A little investigation would seem to show a large number (perhaps a majority?) of the Muslims in places like Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and Jordan are actually descendants of Christians who apostacized when the armies of Islam came pouring out of Arabia. It would be interesting to speculate how the region, the world, and even the lives of thier children would have been different had they not abandoned the Faith.

What do you think?

I’ll be 100 then so I might be around to see it all.

The story is here…

I’ve heard it said that a boy never really becomes a man until his father dies. There is some truth to that but it seems a high price to pay.

It has been over 13 years since my father died while on a business trip in Chicago. He had had at least one heart attack he had simply walked through, another that put him in the hospital, and the third one that took his life. My mom was at our house, which they had helped us buy, just a day after we closed on it and was starting to paint and get things ready. That meant that I was the one who had to give her the news.

On the way I remember being upset with God about his death. It wasn’t so much that it wasn’t expected. For years I had thought that one day I would get that late night call with the news of his passing. It just seemed like the wrong time, too soon, very much to soon.

My father seemed to have spent much of his adult life angry at how the world was, or maybe how it treated him, or how things never quite lived up to expectations. We always had food, and clothing, and more than enough (something he didn’t have as a child) but the cost was living on pins and needles and wondering what kind of person was coming home from work that night. I suspect it was hard on him as well.

And when you’re a child you don’t understand. All you see is the person as they are in front of you at that moment and you haven’t yet developed the skills to see through time and view the picture from a distance. Context is everything when you relate to people and I had no context other than the fear that something I would do or say or maybe even never had done would get me hit. It can be a harsh way to live.

But it was, in retrospect, not all dark. There were those wonderful nights when dad would come home from work and take us, one at a time, to my uncle’s cabin near Tomahawk, Wisconsin to fish with a stop at the Dairy Queen on the way home. There was the day I remember him running next to me and then letting go as I rode my bike without training wheels for the very first time. There were Saturday nights at the YMCA with popcorn and a whole 16 ounce bottle of pop all for myself. I remember Sunday afternoon drives following church and driving out in the country after dark looking for deer. Dad cried sometimes on Sunday mornings when a song or hymn touched him and I’m sure that he probably wanted to be in heaven long before he actually died because Earth was sometimes pretty hard on him.

That’s all the stuff I found out later, how he didn’t really have a father himself, and times were tough, and the only way to get to college was by being a Marine. Although I never met her his mother seemed harsh and yet he still sent a good chunk of his enlisted man’s salary home so she could live. I suspect that all haunted him and we lived with those ghosts as well. Dad saved money by riding a bike to work and then found a way to go back to college while working full time and caring for a family. Looking back I don’t wonder at all why he sometimes came home, had supper, and almost immediately fell asleep on the couch.

There comes a time when you stop seeing your parents with the heroic eyes of a child or the scoffing vision of a teenager. It’s a time when you see them warts and all as people who tried hard and made mistakes sometimes and were often shaped by forces beyond their control, things that you had no idea existed in the shelter of youth. By the time I reached my early thirties most of the pain had already died away. I was who I was and so was he.

And yet in those same years I saw a change in my father. I saw the goodness that had been inside of him, that something that made my mother fall in love with him and broke through as the sun set on the lake while we paddled silently for shore. I saw it emerge in a way that somehow had eluded him as the years passed. Call it grace, call it age, call it a man who had defined himself by duty now finally realizing the value of who we was and not just what he could do. I don’t know what it all was but I do know it was good.

I wanted more, but time and health and work and this weary old world had done their damage and more was not to be had. So on Father’s Day I’m grateful for every moment in the sun, for what glimpses I was given, for the grace that lead my father safely home. And I mourn what could have been, those gracious years when sons and fathers leave the tumultuous growing pains behind and sit next to each other in a boat fishing without words.

