In a few hours I’ll be on the road again, there are services tomorrow and its easier if we make it to LaCrosse tonight. The greatest week of the Christian faith is at hand and all is ready. Lazarus Saturday, full of promise and life, is less then a day away.

I don’t know how many will be present for Liturgy tomorrow (truthfully its possible that, God forbid, I may not be at Liturgy tomorrow) but over the years Lazarus Saturday has become a special time, a ray of hope that flavors all the week to come. In Lazarus Saturday, no matter how many may be physically present we sense the presence of those gone from our sight but with us mystically in the reality of glory and the assurance of resurrection. In it the Church says that no dark time is beyond the reach of the love or power of Christ and even the darkest time, death, is powerless before a word from our Lord.

In some ways this has been the greatest gift to me from Orthodoxy, the understanding of the depths of our mortality always flavored with the light of Pascha and resurrection. Even in the depths of my own struggle I cannot escape this hope. Every evening when I fall alseep and by the mercy of God awaken with the sun I’m reminded of it all. When my heart is laid bare and broken in confession and made new in absolution I am given a taste of that which has been promised. When I, the unworthy presbyter John, receive the most precious body and blood of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, I literally ingest it.

From it also flows an understanding of those I love who are an eternity away and as close as a prayer. They, although their bodies sleep in death, know the light of Pascha in a direct and certain way and though we sometimes think them distant from us they are but a heart beat away from us, part of us, cognizant of us with a kind of life that we can only imagine but whose affects we often feel even if they are subtle to the point of being unrecognizable.

As a child I was told that those who had died were away from me, inaccessible to me, with the Lord for sure but on one side of an impassible chasm. There was no malice in this, just a desire to avoid a kind of worship or obsession with those who had gone before. But Orthodoxy called me to remember that even death is filled with the life of Christ and those who live in him are never ultimately extinguished and share in a mystical way some of the unseen closeness that Christ has for all who follow him. I pray for them as a sign of my love for them and the remembrance of them that continues to be part and parcel of who I am. I ask them to pray for me because Christ has made them alive in a way that I cannot understand but which allows them to remember all of us in the Church militant with a purity my feeble prayers cannot achieve in the bonds of this life. Jesus could call to his friend Lazarus because he was alive and Lazarus could respond for the same reason.

So tonight I’ll drive on and get ready for the days to come. It promises to be busy and fatiguing yet the light of it will find a way to stay with me whatever happens in the days to come a light that begins with the spark of Lazarus Saturday.

From time to time I check the cluster map indicating where visitors to this blog come from in a sort of general way and usually on the top of the world map with little red dots are advertisements. I presume they help pay the way for Cluster Maps to provide free service.

As an aside you need to know that I don’t track any of this in anything more than a generic way. I don’t have, or want to have, the IP addresses of visitors and don’t collect any private data other than a general area where the “hit” comes from. So, for example I know there have been visitors to this blog from the south of India but specifically who or where is unknown and I’d like to keep it that way.

That being said one of the recent advertisements was for “Orthodox ringtones” for cell phones. I haven’t clicked on it yet but there is a certain amount of curiousity about it all. First I’d like to know what they mean by “Orthodox” and second if they really are Eastern Orthodox ringtones I’d like to see the menu.

I personally would like to have the Cherubic Hymn as a ringtone because it remains for me one of the greatest treasures of Byzantine music. For the sake of my soul, though, I probably need the Prayer of St. Ephraim “O Lord and Master of my life, take from me the spirit of sloth, despondency, lust for power and idle talk…” That would be a helpful thing to hear several times a day but I might find myself doing prostrations in the oddest places.

Holy Week is the story of two loves. One love was human, fickle, and cringing in the face of death. The other was divine, enduring, and shattered mortality with its power even as it gave all that could be shared. In doing this it showed us beyond words what it means to be Christian.

The next several weeks should be a blur as the preparation for, and celebration of, Holy Week services begins. It’s all about staying on the move and one step ahead and this can be a problem.

