It was 8:00 PM bfore I got on the road this past Sunday. It was the day of the parish festival and well after events closed down there were still buildings to clean and things to haul back to church.

I had been standing for nearly twelve hours and my voice was hoarse from moving from table to table to talk to people. But the truth is that others had done a whole lot more. There were folks in the kitchen who kept meal after meal coming without air conditioning to take the edge off. Someone had to scrub pans in the back with clothing glued to their body by steam and sweat. Two men stood in front of a grill for hours. Compared to that walking around and making sure people were schmooozed was down right child’s play.

I’m amazed at these festivals how many Orthodox are actually in the LaCrosse area. If everybody showed up we’d probably have around 100 or more in church on any given Sunday. They show up for festivals and Pascha and sometimes Christmas and often when they die but alas even in this neck of the woods its hard to find a way to convince them to take part in the everyday life of the church. I wonder sometimes. Do I have bad breath? Body odor? Is there some magical thing I can do to help them see the value of their faith? And more often than not I think to myself “What happened at some time in the past that switched the devotion “off” and brought them to a place where the faith that many in their own countries paid for with their lives means little more than a ceremonial convenience? I wish I knew. I pray I would come to know. I pray for all those who should be with us almost every time I prepare the gifts before Liturgy.

There’s no judgement there, just sadness. Some day people will need their faith and all the things it bestows and the problem is that if they haven’t developed it over time there’s no way to bring it all back in a moment of crisis. I was a health care chaplain for some years and so many times family members would contact me and ask for help in a moment of trouble and I would discover they had never practiced their faith in any real way until this moment when their family member was lying in the hospital unresponsive with tubes and machines everywhere. There was little I could do except pray and hope that somehow God could penetrate the moment with the kind of grace that catches a person just before they fall over a cliff.

I pray, too, that these good people I meet only at Festivals who, like so many in this culture, have probably been slowly weaned off the need for the holy by the constant allures of a consumer culture and “right here, right now” mentality will be touched by grace. I hope they will see there is so much more to life and far from being a place for rituals the church is the nerve center for a whole way of life, a whole world view, that transforms, heals, restores, and saves. I really do believe that and it’s what keeps me a Priest.

That all being said, the Festival was a good day, warm but not too hot (except in the kitchen) and a time where the whole community got to see and meet us. People had fun, enjoyed each other’s company, and old acquaintances found each other with laughs and smiles throughout the day. Everything was permeated by the devotion of our small group of folks to hard work for an object of love, the little Parish of St. Elias where a dozen or so people fed nearly a thousand and let our light shine. And as tired as I was the drive home was peaceful and beautiful with the kind of light that only can be seen at dawn or when the sun is ready to set behind hills.

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If you do anything today please go to the home page of Ancient Faith Radio and look for the audio file of Lynette Hoppe an Orthodox missionary in Albania who resposed in the Lord in August of 2006. Two weeks before she died she gave a talk that must be heard. It is a magnificent testimony of the grace of God.

Next Sunday marks our 28th Annual Mediterranean Festival at St. Elias.

It’s quite an event for such a small church with entertainers, a bookstore, a silen auction, and meals for over a thousand. We’ll fill, with good fortune, a building the size of an American football field with people and for such a small parish that means a lot of work.

There’s a love / hate relationship in Orthodoxy with Festivals. Sometimes they can become an end in themselves and frankly we need the money they raise. On the other hand they are a common project that can bind a community together and a nice way to get some exposure in the community. Obviously we’d rather have everyone just tithe and end the need of these events to cover operating expenses and yet even if that happened I’m sure we’d do them almost entirely for charity and as a way to celebrate that we’re here.

I’m proud of St. Elias for taking the step of tithing our festival income. Ten percent of our income will go to charity, probably our own funds for charitable ministries, and that’s quite a step of faith to take ten percent off the top when the budget is tight. Yet it’s the right thing to do and so we’ll press on.
God has and will always take care of us.

And the hard work binds us together. After almost thirty years its amazing how about twenty people can plan and implement a whole program that includes feeding hundreds. It would seem daunting, but it does work and somehow we make it through. This coming Sunday night, weather being good and all things working, we’ll be tired to the bone but grateful for all that God has done and hoping for the future.

Pray for us!

Here. Worth the reading.

