Second Terrace

the disappearing symbol

 

In just a little while, the funeral service will commence for Rev (and state senator) Clementa Pinckney at the Mother Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston SC. When the caisson bearing his remains passes under the Confederate flag, it will be the last time this good man will be troubled by the sight of it.

There is a simple reason for the absence of riots, vandalism and other violent disturbances that flared up after other recent deaths. One would have expected such, because these present nine victims were older, placid, so innocent, non-violent.

The reason is because they -- even in their suffering -- showed Christ, the Prince of Peace, so well.

I continue to be surprised when I hear the people and clergy of this AME community speak so confidently of Christ and the Cross, and the seamless link between their individual holiness and the needs and issues of the community.

They are examples to us all.

These days, we worry about events like this "getting politicized," and there is no small frustration at the removal of the Confederate flag.

We need to remember that all politics belong to the larger class of morality. There will always be a political side to a community event. One might get miffed at "people taking political opportunity from a tragedy" -- and this is a very old complaint. But that is like complaining about something that happens as predictably as daylight. 

There is always a political moment after every tragedy.

I admire, especially, the southern Republicans who are working hard to remove the Confederate flag from all positions of governmental symbolism. Yes, it is part of the heritage and history. Yes, it should continue on at battlefields and museums.

But these Republicans are responding to this horrific tragedy by empathizing with a population that looks upon the Confederate flag in a much different way. When African Americans look at this symbol, they do not see the romantic nobility of Lee and Jackson and the "Lost Cause." Nor do they see the down-homeness of Daisy and the Dukes of Hazzard. 

No. African Americans see -- and they must see -- the Confederate flag just as Jews see the flag of the Third Reich, emblazoned with the swastika. You can point out to me the long history of the swastika that has nothing to do with the Nazis -- and you would be right.

But now that symbol has been permanently stained by the satanic madness of Hitler and his movement.

The Confederate flag, for African Americans, must and can only stand for the Middle Passage of the horrible slave trade. It stands for an entire racial community suffering in bondage for three centuries in this country. It stands for the forced separation of husbands and wives, parents and children. It stands for the bodily mutilation and torture of thousands of escaped or "misbehaved" slaves. It stands for the Nazi-like money-addicted plantation owners and cotton magnates who profited from human suffering.

So since this symbol carries this horrific meaning to my brothers and sisters, would I insist on waving it from a position of authority, or anywhere in my community? Would I be so callous as to wave the swastika in front of those whose last names are written hundreds of times at Yad Vashem?

There is no boundary between morality and politics. All politics is an expression of morality, an interaction between good and evil. Every expression of goodness comes with a price tag in the exchange: at every act of peacemaking (because that is what the Prince of Peace calls us to do with the Cross), the price is the giving up of "personal right," of convenience, of personal taste and maybe, even, political opinion.

Gravitational heresies

Here is a list of attractions that have persistently invited Christians, over the centuries, to veer off course. Surely, when you're off the course, you've dropped into heresy.

But there are bad attractions (like sin and passion and atheism), and then there are "good" attractions. And for these latter ones, Christians really ought to always be "attracted" by these:

1. Universalism -- i.e., the belief that everyone (including the devil) will eventually be saved. Yes, it's a heresy (ask Origen, maybe). But the idea should at least remain appealing. No one should be happy about the inevitability of perdition. And, for God's sake, no one should ever "need" or be assured that someone is going to hell. It is better to be a Universalist than to be a Double Pre-destinarian. Better to believe in Gaia than to believe in a deity that damns before conception.

2. Pacifism -- yes, we all know that there will never be perfect world peace until the Messiah comes for the second time. But frankly, in this day and age, Christians need to "man up" and admit that there is and never was a truly Christian warrant for violence. At best, the "just war" theory -- as dubious as it really is -- is an accommodation with the way the world is. And at best, the provision of personal and family defense is just that also -- only an accommodation: it can never be part of one's Christian birthright (please note, before the fever sets in, that we are speaking of defense against humans and not sport or, less likely, the necessary provision of food).

3. Charitism -- this is a made-up word, admittedly: but it represents the tendency toward giving money and food away to those in need, and even supporting the State's involvement. Indeed, one can go too far along these lines (and one often does), and becomes so liberally accepting that he gives up on theism completely, and becomes "religiously" communistic (and ends up supporting a tyrannical culture of revolution). After all, it was the Byzantine State that invented hospitals, and one doubts very much whether present-day libertarians would have enjoyed the taxation economy of Constantinople's regime. True, there are real Christian criticisms of socialism (as usually defined) -- enough so that prevents any acceptance of a socialistic state. But at the same time, there are real Christian criticisms of capitalism: enough so that prevents any Christian acceptance of the system that we now have.

4. Environmentalism -- yes, there are crazy EarthFirster's and moonbats who demand a "return to the wild" (like l'enfant terrible Rousseau). But Christians should be able to tell the difference between these folk, and the much more valid concern for the land. All Creation belongs to the Creator -- so the whole idea of owning land is temporary at most -- and we call this temporality "stewardship." "Dominion" has never meant foolish exhaustion of resources, or the ugly befouling of natural beauty -- which is itself a symbol of God's Beauty. Christians should always "tend" toward environmentalism. They should at least remember that the paternal protection of the beautiful land and its creatures is the first and truest meaning of "conservatism."

Can Christians water board?

There are many positions that you can adopt as an American, but cannot hold to as a Christian.

One such position is "free speech" that includes pornography, sedition (e.g., what's his name out in Nevada), racial bigotry (e.g., what's his name in LA NBA) and campaign finance (e.g., corporations/unions-as-people).

Another position is the freedom to consume at whim, to pollute (or contribute to pollution in the process), and to insist on radical de-regulation.

Another is the freedom to engage in pleasure as a goal-in-and-of-itself -- especially sexual pleasure outside the traditional standards.

Another is the libertine recourse to violence -- whether for real, or within the precincts of virtual reality (interpret that as you will).

Another is the engagement in modern anti-civilian warfare -- especially warfare-as-politics (a la von Clausewitz).

And, obviously, the use of torture ... at all. There is no warrant whatsoever in authentic Christianity -- even in heterodox Christianity -- for the use of torture. Those who engage in it have essentially excommunicated themselves from the Body of Christ, whether or not their judicatories notice or do their jobs.

Perhaps as a modernist one may commend himself for water boarding, but never as a Christian. I would argue, too, that classical conservatism gives no support for torture or any of the above positions -- this is so mainly because classical conservatism is a derivative of Christianity. This is why some positions of classical conservatism are reviled by the rightwing and mistakenly labeled as "liberal" because concern for the poor, the frail and marginalized is an essentially Christian, and therefore conservative, position.

Not everything the State does is "statist" -- and not everything the corporation or market does is "free."

Christians really do not understand ethics and morality in terms of "rights." There is no such thing as self-promotion in Christian language. Not when you have to submit to the structuralism of the Cross.

Thus, Ms Sarah Palin (as reported here) can recommend water boarding all she wants. And she may have the freedom to do so as an American (unfortunately).

But not as a Christian.

Let alone the fact that her associating water boarding with baptism reveals a complete ignorance of the latter term's sacramental meaning, and the former term's essential demonism.

