I haven’t been feeling like myself for some time now, a variety of symptoms, some days better then others. The travel, long weeks, and my own lack of self care are taking their toll. That all being said I was moved by this verse from today’s readings…

Brethren, it is the God who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ. But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, to show that the transcendent power belongs to God and not to us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair, persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may be manifested in our bodies. For while we live we are always being given up to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus may be manifested in our mortal flesh. So death is at work in us, but life in you. Since we have the same spirit of faith as he had who wrote, “I believed, and so I spoke,” we too believed, and so we speak, knowing that He who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus and bring us with you into His presence. For it is all for your sake, so that as grace extends to more and more people it may increase thanksgiving, to the glory of God…

2 Corinthians 4:6-15

I know I haven’t endured even a fraction of what St. Paul has endured but the words bring comfort anyways.

I am God’s wheat.

Sin is bad for you. Really.

Some time ago I told the good people of St. Elias “Go ahead and sin, do whatever you want, and if you’re actually alive in six months you’ll be very miserable.” I didn’t want them, or me, to actually put that into practice, of course, but I wanted to make a point. The stuff the Tradition of our Faith calls “sin” can really wipe you out, physicially, spiritually, emotionally, financially, your choice.

Don’t believe me? Underlying this whole financial mess we’re in right now is not the market but sin. People got greedy. People wanted what their neighbors had. People ignored the rules because they wanted theirs. Look where it got us. Things like what we’re experiencing now are the blowback of moral failure, yours, mine, and ours. Nobody wants to talk about that dimension, of course, because ideas like “sin” are considered medieval and primitive but in all the debates about stimulus packages and economic changes morality is the elephant in the kitchen. None of it will matter if people don’t relearn a simple principle, “Thou shalt not steal.”

The great irony of our time may be that the recovery of our economy, our culture, our health, and our general welfare may depend not on some new technological acheivement and certainly not by the fiat of this government or that but by the recovery of the conciousness of sin, in ourselves, our culture, and the world. If we can recover that, and it normally takes a tremendous amount of pain to get the average person (myself included) to face this, then we’re on the road to health. If not, then all, for now, may be lost.

What is the meaning of the sanctity of life?

Immediately, of course, the issue of abortion emerges. It’s often the flash point in these times when the topic is the sanctity of life. As Orthodox we share the historic Christian understanding that abortion is a grave moral wrong. Our teaching has not changed even when the proponents of abortion try to hide its reality with the use of words like “choice.”

But the sanctity of life is more than simply the Church’s position on abortion. Because it is so prevalent today, people often focus on abortion as they speak of the sanctity of human life from the Christian perspective and in doing so forget that this issue is woven into a larger understanding, a greater whole.

At the core of the Christian understanding of the sanctity of life is the reality that human beings were created by God and given something that even the animals, as intelligent as they can be, do not possess, the breath of God the capacity to be a living soul. Even the darkness of human sin and mortality has not completely extinguished that light, that life from God.

Because human life comes from God is has sanctity and this sanctity is absolute because of its origins. We see ourselves as we are and we often, by default, accept this current way of existing as being natural and normal. But we were not designed by God to harm, demean, sacrifice, or kill each other and the way we often live is actually unnatural, out of sync, and dysfunctional, contrary to the purpose and design of our creation.

As Christians we’re actually seeking to return to our “normal” state, the primal innocence and union with God that marked our beginnings and from which we chose to stray. We live in a world where we see the consequences of our choice to reject God, war, hatred, dysfunction, brokenness, pain, hurt, and death, and we are trying to find our way home. Our Lord Jesus Christ shows us this way, in fact He is the way because to bring humanity back to God, God chose to become human allowing us to come back, as it were, to the Eden we had forsaken. And because of this, because we have been reunited with God, we are called to live in a different way. We are called to embody not the values of the cultures around us still languishing in darkness but rather to live as children of God, as people who have been sanctified, illuminated, and regenerated. We have Christ for our example, the Tradition of our Faith for the assistance we need, and the presence of the Holy Spirit within us to give us the grace and power to accomplish this.

The implications of this understanding are far reaching and touch every facet of our existence. This is something we must understand. Our Faith is not simply something we add on to whatever else we have going on in our lives but, when properly understood, should become our lives. No hyphen is allowed before the word “Christian” in our lives, any modifier to the word means we still have not understood what it means. If we wish to be saved Christian must become the only term by which we describe ourselves, the only motivation for our life.

This, of course, has far ranging implications but among them is how we view human life, ours, the life of those we share affinity with, and even the life of those we do not know or who are our enemies. Being illuminated we understand that often our culture’s understanding of the value of human life is broken, misplaced, commercialized, exploited, harmed, and mutilated. For the sake of a better way we try as best we can to live beyond a broken world’s understandings of humanity and embrace, even in this world’s darkness, the original God given understanding of who we are.

