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A Few Days Ago…

~ Fr. John Chagnon ~ 1 Comment

I read an article in the news that estimated around 44 percent of American homes had a firearm. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, one of the fastest growing industries of the past decade or so has been the firearms trade. We Americans have purchased a lot of guns in a short time and I’ve seen estimates of somewhere over 200 million firearms of all kinds in our country.

Now here’s where you’d expect the usual anti-gun screed to start but I’m not going to give it to you. I grew up in a household with firearms. I know what they can do and how to use them, and I know that the vast majority of people who own them are law abiding and have no intention at all of doing horrible things.

Yet a part of me is sad and troubled as well about it all because I know that for more than a few of those people who are in the sporting goods stores lining up to purchase firearms there is also a sense that things aren’t right and it may be a good time to hope for the best but prepare for the worst. I’m not talking about hard core “prepper” types with food for a few years and a thousand rounds of ammo in the basement. They exist but they are still few and far between. Instead I see, better yet I feel, a kind of social unease where regular folks are contemplating the world they see around them, the culture they are experiencing, and quietly thinking about how to protect themselves and the ones they love if the usual things that hold us together start falling apart.

These are mostly regular folks, people with the kind of usual lives that form the core of any stable society. They are members of our churches, the people we do business with, folks from all kinds of routine walks of life who are pondering and wondering and then quietly find their way to the counters of the sporting goods stores with a combination of reserve and resolve and thoughts about the “what ifs” where their lives could be changed in an instant if the things they see on TV stop being someone else’s problem and start becoming theirs.

Fortunately the odds are still in their favor, for now. The vast majority of them, and us, will not, and perhaps never, be the victims of violence. Yet, at the same time I know the unease because I feel it too. Could my neighborhood, my city, with its very eclectic groups of people, one day break out into chaos? The answer is simple, “Yes.” Could the bonds that have held us together over the years in relative peace come suddenly unglued? Indeed they could because sin and brokenness and evil are part of the human condition, part of even the best of us, and insanity can quickly descend when the things that make for community are undone and it becomes everyone for themselves.

So you won’t get any argument from me about people trying to think about an end game if the worst should become real. There’s a wisdom in that and as long as it doesn’t descend into a kind of paranoia and, in doing so, actually create fires where none were started it might actually be helpful to keep the peace. Yet there is also a need for a greater wisdom in these days, a wisdom that transcends time and calls us to a way of life that is larger than any moment.

The unease we can feel. The sense of protection and peace we desire but cannot always find. The realization that things are not as we would like them to be and that there is potential for even worse, are illnesses of the soul that no law can cure. The political class often sees laws as an answer in the same way as a person who has only a hammer sees everything as a nail. Yet something larger beckons. The sicknesses of the soul can only, and ultimately, be healed by God alone. The farther we drift away from God the more perilous our journey becomes and our rest is found as we seek and find God. As we draw closer to God the result, in the Christian sense of that drawing closer, is also to bind us to each other and bring down the walls between us, walls sometimes bristling with gun barrels, and even if we cannot always agree on the details we can at least begin to see the “others” in our lives as humans and that’s a good start.

Yes, there is a kind of wisdom in reasonably preparing for the worst. Yet the greater wisdom, even while doing that, is to hope and work for the better. Without that second and greater wisdom we might all find ourselves living in a culture marked by tribalism and violence without meaning. If the light of that greater wisdom is allowed to flourish we at least have a chance.

 

Tomorrow…

~ Fr. John Chagnon ~ 2 Comments

marks the 11th anniversary of my ordination as Priest in the Orthodox Church but there’s more to the story. I was first ordained as a Baptist pastor in 1989 so, in fact, I’ve been in ordained parish or chaplaincy service for over a quarter century and what a long and interesting trip it’s been!

I remember those days late in my last year of seminary, contemplating the future as a fresh, new, and young minister. I had hoped to do good things, many even great ones, through the best way I knew how namely the Gospel, the good news of Jesus. I had studied. I had tested. I had taken psychological tests. I passed the various boards and gatekeepers. I had arrived.