It also reveals something else -- an abysmal ignorance of history, and a frightening loss of orthodox theology. And that something else is getting more common, concomitant with the bestial rise of banal libertinism -- the new gnosticism of our day.

Fire in the Theater: Rights and Christians

Last night, Jerry Sandusky, formerly of Penn State, released an audio statement in which he outlined his alternative view regarding his legal disposition.

He has a right to do this, of course.

And, of course, his statement is immoral (let alone the actions that led up to his current living arrangements).

This is a divergence between what is a "right," and what is "moral." In fact, I doubt whether the concept of "right" has much meaning in the Church. The Church is, after all, a culture that asks for -- and can not demand -- a universal ethic of self-sacrifice.

This ethic displaces Kant's categorical imperatives. For the Christian, no value or valuation can stand above the continual, overwhelming call of pouring out oneself for the sake of others. This is the famous moral of "kenosis," obviously, and it requests -- not commands -- in a beautiful rhetoric of courtesy, that the needs of others should outweigh the needs of the self.

Such is a culture that is haunted by the Cross and illuminated by Easter Pentecost.

In this transcendent society of meekness, the concept of "right" sounds drab, at least, if not completely out of place. It is much like showing up at a wedding banquet without one's wedding garment on. Like dragging muck-stained overalls into the china and silver.

So it is hard -- or should be hard -- for Christians to speak much of their rights of free speech -- especially as they are flaunted in egregious exercises of this right. Like these dreary examples:

1. Jerry Sandusky's claim that he is the victim of a conspiracy hatched by the families of his accusers, along with social workers and psychologists and the media.
2. Charlie Fuqua's book, God's Law (sic, and very sic), that suggests that parents should have the right to pursue capital punishment for bad children. He is a candidate for Congress these days, and claims that he is a Christian.
3. Terry Jones, who also claims to be a Christian (and a preacher at that), who, just a year after he burned the Koran, gave his wholehearted endorsement to a regrettable movie that said vapid things about a certain religion.

As an American, these individuals could certainly claim and exploit their right to make these claims. They are legally constrained only by the most minimal of standards. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once coined, in 1919, what has become a cliche: "One cannot falsely shout fire in a crowded theater."

That cliche is hardly a meaningful restraint.

As an American citizen, what can be said, legally, is wide-ranging indeed. One has a right to exagerrate and even, on occasion, to lie. One has a right to fully vent and articulate his passions. If one is enraged, he has a right to inveigh, albeit stupidly, against entire societies about which he knows less than nothing. If one is avaricious, he may manipulate markets and publish images that exploit other passions. If one is concupiscient, he may misrepresent himself, with beer goggles on, to the girl on the next stool. If one is prideful, he may misrepresent his opponent in a political campaign, and suggest to the masses that he "has a plan," while artfully dodging the nettlesome fact that most of his promises are legislative and not executive.

An American citizen has many rights. A Christian has none -- all he has are invitations to virtue, and the promise of beatitude.

An American has a right to bear arms. A Christian may make such a claim, but not as a Christian. I'm sure that a Christian can go hunting and can even keep something for the defense of his home (although that possibility is even less supported for a priest). But I am even surer that a Christian -- as a Christian -- cannot ever demand the right to possess and traffic in assault munitions.

An American has a right to terminate a fetus. A Christian does not.

An American has a right to engage in sexual activity outside the contours of a sacramentalized union of a man and woman. A Christian does not. He or she, whether we like it or not, is asked to surrender not only homosexual activity, but also heterosexual activity that is before or outside of traditional marriage. He is requested to devote himself to not only physical chastity, but also to the "chastity of the imagination" -- a concept, I'm sure, is not the most popular of positions.

An American has the right to accumulate wealth, and to deny comfort to his neighbor and pollute the environment in the process of doing so. A Christian does not. Wealth is given to Christians, as St. Paul and the Prophets and the Fathers make painfully clear, solely for the sake of "kenotic" giving away. It was only the Reformation that made the idea of "wealth-protection" a Christian possibility.

An American has the right of self-determination in religion and association. A Christian does not. The history of American religion is an uninterrupted pageant of one self-anointed autocephalous schism after another. The Protestants did this, to be sure, but not as Christians -- they did so, rather, as Americans. There are Orthodox Christians (even clergy), I am sure, who orchestrate putsches and hierarchical maneuvers ... who migrate from parish to parish, jurisdiction to jurisdiction, all for the sake of "church shopping" and looking for Godot. And no one will stop them or bar the doors. But they do so as Americans, not in the mind of Christ.

It is better, I think, for a Christian to regard their American "rights" as temporary "privileges." Certainly, we cannot afford to be so enamored of these rights that we assume, wrongly, that these rights are necessary for the survival of the Church. The Orthodox Church has a long memory of "second class citizenship," and an even longer experience of a dominant culture that did not respect individual and heterogeneous rights.

Still, even in its minority status, the Church heeded the divine and meek call to virtue, and sought -- despite many disappointments -- the contentment of beatitude.

I do so wish, intensely, we would do more of this today. Jesus is simple, the Trinity is beautiful. I will die and live for the One and Three.

It is this Word that gives me hope and peace today.

Not any right.

Enemies and rubber chickens

At one of those rubber chicken dinners that speckle the landscape of the hot religious night life, I heard a band of colleagues making a joke.

Not just telling one, mind you. Actually creating one out of nothing (at my expense, unbeknownst to them … well, maybe).

Here is the gist and the rub: a friend of mine in my company's division transferred over to their division (a transfer that turned me blue, true, but I grudgingly saw the sense of it). Sitting at my left, my friend's new boss elfinly declared, with his usual innocent-looking charm, that he should send one of his own number back to my division as a sort of even-steven maneuver.

Shock registered around the table, as my division will never be the golden ring on the roundabout, or hold the pot-o'-gold at the bow's end, or substantiate as a destination for football heroes and calypsos from TV cop shows.

Then, seeing the boss' ironic ocular twinkle, they laughed with relief. Each one, round the table, as their sort can't bear not making a Gospel joke, said, "Which one of us must go? Is it I, master?"

Then I, seeing the joke, insinuated the forlorn note (as is my wont): "You can tell which, master, by the lost shaker of salt."

Ah, enemies, there's enough, as the sergeant said in "Gods and Generals," of them in this business.

Recently, JCW raised the issue of "enemies" in a comment on a recent post here. The Psalms, in particular, speaks much of enemies and goes to lengths to dispose of them. There are a few ghastly mentions of gore, but most of the imprecations have to do with their being driven out of the land and becoming quite forgotten.

Then there is that spooky issue of kismet in the Psalms and Proverbs, or "what goes around comes around." Actually, it's better in Finnish: minkä taakseen jättää, sen edestään löytää (i.e., "what you leave behind you, that you will find in front of you").

The wicked generally have an odd way of falling into their own black holes: perhaps it is the gravitation of sin, or cavitation of time, take your pick.

In any case, there are enemies all around and what do we do with them? A cursory reading of the Psalms seems to indicate that we should pray for very bad things.

