Second Terrace

the collision: parkland, ashes and roses

At the juncture of Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day, a collision with the newest school shooting, this one in Parkland, Florida.

For now I won’t mention any kind of response in terms of firearms control. There seems to be little chance for fruitful dialogue here.

But it must be said that acts of horrifying cruelty, whether physical, sexual or both, are not without antecedent: there are always prior development and reinforcement.

We have permitted the immersion of our youth into a media bath of explicit, gory violence on one hand, and propogandized images of unstructured sexuality on the other.

In other words, we have aided and abetted the reinforcement of cruel, abusive behavior, and the desensitization to a river of images that should produce PTSD in any sane adult in a less sophisticated age.

We have not only aided this comprehensive program, we have fiercely protected it in the name of political shibboleths.

And we adults have demanded our personal rights to behave with discourtesy, incivility, free expression of anger that ranges from brooding to outburst, contempt for any and all disagreement. Let alone how we have adopted cynical, vulgar and denunciatory forms in our everyday speech.

And we fools have called this "freedom." Even we religious types have taken to the grammar and syntax of the gang-hardened streets.

Forget the guns for now. If you want to see less school shootings, less teachers who have to shield kids from a lead eruption of an AR-15,

then for God’s sake, and the children’s, stop the cruelty in you and around you. Stop getting mad and aroused.

Make peace. Be meek, pure in heart. Hunger and thirst for a better kingdom.

This Lent, look for true beauty, work for wisdom, pour your ego out in love, and make them real.

New Calendar Halloween

 

New Calendar Halloween

Years ago, when we lived in Warren Ohio on Genesee Lane, Trick-or-Treaters came to the door on the nearest Saturday afternoon to October thirty-first. I looked forward to handing out Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups to the little crowds of carnivalers. In the chilly late fall evening, you could hear the laughter, the parents and grandparents trying to keep the stragglers from lagging behind.

And you could see, coming up my long driveway, under the bare branches of my red maple tree, a loose band of Buzz Lightyears, Ariels, Belles, Supermans, Batmans, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Power Rangers, and an occasional Charlie Brown ghost.

My favorites were the toddlers dressed up like pumpkins or bumble-bees.

I miss those days. In my neighborhood now, my closest neighbor is my friend Pat’s funeral home. There’s no coming to my door on New Calendar Halloween from his place, not even thirteen days later on the Old Calendar. His place, late at night, is usually very quiet.

Still, I never did like kids tricked out like zombies, vampires, demons or the devil himself.

Ariels, Barbies and Supermans are all fun make-believe, and I love that stuff. But there is no make believe with demons.

The entertainment forms of the demonic try to make the reality of demons make-believe. In this category, you have your Jasons and Freddies, your Draculas and your creepy children of the corn. You have your Regans (from the “Exorcist”) and Damiens (from the “Omen”) and all the other horror shows.

But these are all just “shows.” Not a single one of these is real or accurate.

Pop culture (including the current fascination with zombies) values the demonic for its entertainment value. But pop culture, and scientists and philosophers, would rather not believe in the demonic at all. Much intellectual work has gone into the “disbelief” of spiritual reality in general, and in particular, the presence of God on one hand, and the demonic on the other. Immanuel Kant worked like Hercules to argue that the indefiniteness of the universe had nothing to do personal spiritual reality. Baruch Spinoza worked just as hard to “prove” that Holy Scripture was not holy or spiritual at all, but was rather just another normal text: you could, Spinoza said, interpret it any way you wanted in a private fashion, but never ever bother the State with any notion that there was an unseen reality — whether above, or below.

If you think about it, the whole idea of “secularism” is really a cowardly attempt to run away from spiritual reality.

Despite all this running away, the demonic leaks into our attention now and then, and bothers atheists with evidence that their worldview is just a heap of soggy cardboard.

The most immediate evidence of this “leakage” is the horrific mass-shooting tragedy that took place at the Umpqua Community College in Oregon just a few weeks ago. The shootist asked people whether they were Christian, and shot them regardless of what they said. He even ordered a disabled woman to get back into her wheelchair, only to shoot her dead.

Secularity is mute and stupid in the face of such horror.

