cannot cure us without destroying our swine ..."

Hmmm.

How I love poetry. It says so much in so little.

Are You Saved?

You may have had someone come up to you and ask, “Are you saved?” And they might have pressed a brochure into you hands. They meant well, but they usually never stick around for a patient, Christian discussion.

The correct answer to this question is “I was saved by the Cross. I am being saved by the Holy Spirit. I will be saved by Jesus coming back again on the Last Day.” No one who has approached me with this question was willing to stick around and hear a Biblical answer.

The question “Are you saved?” is an incomplete, insufficient question -- it needs more words to make it make sense. It is a lot like asking, “Do you walk to work or take your lunch?” or “What is orange, true or false?” These ridiculous questions are impossible to answer -- not because they are hard, but because they are ridiculous.

In the Epistle reading for today, St. Paul explains what “being saved” means. He says clearly that “you will be saved” if, and only if, “you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead” (Romans 10.9).

This is good news. It means that we do not have to worry about successfully and perfectly obeying the Old Testament Law -- which is what the Jews tried to do and failed, over and over again. Jesus is the only One Who has ever perfectly obeyed, and perfectly lived. It is only by communing with Him that we can share in the benefits of that perfect obedience, and in His deathless Life of the Holy Spirit.

So, we must do two things, or rather, two “sides” of belief: outside and inside. On the “outside,” we must “confess with our mouth” -- this means that our speech and our actions must be made obviously Christian. Our conversation and behavior must be confidently Christian and bring honor to Jesus Christ.

And on the “inside” we must believe in our hearts. “Belief” is the acceptance of Orthodox teachings, and using these teachings to change our opinions and feelings. On the “inside” we have to struggle and fight against our passions -- because these passions (which St. Paul calls “the law of the flesh”) make the heart resistant to belief. Passion is like an allergic reaction to penicillin: penicillin is a life-saving drug, but the life-saving is prevented by the allergy. Anger, greed, self-centeredness, lust and pride are allergies to Christian belief: which is the knowledge that God has certainly raised Jesus from the dead, and has thus revealed Jesus as the Son of Man and the Son of God, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity Who was born of the Virgin and died on the Cross.

So, what is “salvation”? What does it mean to be “saved”? Saved from what?

Those who believe in Christ, as the Apostles taught, are saved from death. “Death” is the refusal of God’s Life, and the turning away from Him into the void and darkness. That void -- which is an infinite, lonely regression toward (but never attaining) nothingness -- is a thousand times grimmer than the maudlin torture chambers of medieval scholasticism and the fetid imagination of Jack T. Chick & Co.

“Salvation” is communion with Christ, through a life of repentant prayer and the receiving the Eucharist -- and letting that Eucharist descend into your heart. Salvation is the Holy Spirit immersing you in the life of divinity -- the life of participation in the very nature of God, as St. Peter taught (in 2 Peter 1.4). Because of God’s outpouring Self-sacrifice, we are able to receive and be transformed by His uncreated energy, His Grace -- and that transformation is into His Divine Beauty that has no end.

So if someone comes to you and asks you, “Are you saved?”, you can ask them back -- “Do you want to commune with Jesus Christ? Do you want to know God forever, and to become more and more like Him forever? Then if you do, come with me to the Orthodox Church. Come and see.”

 Answer a very inadequate question with a very real, and better, one.

 

The Promise of Living

This is the America I love, the America that inhabits my patriotic hopes,
the America for which I pray, for which I envision
in joyful futurity, the contented solitude of Christological peace. 

 

In the early Spring of 1977, I had the privilege of singing bass in a choir that performed Copland's deeply moving embellishment of an old American hymn tune. I was lucky to be in a choir that performed it well -- in my memory, the performance was as good as John Williams' production above.

The lyrics were written by Horace Everett, after he had seen the Depression photographs of Walker Evans. Here is one of them:

The whole idea behind the opera, "The Tender Land" -- of which "The Promise of Living" is a part -- is about the succession of life in a large land. Things change, but other things stay the same: nowhere, I think, is that truth more obvious than in America, in her land and in her history.

This wonderful hymn, "The Promise of Living," closes the first act, which is probably the happiest part of the operetta. At this point, a stationary, rooted family joins in labor with two wandering hobos. And in labor and artifice, they join with nature in a synergy of creation and peace.

Sure, the second act is bittersweet at best.

But so is our history.

Again, take a look at both sets of pictures: the ones in color, and the one in black and white. Both hail from the same America.

Our history cannot be triumphalist -- it is a deadly burden to lay on this land to be so: and the history is exceptional in a limited manner:

America is exceptional only to an American: and this is an authentically patriotic thought.

