Category: Faith

To Be Honest…

~ Fr. John Chagnon ~ Leave a comment

I’m disappointed with America right now, what we’ve become, the lengths it seems we’ve fallen from the good and how what is happening with us affects the larger world. Our freedom is becoming more and more about license and entitlement, our wealth is less about charity and more about hoarding, and our technology is slowly changing from servant to master. Our chief exports seem to be war and moral decay. Our chief imports are whatever toys we can get the poor and oppressed of the world to make for us at a price point to occupy us while our hearts empty and the world around us burns.

Trump and Clinton, we like to point out their mistakes, their scandals, their moral challenges, but they are us and we are them. They are a mirror for all of us and yet we don’t seem to understand that the person we see as we look is actually ourselves. We’ve got some rough years ahead and we may never remember to pull the chute as we free fall because we’re so busy looking at our phones on the way down.

The sadder part is that while this has been happening the church has often been the chaplain for the whole process of decay. Many churches are deeply compromised and, in fact, have become places where there is a veneer of Christian ritual covering a substance that is deeply and profoundly disconnected from the actual content of the Faith itself. Where there is a substance of Faith there is often a mass complacency to the real nature of the times, a denial of what is really happening around us and a bunker mentality that increasingly isolates us from the people who need us most, the lost, the confused, the massive numbers of people who are victims of these times.

Someone, and I forgot who it was said “Americans will do the right thing, after they’ve done everything else.” I think there is some truth to this. Perhaps, in time, the pain we’ve brought on ourselves from our continuing experiments in selfishness and decadence will finally get to be so high that some of us will start to think the unthinkable, the possibility that we were wrong when we thought that getting rid of the standards tested in time and the crucible of real world experience, the traditions if you will, was a bad idea. Already the cracks in our new world order are beginning to show and eventually even massive doses of TV and weed will not be able to medicate the pain.

Until that time we in the church need to strive as best as we broken people can to live the gift we’ve been given and share it at every opportunity. The times call for courageous, loving, and transparent people to stand for something that is very unpopular right now, the idea that there are things in the human experience that transcend the individual, things larger and more true than any emotion, purchase, urge, or perceived need. Your culture will find ways, at the present, to punish you for this because you will be, wherever you are, the child that reminds the emperors of this world that they really don’t have any clothes. Your mere presence will be an irritant to those who plan on making fortunes for themselves while the culture goes bankrupt, forgetting of course that the bankrupt culture will eventually make paupers of them as well. The way you live your life will be an affront to people who believe that power over others is the way to their utopia by eliminating the dissent that reminds them of their own emptiness.

So, there is hope but it will be hope realized in long term, peaceful, and activist struggle. The struggle of those who are looking for sanity to achieve it for themselves and then the struggle to change the world around them by sharing that sanity one person at a time until it prevails. Those who choose to take on the struggle will need to understand that for years they may have to be on the outside looking in as they make the deliberate choice to live as exiles in their own land until the day its soul destroying tendencies can be healed. For the churches that remain faithful there will have to be an almost entire change of vision, a reorientation towards the understanding that this America is already a pagan land, as it were, and that, far from being acceptable and normal in these times, we are a community often at radical dissonance with the world around us, a revolutionary body who have been called to be salt and light in ways that will make us uncomfortable as we are torn from our isolation and complacency. In the end only the churches that have refused to baptize the brokenness of this culture will have any meaning, substance, or even existence and we have to daily make a choice what kind of church we will be.

I’m disappointed in America right now. While in the larger and eternal scheme of things nations don’t matter because they’re temporary entities subject to change they can, in any one moment of time, be part of the larger human good. Right now this America I live in is often not. The only remedy I can see is to be fully a citizen of my actual and permanent country, the observant Christian will understand what I am saying, and that by doing so transform my temporary one.

Long live the revolution!

 

Ecumenical Martyrdom

~ Fr. John Chagnon ~ Leave a comment

In these last years as we have heard, seen, and read the stories of Christians martyred across the world something interesting seems to be happening. The stories are being covered by all kinds of media across the spectrum of the Christian world and basically all of it speaks of these martyrs as Christians regardless of the particular label. The usual rhetoric that divides us has given way, in some ways, to an understanding that we have a unity, if not in doctrine at least in blood.

Of course we identify the people who are killed by their community, still there also seems to be a shared sense of commonality among all of us in the observant Christian community for the fate of these people and a realization of some sense of kinship in the growing sense that we, too, whatever out particular communion, could be one day the people in the cross hairs of some effort to eliminate us. If our shared faith doesn’t bind us our potential shared fate could.

My community is Orthodox and yet we have commemorated in our prayers of the Great Entrance the Catholic nuns who were murdered in Yemen not as “Papist Heretics” but as those who were killed for their faith in Christ. No, they won’t be officially listed on the “rolls” as it were of martyrs and if and when the Roman Catholic church recognizes their sainthood our recognition will wait until some far off council where, if it were possible, some kind of union between the Catholic and Orthodox communions could happen. I’m not holding my breath on that one but until then I can at least recognize that these nuns, and so many others like them, have served Christ to the end and that sacrifice can be something that binds us together, a shared experience, a shared threat even, that helps us to see the faith in the other, the reality of Christ in the other, in ways that comfort and ease have not.

