Second Terrace

the necessary wilderness

 

Who will give me wings like a dove?

The Prophet Elijah won a showdown at Mount Carmel. On one side were 450 prophets of the demon-god Baal, a sacrifice of a bull and dry wood. On the other side was Elijah, standing alone, with a sacrifice on twelve stones that Elijah piled up by himself -- and to make the difference even starker, the sacrifice and the wood were doused by four large containers of water.

You know the story. The servants of Baal chanted and moaned, danced and prostrated and even cut themselves to impress their god. They went on like this from morning until the evening. Nothing, of course, came. All demons -- and Baal was no different -- are powerless in the light, in the face of God’s Word, His Logos.

After all, Elijah spoke the Word of the Lord -- he expressed the message and represented the presence of the Son of God. If Jesus in the Gospel always exorcized demonic presence, then His Word -- even in the Old Testament before the Incarnation -- always did so as well. This is how we understand the struggle of the nation of Israel in the Old Testament against dark powers of Canaan: from Joshua through the Judges through the kings (or rather, what they should have done) and now through the prophets, the story is mainly about the exorcism of the Promised Land by the Word of God.

Let us remember that Baal is a heartless demon-god of commerce that required lust for his liturgy, babies for sacrifice, and the enslavement of weak, poor, unattractive people.

You know the story. Elijah won the showdown in a blow-out. The prophets of Baal exhausted themselves with their dead-end repetitions of darkness, and all they had to show for it was a dead bull lying on top of a pile of wood.

Elijah, on the other hand, prayed a simple, short prayer. “Then fire fell from the Lord out of the heaven and consumed the whole burnt offering, the firewood, and the water in the furrow. The fire also licked up the stones and the soil” (3 Kingdoms 18.38 LXX).

Let us remember that Baal-worship (whether Baal is named or not) always becomes enraged at any knowledge of God. The demonic culture of Baal will attack, with passionate wrath (as St John Chrysostom points out), any mention of the Holy Trinity -- that God is beautiful, that He is peace and comfort, that He is Love, that He is coming to save His people, that He will deify His entire Creation -- from the hearts of humans to the animals and trees and to the stars ... and demons like Baal will have nowhere to go.

You would think that Elijah could rest on his laurels after such a big win, that he could just “live happily ever after.” But such is not the case in real life. Immediately, the evil Queen Jezebel sent agents to find and kill Elijah, because he had so shamed her god Baal -- Baal who had made her powerful and very rich indeed.

Elijah had to run. He ran one hundred miles from Mount Carmel to Beersheba (south of Jerusalem). There, exhausted, his servant could go no further and Elijah continued alone. That night, in the wilderness, Elijah asked God to take his life, because he was so tired. In the morning, an angel of the Lord brought him breakfast and told the prophet, “Arise and eat, because the journey is far for you.”

Elijah ate the bread and water, made by the angel, and traveled for forty days into the desert, and finally arrived on Mount Horeb -- which is the other name for Mount Sinai. The place of the Ten Commandments so many years before.

Holy people -- the saints -- have always loved the wilderness and have always been drawn to dwell in its quiet beauty. Jesus Himself retired often to the solitude outside the city and civilization. There you can pray easily, because God’s Creation is seen clearly in the wilderness, and His Creation is really the “first book” of His introducing Himself to us as a God of complete love, total power, and infinite splendor (Romans 1.20). Things are clearer in the wild: “I want creation to penetrate you with so much admiration that everywhere, wherever you may be, the least plant may bring to you the clear remembrance of the Creator” (St Basil the Great, Hexaemeron). Cities and civilization are where God has always sent His servants -- the prophets, the apostles and the saints: but these places were places of constant affliction ... the wilderness is where they were “put together again,” where they met the God of comfort, and were “re-minded” of His primordial peace, and beauty, and the Love that He IS.

So it was for Elijah. Jesus came and spoke to Elijah (just as Elijah -- and another prophet of Sinai, Moses -- would come seven hundred years later and speak with Jesus at the Transfiguration). “Elijah, what are you doing here?”

And Elijah confessed, which means he opened his heart completely to the Lord and expressed out loud his grief: “I have been very zealous for the Lord Almighty since the children of Israel have forsaken You. They tore down Your altars and killed Your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they seek to take my life” (3 Kingdoms 19.10).

This feeling of “alone-ness,” or isolation, even abandonment, is tragically a common experience of God’s prophets and apostles. Moses felt it. So did the Judges between Moses and Samuel. King David certainly experienced this grief -- at least a fourth of the Psalms talk about this sense of “I alone am left.” St Paul (and all the Apostles) felt this: “... we were troubled on every side. Outside were conflicts, inside were fears,” he wrote, describing his Elijah-like experience in Macedonia.

And, most importantly, the Son of God, fully divine in His nature, yet in His human nature He too -- more than any other human -- experienced this same “I alone am left.” In the Garden of Gethsemane, He said to the disciples: “My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death: tarry ye here, and watch with me” (Matthew 26.38 KJV). 

Indeed, the loneliest confession of all Time was His own, at the extremity of the Cross: “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” (Matthew 27.46, quoting Psalm 21.1 LXX).

