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Author: Fr. John Chagnon
People Sometimes Say…
that the Church is full of hypocrites. To which I often reply, “If you were to join it would there be one more or one less?” In the the Orthodox understanding the idea that you’re not always what you’d like to be, not always living the ideals of your Faith, and even struggling, sometimes often, to just make it through the day in some kind of Christian manner is precisely WHY you are part of the Church. The Church is the place where we continue on the path of leaving our hypocrisy behind, a little at a time if need be, and find the wholeness, clarity, and integration of our lives by following and growing in Christ.
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Ecumenical Martyrdom
In these last years as we have heard, seen, and read the stories of Christians martyred across the world something interesting seems to be happening. The stories are being covered by all kinds of media across the spectrum of the Christian world and basically all of it speaks of these martyrs as Christians regardless of the particular label. The usual rhetoric that divides us has given way, in some ways, to an understanding that we have a unity, if not in doctrine at least in blood.
Of course we identify the people who are killed by their community, still there also seems to be a shared sense of commonality among all of us in the observant Christian community for the fate of these people and a realization of some sense of kinship in the growing sense that we, too, whatever out particular communion, could be one day the people in the cross hairs of some effort to eliminate us. If our shared faith doesn’t bind us our potential shared fate could.
My community is Orthodox and yet we have commemorated in our prayers of the Great Entrance the Catholic nuns who were murdered in Yemen not as “Papist Heretics” but as those who were killed for their faith in Christ. No, they won’t be officially listed on the “rolls” as it were of martyrs and if and when the Roman Catholic church recognizes their sainthood our recognition will wait until some far off council where, if it were possible, some kind of union between the Catholic and Orthodox communions could happen. I’m not holding my breath on that one but until then I can at least recognize that these nuns, and so many others like them, have served Christ to the end and that sacrifice can be something that binds us together, a shared experience, a shared threat even, that helps us to see the faith in the other, the reality of Christ in the other, in ways that comfort and ease have not.
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Music and Me
I do think about it sometimes, about what my work and life in music could be if I were not a Priest. Occasionally I ponder the Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday nights that would be open, the Sunday mornings that could be used for travel or practice, and lack of sudden and unanticipated schedule changes that are part and parcel of ministry. I do admit, at times, to a little bit of envy when I see people who have shows on Friday nights in Lent when I am helping to serve an Akathist, or on those feast days when I need to be in Church. I know, too, that my status as a Priest can make it harder for me to be the right “fit” in a group and “fit” is so important to make music together. I do think about things like that from time to time.
Usually, though, the “what ifs” don’t last too long. I’m a Priest before I’m a musician and not just a musician that shows up at church a lot. True, there are days when I would like to be out on stage with the boys but mostly I’m happy and content on what I consider to be, for lack of a better term, the greatest “stage” of all, the altar of any Orthodox church. I love music but I know that the eternal things are of greater value and duration. A hundred years from now no one will remember my music but what I can do to bless people as a Priest may last that long on this earth and perhaps, by God’s grace, for eternity in the world beyond this.
I do get to make music, of course, for myself and the experience that comes with sitting alone and pondering the world with an instrument in my hands (an experience I highly recommend for others), the good folks I serve at my senior residence, and every so often a public performance. I love to make music in groups (something that comes from years of playing the bass, a very group dependent instrument), but slowly but surely doors are also opening up for me as a solo performer and hopefully as a songwriter as well. I simply trust that if there is a divine plan for me that includes music the songs and situations will happen. That being said I know there is a divine plan for me as a Priest, even if its only to show the world that God has a sense of humor.
In the end I wouldn’t really want it any other way. Jesus is just too amazing, too important, and too wonderful to be anything but at the top of my priorities. Although I’m far from perfect I believe what He is, what He has to teach us, and what He offers to us is the most beautiful kind of music, healing, and life for the whole of who we are. If I try to have Him front and center everything else will find its proper place. While I play a number of instruments I, as best as a struggling human can do, want to be His harp.
In the end that’s what really matters.
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The Sunday of Orthodoxy
The most basic and important triumph of Orthodoxy, the one on which all other rests, is the triumph of Orthodoxy in the individual lives of its adherents. The formal externals of Orthodoxy mean nothing if they come from a heart that is distant from its graces. Holding an icon in procession is meaningful only to the extent that the person is in the process of becoming an “icon” themselves and ritual is lifeless when it is disconnected from its Life.
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An FYI…
It’s a Crazy World Out There…
and a lot of people are shouting trying to be heard. Only God seems quiet these days as our culture seems to find ways to the bottom and then start digging. Yet, is that so?
I’m no prophet but the signs of the times in the United States appear to point to an era where observant Christians will no longer find support from the most of the major institutions of this culture, including many churches. Corporations, media, governments, and academia in many places are either not supportive of our lives, our visions, or our lifestyles, and often can be directly hostile. Truly the world of my childhood when towns were basically closed on Sundays is long gone and, in my lifetime, will never return.
So its a wilderness life for us until our culture cracks and breaks under the pressure of the many forms of brokenness that come to pass when people ignore the lived experiences of people over time we call tradition. It’s already starting as our nation, having jettisoned any idea of an overarching narrative informed by the graces of Christianity is becoming more diseased and turning on itself. Sanity will come, of course, but not after some years of tribulation while the old lessons being ignored are relearned through pain.
