I invariably don’t keep New Year’s resolutions. In fact a few weeks ago I joked with some of the residents at work that in 2009 I planned on gaining 30 pounds, stopping exercise, and taking up smoking knowing that I would inevitably fail at it just because they were resolutions and may end up healthy by default.

I have a stirring, though, for what I should be doing now that the year is fresh. I would like to draw closer to God and become more human. They’re tied together, of course, and they sound grandiose but its what I know I need to do whether its in resolution form or not. Some of what I must do is already apparent and I trust that God will clue me in for whatever else needs to be done.

And then, one foot in front of the other…

As some of you have noticed by the time/date stamps on some of my postings I can have occasional bouts of insomnia. Have any of you tried Valerian and if you have how have you experienced it?

Tarpon Springs, Florida, Epiphany, and the crowds have come early. The Bishop will be present and standing at the edge of the water. At the appropriate time, a group of young boys at the ready, he will throw a cross into the water and the young men will dive in the hope of recovering it and gaining a little bit of celebrity and blessings for the year.

Up here where the snow falls and the water gets hard around December we try to avoid doing this. It’s not that we don’t cherish Epiphany, we do, but we prefer those who dive into the water to come out intact so we put the cross in the hands of a Priest and plunge it into a bowl of water to bless it. If the weather is better and the people more inclined they may process to a local river or lake and bless the water from the shore or through the ice.

Regardless the symbolism is the same. In Tarpon Springs the cross symbolizes Christ and the boys who dive for it call to mind St. John the Forerunner lifting our Lord from the water following his baptism. And in places grand and humble Orthodox Christians will symbolically repeat that action, crosses in water calling to mind the baptism of Christ. But there is more to the story, truths the various customs call us to remember.

The word Epiphany itself means “to show” or “to reveal” and occasionally the word will be used to describe when a person has a moment when they finally understand something. As Orthodox we understand three things are made known to us in the events commemorated by this Holy Day.

The first is the truth of the Trinity. In the story of Jesus baptism we see the first time when in a very explicit way the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are present to humanity. Those who witnessed Jesus’ baptism heard the voice of the Father declaring that this person being baptized was indeed the Son and above it all the Holy Spirit hovered, as at the beginning of the world, over the waters.

As Orthodox Christians we need to be reminded that our view of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, did not arise out of some inner need to be esoteric or mystical but rather because God chose to reveal Himself this way. At times it’s difficult to conceive of a God who can be three persons in one essence, the uniqueness of God leaves us with nothing with which we can compare. Yet we know, as well, that there are things in the world which are true even though we cannot exhaustively understand them.Rather than seeing the Trinity as a puzzle which must be solved we understand this revelation as a gift given by love, an infinite God showing finite humanity the truth of His being in a way that we can at least grasp on to even as it challenges our senses and categories.

The second truth revealed in the Epiphany is the solidarity of God with His creation and with its redemption. People who study the scriptural accounts often wonder why it was that Jesus was baptized. We understand that baptism for us is regenerative, that is it brings us forgiveness of sins, enlightenment, salvation, and the grace of God to grow in a continuing life of faith. But Jesus had no need of any of this. So for Orthodox it was not the waters that sanctified Jesus but Jesus who sanctified the waters, and all creation, by his baptism. The waters of the Jordan and through them all creation were blessed by contact with Jesus in his baptism, a kind of preparation for the day when all creation will be returned to the goodness and glory with which it was endowed by God.

Related to this is our Orthodox understanding that as Jesus entered into physical matter, in his birth and in his baptism, matter itself, far from being crude or base, can be a channel of grace. This is why we bless people, objects and animals, use water, incense, oil, and a wide variety of physical items in our worship and life, and of course celebrate the icon. It’s also why we don’t cremate our dead; a body that has been, like all physical matter, touched by grace in Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit becomes itself a sacred thing. When Jesus stepped into the water phyiscal matter began its return to sanctity and while many think of us as a mystical faith in reality Orthodoxy is very organic, earthy, and sacramental.

And finally there is a call to us as well, in remembering the significance of the Epiphany, to reveal the reality of God in our own lives. We’re challenged by our faith to allow God to be revealed in us so that through us God can be revealed to the world. The Epiphany is not just something we recall or an event that we can study for its significance but it should also be our lived experience, the reality of God living in us revealing God to a world that now more than ever needs to see his face.

Understand this and you’ll begin to know your Faith.

