Author: Fr. John Chagnon

Christianity is Difficult…

~ Fr. John Chagnon ~ Leave a comment

because it really does require a life long commitment of every aspect of life in the quest to become like Christ. To truly understand Christian Faith you have to understand that the word “Christian” has no hyphen before or asterisk after to modify it. The old American Protestant hymn is quite correct “I have decided to follow Jesus, no turning back…”

Christianity is also beautiful beyond words because as its transformative powers are allowed to work, even if that transformation is difficult in any given moment, the person on the path begins to become what they were meant to be and discovers a kind of existence that, while fully engaged in the world, also transcends it, a world to come that lives in the present.

Dear Orthodox Christians…

~ Fr. John Chagnon ~ 4 Comments

Please come to the services on time.

I know, I know, you have kids, stuff, a late Saturday night, a world of reasons why. Still you can arrange, change, and set the alarm clock early if you really want to. You do this for work. You do this when you have tickets to a concert or pro sports event. You do this for a date. Why not for God?

Let me explain.

Would it make sense to you to come to a movie towards the end just so you can slip in and see the finish? Would you try to slide into a chair at the conference table at work just so the boss would notice you’ve at least arrived?

So why come late to church?

Perhaps you think you already know what’s going on, what’s going to be said, what’s the next item on the agenda. Truthfully, if you pay attention to the services of the Church you’ll realize it’s not all the same all the time. Yes the basic structure, tested by centuries of experience in worship, may be the same but the hymns, the readings, all of that is different depending on what day it is and what we’re calling to mind. Try listening. Try participating. You’ll be surprised at what you discover.

Maybe its just a cultural thing. After all, people wandered in late back in the old country so it must be the way things are, right? Wrong. A bad habit doesn’t get a special blessing just because it comes from the old country.

Then, again, it could be about everything just being plain boring. Yet the bottom line is that the services of the Church, or any church, are as boring as the people who are in attendance. If your heart is cold towards God and holy things no amount of fireworks, smoke, or loud music will warm it up. If you struggle with being in the presence of God for an hour or so once a week consider pondering what that says about how you and God are really relating. God hasn’t changed, so what’s different?

The truth is simple.

If you understand your Orthodox Faith correctly you realize that worship is the most important thing we do. Everything in our life flows from our awe and reverence of God and any time we can stand in His presence is holy time, unique, special, and of eternal importance. There is a blessing in worship, just being in the presence of the Holy can eternally change us. Worship calls us from a crazy world to the one place where there is sanity, the presence of God. Worship, when we are truly engaged in it, helps us to understand who we are and what we’re supposed to be. Worship is deliberately attempting to be with the One for whom, and by whom, we were made and as we make the attempt that God encounters us as well. Right worship is built right into our name “Ortho-dox” and without it we are meaningless.

So here’s the challenge.

Make the effort to get to all the services of the Church on time, early is even better. No more excuses, no more shading the edges, no more waiting until just before the Gospel is read so you can slip in and get the “prize” of the Eucharist like God’s love was some sort of Cracker Jack box.

Change yourself. Change your heart. Struggle if you have to, but just do it. And as you do don’t be surprised when you start seeing things in an entirely new way, God’s way, and you begin to realize that this Christian “stuff” is for real.

 

 

There is a great peace…

~ Fr. John Chagnon ~ Leave a comment

just in spending time in a church. I feel it when I step in, a sense of sanctuary from the craziness of the world, a physical reminder there are higher and more enduring realities in the world.

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At times it makes no difference what is actually going on, what Liturgy is being served, or how I am part of things. Just to be there, to have my eyes completely captured only by holy things, a whole world around me where nothing profane can find root. This is a deep kind of joy.

Now there is precious little refuge to be found. The whole world is about signs and commerce and work and the endless pursuit of the next “thing”. Some who are called flee to the deserts and forests to find a place of rest but I am called to be in this world and so I need a place in the world, a place that calls me to what is higher, better, and more enduring.

