It’s about 6 am in the morning on Monday and I’m up and bright eyed. That’s largely because I went to bed around 7 PM last night and slept through until a little after 5 this morning.

My normal routine after driving through the afternoon would have been to arrive home, have a little supper, and then catch the football games and whatever else is on. Sometimes I’d stay up until midnight. But last night I just went to bed when I was tired and slept as long as I needed since I have Mondays off. When I was finished sleeping my body woke up, no alarms and no weariness. I’ve noticed this in other times when I’ve cut myself away from the box. I sleep better and after a time of catching up on my sleep feel rested and alert. We’ll see if this happens again.

And BTW here’s an article regarding children under the age of two and television.

PS – As I’ve stated before I’m not talking about this because I’m some super saint. If the truth be known I’ve just gotten tired of what I was becoming after attaching myself to our culture’s umbilical cord / sewer pipe and decided to take myself off the grid.

It looks like its going to be a tight Nativity this year.

Already the stores are starting to advertise merchandise at deep discounts but people watching the markets dive and spin are holding on to whatever money they have left. The next few weeks might be some of the best in years to buy a TV but I doubt you’ll be going elbow to elbow with other shoppers at Best Buy, let alone the now bankrupt Circuit City. Some of the fancy people are even swallowing their pride and taking that first big step into WalMart or the local thrift store.

This is all new to us, or at least to some of us, this insecurity, this sense of limits, this realization that there’s a ceiling above us and that times can take a sudden turn. Of course, what we feel now is business as usual in most of the world, in fact its better then the day to day life of many who live with fluctuating politics, uncertain economies, and what we would consider deprivation as a matter of course. But we’ve been cocooned in our prosperity, wrapped up in a same warm blanket that, until now, has largely kept us out of the cold. Perhaps there is someone now, in some forgotten part of the third world who’s looking in on all of this and saying “Perhaps now you’ll understand…”

With this sudden and new feeling of vulnerability coursing through our souls we’ve called out to our leaders to save us but the truth is that ones departing and the ones arriving are basically helpless and somehow deep inside we know it. They’re helpless because the whole thing is a house of cards, an illusion, a scheme where we can borrow, beg, or steal our way to ever increasing prosperity and leave the bill for someone else. Well the repo man is here, now, and he’s not taking “The check’s in the mail” for an answer. And in the face of this uncertainty we might even shake our fists, as it were, at the sky and ask “Why, God? Why this turmoil and why now? Why this disturbance in the quiet comfort of my life? Why these foreboding times?” The answer may have two parts.

First, we’re going to rediscover that the god we worship, the god of suburban comforts, the giant ATM in the sky who loves America, and has his name on money is not the God who actually exists. That god is an idol, always was, a projection of ourselves and our culture on the skies above and our prayers to such a god echo in an empty room. The God that exists is a fire, powerful, awesome merely at the mention of his name, and calls us both to account and to salvation for the sake of a love that defies our attempts to measure. The life he calls us to is a life completely alive, completely human, a life where we are transfigured by divinity and called to shine with perfect light even in a world darkness often seems to rule. And second, this God loves us so much that he may even allow our money, our security, and our earthly stability, to be taken away from us so that we discover, again, those things that are eternal, those things that last, those things which make us human, those things which can never be taken away. In short, to rediscover God. We may have to lose the whole world, as Jesus tells us, to save our own soul.

So now the fast is upon us, not a fast as a ritual exercise or a convenience, but a fast we cannot escape brought on by forces beyond our control but not God’s. In times past we cut back, we shared, we gave to others and prayed for ourselves and each other from the scraps of our table, from the excess of our abundance. As the times unfold and the larger bills come due we may find every day to be a kind of fast, a disciplining of ourselves because we cannot afford anymore to live in excess. But in this time devout hearts will also discover again the true meaning of things; the clinging to that which lasts and the discarding of that which does not matter, the reality that in giving to others we provide for ourselves, the truth that our ultimate hope is not in those who would lead us for a time but rather in our Lord Jesus Christ who has overcome all the world.

If we come to understand this the days ahead may be, for us the holiest times of our lives, the days when we as the comfortable Christians of America awoke from our dream and saw, again, the truth of Bethlehem’s star.

If this story and others (Google “Bob Marley Christian”) are true this would be wonderful in so many ways.

A silence has settled over the house…

O.K., not really, but the TV isn’t on and I’m going to try my best to see how things go without TV for the duration of the Nativity Fast. I just had a concern about how much precious life I was burning in front of the box and what it would be like if I spent some time without all those frantic pulses of information charging through my head.