Jesus was falsely accused and prosecuted in the city. St Paul got attacked time after time in the city. Baal and his fellow demons continue to dwell and fester in the city (extended everywhere now by the media web). King David suffered one conspiracy and court intrigue after another in the city: “I have seen iniquity and strife in the city. Day and night strife shall surround her, even to her walls, iniquity and vain toil and unrighteousness are in her midst and usury and deceit never depart from her streets” (Psalm 54.9-11 LXX).

That is why David, ancestor and poet of the Lord, said “Who will give me wings like a dove, that I may fly away and be at rest? See how far away I have fled, I have dwelt in the wilderness” (Psalm 54.6-7 LXX).

That is why Jesus told Elijah to go stand on the mountainside of Sinai. So that Elijah could leave the confusion and strife, and see clearly, spiritually, the Beauty of the Lord written large in the wonder of His creation -- the expanse of sky and the majesty of the mountain.

Elijah, in his humility and pity, in his faith and confession, could see the invisibility of God’s true Kingdom through the visibility of God’s Creation. God’s Beauty must been seen, as God’s Beauty -- as Dostoevsky said so truly -- “will save the world.”

Three moments passed. First a powerful wind stormed over the mountain: but the storm itself was not the Lord Himself. Then the ground shook with terrible force: but the earthquake itself was not the Lord Himself. The a fire raged fiercely: but the fire itself was not the Lord Himself.

Each of these three elements reveal God’s infinite power and glory: they show Him, but they are not Him Himself. This point is where the human mind usually goes wrong, always tempted to do the lazy thing by stopping at the sign, but not going on to what is signified. This is where the devil and the demons stopped, by the way, and still are: they stopped at the sign, possessed it, and confined it to the Self.

But Elijah waited, knowing better than Baal or the devil, or Ahab or Jezebel or the city.

After all these manifestations of glory, then the Lord came in a still, small Voice. Jesus Himself, invisible, in the heart.

And He told the lonesome prophet, “No. You are not alone.”

Which is reminiscent of another mountain, in another time, when the Lord told His disciples, “I will never leave you nor forsake you, even to the end of the age.”

This is the Comfort that Elijah needed, and the “peace that passes all understanding” (Philippians 4.7), which happens when we repent and turn away from our passions and our entanglements in the frustrations of the City ... and when we turn to God in the quiet and look to see Him, the Invisible, in the beautiful Visibility of His Creation.

“Truly,” St Dionysius the Areopagite wrote, “the visible is the manifest icon of the invisible” (Epistles 10, 1117B).

* * * * * *

Sometimes, we all have to take our leave of the city and seek God’s Peace in the wilderness, like Elijah, listening -- with the Bible and the Fathers in hand, a pencil in the other, with our eyes and ears open, waiting upon the rustling of the leaves and the trickling of clear waters, breathing in the scent of field and forest and letting the sunlight settle on our shoulders. Sometimes, we need to let the rain fall and put away the urban umbrella.

I tell my seminarians, every year, that sometimes you need to get away in the woods to clear your head. I say the same to you.

Too much of the city is in our heads.

We need to see the invisible through the visible. 

We need to hear the still, small voice.

Sometimes, things have to change.

For the better, for beauty.

❦

three prayers

 

If there will be any regret after the last moment on earth, it will be that I should have, could have, prayed a lot more.

At the end, it will be obvious, even to my little understanding, that prayer not only means something, but makes something, and a very lot of it too.

I keep wondering if prayer is not the greatest work, the most beautiful engagement in art that I can ever do. It is certainly the deepest, truest action from what I really am. Perhaps this is the truest form of what Tolkien called "sub-creation" -- a Christian idea that's been hidden by the construction of the false secular world.

Prayer is not opposed to or distinct from theology. Prayer, rather, is the height of theology, just as theology (i.e., knowledge of God in relationship -- "covenant" as "betrothal") is the natural, even necessary, extension of prayer.

In the past, I separated prayer from theology. I regret this, and will try not to do it again.

These last few months have been like Dickens' London and Paris -- the best of times and the less-than-best. In those "Parisian" moments of challenge, I learned (and not, sadly, from many successes), that there is no romance in confronting evil. Standing up, like St Paul's martial characterization (in Ephesians 6), against the withering tide is not like the war movies with stirring soundtracks, or chivalrous joie de guerre of Arthur, Orlando, or even Hector.

What I found from my time with the devil is that he/it/they/whatever is depressing, sickening, enervating, existentially nauseating. It is not at all like Barad-dûr, nor trudging through Moria nor even the Paths of the Dead. It is much more like the despairing shuffle through the Dead Marshes, where everywhere are anti-icons of the devolution of noble battles into the decay of history and missed chances, nature declining into absurd.

I felt the same sort of cold resistance, low-grade dread and attrition of spirit that C S Lewis so well described in his approach to Ransom's house (in Out of the Silent Planet). Evil does not work in glamor. Only in decay.

So I will tell you this, like Ishmael coming back, surviving not only the whale but the regime of Ahab:

Never before have I needed the sacraments of the Eucharist, and also of human friendship, more.

And never have I found prayer so strong an artesian spring of peace before. And bear in mind that I say this more out of mistakes, missed chances and failure than success.

I have had to understand, sometimes unwillingly, the divine words, "“My grace is sufficient for you, for My strength is made perfect in weakness.”

And that weakness would be mine.

We have, in the Church, thousands and thousands of prayers.

But for me in these last few months, I prayed mainly three.

I offered the Lord's Prayer to the Father, believing that since I was incorporated in the Son I was praying with Him in forgiveness, for time, for deliverance.

