Category: Culture

A short rant…

~ Fr. John Chagnon ~ 1 Comment

Please understand, ladies, that the sexual revolution is over and men have won. We have convinced you that being promiscuous is liberating, that being an object is freedom, and we by and large have left you with the consequences while we do what we want. Only when you decide that you want something better and  are willing to stick to your decisions will any of this change.

And men, we may have won but the victory is hollow. We got what we think we wanted, lots of sex without consequence, but behind the posturing there is still a desire for true love that remains unfulfilled no matter how many hook ups you record. You will never find your soul mate in America’s sexual jungle and nothing will change until you decide that you want something more.

Whirlwind Ministries…

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is tucked inside what appears to be a gym with a kitchen attached. One door in. One door out. One half the room is table and the other half instruments with a pulpit shoehorned in between.

The walls are covered with pictures, trees mostly, and some holy thoughts. Perhaps one day someone said “I know, let’s get the kids to paint the wall” and this is what they got. Yet its all pleasant in a well worn kind of way, like the house of an aunt who never made much money but was still your favorite.

I was to be the bassist in the praise band, using the time up front to practice for a later prison ministry gig,  and because of work I arrived late while the service was in full swing. Quickly unpacking I found my place in the music and began to play. Three chords, lots of repeating, and tons of emotion. The sounds system was loud, so loud that I had trouble at first picking out my bass notes, but it was the volume of passion. While we Orthodox may occasionally mumble a few notes Pentecostals sing from the bottom of their shoes.

Songs done, a sermon was next in the order of business, a young lady skipping from passage to passage, thought to thought, using a whiteboard to help her along. Bibles were open and occasionally someone joined in with a question or comment. I listened, and remembered. This was me, some time ago, the music, the sermon, everything. It’s been a million miles down the road, of course, but I had not forgotten.

Yes, I am a different person now, Orthodox through and through. I was never a good Pentecostal even when I hung around with them. Too much noise. Too many things going on. I could never imagine going back to that world. I love the beautiful stillness and holy peace of Orthodoxy. Yet one thing remains. The love.

Whatever else was going on, good, bad, or otherwise, there was love. Love in the music. Love in a parish with its doors wide open to folks from the local Gospel Mission. Even a love for holy things that jumped from place to place with the sermon. Come in broken, disheveled, lonely, or not quite right for “polite” society and Whirlwind’s heart was ready to expand to fit anyone who walked in.

Whatever else we have we don’t often have that and in their own way Whirlwind may be more Orthodox than we could ever imagine, or be.

FWIW…

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I was watching a little of ESPN this morning and the stories were all about athletes with multi-million dollar contracts holding out for a “better deal”.  Perhaps it would be good for them to consider that in these times such hold outs, an irritation before, are appearing more and more obscene.

Orthodox Christianity has liturgies…

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in fact a pretty good number of them including services that are done only once a year and they all have on thing in common. There not about you, or me for that matter.

The object is always God and that takes getting used to in a culture where our worship of our emotions, our needs, our thoughts, and our preferences bleeds over into our churches. If there is one thing that comes from Orthodox Christian worship it’s that you, or I, are not God. Weddings, funerals, divine liturgy, morning prayers, it makes no difference. It’s not about you, or us, or the world around or within,  just God.

You see you and I have been blessed all week with things like gravity, a heartbeat, food (usually too much) and a host of things that we’re often blind to in a society that counts on us always being addicted to more. For most of us, in this country especially, we are swimming in a sea of blessings for which we are, in the main, generally ungrateful and unresponsive. We’ve forgotten the Giver and even the time set aside to give thanks, to be grateful, to return a few words of worship for an eternity of goodness is tinged with our selfishness.

Orthodox worship challenges us to step out of ourselves, even if its just for a few hours a week. Orthodox worship calls us to to another Kingdom, not just the affirmation of the ones we’ve created. Orthodox liturgy is designed to break us out of our boxes and give us the opportunity to be what we were designed to be, creatures in communion with our Creator.

Only when our hearts are set on higher things can we transcend. The moment, any moment,  when we are truly present to God is the moment when we are most alive. In losing ourselves in the presence of God we find that for which we hunger.

Understand this and it will be easy to turn off the TV on Sunday morning.

It's not possible…

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to truly enter into Orthodoxy if you come to change it, save it, add your distinctive (political, sexual,theological, etc.) or think that the addition of you is going to inevitably change the course of its stream. If you come in the door this way only three things can happen. You’ll leave when you finally discover that the Church isn’t going to accept your particular slant on things or if they do it might take a couple of hundred years. You’ll grow old in the Church in some quirky corner and always be partly disappointed.  Or you’ll decide that whatever you thought was so gung ho important coming in is not important as the mind of the Church over the centuries and you’ll start to “get it”.

The truth is that in the 2000 plus years the Church has been around it has seen and done more than you. You have nothing new to offer it, not your ideas, not your sins, not your perspectives, and every time you think you do the reply is the same “Been there, done that, let’s go to prayer.” If you understand this, or come to understand this, you’ll start to see the freedom that lies in it all. If you don’t you’ll find yourself spending a lot of time “kicking against the goads.”

Orthodox Christianity, with all the flaws of its adherents, still has an enormous amount to offer the hungry soul. Whatever else can be said, good or ill, about it it can never be accused of lacking depth.  Yet if there’s a label, a hyphen of any kind before the words Orthodox Christian, either in your mind or out loud in front of everybody,  you can spend a hundred years in the pews, know every rubric, and be correct in every step of the dance and still not understand what you’re doing.

Count on it.

Tower of Babel…

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One of the curses of this time, this post modern era, is the idea that the definition of a word, or a thing, or an idea is entirely the possession of the one who uses it. In rejecting the idea of any common truth, or even a standard whereby truth may be discerned, we live in a post tower of Babel world of our own creating, speaking multiple languages and living in mutual incomprehensibility.

I wonder about the day when the ordinary business of human affairs becomes clouded by all of this, when people decide to ignore the normal courtesies that help us get from point A to point B because they don’t fit within their current construct. Will what has happened to art, already in the throes of its deconstruction, become life? Perhaps it already has.

I wonder, as well, what will become of the world when we start to realize, again, that nature in itself has its own truth, its own limits and definitions beyond which even the most technological cultures cannot proceed. How painful will it be to rediscover what we have ignored, that there is a cadence, principals, and laws worked into the very cells of the universe that can be pushed and redefined in some false hope but never overcome. What terrible agony will proceed the coming sanity?

It seems in these days we have each chosen not to join together to build one tower to heaven but rather for each of us to build our own in the belief that God either doesn’t notice or perhaps even affirms the project. The results, though, will be the same.