I am convinced…

that, in the end, a Christian sexual ethic will triumph. This is because it most agrees with human happiness and design as it comes from the Designer. The problem is that we currently live in an age of arrogance, an age when all prior wisdom is considered suspect and knowledge that may appear to have spiritual sources even more so. So the ideas and wisdom formed over millenia of human experience are being disregarded in the belief they are shackles to progress rather than wisdom transcending time.

Of course it’s not so. Every generation thinks they invented sex and yet somehow doesn’t recall how they themselves got here. There is nothing new under the sun and our religious belief that somehow there is something new under the sun and that we are its source will eventually play out under the constant barrage of historical truth rooted in actual human experience and not utopian desire. We’re already seeing that happen in the great silent experience of people who’ve bought into our lies and have yet to voice their struggles.

Yet to get back to that place of respect and understanding, that place where we come to realize that the ideas that became traditional may just have become so because they, in fact, work in the world as it is and not as we think it should be, we are going to suffer. History is going to repeat itself because we are refusing to listen. Our current generation of lonely, broken, STD ridden people thinking that just breaking down one more barrier will be the key to love and happiness are going to find out they are wrong as have every generation before them which tried the same experiment. We will learn, the old lessons will be reaffirmed, but it will be by hard trial and painful experience and who knows how many generations and lives it will cost before sanity returns?

In that day the people now called homophobes, prudes, and regressives will be considered prophets and sages and those who continued to observe the Christian sexual ethic in the face of society’s barrages will be considered the forerunners of a new and better way of life. 

Those who decided to flow with current will, if they remain alive, need us to help them pick up the pieces and try to make some sense out of the damage.  And we will, because the love of Christ that motivates all true chastity also calls us to bind the wounds of those who have experienced the pains of its abandonment.

Until then we wait, watch, pray, and work for the greater good, even if the “greater” hates us for doing it.

Can Liberal Christianity…

be saved? A story of the Episcopal Church that calls to mind the general decline of mainline Protestant life. Some years ago I had hoped that perhaps there would be a place for me in the Episcopal Church. Alas, I was not a Patristics scholar but I knew that where I was headed and where this church was headed were two different directions. Still, there is no joy in this. A venerable community of faith is in the process of collapsing both in faith, life, and numbers. A cautionary tale, as well, for us all.

Wise Thoughts…

Humility in Russian means a state of being at peace, when a person has made peace with God’s will; that is, he has given himself over to it boundlessly, fully, and joyfully, and says, “Lord, do with me as Thou wilt!” As a result he has also made peace with all the circumstances of his own life—everything for him is a gift of God, be it good or terrible. God has called us to be His emissaries on earth, and He sends us into places of darkness in order to be a light; into places of hopelessness in order to bring hope; into places where joy has died in order to be a joy; and so on. Our place is not necessarily where it is peaceful—in church, at the Liturgy, where we are shielded by the mutual presence of the faithful—but in those places where we stand alone, as the presence of Christ in the darkness of a disfigured world.

I Think…

that perhaps one of the reasons the imperfections of the world, both minor and horrible, are allowed to continue is to stop us in our tracks, remind us of what might be, and call our thoughts higher. Everything here is temporary. Everything here, no matter how good or beautiful, is tinged with sadness, colored with imperfection, flavored by a struggle. Its a kind of wisdom to understand this and to, upon reflecting on it, live lightly on this Earth and fully in the Kingdom of God.

Good Words…

No wonder, then, that it is so hard to be Christian–it is not hard it is impossible. No one can knowingly accept a way of life which, the more truly it is lived, leads more surely to one’s own destruction. And that is why we constantly rebel, try to make life easier, try to be half-Christian, try to make the best of both worlds. We must ultimately choose–our felicity lies in one world or the other, not in both.

Fr. Seraphim Rose

On Affirmation…

Christianity affirms you but not in the way affirmation is generally presented in this culture. In fact Christianity may not affirm your present emotions, state of being, practices, or relationships. It’s very possible that Christianity will say to you, to me, to us all “No, that’s not acceptable.” So if you’re looking for a religion to simply embrace you wherever you are at any given moment Christianity is not for you. Christianity does, however, affirm the person you can become in God and it understands that it is this person, and not the person dancing with thoughts, feelings, and ever-changing desires in any given moment that is actually the “real” you. The path that Christ lays out is not about simply baptizing whatever it is you desire to be but rather to make you what you were designed to be, a human in communion with God.  It would be easier, of course, especially in the short run for Christianity to just baptize anything we want, but that would be settling for less, and always having to settle for less is a kind of hell in the midst of life.

Wise Thoughts…

…”How is it that I think and do things that I don’t want or desire to think or do”? I answered that everyone is that way, and so forth. Therefore, the more one conquers himself, the greater the reward that he will receive there in eternity. This is the Christian’s most essential duty, and for this one needs God’s help, which is received through prayer…

St. Innocent of Alaska

Wisdom…

Faith and love which are gifts of the Holy Spirit are such great
and powerful means that a person who has them can easily, and with
joy and consolation, go the way Jesus Christ went. Besides this,
the Holy Spirit gives man the power to resist the delusions of the
world so that although he makes use of earthly good, yet he uses
them as a temporary visitor, without attaching his heart to them.
But a man who has not got the Holy Spirit, despite all his
learning and prudence, is always more or less a slave and
worshiper of the world.

St. Innocent of Irkutsk, Indication of the Way into the Kingdom of
Heaven.