I prayed in the night watches "O Heavenly King, the Comforter, O Spirit of Truth, Who are in all places and fill all things; Treasury of blessings and Giver of life, come and dwell within us and cleanse us from every blemish and save our souls, O Blessed One." He is the Comforter, the bringer of Peace, the "actualizer" of the miraculous psychology of Christ in the precincts of my soul. Through Him, I see the beauty of the Logos everywhere, and Time again becomes promise, instead of dread.

And, at the negative extremities, when the abyss looked like the old darkness of Sheol, bottomless, catastrophically chasmic, there rose up -- without my conscious will (at first, at least) -- the Jesus Prayer. It came in my breath, cadenced to my heart. And Whose Will was it, in Whose Body I am, but the One Who knocks at my door always, pleading like Lazarus to join my foolish, pseudo-rich table?

Who else but the One Who descends into all and every dereliction, but the Beggar Christ?

So, I will try to have less regrets at the end of days.

I will hope that my friends will say, "At least he prays."

Lead us, leaving no one, in the beggar's glory of Your ways.

fruition

 

Joachim and Anna were faithful, pious, cheerful, peaceful, dedicated, welcoming, pleasant, personable, generous, kind, openhearted, friendly … just plain nice.

They were “good people.” They were the kind of couple that you were always glad to have over for dinner. They remembered all the birthdays, they sent nice notes to cheer you up, they showed up at all the viewings at the funeral homes.

They were happy together, as all married couples should be.

But there was an aching heart at the center of their home.

There was no child, no baby, no slamming of the screen doors and the peals of delight at the first day of summer, no crayon masterpieces on the fridge door.

This ache, thus, is easy to understand. A child -- or children -- is an expected fulfillment of marriage. What is begun in the nuptial, joyful embrace of husband and wife is perfected by the bringing forth and raising up of a daughter or son.

For Joachim and Anna -- this wonderful, nice couple -- the ache of childlessness was even harder then than it is now. Society can be cruel and judgmental. As Joachim and Anna grew older, the nasty gossip in the neighborhood started to turn against them. Anna was called “barren,” and people made up theories about just why they didn’t have a child. Perhaps God was judging them, the gossipers said, because of some past sin. Perhaps something was wrong with Joachim.

When people don’t love who they’r talking about, and when they don’t actually know what they’re talking about, the guesswork of gossip is always wrong, and always destructive. Thank heaven, at least, there were no phones back then: the situation would have been even worse.

And so, the loneliness that was at the aching heart of this nice couple spread outside the home and into the entire neighborhood.

It is obvious that Joachim and Anna did not give up. They persisted. They kept their faith. They believed, without missing a beat, that God is infinite, and that God is good. They kept in their heart the shining hope that God is the “Keeper of Promises” and the “Giver of Second Chances.” 

He is the Redeemer and Rescuer: it is the main job of humans to believe this no matter what.

They kept on fasting. They kept attending the prayers, the chanting of Psalms at the Temple. They kept giving charity to the needy around them. They kept to their humble lifestyles, working with their hands. They kept to being meek, poor in spirit, hungry and thirsty for righteousness.

When their neighborhood got cruel, and society turned its back on them, Joachim and Anna simply turned more to the Lord.

That is what God’s people do, even when the people of the world do not.

* * * * * * *

It is obvious that this story has a happy ending, because today is, after all, the Feast of the Nativity of the Theotokos: Anna gave birth to Mary, the Ever-Virgin and Mother of the Church, the Body of Christ.

The neighborhood and the world had already written off Anna because she was “too old.” It was now long past the age of childbearing for her. She was called “barren” behind her back and probably to her face.

But they still prayed. One day, Joachim, who was a shepherd, went into the desert to pray. While he was away, Anna prayed. As she did, she looked at a nest in the garden, and she saw hatchlings being fed by their mother.

“Why was I born?” Anna said out loud in her sadness. An angel of the Lord appeared, and told her that she would soon bear a little baby girl, and that she should call her Mary.

At the same time, Joachim was also greeted by an angel, who had announced to him the same glad tidings. He hurried back to Jerusalem, and amazingly, Anna hurried to the entrance gate of the city.

In the greatest love story of all time, this wonderful, nice couple -- who never fell out of love, who remained faithful to God and each other, even in desperate sadness, even in the face of loneliness, contempt and neighborhood gossip -- reached each other at the same place and at the same time …

… at Jerusalem’s Golden Gate, where in joy and love, they embraced …

… in a scene that has become the greatest Christian symbol for nuptial happiness, peace, and fruition.

Joachim and Anna, in this embrace at the Golden Gate, is what every Christian marriage should grow up to be.

Nine months later, a little girl was born … a little girl that would change the world

* * * * * * *

It was happiness enough for that little house in Jerusalem to be filled with the sounds of a little girl.

But it was joy of the soul and overflowing to know that this little girl would become the Ever-Virgin Mother of God, who would lead the Church in the millennial Kingdom of Prayer, all throughout the spiritual and symbolic thousand years of the reign of the saints.

How could Joachim and Anna have ever known, in their struggle, that their Grandson would one day tell the chief Jewish Elder, in a secret meeting on a Jerusalem night (some fifty years into the future), these words -- the most Important Words Ever Spoken For All Time (and Eternity):

For God so loved the world,
that He gave His Only-Begotten Son,
that whosoever should believe in Him
should not perish,
but have everlasting life.

