Second Terrace

on the loss of Kallistos

 

On the Loss of Kallistos

1989. I wandered into the tiny library of my wife’s native Orthodox Church. I found an old thin 4” by 9” copy of The Orthodox Church, by an Englishman, Timothy Ware. It was printed in tiny, cramped paper that went brittle and musty over the years.

Tempus fugit. Fast forward.

Metropolitan Kallistos just reposed in the Lord on 23 August 2022. I pray, along with many others, “Memory Eternal! Vicnaja Pamjat.”

And while I pray this, other thoughts arise.

The passing of this wonderful, generous teacher and hierarch will become an inflection point. His departure from us who remain in the “church militant” – beyond the loss of his physical presence, his voice, and the possibility of new writings – will become a high tide mark, after which the waters turn and recede.

Decades ago, in 1990, I was converted from Evangelical Protestantism to Eastern Orthodoxy. 

It was a hard journey. I had been brought up with the certainty that the only possible real Christianity was my particular sectarian upbringing. It was a “fundamentalist” experience. There was a constant hyper-vigilance – even a fear – of modernism. We were bound by a literalism that was, I discovered later on, inconsistent.

It was also emotional and experiential: we were all bound by a shared, self-reported crisis experience, something that Billy Graham called “the hour of decision.” We sought “mountaintop” moments of cathartic ecstasy, unbound and unlimited by “programmed worship."

Nearly everything about Orthodoxy was patently opposed to this religious upbringing. Icons, saints, priests and bishops, the idea of Holy Tradition, the “smells and bells,” the Eucharist, and the structure of Divine Liturgy were not only strange to this “free church” evangelical, but even presented themselves as points of guilt. It was as though I was betraying my native soil by wandering off into this radically different language and people.

But against these obstacles, I soldiered on. 

And I made many unforced errors. I still harbor many regrets from that time of conversion.

I was rude to my family and my friends from the religion I was converting away from. I was insufferable. I spoke with an egregious superiority as if theology resided in me alone and not at all with my interlocutors. Truly, "wisdom died with me" -- that is, like Job's "friends," wisdom shriveled at the echo of my voice.

Everyone would have been better off had I remained quiet and humble, loving and patient. 

Thank God for the writings of Metropolitan Kallistos Ware. The Orthodox Church and The Orthodox Way were gentle, confident, and hopeful lights to me. 

So also were the writings and the voice of Fr Thomas Hopko. And Paul Evdokimov. And Olivier Clement.

These voices kept urging, gently and pastorally, the Gospel of Trinitarian kenosis, and the possibility of participation in Grace. They presented a generous, beautiful Orthodoxy. I heard from them the promise of an Orthodox evangel that was truly good news.

Maybe, just maybe, a whole lot of people will be saved, instead of just a tiny raptured few. Maybe there was a better eschatology than the rather occultic one presented by the ilk of Jack T Chick’s comic book, “This Is Your Life.”

So I converted, traveling from the evangelical “free church” culture to the much older, broader, and far richer culture of Eastern Orthodoxy. 

I made my trip about the same time as Franky Schaeffer and hundreds of other evangelicals. 

And I did something that many of my fellow ex-evangelicals did. I carried my fundamentalism with me.

I forced the “round” ascetical disciplines of Orthodoxy into the square hole of my latent, but still potent, legalism of my past religion. I extrapolated the Biblical literalism of my past (which I had called “inerrancy”) onto an expanded canon: I was enthused by not only the expanded Scriptural Canon, but also a larger inerrant (so I supposed) Patristic Canon – inerrant, at least, for some favored texts. 

My theology had not changed essentially – it was only augmented with a few more facts. Now I had new chapters, like sacramentology, liturgics, a little hagiology.

But in the center of my theology, not much had changed. I wasn’t troubled too much by Trinitarian theology or anything beyond the Chalcedonic formula for Christology. I was still a sentimental voluntarist. Still quite the infernalist: eternal hell remained a postulate logically necessary for my cramped doctrinal system.

The unconscious rubric was to augment my fundamentalism with additional Orthodox propositions. Kenosis remained ephemeral and abstract. Trinitarian perichoresis remained even further out in the realm of nominal, unthinking assent. And the notions of methexis and sophiology lay beyond any of my questions, any existential need.