In fact, I had a chanter once who enjoyed intoning Psalms 53 and 54 (LXX, for the Sixth Hour) for all the wrong reasons. There was too much white-knuckling chin-wrinkling eye-squinting verve in the production of lines like "He will bring evils upon mine enemies. Utterly destroy them by Thy truth." Or, "mine eye hath looked down upon mine enemies" (it didn't help that this particular intoner stood up in the choir loft). I heard too much old parochial history in the line "But thou it was, O man of like soul with me, my guide and my familiar friend … in the house of God I walked with thee in oneness of mind."

It was not conducive to prayer to hear "Let death come upon such ones and let them go down alive into hades." Not when one was quite certain that "such ones" were predicated on human faces and names.

Let's just say that the chanter regretted being told that "such ones" were not human beings or any other creature in the physical realms. I assigned the chanting of pre-communion prayers instead: others could take over the Sixth Hour Psalms with less subtext.

I was surprised that shortly thereafter, the chanter gave up on church, missing too abjectly her private muezzin tower of imprecation.

Unfortunately, the regret ran the predictable kismet course. Anger and hatred that should have been turned toward the demonic was turned against images of God with faces and names. And now that body of anger and imprecation is cursed with self-smirching soil and psychic toil.

Gravitation, cavitation. Hospodi pomiluj.

The silly tragedy in this modern case study is that the chanter suffered no real enemies to speak of. There were some romantic rivals and some gossipers, to be sure. But there were no real enemies, even on the human scale.

This is the case for most of our Christian interpersonal complaints. There is not that much to complain, really, about. Someone beats us out in church officer elections. Someone disparages our potato salad recipe. Someone telephonically smirches our holy social status.

And we call these people "enemies"? You can sure tell that we haven't had much war here, stateside, because the prospect of blown up heads and shredded skin renders the puerile stuff of church basement gossip a matter of squeamish shame and well-deserved contempt.

I suggested to the intense chanter, who had so many of these ersatz enemies, that the enemies of the imprecatory Psalms were not human at all. The treacherous "friend of our soul" in Psalm 54 is not someone else, and especially not an ex-friend, but is our own tendency to sin: we are our own worst traitors. The enemies that should "go down alive into the Pit" are the demonic powers who should be exorcised from the human race and evicted from Creation. This is not hard stuff, I wanted to say. It used to be taught when the catechumenate was the real deal (but now, even some monasteries don't cover this in their "formation" orientations). But, darn it, my youth class knows this and understands, why can't you? Adults, though, would rather not mess with demons, not up front, that is.

Then I suggested that we know exactly what to do with human enemies. Despite her abysmal off-reading of the Psalms, "enemies" are a well-known category in the New Testament and Apostolic culture. "Forgive," I said, "is what we are told to do always with human enemies."

"They are not my enemies. They are bad people and they need to repent, but they are not enemies."

Then I understood. As long as we did not attach a concrete word onto these troublesome human beings, whose distorted images lurked in our minds like succubae and incubae with long black-book debit histories and registries of offense that were sub-vocally chanted in occultic necromancery – as long as we did not call them "enemies," then we could keep them in ambiguity, where our souls could do to them whatever the hell we wanted to.

Passions are addictive, and they quite readily fight for survival. Anger and pride are like that and resist forgiveness at all costs.

The other tragedy, not so silly, is that there are real enemies to hate, real enemies which should be the aim of our anger.

The rather ill-mannered cretins with whom I dined on sullen chicken were no enemies, and I regretted my sardonic reference to Leonardo's masterpiece (which can be found too readily on iconostases). Never mind, it turns out, the line was barely heard, the allusion was missed, and the whole thing was quite forgotten.

They didn't mean well for sure, but they didn't mean badly.

That is what we do really well over rubber chicken these days. Just "not mean badly," while others (like my poor ex-chanter) think that some people do.

Enemies are pointed at in crowds of Muslims and Democrats, busloads and rallies of Republican purveyors of camellia sinensis (not in bags, God forbid!). They are pointed at in the White House and on TV shriek shows. They are summarized in file folders in central administrations. They are complained about in emails and phone calls and tweets.

They make us so mad, in a cardboard way.

Meanwhile, our anger is just that – mad, not real. It is misdirected. It is misaimed, like a pre-pubescent with an aught six.

We do not forgive, oddly, because we are not angry enough at the right things.

Neither angry or nearly loving enough toward our neighbor and friend.

We don't mean badly, but we don't mean well.

Marital Confessions

I have to confess that I do not like marriage counseling at all, not one bit. I suppose I can get away with a slight qualification, to make my confession somewhat more savory. I could say that while I do not like the counseling, I love the counselees. But everyone says this, and it is practically meaningless.

I do not like, of course, the custom of mutual complaint. It is sad (and trying) to witness romantically glued-together couples, for whom everything was faerie and Wagner (well, Coldplay), descend into boorish throes and woes. Now, the things that heretofore were endearing have moved quickly through forbearance into articles of contempt: socks on the floor are now sparks in tinder, and the once-charming scattermindedness of a young bride is now the subject of beer-sotted fraternal denunciation.

It is sad, too, to hear the conversation of charge and counter-charge. It is rare that this dialogue ever ventures above adolescence, above the dull conventions of "He did this" and "She did this first." I think when I listen to these prurient ravings – these contretemps which are amplified into melodrama – I am actually hearing artifacts from movies and television. I think I am hearing not real and actual selves, but scripted ghosts of selves. It is as though the combatants were only faintly aware of feelings, and sought thus hither and thither in their short-term memory for some good line to articulate these feelings: but what is accessed and brought to the fore is simply that which is regarded the most, considered the most, and interiorized (even cathected) the most.

This is what I think happens with dreams during sleep: the particular blue note struck here is that couples who present themselves for marriage counseling are usually sleepwalking, and they play out their fights in TV dreams.

In marriage counseling, at the first impression, I am working with incorporeal fragments of melodrama: clichés, posturings and images, intergenerational trends which would be comically stupid were they not so stupidly tragic. I am hearing echoes of a remarkable failure of men to embrace the charisms of their gender, and of women to follow the example of the Theotokos. I am hearing grown up children who have themselves never seen a home embrace prayer and a culture of joy. They have not seen peace and a domestic order that was both humane and divine.

They have seen, rather, the person-hood of their own parents wilt in the serfdom of materialism: for what else can we call the worshipful obedience to the commands of the advertisement? What else can we call the almost unconscious lurch into unprecedented indebtedness?

Serfs, history tells us, will get drunk to synthesize some plastic mask of happiness: and thus, these young husbands and wives have learned this lesson too. Not just with alcohol or other chemicals, but more usually with the constant standby mental switch to laziness of thought, a passivity and uncritical acceptance of brainwashing from the bozart gods: McLuhan called this a "cold" medium – which required little to no interaction. Freud rightly called this the "sub-conscious." The Church calls this "forgetfulness of God," "reverie," especially "neptic neglect."

I like the latter term most. "Nepsis" is the watchfulness of every thought. It is a constant discernment and critical judgment on whether that thought should be permitted entrance into the deeper strata of the psyche.

Most young husbands and wives (or older cold warriors) have simply left the back door wide open, and the front, and all the windows to boot. I think that some, for good measure, would take off the roof of their mental housing so they could have "convertible souls" – which would be the ultimate in the way of being "open-minded."