It does not need to be a fancy, covered with gold and finery. Wherever people of true Faith come in humility to encounter God is already covered in the best of decoration. I have been to beautiful churches and I have been to humble ones and I can say that God is no respecter of persons as much as He is a respecter of hearts. The holiness of hearts is what makes a church a temple and such hearts transform a building into a refuge from a confusing and aggressive world.

If nothing else is to be gained the Faithful should be in their temple as often as possible simply because it is “other” than any place in the world and may be the one place, the only place in the world, where holiness and the deep peace it brings is welcome. To rest in such a place refreshes the soul and brings healing to lives numbed by the restlessness of this world.

 

 

As I Have Grown Older…

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I have come to view the weeks of spring with a greater sense of appreciation. As the snow fades and the green emerges from the ground I feel the cool air give way to warmth and listen to the birds announce life’s return to the trees. There is a kind of gentle hope in all of that, a hope that means more to me now that I realize there are more years behind than ahead, more days past than days to come.

Hope and spring allow me to endure the craziness of the world, the sense of the whole thing flying off its axis and spinning madly through space and time. More than anything else these days I’m simply sad at what I see around me, a great delusion with victims who have no idea of how to escape and transcend. I find myself caught up in it as well, drowning in a stormy sea and waiting for the Master to reach down and pull me from the waves. Yet, at least  I know there’s a Master there and couldn’t imagine what it would be like if I didn’t. Such is the world these days, the world of headlines, 24 hour access, and a culture designed to make drones of us all.

Then spring comes and resurrection and a still, small, voice speaks with a clarity beyond the storm. Life begins anew. It always does. Crazy, bitter cold winters can wreak havoc with their temperamental winds driving us to huddle inside by any fire we have left to keep us warm. Yet they never last. Life, sanity, joy, better things, they always return. Sometimes, of course, there is much pain in the journey to that return, but the return, like spring, is inevitable.

One day my body, worn down by all the days that have passed will enter its winter slumber. One day the world around me will enter its night as well. Perhaps it already has. Yet I will rise and so will the world, both by the same force, the grace of God, God’s eternal spring which even death, the death of a person or the death of a culture, cannot overcome. What the birds in the trees announce now. the angels will then, and so the hope inside me never dies.

 

 

I Have a Gay Cousin…

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and I discovered that he recently married his long time partner, so all the stuff in the news these days has come a little closer to home.

My mother has met my cousin’s partner and apparently he’s a pretty nice guy. He’s an academic, a musician, and they have a nice home where they’ve lived together for years. There’s a beautiful garden in the yard and a certain kind of domestic stability that pervades the place. Had the judge not overturned their state’s laws on marriage and given them the opportunity to wed they would still be together as they have been for years. This is their house, their place, and their life.

It’s been decades since I’ve seen my cousin and years since we’ve talked, briefly, on the phone. The last surviving member of his immediate family, I only have a picture in my head of what he looks like and mostly I remember his paintings on the walls of their cabin on the lake. The son of my dad’s older sister I can’t say we’ve ever been close. In fact I don’t recall being close to any of the family on my dad’s side of the equation. So, in some ways. there is a distance between me and the news that he had married his partner.

I know what I’m not going to do. I’m not going to ostracize. I’m not going to despise. I’m not going to yell, badger, or harass. There will be no phone calls with Bible in hand and, if by chance, we meet some time we’ll talk of old times, look at some of his paintings, and catch up on all the years gone by.

Of course its hard for me in a way, but not the way most people may think. I was part of a team that spearheaded the introduction of HIV care to a health care facility. I’ve been a health care chaplain. I’ve watched good men, witty, bright, artistic, interesting, full of life, who happened to be gay, get sick and die. It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t good. It bore very little resemblance to the movie “Philadelphia”. Above all it was just sad.