And so I came into Orthodoxy as an “evangelical of the Byzantine Rite.” I was happy to sign on to the crowd of fellow travelers who desired a hyper-conservative brand of Christianity. Perhaps, we told ourselves, Orthodoxy was a more robust defense against the peril of liberalism.

It wasn’t much of a jump from Orthodox traditionalism to rightwing political ideology.

In the 1990’s, many of us styled ourselves as “refugees from the West.” We denounced Aristotle and nominalism – without, I must admit, understanding exactly why. But it sure sounded cool.

I started to blog (on this very site) in 2005. In one of the earlier posts (I think in either 2005 or 2006), I said straight out that the Orthodox Church should be thankful for the influx of us ex-evangelicals. Why? you may ask. Easy, I said: to keep you conservative.

That article was picked up by a well-known conservative Orthodox site, and was relayed from there to other like-minded blogs. I made a minor name for myself (more a footnote than anything else) by complaining about “liberal” Orthodox scholars and writers: I didn’t work too hard at comprehending their arguments – it was sufficient to categorize them under the heading of “modernizers” and “accomodationists.”

Yes. I remained insufferable, especially when I was writing as a new convert, possessing very little common sense and unaffected by real Orthodox theology and ethos.

Still, I kept reading Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, and Fr Tom Hopko, and Evdokimov.

But I was proud to be associated with the growing movement of traditionalists and “ortho-bros” in the Orthodox internet community. No one’s going to make our new Orthodox home liberal. We’re not going to go the way of the Episcopalians, no sirree. Not on our watch.

I started to read other writers. David Bentley Hart’s Beauty of the Infinite figured as a sea change in my thinking. Though it might pain others to hear this, Hart’s work, with his rambunctious style and dauntless logic, started to lay waste the scrubby terrain of my doctrinal thought. 

From there: John Milbank and others in the Radical Orthodoxy movement. Then, crucially, Pavel Florensky and Sergius Bulgakov.

I collected a ragtag crew of correspondents and colleagues in the Orthosphere from those days, way back when. Weird, strange names: we had to be possessed of a certain elan, a spark. The Axegrinder was one. There were other regrettable puns and plays on theologisms and neologisms: Monomakhos was one, Energetic Procession another, American Orthodoxy this or that, even Men in Black (not the movie), and several danced around the word “anamnesis.” This corner of the Orthosphere produced another neologism: the well-deserved term "hyperdoxy." Once in a while it was well-intended -- too often it descended into cruelty.

My own place was (and continues to be) “Second Terrace,” which is actually a recondite allusion to Dante’s Purgatorio. We all loved our new-found treasury of Greek and Russian vocabulary. It was, so to speak, fun.

And of course, the famous (or infamous) Ochlophobist: Owen and his family remain on my proskomedia commemorations: all kinds of folks have disappeared (having left in a hissy fit or getting disappeared for, let's just say, being more than a bubble off plumb) from my social media neighborhood, but they remain as crumbs on my plate.

Those were the innocent – or rather, mostly innocent – halcyon days.

I was naive. I was one of those jejune brash dilettantes who mistook self-induced, manufactured play-acting and posturing for courage and confidence. I misrepresented wisdom and theology with smug opinion that was clever on occasion, but wince-inducing awkward moments from my wiser friends more times than not. 

From others? Justified academic contempt. And I bear them no ill-will now (it took a while), as I more than abundantly deserved it.

All the while, there was Timothy Ware. Then Archimandrite Kallistos. Then Bishop Kallistos. Then Metropolitan Kallistos of Diokleia.

I met him once in Boston, at Holy Cross. At a lecture, I asked him an ignorant question about priests giving confession (I was a deacon at the time). He was charmingly forgiving: I didn’t know that in the Greek Archdiocese, not all priests were granted the faculties to hear confessions.

I met him again, a year or two later in Cleveland. He spoke winsomely and graciously, all expected. I got his autograph.

I don’t think the folks in my van up to Cleveland were all that impressed. They wanted something more aggressive, less theological, but more along the lines of the rising anti-modernism temper of the time.

Kallistos Ware didn’t seem to show the requisite interest in the culture wars, that scurrilous invention of Pat Buchanan and Lee Atwater, and inflamed by Jerry Falwell and James Dobson et al, ad infinitum, ad nauseum, that seemed to fan so many convert flames.