Frankly, seeing this tragedy in Oregon (9) should have made us all run to the Orthodox Church every day for spiritual shelter – we should have been there already after having also witnessed Charleston SC (9); Isla Vista CA 2014 (6); Fort Hood TX 2014 (3); Washington DC 2013 (12); Santa Monica CA 2013 (5); Newton CN 2012 (27, mostly first graders); Brookfield WS 2012 (3); Minneapolis MN 2012 (6); Oak Creek WS 2012 (6); Aurora CO 2012 (12); Oakland CA 2012 (7); Seal Beach CA 2011(8); Tucson AZ 2011 (6); Manchester CN 2010 (8); Huntsville AL 2010 (3); Fort Hood TX 2009 (13); Binghamton NY 2009 (13); DeKalb IL 2008 (5); Omaha NB 2007 (8); Blacksburg VA – Virginia Tech 2007 (32); Salt Lake City UT 2007 (5); Nickel Mines PA 2006 (5); Red Lake Indian Reservation MN 2005 (9); Meridian MS 2003 (5); Tucson AZ 2002 (3); Santee CA 2001 (2); Wakefield MA 2000 (7); Honolulu 1999 (7); Fort Worth TX 1999 (7); Atlanta 1999 (9); and finally – and I could go on and on – Columbine CO 1999 (13). I’ll leave it to you to figure out what the numbers in the parentheses represent. 

Say what you want about guns, gun control, mental disorders and parental neglect, but the real cause of this horror (with human cooperation and responsibility) is obvious.

You will say that this latest event was extremely unnatural and inhumane. And I will say “Precisely.” These words — “unnatural” and “inhumane” — constitute the clearest signs of the activity of the demonic. We Orthodox do not need to see the spectacle of horror-movie special effects to discern the activity of the Evil One. We notice when a human existence becomes unnatural … when it moves toward cruelty … when it is no longer empathetic toward others … when it becomes uncaring about the suffering of Creation around it … when it is so angry or lustful that it it is no longer rational, and cannot stand the idea of God, or the reality of other human persons.

Self-pitying self-centeredness is horribly unnatural. The Church has always known this. The world wants us to forget this.

Although my seminarians are probably tired of hearing this, chew on this fact: What is “natural” and what is “normal” are not the same – the more the unnatural becomes the norm, the more vulnerable and open to the demonic a society becomes.

And we are already there.

There are a number of things we know — especially in Orthodoxy — about the demonic that can be helpful. Here are a few helpful ideas about the Enemy for this (and every other) New Calendar Halloween:

1)    Demons have no names. You may be surprised at this. But the word “Legion” (in the story of the Gadarene demoniac — Luke 8.26-39) is actually a number. The name “Lucifer” (i.e., “Morning Star”) was the original name of the devil, but he rejected this name at his fall. “Satan” is simply the function of the devil, which means “accuser” or “adversary.” The reason why this point is important is that the devil and the demons, as the Blessed Fr Dumitru Staniloae taught, have rejected God’s gift of Personhood. Since their name is a statement of their life in relationship with God — which they have also rejected – they have turned away from the names (i.e., their “logoi”). Pay no attention to superstitious and occult stories that make a big deal about demonic names. Also, pay no attention to ecstatic services where the evangelists try to “interview” the evil spirit: if this is not just mere showmanship (which most of it is), then it is insane. Stop watching horror movies: read the Psalms, which are far, far more accurate (and helpful) in the darkness of the night.

2)    Demons are attracted — like flies — to passions. They are drawn to anger, lust, greed, addiction, pride and especially self-pity. We live in an extremely passionate age, and that level of total passion is the reason why there is so much inhumanity, violence, chaos, and unnatural behavior. Demons especially swarm toward self-pity, and the results are deadly. This is the reason for the Oregon shooting. It is probably the chief reason for the decline of church attendance and fellowship, which are also deadly.

3)    Demons are repelled by faith. We Orthodox “exorcize” – or “banish” – demons all the time. This happens at every blessing -- every blessing makes another person, another thing, another event intolerable for demons. They cannot abide the Name of God – the Holy Trinity. They cannot survive the affirmation that the Son of God became incarnate in the flesh. They shrivel at the Sign of the Cross made in faith. They are driven out by confident, total self-pouring out prayer. They cannot touch a mind that has been structured by Orthodox theology. They cannot even look at a soul that has received, in complete prayerful faith, the Holy Eucharist. If you pray the entirety of the Psalms every week in your heart, like the early Orthodox Christians did, the devil will not stand a chance.

The worst thing we can do is to say, with the world, that demons are just old-fashioned juju, and that we can go our way taking time off from church, forgetting the Eucharist, leaving off our prayers, scheduling our kids away from the church (even Sunday mornings).

