Category: History

Indeed…

~ Fr. John Chagnon ~ Leave a comment

The difference between Christians and the rest of men is neither in country, nor in language, nor in customs…. They dwell in their own fatherlands, but as temporary inhabitants. They take part in all things as citizens, while enduring the hardships of foreigners. Every foreign place is their fatherland, and every fatherland is to them a foreign place. Like all others, they marry and beget children; but they do not expose their offspring. Their board they set for all, but not their bed. Their lot is cast in the flesh; but they do not live for the flesh. They pass their time on earth; but their citizenship is in heaven. They obey the established laws, and their private lives they surpass the laws.

“Letter to Diognetus” c 125/200 AD

Via Bishop Melchisedek

Wise Thoughts…

~ Fr. John Chagnon ~ Leave a comment

“The majority of modern thought exalts the state at the expense of the family, treating the family as a problem that has to be redefined continually and managed by the benevolent bureaucrats of the more powerful and wiser state. But the experience of politically and economically turbulent times reveals that the family is, and must remain, the more fundamental entity. A man “cannot really refer the daily domestic problems of his life to a State that may be turned upside-down every twenty-four hours. He must, in fact, fall back on that primal and prehistoric institution; the fact that he has a mate and they have a child; and the three must get on together somehow, under whatever law or lawlessness they are supposed to be living.” — G.K. Chesterton.

St. Kyriaki…

~ Fr. John Chagnon ~ Leave a comment

Among the most steadfast of all the Saints are the virgin martyrs. Their fortitude in the face of extreme persecution humbles us who are often only mildly inconvenienced, at worst, for Christ.  Oh, to have this kind of love for Christ and this level of faith. St. Kyriaki pray for us.

st-kyriaki

A Good Article…

~ Fr. John Chagnon ~ Leave a comment

“Orthodoxy is not here by accident.”

The early immigrants would probably not have understood the meaning or implication of those words.  It is for the generations after them to understand that God used the immigration for His own purposes, and to incarnate those words into action.  America has yet to hear the Orthodox word – a word that is neither Roman Catholic nor Protestant but which echoes and resonates with the unbroken vision and preaching of earliest Christianity.  Orthodoxy was brought to America through Alaska.  Their writings and labor reveal that the original Russian missionaries keenly felt that “Orthodoxy is not here by accident” – a conviction affirmed in 1970 by the bishops of the Russian Church who gave us our “autocephaly.”  However this autocephaly will be worked out or altered in the future, mission to and for America  –  in all of its dimensions – must remain the focus and work of this generation of Orthodox Christians – because Orthodoxy is not here by accident, but by the wisdom and providence of the Lord.

Read more here.

Worth Considering…

~ Fr. John Chagnon ~ 1 Comment

More than forty years ago, that remarkable historian Christopher Dawson, in his book Religion and Culture, expressed this hard truth strongly. “The events of the last few years,” Dawson wrote, “portend either the end of human history or a turning point in it. They have warned us in letters of fire that our civilization has been tried in the balance and found wanting-that there is an absolute limit to the progress than can be achieved by the perfectionment of scientific techniques detached from spiritual aims and moral values…. The recovery of moral control and the return to spiritual order have become the indispensable conditions of human survival. But they can be achieved only by a profound change in the spirit of modern civilization. This does not mean a new religion or a new culture but a movement of spiritual reintegration which would restore that vital relation between religion and culture which has existed at every age and on every level of human development.”

Read more here.

A Snippet of Church History…

~ Fr. John Chagnon ~ Leave a comment

Written from a Roman Catholic understanding but this would also be shared by Orthodox. Hat tip to N. Begley.

“Some non-Catholic Christians urge that the whole Church went off the rails by about A.D. 95, and hence that ‘Church history’ is really the record of an immense botch. These Christians would urge that the Church of Jesus Christ, made up as she is exclusively of true believers, pursued its humble and obscure way in little assemblies here and remote groupings there, quite apart from the brontosaurian impostor that, early on, took unto herself the name of The Catholic Church.