Ah, yes, how sharply I remember. Proudly I donned my cossack and played bingo on the charter bus down to DC for the National Right to Life March in January, 1992 and 1993 and 1994 and 1995 (I’m not counting here the pre-Orthodox marching years and protests at hospitals in Pittsburgh in the 80’s). Proudly I walked, as one of the front deacons, trouping like an Old World entourage around the Orthodox hierarchs as we led the black-robed parade of culture warriors. We carried our signs, bore our banners, chanted our commemorations and Trisagions.

As the years progressed, more and more political partisan signs littered the parade. Extremist language began to dominate not only the March, but American Orthodoxy in general. All sorts of modernist transgressions were threatening the faithful. There were all kinds of “Others” perceived, in darkening gaze, as cropping up on the horizon, posing existential threat.

Still, there was Kallistos, talking about hesychia. Praying the Jesus Prayer.  Describing a generous freedom in Orthodoxy. Humility. Meekness. Pastoral kenosis. Self-denial. The Way of the Cross.

It seemed that his whole self was fully engaged in thinking and living from the truth of the Trinity and the Grace that infinitely streamed from it. He was all about Christology – the union of divinity and humanity and the prayer that beheld that union and invoked it, from the depths of the soul out into the world, as salt and light.

His was an Orthodoxy that was becoming more and more sharply distinct from -- almost in opposition to -- the construct of “American Orthodoxy” invented by me and my fellow rightwing converts from fundamentalism.

But he hadn’t moved anywhere. Instead, we crypto-fundamentalists had moved American Orthodoxy to our sentimental and partisan liking.

I think there was one moment that remains, in my memory, a symbol of my divorce from my partisan squadron.

It was back in the days of Obama’s first administration.

I received a breathless email from a soon-to-be ex-friend. He wanted me to review a manifesto he was drawing up, and that he would send to SCOBA (the predecessor of the Assembly of Bishops).

He wanted to apprise them of the frightening changes in American demographics. “We must, as Orthodox Christians who care about America,” he gushed, “do everything in our power to protect the caucasian majority, and ensure its prominence for generations to come.”

There was a lot more of that in his fever dream.

I wrote him back: “This could be construed as racist.”

He replied, quickly: “No it’s not. It’s patriotic. It’s Orthodox American.”

I told him to never write me again until he changed his ways. Haven’t seen or heard such a thing since.

And he’s not alone. Many have entered the lists of the culture wars. Many have indoctrinated themselves in the ideologies of modernist peril. Many have written reams and recorded podcasts and interviews and lectures at conferences, beating the war-drum and sounding the alarm against globalism, secularism, cultural marxism, and other bogeys like Critical Race Theory and dangerous books like Huck Finn, 1984, To Kill a Mockingbird, even Harry Potter. Authorities have issued ukases forbidding academic discussion about sexuality.

Large swaths of American Orthodoxy enthusiastically enlisted in the conspiracy theory occult of anti-vaxxing, anti-masking, and have swallowed the Big Lie hook, line, and sinker: one of my erstwhile priest-friends actually participated in the January 6th debacle. Many smugly despise democracy and its essential secularity and multi-culturalism, and long instead for a Putinesque authoritarian politics, and happily participate in the constriction of suffrage. Many of these lionize Viktor Orbàn of Hungary – one of his biggest fans was platformed in the name of Fr Alexander Schmemann, if that can be believed. It shouldn’t be believed, but such a thing is becoming more commonplace, not less, these days.

It should never have been that clergy and monastics made authoritative statements against vaccines, or proclaimed extremist partisan anti-democratic speech.

Several years ago, I was taken to the woodshed by a brand new convert. Online, of course. I was quoting something on Orthodox angelology (yes, there is such a thing).

The earnest young man informed me that I was publishing heresy. He also announced that he had been given a blessing by his priest to go after heretics wherever he found them.

So he found me. I informed him that I was quoting Pseudo-Dionysius, from his Celestial Hierarchy. I also informed him that he, too, needed to make things right.

I haven’t heard from him either.

Come to think of it, I probably shouldn’t have mentioned the “pseudo” part. I’m sure that didn’t help my case.

I understand things a little better now. That essay I wrote so long ago, on how we converts can keep Orthodoxy “conservative”? 

I had no clue what “conservative” meant, and what it is was going to mean.

