Author: Fr. John Chagnon
A Laugh or Two
A Place for Vestments
You Will Be Out of Step
if you live this Orthodox life. There’s no question about it. Out of step with the flow of the world around you. It really can’t be any other way.
I’m thinking about this as Lent is drawing near with its Wednesday and Friday services and, in our area, Sunday afternoon Pan-Orthodox vespers. Then, of course, there’s Holy Week. Even outside of Lent my schedule is just different because my Faith calculates time with little thought to the commercial, social, and digital world in which I live. When something has to give its that larger world and not the world of my Faith that has to do the giving. It’s just part of how this thing called Orthodoxy works.
What I’m trying to value is out of step as well. If I am to seriously be Orthodox my political life, as this is an election year here in the United States, will never quite fit in any of the categories provided for me. The same for my economic life. As the culture changes my views on sexuality and family are becoming way out of the mainstream, and lately I’ve been noticing it all.
It’s probably because of where I believe I’m headed. I’m trying to be wherever Jesus is and although I’m not even close to being good at it I still want to try. As I get older I understand more and more that when that’s your destination things are just going to be different, and I’ll be different, too, just a bit out of step with the world around me, attached but not too tightly, and traveling on a path at variance with the paths around me.
All of this is not a complaint, but rather a statement of fact. One of the great blessings of growing older is the lessening of the pressure to be like everyone else. I’m much more comfortable in the understanding that my Faith will mean that some days I will truly be out of step with the world around me. Still, as I get closer to home I also understand in ever greater depth why this is the way it must be and the joy of it all increases as well.
Share this:
Being the Church…
When you come into the Orthodox Faith from outside there is a kind of hope. You’ve read the material. You’ve kicked the tires a bit. In some vague sense there is an awareness of the reality that problems, struggles, challenges, and sin exists within Her yet they don’t seem to be at the front of your mind. The beauty of it all just sort of eclipses everything else.
You can run on that energy for some time, years even. Hope is a powerful force and even as you experience more of the humanity of the Faith that hope covers a multitude of things so that you can carry on even as you become more aware of not just the promises you read about in “Becoming Orthodox” but the everyday life in your everyday parish.
Somewhere along the line, though, the rose color will disappear from your glasses and you’ll discover that, well, your church, that shining city on the hill you had hoped for, is filled with people, regular people with every liability that comes with being human. You wanted something bright, beautiful, and glorious, and, while that occasionally happens, what you often get is something worn, tired, and less than the ideals that drew you to Her door.
At this point people will give up. When, as they say, the “Thrill is gone”, people do get up and leave, even the Orthodox Church. It happens all the time. Others give up while staying, marking time with lowered expectations and a kind of steady numbness that allows them to make do. Neither is particularly healthy. If you leave the Orthodox Church to “shop” a while for a new thing in time that new thing will, like your Orthodox experience, grow old as well. Count on it. If you decide to “Drop out” while still in the Orthodox Faith you’ll at least be present but it will largely be pointless, a whole bunch of Sundays spent going through the motions.
Instead, I think, the answer lies in being the kind of Orthodox Christian you’d like your parish and the larger church to be. If you want a dynamic, active, and living Faith, the kind of Faith you read about in the books, the kind that stirs your soul and challenges you to holy and good things, the only place to start is with yourself. The revival you are looking for begins with you. The grace you are looking for is the grace you receive, cultivate, and share. The holiness you desire will only be as vital as your own. The mission you want for your parish is the mission you undertake. If you want a lively parish you must have a lively faith.
Of course this is not easy. Orthodoxy is not easy because it is thorough, deep, and profound, even if some times, or most times, its collective and human forms do not live that way. If you want something better than what you see around you, don’t leave or spend your life of faith in numb despair. Resolve to be the kind of change, the kind of holiness, the kind of grace, the kind of beauty, that drew you to Orthodoxy in the first place and in saving yourself you will save others as well.