It can be all quite frightening to watch. Sad, as well. What kind of person can watch a society come unraveled without having some kind of compassion, especially a Christian? Yet, is it possible that in all the storms and hubbub God is not silent, but gently calling those who still seek Him to something beautiful, real, and holy. Stripped of all the trappings of the world’s support, could it be that we are being called back to our first loves, not the least of which may be the simple rediscovery of God?
We American Christians can make such an idol of our country, so much that we mistake its values for what should be our own, it’s ideals for ours, and it’s way of life for the life of Christ. That might be why so many of us are actually shocked and traumatized to discover that this culture in which we had put so much hope is starting to turn on us and one day might even use its power to make us outcasts in our own land.
Yet, our home, as observant Christians, was never truly in this land or any other for that matter. We belong to a Kingdom that can live in this world but ultimately is beyond it. If it is our lot to be exiles in this country the blessing in it may be that we rediscover Whose we are, who we are, and the very core of Truth about God, ourselves, and this world that’s been buried under the weight of an increasingly consumer and decadent culture.
The world is crazy, and I think, sadly, that we’ve not even come close to the end of the shouting all around us. Still, God is there, alive, present, and quietly inviting us to come to Him and find the real rest we’ve been seeking. In the end that still, small, voice, may be just exactly what we need to hear and the one place of true rest in a world of storms.
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The Class of ’79
I had the chance to meet a member of my high school class a short while ago. We had both found our way to the hot tub in our health club and, while it took a second, we recognized each other and began to talk.
We talked about knees, mine, hers, the operations we had or anticipated. When only a few years have passed since high school people talk about jobs, success, cars, and such. As the years pass we talk about children, grandchildren, and knees that don’t quite work the same way as they did when we were younger. I suppose that in the years to come those of us who remain will talk about those who have passed on and one day there will only be one of us left to remember anything at all. Such is the nature of things.
In some ways my high school days seem like they really were decades ago, and sometimes it seems like an instant. I was new to town and so I didn’t have the advantage of history with people that’s so important when you try to fit in in a small town, and although the town I went to high school in was a metropolitan suburb, it was also a small town. My father’s job, a good job for him and us, uprooted me from the place where I had grown and I don’t think I ever was successfully transplanted to the new garden.
So high school was often odd and lonely for me and I certainly don’t look back at it as some kind of “Glory days.” It’s hard to be forced by law and geography to be at a place where you don’t feel you belong and combining that with all the craziness that is adolescence was sometimes overwhelming. There are days when even now I wish I could have somehow stayed in my hometown with the people who knew me from when I was a kid, the people I had to leave suddenly in the middle of 8th grade. That place wasn’t perfect either, no place is, but sometimes when I walked the high school halls alone I wished I was somewhere, anywhere, else and the place I left behind seemed as good a place as any.
Thirty plus years out from high school, of course, everything is different. Time and maturity do their work and wisdom helps you gain perspective. High school was hard for me but it also helped me grow strong, become a caring person, and provided the storm that made the calm that followed even more sweet. I left the place like a rocket launching into the air and I’ve kept climbing. A substantial part of who I am now is rooted in that time, the largest part, I suppose, just the sheer determination to prove to the world that the person they saw in those days was never going to be my destiny and that there was, and is, so much more. Knowing what it was like to hurt, and hurt badly, my whole life from those days has been about healing, my own, and, even more than that, doing whatever I could to see healing happen wherever I happened to be. It helped make me a Priest, and a caregiver, and a person fiercely passionate about the amazing power of Jesus to transform lives, even reality itself. Though I was often a stranger at my own high school I’d like to think that if they saw me now they would know that things have worked out well, thank God.
Still, I don’t keep track of many of the people from my high school class. I know some of them have died and from time to time I meet one here and there. It’s in my nature to have only a few close friends. It’s not that I don’t like people, my work is such that I’m surrounded by them every day and I probably know, or have known, hundreds of people all around the world. My inner circle, by my own preference, is just small. Still, I do pray for my high school class often, sometimes at church and more often when God wakes me up in the middle of the night to pray. I wish them well, I really do, and I wish them all the blessings and good things this life has to offer. I hope they are at peace and sometimes when I ponder things I think about what they may be doing or where they are and I hope the life they have is wonderful in the best sense of that word.
So it was good, this chance meeting in the health club hot tub with an old classmate. I remember her as a good person, still is, and we talked about knees, hers, mine, and ours, the kind of talk you get from people in their middle age. The thoughts of that chance encounter are the seed of what I’ve written and I pray, too, that her life has been, and will be blessed.
God is good, all the time, and because of His goodness to me I wish every one in the Mahtomedi High School Class of 1979 all of His blessings as well, peace in this world and heaven in the world to come. This coming Sunday I’ll do what I’ve often done before and light a candle at church with your names on it.
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Fasting Diets…
are gaining new acceptance, so says the headline. In Orthodox Christianity we’ve been following a fasting diet for around 20 centuries and, as a general rule, support the idea of moderation in our consumption of food throughout the year. From time to time stories like these remind us that our ancestors, although not as technically advanced as we are, had wisdom that has stood the test of time couched in the form of stories, traditions, and spiritual writings.
The Beautiful Path 