I meant faithfulness to the Nicene Creed. I thought that Orthodox Patristics was one big and completely consistent elaboration of a single seamless tradition, a single theoria, a single homogeneous “phronema.”

I did not appreciate what others – and I mean the majority of others – meant by "conservative." 

And I've had to make my peace with the complications and ambiguities of history, especially church history. Tradition is not seamless. It is not just elaboration. The Orthodox "phronema" cannot be programmed or reduced into shibboleths: the way "phronema" has been marketed these days, it's become something of a modern instrumental device.

I traded in my triumphalism for the song of the Theotokos: "He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich He has sent empty away."

I think we American Orthodox people are afraid. The world is changing. People are changing. The contours of life today are not what they were, and they will not be what they are now. In our heart of hearts, we know the climate is changing, drastically: we may say otherwise out loud to coddle ourselves, but we know better at 3 am.

Our political conservatism has been radicalized into authoritarian extremism: again, we might protest and say otherwise: but the fact of this stands, nonetheless. In our fear and lack of confidence, we have taken the easy way out, and have gone into a hermetic, legalistic retreat – psychic and physical. We've taken leaves from the book of Pharisees and called them Canon, which some of us have granted inerrant Scriptural authority: we "compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, we make him twofold more the child of hell than ourselves."

There really is something comforting, even luxurious and soporific, about rigorism and authoritarianism. Even racism and ethno-centrism and phobia-based privilege beckon their appeal, like the Sirens on the lee and mortal shore.

The real world is frightening. It is shattering old conventions. In many ways, it’s a very attractive, easier alternative to don a new identity, a new appearance, even a new name, and to embrace ritual without hard theology, custom without hard ethics, cult without evangel, ascetics without love.

All in the rubric of denial. Shrink the Other into a Straw Man, then we can tell ourselves -- like Isaiah's "chirping and twittering wizards" -- that we've settled things. 

In too many places, too many speeches, we've joined in with the mad crowd that dragged Jeremiah to despair, repeating the magic incantation: "This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord."

The foundations of old certainties are shaking. Maybe they need to be shaken. Our old institutions are tottering. Maybe it is time for that, too.

It is a harder thing to be salt and light in the real world -- without demanding that the world change, without denouncing the world for being the world. It is a harder thing to "let our light shine," to follow the kenotic ways of the Saviour Who washed the feet of His friends as the Suffering Servant ... to deny oneself and take up His Cross and follow Him.

It is a harder thing to love the world as God so loved it.

It’s also time to remember and embrace the even older certainties. It’s time to imbibe deeply from the springs of Trinitarian and Christological truth. 

It’s time to be less American, and more Sermon on the Mount Orthodox Christians.

It’s time to sing the Magnificat with our Queen again.

It’s time to be more like Metropolitan Kallistos: more like him, and less like what I used to be.

on the mustard seed

There are some very interesting things about both of the readings appointed for tomorrow (1 Corinthians 4.9-16 and Matthew 17.14-22). The most important is the “higher reality” of the Kingdom of God.

The fallen world is a place that celebrates violent power and domination, aristocratic and royal privilege, and crowd-amazing spectacle. It is a place where the “big stick” speaks, where power is measured by weapons and ammunition – the ability to destroy and murder. A place where a person is followed if he says the most alarming and vulgar things, and he’s given authority if he can attract the greatest crowds. People are celebrated if they can entertain and cater to the basest of feelings.

No – I’m not speaking of our contemporary moment (well, not exactly). This, too, was the reality in the time of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the Apostle Paul.

Everyone wanted “signs and wonders.” Everyone wanted to witness a bedazzling miracle – and if they saw it, surely, they would believe and join the new righteous movement.

The logic of the mustard seed

The Kingdom of God does not work this way. There will be no spectacle. 

Jesus moves only by the logic of the mustard seed.

A mustard seed is tiny. No one pays it any attention because no one notices it. It is smaller than a grain of sand. 

And yet, when it is planted by you or the wind or the birds, this is what happens:

A whole endless field – mustard plants, sometimes as far as the eye can see. All from what the world cannot see: a tiny little mustard seed.

In the planting of the seed, there was no spectacle. No power. No celebrity.

Having this is mind, both the Gospel and the Epistle Reading this morning take on a deeper and more radical tone.