So this is how those scripts, those idiotic oneliners from Raymond and Roseanne, from Archie and "Married with Children," from Homer (Simpson) and Scarlett O'Hara, crept into the brains of my heartbreakers. These are all logismoi – quite demonic insinuations – and they are effective in pressing the buttons, gassing up the engines, and letting passions fly.

My young heartbreakers must not know real happiness, else they would quickly grow tired of their plastic jejune attempts to make themselves that way. Their attempts, sadly, are no longer mutual: they have lapsed into their pre-romantic individualized habits of their parents and peers.

It turns out, more often than not, that they were not taught at home, growing up, over Sunday dinner, the noble stories, the beautiful myths that had the winsome virtue of psychic ordinance – the interiorization of the Sacred Order. They did not see the mother fill the room with light and grace, sustenance and healing, commanding love by the sheer presence of her quiet love and forgiveness. They did not see the father talk deep on memory and stand on ceremony.They did not see the father command himself before he ever thought to lead his wife and children.

(For that is what "headship" means: all command is predicated on self-command ... all external order is based on and structured by internal order. That is the simple, ridiculously simple, and sole reason why only an insufferable dolt insists that women and children "submit" to him: the very act of stating thus is itself an transgressive rejection of self-command.)

These adult children saw instead a full embrace of sixties mod art and polyester, smorgasbord and shiny aluminum swanson Salisbury (that had nothing, in the end, to do with steak or England). They saw the father belittled and the mother belabored. They saw the cultural divinization of childishness at the expense of the domestic life-or-death nurturance of childhood.

And now I have husbands who do not know manhood enough to be husband or father … wives who do not know womanhood enough to be wife or mother. I have heartbreakers who are stuffed with the scripts of transgressive ego, but they are not filled with words or English: language, after all, communicates – but psychic "tapes" do not act as language at all. They are, simply, soliloquies. They are puerile challenges to the abyss, and the echoes are taken – insipidly – as confirmations of their self-established myth.

Certainly, I urge them to talk simply and fairly. I know that the arrangements of our sessions – my cranky office with icons and nautical paraphernalia (i.e., O'Brian stuff), and the very fact that I'm sitting there in clerical garb – is enough to keep them from complete barbarism. I direct them to talk with each other, instead of engage in two simultaneous denunciations of the other in the third person, and I am thought to be the Judge and Arbiter. I review the melancholic realities of separation and divorce: i.e., "separation usually leads to divorce, since it invariably reinforces your attitudes about your marriage"; and "divorce is always bad, socioeconomically, for the mother and the children." I sometimes throw in, if I'm particularly peevish, the fact that a divorce with children in just a few years will only keep putting bread and bacon on the table for child therapists like I used to be. I tell them to never yell in front of the children, that they should walk away into their own sanctuaries, like their bedroom, or taking a walk outside. I don't tell them that I used to give this very advice to my ADHD clientele in the elementary grades, and that these infant clients were fairly adept at self-monitoring and the practice of self-soothing techniques and frustration/anger coping skills. I don't tell my heartbreaking marriage clients this fact because usually – and I must say this out loud or I will burst – my child clients were a lot better at taking counsel and practicing new behaviors than my adults ever were (or are).

So, in all this, as I am beating off the red-eyed wolf and the raving lion with my staff and smooth stones, I plead with my cold warriors to forgive as Jesus did. I paint the icon, psychically, of the extremity of the Cross, in the middle of the anger-spouting faces. And I try to plant, "Father forgive them for they know not what they do" in the middle of their lips. I know that that God has condemned (or rather, elected) them both to the eternal yoke of this marriage: and that this cold marital season, this very winter of their discontent, is meant for the chastening of their will, and for the redemption of soul and body. I know this, and I remind them of the fears and joys of forever.

If I were a secular therapist, an priest-adept of the posthuman religion, I'd suggest all sorts of things. Such measures would be so popular that I could put up a shingle and charge a lot of money (which I don't at all). These measures would get compliance, certainly. I'd suggest rage therapy, separate mini-vacations, trial separations, masturbation, fantasizing about other partners during intercourse, free association, the swinging of rubber foam sticks "to get the aggression out," puppet theater, psychopharmacology of some sort, the reading of astrology, the reading of Mars and Venus and electric women, the science of sexuality and genitalia.

And if all else failed (which these measures do, in spades), then I'd relent, and the three of us would sigh finally in relief because we really tried hard, and I'd finally say (and give permission): "Well, you might as well divorce."

No. Instead of those money-making measures (and you can write a best-selling book about any self-soothing therapy), I have more in mind that just won't go away. I have this little thing called eternity, and for that, marriage requires not foam sticks, modern sex or fantasy. It requires fasting, for one thing. It requires quiet (turn off the matrix noise). It requires the Eucharist and the washing of feet, practiced every day in nuptial self-sacrifice. It requires giving up and surrendering in verbal arguments: even and especially husbands should say, simply, "You're right," pick up his socks and muddy boots, and let her have the last word.

I think that all verbal arguments should be ended with surrender. Let them win. For all your victories have been pyrrhic, no?

Marriage requires nepsis. It requires grace and dogma. It calls for kenosis, self-pouring-out like Christ did when He became like a slave on the Cross.

Marriage requires a tradition of beauty and peace – and for too, too many of our young couples, they have no domestic experience of this. In marriage counseling, we are really calling them to a place they've never been.

And that, friends, is why I don't like marriage counseling. It calls for kenosis, Cross and forever. Husbands and wives cannot completely run away from this note, struck so deeply at the nuptial sacrament, and they know what needs to be done, in their heart. My heartbreakers are rightly afraid of it.

And, I fear, they are not afraid of it enough.

Be all the judge you can be

I was at a conference recently (I generally, in my crankiness, do not go to these things), where I heard a nice presentation by a young lady.

Her speech was appealing, until the very last line, when she concluded a travelogue with this non sequitur: "And I learned on my trip that the most important thing for an Orthodox Christian is to not judge."

I think she and I might be in agreement, ultimately, once we paddle together through the semantic miasma that separates us. But I'm not sure she would be too keen on my lecture tomorrow, as I present this text in our first ethics class of the season at seminary (please excuse the conversational tone: it's the introduction, after all):

“Judge not,” our Lord said, “lest ye be judged.” “Do not look for specks in the eye of your brother,” He also said, “when you have a log in your own.”

This is as clear a condemnation of judgmentalism as can be. And we know exactly what it means. It means that we should not be putting ourselves on a higher level than others, or putting others on a lower level than ourselves.

And yet, this course is all about judging. This class and all our readings invite you to no less than a lifestyle of judging. In fact, I suggest right here and now that you probably haven’t been judging enough. Not nearly enough.

There is a clear difference between the judging that I recommend, and the judgmentalism that the Lord condemns. Judgmentalism is aimed at other people. It forgets that another person is made in the image of God. It overlooks that the other Christian is on a life journey toward nothing less than theosis. It is blind to the fact that the other human being is immortal by grace, destined for eternity in blessing or fire.

