The sleet is falling outside, with wind moving through the trees and thunder in the distance. A storm is moving through and they say there’ll be over a foot of snow just an hour or so north of here. I wonder what things will look like when I wake tomorrow.

An interesting week is drawing to a close, a week of tension at work and calm at the altar, a new season of change and the timeless flow of faith. My instincts tell me a chapter is ending and something is yet to begin. There’s no direction to it all yet, just instinct. Yet the feeling is strong.

My times, your times, the times of the world are all in God’s hands. There will always be pressures. There will always be changes. There will always be some crisis. We’re not required to be passive in the face of it all but we act rooted in assurance, the assurance that all things are somehow, somewhere in control and part of a larger plan. Right now there are decisions being made and who knows what they will be. I know what I will do. I will not panic but I will pray tonight and place my life in the hands of Mercy and go to work tomorrow and church this weekend to do my very best knowing the everything is in good hands.

Last Saturday a former fiance of mine was married up in Crookston, Minnesota. I was invited, with my wife, to the wedding but she was ill and weekends are kind of locked up for me. Although we couldn’t come we sent along a card with some money and our best wishes.

The details are not important but things I had hoped for didn’t work out between the two of us; too much distance, too many things that didn’t make for longevity. It’s okay, that’s what these things are for, testing out the waters, seeing if a lifetime together is possible with the freedom to back out with less consequence then a divorce.

There is an ironic side in this all, of course, as my wife was supposed to stand up for my former fiance at the wedding. No, she didn’t do anything to break things up but one thing leads to another and we’ve been married now for almost 23 years. I like to talk about it sometimes because it has the feeling of scandal in a lighthearted way even though our lives have been basically boring (if you count boring as contrasted with, say, the life of a movie star). People laugh and smile at it all when I tell them about how I married the Maid of Honor at what would have been my wedding had events not intervened.

Every once in a while you see a bumper sticker that says “You have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find your Prince” and I think its true. Very few people marry their first love and lots of us have to explore with our hearts exposed before we can find a love that endures. It’s an awkward thing and there are a lot of mistakes along the way. Its not hard to step on someone else’s toes when you’re both stumbling around in the dark, as it were, looking for the light switch.

Still I wish them all well, and pray for them at times, these people who came in to my life as I looked for enduring love. I hope if I was their “frog” they found their prince. I hope they can forgive me for whatever I lacked and that their journey has been smooth. Most of them, of course, I’ve never seen or heard from because this is the way of things but I do hope one day we may see each other in heaven, recognize each other for an instant, and realize that all has turned out well.

Many blessings, Mary, on your wedding and may God grant you many years!

Rooted in an Evangelical worldview crossexamined.org is a great source for basic apologetics (the defense of the faith). When you get there you’ll see a significant number of resources to help you understand your faith and discover how reasonable and defendable your Christian faith can be.

Pay a visit and tell me what you think!

Tomorrow I will be serving the Pre-Sanctified Liturgy in replacement of the Priest at St. George Orthodox Church in West St. Paul, MN. It’s the long one with the extra readings and as I have been traveling I have only served a few of these liturgies in my tenure as Priest. Please say a prayer or two!

Thanks.

Another day of change at work today. Looks like things are going to get rearranged again. And although the truth is that I sometimes get exasperated by it all it’s just part of the business.

The economy is supposedly down. I say supposedly because lots of media voices are telling us things are bad. But it’s their bread and butter to keep people glued to the set and bad news is a great way to do it. An example; I was listening to the news on my way down to LaCrosse this past weekend and it turns out that around 95 percent of people with mortgages are paying them off on time, the “crisis” is about 5% or so of mortgage holders! But if you watch the television it seems like they portray the whole thing as millions of families just a visit from the evil banker away from losing their homes and starring in their own version of The Grapes of Wrath. But whatever level of truth are in those breathless reports by millionaire news anchors we’re on the receiving end of it all in one way.

