I’ve been away from blogging for a few days because a project needed my attention.

In a small Parish like St. Elias every penny counts and there is always a need to find ways to do business that exploit technology and efficiency. In fact, one of the gifts of a small Parish can be the kind of “edginess” required to make things happen that may not be possible in a large Parish with less nimble structures and systems.

In our specific case the issue is the development of a Parish newsletter as a way to connect people from some distances and share information. The normal process is to create a mini-newspaper with columns and calendars and send them to as many people as possible, even people who haven’t asked for them, in order to comply with the requirements of the Post Office regrading bulk mail. (To qualify for a bulk mail permit there must be a minimum number of mailed items).

I’ve been pondering this for several months and a few days ago it occurred to me that it’s possible to adapt a blogger.com site for use as an “e-newsletter” that is easy to produce, easy to update, inexpensive, self storing, and widely available. I’ve made a rough copy of such an item here. I presume I’m not the first person to contemplate this but its potential for small parishes and missions could be significant.

I’m still trying to work out how I could adapt the site to hold a calendar of events but I’ll figure it out. Regardless if you drop by and have an idea or comment I would appreciate it.

Through the kindness of parishioners I had the chance to attend a baseball game following Vespers on Saturday night.

Although I never played it much as a kid (I grew up in a football town) over the years I’ve come to truly enjoy baseball games. My wife and I basically bought our satellite dish just to get the Twins games in on Fox Sports North, and the XM Radio in my car is often set right to channel 175, the one with all the Major League scores. If somehow we won the lottery the one vacation we would take is the package where you can travel for a month and see all the major league teams play. This past winter I even followed the world baseball tournament with about, apparently, three other people here in the US.

The local team in LaCrosse is called the Loggers in honor of the fact that LaCrosse came to prominence largely through the timber industry. The team is an amateur team comprised of people from various colleges who wish to keep their baseball dreams alive by playing summer ball in a small circuit of similar teams. In lieu of pay they are housed with local families both at home and on the road and when the season is done they return to college.

That kind of team hearkens back to a day when many towns had a local nine and the pride of the city was often on the line when teams met. On this night, even for this level of play, over 3000 fans from LaCrosse came to see the Loggers play the Green Bay Bullfrogs. Cars filled the streets around St. Elias, less than a half city block away from the field, and some came for miles to see the Loggers play. Our seats were in the first row behind the home dug out, great for catching foul balls and so close you could hear the players cough.

But alas is was not to be. The introductions done, the national anthem sung, there was only time for a handful of pitches before the first drops of rain began to fall. Soon it was a torrent, a storm that rushed across the river valley from Minnesota without stopping until the field was soaked beyond repair for the night. It was a good rain, a needed rain, but I still felt a kind of an “Oh rats…” feeling inside as I walked toward my car.

I know there is scandal in the world, and trouble, and things that aren’t right. I’m a Priest and sometimes I have to wallow in it all as part of the job. I even know that baseball is sometimes messed up with chemically enhanced players getting obscene salaries to produce pumped up statistics. Even so there is something about a night under the stars with the sounds and sights and smells of a baseball game that’s like a tonic to me. And last Saturday I only got the slightest taste of it, but I do have a schedule in my pocket and with the best seat in the house costing just $7 I know I’ll be back. Soon.

Peter Hitchens reviews the book “God is not Great” written by his brother, renowned atheist Christopher Hitchens. Interesting read.

Yesterday I had the chance to take a group to from my work site for a tour of St. George Orthodox Church in West St. Paul. Although my assignment is at St. Elias there are times when I assist as services or otherwise get the chance to visit my “home” parish and this visit had a bittersweet quality to it.

The sweetness was the church itself, so beautiful and familiar. Even the smell says home and everything is in its proper place. The bitterness was in what I myself was missing as I watched the new Priest tend to his chores. It was the sense of belonging to a place, of having those ministry routines, the little things that sometimes bother us but are really tasks that identify the place as home.

For the time being I live in suspension, somewhere between being the Priest I was called to be and the Activity Coordinator I must be to keep a roof over my head. Each is a ministry of a kind and neither is to be despised but in life between the two each overlaps the other and both, in some ways, suffer in the divide. And I miss all those little things, the time to visit the sick, to really dig in and prepare good homilies, the freedom to keep ahead of the administrative tasks and stay in the loop, as it were, in the comings and goings of the Diocese. I miss being able to do all those “other” services like Kneeling Prayers that are so important even if hardly anyone shows up.

I sometimes tell the people at St. Elias that what we’re struggling for, what all our work is about is really just the ability to be a “normal” Orthodox Parish. And what I miss sometimes, especially when I visit St. George, is just being a normal Priest.

Some day. Some day.

In anticipation of All Saint’s a short article on the glorification of Saints in the Orthodox Tradition.

An article from First Things with a different take on the interplay between Islam and Europe.