Real life is not like New Calendar Halloween: there really is something under the scary mask.

Do not let it in.

Do not let it win.

“We are more than conquerors through Him Who loved us” (Romans 9.37). “Greater is He that is in you than he that is in the world” (1 John 4.4).

on friday, marriage

On Friday -- on a day that the news should have focused entirely on the funeral of +Rev Clementa Pinckney (attended by His Eminence Archbishop Demetrios) -- the Supreme Court thought it appropriate to announce its decision on the case Obergefell v. Hodges: the Court determined that there is now a federally-protected right of same-sex couples to be married under civil law.

What does this mean? And what does this mean for us?

Historically speaking (that is, outside the Church), this is something new. In general, cultures across the world made marriage a “legal” thing between a man and a woman for the purposes of bearing children (i.e., “procreation”) and owning property. That is why society in general has always been so interested in marriage, and it has -- across the board -- legislated various laws to regulate and to support marriage.

This is what is called “civil marriage.”

We should remember that one of the main reasons why society upheld marriage by law was for the purpose of procreation. That is why marriage has been limited, historically and even outside Christianity, to a relationship between a man and a woman.

As far as the Church is concerned, marriage goes far beyond the legalized “civil union” that society or the State is interested in upholding. Marriage, in Holy Tradition, is a “sacrament.” It is one of the seven primary “means of grace” that God has given us for the sake of our salvation. We say confidently that we can be “saved” through marriage.

For the first few centuries of the Church (until about 900 AD), when early Christians got married, they first went to the city magistrate (kind of like our “Justice of the Peace”) and entered into a “civil union.” Then, soon afterward, they had their marriage blessed in Divine Liturgy on Sunday morning.

The Sacrament of Holy Matrimony -- or, better, the “Holy Mystery of Nuptial Union” -- goes far beyond the interests of society. Marriage, in the Holy Tradition of Orthodoxy, is an eternal union of a man and a woman (just like Adam and Eve, and -- more profoundly -- Christ and His Bride the Church). Every sacramental marriage is a part and a beginning of the cosmic reconciliation of Christ returning all of Creation to the Father in universal transfiguration. Marriage includes the possibility of children, but it extends into love and joy in every moment between the husband and wife. 

We Orthodox have deep and eternal view of marriage.

And because of that, we venerate and protect it -- not just as a civil institution, or as a “contract” that will cease at the end of life. Marriage, for us, is forever, always initiating a return to Paradise, always transforming a home into a “Garden of Eden.”

So what do we do when the Supreme Court, in a very poorly written, poorly argued and irresponsible opinion, has changed the legal definition of marriage? 

(The gaping holes in this opinion, written by Reagan-appointee Anthony Kennedy, are egregious. One unanswered question in this statement -- as if it didn’t matter -- is whether religious institutions who choose not to perform such unions will receive adequate legal protection.)

First of all, we need to remain “courageously peaceful” and remember that while this decision is huge for civil law, it does nothing to the Orthodox definition of marriage.

I doubt that the Church will ever be forced, by law, to perform same-sex marriages. Such a thing has not happened once in Massachusetts, which has legalized such marriages since 2004. 

But in the event that everyone who performs the “civil marriage” within the church ceremony -- which I and every other clergy do for the State in a wedding -- might be required by law to perform a same-sex marriage … then I -- and every other traditional priest -- will stop performing the civil part (i.e., I would no longer sign the marriage license).

I do not think this is a very big deal in itself. The “clergy-signed marriage license” was always a government function, starting around 900 AD with the hugely significant "Novella 89" of Leo VI. Historically, I think that any and every entanglement with the State has turned out to be a huge mistake.

We need to remember that there have been, for a long time, many “civil marriages” that the Church does not recognize as “sacramental”: “same sex union” is not the only impediment to Church-blessed sacramental marriage. There are other “impediments": marriage between too close of blood relations is prohibited; so also is habitual adultery and criminality. Age and consent also factor as significant concerns.

We need to also keep in mind that not only does the Church warn against homosexual activity, but it warns -- just as strongly -- against all sexual behavior outside of sacramental marriage (like adultery). It is usually overlooked that the Church warns against all lustful or fetishizing sex -- even within marriage. The Church warns, too, against childbearing attempts that take place outside sacramental marriage: e.g., sperm or egg donation; in vitro fertilization; surrogate motherhood; and any and all manipulations of human life, including DNA modification. 