Our bread and butter, though, is all about seniors selling their homes and making the jump to retirement living with us. Parkshore Senior Campus is a high quality place with a lot of services but also a hefty price tag. Two kinds of people come to stay with us, people with money to begin with and people who’ve acquired money through the sale of their homes or other assets and are essentially drawing down on that investment by living with us. If people think there is a crisis in housing they hold on for as long as they can, especially the potential clients of our independent living apartments, and vacancies accumulate. Just a handful of openings can take a lot of cash out of the flow and we need to find ways to be creative to keep everything out of deficit

And it could get worse because the baby boom is expected to produce a lot of seniors but how much they’ve actually saved for their retirement is still in question. My generation, and I’m on the very tail of the baby boom, are not necessarily as thrifty as the WW2 folks who experienced the Depression of the 30’s. There’s a rush to put up senior apartments, condos, and residences of all kinds but the truth is they might, in just a few years, be scrambling for residents as there will be plenty of space chasing too few with the money to pay the prices.

So it looks like we’re going to retool again, find ways to do more with less and make sure all things are lined up in that uniquely corporate way. Part of me is tired of the constant flux but another part understands that this is just the way it is, being nimble and anticipatory is part of the game. One thing is certain, I continue to gain a deeper empathy for those who’s vocation lies outside of the Parish, people who work in countless jobs and try to do their best to be Christians while swimming in the corporate river. It is a kind of martyrdom to be able to know how to navigate the maze, be a person of integrity, and still be fresh and ready in a world where business change now happens daily and in some cases on the hour. Whatever else comes out of this these times will make me a better Priest and hopefully wiser as well.

Admittedly I get bored with my blog’s design and change it every so often, well, just because. But I did find this picture of the Great River Bluffs State Park along Highway 61 and I thought to make a masthead of it because it gives you all an idea of the kind of country where LaCrosse, Wisconsin finds itself and the road I travel every weekend. These bluffs along the highway are my companions on every trip and these two in particular I get to visit on my right going south and my left going north.
The drive going south on Highway 52 to Rochester is faster but now you have an idea why I take my time and enjoy Highway 61.

April 6, 2008

There are, among all the prayers of the Gospels, two very poignant prayers spoken from the depths of the heart whose words touch us over the centuries.

The first is the prayer of the blind man, Bartimaeus, from the side of the street in Jericho. Hearing that Jesus was near he shouted with his whole being “Jesus Christ, son of David, have mercy on me!” So fierce was his desire to be heard that his call for help drowned out even the noise of crowd and drew Jesus’ attention as he walked by.

The prayer was short and desperate and filled with both the sadness of years living in darkness and the fire of a slim hope undimmed even by the vulnerability of life without sight. His prayer became the basis for our Jesus Prayer, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner”, our own cry from whatever constitutes our darkness and often filled with the same desperation of its author. When complex thoughts and deep meanings fail us those simple words uttered from our hearts speak paragraphs and verses and chapters.

In the gospel reading for this day we see another kind of prayer, short but full of the pain, struggle and need of a father for his son. “Lord I believe, help me in my unbelief…” and like the Jesus Prayer it’s often our own prayer as well.

It’s not difficult for our heart to go out to this father. Who knows how many cures he sought, only to have his hopes dashed each time? What pain must have coursed through his heart, what sense of powerlessness as his son was thrown about by demonically induced seizures? How many times did he ask why? How many conversations did he have with what he must have thought was empty sky?

And after all of this at the moment he faced Jesus he still wished to reach out one more time for something, anything, to make sense of it all, to cure his pain, and heal his son. But all of that hard experience and all the struggle had taken its toll. Faith was hard to come by, skepticism was there in quantity, and all he could do was ask for help to believe, just one more time.

Life can be very difficult sometimes. Often the pieces of the puzzle just don’t seem to fit. Pain and struggle come to us and the meaning of it all is elusive. The search for answers can be long and difficult and sometimes they never come. We try denying our pain, but the feeling pierces through this armor. We hope to anesthetize our struggles with a hundred different things but the anesthesia wears away. On the surface we’ve maintained our composure but underneath there’s a hidden river where faith and doubt, experience and hope,
flow together in a swift current.

There’s no condemnation in this because its our lot as human beings. In our lives we ‘re destined to be a mixture of faith and doubt, hope and despair. Something inside tells us that there is unimaginably more but it’s a kind of perfection that always seems to elude us in the end. Because of this every kind of joy in our life has a certain kind of melancholy in it and every struggle has its hope.

We carry on. And as we live this life we daily make a crucial decision.