Two parishes followed in reasonably quick succession, parishes with good people but also malignant and vocal minorities who really did plan and scheme and attack and make life miserable. I remember being curled up in a ball deep in my tears in the hall of the parsonage of the church in Kansas that had just fired me without even a clue or a specific reason that I could recall. Somebody somewhere didn’t like me and they had the votes. Everything naive left in me died in those days as we packed our stuff and made plans to head back to Minnesota. All I knew was that I wanted to leave that little town and never go back to a Baptist church, ever, and writing about this even now hurts a bit.

Yet the hurt of those days led me home to Minnesota, older than my years and much wiser through pain. I found a “day job” and then a chaplaincy position in the environment where I started my working life, the nursing home. My studies, too, had taken me far from where I had been. I left the American Baptist Churches, became an Episcopalian, and briefly considered holy orders in the Episcopal Church. I knew then, though, that this community had already gone too far too fast from everything it had cherished and there would be no home for me there.

Instead I discovered in a magazine about a new movement called the Charismatic Episcopal Church, a group of evangelicals and charismatics who had embraced Liturgy and their understanding of the ancient Christian Faith through an Anglican ethos. There were trips to Kansas City to visit the Bishop and, in time, I was ordained Priest and sent back to Minnesota to plant a church. While this was happening I came in greater contact with Eastern Orthodoxy and began to explore its life and ethos. In that time of discovery my heart began to become Orthodox and when I, and then we in our tiny mission, discovered the Western Rite we made the plans to change. Our hope had been to continue our little community as a Western Rite Orthodox Mission (Up here in Minnesota where about 80 percent of everyone who claims a Christian title is either Catholic of Lutheran there is still great potential for such a thing).

Yet it was not to be. Our mission was fervent but larger things were at play and, in time, we chose to leave the mission behind and become part of St. George Orthodox Church. I was eventually ordained Deacon and then two years later Priest and sent to St. Elias Orthodox Church in LaCrosse, Wisconsin. The parish was full of good people but needed money for repairs and the necessities of life so, over the years, I served bivocationally, living in St. Paul and traveling to Wisconsin on weekends. It was good work but the travel and the time left me exhausted and my feeling was to move on and let someone else build on a better foundation so I could rest.

My hope was that I would take a sabbatical year and then be picked up in the “draft” my term for the assignment of Priests that usually happens in the early summer. It never, for reasons I still don’t know, happened. Six years from St. Elias I am still in St. Paul, attached to St. George in West St. Paul, and in a mobile ministry of helping parishes in transition while I work my day job. I am a circuit rider of sorts but instead of a horse I have a Nissan and while the Apostle Paul made tents to keep a roof over his head I plan programs for Seniors in an Assisted Living.

I still dream of planting a church here in Minnesota. There is a great potential for this area but, at the present, the will is just not here. This dream, and its deferment, have been a constant in my heart and while I understand that it was not possible while I was in transition to Orthodoxy I may never understand why the dream has been given but its fulfillment has been rendered impossible to date. I still believe in Jesus, as well, even though there have been times when the people I trusted to care for me have provided plenty of evidence to the contrary. There is sin in me and sin in the Church and I’ve tried to be wise and forbearing in it all. Sadly, I’ve also learned through hard experience to be careful with my trust. They say “Once bitten twice shy” and there is some real pastoral wisdom in that phrase. A Pastor without an escape plan when things get hard places themselves in a very vulnerable place so have a solid amount of cash in the bank if a church board or Bishop changes their mind. If I would say anything to current seminarians it would be to love everyone but also be wise because some of the people you love won’t even try to return the favor.

It’s also been a great privilege to serve and help people which is part of the reason I got into the “business” in the first place. A good Priest can make a significant difference in people’s lives, a difference for the good. While pastoral ministry can be painful there are also many moments of joy, of the true satisfaction that comes from making a positive difference, and those moments are the fuel that keeps that original spark burning. For every hurt there are many more happy moments and when I doubt that I simply look back through my file of cards and letters and pictures to remember everything, good and bad, in its proper context.