Its been in the 90’s (farenheit) for about a week now and as I write this its just starting to rain. One of the great pleasures of living in this part of the world is the cool air that comes when the rain follows a tropical (for us) day.
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Yesterday I indulged my fondness of baseball and my wife and I went to a Twin’s game. For those of you who read this outside North America the Minnesota Twins are a Major League Baseball team. With the Twins behind 2-0 in bottom of the 8th inning we decided to leave and beat the traffic home only to discover that the team had rallied in the bottom of the 9th inning to win the game. We tried to rationalize our loss of faith by saying that our leaving was good luck for the Twins. But I sure would have liked to have stayed for that. Late game rallies are part of the magic of baseball.

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Besides three cats we also have two of what must be the hardiest tropical fish ever to have taken residence in an aquarium. I must confess that I am a neglectful fish owner and yet these two Platys just keep on going. However, lest you get too worried I have changed the filter, added water, and cleaned up the place a bit. Oh, and I really do feed them every day.

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When the weather cools down I’m going to get my Roller Blades out of storage and start back on the exercise trail. Look for injury updates.

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It’s a fair question, I think, to ask “What have we not done that Sodom and Gomorrah were guilty of and with a vigor and pervasiveness that those two towns on the edge of the Dead Sea couldn’t have imagined?”

And why are we still here?

I’ve pondered that for my culture and for myself and the answer seems to point to something deep and profound beyond words. It starts with the understanding that if God were a God of justice alone my society, myself included, would for the sake of justice have been destroyed long ago. The evidence is stark and compelling. Immorality? Check. Injustice? Check. Callousness of soul? Check. Idolatry? Check. Human sacrifice? Check. Name any sin of biblical proportion and we have done it and more than any Philistine or Amorite or Amalekite could ever have imagined. And in one way or another I have participated in it all.

So why are we, why am I, still here?

Why have we not gone the way of those long ago peoples whose crimes were less than ours and who did not have the benefit of the knowledge of holy things?

I suppose there’s an argument for the fact that it simply hasn’t been our time yet. After all there is no guarantee that any culture or country is a permanent thing. It is possible that a thousand years from now whoever is on the face of the Earth will see us in the same way as we look at Romans or Hittites. We could be destined to be merely a curiosity in the larger scope of things or worse yet an example of a social order gone dark at the apex of its power. It wouldn’t be the first time.

Yet I also believe there is something more in play, something more about God that explains why despite my, and my culture’s pervasive sins, we remain. Simply put, God is also a God of mercy of a depth and kind that defies our notions of fairness and justice and is capable of swallowing not simply the sins of one person or another but that of a whole society, even the whole universe, in its abyss.

Every provocation of defiant humanity, every insult flung to the skies, every instance when humans alone or in total have spit at the heavens and even that moment when in our insane rage we sought to kill God Himself, all in an instant can be absorbed and annihilated in the unending sea of mercy that is in the character of God.

I have no capability to explain this. Every adjective crumbles in its presence. Somewhere in the character of God there is the hope that even as we bear in ourselves, and in our cultures, the pain and death of our deeds there will be a moment when we come to our senses, realize the reality of our situation, and cry out for help. And when we do mercy will be there.

The texts and the tradition tell me that one day it will end, that the justice of God also must come into the equation in a way that only God himself can comprehend and with a truth to it that can only be from the one in whom there are no shadows. Outside of my own last breath I do not know when that moment will be. But until then there is time and opportunity and the means to seize mercy, and while that time remains hope does as well.

The vote wasn’t even close as the Massachusetts Legislature decided in overwhelming fashion to deny its citizens the right to vote on the issue of homosexual marriage, an issue forced into play by the decision of a simple majority of its Supreme Court. In effect four people, I believe, decided for all that the historic rules of marriage and family need not apply anymore and no one has the right or authority to question their wisdom.

Much could be written about judges ruling as autocrats and legislators without the courage to stand in their way. The idea that a group of judges has the right to demand a legislature make laws in conformity to their wishes is deeply repulsive to the American understanding of government. We are slowly being ruled by juntas of people in robes who dismiss the rest of us great unwashed with words and ideas that make sense only in the air tight realms of power. The cost of this is already high and one day may be unbearable. It may well be the Massachusetts Supreme Court has already fired the first shot in the next American Civil War. God forbid.

But a larger issue is emerging.