Joachim and Anna’s long disappointment and struggle, the long heartache and loneliness -- all this that they experienced was actually part of the Greatest Plan of All Time, the deepest mystery that kings and prophets and even angels longed to understand, because they could sense it in God’s nature of love, but they couldn’t ever quite grasp.

And all along, God was working this out, and bringing His “For God so loved the world” idea to fruition … to this nice couple, who were happy together …

… who were happy in God.

* * * * * * *

Think about it: the great Cosmic Plan, the most secret and powerful mystery ever known -- far more powerful than anything dreamt up by conspiracy theorists … a Cosmic Plan so large that it extends beyond this planet and out into the galaxy and beyond the boundaries of the universe …

… this Cosmic Plan came down to a single Love Story, so romantic and humble, between a man and a woman who stayed faithful through disappointment.

They prayed. They stayed. They waited on God to fill their emptiness, to encourage their discouragement.

And so should you.

❦

supplication

"Seascape with a storm coming on" -- J.M.W. Turner, 1840

 

Is prayer more important than theology? Yes, I think so.

Dogmatic theology is secondary to prayer, since prayer is fellowship, or communion. It is the deep speech of persons, not just the learning and saying of true sentences, even when those sentences are arranged poetically, in beauty.

But theology is necessary for prayer. How else would we know that God is Father, and Love?

Real theology turns out to be the grammar of prayer. And prayer turns out to be necessary, from the authentic goodness of human nature (which still obtains).

In this anxious culture, it is easy to assume that he is a demiurge, a deistic craftsman, or a tyrannical potentate who is divine because he is most powerful and sublime (and thus liable to honest questions like, "If he is omnipresent and omnipotent, and every event is his will, then how could he be good?")

Left to my own devices, I fall perenially into deism, or voluntarism, or even agnosticism. That is what I infer lazily, despondently from a simplistic regard of events. I think these lapses are concomitant with the constant, modern drift of abandoning the soul for the siren song of the ego.

But I am not happy with the status quo. There is this holy earth, this world, and my neighborhood that intrudes upon my egocentricism. The sunlight of day penetrates into the crevices and caves, and interrupts egoistic despondency with prismatic analogies. Divine names are whispered meekly in the wind, insistently in the rhetoric of peace like the leaves of paradise. The Logos is behind, in and forward of every recognition of logoi.

These things, for humans, must be attended to. It is our nature.

And, truth be told, even in the precincts of self it is no good forsaking the rest of creation. There is no rock, no island, no possibility of invictus: the problem is not that retreating into self shields the ego from the tempest. The problem is that the greatest tempest, the greatest wrong, is confronted inescapably within that ego itself: the more intense the egoism, the greater the despair.

So, I am glad of neighbors, and brother sun and sister moon and all that. I hurt not only because I hurt, but they hurt. Their pain, sun and moon, beasts and children, neighbor, brother and sister -- their pain and mine comprise a problem.

I know, beyond any doubt, that things should not be this way. This is a disruption, a breaking, of a primordial beauty and peace. It is not true that "it is what it is." La vie is not c'est la vie, or c'est la guerre. Being is not chaos. Being is not an interruption of non-being. Life is not a meaningless succession of dominations, unrealistically and temporarily beautiful but realistically and always bleak, empty, wrong.

We know this, despite nightmares of a terrible sublimity, which I think are the tragic perceptions of fallen angels, inflicted upon the vulnerable. Perhaps the powers and principalities, the demonic, demonstrates what happens when there is all ego and infinitesimal soul, no perception of the prismatic analogies of creation. One wonders whether the myth of Dionysus really originated with Nietzsche, or was merely insinuated to him, whispered in the dark.

We know, humanly, that Eternity should come one day, and even now it shines into time, and experience is moving in and toward redemption. The kingdom comes, and the good will is being done more and more: despite the fact that some events are certainly not of this good will, there will come a time when all reality will shine with unbroken light and peace.

All phenomena then, on that Day, will show obvious analogy to the true form of Christ.

But in the mean time, things are not that way.

* * * * * * *

I say all this because I think Origen was wrong. He was wrong to suggest that the prayer of supplication, of asking God for reality to change, is inferior to the prayer of praise.

I cannot help but beg God for reality to change. This begging goes on along with my thanks and my praise: they are, practically, inseparable.

I cannot help it. I hunger and thirst for things to be made right. 

I get tired though. Many situations do not change for a long time. Some bad realities look like they will never get better. 

The past cannot be changed, even though history (at least human history) might be amenable to change. After an interval of time and inspiration, under the guidance of Tradition, the lines of a graceful story will emerge. The visual acuity of hindsight is perfect, in the vision of Logos.

But still, I cannot wait until a pretty resolution, when things look better from a distance like a Monet twenty feet away. The hard sharp rocks of pain and the stone mountains of multi-generational agonies, disappointments do not simply resolve into softer, pleasanter shapes under the rubric of "time is the great healer."

No. Sometimes time is the great amplifier, exagerrator even. Witness a lot of historiography, especially the historicist sort.

Time requires work. Time obviates any possibility of passivity -- especially a passivity conditioned by an apostasy into determinism. Time calls for active work for all those who are predestined, the elect -- that is, all those with a mind and a heart, all those fashioned in the image of God, the entire human race, every soul.