We can let all the struggles and fears and pains of life wash over us like a river raging beyond its banks and be swept away in a kind of permanent cynicism and despair. Life can both be hard and make us hard and there are many who have chosen, in their own way, to take the advice of Job’s wife and curse God and die. The world is populated with jagged people, souls as cold as ice, humans who’ve tasted from the cup of struggle and become bitter from its contents.

Or we can, even in the face of intense adversity, see, somewhere in an inexplicable way, a ray of hope, a small bit of whatever it takes to push through dead end after dead end until our journey takes us to Christ. Bloodied, battered, and messed up, still struggling with the accumulated doubts that are the natural children of life’s struggles we can face God honestly, aware of the challenge, aware of the pain, but with just enough faith to reach for the master’s hand.

It would be good for all of us to be giants of faith, possessed of the courage of Saints. To struggle for that result is a notable thing. But for most of us the truth is it’s going to be a mixed bag, working our way through life as best we can, sometimes getting it and more often than not stumbling around in the dark. And if the truth was known even the holiest of people have had their moments. How good it is, though, in all of this, that our Lord Jesus still cares for us, still loves us, still embrace us, and still is, as our prayers say “…good and the lover of mankind” and not just when all is well but even in those times when the best we can hope for is a flicker of faith in the valley of darkness and our only prayer is “Lord I believe, help me in my unbelief…”

A story from Fox News about a student at Tomah High School who got a “zero” on his art project because it had Christian imagery. Tomah is about an hour from LaCrosse, Wisconsin.

A lawsuit, of course, is pending but I have a greater question. The Tomah school will lose this lawsuit because you cannot ban student artistic expression solely because it has a religious theme. The Courts have reaffirmed these rights hundreds of times in cases all over the country. Why is it, then, that these cases keep happening? Are school board officials, principals, and teachers so utterly unaware of these rulings that they keep on formulating policies destined to be shot down, again and again, in the Courts? Or are they so immeshed in PC they think the rules somewhere else simply don’t apply to them? It’s just frustrating to have to pound on this door over and over again.

Thankfully there are attorneys who will fight these rulings in the courts and preserve the rights of religious believers, especially Christians (and why does it always seem to be about Christians) to express their faith in the public square. We, too, must always be vigilant about these things because if we take our rights for granted they will, sometimes slowly and sometimes in a rush, be taken away.

It’s about ten in the evening here in Minnesota, the last day in March and the snow is piling up outside. They say we’ll get around seven inches before its all over. Its not that much of a problem, though, because these spring snows hit hard and go away fast. Down the river a ways it’s a much bigger deal because that water has to go somewhere and that somewhere eventually is the Mississippi and you can already see the river swell.

Of course its Monday, the day when good Priests are supposed to take off and rest a bit but I have two jobs and so every day is a work day. The boss was sick today and will be tomorrow so it looks like I’ll just keep moving until someone yells “Stop!” Busy is still better than bored.

There are the usual things on my mind, people in the hospital, all the calls I should be making but can’t. This traveling thing has its own tradeoffs. We have more money now then ever and we’re spending it on things that really need to be done but I’m away and so many of the normal pastoral things just fall through the cracks or I try to catch up on Saturday and Sunday if I can. As is usual I’m just plain tired but somehow I find a way to make it through. No complaints, though, because I knew this was how it was going to be when I signed on.

The truth is I have much for which to be thankful. Yes, it would be nice to have the money and people and facilities of a larger church. And for sure it would be great to drive a few minutes rather then a few hours to get home. But the people of St. Elias are good. Sometimes when a parish gets small the people do as well but there are a fair amount of folks at St. Elias who really do want something better for their parish and they’re willing to work hard.

We’re just in the process of refinishing the basement at St. Elias and the members who’ve worked on it have done a magnificent job. Everything up to date, walls fixed, new electrical, the works. I hope this is a more then just a renovation. I hope the people see what they, when they give their hearts to God and their hands to work, can do. There’s more to fix and more to clean but the Ladies Group, just restarted this year, is getting busy on the kitchen and I anticipate this to be a summer of building and growth. Boy would I like to have a benefactor or a lottery win to kick it all into high hear!

