A powerful article on cremation and the Christian.

Read the article.

Not all the women who read this may understand, but most of the guys will. A man often has a personal kind of relationship with his electric razor. I’ll explain.

When a guy first starts shaving he usually borrows his dad’s electric razor or buys one for his immediate needs at the local discount store. There’s usually not much to shave so any razor will do. But time changes all of that.

As the facial hair comes in thicker and shaving stops being a novelty and starts becoming a necessity a sojourn also starts. Not all facial hair is the same and its consistency and growth patterns can sometimes be as unique as a fingerprint. For example the hair on my face is fairly straight but as you proceed down the neck there are several areas where it slightly swirls. Because of this not just any razor will do, you must find the one that matches your face and so the journey begins.

Sometimes a guy is lucky and the first razor he gets is the perfect one. Usually it may take an attempt or two to find the real deal, the razor whose design and cutting features do the best job with the greatest amount of comfort. Now I may be letting some of you in on the secret world of guys as it were but most manufacturers of electric razors actually tell you it may be a while after you make your purchase before your skin and the razor match. They have to get used to each other. Really, I’m not kidding. If they don’t you can be literally rubbed raw.

That’s why men, when they’ve found that perfect shaver, may keep it for many years, often longer than a car or even a house. Well meaning wives often say “Why don’t you get rid of that old thing?” without realizing it took some hard searching (they don’t have demo models for shavers) and more than a few unpleasant experiences to finally find the right razor and most guys would rather not have to do that over again. In this world where everything seems disposable there are still small shops hidden here and there where men can take their decades old friend of a razor for cleaning and repair. An older man is usually sitting behind a cubby hole desk in a room smeeling of three-in-one oil with shavers and parts about the place and a silence that pervades everything, a silence of work, of expectation, and of a unique dread that comes when the man behind the desk holds your razor with the grim look of a doctor diagnosing terminal illness. There are men out there with fewer shavers than wives.

Now my facial “soul mate” if you will is a Braun 5414 that I purchased almost ten years ago. It wasn’t the most expensive shaver out there but the cutter is straight, the head swivels, and it cleanly mows through those pesky swirls on my neck with the elegance of a well handled rapier. And then a year or so it disappeared, lost somehow in my travels. I searched the house and every suitcase I owned but to no avail.

For a while I muddled on with plain old straight razors. They can shave smooth but a slight slip of the hand and you can turn a piece of face into a fillet. Then, for some reason still unknown to me, I chose a Norelco with the three pivoting heads etc., etc.. Perhaps I thought I needed the change, but the truth is that I’ve been paying the price ever since. Well beyond the usual two week “break in” period the Norelco has continued to be the “little engine that couldn’t” and every morning leaves red marks on my neck. It has nothing to do with the Norelco, it’s just not a good match for my face and yet even when I finally found my Braun I consigned it to a drawer and still used the Norelco. We guys can be hard to figure out sometimes.

But enough is enough and today I found the old Braun, cleaned it up, and installed a new cutter head and screen. Now in the old days you could get easily get parts for a very old shaver but things have changed.
There is evil in the world and the capitalist swine who own the shaver companies have sacrificed loyalty for crass profit by implementing one simple policy. If they stop making replacement cutters and shaving heads, or make them the search for them daunting enough, eventually even the most die hard man will have to part with his old friend and buy a new one. Never mind that the mechanics of the razor may be just fine, just stop making parts for models over ten years old and eventually the sheer pain of using a dull razor will compel a purchase. If there was ever evidence for the devil…

Thankfully, my local store still had the parts, which together could easily be stored in a 2 inch square box, for about $25 US and even now my old friend is getting some new life through the charger while awaiting tomorrow morning and that all important first shave with a fresh cutter and screen. I wonder what my neck will look like without the red marks? I hope my old friend won’t hold a grudge for being left in a drawer for about six months.

Maybe I’ll just say the Norelco was a fling and it really didn’t mean that much to me. After all, we were made for each other.

Driving back from St. Elias on Sunday I had the chance to pay a final visit to a Dairy Queen * in Lake City, Minnesota. Lo and behold they had a favorite of mine, “twist” cones with chocolate on one side and vanilla on the other. For some odd reason many Dairy Queens have taken out the special dispensing nozzle required to combine the two flavors in one cone and even more have simply eliminated chocolate soft serve all together. So finding a place that still serves the “twist” cone was an unexpected treat.

And now I know where I’ll stop on the way home after Agape Vespers!


*For those who read this blog from outside the US or Canada, Dairy Queen is a chain restaurant that serves, among other things, a kind of ice cream called “soft serve” which in consistency is somewhere between actual ice cream and whipped cream and can be mechanically pumped into a cone.

Why is there a part of me that secretly wishes DNA tests would prove that none of the men clamoring to be named the “father” of Anna Nicole Smith’s baby is the real one?

What a cross that small child will have to bear some day!

Thanks to Fr. Rick Andrews, Pastor of St. George Greek Orthodox Church, St. Paul, MN

As I was walking to my car, I felt that I had done my duty and I would leave with a renewed sense of purpose and dedication, in spite of my tardiness. As I was opening the door to my car and taking off my coat, I overheard one of the workers saying to another, “I’ve been putting in septic tanks for 20 years, and I ain’t never seen anything like that before. “

A must read article from Mark Shea on not being asked out to the dance.

I’m certainly no prophet and often don’t understand the ways of the world. My wisdom is shallow. My thoughts are tepid water.

But this is true.

Somehow, some way, God still loves this small blue orb in space and all who inhabit, and sometimes seem to infest, it. I can’t tell you why this is or how it all works out. That would be because I am not God.
But I see glimmers of it and every time I feel like nothing is left and faith is gone there is always a shred of light, sometimes just a pinprick, that makes it through.