Sign-addiction

Why did the disciples fail at helping the little boy and his father? 

Look at the Lord’s surprising response to His disciples when they asked Him this very question: “O faithless and perverse generation, how long am I to be with you? How long am I to bear with you?”

Jesus had already exclaimed His disgust at this dull demand for a “sign” just one chapter before in Matthew: “An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign shall be given to it except the sign of Jonah” (Matthew 16.4).

The “sign of Jonah” here is an obvious reference ot His Resurrection on the third day – Jonah had been expelled from the big fish after the same period of time.

All through the Old Testament, even, the Lord had continually exclaimed His frustration with His people’s refusal to believe, to have faith, to have a completely childlike trust in His Great Love, His “good will toward men.” 

Instead, they kept on demanding signs like misbehaved children who complain that they are bored, who only want ever greater entertainment, like gross crowds who demand ever more spectacular and grotesque entertainment.

The failure of the disciples in the Gospel text is this: they wanted to perform a miracle, to pull off a big spectacular sign. 

And I’ll go on with their motive – which is exactly what Jesus was denouncing:

Maybe then the people will join us. Maybe then we can take over the Temple. Maybe then we can kick out the Romans and achieve real political power. Maybe then we can be the ones who dominate. Maybe then people will bow down to us and kiss our hand.

But no.

How mountains move

The Lord of the Kingdom of God says this in total opposition to the worldly, and very dull, opinion held by His disciples:

The Kingdom of God that moves every mountain (“and every valley shall be exalted” – Isaiah 40.4) moves by way of the mustard seed. It moves by meekness, by childlike trust.

It moves by communion with Jesus in His Body and Blood, by fellowship with Him and His Mother and all His Saints, with the Body of Christ.

It moves in whispers. It moves in human weakness: “My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12.9).

When the world wants spectacle, it moves underground, in secret.

When the world wants celebrity and power, it moves in poverty, rags, and persecution: “We have become, and are now, as the refuse of the world, the off-scouring of all things” (1 Corinthians 4.13).

All because in faith we commune with the Creator Who moves every mountain, surmounts every obstacle. If we have this faith, Jesus says, this faith that can only ever be the size of a mustard seed, then we participate in the divine nature that can move every mountain – as it does indeed.

And in our faith – deepened and intensified by “prayer and fasting” – we can participate in the Lord’s great and ongoing project of exorcising the demoniac from His beautiful physical creation.

Eden is closer than you think

When we think of the demoniac – the enemy which pollutes and ravages and opposes the real King of Creation – it is best to first recall what Creation was meant to be in the first place.

What did God want in His Creation? What did He mean for it to become? What design did He use to form Creation – the design that He desired for its purpose, its eternal goal?

Recently, I took a few “Eden-ish” pictures:

You know this one. It’s the cypress tree standing in the middle of Edenton Bay, right next to the Barker House.

Eden is never to be forgotten. Reminders, the true signs of the Kingdom, show up in the most surprising, even familiar, places.

Like in our neighborhoods, in our homes. Beauty is clearest when it is nearest and dearest.

And this:

That’s my granddaughter and me at Coquina Beach, from this last Wednesday.

I know. You are probably surprised that I included familiar pictures from around Edenton (North Carolina, my town) to illustrate the Garden of Eden.

It’s surprising because we naturally think of Eden as long gone and far away – far, far into the mists of the prehistoric ages. 

But the Garden of Eden is meant by God to be always on our mind. We should always be thinking of God’s “peace on earth, good will toward men” in the Garden. There was no killing, no violence. The lamb lay down with the lion. Mankind husbanded creation – Adam named the animals because he knew them as friends and companions. No one went hungry, because God continues to provide a world that could – if not obstructed by evil – still provide for everyone. 

Eden is Beauty. Eden is the formative design and purpose of the world. And man is at its very center, always meant to name and to husband, to be stewards and gardeners.

And Jesus is the only King, as always before, is now, and always shall be.

The alien presence of the demonic

The demonic is the fallen angels who want to steal aod dominate. And to get what they want, they wage violence. They infect with the disease of disorder and sin. They are themselves the spiritual leprosy that darkens the world

And who do you think the demonic is most motivated to target their infection, their corruption?

What is the heart and crown of all Creation, that which delights God the most, that which He most desires?

