Author: Fr. John Chagnon

When You’re a Young Man…

~ Fr. John Chagnon ~ 1 Comment

you want to love and be loved but to find someone to teach you how requires wading through a world of rock stars, pornographers, and people as clueless as yourself. Under their twisted supervision earnest seekers become victims and then victimizers as everyone is doing what the movies, songs, and buddies tell them they’re supposed to but no one is really happy and more than a few are broken in the process. The only escape seems to be more of the same, the illusion that the next one will be the real one yet it never seems to be ever happen that way.

If I could speak back through time to my younger self I would tell that person the hunger to be loved, to be touched, to encounter another, is perfectly real and good. Still, great care has to be taken with that fire so that it warms without consuming everything in its path.

I would say do things in the reverse of what the rock stars, pornographers, and clueless tell you. Seek out the spirit of the other, their goodness, all the qualities that attract you to them. Seek that first and let the physical, no matter how demanding it may be, rest, for later, for better. Any two can, in any moment, produce an ecstasy but there is so much more to love than that and becoming the soul mates you want, you need, takes time, takes genuine engagement with the other, and a willingness to build a life, and not just a moment, together.

I would also say “Look for the beauty of the soul” because the time of smooth skin and youthful vigor is very short indeed while a good heart lasts well beyond those days. If all that matters is physical charm your days of “love” will be very brief. Aim, instead, for everything that matters, everything that lasts.

Finally, find the “sweet spot” and let your teachers in all of this be somewhere in between those who are obsessed with exploring and engaging every possible passion and pleasure and those who see love and sex as necessary evils. A wise person is somewhere between a prude and a pervert, someone who understands the great gift of love, of sex, but also sees a much larger picture, the goodness of it all and, indeed, the holiness that is possible. If your teachers are those who truly seek out the Creator, the God who created us to love and touch and be sexual they will often naturally be in that “sweet spot” and their knowledge can save your heart, your soul, and your life if you are willing to accept it.

This, I would say to my younger self, will help you find not just what you want but what you need.

If I could…

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go back I think I’d only wish to change the times I did hurtful things to others or said unkind words. Everything else could stay the same.

The difficulty with that, of course, is the impossibility of it happening. Hard things done and hurtful words said are released into lives and can never truly be retrieved. Three things, though, provide some hope.

The first is that from time to time a person actually does get the opportunity to apologize and at least try to make things right. Seize those moments whenever you can.

The second is that time, the medium into which hard deeds and hurtful words is cast, is also a potential healer. Time gives people, even the hurting, a place to reflect, to understand, to grow, and to overcome. Time does heal, not always, but it can.

The third is heaven. For those wounds inflicted for which there is no possible apology or those which time cannot heal there is a place where, as we often say, “All sickness, sorrow, and sighing have fled away…” If life takes those I have hurt beyond my reach and time cannot heal I, at least, can pray fervently that those who I, in my own brokenness, have inflicted myself upon could at know and find heaven after the brevity of this life and perhaps there we both can find what eluded us along the journey here.

The Truth Is…

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most of us, almost all of us, will eventually be forgotten.

We’re born into a moment of history in a place and a time. Things happen to us and we change things ourselves in ways large, sometimes, but mostly small and then, when our time is done we exit. We go one way and the rest of the world another. The dead rest and fade away, even the tombstones will one day crumble to dust, and the living keep on living until their turn comes.

For a while we’ll be remembered and missed. But as the years march on the people who recall us will themselves be recalled and each generation that fades away dilutes the recollections. A fortunate few will leave something behind but most will not and all of us will become anonymous as time does it’s inevitable work. Even the Beatles will one day be forgotten.

We humans know this somewhere inside, in a place we don’t often visit and basically never want others to see. It makes us afraid, sometimes, to think of being extinguished or sorrowful in the recognition of our, sooner than we can imagine, disappearance. Indeed we rage against the dying of the light.

It would overwhelm us, it does overwhelm us, except for the possibility of Pascha, of something more, of resurrection. One can choose, I suppose, to be outrageous, to be affluent, to be infamous, to embrace celebrity even at the cost of our soul for the sake of being remembered, of being something more. Yet there may be more.