And what is that work? "This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He sent" (John 6.29). Yes, certainly.

But more precisely, or immediately: the work required by time is to believe in Him now.

Immediate belief is supplication. You cannot pray if you don't believe, and you cannot pray well if you don't believe well.

The efficacy of prayer is not my main concern here. I think that much about efficacy is pretty clear: if God is thought to be an arbitrary tyrant, then he will be addressed accordingly. Perhaps the real God will listen in to a mis-directed appeal: I think that if He hears sinners like me, He will certainly hear deistic determinists. But that is not a problem nearly so much as the superimposition of the ego that militates against prayer. Everyone has probably figured out, because it is one of those endoxa that Aristotle spoke highly of, or maybe part of the anamnesis that Plato referred to -- in any case, every human from birth knows that the soul is the only place from which God may be addressed.

The passions propel the consciousness into the ego. And I do not think the ego -- especially the Cartesian ego and all the other egos after it -- can ever pray.

My main concern is something else, though.

What should be my main concern?

To glorify God? To be deified? To become more like Christ? 

These infinitives are no so much actions as they are ways of being. I can give my assent, proclaim my desire, participate in grace in my necessary, but very insufficient, way. It is work, I suppose, inasmuch as "faith without works is dead." Or, inasmuch as I should "work out my salvation with fear and trembling."

But it hardly counts as hard choice or effort.

What is my main concern? To believe that God exists?

Really now ... and let us be honest, and reason together. How can I not believe in the Trinity, and in the divine and human Christ in Whom I live in the fellowship of the Trinity? Belief is easy, as in "My yoke is easy and My burden is light."

Once seen outside the cave, Plato, I could not deny the daylight.

What is my main concern? My main work in this day and age?

In a word?

Supplication.

* * * * * * *

I pray like a fool.

Every age cherishes its own set of possibilities and impossibilities. They are like "epistemological indictions" -- bondaries that demarcate what can be thought, what should be believed.

This age is all about determinism, notwithstanding its prima facie libertinism. In a universe that is only material, what will be will be. Chance is hardly freedom, and what consciousness I think I experience is only epiphenomenal, only a product of the interplay of various neuronal systems -- maybe even occurring at a quantum level.

But never mind this physics stuff. 

I accuse this culture of being addicted to damnation.

That is: defining -- or rather, confining -- a person to sociological boundaries or to historicist roles. Disregarding the surface appearances of beauty, as analogous to the infinite and absolute. Forgetting about the old traditions of gift exchange and peace. Rationalizing the agonies of the innocent and not-so-innocent, and sublimating such suffering under the rubrics of some esoteric economy (almost like extrapolating aristocracy onto the divine). Entertaining meaninglessness and hopelessness at the very foundation of thought. Accepting the cold dictates of chaos, consumption, entropy. Abandoning the soul for the ego, lost in a mirrored hall, in which the footsteps echo, fading.

And watching cartoons all the while.

It is the culture of damnation from which I must disentangle my mind. That a mountain seems immovable, or a situation calicified in demonic dysfunction, or a tragedy appearing only to be ironic and meaningless only means that I've been habituated to the habits of inferno.

I shake my head, and hear rumors of grace and see angels of revolution.

It is the cords of determinism that I must sever: each cord a demonic rejection of being that is goodness, an impossible embrace of Nothing. I sever, and persevere Logotherapeutically, so that I and my neighborhood of sun and moon, beasts and children, sisters and brothers, can rise.

Forgive the rhapsody.

But all is rhetoric: I have left off dialectic long ago.

* * * * * * *

The main concern of the Church is supplication. 

Qoheleth must bind up the testimony and say that supplication is the hardest work, and is the truest maker of change. I would do anything to pray better -- for the sake of the sick children I know about, the dying children I hear about, the suffering war-weary I mourn for, the families riven by secret pain I sense, the penitents who suffer from old repeated failures, the weary refugees beaten by the re-emergence of ancient aristocracies.

I would do anything. Even if it meant ego-slaying like fasting, which is chic. Charity, which can be performed. Forgiveness, which is no good for anything in the marketplace. Supplication needs the abnegation of the ego, and the ego loves the marketplace.

Anything, even the obscurity of church.

We go to church to pray, not for institutional survival. Eschatological revolution, not for cardboard salvations of material success, and frenetic Baal-priest spurts of TV happiness. Beauty, not cuteness. Peace, not the segregations of homogeneous clusters who will erect the same signs in the lawn, watch the same shows, speak in furtive ludicrous code. Being as beauty, not chaos, not domination. Difference in peace, irreducible.

We go to the uncomfortable, inconvenient church, in peace and beauty, to work hard in supplication. Even if there are only two or three and the world does not give a damn (which it is good at giving).

So I will pray like a fool who rejects the tutelage of perdition. I will pray, thus, for salvation. The persistence of my neighborhood, expansive. Peace. Justice. Transformation, not destruction. Complete rescue, no one, nothing left behind. A beauty that gathers in. Where in that heaven all is gained, nothing is lost.

Prayer is eschatological, but prayer does not abandon the surfaces of this world. The Other is recognized by her eyes, or the shape of his words. Prayer, too, casts a net into history, and re-narrates it in a wider, longer setting.

The presence of supplication is the fruit looked-for on the fig tree, in season and out: the absence of supplication calls for the cleansing of the precincts, where moneychangers are always the ones displacing the one thing needful.