Right or wrong, sinful or forgiven, at my best or worst, I’ve never lost the awe of serving at the altar and I suppose that if there is anything that could be salvaged from these years it would be just that. There have been moments, of course, when I just wanted to quit, to retreat from the battle and rest for a while. Somehow I always find my way back which either means I’m crazy or called. I’ve also never stopped believing in Christ, although sometimes that belief has come through tears or clenched teeth. Nothing that’s happened to me, good or bad, as a Priest and Pastor has changed my belief that Jesus is exactly who he and his Church claim he is and, because of that, everything he is and says is of the utmost importance.

As the 11th year comes and goes the truth is I have no idea what is going to happen or where this long, strange, trip will take my wife and I. Sometimes I wish I did but that seems to be about me learning the lessons of trust. There are things I would change, of course, like never moving to Kansas, but for the most part its been good and for that goodness the glory goes to the God who has enough of a sense of humor and even more of grace to let me ordained not once, but three times (Baptist, Anglican, and Orthodox) as a tender of his flock.

 

 

 

 

I was 17…

~ Fr. John Chagnon ~ 1 Comment

when I had my first encounter with death, not the movie or funeral home kind of death but the real thing as in a person without breath, without color, their mouth frozen open as they were when their soul left the body. That was my job in high school, a nursing assistant, and while others my age were figuring out how to ask someone to a date I was learning how to properly clean and present the dead while we waited for the funeral home.

In my early years in ministry death was there as well. The call in the night. The bedside vigil. Watching, praying, trying to think of something that would help as the person moved from this life to the next. Mostly peaceful, sometimes violent, always in the understanding that sometime profound had happened, perhaps the most profound thing of all.

The sad truth is that I don’t even remember all of them, the bodies I washed, the vigils I kept, the funerals I’ve done. The traumatic ones have stayed. Those I watched over who were close to me remain. Others, sadly, have been lost to time and only remain in God’s memory. Each has left their mark. The first was an older lady well into her dementia. The most violent was a man who died in front of me as he coughed up his lungs into a towel I was holding because it happened so suddenly we couldn’t even get him to bed. The saddest were the man who I watched die in the middle of DT’s in his middle 40’s and the old man I sat with in the Kansas nursing home who had suffered his whole life with both mental illness and the tragic stigma that it came with in those days. Lately, even though I work with Seniors and people who are dealing with sometimes chronic illness, I’ve largely been spared yet the memories remain because once you see death up close and for real everything changes.

Death is hardly ever like the old movies where a person sort of tips their head to one side, after a few last words, and then look like they go to sleep. Death is sometimes traumatic, violent, and bloody, where the life, by virtue of that trauma, is forcibly removed. Death from illness can be long and drawn out, sometimes taking years as the life slowly trickles out from the one who is sick. The body grows weaker and simply can no longer sustain itself. Sometimes death comes quickly with the first and last signs of its arrival only minutes apart. There are as many ways, and combinations of ways, for people to die as there are people and so even if the causes are identical the actual dying may never be.

Death strikes fear in us. Death is the ultimate threat. Yet death is not without its wisdom and the discerning can learn from it if they’re willing to spend the time contemplating it. As people get older, of course, they do this simply by looking in the mirror but one does not have to wait for the obvious signs of their mortality staring back at them to begin to get the larger picture.

You will die and so will I. Outside the intervention of God every single human being will die. It may be sooner, it may be later, but the fight for life will end and you will lose, at least in the short term. I remember seeing a tee shirt that said “Eat right, exercise, die anyways” and that shirt is 100 percent correct. A thought like that can make one morbid, obsessively introspective, and prone to despair because there is truth to it. Life really is short, often troubled, and eventually ends. Or it can set you free if take it just one step further and realize that since life really can be short, often troubled, and does end, there are so many things you think are important, things you’ve been told or tell yourself, that just simply, in the bigger picture, aren’t. As you come to realize this they lose their power over you, they lose the ability to compel and imprison you. It really is true, you can’t take it with you, so why get too upset if you don’t have it now and if you do have it why tie yourself to the chase of getting more instead of sharing? Death will take everything from you that doesn’t truly matter, that’s not eternal, but everything that matters is both good in this life and remains.