Share this:
Death and Wisdom
In a little over a month three people in my parish have passed away. One was a venerable Archdeacon, a good man full of years. He had served His Lord and the Church for decades and passed peacefully in his sleep. The other two were young, a high school boy full of promise tragically taken in a car accident, and a man in his early twenties who reposed in the Lord after a brave battle with illness.
Three deaths in three different ways. Death is ingenious like that, it has the ability to come in as many ways as there are people to visit and no one, regardless of their age or station, is immune. We expect, in the normal course of life, for those along in years to die but even the young can, and do, leave this life. We have seen it, first hand, as December has given way to the new year.
There are no answers in all of this, at least not in the short term. We know, in each case, the cause of death but the greater questions of “Why?” will take time to ponder. It always does. Death challenges pious platitudes and easy answers because death has a profound depth to it, a great mystery in the best sense of that word, and easy answers seem to fall apart in the face of it.
Death is also, though, a forge of wisdom with the power to clarify the true value of things and burn through everything superficial. The knowledge that this time on earth is limited can be a source of frivolity where all of our efforts are focused on extracting fleeting glimpses of whatever we consider the good life in a mad dash before the deadline. It can also be a source of paralysis and despair where the idea of the inevitable end clouds every part of every point along the way. Or it can call us to something higher, to search for, and practice, the good, the true, the things that transcend the moment, and even life itself. If that is the course we choose, then, perhaps, even death, as mysterious and powerful and challenging as it is, has something to offer us in this life.
Share this:
A Monk…
Share this:
Time and the Dead….
In this past month we’ve had two sad deaths in our parish and the grieving has had me ponder what time must be like for those who are in the nearer presence of Christ.
First, though, a note. I used the title “Time and the Dead” for this post because it was kind of catchy, almost like a name for a rock band, but the Orthodox understanding of death is that the body dies, something we consider to be a temporary condition because we believe that the body will also, at some future time, be resurrected, and the soul continues on, for the faithful, in the presence of God. So we use the term “dead” not so much as the idea of being completely extinguished as an entity but rather as a temporary separation of the body and the soul awaiting the resurrection and the transformation of all of who we are to our final state.
What led me to ponder the sense of time for those who have passed on were quotes and thoughts that came from the events of this month and around Facebook at this time of year about those who have passed on spending Christmas in heaven. I understand the sentiment, when my father and brother died I thought of that as well, how they would be spending events like Christmas and Pascha in the presence of Christ. There’s a certain peace that comes with knowing that the joy that we can experience in these feasts is a foretaste of the joy of being in God’s nearer presence.
Still, those sentiments, as good as they are, come from the reality that we are creatures of time. Yes, eternity is in our hearts, but we live in time and so we see things that way. Yet, I wonder if those who are in the presence of Christ also see things that way? I’m inclined to believe they don’t, but what I am writing is speculation out loud and the reader should take it as that. The truth is that we’re never given precisely detailed descriptions of what life beyond this life entails and so our thoughts and hearts can travel to that existence but it would be hard to claim extensive knowledge. If only Lazarus had written a book!
From the stories of the Transfiguration of Christ we know that those who are departed to be with God have some sense of what is happening here. Moses and Elijah were speaking with Jesus, in one reading of that story, about what Jesus was to accomplish so there seems to be some kind of consciousness “over there” , as it were, of life “back here”. Over the centuries, as well, we, as Orthodox Christians have experienced the reality of the intercessions, not mediations, of the Saints, answers in our own lives of our requests for those who have gone to be with Christ to pray for us. The writer of Hebrews also uses the image of a stadium where people are in the stands are watching, as a cloud of witnesses, those of us who are currently living the Christian life. So, somehow, in a holy and blessed way, those who have departed this life have a kind of consciousness about what is happening here and, in certain cases, individual lives of the faithful.