You. You (and all humanity for all time) are the heart and crown of God’s desire.

As I’ve said before, we are not to spend any time or energy trying to figure out the demonic. We are not to name them or count them. We are forbidden to develop any “science” about them, simply because all such attempts are bound to fall into deception.

That is why I prefer, along with many Fathers, to just say “evil” rather than “evil one” in the Lord’s Prayer. The demonic has rejected the name and personhood that only participation in God’s Grace can give.

The demonic is the main obstacle that we confront in our life. It is the real enemy. The “mountain,” in other words.

In the Psalms, we often pray against the enemies, the sinners, the “bloodthirsty men,” the “strange ones” or the “children of the strange ones.”

We are not permitted to think of other humans (or any physical creature at all) when we pray these Psalms of complaint and imprecation.

After the Incarnation and its revelation, the only enemy that remains is the spiritual enemy, the demonic.

And the only weapons we have are the prayer and fasting that Jesus mentioned in the Gospel reading: “this kind never comes out except by prayer and fasting.”

So we need to expand our definition of prayer and fasting.

The larger prayer

“Prayer” is our communing with God, hearing His Word and emptying our hearts in full honesty – no matter how painful and self-incriminating, no matter how frustrating – and offering it “as an evening sacrifice” to the Lord.

So prayer is emotional. It is spiritual. It is also intellectual and theological. In Orthodoxy, we reject any division between mysticism, spirituality, and intellectuality.

As St Evagrius once said, “A true theologian is one who prays, and a true pray-er is one who theologizes.”

Bad theology (like thinking God causes you harm) will end up disabling your prayer.

But prayer that is buoyed and inspired by Divine Wisdom enters into and participates in the infinite stream of Trinitarian prayer -- the adoration offered by the Son and Spirit to the Father, and the Father's revelation of the Son by the Spirit, the glorification of Creation in Beauty.

Fasting as exile and renunciation

“Fasting” is not just depriving yourself of food. Fasting is much, much more than that.

The fasting that moves mountains, the fasting that joins with Jesus in His program of exorcising all Creation, of cleansing the world to make it Eden Again, is the fasting of declaring independence from the dark, dull, power and entertainment-addicted world

“Fasting” is your going into self-exile, leaving, constantly leaving the worldly city, the Babylon of Genesis and Revelation, where there is only “faintheartedness and tempest” (Psalm 54 LXX), where there is a univocal culture of “iniquity and strife” that surrounds the city, “even to her walls,” where “usury and deceit have never departed from her streets.”  

The city of broken love

And worst of all, in this antichrist Babylon which has always aggressed against the Kingdom of God, the demonic cult of Babylon is always setting about to corrupt and break human relationships – human loves, human friendships, human neighborhood. 

It is the demonic that seduces us to objectify our fellow bearers of the image of Christ, that makes us forget His promise: “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these My brethren, ye have done it also unto Me.”

That statement attacks the very gates of Hell, no matter that they’re made out of “brass and iron.”

Participating in the Kingdom:
revolution in exile

So we leave in exile, in prayer and fasting, the dark dull culture of Babylon: the place of betrayal, the place of power-mad mobs who lust after spectacle, who fight and kill for power and advantage.

The culture of Anti-Wisdom, Anti-Love, Anti-Spirit ... Anti-Christ.

And we commune with our Lord Jesus Christ, Who reigns as the Only King – and in this faith the size of a mustard seed -- the way of Wisdom -- we engage the gates of Hell. 

We pray without ceasing, praying the Jesus Prayer, invoking His all-powerful Name. We bathe in His cleansing Word. We imbibe His wisdom that shatters every demonic structure of violent domination. 

And we always seek the Garden. In communing with Divine Wisdom, we learn to husband again. We seek to perceive and recognize His Design – His Law – in the smallest and greatest of creatures. We rejoice in knowing that He has numbered every hair on our head, and He knows when every sparrow falls, and He calls every star by name – which is a mightily unthinkable thing, as even the galaxies are without number.

(image of a galaxy field taken from the new James Webb telescope in a halo orbit around the L2 LaGrange point 1.5 million miles from Earth)

“Every star by name” (Psalm 146.4 LXX). 

And the angels are even more in number: “Your beloved friends, O God, have become greatly precious to me, their authority become greatly strong. I shall count them and they shall only increase more than the sands of the sea” (Psalm 138.17-18 LXX). 