I was browsing the www looking for resources on Orthodox faith and anger/depression and stumbled across this prayer…

O my beloved Queen, my hope, O Mother of God, protector of orphans and protector of those who are hurt, the savior of those who perish and the consolation of all those who are in distress, you see my misery, you see my sorrow and my loneliness. Help me, I am powerless, give me strength. You know what I suffer, you know my grief — lend me your hand because who else can be my hope but you, my protector and my intercessor before God? I have sinned before you and before all people. Be my Mother, my consoler, my helper. Protect me and save me, chase grief away from me, chase my lowness of heart and my despondency. Help me, O Mother of my God!

The prayer is from a Priest who suffered much in the Russian gulag and is quoted in an article from Fr. George Morelli which can be found here.

New Year’s Day. Sleep in for a while, health club before lunch, return home and find a three hour nap with my name on it. Wake up and discover a Looney Tunes (the old stuff with Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd, Sylvester & Tweety) marathon on Cartoon Network and I get to be a kid again.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhh!

May God grant you and all those you love his great mercy and blessings in the coming year!

My nieces and nephew text like there is no tomorrow, they of the flying thumbs and the ability to communicate through abbreviations. I, being the dinosaur in these matters, have probably sent a total of five text messages in my life. I’ve slways figured that phones were for people to talk to each other (I know, I’m old school and basically fossilized on these things).

Well it appears that text messages, those little quasi-sentences like “r u ok?” cost the various service providers next to nothing but that doesn’t keep them from charging you a tidy sum to thumb them along. Basically the whole thing is a fad created by the phone companies to make bundles of money. My generation had the “pet rock” and these crazy kids nowadays have text messaging. Some things never change.

I’ll be staying home for New Year’s Eve, thank you, and that’s alright with me.

I’ve never been much of a New Year’s person. As a child we would go to church on New Year’s Eve for a program and a prayer meeting so I never had the whole wild party thing as part of my experience. I often don’t even stay up until midnight. After all the year will change whether I’m awake to see it or not.

When I served as chaplain at a care center for men with addictions and mental illness I learned the Residents, long practiced in the art of inebriation, called New Year’s Eve “amateur night” the time when accountants and other assorted varieties of “straights” tried to make it as drunks. In the weird world of street drinkers there’s a perverse kind of pride in knowing how to keep the buzz going, what things to avoid, and how to live through it all including the next morning, knowledge the average guy with a goofy hat and a tipsy girlfriend just doesn’t possess.

Wisconsin, too, is a drinking state. Crossing the river from the scolding moral Lutheran universe one discovers a different world just east of Minnesota, a world where there are often four bars on four corners and all of them open long after decent folk should be in bed. If Minnesotans do bad things and then enjoy feeling chastised for it people in Wisconsin have no such issues. Folks are more honest about it on the LaCrosse side of the river but that doesn’t make it more safe. I’d rather not have to drive south in the wee small hours of the New Year to take care of a parishioner who has, shall we say, suffered the affects or worse yet was seriously injured by an amateur with too much booze and too little sense.

So it’ll be my wife and I, my mother, and the cats, watching movies eating pizza and doing our best to keep off the streets. Time will do its work and while the party animals sleep and dream feverish spinning dreams we’ll be up and free of headache.

Up to half a foot of snow expected today. Okay.

Up here in flyover country we just get kind of stoic about it all. Nature is in charge and there’s a few things we can do (like furnaces and indoor plumbing) and a whole lot we can’t. There’s nothing like six inches of snow followed by below zero temperatures to get a person into the proper perspective about things.

Anyway, up here in Minnesota we always say, “Well we could use the moisture…” and beyond the fact that we’d be stuck with the snow even if we were as wet as a tea bag, the truth is we really do need the moisture. Rivers, lakes, and fields will all get a needed dose when this melts off in spring and this matters because if the folks out in the country have a dry year the rest of us don’t eat so well.

So the shovel is out, the snowblower is ready, and we’re getting psyched for the long commute this morning. Just no ice please and we’ll bear up as best we can.

I’ve got no one to blame for it except myself.

For the past week and change I’ve been looking for the perfect amplifier for my electric bass. I had saved some money and wanted to “step up” but invited myself, as well, to a nightmare of my own making. Time on the internet, purchasing and returning, starting out with one moving to two others and then returning to the first. What I thought was going to be like a kid going to a candy store was more about obsession, disappointment, and the hangover that always seems to come the morning after the great consumer party is finished. I actually like my bass and the whole idea of it less.

The whole thing has reminded me, again, how there is not “perfect” thing, ever, and that everything one can buy is about shades of better or worse. I’m reminded, as well, that if I had pursued holiness, virtue, faith, or any number of good things with the effort squandered in the pursuit of a few notes of sound I would be happier then I am now, and certainly not feeling like I’d been ridden hard and put away wet.

And hopefully they won’t ban me for life from Guitar Center for being so neurotic.