What if our memory, everything we will ever be, could be placed not in the human hands but God’s? What if our treasure, everything we could accomplish, could be stored away in a place currently invisible but most certainly real? What if this is just a beginning, this life, and not the sum total of everything there is? What if Pascha, resurrection, was not just an event of the past or a hope for the future but a way of life where existence is not measured in months and years but in eons and stages and everything we are, if its given to God, remains in His memory forever?

Tonight it will be Pascha again. Easter. For those who understand the Sun will rise at midnight and for those willing to grasp it comes the truth that there’s so much more, so very much more indeed.

January 23

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Only you, Lord, do I seek,

My haven, my rest, my constant in change.

Only you, Lord, do I seek,

My spring in the desert, my gentle snow.

In the night when my soul is tired I find your rest.

In the day when work encompasses me I know your strength.

In my broken moments you are oil and wine

When I am deceived you lead me home.

Only you, Lord, do I seek,

My calm on the ocean of life.

Only you, Lord, do I seek,

My life stronger than death.

Adios Facebook!

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I’m weary of the noise, weary of the half baked conspiracies, weary of the anger, and thinking about how much of my life was wasted has wearied me even further. It’s time for some detox, time for pure water from the Scriptures and the Saints to wash over and through me. Time for rest. Time to do good things. Time to exchange meaninglessness for grace.

Adios Facebook!

2021

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It is good to be here, dear friends, despite the world, the politics, and the general hysteria and anger.

Everything around has been reduced in the knowledge that almost everything can be taken away and all we have now is our faith, our prayers, and our belief to carry us on and through.

Therefore we have all we need.

These are interesting times

~ Fr. John Chagnon ~ 4 Comments

in the United States.

Those of us who’ve lived long enough have, of course, seen these before, more than we can count and, of course, each presents itself as “the” crisis of our times as if there was no before or after. For those who are younger without that history it must surely seem that way.

The genius of the American experiment is not that everything has always been perfect. In over two centuries there have been injustices, crimes, scandals, and any number of cringe worthy moments. It’s as historically blind to say these never happened as it is to say everything has always been riddled with them.

Rather, the wisdom of this Union lies in its capacity for self correction. Within its mechanisms has always been the means to face and correct what has gone astray, even if those mechanisms are, in and of themselves, riddled with human frailty. Of course, some things took too long, decades too long, but the point remains; they did happen and they still can.

Contrast this with the experience of those states where totalitarianism, of the Left or the Right, has been proposed as the avenue of utopian social change and been implemented on the promise. The record is clear, massive human rights abuses, a complete lack of respect for human persons and property, wealth for those in control with poverty for the masses, and death on an industrial scale.

Is our Union perfect? No, there is perfecting to be done. However the mere understanding that such perfecting can be done is why this Union, its constitution, its laws, its customs, and its potential for improvement, should be preserved if for no other reason that, even flawed, it is still the better alternative to any other and especially to those proposed by people who believe they can create the future by vandalizing the present.

Looking for Light

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There are dark things happening in the world.

As much as I try, for the sake of my soul, to keep the news at arm’s length, it finds a way in. Its hard to watch cameras sharing scenes of violence, especially knowing they’re doing it mostly to keep your eyes glued to the screen for their commercials.

Illness? In my work with Seniors with dementia producing illnesses I’ve experienced more people who’ve died of Covid than I have fingers and toes. So have all the others who work with me. So have countless nurses and providers all over this country. A decade or more, perhaps to the end of our lives, we’ll remember these days and those faces.

But the light, the light is still shining out there if you dare to look for it, if you choose to turn off your yammering TV and see beyond the walls of quarantine. First the light of God which is undimmed by any of the darkness of this world. Second, the light of God shining through the goodness of humans who’ve chosen to do good for each other, sometimes even at their own peril. Third, the goodness of God in the creation that reveals itself like a rose in the middle of thorns. All of it is there, undenied, undying, and real to those who have the faith to see with eyes attuned not to just the present but also to that which is real beyond the present.

We all see what we want to see, what we’ve been conditioned to see, what our culture tells us to see. Some much of it is one dimensional, a present of only the here and now and that’s both unreal and a shame. Unreal because truly there is so much more than only that which meets the eye in any given moment and a shame because if a person hasn’t figured out how to see with the eyes of faith they will be forced to live without seeing the whole picture, to live as if the TV was all there is.