 

 

I Was Serving the Liturgy…

~ Fr. John Chagnon ~ 2 Comments

at Holy Resurrection Church in Fargo, North Dakota yesterday and as I was serving I heard the voices of children who had joined in with the choir. They were not polished voices, they were simple, pure, pious, and innocent voices which is much to be preferred if a choice must be made, and they reminded me, as well, of those days when I had a simple, and unsophisticated as the world would see it,  faith. Could it be possible that the whole point of this beautiful path, this life of Faith, is to, even knowing what we all do in the complicated adult life, get back to that place where our faith is like a child’s and we can sing from our hearts the songs of Faith?

 

Many Years Ago…

~ Fr. John Chagnon ~ 2 Comments

guns were available at hardware and sporting goods stores, no background check and all the ammunition you could afford. Walk in, buy, walk out. You could even order them via catalog if you didn’t want to leave the house. My grandfather, as a young man, even had access to dynamite to help remove stumps from the ground.

Yet, no mass shootings basically anywhere. So what’s the difference between then, in the freewheeling bad old days of virtually no gun control and now? I don’t think its the guns. I do think its us.

The one difference I can see between then and now is that back then there was a larger moral framework rooted in a Judaeo Christian ethic where “Thou shalt not kill (murder)” was still taken seriously, and even the mobsters took care to follow it in their own way by trying to minimize “civilian” casualties.

Leap forward to now and that narrative is largely gone, done in by a culture where even some sense moral and social caution is identified as repression, where human identity is entirely divorced from any concept of the image of God and reduced to a basic consumer equation, and violence as a routine solution to human challenges has filled the moral vacuum with a hundred little deaths and, from time to time, explosions of death that make the headlines.

Politicians, bathed in this culture, see only more and different kinds of laws as the solution because they have forgotten about, or deliberately sought to undermine, the law inside a human heart. A moral human, properly formed, encouraged, and supported by a larger spiritual and ethical imperative, will hesitate to do violence even when its tools are close at hand but a person who has no  proper morals, and lives in a culture where there is no larger context than how a person feels at any given moment, will use any tool at hand and no law can, or will, stop them. Witness the couple in San Bernadino who obtained the weapons used in the horrific crime outside of the existing laws.

No, I’m not advocating a weapons free for all. What I am advocating is something that most politicians, pundits, and sometimes even preachers have forgotten. We need a moral revival, a return to a larger moral narrative that affirms human life, impresses a moral responsibility on its members to strive above all to do no harm, and calls us away from our consumer driven, violence saturated, world. That revival will start when Christians decide to be Christians again and churches do the same.

 

 

 

 

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.”

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.

In Recent Days…

~ Fr. John Chagnon ~ Leave a comment

the efficiency and beauty of the Lord’s Prayer have been brought to mind.

Life is busy, full of stimuli, things to do, places to go, and work to be done. Prayer can be like just one more thing swirling around waiting to be grasped. But how to pray? How to know what to say, what to ponder, what to remember in the 24 hour news and information world? There can be simultaneously too many things and things that escape memory all at the same time.

Enter the Lord’s Prayer, beautiful, poetic, and restful. Simple and direct it can, by itself, contain in broad strokes all that the faithful person wants to say, all they need.  If time and the craziness of life rise up it provides a moment of peace, a place where the words themselves point to the deep longings of our heart and God is able to both hear the prayer and those longings between the lines.

Yes, I have wishes and specifics but those are already known to God. I inform Him of nothing in expressing them. Mostly it seems in these days what I need to do is not fill God’s ear with my endless words but simply put myself in His care and the Lord’s Prayer is, above all else, an act by which this is done. Short on specifics and long on the broadest human needs it says, simply, “You are my heavenly Father, help me to want what you want and trust you for everything else.” There is great peace in that, the freedom of not worrying about every little thing that God already knows and releasing the worry of the details to the One who knows and loves me more than I know or love myself.

Truly, the God who knows my longings also knows what, in the end, is first, best, and most conducive to my greatest good. I’m not to that point of total reliance and peace yet, but this prayer, this Lord’s Prayer is increasingly my friend on the journey there.

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

I Come to Church Early…

~ Fr. John Chagnon ~ Leave a comment

on Sunday mornings so I have the place all to myself at least for a few minutes. I know, the point is that we gather in community but before the work of the Liturgy I have time to do little tasks, light candles, fire up the censer, warm some water, the little details that will make everything flow in the hours ahead. Such things are a kind of offering for me, tidying up the place is a kind of worship because of Who we expect to be with us.

I find a kind of shelter, as well, in those quiet moments of simple tasks. My world can be busy, electric, digital, and full of people. I crave the silence of the early morning church, the time to take deep breaths and try to distance my heart from the world outside. I’m not trying to hide. I’ll go back into that world soon enough. Still, a moment or two of peace in a holy place is a enduring kind of sustenance.

Perhaps visitors who come to my church will see the colors, vestments, and beautiful things and think only about the practicality of it all. Couldn’t you have done with less? Don’t you know that there are poor people out there who could have benefitted from what you paid for that chalice? All of that is true in its own way and a very real part of our lives is dedicated to making sure that those enduring human needs are being met in the name of Christ.

Yet, I need beauty and holiness as well, the idea, the reality that there are places in the world where the world itself stops for a while and heaven seems close. I know God is everywhere but at the same time I cherish being in a place where He is the only reason for its existence, a place where God is deliberately and lovingly invited to be with us and all the angels and Saints are welcome as well. Such places are growing rarer in this world, and, simple or elaborate, each one is a refuge from time and space, a place where the weary can find some rest and where in the quiet moments before Liturgy, alone in a room full of candles, icons, and the smell of incense, I become truly alive.