There is no equivalent in the Eastern Church to the “low” or spoken Mass found in the Western Rite of Orthodoxy and the Roman Church. Most Eastern liturgies seem to be a blend of the sheer duration of monasticism with the pomp of Byzantine court life and assume a Parish with all the resources to make that real even if most don’t. In a large church with several Priests or Deacons and a competently staffed and led choir there is little that rivals the sheer numinous quality of the Eastern liturgies, especially at Holy Week. In a small church with no assistants and everyone just trying to hang on for the ride the usual liturgies are sometimes problematic and Holy Week moves beyond exhausting.

This coming Holy Week I will stand at the altar largely alone and through the valiant efforts of my wife and a few very dedicated lay people we will get through as best we can and make the careful adjustments needed to celebrate faithfully with the resources at hand. But I guarantee you they and I will be tired for days after Pascha. And there’s a sadness in that.

One of the hardest parts about being a Priest is the lack of worship. That may seem puzzling to people who see a Priest stand at what appears to be the very center of the Liturgy. But that place is all about making sure things flow smoothly, sweating out the details, handling the glitches, and perpetually working under the master’s lash of time. With assistance it may be possible to snatch moments of the holy from the flow of things but without it its mostly about rubrics. When I was learning to dance I remember missing the whole point of the dance because I was whispering the steps under my breath and I often feel that way about the Liturgy. I would like to feast on the words and have even a moment or two where I understood not just in my head but in my heart that heaven and earth were joined but there’s a prayer I have to say because I don’t have a Deacon and a couple of things I need to do and an altar boy jumping up and down because he forgot to go to the bathroom before the service and so any moment of transcendence, if it comes at all, rarely lasts for more than a passing moment.

Of course I can always hope for better and perhaps with time and experience I will be less tied to the rubrics and more tied to the larger picture. But roughly this time next week the services will be beginning in earnest and people, even those for whom this is the only time of year they will be in church, will have expectations. And I want them to know the resurrection and perhaps be changed as they walk with Jesus through His Passion. It really does matter, perhaps even more now than ever.

It’s just kind of sad that when I was first Orthodox I couldn’t wait for Pascha and now that I’m a Priest part of me can’t wait for the Monday after.

If you’re not from the United States you might not get this so just smile, nod, and humor us.

A columnist you should know on a historical character you should know as well.

Lent is half over and again I’m learning the simple lesson “Garbage in, garbage out”.

I have to choose not only what I fast from but what I consume as well. If I eat, as it were, my culture’s trash (and we’re at a very trashy moment in American culture right now) that food, like all food, becomes part of me and changes me at the core. If I take in good the process is the same but I am transformed by holiness.

A strong argument can be made that the larger society at this era of history is less supportive of the true and holy. I’m not sure it ever really was, every generation seems to kill its prophets and saints, but certainly the veneer of pretension has worn off and people no longer feel shamed by embracing raw passions. Those who seek sacred things often have to search deeper, endure greater hardship, and more often travel without company, or even the illusion of company, in our wealthy and decayed state then perhaps was true even a generation ago.

And the speed by which we are immersed in this decayed culture has exponentially increased. In my childhood there were limitations of technology and therefore of time which allowed the larger world out there to be digested a bit as it percolated down. It is not so today. Only the most isolated person today can avoid feeling like a goaltender being constantly barraged by players from all sides and unable to stop the hundred of shots per minute aimed by our internet 24 hour news cycle world. Some are going to slip through even the most adept, vigilant, and quick of reflex.

So we, so I, have to make deliberate and planned choices about what I let in and what stays out, what I eat, as it were and from what I abstain. Its is the maryrdom of this age with the stakes as high as in the days of fire and sword. Compared to it walking past a McDonald’s is child’s play.

Udolpho’s comments on “The Thrill of the Chaste”, a must read book.

Here is “The Thrill of the Chaste” author Dawn Eden’s blog.

Thank goodness God doesn’t hear our prayers with the same level of promptness we have for coming to church!