Category: Culture

Pray for Charlie…

~ Fr. John Chagnon ~ Leave a comment

Pray, first, because we are more alike than different. Given the money, fame, and access, which one of can say with certainty that we could have kept the powers of sin, struggle, and addiction away from our lives? Even without them we often fall so it is perhaps a grace that we don’t have more and thereby increase our risk.

Pray, again, because more than likely that wealth and access will be quickly gone and the fame will grow very shallow. There will be lawsuits by those who were deceived and damaged. There will be opportunities lost and expenses incurred. When the good times stop the good time friends may disappear, replaced by a kind of loneliness softened only by the discovery of those who were true and good all the time.

Pray, some more, because these wonderful drugs that keep people alive also rule the lives of those who take them. Life is measured by the dates and times and doses and everything must be done with great precision and little spontaneity Far away from the lights and the public persona there will always be a Charlie who knows that his life hangs by a pharmaceutical thread and even the lowest of viral loads doesn’t mean that this infection is gone, just hidden somewhere in a quiet spot where the current tests still can’t reach. This will be his life.

Pray, as well, because the potential of his life is still enormous. Sanity, health, and wholeness are often found through difficult circumstances and as long as there is life there is always hope. Truly, as St. Augustine is reputed to have said “There is no Saint without a past or a sinner without a future.”  God is not done with any one of us and neither is he done with Mr. Sheen.

Pray, finally, for ourselves. Seeing someone struggle and bear the consequences of that struggle should never elicit any thought or emotion in us save for humility in knowing that we, too, are capable of our own kinds of struggles, sins, and darkness. Yes, perhaps this was not our particular sin but we each have our own and in their own way they are deadly to us as well.

If he were here, I guess I would say only this to Charlie,  “God loves you more than you can possible imagine and His grace is greater than any darkness you or I may wrestle with in our lives. There is better for you if you want it and God’s door is always open.”

I Live in a World of Rage…

~ Fr. John Chagnon ~ Leave a comment

born of selfishness and entitlement unfulfilled. All around me the world I live in shouts “What you feel is what is real and what you feel you need is what the rest of the world is obligated to provide.” When this is not true, which is more often the case than not, I am told that raging against whatever is outside of me that has failed my feelings is my right, my obligation even, until the ever-changing feelings and needs inside of me are satiated.

I reject this even as I understand that in doing so it can be like a fish rejecting water. This is the ocean I swim in, the river that is my home, and the pond where I was born, and yet I know this, all around me, is not the real world even as it surrounds me everywhere. So I resist as I can, asking God for peace, for insight, and a sense of eternity in the world of time. My own world is too small and it is constantly unsettled and angry because of its smallness and in moments when I am distant from the Truth I can feel the anger of my tiny world’s unfulfilled entitlement swelling inside until I am ready to burst.

I must die, daily even, to this small world and its rage. Daily I must recall its illusions, its shadows, and its emptiness. Instead of the thousand shouting voices all around me telling me  to burn and hate and consume and make war I must listen to the one voice that matters, the still, small, voice that comes after the storm and earthquakes and fire have passed. That is the voice of God. The rest is madness.

 

 

Above All There is Christ…

~ Fr. John Chagnon ~ Leave a comment

This life, this Christian way, is not a path for cowards. Our Lord was not joking when he told his followers they would have to, if they wished to be with him, “Take up their cross…” and the longer you travel along this Beautiful Path the more you will see of just that.

Still, although there are often temptations to step back from the challenges, go with the flow, and somehow find a way to walk without always having to face into the wind there is, above all, Christ.

There is a deep and profound beauty in Jesus, a vibrant and lively truth, and a sense of eternity embodied in Him that endures through time. When we draw close to Him there is a deep blessedness and even when we wander away there is still a light and hope  that can draw us through the darkness.

In this world, our Lord says, we will have many troubles but his voice also adds this calm assurance “Do not fear for I have overcome the world…”. Banged up and bruised, crawling through the night if that’s the best we can do, we remain his and he is ours and those who truly understand this can never go back.

Starbuck’s

~ Fr. John Chagnon ~ 2 Comments

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This says everything to be said about why I’m not even slightly interested in this manufactured “crisis”.  That, and the reality that I prefer Dunn Brothers anyway.

I Sometimes Envy the Dead…

~ Fr. John Chagnon ~ 4 Comments

in a certain kind of way. Yet, before you get worried or call 911 or think I’m off my rocker I need to explain what I mean because in a Christian context that statement is remarkably different from how it may be expressed in the world.

As I get older I have the advantage and disadvantage of having more experience, of having seen more of life than I did when I was in my youth and physical prime. There’s a good to that because one can learn much and gain wisdom if their eyes and ears and heart is open through the years to take in and learn the lessons of life. I sometimes tell people that I wish I had everything I know about the world now and my 18-year-old body. Alas, my whole self has had to travel through time to get to this point and while parts of my body are already beginning their slow decline,  I feel a sense of depth, wholeness, and understanding flourishing within of the kind that only comes with age.