Judgmentalism is guilty of forcing square pegs into round holes. It raises theories and categories to near godlike status, and distorts reality to fit into preconceived notions. It says cockamamie things like “all members of such-and-such a class are all alike.” It says people are defined by their racial heritage, or their psychiatric diagnosis, or their astrological sign, or their genetic composition, or their place on the evolutionary ladder.

That is judgmentalism. You have doubtlessly concluded, by now, that it is not a good idea, and quite a bad thing to do.

That said (and there is more to be said in this volume about judgmentalism), we should conclude, on the other hand, that we should be more dedicated to the business of judging: you know, “be all the judge you can be.”

What I mean by “judging,” as opposed to “judgmentalism,” is probably better served by the word “discernment.” The judging that I recommend is better commended in Scripture, and it has to do with how we think, what we think, and the way that society thinks. “Brethren, do not believe every spirit,” St. John said in his first epistle, “but test the spirits to see whether they are of God” (1 John 4.1).

There are certainly, in this life and society, influences that are certifiably not of God. It is up to us to “discern” these influences to figure out “where they are coming from.” Earlier in the same epistle, St. John warns that “For all that is in the world -- the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life – is not of the Father but is of the world” (1 John 2.16). “World” here should not be understood as the planet Earth, or even society in general, but rather as the realm of darkness under the sway of the Evil One and his despairing company. After all, the same Apostle wrote, in his Gospel, that “God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son” (John 3.16) – obviously, “world” is used in different senses, depending on the context.

What makes “judging” necessary in this life and in this society is that we are faced by a dark world of lust and pride all the time, and there are many, many spirits, or “influences,” that are not of God. There certainly are real, evil spirits that are part of Satan’s regime. They insinuate suggestions to our souls frequently. These suggestions are called logismoi, in the terminology of the Fathers. If such suggestions are permitted to linger and have their sway on our thinking, then the soul “darkens” and becomes ill, infected with passions.

The Fathers of the Church call us to “watch” over the influences, ideas and suggestions that demand admittance into our thinking. We should examine each thought carefully, much as a guard at military facility “watches” each person that comes in. Failure to stay alert in this watchfulness (or “nepsis”) can have disastrous effects for a military facility, or – more importantly – the soul.

This makes loads of sense, of course. No one wants to end up being a puppet for the dark side. It is obvious that we should watch against easily identified insinuations such as “Go ahead and rob that bank,” or “Just blow your family budget on crack cocaine.” But the devil usually does not work in such an obvious manner. He does not wear a red flannel suit with pointy ears, hooves and a long tail ending in a barb. Neither does he go about attired like Jason or Freddy Krueger. Rather, if he wears anything at all (he doesn’t, since he is bodiless), he is more likely to wear a designer suit straight from the glossy pages of GQ.

I mention this only to emphasize that the enemy works subtly and underground (no pun intended, for once). He would rather that people not believe in him, since his best agents are those who are unaware of their employer. For good reason he is called, by St. Paul, the “Prince of the Air,” since he works best in chaos and ambiguity. He is slippery, to be sure, and he does not want to be found, even by the tragic fools who consider themselves his adepts. Satan is embarrassed by Satanists. He is much happier with those who say he does not exist.

Satan works hard at orchestrating conditions of unbelief. This is his number one goal of behind all his work of influence. It is the objective behind his every suggestion. “In the case of those who are perishing,” St. Paul wrote, “the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, Who is the Likeness of God” (2 Corinthians 4.4).

So in this life, we are confronted by a complex program of influences. Some of them are obviously diabolical. Many others are just as corrosive, but are not nearly so evil-looking. Then again, to make matters even more complicated, some influences and ideas are not obviously Christian, but are good and true nonetheless.

This is why St. Paul wrote, in his first epistle to the Thessalonians, to “test everything, to hold fast what is good, and to abstain from every form of evil” (1 Thessalonians 5.21-22). We are called to test, to watch, to examine what goes into our heads. After all, we become not what we eat, but what we think.

It should go without saying that you cannot think about obviously religious things alone. You and I live outside the monastery, and so we must look at billboards while we drive. We will listen to the radio, watch TV, surf the Internet, and hear the conversations of our friends, colleagues at work, and teachers at school. We cannot escape the hard work of judging by merely ignoring society, and dismissing it as “worldly.” Some people try to do this, and I think that they neglect the command to be “salt and light” in this world. We have to cultivate the discipline of discernment, not only so that we are able to “watch” the influences and “guard” our souls, but also so that we can fight against the darkness, and reinforce the light.

To this end, here is St. Paul again: “We destroy arguments and every proud obstacle to the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Corinthians 10.5). This means that we have to figure out the message behind cultural influences, and to decide to agree with them or not. For example, we need to ask ourselves just what Britney (Spears) is ultimately advertising, or what Howard (Stern) wants us to become (i.e., "grown up" like him?).

Well, okay, that was too obvious. More to the point, we should ask troubling questions like “Why is evolution so aggressively promoted?” “Why does multiculturalism preach tolerance for everything but Christianity?” “Why is homosexuality given the same status of victimization as minority and disabled groups?”  "Why is consumerism so entrenched in the Christian community?" Or, "Why are conservative Christians so strongly aligned with the political agenda of industrialism?"

But troubling questions are not enough. Once we find out the answers to these questions, we have to do more than just go along with the crowd, or throw up our hands in despair. I am calling here for a lot more decisiveness in acceptance or rejection of cultural influences. There is much in American and the modern world that we should recognize as good. But then again, there is much that is not. In the past, when faced by the “not so good” or downright “icky,” we have only shrugged our collective shoulders and muttered profound things like “Oh well,” or (my favorite) “whatever.” It is too late, anymore, to say whatever, for the enemy has been very busy at dismantling our civilization. Secular historians like the inimitable Jacques Barzun, in his masterful work From Dawn to Decadence, and even Marxist scholars like Eric J. Hobsbawm have concluded that Western civilization is deeply gripped in the throes of decadence and decline. You and I have just been too close to the action to notice the severity of the change: it’s that “not being able to see the woods for the trees” sort of thing. So while we were shrugging our shoulders and not actively fulfilling our critical task, skyscrapers have plummeted into dust and ashes, infants and the infirm have been discarded, and the media has re-defined “lust” as “liberty.”

We need to become critical in this world – not against people, but about influences and ideas. We do not need to condemn society in broad pronouncements, mainly because society is not completely or even mostly evil to warrant such generalizations. But we do need to make judgments about what is going on in the world around us: we need to tell – not just ourselves, but our children and friends – right from wrong.

This course is all about telling right from wrong. It is about judging the truth and worth of influences and ideas. You will hear repeatedly how important it is for you to become a discerning critic of modern trends, fads and fashions.

I cordially invite you to become a critic and a judge. I do not mean by this that you should become a crank. Criticism is not the same as cynicism, despite their frequent confusion. Cynicism involves constant complaint, pessimism about nearly everything, and the constant assumption of bad motives and the worst interpretation of people and events. On the other hand, criticism is the search for goodness, beauty and truth. The cynic, like his master Diogenes who searched Athens for an honest man, cannot ever find goodness because he doesn’t believe it exists at all. The true critic knows better, because he believes in God, Who has distributed His signs of goodness, beauty and truth liberally throughout the cosmos.