My hope is that the people of St. Elias will keep on pushing forward. My fear is that somewhere along the line they’ll lose hope. May angels protect us! Anyway I need to make calls tomorrow and start working on the Liturgy. There will be snow to shovel and lots to do at work. My cat is already asleep on the bed and I should be too.

Lord watch over your flock at St. Elias through this night and in all the days to come. Have mercy on their sinful Priest, and establish us by Your grace.

Good night.

Sunday of the Adoration of the Cross
March 30, 2008

There are crosses, it seems, everywhere in our culture, on the sides of roads, around people’s necks, on bumpers and buildings everywhere. Rock stars wear them as bling, cemeteries have them for hope, and bikers wear them as tattoos. A cross inspires veneration in one and loathing in another. In art they sometimes become masterpieces and other times the visual expression of an artist’s contempt. They are simultaneously present in many places and banished from the public square. They are everywhere found and seldom understood, even by those who claim the faith they symbolize.

So what is a cross?

In its origins the cross was a tool of execution used by cultures before them but perfected by the Romans. It was a junction of two pieces of wood roughly in the shape of the letter “t” designed to promote a lingering death by torture and asphyxiation with a maximum amount of public spectacle for those sentenced to die under Roman law. Its effect as propaganda was immense because it displayed Roman authority and the consequences of rebellion and this is probably why the title “King of The Jews” was written over Jesus’ head in all the common languages of the region as a reminder of what would happen to those who defied Caesar. The savagery of this method of execution was so profound that it was inflicted only on foreigners, Roman citizens like St. Paul, no matter how great their alleged crime, were executed by a swift beheading.

And it was because of Jesus’ death on such a device that representations of it became the predominant symbol of Christian faith. To the early Christians the meaning of what occurred in that death transformed what the larger culture certainly saw as a representation of a dishonorable life and end into a symbol of victory, life, and hope. Although the earliest Christians already possessed an iconography of various symbols, lambs, fish, the good shepherd, none had both the power and depth of the simple representation of two lines crossed. We Orthodox continue this veneration of the cross because we see what the Romans had perfected for torture as the very place where our Lord voluntarily gave up his life and in doing so broke the ultimate power of sin and death and in doing so provided a way for us to be restored to union with God.

The cross for us, as Orthodox is not a place of punishment where an angry God, offended by our sins receives a sacrifice sufficient enough to turn away his wrath. The cross is not the place where Jesus stepped in to deflect the angry blows of God directed towards us. These images are understandable because this is what the Romans designed the cross to be; an instrument of punishment, but it is not our Orthodox understanding.

When you see a cross in the Orthodox setting you see Jesus, not flayed and tortured like in the movie “The Passion of the Christ” but already dead, peaceful, and remaining full of grace and power. Certainly the sufferings of Jesus were real but we, as Orthodox, already see beyond them as Jesus did and we are aware of the timeless significance of those hours on the cross even as we see Jesus’ body at rest.

We know that where others see defeat and death we see victory and life. Where some may see another triumph of the Roman empire and the religious leaders who brought Jesus to trial we see the King of Kings and Lord of Lords in the aftermath of conquering everything that has kept we humans broken and apart from God. Even as Jesus’ lifeless body is on the cross he is entering the realm of death and pillaging it, removing all who would respond from the grip of hades. The thief is already in paradise and hell shudders.

The world sees powerlessness but we see the most amazing display of power. The world sees brokenness but we understand that healing has come. The world sees the strength of darkness, but we know that in three days time a light will come that can never be overtaken by the night. In that cross we already see the seeds of the resurrection and so even in the middle of this disfiguring moment there is hope.

And from all of that a well of gratitude should spring up in us. God in love entered our world to teach us how to live and out of love voluntarily allowed himself to endure suffering and death so that its ultimate power could be broken and we could be restored. Even sin and pain and death are not so powerful that they could not be swallowed up in the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ. One day we will know this for ourselves because in union with Him even death can never have the final word on our destiny.

In this middle of Lent, when the novelty of the fast has grown cold and when, if we are facing our sins a kind of weariness may set in, we have this day to look into the distance and see the cross, the tree of life, and take hope. In a few short weeks we will be singing “Christ has risen from the dead trampling down death by death…” and knowing that alone you will understand the cross we venerate today.