The disadvantage that comes with age is that experience is also the experience of years of struggle and pain. The longer one lives the more one sees of war, poverty, brokenness, all the pathologies birthed in human sin. Such things stack up over the years and they can be wearying to the soul. Within myself I am continually reminded of enduring temptations and challenges and without I see a world simultaneously full of great beauty and great pain. It can be overwhelming.

And because of that as I get older I am growing less wary of death. Yes, I would still like to live because there is much that is worth keeping alive even in a fallen world. There are places to go, things to see, people to meet, and above all there is still, despite our best efforts to extinguish it, love and hope everywhere if people would only look up from their phones to see it. This world is still a place of God’s grace and an arena where we can know and live in it.

Still I see the gift that is death, at least if you see it from the Orthodox perspective. While death is an expression, the ultimate expression, of our brokenness and alienation, it has within it it, because of Christ, the seed of eternal life. It would not be good, I think, to live perpetually in a broken world. It would be wearying and deadly to us to experience over and over again the countless challenges and struggles of this world as it is. There is a kind of mercy in death, a mercy God provides so that we can rest and be taken from this world to be with Him until such time as God returns this world to what it was meant to be. In that sense I sometimes envy those who have gone to be with Christ. Their course is finished. Their tasks are completed. The pains of this present world have no power over them. They rest, and there are days when that rest in Christ can be quite appealing.

Still, my turn, for sure, will also come. I don’t plan to either hurry it along or needlessly attempt to delay its arrival. When it comes it comes and I hope that its presence will find me in faith and doing good things until the very last. Christ’s transforming death is also, for me, Christ’s transforming of life. My prayer is that because death has been transformed I can be transformed even now in anticipation and hope of that day when I, too, will rest in hope.

22 If I am to go on living in the body, this will mean fruitful labor for me. Yet what shall I choose? I do not know! 23 I am torn between the two: I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far; 24 but it is more necessary for you that I remain in the body. 25 Convinced of this, I know that I will remain, and I will continue with all of you for your progress and joy in the faith, 26 so that through my being with you again your boasting in Christ Jesus will abound on account of me. Philippians 1

From the News…

~ Fr. John Chagnon ~ Leave a comment

http://nypost.com/2015/10/01/oregon-gunman-singled-out-christians-during-rampage/

May God grant rest to those who have died, comfort to those who have survived, and courage to all of us to be willing to answer the question “Are you a Christian?” with a resolute “Yes.”

I’m Not Pure…

~ Fr. John Chagnon ~ Leave a comment

When it comes to sin if I haven’t done it I’ve probably at least had a passing thought about it and I suppose that if God would give me an unvarnished and undeceived view of myself I would discover things I would definitely rather not know or share.

Yet that doesn’t mean I’m hopeless.

I’m on a journey, you see, a journey of transformation where, by God’s grace, I hope to be changed, even if it’s at a very slow place, into something that looks more and more like Jesus who is purity, truth, love, freedom, and joy itself. And as I travel I’ve seen glimpses, short ones for sure, but real nonetheless, of what that destination is like. They are beautiful, peaceful, integrated, whole, and full of indescribable light. In a weary world their brevity still brings great peace to me, fresh water from a pure stream, a cloudless summer day, and the sense that time itself is temporary.

So I’m not pure. Yet I’ve seen what that purity looks like. It looks like Jesus,  and I’ve decided that even though I know I’ll fall sometimes, and even though my life and my most profound ideals won’t always match, it would still be better trying to gain those lofty heights than to settle into the comfortable numbness of an ordinary life, a life spent achieving everything less than what the God who loves me would like to share.

It’s just that I’ve seen life as it could be, and even if I trip and fall I’m not able to go back.

There is a great peace…

~ Fr. John Chagnon ~ Leave a comment

just in spending time in a church. I feel it when I step in, a sense of sanctuary from the craziness of the world, a physical reminder there are higher and more enduring realities in the world.

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At times it makes no difference what is actually going on, what Liturgy is being served, or how I am part of things. Just to be there, to have my eyes completely captured only by holy things, a whole world around me where nothing profane can find root. This is a deep kind of joy.

Now there is precious little refuge to be found. The whole world is about signs and commerce and work and the endless pursuit of the next “thing”. Some who are called flee to the deserts and forests to find a place of rest but I am called to be in this world and so I need a place in the world, a place that calls me to what is higher, better, and more enduring.

It does not need to be a fancy, covered with gold and finery. Wherever people of true Faith come in humility to encounter God is already covered in the best of decoration. I have been to beautiful churches and I have been to humble ones and I can say that God is no respecter of persons as much as He is a respecter of hearts. The holiness of hearts is what makes a church a temple and such hearts transform a building into a refuge from a confusing and aggressive world.