Criticism is not crankiness, to be sure. It is also not eggheaded academic intellectuality. One needn’t have a degree to be a good critic – in fact, you are probably better off as a “real” critic if you don’t have one. This course will have more to say about the present state of education, especially in its failure to train students in good criticism (this is, according to the Blessed Augustine, the main purpose of education). I suspect that the main reason why Christians are not as confident as they should be about criticizing culture is simply because they have swallowed the nonsense that criticism belongs to Ph. D’s (and other degrees).

That is nonsense, and we should stop swallowing it. Criticism not only belongs to you. It is your job as a Christian, especially as an Orthodox Christian. You have experienced Paradise already, in prayer and holy mystery. Perhaps the experience has been small and under your perception – but you really have tasted grace, and you have known sweetness and light. In other words, you have been visited by God with His goodness and beauty. You have known the Truth, and the Truth has set you free.

From this perspective, you and I ought to be able to discern, to test the spirits, and to discover God’s will. It requires practice and discipline, to be sure, but we have all the tools we need, and we have all the heavenly assistance we must have. What remains for us is to practice to “be all the judge we can be.”

The most helpful passage about judging the ideas and influences we admit into our souls from culture is found in St. Paul’s letter to the Philippians: “Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things” (Philippians 4.8).
Think about good things. Savor them. Treasure them. Cherish them. The main cultural problem for Orthodox Christians today is that they simply do not think about good things nearly enough, or strongly enough.

That is what this course is about: thinking about these things.

There is a little story by a modern writer, whose name is Italo Calvino. In his short book, Invisible Cities, the voyager Marco Polo narrates his travels to Kublai Khan. The traveler describes a journey through the good and the bad, the wonderful and tedious, the lovely and loathsome. Through this travelogue, Calvino accidentally describes the pilgrimage of life for an Orthodox Christian, for we face all of these things – in this life and in this world, we visit glimmers of paradise, but we also suffer the smog of Hades and inferno.

I mention this story not only to commend it for your reading, but also to quote, here, Calvino’s conclusion, which is a motto for us all: … seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.

That is one way of describing the goal of Orthodox ethics -- to discern in the midst of a darkening world the good, and to give it space.

More morbidities

A few days ago, a correspondent commented on the post about suicide and euthanasia. Here is what he said:

I have worked with people in deep anguish either from physical pain or absolute hopelessness and depression. They say "I pray for relief, and God does not give it, I can tolerate no more." How can I say to them, "This is an opportunity for cross bearing and repentance, it will be worse for you if you end your life now,” when they have reached their limit. I grieve for them and pray that God gives them some relief. I‘m not sure that I could, in their place, bear their suffering either. It is easy to give theoretical answers, “You are rejecting the gift of life that God gave you and don’t trust His Providence enough.” If I, in empathy to their pain, can understand and see how they could succumb to hopelessness and despair, feel compassion for their suffering, and not be sure that I could stand it myself, how could God not respond by easing their suffering so that they can bear it (of course sometimes He does)? If God does not seem to answer the prayers of some desperate people and they continue to feel abandoned what can we say to them?

A most poignant query. Here is my response:

The point of "Morbid Fragments" was not about what should be said to desperate people in deep anguish. It was rather about what should not be said.

There are extreme points of shocking pain and despair where the giving of any theoretical answer will be hollow at best, and maybe even damaging.

But even at these extremities, the sufferer cannot wreak self-destruction while assuming he has consent from his friends. This consent may be only implied. It may be from close friends and family -- say, in one case, where the family of an accused pedophile left the house for two days after purchasing at WalMart a "strong enough" clothesline.

Or, more likely, it may be passive, even from the Church itself, whose ordained representatives -- "apostles" sent to the existential trials of others (like the "helpers" of Job) -- often assume that compassion and dogma are mutually exclusive.

I strongly believe, from personal experience with my own professional (secular psychiatry) failures and more successful pastoral (Orthodox clergy) interchanges, that one may bring the comfort and compassion of the Church, while expressing the simple truth that self-destruction, even in desperation, is still sin.

In those few successes I didn't give theoretical answers, but instead I prayed, discussed the Gospel and even dogma, and simply stayed. I found that as the situation became more intense, the needs of the sufferer became more primitive, and less sophisticated, so that the worst of my suicidals needed simply a friend at best.

And there have been times where the sufferer needed to know, clearly, what was expected by Heaven of him. "This is your cross," I have said, without any hint of theory, "and this is given to you for some mysterious participation in redemption." I have also said, baldly, that suicide will bring no relief, only exaggeration. I always thought that a suicidal ought to know this at the least, since he already knows quite a lot of information about his pain, and even about possible exits and the legalities thereof.

(I had been constrained in psychiatry, mainly because the profession doesn't, officially, permit any talk about the soul. In my present position, psychology is not censored or truncated.)

God may not have eased these extreme sufferings in the next hour or day, but in every case, He eased them all into repose. This repose took the form of an alleviation of at least the most acute agonies, even an emergence from a depressive trough. Or the repose took the form of the final one, what the gentiles call "death," but we call sleep for the penitent. A suicide, in these extremities, would have only hastened death by a few days or weeks at most, and at what horrible cost.

I am sure that if you asked a friend of mine, who reposed after a long hellish bout with Lou Gehrig's disease (ALS), whether he is glad that he remained steadfast to the end ... and if you asked him this today, where he is, I am sure that he would say, today, that he is simply glad -- and that gladness made the years of suffering worthwhile, and true.

Every suicide, and every suicidal ideation, and every suicidal thought (include in this category every sin and passion, every logismoi and fantasia, because suicide is where sin will take you) is essentially a question of theodicy. Suicide is an ultimate complaint against Divine Providence. When I suffer (my lack of real anguish in my life is embarrassing here, to even compare with the Martyrs), I carnally tend toward anti-prayers like "I don't like this moment" or "I don't like this place" and "It shouldn't have been me." And I lurch into the fantasia of "it should have been" and "God You're wrong for letting me be." The whole philosophical tradition of theodicy is predicated on our disagreements with Providence: it is the ancient existential complaint rooted deep in the antichrist vocation of suicide.

But no adequate reasoning can be made of the moral ambiguities of this life, in this life: resolution happens only in the shade of the River of Life, under the healing leaves. The first concern of Christians is for peace and repentance in this life, and for the blessing of salvation. If that is not the case (a rubric, I suspect, that obtains in many bio-ethical discussions), then Christians are forced to speak of what they do not know, and they are forced, rhetorically, to shut the treasure chests of their heart (which is a common occurrence with Christians who try to accommodate modernity).

Christianity is all about proclaiming the Gospel in extremity. The Gospel is contaminated when it is confined by rhetorics of theodicy. The Gospel must be free and revolutionary -- not "liberated" in an accommodationist sense -- but free in the scandalous sense of experiencing the beauty of the Trinity and the fellowship of Jesus Christ in the depths of every trial. Our greatest, most historic proclamations of the Gospel, our most dynamic rhetorics of peace, are made in the profoundest depths of suffering.

Compassion, prayer and anointing are Sacraments that must always violate determinisms (which are always symptomatic of Christianity lapsed into intellectual cowardice) and scandalize modernistic sensibilities (Christianity must always offend certain fraternities in the agora and on Mars Hill) ... and, if not done in a mere "theoretical" manner, this Unction is always sufficient grace for every desperation.