And isn't it enough, to ask only Americans to think that America is exceptional? Is it not enough to be thankful for a day, a place, a family stake, an album of photos that reach across the decades? Is it not enough to be happy in a freedom that is not abrogated, that is not by any means imperiled, especially in the starving face of hardship for the real ninety-nine percent of the world population?

Our freedoms are not in jeopardy. On the other hand, the poor, the unborn and the undoctored, the disenfranchised, the children and the weak who are collateral damage in wars and inhumane industries -- those people can say, rightly, that they are not free.

Prayer for a nation is constricted by triumphalism. It is defeated by a self-absorption that cannot recognize the pain of the weak, the starvation and thirst of the foreign Christ.

If you want to sing, with fervent effectuality, "God Bless America," then pray for the promise of living.

Twilight, hermeneutical

 

Here [i.e., in Heidegger and all the "last metaphysicians"] the ambiguous Platonic wakefulness to wonder is submerged again into brute passivity, the full Christian awakening is entirely purged from  memory, and philosophy becomes a crepuscular pathos, a twilit meditation upon its own death.

  Within the world of thought though, it seems worth noting, as in the physical world, twilight comes about not because the sun (or the sun of the Good) is setting, but only because the world is itself turning away into its own shadow.

-- David Bentley Hart, in The Beauty of the Infinite, p227

I should add to this somber note a few applications.

First, the wonder that Hart speaks of is the wonder at God, as not just bigness or terrifying power, but as One Who does not play the sacrificial "zero sum" game of cosmic have's at the expense of have not's.

That wonder is quantitatively, and potentially infinitely, greater than the wonder at CERN nowadays, at a little particle called, non-metaphysically, the "God-particle."

Second, the twilight is due to the rising again, undead-like, of nihilism. Rip metaphysics from theology and this is what happens. Make God voluntaristic, and associate Him with every event in the everyday, and you must do such ripping with metaphysics.

It is due also to Orthodox priests, the guardians of Tradition, practicing economic theory at such profound odds with the economic theory of the Trinity.

Finally, nihilism is everywhere the Word is preached outside the Apostolic Rule. Where salvation is reduced to self-improvement. Where men and women are not venerated as icons of Christ. Where the poor are left hungry and the rich are left ignorant of James. Where Christ is not understood as the victim of every sin. Where Tradition does not produce the meekness of peace.

Every prayer is a charge against the gates of hell. Every intercession is a Herculean deathmatch with nihilism. Every repentance is a confession of the goodness of creation.

Nihilism is the darkness. Too much of what we do, say and think is this stuff of adumbration. 

We are crepuscular indeed -- that is the character of our priesthood today.

 

Rapture

Recently, a rather ollie-ollie-in-free "theological" discussion group posed the rather odd question: "Are YOU Rapturable? When Jesus calls His Christians into the clouds, will you be there?" Here is my cranky response. It didn't go over too well.

The "rapture" as it is presently taught in so many places is a relatively new innovation that is part of an older diversion from apostolic doctrine.

The diversion is called "chiliasm," which is the teaching that the Lord will establish an earthly millennial kingdom, but will come under attack in a final conflagration. It is called "chiliastic" because it suggests a disruption of the Lord's Kingdom.

Despite the fact that Saints Justin Martyr and Irenaeus tended to embrace this doctrine, it was finally condemned as heretical by the Second Ecumenical Council.

Consequently, the Nicene Creed reads "And He shall come again with glory to judge the living and the dead, and His Kingdom shall have no end." Every pre-millennial preaching, any chiliastic doctrine (especially Rapture Theory) is cancelled by this affirmation: "His Kingdom shall have no end."

Bear in mind that we all accept at least the relative authority of these Ecumenical Councils whenever we hold to the authority of canonical Scriptures, or the doctrines of the Trinity, the divinity of Christ and the Holy Spirit, and the Virgin Birth.

I say this to wonder, openly, why there is such a strong gravitation to this chiliastic doctrine -- so strong that it produces such flagrant departures from apostolic doctrine as "rapture eschatology."

The Church has always known that true Christians never escape Tribulation, but suffer with Jesus under the attacks of the Beast. The Antichrist is never escaped: he must be fought, as St. Paul tells us in Ephesians, on the battlefield, where we must stand and not seek, cravenly, for escape.

If you ever think the Rapture jailbreak is coming, and the door is made open for you to escape, the better and more Christian thing to do is to say, "Well, if you don't mind, I'll stay here with Jesus and His friends."