Category: Life
An interesting article…
on the relationship between foreign patriarchates and the American Orthodox Christian community and its context for the current status of the Church in this country. Read in context.
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Doctors without religious beliefs…
are more likely to help patients die. Makes sense. If there is no meaning or value to life beyond utility then why shouldn’t death be hastened for those who are, or may, die anyway.
Might be good, by the way, to check in on your doctor’s spiritual life before you go under anesthesia. Just a thought.
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Please pray for our Bishops…
and our Archdiocese. The Holy Synod in Antioch has removed any kind of independence from our Dioceses, reduced our Bishops, outside of the Metropolitan, to auxuliary Bishops, and essentially transferred most of the authority in the Archdiocese to the Metropolitan. Where this will all eventually lead is still not clear but I feel that there may be some rough times ahead. Lord have mercy!
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The winds are cool today…
and the house windows are open. Late August is a taste of fall and even the sunlight seems a little different on a day like today. The seasons seem to be moving, first to harvest, then to sleep, then to rest. Night falls earlier and the last blossoms race for the sun.
There will be no driving down Highway 61 this fall. One more Sunday down and back and then its weekends at home with church just up the road. There is nothing like fall along the northern Mississippi. People come from all over the country just to watch it happen. Yet this fall, the passage between my worlds, the road between life in St. Paul and faith in LaCrosse will vanish. The birds make their way south and I will head against the wind and north seldom to return.
How do you say everything you wish to say? How do you tell people you love them and believe in them and wish them every good thing even as a still small voice tells you is time to leave them? In one way it doesn’t matter. What’s done is done and some tasks will just have to remain incomplete. Yet it may be a while before the urge, the desire to follow the highway to their world, subsides and I relocate my heart where my home is.
Suffice it to say I will miss them and if I only had one sentence to leave them with it would be “God loves you more than you know so don’t ever give up.” You’d have to know them to understand why this makes sense, and I do because a part of me will always be there. From the bottom of my heart I say “Thank you, St. Elias, for everything, the welcome in, the graceful exit, and everything in between.” We can fill in the details as we remember them through the years. Good things are coming for you, I know it, and no matter where I travel you’ll always be close, count on it.
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From Robert Service…
A Rolling Stone
There’s sunshine in the heart of me,
My blood sings in the breeze;
The mountains are a part of me,
I’m fellow to the trees.
My golden youth I’m squandering,
Sun-libertine am I;
A-wandering, a-wandering,
Until the day I die.
I was once, I declare, a Stone-Age man,
And I roomed in the cool of a cave;
I have known, I will swear, in a new life-span,
The fret and the sweat of a slave:
For far over all that folks hold worth,
There lives and there leaps in me
A love of the lowly things of earth,
And a passion to be free.
To pitch my tent with no prosy plan,
To range and to change at will;
To mock at the mastership of man,
To seek Adventure’s thrill.
Carefree to be, as a bird that sings;
To go my own sweet way;
To reck not at all what may befall,
But to live and to love each day.
To make my body a temple pure
Wherein I dwell serene;
To care for the things that shall endure,
The simple, sweet and clean.
To oust out envy and hate and rage,
To breathe with no alarm;
For Nature shall be my anchorage,
And none shall do me harm.
To shun all lures that debauch the soul,
The orgied rites of the rich;
To eat my crust as a rover must
With the rough-neck down in the ditch.
To trudge by his side whate’er betide;
To share his fire at night;
To call him friend to the long trail-end,
And to read his heart aright.
To scorn all strife, and to view all life
With the curious eyes of a child;
From the plangent sea to the prairie,
From the slum to the heart of the Wild.
From the red-rimmed star to the speck of sand,
From the vast to the greatly small;
For I know that the whole for good is planned,
And I want to see it all.
To see it all, the wide world-way,
From the fig-leaf belt to the Pole;
With never a one to say me nay,
And none to cramp my soul.
In belly-pinch I will pay the price,
But God! let me be free;
For once I know in the long ago,
They made a slave of me.
In a flannel shirt from earth’s clean dirt,
Here, pal, is my calloused hand!
Oh, I love each day as a rover may,
Nor seek to understand.
To enjoy is good enough for me;
The gypsy of God am I;
Then here’s a hail to each flaring dawn!
And here’s a cheer to the night that’s gone!
And may I go a-roaming on
Until the day I die!
Then every star shall sing to me
Its song of liberty;
And every morn shall bring to me
Its mandate to be free.
In every throbbing vein of me
I’ll feel the vast Earth-call;
O body, heart and brain of me
Praise Him who made it all!
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I Admit…
I like to watch “How Clean is Your House?” on BBC America. Go figure.
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The Music Was Over…
and the sound system was on its way to storage. The room that had been full of chairs and men was lining up with cots, a sheet on the bottom and a donated blanket on top, no pillow. Everyone knew the drill.
Some of the guys were already in their cot, covers over their head as the tasks continued. People talking. A few being prayed over. Others wandering the hall or stepping out in the humid night for one last cigarette before the lights went out. It was the rhythm of things, a meal, a service with music, and a bed of sorts, the Mission’s way of keeping the Hours.
On the streets outside people were driving by, unaware of the thousands of stories and hundreds of ghosts just inside the Mission walls. In hungry times such places are refuges of charity but also stark reminders of what could be a pink slip, or a the sideways tip of an addiction away. They send checks and hope that those inside stay them and not us.
Walking to the car with gear in hand and the air conditioning giving way to the August night one of those stories, one of those ghosts, one of God’s beloved, walked by. “Bro, you sure play that bass good…” he said. I hope I did.
I hope it mattered.
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The Union Gospel Mission…
has been a fixture in St. Paul for decades. Evangelical in its orientation it has provided a haven, a home, and a refuge for all who are homeless, addicted, and battered and find their way to its doors. It has never, to my knowledge, been a source of scandal.
I’ll be there tonight with a band of Pentecostals to assist in a group event by playing music. Do I agree with every point of their theology. No. Could I accept every part of the Mission’s statement of faith. Again, no. Yet I’ve resolved to walk through any decent door that comes open to me and help any group of believers who are ministering to the poor and downtrodden based, if on nothing else, on the shared desire to fulfill the call of Matthew 25.
I’m Orthodox down to my toes and if anyone asks I’ll tell them why. Yet the truth is that the only way to be “out there” is to be out there beyond the parish walls and trying to find any good way to reach out and do what needs to be done. If my fellow travelers are not exactly like me I’ll take whatever help I can get and share whatever I can with them. We won’t be able to share the Eucharist together, that will have to wait, but for the person in prison or stuck without a home that is remarkably low on the priority list. Let’s stop the bleeding or the hunger first and then we can get on to the details.
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Just a note of thanks…
to His Grace, Bishop Mark, of the Diocese of Toledo and the Midwest, for all the pastoral care given to my wife and I in our transition to a sabbatical. It is good to know that one’s needs are taken seriously by a Bishop and that he will work, when needed, on your behalf. Most people know him only by the information presented in the give and take of the recent struggles in our Archdiocese but in dozens of quiet and unpublicized ways he has been a blessing to the Priests and Parishes of this Diocese. Thank you.
The Beautiful Path 