If nothing else is to be gained the Faithful should be in their temple as often as possible simply because it is “other” than any place in the world and may be the one place, the only place in the world, where holiness and the deep peace it brings is welcome. To rest in such a place refreshes the soul and brings healing to lives numbed by the restlessness of this world.

 

 

As I Have Grown Older…

~ Fr. John Chagnon ~ Leave a comment

I have come to view the weeks of spring with a greater sense of appreciation. As the snow fades and the green emerges from the ground I feel the cool air give way to warmth and listen to the birds announce life’s return to the trees. There is a kind of gentle hope in all of that, a hope that means more to me now that I realize there are more years behind than ahead, more days past than days to come.

Hope and spring allow me to endure the craziness of the world, the sense of the whole thing flying off its axis and spinning madly through space and time. More than anything else these days I’m simply sad at what I see around me, a great delusion with victims who have no idea of how to escape and transcend. I find myself caught up in it as well, drowning in a stormy sea and waiting for the Master to reach down and pull me from the waves. Yet, at least  I know there’s a Master there and couldn’t imagine what it would be like if I didn’t. Such is the world these days, the world of headlines, 24 hour access, and a culture designed to make drones of us all.

Then spring comes and resurrection and a still, small, voice speaks with a clarity beyond the storm. Life begins anew. It always does. Crazy, bitter cold winters can wreak havoc with their temperamental winds driving us to huddle inside by any fire we have left to keep us warm. Yet they never last. Life, sanity, joy, better things, they always return. Sometimes, of course, there is much pain in the journey to that return, but the return, like spring, is inevitable.

One day my body, worn down by all the days that have passed will enter its winter slumber. One day the world around me will enter its night as well. Perhaps it already has. Yet I will rise and so will the world, both by the same force, the grace of God, God’s eternal spring which even death, the death of a person or the death of a culture, cannot overcome. What the birds in the trees announce now. the angels will then, and so the hope inside me never dies.

 

 

I Have a Gay Cousin…

~ Fr. John Chagnon ~ Leave a comment

and I discovered that he recently married his long time partner, so all the stuff in the news these days has come a little closer to home.

My mother has met my cousin’s partner and apparently he’s a pretty nice guy. He’s an academic, a musician, and they have a nice home where they’ve lived together for years. There’s a beautiful garden in the yard and a certain kind of domestic stability that pervades the place. Had the judge not overturned their state’s laws on marriage and given them the opportunity to wed they would still be together as they have been for years. This is their house, their place, and their life.

It’s been decades since I’ve seen my cousin and years since we’ve talked, briefly, on the phone. The last surviving member of his immediate family, I only have a picture in my head of what he looks like and mostly I remember his paintings on the walls of their cabin on the lake. The son of my dad’s older sister I can’t say we’ve ever been close. In fact I don’t recall being close to any of the family on my dad’s side of the equation. So, in some ways. there is a distance between me and the news that he had married his partner.

I know what I’m not going to do. I’m not going to ostracize. I’m not going to despise. I’m not going to yell, badger, or harass. There will be no phone calls with Bible in hand and, if by chance, we meet some time we’ll talk of old times, look at some of his paintings, and catch up on all the years gone by.

Of course its hard for me in a way, but not the way most people may think. I was part of a team that spearheaded the introduction of HIV care to a health care facility. I’ve been a health care chaplain. I’ve watched good men, witty, bright, artistic, interesting, full of life, who happened to be gay, get sick and die. It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t good. It bore very little resemblance to the movie “Philadelphia”. Above all it was just sad.

The truth is that the image of a young man I cared for in tears, full of the realization that the man he looked to for love and happiness gave him an incurable illness, is stuck in my head and probably will be for the rest of my life. I see the statistics. I keep up on the health news. To be a sexual person in these United States is like running a gauntlet and for folks who identify as gay the risks are even higher. That’s not hate, just medical fact and there’s absolutely no joy or sense of “I told you so” in any of it. As a Christian I’ve given my life to helping make other people’s lives better and my heart aches in the face of human suffering. I’m glad my cousin has a steady place to be and people who care for him, as I understand it that’s not always been the case, but I also don’t want him to be another name on some quilt.

So, yes I worry a bit and pray, a lot. I cannot change anyone else. It’s enough that I struggle to change myself. I don’t have to agree with the choices other people make or the life they live as a condition for caring for them or having them as family or friends, so my door will always be open for anyone come what may. If there really is some kind of culture war to be fought I will fight it in my prayer corner and with loving service to others in confidence that God will shine His light where it is most needed.

Yes, my cousin is gay and married. But God isn’t finished with him, or me, yet.