The Psalmist asked God to teach him to number his days so he could increase in wisdom. In Orthodoxy we talk about this as the contemplation of our own death not as a morbid thought rooted in brokenness and despair but rather as that which can, properly understood, be the wings we’ve always wanted to fly high and clear from the sad, broken, gravity of the world as it is. The wisest of people live life as if they are dying because, quite frankly, they are, but they do this not as simple thrill seekers trying to pack in as much “life” before the end but rather as souls who realize where, and in Whom, life in its fullness actually occurs and, that in finding that eternal “more” they find life here as well.

 

Kids These Days…

~ Fr. John Chagnon ~ Leave a comment

It’s kind of “in” these days to speak about the millenials and snowflakes and kids in college who need “safe zones” so they won’t hear “microaggressive” things that may make them have an emotional reaction to whatever doesn’t agree with their world views. They’re really low hanging fruit, actually, when it comes to critique, yet we’ve forgotten something.

Whose kids are these? Who taught them to be this way? Who raised these “snowflakes” to be the kind of people we now love to mock?

Well, actually, we did.

It’s just a natural fact that a generation gets its cues from the ones prior to it. How to live, love, learn, grow, and how to face the world are not something that comes instinctually to humans, someone in the years it takes to make a mature human has to show the way and the product we see in the present is the result of what happened along that way.

Now it’s easy to be aghast at some of the people we see at campuses around the country, adult in body but childlike in the worst sense of that word when it comes to emotions, expression, and the logic needed to function in reality. Some of these people really are a kind of horror. Yet they are also a mirror that exposes us as well, the people who raised them and the people who have taught them to be what we now see. These perpetual adolescents didn’t come from outer space, they came from our homes, our schools, our houses of worship, and our families.

And that’s where the restoration has to start as well.

A Blessing in Aging

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To me there is a kind of blessing in growing older because, in some ways, as our physical vigor diminishes so does the ability to actively sin. Surely our thoughts can be hot beds of temptation at any age but to turn that temptation into action can be more difficult as our bodies age. Quite frankly there are some checks, as we get older, that we just know our mind may be able to write but our body can’t cash. Perhaps aging’s limits of our physical ability to do what our mind contemplates can be a kind of gift when it comes to living out our temptations, a grace that keeps us from doing, by virtue of age, that which would deface and destroy us if we had the ability.

Somerset

~ Fr. John Chagnon ~ Leave a comment

It was good to be in Somerset, Wisconsin, today.

There have been too many sirens, too many people, and too much pace in my life these past weeks and the toll had been exacted in every part of me. Somerset, a small town in the rolling hills of western Wisconsin within an easy drive of my house in the big city is a tonic for such times. You can feel the pace decrease, smell the wind as it blows through your open car windows, and look around as the buildings fade into farms and woods.

If there were any kind of appropriate work in such a place a part of me would love to leave it all behind spend the rest of my life on a Saturday porch while the spring sun warms me and the quiet soothes. The older I get the less I like the sheer noise of the city and today I found Somerset.

My work, my life, my calling have all taken me to the big city and part of me is just tired of traffic, cement, and learning how to tell gun fire from fireworks in the night. Still, if I must be here it’s  good to know that there is a Somerset within an easy drive so I can plan my escape.

And I will.

Perhaps some people…

~ Fr. John Chagnon ~ Leave a comment

understand that their transition to Orthodoxy represents a complete break with their past. Yet I am who I am and my journey is also is marked through time and part of what brought me to this beautiful path. Each place I have been has been a step along the way, each mistake a part of the larger fabric, and each blessing continues. If I were to erase any of it I would cease to be me even as I daily struggle to be something higher, better, and more godly.

The last little while has been tiring for me, and I can see it in my face and feel it in my body as each day takes another step closer to home. In these sometimes lean, dry, times though the places where I have been reach forward from my past to help me along the way. Witness this beautiful hymn we sang in the days when I was an earnest Protestant.