But most importantly, we need to consider that these warnings are for the conservation of formal human life and culture, and for the beautification of human existence for eternity: so the Church warns against all destructive passions -- not only sexuality outside Holy Tradition, but also greed, anger, gluttony, pride and despair.

We are now in a moment when we need to think carefully about our response to this cultural watershed moment. Unfortunately, it is a watershed: but our response does not need to be so chaotic or reactionary. It is not the best thing, surely, to wage another round of "culture wars." Neither is a retreat from full-on engagement of from contemporary society (and history): we are neither Amish, nor are most of us monastic. So in general, I reject the "Benedict Option." It is neither robust nor comprehensive as a real strategy.

Frankly, we should have been thinking about "responses" to the devolution of contemporary society a long time ago. Maybe as far back as when usury was legalized in modern Europe, and everything became commoditized (even human labor). Maybe even further back as when Christendom lost its soul when the western Church itself began contractualizing the concept of "covenant" and all relationships, and secularity was thus invented and set loose upon human society.

Why do we notice how bad things are only when our hot buttons are pushed? I think our surprise and shock about Friday June 26th reveal not so much the badness of the world, but our egregious lack of wisdom, and failure to discern.

For now, I will offer only this, in the particular subject of marriage:

The best thing to do, in response, is this: We need to understand and reveal the truth of Orthodox Marriage. Our homes need to be islands of the joy and peace of the Risen Christ. Our marriages need to reveal the possibilities of Trinitarian love in our time. And we need to be able to talk freely, peacefully and courageously, about what our marriages mean in Orthodoxy.

Do I have to know this?

The eminently replaceable, dubitable Daily Beast has more tidbits to offer up about the fantastically-interesting kicking-of-the-bucket of Philip Seymour Hoffman.

Dear Beast,

Thank you for your breathless reportage on the passing of Mr Hoffman -- whom I very much admired, agreeing mostly with the notion that he is probably this generation's greatest actor. 

Thanks, but no thanks, really. All I needed from you was a subdued notice that he died, all too prematurely. You could have, since we live in such a seedy age, simply stated that it was an apparent drug overdose.

Period.

But no. You had to "scoop" us with those glistening brain-candy factoids that included terms like "syringes," "toilet," "heroin," "kindergartner," "mother of his kids."

These words, as you well know, are just as alluring as the usual titillating terms in the sex-and-violence lexicon.

What an opportunity! A great actor (with, as you know, a back story that dresses up his demise with drapes of melodrama) who not only dies, but does us the service of dying in squalor. The story couldn't be better.

Did you think that your name, the Daily Beast, festoons you with a rubric for scooping offal news like this? Do you believe that Evelyn Waugh thought this name, "Beast," that is, on a daily frequency of emission, was something to be emulated? A model?

If you do, then I guess you deserve some mitigation of your moral responsibility. You're just ignorant, then.

But you're still just, as in merely (since we probably have to spell out these fancy concepts to you), pornographic.

Sigh. You probably need a dictionary for that one, if only to head you off from the commercial brain-candy connotation of the term.

Beast.

Old fashioned investment

Apparently, well-heeled persons suffer a conundrum of what to do with recent profits.

And, mind you, the term "person" these days is meant – legally speaking – to refer to organisms of the homo sapiens species and -- thanks to SCOTUS -- now corporations. Both now have rights of free speech, after all, so one must show proper respect.

(By the way, would that be a conservative development, or an outright liberal, à la Roe v. Wade, development? But I digress.)

Accordingly, I offer my assistance to these persons with help for some resolution of their ethical conundrum.

The first impulse is to plow back earnings into investments, especially the derivative and other hyper-finance products that have been so beneficial to our economy as of late.

The second impulse is to provide increased dividends to stockholders. That might help stave off uncomfortable stockholder meetings and possible ousters of officers, CEOs and the board.

But these unpleasantries are relatively rare, since board members are interrelated by bonds of Wall Street incest – a seething relationship that has fostered a groupthink that, in turn, produces economists like Larry Summers and cabinet members and federal reserve chairmen who intone, ritually, incantational assurances that the hyper-finance collapse was not – what I thought, stupid me – a failure of their theoretical model, but was a demonstration of the robustness of their economical theory.

Here I had assumed that the Wall Street meltdown had made chumps of all economists. But it turns out that the collapse itself had proven the rightness of their ways.

There you go.

I guess I should reconsider my dark notion that the Wall Street collapse was really the largest shift of wealth away from the middle class and the poor, and the most radical particularization of wealth into the coffins – I mean, coffers – of a few. This, as it turns out in the equations of the wise, is not so. The Emperor's clothes are beautiful, are they not?