It is better to pray than to philosophize with someone in pain. It is better to read the Gospel and dogma than to read, to the dejected, the texts of modern complaint. It is better to apply the ecclesial oil of the Good Samaritan to the sufferer, than to drink with the wounded man the koolaid of Kevorkian and Sartre, Singer and Fletcher.

A priest who does this can do this only insofar as he himself is a man of prayer and virtue. One can speak of peace insofar as he is a witness of peace.

Priests are not meant to answer questions of theodicy (a subject that cannot escape its bourgeois roots), because when it comes to justice, he knows, more than any, that salvation is the most unjust thing of all.

Why I am not a good ethicist

For one reason or another, I receive essays on ethics for perusal. The day before yesterday, my e-mail program announced, with a ding, the odd arrival of an old article from the Boston Review, written by a man who claims Orthodoxy now as his “faith tradition,” having been drawn out of Roman Catholicism about a decade ago.

There is much to commend in the article. Its complaints about racism and consumerism won nods from my stiff neck. It faithfully affirmed Fr. Alexander Schmemann’s definition of secularism (i.e., reducing religion to a particular “department” of life). It discussed the reality of the Eucharist as the Body and Blood of Christ, and how we Christians are transformed by that singular transformation.

But the nods soon faded into sighs. The obligatory “I personally think that abortion is appalling” vote was cast, but it was quickly conditioned by an acceptance of the doctrines of privacy and individual freedom. There was the old saw about the abortion rate increasing during Reagan’s years, but decreasing during Clinton’s (I’m not sure what point is being made here).

There was that equally tiring saw about how there just isn’t any political party to suit the Orthodox taste:

I am troubled that there is no political home for my consistent ethic of life, but I also take comfort in the knowledge that electoral politics is not all there is to politics. If Chesterton’s idea of an America with the soul of a church has any validity, I believe it lies in our tradition of voluntary activity, through which faith can mobilize people to participate in the long and difficult grassroots struggle to transform our communities into a more just and peaceful society.

Well, yes, I have looked for a party for a long time, and there is just no Eagle and Child to be found in Pittsburgh. And who can argue against the need for voluntarism? Everyone, and not just Christian voices, knows that we should do more for the poor, the powerless, and all of Creation. Yes, yes, yes, by all means, we should attend to the “liturgy between the liturgies,” we should attend to the altars of the suffering poor on the streets outside the Temple.

That will never change. “The poor you will always have with you.” We should build houses in New Orleans, serve the soup lines in our boweries, and clear up the mess in Greenfield, Kansas. We should take care of addicts, protect children, feed the hungry on the other side of the world and the working poor in our town, and preserve families.

No one doubts this. I certainly don’t. But what sets me apart from most of my ethicist brethren (and sistren) is that I also do not doubt that the poor we will always have with us. We will never end poverty, or war, or injustice. We wait for the Messiah, and work whilst it remains day, for the night is coming, and the harvest is great.

I believe, coming out of my “faith tradition” as I do, that the main reason why we feed the hungry here is not to acclimate them to the world, but to help lead them into the next.

Yes, and I’m sure we should probably do more about justice, but I am not nearly as confident about the particularities of political struggles and social justice as are my professional colleagues in ethics. I am confused when hierarchs like +Archbishop Iakovos (of thrice-blessed memory) are applauded when they walk with Martin Luther King, but other hierarchs are denigrated, with those sherry-and-canape academic harrumphs, when they are seen slumming with the National Right to Life March.

I am quite sure about the pro-life movement as an appropriate movement for Christian political involvement, as it is a clear moment of ecclesial prophecy. In all of its phases – anti-eugenics, anti-abortion, pro-decent provision for the fatherless and single-mothers, and anti-euthanasia (or, more accurately, anti-“geriatricide”) – the Orthodox ethic is clear.

I’m not sure that such clarity is achieved in other, more radically chic, political endeavors. For example, I do not think that the politics of homosexual liberation has any place in an Orthodox prophetic witness. Neither do I think that the gender politics of inclusive language or female ordination have anything to do with justice, in the Christian sense (perhaps it has something to do with other senses).

The problem here is a tension that emerges not from what Albert Raboteau said in his rather fine article, but from what he didn’t say. And here, I should mention that I’m picking on Raboteau mainly because of the esteem I’ve felt for him since his old interview with Franky Schaeffer in the Christian Activist (that erstwhile, occasional magazine whose publication schedule was a Messianic secret). Raboteau said, in his Boston Review piece, that he was drawn to Orthodoxy because of deeply-felt affinities between his African experience of "joyful sorrow," and the same experience in the Apostolic Church of the ancient East.

Yes, yes, and yes. I agree with all my heart. But what I disagree with here is that Raboteau failed to proclaim the substance, the salient point of the Orthodox ethic and the prophetic witness of the Kingdom of God:

We do not protest injustice (in the Marxist manner).

We do protest wickedness and sin.

We are against slavery and abortion not primarily because they are oppressive acts of socio-economic bondage and tyranny against the powerless. We oppose these bad things (and many others) mainly because they are unclean works of the devil … because they are evil and demonic, not because they deprive the meek of material goods.

We do not primarily affirm social justice.

We affirm, instead, holiness and spiritual peace through Jesus Christ, and in His Communion.

Oddly enough, in Raboteau’s article, and in the essays of most Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and even conservative Protestant ethicists, there is very little mention of the word “sin.” There is just as patent an aversion to the word “holiness.”

It may be that there has been a decline of the frequency of these horrid old-fashioned and patriarchal terms concurrent with the decline of the place of metaphysics in the intellectual agora. With the loss of divinity as an acceptable referent in polite conversation, the only terms that can be pronounced are jaundiced words like “ethics,” or, my favorite, “faith tradition.”

There is a common push toward the recovery of a “patristic worldview” in the Orthodox and Roman realms, and even in the Protestant constellation. There is, in this worldview (a term probably too hard for the Fathers to understand), an affirmation of a sacramental or liturgical lifestyle, even an “eschatological ethos.” Under these rubrics, it seems that old-fashioned words like “sin” and “evil” have been modified into more progressive meanings (like “oppressive,” or “insensitive,” or “patriarchal,” or “colonial”).

Pastors and parishes receive, in annual or semi-annual batches of snail-mail and e-mail, the voluminous statements and study guides from official ethics committees (the publication of study guides, videos, and "resources" exist as rationale for next year's budgetary allocation: "See? We put out thousands of pages on modern concerns? How could they get along without us?"). As the cluster headache fog of mystification descends on the native intelligences of the rank and file, the last clear ethical thought goes something like this: "Why is it that the more these committees work, the more I'm confused, and the more old-fashioned sinners are left off the hook?"

It is hard to defeat the notion, held in the back of many lay minds, that central administration commissions do a lot of cultural accommodation in the obfuscating language of bureacrateze (or is that "bureaucratish"? -- you know what I mean: that special melange of rhetoric and vocabulary that enables corporations and commissions to defer responsibility, edit reality, and manage re-education).