Sometimes it seems, at least on cursory review that some of the church fathers and early writers saw marriage as, at best, a kind of condescension to human weakness, a way to at least regulate a base and primal urge.

I suppose some of it may be that large numbers of those who could write in those days were, if not monastic in their orientation, monastics themselves and being monastic would see the path they had chosen as a better one, like St. Paul. Some also saw the promiscuity in the larger culture (yes the baby boomers didn’t invent “gettin it on”) and in themselves and reacted with over statement.

Yet the Scripture and and the Tradition are very clear, marriage is honorable, full of grace, and a holy path for those men and women who prayerfully choose it. And I sense that every day because I have an extraordinary khouria (Arabic for priest’s wife) and on the occasion of this day, her birthday, I’m reminded again of how much I have received despite my unworthiness.

It’s not easy to be the wife of a priest. The expectations, rightly or wrongly, can be high. The schedules sometimes get messed up. And their are times, like today, of absence, when the duties of the calling separate a priest and his family and one must make do as best as possible. Some parishes even still expect a “twofer” that is they get two people full time serving the church for one salary. Oh, by the way, the job description keeps changing too, sometimes every week.

As we’ve traveled from place to place and followed the path that God has set for us my wife has been the single person who has been support, strength,helpful critic, and the foundation of our life together. Nothing that I have done or will do could happen without her and if there are rewards for something I’ve done that somehow escapes the refiners fire it will be at least half hers and maybe all.

Far from a condescension to weakness we are strong together in a way that we could not be alone and together we have endured much and yet have also known a kind of joy that comes only when it can be shared. This fall will mark 22 years of marriage, and if, by God’s grace there are 22 more I would not complain.

I’m only sad for St. Augustine because if he had known what I have known the world may have been very different.

“The liturgy has always been a way to elevate even the lowliest of believers, sometimes the only way available to them, so that a de-emphasis of beauty in music, buildings, and language, in the name of ease to understand or comprehend faith, has the unfortunate result of eliminating the main channel by which people can escape from a deadening common culture whose principles are the opposite of this elevation to beauty.”

From this article.

It’s around 9:30 PM and I’ve just gotten up from an evening’s nap. You never how tired you are until you lay down on a really nice hotel bed for a few minutes and wake up four hours later.

Lexington, Kentucky is about 13 hours south and east by car from St. Paul, Minnesota and another Priest and I took the trip on Tuesday. The road was mostly fine with the usual gouging for tolls around Chicago and a few blinding rainstorms through central Indiana. We were up before 5 AM and then with travel and a few other things we needed to do were asleep sometime around 11 at night and then up again at 6 AM for Matins at St, Michael’s Church in Louisville on Wednesday. Now you know why I drifted off before supper tonight and still may head right back to bed after this is done.

Kentucky was once the frontier in America, the edge of the wilderness and populated by hearty souls who put cabins on the sides of hills and cut fields out of the forest to make farms. It still has much of that wild beauty although now its thoroughly modern and punctuated with sky scapers. Only the heat, thick and beautiful in its own way as it flows through the shade trees, feels like the old south.

And yes, Orthodoxy is here in a kind of bustling athletic way at St. Michael’s in Louisville with its hundreds of members and plethora of programs and in a more gentle, but no less vibrant, way here in Lexington and St. Andrew’s, the host of our Diocesan Conference here at the hotel. Orthodoxy shows up in all kinds of places and is actually growing in the south far from the ethnic bastions of the American northeast. Quite under the larger culture’s radar Orthodoxy is establishing itself across the United States, quietly doing its work, and subtlely planting its seeds.

We’re subversives, you know, we Orthodox. Right in the middle of a crazy consumer culture where the ground seems to shake with every twitch of shallowness we’re digging deep and building for the long haul, for forever for that matter. We’re the real counter culture, the alternative to a world that sometimes seem to have gone blind stinkin’ drunk on its own home brew. People are finding us, often despite our complete lack of inviting them, for the sake of sanity and for that something inside which drives thirsty people to water. Awed by what we have received through absolutely no worth of ourselves there are many of us who feel that if God will have mercy on us, and believe me we need it in buckets, the next great wave of the church in this land will not come from churches in auditoriums with television shows but in these little seeds of Orthodox life and faith being planted in places that only God knows why and the hearts of seekers of truth, beauty, and the God of the universe.

Watch for it.

Agree or disagree the man has a razor edge wit and can write with the best of them.