The third impulse simply does not occur to anyone. Creating jobs – creating "make-work" positions – if only to increase the numbers of the gainfully employed – is just a bad idea these days.

Against these impulses, especially the first two, I suggest a simple old-fashioned idea:

Distribute the profits to the poor.

This can be done in several ways. I discourage the giving of cash. Housing would be nice. Good land would be better. A cow. Some chickens. A good education in the trivium and quadrivium is essential. Something along the line of medical assistance would be okay, but I dare not mention the word "healthcare" here, since the term itself is trip-wired to a zip-lock bag of napalm.

I think this was done before. I can think of one example in Catholic Spain, where the surplus of public wealth was given to the destitute.

But then, as is now the expedient practice in the religious business of wealth-protection, there were those who took umbrage. Sir James Stewart suggested that this was no good. "The regulation of need" – not charity – was better at effecting social control and increasing the population.

The logic of Sir James is insurmountable. If one does not distribute surplus in public charity, then one has more to invest in future profit-making industry.

There are two good consequences here. An improved industry will reap more rewards to the self: huzzah. And, even better, the "element of need among the workers" is constantly preserved. Workers are happy to work. Happy to be disciplined. Double-huzzah.

If one wanted to gather more of these "huzzah's," then the only thing that certain "persons" would have to do is to wait for a while. Hold back. Make the workers appreciate work. Build up that "element of need."

Never mind the tongue-in-cheek tone of this post. I should not have to say it, but in this pedestrian climate of howitzer-inanity (e.g., last night's 'Reality TV" political debate), I have to say out loud that I disagree with impolite forms of redistribution of wealth. One mustn't, after all, touch the third rail of Christian conservatism, which is the dirty secret that there is nothing very conservative Christian about Wall Street ethics or Wall street metaphysics. Perhaps liberal, yes, and perhaps (and especially) calvino-voluntarist heterodox: but not old fashioned Christian.

Like giving to the poor is.

Far as the curse is found

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

And why children and mothers suffer on the street.

Why the already ravaged poor are ravaged even more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, it doesn't.

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

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

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

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

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

Pray and give.

He comes to make His blessings flow ...

What Orthodox Christians do about the earthquake in Port au Prince

This was the Presidential Palace before yesterday. 

Now ...

  

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that state of affairs was before the earthquake.

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

And that is what Orthodox Christians do.

Good for the poor

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

Matt,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prophet Lite (part one)

Jello Salad in the Public Square

I have been chided, in a not overly gentle manner, for not being enthusiastic enough for some recent declarations. One such declaration called "Manhattan" was full of things with which no one with a human nature could rightly disagree. I demurred in my response, mainly suggesting that making declarations is either like Diogenes doing barrel rolls down the Corinthian hillside. Or it is like operating a Baptist booth on the public square with jello salad and koolaid for sale, while everyone else is hawking draft beer, sausage and onions, kapusta pirohi and slivovica.

I also thought that the Declaration, as well as most declarations, was missing a lot on the menu: there were appetizers and dessert, but the main course (you know, the meat-and-potato part that actually explains things) was left ambiguous. It tried to be robust and prophetic, but ended up coming out "prophet lite," mostly pop and carbonation.

These days, it is the fashion in Christian quarters to claim to be a Prophet, or at least to use a Prophet or the whole lot of them (or the Apostles) as precedent for a thought or fuzzy impression about which one has grown excessively fond.

Prophets can be found in surprising places. I find them prophesying in daily, mundane conversation. One of my favorite dead giveaways is: "I'm really a great judge of character." By this expression, the Prophet means that his judgments about the quality of another individual should be taken as Gospel, or even more seriously than that.

I have found that they who claim such extraordinary powers are usually deficient in that very ability. "Great judges of character" are usually blind to the sordid character around them. Meanwhile, saints who possess real clairvoyance would never make such claims.

Or how about this variety of pop-prophecy? "I have a vision." Or, "I'm vision-casting." Or, more explicitly, "I feel the Spirit [Who happens to be agreeing with me] moving." I heard this last line in an ecclesial discussion some months ago about an issue no less captivating than a consideration of new funding proposals.

I'll be blunt: the Holy Spirit does not manifest prophecies about funding proposals, whether they refer to the protestant tradition of tithing or the newfangled Aladdin's Lamp of "proportional giving." (cue whispered crowd gasps of ooh's and aah's).