The difficulty of maintaining this view arises from the nature of the topic itself. The Christian believers who were under the authority of the apostles and then under the bishops appointed by them understood this episcopal entity to be the Church. All the writings we have from the first and second century attest to this. If we will read the letters, sermons, and tracts of Ignatius and Clement and Justin and Irenaeus, we will find a church that, if she is not the Church, is certainly the only one anyone had any knowledge of. If we wish to forego any connection with this lineage, then we find ourselves obliged either to link ourselves with the Montanists, the Marcionites, or the Nicolaitans or to postulate some fugitive network of assemblies of which there is no record.”

(Thomas Howard, On Being Catholic, San Francisco, Ignatius Press, 1997, p.50-51). Paul Newcombe

Worth a Read…

~ Fr. John Chagnon ~ Leave a comment

A review of the book “The Unintended Reformation”…

The underlying problem is that most people seek–and through relentless advertising are encouraged to pursue–ever greater material affluence and comfort, despite the fact that the average American income, for example, rose eightfold in real terms during the twentieth century.  Westerners now live in societies without an acquisitive ceiling:  a distinctly consumerist (rather than merely industrial) economic ethos depends precisely on persuading people to discard as quickly as possible what they were no less insistently urged to purchase, so that another acquisitive cycle might begin

If “rights” and “persons” no less than “morality” are mere constructs without empirical grounding in the findings of science, and only science can legitimately tell us anything true about reality, then such constructs can be deconstructed and dismissed in the pursuit of alternatives.

>Reformation leaders thought the root problem was doctrinal, and in seeking to fix it by turning to the Bible they unintentionally introduced multiple sorts of unwanted disagreement.  This constituted a new set of problems, different from the first.  What was true Christianity and how was it known?  Doctrinal controversy was literally endless, and religio-political conflicts…were destructive and inconclusive.

What sort of public life or common culture is possible in societies whose members share ever fewer substantive beliefs, norms, and values save for a nearly universal embrace of consumerist acquisitiveness?

Read more here.

We American Christians…

~ Fr. John Chagnon ~ Leave a comment

have to get over ourselves. We seem to complain a lot, muse a lot, and write a lot of how tough we have it and how it seems the Church is in decline and the forces of evil have gathered against us. Woe be to us! Jesus come and save us. Then we wait as we sit on our hands.

First, we seem to have forgotten that the Church is so much larger than us, larger in size, larger in scope, and larger in action. Observant Christians in this country are not the sum of world Christianity we are a “fraction” of it. We belong to a community of brothers and sisters that extends across the globe, a community of which we are neither the apex or the definition. If Christian faith seems to be languishing in the parts of the world inhabited by Western Europeans its thriving elsewhere. Africa? Growing. Asia? Growing. Eastern Europe? Growing. The list could go on.  Because your Parish is dwindling doesn’t mean that the Church is and perhaps instead of complaining it would be good for we Americans to humble ourselves a bit and learn from the Christians where the Church is growing about how to grow ourselves.

Next, we are not in persecution. The vast majority of American Christians have never even broken a nail in the cause of Christ. We fret because the election didn’t go our way while in other places of the world buildings are being burned down with the Christians still inside of them. Yes, there are people who dislike us, even hate us in this country, but by and large even our excess hasn’t been threatened. If there were real persecution in this country the truth is that most of us couldn’t take it. Whole denominations of Christians in the US have collapsed just because small groups have complained about something. How do you think it would be if there were, like many places in the world, actual soldiers at our doors? Perhaps the minor inconveniences we experience, again compared to the state of the Faith in the world, are God’s way of gently encouraging us to awake from our contented slumber and face, in a very tiny way, what our brothers and sisters around the world face at levels we can’t even imagine.

And finally, yes, of course we may be in for some tougher times. Who promised that being a Christian would be easy? Certainly not Jesus! Perhaps we need to revisit the actual history of our Faith and realize that as a counter cultural force, even in nominally “christian” societies, a certain amount of struggle is part and parcel of what it means to be faithful. The question seems to be a matter of what we’re going to do about it. Are we going to hunker down, keep the light under the bushel, and mutter as we pick through the end times tea leaves or are we going to realize that as our culture embraces more darkness it’s actually our moment in history to let our lights shine? In the coming days individual Christian people will making such choices, the times are forcing them on us since we seem to have been completely content just going along to get along, and how we choose to respond will make all the difference.

The first choice, though, is to get over ourselves.