In this age when everyone with a guitar thinks the world is entitled to thier opinions on everything Sheryl Crow has staked out her case for a limit on toilet paper in her efforts to promote ecological awareness.

Uhhhhh Sheryl, how about giving up that electric guitar, and all those speakers and lights, and that really big house, and the tour bus and….

And maybe someone needs to remind her that paper products come from trees which, you know, can be planted again after they have been harvested.

And for Pete’s sake lady, limiting yourself to one or two squares of paper for every time you, let’s say, have need of them. No way am I ever going to shake your hand. Ever!

That screaming by the way is the noise that common sense makes when its being killed.

A powerful article from “Spiked” that addresses the issue of dissent and speech becoming a disease.

A little wisdom from Cardinal George Pell, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, Australia, on the apocalyptic claims of some in the “global warming community”.

“People without religion”, he said, “are often looking for something to fear”.

A begining of wisdom for the Church in the United States is the recognition this is a consumer culture in which there happen to be Christians. That may burst our bubble but its the first step to help us make sense of things and save our country from itself.

Some time ago I made an online “plug” for www.jihadwatch.org a site run by an often vilified but genuinely skilled American collector of stories and information about global efforts by various Islamic groups to promote thier faith by violent action. These stories are very often not covered by mainstream American journalists and when they are they’re usually full of euphemisms like “insurgents” or “militants” to soften the viciousness of individuals and groups now waging war against any culture, even Islamic ones, that refuse to submit to their understanding of Muslim faith.

But www.jihandwatch.org is a must see www site if only to get an idea of the scope of what people of all faiths are up against when it comes to the global vision of hard line Muslim groups. To know the times is to see things as they truly are and then work to overcome them by the force of good. We need to see the panorama of these groups, individuals, and acts to remove the blinders from our eyes and come to terms with some very horrible “might be’s…” if thier dark dreams become reality outside of narrow pockets of the world.

Yet panic or blind hatred would not be the order of the day. Our Lord promised us that we would have troubles in this world but to not be afraid because he had overcome it. So we need to see all things truly, not just the gruesome outworking of fanatics but also the very much more real assurance that the Kingdom of God, beset about throughout history, is still the final destiny of the universe. And we need to fight as we should, not so much in the military way (although we do have the right to defend the powerless against agressors) but in the way of Christ himself who instructed us to overcome evil with good. The most effective witness for the Christian way of life is simply and always a Christian who, God giving him strength, actually lives as a Christian.

So learn and become aware. Dismiss the haters that sometimes crop up in the comments section of www.jihadwatch.org and are usually promptly removed when discovered. Gain knowledge not for the purpose of mindless speculation or mongering in conspiracies but rather for the purpose of knowing that which we have to face in this day. Then, in the middle of this darkness, light your Light, the Light which we were recalled again this Pascha, the Light that shines in the darkness and has never been overcome by it.

Atheism is the opiate of the pseudo-intellectuals!

The US Supreme Court has upheld the federal ban on “partial birth abortions”. Perhaps this is the end to a horrible practice that can best be described as physician assisted infanticide.

In the aftermath of the horrible killings at Virginia Tech its interesting to me to note the use of ritual to come to terms with the realities of that day and even life itself. Thousands of students attended a mass gathering that ended with a unison chant and then yesterday evening they gathered for a candlelight vigil. Ordered group activities with sensual elements like music and candles were where people naturally gravitated to begin to understand the harsh truth of the past days.

People sometimes ask Orthodox about our ritual life, the vestments, the “smells and bells”, and the sometimes complex movement of people and objects that mark our worship. Its because we understand that humans are creatures of ritual and even in a bastion of intense secularism like the modern University campus that primal call to understand the world in the movement of “liturgy”, if you like, cannot be quenched.

And the goal is the same as well. The rituals at Virginia Tech are designed to begin a process of human transformation from intense pain and loss to some future time when the more regular rythms of life will once again prevail. In Orthodoxy we seek a transformation as well, one not rooted in a response to a specific moment but rather to the love of God and the continuing hope that we can always be drawn through that love into a union with Him.

Over the centuries the things we do, despite thier appearance as unnecessary complexities in a world that worships efficiency above efficacy, have been the numinous things whose effects have radically changed people and even cultures towards holiness. They are powerful and touch the deepest part of the human soul even if that soul is unaware. They call us to ancient and heavenly cycles of life, remind us of our place in life, and carry us through the moments of struggle to our true home.

Only a living thing can swim upstream…

The bodies had hardly been cared for and families notified before the blame game for the shootings at Virgina Tech was already underway. An army of reporters and pundits, all of whom had not being there and not being aware of the situation in common, descended on the University to get thier thirty second sound bite and try to sound on top of things by questioning the response of the people who were actually there and trying to make a difference. Next the politicians will come and soon after them, if they’re not already there, will be a school of lawyers attracted by the smell of blood.

The European press is talking about America’s gun control laws while ignoring thier own bloody past and the whole idea that a maniac would take the time to make sure he had all the paperwork in order before going on a rampage. People are asking for the President of the University to be fired as if he should have been omniscient and able to know every bit of the future and protect every person on campus by himself. People are looking for someone to blame, some structure, some program, some group, or maybe just one person but the truth is right in the faces we see in the mirror every day.

We have given up as unfashionable the idea that evil exists and that in every human and every group of humans there is a dark part that can overwhelm us sometimes without our even seeing it. Sometimes that evil emerges horrendously like shooting rampages or wars but most often it’s just a silent killer lurking underneath all of our skins killing us slowly every time we give in to it. And we’d like to think we can master it, subject it to some superior system of management, to a better environment, or a more perfect structure. But it never seems to work and having long ago given up looking at the content of our souls for answers we look for someone, anyone, to blame.

But the shooting is about us, that part of us that is dark and foreboding and full of unholy trash accumulated over the years. Without the resources to fight it its just a matter of time before it, like a deep infection, finds its way to the skin of our life as a boil. There are many ways this happens but only one source and until we deal with that we’ll all find ourselves at that moment in our life when one way or another we stand faced with the choice to pull our own particular trigger and we do.

No law, no structure, no environment, or program, as good as they can be, will change a thing until the inside of a person is redirected away from darkness and towards the Light. We are not mindless beings subject to the whims of our environment but embodied souls with the capacity to transcend and when we fail to do so the results are always tragic even if there isn’t 24 hour press coverage of the results. A man can have access to a hundred guns but if his heart is turned away from killing there will be no death. And the same is true for whatever darkness we shelter and nourish in the secret part of our hearts.

This is why who we are and what we seek to be as Christians matters, because at the heart of our faith lived in this world is a desire to be transformed deeply and truly from what we are to what we by grace can become. Each act of repentance is not merely a response to a past embrace of darkness but also a positive act for the betterment of our selves and the world. A person who renounces killing saves thier soul but also saves the world from whatever harm could have been done by virtue of their forsaken murders. And so it is with all sins and struggles and moments of dark despair not embraced in the pursuit of the Savior.

Yet what has happened in these past hours cannot be undone and so we are left with another reminder of the savage that lies within us all and the call to care as best we can for those who suffered from its manifestation at Virginia Tech. Some day the world, and we ourselves, will not be this way and so we urge our Lord to come and return heaven to earth and make all things new. And as we do we hope ourselves, in some small way, to be continually be made new from the very core of our being for as long as we live here in hope.