Prayer calls for the de-chaining of Peter, and the care of the discarded.

Prayer, supplication, calls upon the Father to send down rain upon the just and the unjust, but for justice to reign. In the peace of the never-setting Son. the presently realizable coming of the Kingdom by the Spirit.

Righteousness that is hungered for and thirsted, is the content of supplication.

The cost of this is the turning away from ego, turning to the Cross in the precincts of the soul.

It is time to pray. For this.

 

righteousness and satisfaction

 

-- the "Annunciation" (oil) by Jan van Eyck, ca 1434
because it is so beautiful

“Blessed are they who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be satisfied” (Matthew 5.6, in the Beatitudes).

“Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you” (Matthew 6.33).

“He hath set me on the paths of righteousness, for His Name’s sake” (Psalm 22.3 LXX).

I will tell you right off the bat what I want to accomplish in this little essay. I want to make the word “righteousness” attractive” again. I want to “renovate” its modern understanding, and return it to its original sense of beauty and awe. With all my heart, I would like to make it appealing again …

… to you. So that you will want righteousness. So that you will “hunger and thirst” after righteousness. So that at the Marriage Reception Feast of Jesus and His Church at the End of Time, you will have wanted the “garment of righteousness” so much that your wedding outfit will shine in splendor.

* * * * * * *

“Righteousness” means following God’s way in all your life -- in every moment, in every thought, word and deed. It means remembering the presence of Christ in your soul and in your body. It means recognizing Christ in the face of your neighbor, who is every single person you meet or know about. It means becoming more and more “Christlike” with every day and month and year you grow older -- because that is the whole positive reason for Time, in God’s Creation.

“Righteousness” means following God’s “Law,” which is His design for Life. Live according to this design, or “way” of life, and you will live forever, becoming more and more beautiful according to the infinite glory of the Holy Trinity.

But if you leave (or shrug your shoulders and simply don’t care about) the “paths of righteousness,” then you will fall off the mountain path, and go down, first class and comfortable, on the cushy interstate downhill journey of perdition, complaining like the devil, who was the first to jump off Christ’s hiking trail and is now driving the bus that will one day stop at the very worst and mangiest bus terminal of Time.

* * * * * * *

The happiest thing about Righteousness is that all you have to do is desire it, to want it, to hunger and thirst for it. You do this by taking the first step, making a beginning toward walking on God’s way. You replace a passion with a virtue. You share generously if you are greedy. You fast if you are gluttonous with food or substance abuse. You humble yourself in lowly service if you are egotistical. You read Scripture, the Fathers and do the Jesus Prayer if you are forgetful about God. You learn how to be by yourself if you are lustful or codependent. You focus on the feelings of others if you are a rage-aholic. You push yourself into tangible work and develop a grownup distaste for luxury if you are lazy. You enter into poverty if you are addicted to usury.

And if you look as though for years you've sucked lemons, then you wonder like a child at the poetry sky. And stay there until joy hobbles the adult in you, and takes you back to the meek child at heart. Because I do not know if an adult stuck in the bus terminal of self can ever forgive, or accept forgiveness.

Orthodox Christianity involves change -- constant change from the now to the not-yet, from the status quo to the eschatological beautiful. Some of my friends are melancholy and even atheistic because they did not see enough change. Others of my friends say that change is not necessary.

For their sake, and yours, I do not agree. Change happens under divine conditions, as the Holy Trinity is our infinite absolute. Thus, change, conversion, certainly the fullness of righteousness and the glorious weight of beauty even now escapes the limited perception of our frail ego.

That said, it is expected that our change proceed from the inside to the out: we must engage with history, and leave written behind us the autograph of our Lord. The world has a right to see righteousness realized in the lives of those who bear His Name. 

These are only “first steps.” They are, in the context of eternity, relatively easy. They are possible. God does the rest, the remainder that is “impossible.”

His Grace is always sufficient. His Righteousness is not only beautiful and peaceful, but it is meant to be successful. You take the first step: God does the rest. He waits on your choice. You make that choice in action, and God does the greater work. “And I am sure that He Who began a good work in you will bring it to completion on the day of Jesus Christ” (Philippians 1.6).

You can be beautiful. You can experience peace in the here and now.

You can be satisfied in the beauty of His Righteousness, in the peace of the Kingdom of God.

But only there. Because you’re human. Because God -- Who is Righteousness -- made you, and is and always will be the source of your life and being.

* * * * * * *

“Righteousness” is beautiful. But lately, it has been insulted. It has been surrounded by a lot of foolish catcalls and shallow comedy. It has been associated with a lot of untrue definitions.

I remember from some years ago a certain comedy sketch from SNL called “The Church Lady.” It was a comedian dressing up like an older woman in a nice dress from the 1950s, sitting down and gossiping about people she had met in church that day. For a lot of laughs, the Church Lady peppered her remarks with expressions like “Isn’t that special?” or “It must be the devil!”

The general theme of the Church Lady was to make fun of the idea of “righteousness.” This comic picture summed up the general modern attitude toward this word. For modern America, “righteousness” means a hypocritical, shallow judgmentalism. It means a focus only on outward behavior -- the things that are easy to pick out, like smoking, drinking, swearing, uncleanliness. “Righteousness” in modern America has been made to look comic, even ugly, old-fashioned, certainly very unattractive and not beautiful at all.