Already I’ve realized how automatically I would turn to the TV for background noise, something just to fill the spaces in the day. And I wonder what I’ll do with those spaces. I have some plans, more music, more reading, more attention to my business. But plans are plans and we’ll see how things go after a while. The first days of a fast are always easy, in some ways, because your motivation is high and one can generally hold back an urge for a while. I can tell you, though, that the stuff inside of me will probably want to come out somehow, somewhere, so a few days from now the battle will be on. I’ll put my book down because I’m tired of reading and my hand will move to the remote to get a dose of that mindless TV input.

Then we’ll see what I’m made of!

PS I know you’re not supposed to tell people about your fast and the truth is this has nothing to do with my being some super Christian and a lot more to do with coming to terms with the junk I’ve been putting into myself and how its made a mess of me. Who knows? I might end up as a slobbering fool flat on my back in front of the box about a week from now, but I’m going to give it my best shot.

Bishop JONAH of Ft. Worth has been selected to be Metropolitan of the Orthodox Church in America. Here is the story. My brother, who is in the OCA, called with great joy following his election and many are hoping for a new future under the guidance of Metropolitan JONAH.

May God grant Him many years!

Gay protesters harass an elderly woman. To begin to help the world to become what it should be we must see it as it actually is. When I saw this I had images in my mind of the men of Sodom demanding that Lot turn over his angelic guests for their dark pleasures and I also saw people so deeply immeshed in their own struggles that they thought nothing of harassing a woman for the “crime” of disagreeing with them. Either way we desperately need to be, myself first, the kind of people God wants us to be and we need to understand that if we care about our society we must come to our senses, awaken from our sleep, turn our hearts to God, and let our lights shine. Pray for those who are abusing this woman and the woman herself.

Sometimes you’re the hand and sometimes your the puppet.

The air is cold now and the sky is gray and full of snow. I heard we might get an inch or two today, earlier then the past few years but right on time for Minnesota in November.

Yesterday was all about the last things to do on the list. Clean up the leaves one last time so they’re not found wet and cold next spring. Mow the lawn level. Take out the remains of the climbing plants. And yes, set up the lights for Advent even though its still a week away. The rumors are its going to be a cold and snowy one this year, the kind of winter we had when we were kids, so now is the time to get things done.

On November 15 the TV goes dark and the fast begins. I’ve got things to do and books to read for all that down time. I think I’ll start weaning myself off the box tonight. There’s plenty of vegetable soup for meals and I had one last hamburger on the way down to LaCrosse this past Saturday. Now that the house is in order it seems like its time to get myself in order for the weeks to come, weeks I need right now to get everything back to where it needs to be.

One of the great gifts of Orthodoxy are the fasting times. Its so normal for my life to get all out of whack and the fasts call me back to sanity, winding up all the loose ends and untying the knots. And I need this one in particular, this post election, post church vandalism, post busy stuff at work, post everything nativity fast. Now that I’m buttoned up on the outside I need to be buttoned up on the inside.

Looking out of my window I see the snow has begun to fall. And so it begins.

A SERMON BY C.S. LEWIS

Some years ago I preached a sermon at a Pan-Orthodox gathering right after San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom decided to disregard California law and begin allowing same sex weddings. I spoke of how his actions were prophetic in that they were a foretaste of what would come. My point was that the disintegration of morals and the culture were, in part, because Orthodox Christians were absent from the real world and I reminded them the world is the way it is in part because we are not who we are called to be.

Now news is coming from California about protests following the passing of Proposition 8 in California, a constitutional amendment that returned California law to its historic understanding of marriage and family. Religious buildings have been defaced, people have been verbally and physically attacked, and marchers have threatened both people and institutions they believe supported the proposition.

Amazing, isn’t it, how some of the proponents of “tolerance” and “inclusivity” get angry and violent when they don’t get their way. If you think that the movement towards same sex marriage is completely benign and simply about “equal rights” do a Google search on this and take a look at the faces of the people in these protests. Take a look, as well, at what some “activists” have done, in countries where same sex marriage is the law of the land, to harass and intimidate those they cannot indoctrinate. Witness, again, the wholesale purge of traditional clergy and parishes currently underway by the very people who have come to power in the Episcopal Church by seeking “dialogue” and “openness” in the areas of sexuality and the church. The information can be startling.

Because of our Faith we cannot respond in kind or act out of fear but we do need to be wise. Underneath the gentle hand of “tolerance” and “inclusivity” there can be hard balled up fist aimed right at your face if, as a traditional Christian, Muslim, Jew, Hindu, or Buddhist for that matter, you dare to oppose the new regime. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst, seek in love to reach out and be a channel of grace, and always be ready to pray for even those who would, if they had the chance, silence you.