More often than not I struggle to make sense of things and sometimes get lost and feel angry and wrestle with angels or give in to my demons. Yet I am convinced there’s a plan to it all. I wish I knew what it was but somehow it is certain that God holds all things in His love. More than that I cannot say with any clarity at all and probably won’t until this Earth’s air leaves my lungs and the breath of heaven fills them.

But I still believe, or I’m unable to not believe. Is that faith? I don’t know. But somehow I feel safe in the storm.

Tonight my wife and I will go out for dinner and then a play. We’ll drive home and she and I and the three cats will all tuck in for a winter’s sleep. Together.

Now the origins of this day are the subject of debate and who St. Valentine actually was is shrouded in obscurity but hearts and flowers and dinner are the order for those who share thier life with someone. Those who’ve belonged to each other for years, those who are new at it all, and those who are still trying will all be busy tonight whether the task is making the best impression or the relaxed celebration of the years.

But for some this is the hardest day of all.

For everyone “in the dance’ as it were there are those who sit by themselves on the chairs by the wall. For most its not about being ugly or mean but rather that time and circumstances and the chance winds of life have swept them aside in the waltz of love. Some sit to the side because thier hearts have been broken and the fear of pain’s return is stronger then the hunger for belonging. Others have tried and tried but the fates have weighed against them even as they wait in hope. A few have someone to love but the call of duty has taken them far away so they are alone this day but not forever. Many have belonged at one time, to another, and that belonging has been broken by strife, or hurt, or the too soon arrival of death. They may have the comfort of moments past but the dance goes on without them.

No one on this Earth knows the whys and wherefores of it all, how it is that some are joined and some are alone on this night where everything screams “together” and those who aren’t can be run through with a hundred arrows by the thought of it. If the answers where easy the solace would be as well but as certain as love is in the air this will be a night of tears for some.

For those who have been graced with the presence of someone they love this day reminds us of our fortune and how easily we take it all for granted. We often pass by even those who are intimate with us with a casualness whose effect only occurs to us when they are gone. We too easily ignore and even hurt the ones we love simply because we assume thier presence is a given and so we can treat it like something common and disposable. Today, despite its marketing tackiness, can remind us of the gifts we have been given and those we need to share.

For those who will endure this day with a certain pain of longing a harder calling comes to mind, the task of finding the love of God of which our human loves are a type and shadow without that love being present to show us the way. Human love is a solace, a foretaste of that which God gives, a blessed taste, when it is holy, of that which is to come and those without must transcend the foretaste and discover the substance without the normal direction markers. But God is good and when our love cannot reach up His reaches down and embraces us and carries us through.

Whatever your state this Valentine’s Day, whether everything passes in a blur of events or so slowly you can hear the clock ticking on the wall that highest love remains the greatest of all and those who see even a glimmer of it can make it through the night.

Lent arrives on Monday of this next week and probably not a moment too soon.

As a child growing up in the Plymouth Brethren we had no Lent and only a smattering of holy seasons, or rather holy days like Christmas and Easter. There were, as I remember, times of fasting and prayer where individuals or “assemblies” (what we called parishes) would practice this discipline but no set season as such.

In seminary the ancient flow of the church year, with its cycles of fasting and feasts, was a kind of flavoring added to the eclectic flow of self designed worship. Professors looking to add a dose of depth or flow or novelty to worship would occasionally take snippets of the ancient ordo and attempt to graft them on to whatever form of worship prevailed at the moment. I distinctly remember a class at the Church of the Brethren seminary across from Northern Baptist where we were tasked with designing a worship service and my group grabbed “Jubilate Deo” and stuck it in with a scripture reading and a few other things to make our “service”. If I remember correctly it actually brought out a few tears in those who attended and looking back probably more in some of the Fathers. But we were at least trying to be sincere and for a few of us a taste of those ancient things pushed us to want more and were the first faint impulses of that which brought us to Orthodoxy.

And when one arrives in Orthodoxy there is a fascination with the rubrics of it all, the whys and hows, and what you’re supposed to do and what should be left behind. Having been starved from the richness of all that so many who lived their whole lives in Orthodoxy take for granted the new arrivals often plunge in headfirst and with some passion. There’s nothing wrong with that, I suppose, as long as people see that the rubrics and techniques and services are means and not the end in themselves. We don’t fast in Lent just because we want to be in compliance with ancient canons. We fast because we have need of that which it brings us, repentance and a life drawn closer to God.

I need to fast because I have a need to be free from all that is dark and unholy in me, and believe me there’s a lot. I need to fast because in a gluttonous culture I too have become a glutton. I need to fast because more often than I wish I have lost control of my appetites and need to bring them back into thier proper place. I need to fast because I sin and have made myself a captive and wish to be free.

At the heart of Lent, of all the seasons of the Church year, is that primal need, the need to be transformed from within and draw close to God. It’s that need that keeps the bars open at night as people seek for a moment or two to be right with the world and know joy, or at least a bit of happiness, and perhaps find a person with whom they may connect. It’s that need that keeps people at thier desks all day pursuing the money and things they feel will fulfill them. But the truth is that only God will do and in a strange twist of logic it is in the giving up of ourselves that we obtain what we need, and in the sacrificing of our desires that we are made whole. It was that need that made the Plymouth Brethren fast, we naive seminarians reach out for some fragment of a Tradition the rejection of which defined our denominations, and calls those who have traveled far to the safe shores of Orthodoxy to realize again the precious gift of Lent. Underneath the history and rubrics of it all is that hunger to be close to God, to be other than the person we see in the morning mirror, and we fortunate ones have been given a means to that end.

So I can’t tell you how this fast, once started, will end. I may make a total mess of it. But I’ve got to try. Something deep inside of me needs to. Bright and early on Pure Monday the struggle begins.