The odd thing, here, is that those very Fathers who are the source of things "patristic" were quite firm (and offensive) in their use of words like “sinful” and “wicked.” St. John Chrysostom, as is well known, railed against the rich and their failure to give to the poor, but he also railed against their failure to attend Divine Liturgy regularly. He protested against the Empress, to be sure, but his protest was against her rather self-serving silver statue, not against her wars.

His social protest and the sum of his ethics – like that of all the Fathers – were aimed against wickedness, and he and they urged Christians to attain holiness and piety.

A real, Orthodox ethic might agree with an article like that of Professor Raboteau (and with the articles of many other salon Orthodox writers, Yannaras amongst them). Yes, the environment should be cared for. Yes, the hungry should be fed and the poor sheltered. Yes, racial prejudice should be suppressed. Yes, hurricanes, tsunamis and tornadoes should be responded to with great generosity.

But you could read this sort of thing from anywhere. Tony Campolo and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops say the same thing – that your sense of social justice and politics should be informed by your Sunday morning identity.

But an Orthodox ethic shouldn't even be called an “ethic.” “Ethics,” by itself, has to do with a false dichotomy between action and knowledge, existence and essence. It has been aberrantly set in contraposition to theology. A better word here is “prophecy,” and such a term is far truer to Scripture and Tradition. There were no committees on ethics or social issues in the Patristic era.

But there was prophecy.

There was no such thing as "worldview" (Dilthey notwithstanding).

The Fathers just said "world."

So an Orthodox prophetic witness would protest all the usual things that Raboteau and other Orthodox ethicists protest. But it would also rail against gambling, usury, excessive profiteering. It would not shy from denouncing the trendy agenda of legitimizing homosexuality, imposing egalitarianism, and deconstructing tradition. It would do more warning against celebrity-worship, pornography and unchastity than organizing boycotts of SUVs, rare woods and fur. It would complain trenchantly about church absenteeism, and the failure of Christian parents to lock the world out of their homes. It would condemn the pride that is inherent in slander and gossip. It would also excoriate the anti-clericalism and anti-hierarchalism that are rife today.

Never once, in my entire ethicistical career, have I ever heard mentioned, in committee sessions in Harrisburg, DC and NYC, the base problems of swearing and church absenteeism. And yet, these two problems in particular are mentioned frequently in the Gospels and the Epistles, in contrast to the complete silence on social issues more amenable to modern sensibilities. "Swearing" (not to be confused with vulgarity) is of enormous "ethical" concern in the Sermon on the Mount and the Epistle of St. James. It is of little concern today.

And finally, an Orthodox prophecy would correctly identify the reason why all these things are happening. It would correctly identify, too, just where we are eschatologically – and not simply limit this identification to that commonplace (and quite protestant) simplification of “inaugurated eschatology,” the “now-and-not-yet.”

It would say that the root problem of Orthodox Christians is their failure to pray as Jesus taught -- sacramentally and ascetically. It would say that the root problem of the world is its refusal to protect and listen to the Apostolic and Orthodox Church.

And it would say that the reason why the world is warming is because of the usury of corporate dragons like Smaug, not because of all the poor people who have to gas up their cars to get to their McJobs.

It would say, too, that the Islamization of Europe calls not for a Crusade, but for repentance … and this for the simple reason that any prophet, like Amos, would have no trouble recognizing the new Islamic Jihad for what it really is: another incarnation of the Assyrians, a harbinger and agent of Dies Irae.

This is what prophecy would probably say. And it goes without saying that this is not what Raboteau and all the respective denominational social and moral issues committees would ever say.

They wouldn't say it because they are ethicists.

And that is the problem of the age, my friends: ethics and prophecy do not mix. And I'm afraid they can't.

Concatenation

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

But the cats didn’t like this, as this was too patriarchal for their tastes. So they arranged a Conference, and held long Committee meetings, and heard numerous Consultations and the reports of Commissions, and engaged in some serious Creative writing, couched in the first person plural but (rather not like the Divinity) invariably framed in the passive voice.

So the cats, conferring and consulting, and creatively commissioning, said:

As it has come to our attention that there is a frequently experienced phenomenon known as (but not limited to, as there are other understandings) “existence” or “life,”* we hereby affirm our commitment to our firmly-held conviction that this condition either has always been as we have experienced it, or it has developed over time and in different understandings (all of which are of equal incredibly unique and important value**) to become, incrementally and in seamless transition, what we have been in the here and now.

We courageously affirm the importance of our conviction that the embracing of this metanarrative, this understanding of understandings, has enabled us to experience richly the possibilities of “community-based ontologies” – that is, sociologically-conditioned theories of reality – rather than the outmoded and limited prejudicial theories (i.e., of only one “reality” and one “time”) that have produced regrettable notions of “rightness” and “wrongness.”

We are excited about the infinitely-varied and wide range of possibilities that have become available to our communal and individual consciousness. As together, in a community of freely-inclusive and self-committed individuals, we affirm a “phenomenal consensus,” and in that affirmation we have experienced a richer range of evaluative alternatives that can generate more effective affirmations of lifestyle choices (by re-framing them as extensions of individual psychologies and inevitabilities), we embrace the mandate of electing an ethic for every possible endeavor. We revel in the tapestry of multifaceted ethics, in which each one articulates a new narrative of consciousness, liberation, commitment and free decision-making.

We value and greatly respect the treasuries of past understandings, and freely and inclusively embrace the legacies of sectarian traditions, each of which apprehended its own particular affirmations of totality. We, however, have sought a more affirmative and wider understanding of the present and the future. We believe that it is more effective to model our own experience upon our convictions, rather than “react” to paternalistic possibilities of “creation.” These negative possibilities inflict an undue burden upon the potentialities of future narratives, and restrict the range of future decision-making. This paternalistic pattern has even gone so far as to consign some valid potentialities or choices to the biased and hate-speeched modalities of “wrongness” and “sin.”

We reject these stereotypes that stem from obsolete ethical theories, and we gratefully remind ourselves that we have been privileged to reframe the ethical enterprise into a consensus-based, democratically-conditioned endeavor. We have benefited from the new, hopeful possibilities – an “eschatological narrative of hope” – of the enjoyment of “committee” over the confining prejudices of “creator-ism,” “truth/goodness-ism,” and “morality-ism.” Now that we have identified the implicit narratives of liberation and consciousness underlying the God-myth of more provincial traditions, we have courageously accepted the responsibility of defining our future by the identification and extrapolation of our psychologies and sociology. By this, we have transitioned the outmoded theories of “metaphysics” into more scientifically-acceptable tasks of cost-benefit analyses, management-by-objectives, and economic mobility.

But despite all this, God said “Let there be light”; and there was light, despite the concatenation of feline opinion. He said there is truth, despite the catastrophic, felonious multiplicity of theological ("all philosophy is theology"***) theories and ethical pronouncements. He said there is living water in one place, in spirit and in truth, despite the denominational, "narrative" impulse of cats.

And He said, of His Creation, that it was good.

But for cats there is no creation, only narrative, only ethics, and ontology by committee.

And that, even for a cat, is not too good.

* Cats love scare-quotes, as they cannot call anything anything: they can only "so-call"

** Only cat prose can come up with something like the abominable phrase "important value"

***This is true, and doubting it is the beginning of felinism