In this we understand that life, even from its conception, is sacred and it’s always and everywhere more than whatever is convenient at the moment, more than the value the powerful may place on it, more than even the damage the person themselves may have done to it. Because of this we refuse to dispose of each other, refuse to define each other by any other category than what can found in Christ and refuse to ultimately identify ourselves in any other way as well. In Christ enemies are reconciled, brokenness is made whole, sins are washed away, humanity is reunited to God, and peace is restored. Because of this we are called to live like Christ if we wish to have true life and define ourselves and each other as He would.

As these principles are understood the sense of our ethic becomes apparent. We pray for our enemies because Christ calls us to remember they are still human even if they seek our hurt, subject to the same mortality and passions as we are. We cherish the life of the unborn because our Faith teaches us that all life is a gift from God, even that of the most vulnerable among us. We oppose the commercialization, the exploitation, the slavery of human beings because this disfigures the image of God still within us, both for those who are its victims and its perpetrators. We, as children of the Prince of Peace, see war, even if the cause is just, as deeply regrettable and whenever we can we avoid it and when we cannot we seek its quick end and commit ourselves to the care of everyone regardless of their side because they are human. We understand that those who are rich must share with those who are not so that no person created in the image of God is left in degradation.

The list could go on but the point is made. At various times various issues will present themselves to us as we grapple with what it means to be human and how we should live with each other in the world. Yet underlying them all are inviolable principles; life as a gift, a sacred trust, from God, the call to live as people who see ourselves and each other not in the vision of the world but with the eyes of Christ who by taking on humanity restored its sanctity, and the challenge of the practical, and sometimes radical, ways these truths work themselves out in our lives. Understanding this is the beginning of knowing what we mean when we speak, as Orthodox, of the sanctity of human life and applying it helps us grasp what it means to be called Christian.

On the complementary nature of man and woman.

An interesting take on the recent work by British scientists to eliminate a potential cancer gene before birth.

The temperature outside is dropping like a rock, down to 25 below zero Farenheit in some areas, and I took a day off from Valerian to let my body chemistry readjust so I’m awake and writing. All I can hear is the furnace kicking on again and again as it struggles against the cold and I wonder how much that’s going to cost when we get the bill in February. Oh well, I’ll be back in bed in a minute or two and this won’t last forever. They say we could be in the 30’s by next week and it’ll be nice to go outside without looking like the Michelin man. One more hard day and the mercury starts rising.

BTW I’m not sure what kind of original equipment battery comes with a Saturn Vue, probably an AC/Delco, but mine is amazing. Yesterday morning, below zero, cranks right over. Takes a few miles to get warmed up but starts like a charm.

It’s hard to watch, sometimes, the endless fighting in the Middle East, two cultures with a hand on each other’s throat and an unwillingness to let go. From a distance and the safety of these shores it seems unreal, senseless like two street gangs doing battle over the same dank street corner save for the advanced weapons.

One wonders, how many will have to die? When will two people looking at each other across the divide finally think to themselves “This is insanity, honor, country, people, everything distorted and the only thing real is the blood flowing out of our children.” People long dead started it all and fresh bodies join them on an assembly line powered by grudge. Larger forces play the greater game but like everything else the pawns get brushed off the table. Young men pay for old men who can’t forgive or forget and young women join their mothers in the black clothes of widows.

On the face of it there is no answer. Contemporary Arabic culture is steeped in hatred of Jews, those people whose very life affronts their sense of honor and whose survival calls to mind their ongoing defeat. Jews, with wounds still raw and bleeding from the Holocaust, vow “Never again” and fight to claim a land for themselves and the safety of borders as if the people who’ve lived there for centuries don’t matter. Will the last Palestinian and the last Israeli left alive at least agree turn out the lights when they leave this world?

And here we are as Orthodox Christians, somewhere in between the apocalyptic fueled love for Israel from the right and calculated and oft manipulated Palestinian rage of the left. Somewhere in the middle trying to make sense of it all even as in our hearts we probably have already figured out that sense, at least in the world’s understanding of it, may never come. The diplomats burn fuel trying to make it go away but the fire never stops.

Only one thing remains and that is prayer. Prayer not for one side or the other but prayer for peace, for hope, for wisdom, for that moment when somehow, somewhere, the Holy Spirit touches two people burning with anger and allows them to see the person in the body they are about to exterminate, the child of God under the uniform and say “Enough.” Only our Lord will be able to heal the land of his wayward family, this struggle between the sons of Abraham and until that time comes we cannot forget to pray for that sad, hurting, chunk of the globe, engaging the spiritual forces and principalities which have woven themselves in and through every human experience in anticipation of the day when faith becomes sight.

In your mercy, Lord, let this day be soon.