The Holy Spirit does prophesy – a lot – about deification. In fact, that is simply the content of all prophesy. There is no prophecy without theosis as the critical concern.

Most "visions" are tricked-out New Age versions of "plans" or "goals." Visions of this sort are grammatically (and thematically) similar to the Mission Statement of Ronald McDonald. They generally, even in church, have to do with corporate growth (so does McDonalds), customer satisfaction (so does McDonalds), and employee morale (so does McDonalds).

On the other hand, real visions are received by real saints: and even in this case, visions are not pursued, and they are certainly not broadcast.

The Prophecy Generator

And this brings me to the custom of claiming the prophets or apostles as precedent. The madlib "Prophecy Generator" formula for such precedent-rhetoric goes as follows. "I want (insert ideal, like "world peace" or "lower taxes") or I am against (insert dastardly diabolical conspiracy, like "fundamentalism" or "healthcare") and that is why I am (insert appropriate protest activity, like "holding breath and stomping" or "being Christopher Hitchens"). I am perfectly in my rights for (insert participial form of appropriate protest activity), because I'm only following the example of (insert Prophet or Apostle who has at least a dim, fuzzy analogous link to your situation – the fuzzier the better, like "the Apostles said, 'We should obey God rather than men'").

I feel sorry for all the Prophets – the Apostles in particular – because so many things are done in their name. So many institutions (or "centers" or even "headquarters") carry the term "apostolic" or "prophetic" before some corporate term, most frequently the word "ministry." So many actions are justified by their legacy, despite the fact there is no succession to substantiate this legacy: in fact, it is likely that there is a denial of the need for any succession or continuity. So many "words of knowledge" are pronounced, even on Sunday morning, that have to do with "sacrificial giving" or some particular monetary figure ("The Spirit says that someone in this room has ten thousand dollars to give").

These are all egregious examples, I admit. But there has been much that has been egregious. This is not even my main point: but let us consider the strong likelihood that God has no particular will for particular financial offerings. To press this point, perhaps painfully, it turns out that we cannot command a tithe. I don't know how this happened, but "tithing" appears to have been brought into the Church's ascetical catalog along with Sunday attendance, prayer and fasting: but tithing does not belong there. Look in the New Covenant for the "tithe" and you won't find one (except for a few withering comments like Luke 18.12 and Matthew 23.23).

Equality and Stewardship

Instead of tithing, what you find instead are requests from the Apostles (and later the Bishops) for Christians who have more to share with those who have less. The whole (and entire) principle of that thing called "stewardship" is summed up neatly in St. Paul's words from his second letter to the church in Corinth: For if the readiness is there, it is acceptable according to what a man has, not according to what he has not. I do not mean that others should be eased and you burdened, but that as a matter of equality your abundance at the present time should supply their want, so that their abundance may supply your want, that there may be equality. As it is written, "He who gathered much had nothing over, and he who gathered little had no lack" (2 Corinthians 8.12-15).

You'll find this principle all through Holy Tradition. But you'll find this verse remarkably passed over in the shadow of the Reformation, and especially in the slum-zone tenancy of the evolution-cult of secularity (the blood theurgy of Meon, i.e., "non-being"). What happened to this verse? What happened to the simple ideal of equality, where the old memory of Manna in the Desert is archetypal for both the Eucharist and the only true Christian understanding of economy?

Was this Christian ideal of equality (i.e., ισότης) later submerged under and distorted by degenerate, hysterical forms? Surely, one of the myriad casualties of Marxism (and its many predecessors, including the Peasants' War and the Munster Rebellion) is the Christian word "equality," and the wider concept of "stewardship." Stewardship used to be the North Star for Christian ethics. It used to guide our spiritual and material care of the faithful, our generosity and charity to the poor outside the Fellowship, our critique of the government and the powers and principalities, and our care for the whole Creation (i.e., just like Adam's abdicated task in Eden).

Now we are left with the wrecked, simpering topic of "stewardship" that is exhausted by credit and debit figures, asset reports and the "balancing of the books" – oh, and I almost forgot the worst, "Capital Funds Campaign."

It is because of these twin bastards of materialism – Marxism and Capitalism – that we are left with the boorish topic of stewardship as it is usually presented in adult study groups on Wednesday nights. One can always tell when there is a shortage of money at the front office: there are posters, the obligatory web site (with bells and whistles and "virtual chapels"), pledge cards, and "curriculum" for adult discussion groups that is written in the most somnolent, English-destroying language known to man.