The truth is that the image of a young man I cared for in tears, full of the realization that the man he looked to for love and happiness gave him an incurable illness, is stuck in my head and probably will be for the rest of my life. I see the statistics. I keep up on the health news. To be a sexual person in these United States is like running a gauntlet and for folks who identify as gay the risks are even higher. That’s not hate, just medical fact and there’s absolutely no joy or sense of “I told you so” in any of it. As a Christian I’ve given my life to helping make other people’s lives better and my heart aches in the face of human suffering. I’m glad my cousin has a steady place to be and people who care for him, as I understand it that’s not always been the case, but I also don’t want him to be another name on some quilt.

So, yes I worry a bit and pray, a lot. I cannot change anyone else. It’s enough that I struggle to change myself. I don’t have to agree with the choices other people make or the life they live as a condition for caring for them or having them as family or friends, so my door will always be open for anyone come what may. If there really is some kind of culture war to be fought I will fight it in my prayer corner and with loving service to others in confidence that God will shine His light where it is most needed.

Yes, my cousin is gay and married. But God isn’t finished with him, or me, yet.

 

 

 

 

Youth Retreat…

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Another youth retreat is over and my thoughts are with the younger members of my parish. I don’t recall being as busy, or at least feeling required to be as busy, when I was younger as they seem to be. Advanced placement classes, sports, jobs, various groups, family things. I wonder, sometimes, when they actually sleep. They have a lot of adult stuff thrown at them at a time when they’re still working out all kinds of big questions and if it was rough for me sometimes, and it was, I can’t imagine how it is now.

So when we have a youth retreat people sometimes ask me what the “program” is, what series of events, lectures, and activities am I using to fill the time. I think they’re surprised when they discover there is very little “program” and wide swaths of open space. I guess the idea is that even these times need to be be shaped by the same form that dance class, school, and everything else in their lives seems to have.

And that’s why I don’t often do it that way. To me these good young people are in a whirlwind of daily activities where well meaning people try to cram as much into their lives as possible and fill their potential college application essays with everything they’re supposed to have. It’s almost a kind of competition to do everything and be everything in the shortest amount of time.

There will be plenty of time for that in life after high school and college. In the not too distant future they will be dancing in a blender filled with work, kids, and everything the mad world can throw at them. They need something else.

They need to be allowed to be kids and not just mini adults. There is a kind of fun, goofy, exuberant, kind of life in children that we shouldn’t try to kill off too soon, if ever. Kids need to play. So do adults, by the way, but that’s another post. Somewhere there has to be a release valve where the pressures to do and be and perform are loosened and they can have a precious space of time to be kids without the adult world making its constant demands on them.

Young people need to learn how to rest. Their adult life can be filled with never ending tasks and if they don’t learn how to rest, the beautiful art of doing nothing, they will, sadly, join the herd of unhappy, harried, people who have gained the whole world but lost their soul. God declared a day of rest so we humans could be more than our work, tending to the garden of our relationships and soul which are, in the long run, exceedingly more important than whatever office we can acquire as we claw our way up the corporate ladder.

They also need to learn to contemplate, to look at the stars, live with the kind of silence that can let them think clearly, and ponder great things in the absence of the world’s noise. At one retreat a group of our young folks spent a few hours out on the dock looking up into the night sky and considering the stars above. The knowledge, the wisdom, gained from that is, in my opinion, as important to the development of true character as what they learn in school. While understanding advanced calculus can be a mark of intelligence, pondering the larger world, the whole of God’s creation and its vastness, is what helps make a person wise.

In the end that’s my only program, to create a space where, in the sometimes crazy world, young people can step back from their world, even for a few hours, and be open to something larger than just the continual tasks of any given day. Freed from the moment I hope they will be open to see eternity because no one can see eternity and not be profoundly changed for the good.

Which is Worse…

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the fact that people in darkness are acting out of that darkness or that the people who claim to have Light have been apathetic in the face of the darkness around them? Perhaps the greater judgment will be, not on the people around us who are acting out of a darkness that has made them blind, but rather on those of us who claim to see clearly and have done next to nothing to help those who cannot see.