In pondering that, though, I speculate that those who are with Christ, even as they can, as God allows, be witness to us as we live out lives in time are probably not aware of time as we are. God has no time in the sense that we measure it as one moment processing on to another. I don’t think there are clocks in heaven. Perhaps in hell although I can’t say that for sure, but probably not in heaven. To God, if I understand this correctly, all of what we call time is present. There is no past as we understand it with God, or for that matter the future. Now that doesn’t mean that God isn’t aware that we live in time or that God is incapable of entering human time, but rather that God isn’t bound by time and God’s vision of existence and reality isn’t necessarily framed by what we call time. I remember in my seminary days of one professor describing God as “timeful” that is everything in existence is always present to God.
So my presumption, and presumption it is, is that those who have departed to be with God in a state of blessedness also share in that timefulness. Their consciousness, I believe, is not limited by time as we understand it. So, for example, when the time comes for us to repose from this life those who know and love us who proceeded us won’t be saying “It’s been thirty years, glad you finally made it” because there the idea of anything like “years” is something that simply doesn’t exist. I think, by the way, that this is one reason those who have departed this life can be very effective intercessors for us, because they can pray for us with an understanding of existence not limited by our moment to moment sense of time and events. They can see a larger picture, a vision of things not trapped by our understandings of time and the meaning of things within that context, but rather with a “God’s eye view” of the entire panorama of existence where all events are present from the creation of everything that exists to its fulfilment in God at the end of time as we understand it.
Such heady things to be pondering in the wee, small, hours of a Sunday in December. And if these are only glimpses, what must the fullness of what God would have for us in His presence be like?
Share this:
I Was Serving the Liturgy…
at Holy Resurrection Church in Fargo, North Dakota yesterday and as I was serving I heard the voices of children who had joined in with the choir. They were not polished voices, they were simple, pure, pious, and innocent voices which is much to be preferred if a choice must be made, and they reminded me, as well, of those days when I had a simple, and unsophisticated as the world would see it, faith. Could it be possible that the whole point of this beautiful path, this life of Faith, is to, even knowing what we all do in the complicated adult life, get back to that place where our faith is like a child’s and we can sing from our hearts the songs of Faith?
Share this:
Many Years Ago…
guns were available at hardware and sporting goods stores, no background check and all the ammunition you could afford. Walk in, buy, walk out. You could even order them via catalog if you didn’t want to leave the house. My grandfather, as a young man, even had access to dynamite to help remove stumps from the ground.
Yet, no mass shootings basically anywhere. So what’s the difference between then, in the freewheeling bad old days of virtually no gun control and now? I don’t think its the guns. I do think its us.
The one difference I can see between then and now is that back then there was a larger moral framework rooted in a Judaeo Christian ethic where “Thou shalt not kill (murder)” was still taken seriously, and even the mobsters took care to follow it in their own way by trying to minimize “civilian” casualties.
Leap forward to now and that narrative is largely gone, done in by a culture where even some sense moral and social caution is identified as repression, where human identity is entirely divorced from any concept of the image of God and reduced to a basic consumer equation, and violence as a routine solution to human challenges has filled the moral vacuum with a hundred little deaths and, from time to time, explosions of death that make the headlines.
Politicians, bathed in this culture, see only more and different kinds of laws as the solution because they have forgotten about, or deliberately sought to undermine, the law inside a human heart. A moral human, properly formed, encouraged, and supported by a larger spiritual and ethical imperative, will hesitate to do violence even when its tools are close at hand but a person who has no proper morals, and lives in a culture where there is no larger context than how a person feels at any given moment, will use any tool at hand and no law can, or will, stop them. Witness the couple in San Bernadino who obtained the weapons used in the horrific crime outside of the existing laws.
No, I’m not advocating a weapons free for all. What I am advocating is something that most politicians, pundits, and sometimes even preachers have forgotten. We need a moral revival, a return to a larger moral narrative that affirms human life, impresses a moral responsibility on its members to strive above all to do no harm, and calls us away from our consumer driven, violence saturated, world. That revival will start when Christians decide to be Christians again and churches do the same.
The Beautiful Path 