What you will not find in Tradition are words like "pledges," "dues," "pledge drives," "seed money," "endowment," "investment portfolio," "proportional giving," "raffle," "bake sales," "sales," "campaigns" (accompanied by the obligatory thermometer-graphic), "300 or 700 or Century or Millennium Club," or "Founders Circle."

As is too common these days, you will find many things done by Christians that are not rooted in Tradition. I do not mean to say that these things are wrong (though I suspect that some of them are). I feel toward a term like "dues" the same way I do toward a term like "corporation" – not wrong, but not right, either. Perhaps acceptable or permitted, but certainly not noble, or lovely or of "good report."

What is praiseworthy is a prophecy that enjoins giving so that there is no lack of goods, for anyone, in anyplace. A kind reader, Joshua, once offered a lovely snippet from St. Theophan the Recluse:

'No one who loves his neighbor is wealthier than his neighbor.'

Now that's a "word of knowledge" you don't hear everyday. Neither is it a popular interpretation out of a torrent of tongues.

The Run of the Mill

And you don't find it much in today's political declarations either. Political statements (which are "secular prophecies") are usually run through a cliché mill that forces an opinion to come out into one of two sets of possible positions. On one hand (I don't need to say which) you have "prophecies" that insist on civil rights, economic fairness, and concern for the poor and oppressed. On the other hand, you have a prophetic posture that denounces not so much immorality and apostasy from orthodoxy, but profligate spending and apostasy from industrial tycoonism.

The problem with such a run of the mill "prophecy generator" is that the penchant for trite thought really does produce a crock pot of stupidity. It is almost as though the boredom of cliché produces cantankerous idiocy if only for sheer excitement. An apparatus like this is bound to churn out increasingly noxious positions: both sides violate the peace of humane community, and insist on distortions of nature and human nature. Both instrumentalize human life. One wishes to engineer new psychologies (i.e., the liberal establishment of just any sexual and familial order). The other wishes to engineer new ecologies (i.e., the radical industrialization of the earth).

What we are left with is a single coin of despair: heads I win, tales you lose.

Thus you have, on the heads side of the coin, Senator Barbara Boxer, who is living proof that neither Democrats nor females should be allowed in government: she managed to emit, in the last week, the contention that healthcare should cover women for abortions since it covers men for the use of erectile aids (does that mean that if we get rid of Viagra then we can get rid of abortion? What a deal! I suggest, at the same time, that we reduce the need for erectile aids by getting rid of pernicious PG13 & R pornography: of course, that would put Rupert Murdoch and a lot of Wall Street out of business).

And, on the tails side, you have ex-Vice President Dick Cheney (thank God for that first prefix), who is living proof that neither Republicans nor males should be allowed anywhere near capitol buildings or underground bunkers or red glowing buttons: in the same week, he extruded the thought that by setting up a terrorist trial in New York, the current President of the United States was giving "aid and comfort to our enemies."

Both trite postures are prominent in the Christian community, and they are both the result of failed stewardship. Both have failed to wage the whole prophetic critique against the generation. Both are stunted and cowardly. Both fail theology and anthropology. Both conflict with the possibility of personhood and fellowship.

Both blaspheme God and the holy earth, and the neighbor's face.

Why? Because they have forgotten the touchstone and source of true prophecy. I will not say that this standard is the Church, because to say so is an unhelpful simplicity – and such a statement is compromised by too many extra-Traditional behaviors of this particular ecclesial generation.

Touchstone, Truly

To escape this conundrum, I would rather say that the standard of stewardship and equality, and the clarion of prophecy from which all true Prophets speak, is theosis.

We used to know, in the good old Orthodox days when doctrine still mattered, and praxis still flowed from apostolic liturgy, that God's Will is simply deification. It is not a particular career or whether you should move in with the pygmies. It is not how much you should give to a fund drive or who you should marry. Or, as had been explained to me on one particularly depressing occasion, just which stock option to pick up.

These are all questions that pertain to augury, not God's Will.

God's Will is for you and for me to participate in Triune Fellowship, in His own Divine Nature, to be transformed and inducted into the Healing Light of His Uncreated Energy.

To see this, and nothing less, and to recognize every creature's destiny therein, and even the vectors of politics, is the work of Prophecy. No less.

Next up: a Non-Profit (truly) Corporation

Obama's dented van

Without asking for it, this showed up in my mailbox. It seems that some of my extended family think that I need help with my political views.