The Orthodox Study Bible will be out in a complete version, Old Testament, New Testament, and Deuterocanonicals in February 2008. You can go here to vote for your favorite cover and if you wish you can call Thomas Nelson and pre-order (or at least so I was told by a Customer Services Rep). If you do don’t forget to thank them for taking the risk, as a largely Protestant publishing house, of exploring the Orthodox market and supporting this work.

The clock on my compter says its just a little past 11 at night and in the quiet of my hotel room I see an unvarnished image of myself, lit only by its screen, in the mirror over the desk. My wife is alseep and so I try to type quietly. It may be one of those nights when you get to sleep early in the hopes of rest only to wake up in the small hours of the night with no chance to get back to sleep. We’ll see.

I suspect I would still be sleeping if not for the football dream. I have them once in a while and the basic theme revolves around having an opportunity to play once again for my high school football team or wanting to and getting close but somehow something gets in the way. Its like the dream some people have when they’re waiting for something or have to get somewhere and find they just can’t catch the bus.

The root of it is in my own high school football career and perhaps in high school as a whole kind of archetype for frustration. Football was the sport of my childhood, the sport of my passion. In the weeding out process that comes when kids go from playground to organized ball I was probably destined to be somewhere in the middle of the pack had our family stayed in Wausau and I went to the very large Wausau West High School. But we moved to the small suburb of Mahtomedi, Minnesota in the middle of my eighth grade and I went from small fish in big pond to larger fish in a smaller one. By my sophomore year I was already on the varsity and slated for a back up role and the steady climb through the next two years to something better.

In a scrimmage in the summer of that year I came through the line on a very successful stunt, a play for the defense, and pressuring the quarterback tackled him just as he let go of the ball.In the twist to the ground my left ankle gave way. At first everyone thought it was a sprain and I walked on it for several days but when the pain finally became too much and I had to crawl up the stairs at home I was taken to the doctor and the break became apparent. I remember sitting in the stands the next week with my crutches and cast and crying while the game went on below.

Nothing was the same after that. I did make it back that year but by then the tide had already turned. It wasn’t like it is now in high school with doctors and trainers and all kinds of people to help rehabilitate things.Back then when you were out of sight you became out of mind and only a miracle could change anything. By next year I had been relegated to a kind of nowhere hell that was the lot of those who came out for football and truly had no chance but were allowed by the coach to suit up anyway. We called it the “burger squad” the place where teenage boys first learned what it was like to be a human tackling dummy for their superiors on the starting team. I couldn’t run fast enough, hit hard enough, or do anything to get noticed and escape. In the middle of my junior year there was a dance, there was Southern Comfort and nothing to lose so football ended and for all extents and purpose so did high school.

The next years were things to be endured, a perpetual sense of being dislocated from everything, of never fitting in, with the only the band room piano to help me through the most terrifying hour of all, the lunch hour when you have no one with which to sit. And everyone once in a while those times reach out over the years and touch me when I sleep, a dream where I realize I still have eligibility to play but something, a shoe that can’t be tied, the absence of a helmet, or like tonight the discovery that practice was already well underway and I was stuck watching from the fence outside the field, always got in the way.

Perhaps somewhere in the recesses of my life there is still a sadness for those lost days that has never been completely mourned. Perhaps it is only in dreams that this long ago pain is able to emerge and seek release as I sleep and my guard is down. Or maybe there is something in my life at this very time which is incomplete and the best way my soul can tell me is by drawing on the images of the time in my life when I felt the most unrealized.

Its now almost midnight here in LaCrosse and in less time than I think the sun will have emerged and the day will begin. Duty calls, the things I must do. How strange it is that a grown man, a man whos tired eyes and emerging wrinkles stare back from the mirror over the hotel room desk with the eerie glow of computer light, would be touched again by the ghost of those years. Stranger yet is the continuing mystery of what it all means, the secret codex in my soul that calls these things back from some deep part of me in the hope that one day the cause will be discovered and the dream will need return no more.

Pentecost Sunday 2007

Not far from here just north of Westby is a coulee once owned by Ervin Lotz. In its past the soil had yielded tobacco and the remnants of an old tobacco shed stood in a kind of dilapidated grandeur, a reminder of what had once been where the road met the valley floor.

My father and I came to the Lotz farm many times in the summers of my childhood. Long abandoned for agricultural use the coulee had become a wild vista as prairie plants began to reclaim the land. We came to build a bible camp and in the early years we lived in tents with rotating work crews as the buildings slowly arose and the valley wild was claimed as sacred space, our Plymouth brethren equivalent of monastic seclusion if only for a week or two.

Yet however the valley was transformed the hills remained untamed. Only a few trails penetrated their mystery and only young boys with time on their hands and the will to take on the slope routinely explored the terrain. The hills were pocketed with crevices and caves and from their side flowed small trickles of water, decades and even centuries, old purified by the journey from the sky through the rock and into the sunlight.