They are myriads and many orders of degrees larger, far more numerous than the demoniac.

When demons are exorcised, they are evicted permanently from the physical Creation. Our belief otherwise is a deception, meant only to drive us into despair, making us think wrongly that the enemy is stronger than it is.

In the Name of Jesus – which is the mustard seed itself – in His meekness, in His hiddenness, in His whisper, in His feet-washing servanthood and apparent weakness, in clear theology and fervent prayer, we crush hell.

Which is our job, nothing less. “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world” (Matthew 28.19-20).

So the dark city will say this of us, too: “These who have turned the world upside down have come here too” (Acts 17.6)

dancing on the sand

God created the beach so grandfathers could walk with their granddaughters in the surf.

Sure, there are many other reasons for the ocean and the sand, the wind ushering the waves to wash up on the strand.

Yesterday, I had to relearn a lesson that I keep forgetting. At Coquina Beach (one of my favorite spots in the whole world), I feebly attempted to read a hard theological text on my Kindle, assuming that I could get some work done.

“Feeble” was the word. It was hard to follow the arguments. Any word over two syllables was left unprocessed. It seemed that attention and IQ were cut in half.

The slate blue sea, ribboned by white breakers extending all the way to the far horizon of the azure sky, would not permit any other gaze.

And there she was, my nine-year-old granddaughter, dancing in the breaking surf. She rated the strength of the waves. She called the gentle, faint breakers kittens, the midsize ones puppies, and the greater ones tigers.

A rogue wave ambushed this unstable senior frame, an easy mark for Poseidon aiming his trident at an older guy who hadn’t body-surfed in ages.

“That was a Wilbur wave!” the Princess of the Tides shouted, affixing the name of our senior West Highland terrier to the top of the ratings list.

We both laughed at the comedy and the greatness of the ocean that day.

This little girl opened her gaze and her heart to the overwhelming wave of sun, sky, sand, and sea. She laughed and danced.

That’s just the way to visit the shore. With openness, courage, hope, and joy.

But a memory of contrast sprang to mind.

Years ago, we had brought another person to the shore: an older, much older, person. My wife and I innocently – or rather, naively – presumed that everyone loves the beach. We thought “Who wouldn’t jump at the chance to just sit there and stare off into the horizon?”

Not everyone, it turns out. Maybe it was too hot. Maybe it was crowded. Maybe it was the sand itself: Anakin Skywalker, after all, had said eloquently: ""I don't like sand. It's coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere."

Maybe it was all this. But maybe it wasn’t.

It was obvious from the start that this person was not a beach person. While the sea did her best to sing in the rhythmic surf; while the sunlight danced on the waves and the sand; while the breeze wafted its aroma of distant shores, nothing budged.

No laughter this time. The idea of dancing on the surf was a whole horizon away.

I fully appreciate the fact that the beach might be a matter of taste.

But in this case, I suspect it was something more. It might have been a matter of too many years, too much experience. Maybe too much practice in the dark arts of squeezing one’s gaze and heart into the familiar, the comfortable, the usual.

This person, it seemed, had become allergic to greatness and wonder. To the reality of Beauty itself. He had turned away from the infinite and chose instead the tiny space of what was known and controllable.

He wanted only what was defined, and ended up confined.

I should have known better. For a long time already, he had divided up people into “us vs them.” On the “them” category he affixed labels of threat and conspiracy, and most of all, “enemy.”

He was comfortable only with the “us” category. He tried mightily to interact only with those who thought like him, talked like him, and held the same opinions like him.

He told me he was done with school. He was content to fill his days with reruns – both on TV and ideas. He had become, in psychological terms, “closed off” to new information.

It was no wonder, then, that he disregarded the sea. Its greatness, its beauty was proof that his notions were overwhelmed by the ocean, the unconfined horizon that was utterly free.

The Eternal confronts every heart at every moment, and it's so hard to turn away, and the turning comes at great cost.

Shutting one's eyes to Beauty is the price one pays for running away from the gaze of One Who sends the wind and the waves.

Better by far was my little girl, my Princess of the Tides, who was willing to take a chance on infinite Beauty.

Better by far was her hopeful gaze and her courage, her free choice to laugh in the dance.