SNL’s Church Lady is wrong, dead wrong. And so is anyone who agrees with this sort of very wrong understand of what righteousness is.

* * * * * * *

Because “righteousness” is nothing other than the actual lifestyle of the Kingdom of God lived in the here and now. It is reflecting the awesome beauty of the Holy Trinity in your heart, in your daily life and revealing that beauty and peace through your love of everyone around you. 

Righteousness means Justice -- inside and outside of you. It means that no one is oppressed or under the domination and power of anyone else. It means that all tyranny is stopped. The poor are taken care of, the orphan has a home, the sick and the lame are healed, the blind are made to see again, the truth of God’s Kingdom is proven to an unbelieving world, the character of Christ and His restoration of human are restored as clear goals for all humanity. It means that forgiveness is given to all your fellow humans around you, because God the Father has forgiven you in your union with Christ His Son and your Lord.

Righteousness is the beauty and peace of the Trinity planted deep in the human soul, and flowing as eternal life out in this life you lead, and fountaining upward infinitely to the never-setting Son.

Righteousness is Beauty. Beauty is Righteousness.

If this does not touch your heart, then you understand neither.

But you must. For your sake.

* * * * * * *

You and I should hunger and thirst after righteousness more than anything else. More than burgers on the grill. More than pop or beer. More than a new car or a new roof. More than bread after forty days’ wandering in the desert, weak with hunger.

You and I, in our hearts, should long and be homesick for God’s goodness and righteousness. We will never be happy without this. St Augustine said that our hearts have a hole that can only be filled with this.

I recommend Psalm 106 LXX (107 in the English Bible). I especially honor the ninth verse from Psalm 106. You should highlight it in yellow marker or stick up on your refrigerator, or have your grandchild write it in crayon for your door. It is all about the place of the beauty of God’s righteousness, and our desire for it:

“For He satisfies the longing soul,
And fills the hungry soul with goodness”

Let us long for our beautiful God and His peaceful Law and His Way of life.

We shall be satisfied.

❦

Lenten Fairy Tales, Third

One of the old buddy pigs came running and found me
when I went to ground,
napping in the moldering afternoon,

and reminded me
porcine

that one cannot be in two places

at one time

"that," said he, "is the stuff of the insanity of theoretical physicists.

"At least," sniffed he, "my brethren of the Gadarenes, had the sense
to run over the cliff
when they heard such stuff," said he.

Paradise or pig.

Passion and multiverse.

Or bread and wine, water and air in the anamnesis House.

"one or the other," said he the pig

"I don't give a fig what you do,

but choose." 

Why we fast

Today is the beginning of Lent, which is more accurately called “The Great and Holy Fast.”

If I didn’t have a calendar, I would know this simply because the annual barrage of questions and anxieties come out at this time. It is almost as dependable as Punxsutawney Phil sticking his head up on February 2nd -- or, better, the crocuses poking their heads up out of the cold soil, announcing the Spring.

These questions fall into two groups. The first group is all about practical concerns: 

Q: When is the Fast?

A: It starts from this afternoon at Forgiveness Vespers and lasts until Lazarus Saturday. And then in Holy Week, it gets even more demanding. The fasting rigor for tomorrow and this week is also more demanding.

Q: What should we fast from?

A: For over a thousand years, every Orthodox Christian is generally expected to fast from meat throughout the whole Fast. Many Orthodox also fast from dairy products through the whole period. It is also just as important to fast from worldly distractions like entertainment and parties. TV and movie viewing should go way down during Lent, as well as listening to non-church music. Internet surfing and facebooking should also decrease to an “only-what-is-necessary” basis.

Q: How should we fast?

A: I said “generally fasting from meat (and dairy)” because the Church gives a lot of leeway to various situations. If there are any health or medical issues, then we always relax the demands of the Fast. This is something you need to speak about with your priest. It is interesting that I always worry about the older, frailer people who might be fasting too much, and I have to remind them that they need to be good stewards of their health.

If a person is younger or new to the Faith, we generally make the Fast easier for them as well. However, we expect that the more mature one is in his faith, then he really needs to fast more rigorously. This is true especially of clergy and the leadership of the parish. The “older” you are in the Faith, the more dangerous it is not to fast (or fail to pray or confess or receive any of the sacraments).

But then I hear deeper questions -- and these questions are of the “why” variety, which requires a deeper, more spiritual look.

Question: Why do we fast?

Answer: Not to punish ourselves. There is no such thing as “criminal punishment” in the Orthodox Faith. Sin is seen (and feared) as a putrid disease in Orthodoxy, much more so than a crime that requires punishment.

Also, we fast not because meat and dairy and entertainment are evil things. These are all good things that the Lord has provided for us. They are not unhealthy if consumed moderately. They do not cause passions by themselves, unless they become an addiction -- in which case, it is not the fault of the kielbasa and the cheese -- it is the fault of the glutton who “can’t believe he ate the whole thing.” I say this because hundreds of years ago, people believed that meat helped cause anger -- that is simply not the case, and such a belief was never the Church’s doctrine.

No, we voluntarily give up meat and dairy and entertainment for another, far more important reason.

We fast simply because we are homesick for Paradise, and we just want to go back home.