When the work was done but the sun still warm I clearly recall dipping my hands into some small rivulet and drinking water as clear as glass and refrigerator cold. And from those springs in the hills came the camp’s eventual name, Living Waters.

Jesus choice of the image of living water, flowing freely and without reserve as a picture of the Holy Spirit in the life of his disciples was deliberate. In a land that would be considered perpetually in drought by our standards water was a precious thing, wells were fought over in pitched battles, and life itself was tied to whatever water was to be had.

What could be more precious in a dry land then ever flowing water? And what is more precious to a thirsty soul than the life giving presence of the Holy Spirit flowing in and through and out of it? Its the primal hunger of humanity and nothing with which we can fill our lives, no matter how good, can ever satisfy in the same way because we were designed to live with God and will always be parched of soul in His absence.

And yet its probably true that many, perhaps most of us who hear these words of jesus would not describe our life, our faith, our Christian path, as being like a bubbling fountain of cool water flowing from the depths of our soul. Some of us may have had moments where this was the case but most will sadly live our lives with only drops of the life giving water that’s all around us if only we had the eyes to see.

The Christian life can sometimes be very difficult, nothing good always comes easy, and yet there is so much truth, so much glory, so much peace, so much power, and so much joy to be had as well. Those who catch even a glimpse of the great grace given us cannot help but be transformed and for those who walk in it the difference between heaven and earth is often small.

But where, and how do we find this water, this life of the Holy Spirit so that it may flow in, through, and from us and quench the deepest thirsts of our soul?

Some would point to movements and revivals and there is some substance to that. God does move in and through his people as he providentially directs and people’s hearts, grown cold and dry, are refreshed again and renewed. Too often, though, what is identified as revival is simply emotion. While emotion does have a place in our faith (we Orthodox celebrate the cleansing tears of repentance and shout for joy at Pascha) when it becomes the substance of our vision it becomes shallow and because it is shallow, addictive.

Too often we value the Liturgy, or the sermon, or whatever we do in the church solely on the basis of how it satisfies an immediate emotional need. When it feels right to us it must be God, or at least good, but the effect is often short lived and we are quickly hungry for more. There are millions of Christians who’s whole life is a pilgrimage from one experience to another. When the high wears off they scrounge, like addicts do, for more of the same and without it they go into withdrawl. Only a very deep and unsatisfied hunger for good things could drive a normal person from place to place measuring their faith by the depth of the catharasis at the altar call or whether they dropped to the floor under the spell of the man in the spotlight.

But there is something better for us than a moment in the emotional sun. Something greater than throwing a gallon of gasoline, as it were, in our spiritual fireplace once a Sunday and hoping the fire will stay lit for the whole week. There is water for us, cool, steady, and always flowing, the presence of the Holy Spirit inside us and satisfying every true need.

We were given this Holy Spirit in our baptism and chrismation. We continue the original practice of the Christian faith in baptizing and then by anointing giving, in a mystical way, the living presence of the Holy spirit to the one who receives it, even as a child. Despite our humbleness and the sinfulness of every Priest, myself the first, God in mercy really does, motivated by a transcending love, come and dwell in us.

But the gift, like any gift, must be cared for and used for the full value of it to be experienced and understood. One may purchase an amazing automobile but the fullness of it is missing if it never leaves the garage and a garden untended soon becomes weeds. A great Orthodox saint described the Christian life as the acquisition of the Holy Spirit and that implies a certain responsibility on the part of those who receive Him to take positive action to release the presence and work and glory of His place in our lives.

We, being good Americans, would like this all to happen in a big bang, a quick fix, a moment when we are transformed. We’d like something great to happen, something that shakes us to the core and leaves us without doubt, without struggle, and without having to change. But the truth is often less immediately exciting.

Some people really do have profound moments when they encounter God and their whole life is transformed in ways we would describe as miraculous. But like Christ who came to us humbly as a child in a non descript village and used mundane things like bread and wine and fish and simple stories to transform the world so it is with us. The life giving water of the Holy Spirit within us most often bubbles through us in the day to day things, the prayers we say, the worship we offer, the acts of righteousness we do, and the generosity we show. While we are always open to God moving in and among us in ways that take our breath away the truth is that the less spectacular things, the everyday faithfulness of our lives, is what most often releases the living water of the Holy Spirit within us and our church. Pentecost was the birthday of the Church but the everyday surrender of the lives of the faithful to God was the spring of water, cool, and refrigerator cold, that still touches our lives today and bids the thirsty come and be refreshed.

And that is the invitation of this day, not the hunt for some great moment but rather the quiet opening our hearts, our lives, our parish, and this community to the cleansing, refreshing water of the Holy Spirit. This is life for us, and for the world, without it we can do nothing and with it all things are possible.