Life Along the Orthodox Way
It used to be that people were known for being heroes. Doing something noble or worthy of praise would be reason for someone’s popular acclaim, but with the advance of mass media, a new phenomenon arose within American culture. People began to be known—just for being known. In media studies we’ve come to know this phenomenon as the rise of the celebrity.
Read more here…
Hat tip to Orthodoxy Today
It was a harder sermon than most to give last Sunday.
I reminded the church of a simple fact; as we’re remodeling our building we need to remodel ourselves as well by making our parish a central part of our lives and reaching out to our community in word and deed. Our little church, like many other Orthodox parishes, can suffer from that kind of laxity that comes with age. Everyone likes the general idea of having a church but few are willing to produce the kind of effort it takes, the kind of personal responsibility required, the kind of vision turned into action that makes a parish thrive. Without it all our efforts at remodeling our building may simply mean we’re preparing it for someone else, for the church, group, bookstore, or whatever that buys it when we’re closed.
That’s a hard thing to say, and the truth of it doesn’t make it easier.
There are many things a Priest can do to help a parish but one thing always remains out of our grasp. We cannot create the will, the drive, that invisible something where people say “This is important to me, important enough for me to commit myself, my talents, my gifts, my energy, my resources, to make it happen.” That will cannot be taught, it must be caught, and without it life in an Orthodox church can only be about holding on for as long as possible before time and demographics work their decay.
It’s one of the stranger illusions of life in American Christianity and Orthodoxy in particular. People know if you don’t feed a goldfish it will die and if you don’t invest passion, time, and energy into your business it will go bankrupt. Yet that common sense often seems lost when it comes to our churches where the expectation of high returns on small investments is the order of the day.
Some of that seems to be the rancid fruit of centuries of either being a state church or a persecuted church. In the first few had to invest deeply of themselves because the church was always there, in the second the church was always in some kind of captivity so the idea of a horizon, of a dynamic, was often lost. The Orthodox who immigrated to this country largely brought one of the two of these visions with them and the combination has been poisonous to us in this land where parishes are free from persecution but required to make their own way in the world as well.
One would think that after a century or two of existence in this country we would have “gotten it” but apparently we often still miss this basic lesson, that in this country what you put in to anything often has a direct relationship to what you’ll receive. And that’s a hard thing to tell the people for whom you care, for whom you pray, and for whom you sometimes spend sleepless nights. I wish there was something I could say, something I could do, something to ignite an enduring passion for our little parish in people’s hearts so they would find the way to reach down inside and draw on the gifts they were given in their baptism and chrismation and be what God would have them be. I know they would be better, happier, more alive, and closer to Christ. At times I ache for this in their lives.
Sadly, though, there are no words, no magic formula, no sure fire way for me to help light the spark of hope in these good people’s hearts. I’ll do my best to point the way, and everything else is in God’s hands. But just in case you’re reading this, please God, give these good people who’ve endured so much a glimmer of what could be and the courage to reach out and grasp it.
As to the question when human life begins, the answer to which is above Mr. Obama’s pay grade, oh, let’s go on a little tear. You know why they call it birth control? Because it’s meant to stop a birth from happening nine months later. We know when life begins. Everyone who ever bought a pack of condoms knows when life begins.
Read more here…
This article reminds us why we should be careful consumers of media, especially when it comes to statistics, numbers, and polls. Don’t forget that much of the media exists not for the sake of truth but rather for revenue. The scarier the story, the more the threat, the more likely you’ll look and watch the ads. Because of this the truth is often subservient to the impact of the potential story.
Hat tip to Five Feet of Fury
Hat tip to Craig for the dose of truth.
It’s been busy for a while and I’ve got things to say but little time to write. Hang in there and I’ll get on it, soon.
In a recent forum at Saddleback Church Sen. Barack Obama said, among other things, that the question of when life begins is “Above my pay grade…” I’m not sure why he said that, I presume that he may have been trying to be coy in front of an audience that consisted largely of more or less conservative evangelical Christians or perhaps he wanted to use ambiguity to move towards the center and away from what has been a consistently pro abortion voting record. I can only speculate but it begs some questions.
-Making profound, even life and death, decisions is part of being President. If a question like this is “above your pay grade” are you indicating your personal level of readiness for the job?
-If a question about when life begins is “above your pay grade” then why should it be left to people who presumably are less qualified to answer it then you?
-If you have doubts about when life begins shouldn’t you do everything you can to protect life in all its phases for the sake of the benefit of the doubt?
That I can rattle off these questions in less then a minute says something.
Perhaps the greatest challenge in becoming a Priest was the suddenness of my placement at St. Elias. I was ordained one Sunday, had one Sunday to practice a Liturgy, and then was sent to St. Elias basically to figure it out for myself. I had been a Deacon for two years, of course, but watching and doing are two different things and ever since then I’ve felt like I’ve been playing “catch up” when it comes to serving the liturgies of the Church.
Complicating it is the reality there are few standard forms for serving the liturgy. For whatever time you have to learn the liturgy you largely learn it in the “style” of the person who teaches you and so whenever Priests gather there can often be confusion about who is doing what. Yes, there are rubrics in the various texts, instructions for what you should be doing, but these are often amended or left out entirely depending on the “style” of who is serving and whole sections of the Liturgy, items like the ektenia before the Lord’s Prayer, can be dropped or added depending where you are and who you’re with.
Because of this it can be a difficult task thing to serve the Liturgy well when you feel like you’ve simply not had the training to do it or aren’t sure even what “good” is. Harder yet is serving with other Priests and feeling totally unprepared. If you make a mistake other Priests can be tough customers and I can’t wait to stop being the “junior Priest” at some of these gatherings so some of the tasks fall away from me. Add my bi-vocational status and its lack of daily preparation time to that and it can be quite frustrating.
So what to do? Well, I’m reading the Liturgikon over and over again and trying to make sure that what I’m doing up front is as close to conformity with it as possible. And I try to do my best in the place between knowing the extreme seriousness of what I must do and the reality that in heart, soul, and technique I may never ever be good enough. Oh, and I pray that the people of St. Elias are forgiving when I slip up while I’m hanging on for the ride.
Continuing on the theme of Sen. Barack Obama as a new secular messiah is this article about an ad agency developing a hand gesture in the shape of an “O” that it hopes will be used by people to greet each other and signal their vision for new things and a new hope with the Senator.
In postings past I have observed that the Obama campaign and its followers have used quasi-spiritual symbolism to describe their candidate and what they hope will be his movement as well. I have also observed that this could be, in some part, related to the fact that the political left, largely devoid of traditional faith, has a need to constantly create new faith and new traditions to compensate for that lack because people are inherently traditional and spiritual.
I’m not surprised, then, that the people attached to the campaign would seek to create a faux hand gesture to communicate their faith, an ersatz sign of the cross if you will. I think that it, like a lot of the ideas and images coming out of the Senator’s campaign, will come across to most people as kind of silly. But the hunger for meaning, identity, and transcendence that drives it matters and should be something we Orthodox think about as we live in this culture so rich in goods and poor in spirit.
That being said gestures, what we do with our body, matter, and its interesting that this campaign, as devoid of traditional faith as it is, understands this in a way that perhaps most Orthodox don’t.
The Beautiful Path 