Adam and Eve ate neither meat nor dairy -- just the fruit of the trees and herbs and vegetables from the earth. And they needed no entertainment. Every moment of their life in Paradise was filled with joy -- whether taking care of the garden and the animals … whether helping each other with their work … whether breathing in the bright and pure air or drinking the cool sparkling water or feeling the soft green grasses under their feet … 

… and best of all, walking with Jesus Christ every evening, in the cool of the day, and talking with Him Face to Face.

The entire human race has been homesick ever since Adam and Eve had to leave the Garden of Eden because of their sin. Behind every beautiful scene, we perceive the original beauty of Paradise. Behind every beautiful voice and lovely phrase of music, we hear the rusting leaves of Eden, inviting us to come home again. Behind every wave at the ocean, and behind every waterfall in every stream, there is the sound of the waters of the River of Life, reminding us where we truly belong.

That is why we Fast -- so that we once again return to the diet and lifestyle of the Garden of Eden. 

That is why we do works of charity and almsgiving in this month of sweet sorrow -- so that once again, we can feel and experience the fellowship that God originally intended for the human race in Paradise. That is why we forgive and give up cursing and yelling and backbiting and gossiping and denouncing and complaining: we know, in our hearts, that such talk has no place in the Garden of Eden.

That is why we Pray so much during Lent -- so that once again, we can walk with Jesus (the Second Adam and the Second Person of the Trinity) in the evening of the New Creation, and talk with Him Face to Face.

So for anyone who dreads or resists Fasting, or wants to know the “least” he can get away with, or what the “minimal” requirementss of Fasting are, I gently suggest that maybe you don’t remember, yet, the beauty of Eden, and how you and Eden were literally made for each other ...

… maybe you’re not nearly homesick enough.

Lenten Fairy Tales, Second

Along the way a spade appeared, jabbed in dirt.

I knew he was down there so I dug him up:
he looked "really good," the same

which is what you'd expect after a lifestyle of self-embalming.

"My brothers," he simpered, "one got five and the other three,
so I kept mine for me

"and dug a hole,
and just to be sure,
climbed in for safekeeping.

"Please, if you will, kindly replace the divots?
Can't stand the sun, you see."

Gee.

At least I was sanguine with my nature,

not melancholy. 

Lenten Fairy Tales, First

There is an enormous pig farm in western Ohio where I woke up at, sandwiched between two slats of slate, the jagged sky and the washed out between-snows wintered earth.

I found this notebook in the dirt when I learned to read a word.

I have these early recollections, as Adler-not-Mortimer would say. My lifescript. My romantic programme, a la Berlioz. You know how it goes. Jejune puerile restlessness, liberation exhiliration, experimentation, crisis, boredom, ennui, depression, entertainment/diversion as self-medication, long dull suicide, the bourgeoisie regime.

Must get up. Memory of substance, the images dissipate in gray. Memory persists as the shadows fade.

Does the Father welcome back errant cognoscienti?

Any cognoscienti?

Perhaps as a scrivener, an archivist, a duster, someone to run the shredder, a repairer of crumbling books.

Un-sonned, sure, but one for hire.

Counseling note, little and bright

-- Edward Hopper, "Pennsylvania Coal Town," 1947

He sat down in my office, in the oversized jet-leather club chair, nestled by the literary bookshelf (across from the two shelves of bible and theology).

He was tired. His face showed the downturned use of some years of a low-rent, on and off again shop job, punctuated by a bimonthly visit to a smoke-hazed oldies bar just blocks away from his 1950s ranch-style home, where his dog awaited him, tail wagging, every late afternoon.

He is a refugee from all the old charismatic waves that washed over the Burgh since the early 70s. He's visited about every single phase of emotion and claimed every promise. He's made a lot of positive confessions that have not worked out, and so weary he's entered our old and open doors.

Now he's gotten into difficulty again, and that's real and very hard. We will have to help him through with real practical plans. Who will take care of his loyal dog, who will wait for him every afternoon for the month that he's away? Who will watch his family home, of which he is the last of, out-surviving his mom and dad and sister and brothers? Who will cut the grass and sweep the walk these incarcerated days?

He is amazingly gentle and kind, merciful to the gruff and uncompassionate peers that surround his daily schedule. He's been scuffed, worn and torn by a lot of hard knocks, but the bitter speech, so expected, doesn't show.

He wears a coat and tie to church, sometimes threadbare, but "I want to look my best for God" he says.

I hear his narration, and I want to denounce the powers and anyone else, but he heads me off with "Whatever happens now I'll take from the Lord, as something I need to receive."

So we practice the whitelight arts of the Jesus Prayer and the Trisagion, then. I talk to him about the Liturgy and the Holy Mysteries, and about the ecclesial rehearsals of Heaven on earth.

(It is especially at a moment like this that I take refuge in old-fashioned christology, when and in Whom divine nature might meet human nature, Personally. Christology is best done, I think, on the discarded streets of the world's refugees.)

We begin to speak in tongues of angels -- or rather, the tongues of the Word made flesh. "I can do all things through Christ Who strengtheneth me." "If God be for us who can be against us?" "Greater is He that is in you than he that is in the world." "Perfect love casteth out all fear."

I swear to you all, upon the Altar and Heaven itself, that the air began to brighten at the iteration of these words. I felt the ebbing of the bleak tide.

He stood up after the prayer and smiled with a smile that the world thinks is unbecoming of the poor: but in the Kingdom, a smile such as this makes all the sense in the world.

Handshake, embrace of the meek.

He left, a small man, and I remained, just as small.

... for they shall inherit the earth.