I have asked before, in these phosphorescent pages, for this type of email to stop. I didn't like the anti-Bush stuff. I don't like this anti-Obama stuff.

But I have figured out, through no great intelligence, that people who send me these helpful epistles (with handy-dandy graphics) probably do not visit this site enough to know my feelings.

So instead of my usual practice of pressing the "delete" or "report spam" button in my Gmail apparatus, I replied to a forwarded message -- and not only to the person who directly forwarded it to me, but to the entire chain.

This is probably the only time that I will do such a thing. It probably will not avail: the forwarded emails will continue for sure. The slogans and mottoes and rabble-rousing sound bites will persist. The racist and low-brow graphics will still be sent to Tartarus (where my spam is dumped), and I will add more originating names to my filter-and-refuse list.

But maybe one will read, and that will be enough.

Here is my response:

Dear friend,

I am sending you this note because at one time or another in the last few months, you sent me a graphic or a clever note that complained about the health care legislation being considered in DC. This one to which I am replying is a photo of a clever van. 

You may not have sent me this one, or really anything directly, but you were in the forwarding chain, so I hold you at least indirectly interested in my receiving these posts.

I wish them to stop. Please send me nice cheery notes about your goings on and your family, but not about health care. You protest Obama, and I am not much of a fan of his either. But you are missing the real bogeyman. You say that Obama and his friends are socialists or fascists or nazis or even stalinists (you ought to be consistent here): but really, there is something else that is imposing the statism of Leviathan much more directly and immediately than liberal politicians could have ever accomplished.

Permit me to explain.

I have had the sheer misery of working with health insurance companies as a hospital therapist. 

Because the insurance companies insisted on pre-certifying treatment, I had to spend over a third of my time calling up young bachelors-level kids who determined, sometimes without any medical training, whether or not the insurance would pay for health care. 

On one egregious occasion, I had a suicidal teenager in the Emergency Room, with slashed, bleeding arms, sliced open from elbow to wrist. The insurance company employee on the other end of the phone had the gall to ask me "how deep" the wounds were. This employee initially denied coverage for hospitalization with this explanation: the suicidal teenager had not tried outpatient counseling first ... so therefore, treatment should have started at this level.

Of course, I called his "higher ups" and demanded some sense of morality and intelligence.

At no time did this practice result in lower healthcare cost. The premiums never went down. Maybe there were some treatments or tests that were wasteful: but oddly enough, these "high profit" procedures (usually cardiac or abdominal) were rarely denied, while my low-rent treatments (like detox, or individual, group and family therapy) were denied commonly. 

I suspected then, as I do now, that the denial of treatment by hospitalization "pre-certifiers" is meant for the increase of profit margins. My suspicions appear to be confirmed when I see the salaries of senior executives of health insurance companies -- salaries that far exceed the salaries of any of the DC bureaucrats you love to excoriate.

Do not dismiss me as a typical liberal. I am fervently anti-abortion. I have marched in DC on numerous occasions and have protested at hospitals where abortions were performed. I do not even believe in evolution, for heaven's sake. 

But at the same time, I am weary of complaints about the cost of giving healthcare to the poor. I am tired of how access to healthcare and other assistance for the poor is always blamed for our economic woes, when there is always enough money for bailouts or other Wall Street interventions.

I know that my Church cannot feed all the poor, or take care of all the sick. Therefore, in light of our inability to do so, I am willing to pay more taxes so that people do not have to go to the ER for regular medical care.

Your van is right. It is unfortunate and suspicious that DC bureaucrats want to opt out of the plan. But this fact is only a red herring, and it has little to do with the question before Congress. So also is the absence of tort reform. Neither of these problems disqualify the ideal of universal health care.

I think that my Christianity makes me want universal health care. I know it will be expensive. I know I will have to fight to resist abortion creeping in, as well as other industrial practices like embryo-vivisection and chimera-manufacture.

But healthcare as directed by for-profit insurance companies is patently un-American. It is fascist itself, far more than any nationalized program could be. It is already practicing triage. It is already advancing toward euthanasia. 

Yes, the state should not direct your healthcare: I completely agree with you. But neither should an insurance company. Given the choice between two evils, I'd probably choose the US Government as the lesser: at least the government is liable to the politics of the population, while an insurance company has to answer only to a bottom-line, bottom-feeding board of directors.

Capitalism is only for the marketplace. It is not meant for health care, or any other kind of care. Healthcare should never, ever be for profit.

Thank you for your time.

Fr. Jonathan Tobias