Rev. Jerry Falwell was roundly critiqued for declaring the events of 9/11 as a kind of judgement from God. But in his thoughts there was a grain of truth. It’s risky to say with prophetic certainty that God is acting in these times with a specific intent to judge. The great prophets of old most often experienced a direct and profound call from God and proved this call by the fulfilment of their words in the events of history to bolster their claims. I don’t have this and I know of no one else who does.

But this is true. There is a kind of judgement from God that comes not as some specific action of God directly involving Himself in human affairs but in the simple allowance of the consequences of human actions upon those who take them. Over and over again the texts of the Scripture define what is good and right and holy and what can happen when boundaries are crossed. Whether God directly acts or not humans pushing and crossing over those lines take risks to themselves which they must account for if they choose to ignore the holy in favor of the profane.

Could it be possible the sad state of our culture, its diseases and dilemmas, it fractures and fissures, its darknesses and struggles is directly related to the simple consequences of our own selfishness, our own choosing to ignore the wisdom of history, the elevation of our pleasure above common sense and the assertion of our will in the face of the Divine? Perhaps. Will God set fire to Boston for the defiance of its authorities and their complete irreverence? Probably not. But every time humans as individuals or as societies assert themselves against that which is holy they become coarse, ill, pathological, and in time crush themselves under the weight of their own acts.

Perhaps this is happening even now and every headline we read, the pain we’re feeling, the perplexity with which we see the world, the small nagging part inside of us that says something is deeply wrong, all of it speaks to the weight of our own sins beginning to swallow us and the truth that the mill of God grinds slow but exceedingly fine.

A link to a story on Fox about the imbalance in genders in Asia caused by abortion and gender selection via infanticide. We humans are often so arrogant and stupid at the same time and we continue to pay a high price for it all.

I admit there are moments when I’m very tired when I drive down the river road to LaCrosse. It’s in those moments when I come to grips with how difficult it can be to help a small church reach its potential, how idealism alone doesn’t always make it, and that sometimes its just plain work.

In Seminary they often told us that it was actually easier to start a church from scratch then to help a small and struggling parish to the next level. It’s true. Small parishes have a hard time in the world and St. Elias has struggled from the start. Begun as a good work it has spent the larger part of the last century just trying to get some traction and in the process lost a generation because it was caught in the bind of being too small to afford a Priest yet without one there was no constant presence to keep people and things going. The “action” moved north to St. Paul and other places and when they restarted things in the 1970’s they literally had to knock the birds nests out of the building.

In those days there was no diocesan support, no strategic planning, and little sense of mission as the development of strategies and policies to implement church growth. It was all about just finding a group of people and a Priest willing to go, yet without a plan its a recipe for struggle and failure. I admire the core of people in LaCrosse who have held on for decades in a situation that lesser folks would have simply abandoned.

And these past few months have been especially good. The people who remained at St. Elias have always been the “keepers”, the core that matters, and those who’ve proven their virtue of love and service in the hard times. But now there seems to be, by the grace of God, a renewed sense among some of the value of what we have at St. Elias and what God can do. People are stepping up in a new way and many are working like horses on behalf of our Parish. Whatever else can be said about St. Elias it is not a church of slackers. And all of this means there is hope.

For those of you who read this blog I simply ask your prayers. St. Elias is small but full of good people and in a place where there is a need for an Orthodox witness. Pray that all of us will be given God’s strength so that we can “run and not be weary, and walk and not faint.” Pray that God will send His angels to watch over us so the Enemy of our souls will not have his way in and among us. Pray that in reponse to all the steps of faith, large and small, that our Parish has taken God would send people to us, people who need our good Faith, people who will make this little Parish become everything it was meant to be.

On a personal level I can tell you this. I have served in parishes that were larger and had more but never one of which I was prouder in the best sense of the word. The people of St. Elias are at least trying, and I pray that their work is rewarded. And every time I get tired I remember them and the drive doesn’t seem so hard, the load rests easier on my shoulders, and the car flies down the road even when I’m doing the speed limit.

A link to a recent study on Atheists / Agnostics and Christians in the US. If you do not read the Barna Report it would be good to start.