So much has changed in my life yet these beautiful thoughts, a part of the journey past, have come back to give me strength in the presnt. If I had not been in that place in those days this blessing would have eluded me in the present. To be Orthodox is not so much rejecting e erything that has gone before as it is to take the best of that journey with you, learn from the rough spots, and continue on along the beautiful path cherishing each good thing as a gift from the Giver, evidence of the grace that has never let you go.

 

Music for the Dying…

~ Fr. John Chagnon ~ 1 Comment

The breathing was labored, but the room was quiet. Outside were the voices of staff doing their various good works. Inside there was a person completing the last leg of their journey with Alzheimer’s. Slowly but surely the time to go was coming. When Alzheimer’s takes someone it’s most often like this, quiet, very little sense of trauma, as if the disease was trying to apologize for all the crazy rough stuff along the way it decides to let go slowly, gently even into that good night.

A little voice inside said it was time to visit, to play a bit of music and to sing for the dying person down the hall. I even cut my program for the living a bit short so I could attend at the bedside and do something, perhaps, to make this part of the path a little lighter.

I’ve shared music with all kinds of people in my life from the time I was in grade school until now in my middle age. Some have applauded, some have not, some have told me how good I was and others have told me that I just didn’t “fit” in their group. I’ve made music for audiences that rocked and audiences of quiet older people just trying to stay awake. Still, the music for the dying, this audience of a single person most often without the capacity for response, are the most important audiences of all because yours is the last music they might hear.

So what to do? A little beautiful noodling to start, nothing to complex because this is no place to try to riff some experiment. Then what? Your heart has to be the guide and mine said “Simple”. Amazing Grace, done slowly with the intent to make sure the music doesn’t drown out the words. All the verses because they’re all that good. Then Jesus Loves Me for the very same reasons and who is more weak and in need of Jesus’ strength than a person who is dying. Finally a little more beautiful noodling and one more verse of Jesus Loves Me.

Then silence, the continued labored breathing, and the sound of the nurses in the hall doing their charitable work. No applause, not even someone opening their eyes. Yet that’s okay. A hundred years from now no one will remember even if I had somehow managed to score a Top 100 hit. I pray, though, that in some way the person on the bed across from my chair remembers, and perhaps God, too, on that soon coming day. It’s time to rest, this person made in the image of God from their labors and me, for a short while, to take a break before the needs of others need attention.

Inside, I wish I could cry. Outside, I put on my best smile and head out of the room and down to the hall to the others waiting for me.

Welcome Chreasters…

~ Fr. John Chagnon ~ Leave a comment

About this time of year (Orthodox Holy Week) we start seeing people in church who seem unfamiliar. Some, of course, are people looking in to Orthodoxy. Because the Western and Eastern Holy Weeks are often on a different  calendar people from other Christian communities interested in the Faith will take advantage of the opportunity to visit and learn.

Others, though, will be people who’s connection to our Faith is only partial, those who occasionally visit especially on days like Christmas and Easter (Pascha). Some of these “Chreasters,” the Christmas and Easter attenders, learned this from their own less than fully engaged families. Some have been hurt in the Church and can only bear to be present a few times a year. Others may have a hidden guilt or sense of unworthiness that contributes to a feeling of not being good enough. There are as many reasons as there are people who only come to church on Christmas and Easter.

As a Priest who sees these unfamiliar faces around this time of year I have only one thing to say. “Welcome!” I’m glad that you’ve  come to be with us even for these few holidays. Of course I’d  like you to be with us more often, there is a great blessing in regularly being with people seeking God, but however and whenever and in whatever place you are in I’m  glad you’ve chosen to be with us and we are blessed by your presence.

Something inside inspired you to come to church and you listened to it. That’s a beautiful start. Keep on listening to that still, small, voice calling you to seek God because that’s  the voice that’s been at the beginning  of many powerful human transformations. It can be the voice of Love calling you to discover love. It can be the greatest need of your heart seeking to find the only One who can help you find rest.

Whether you come a few times or often, from devotion or curiosity, in brokenness or vitality, God loves you and welcomes you to a journey of being taken from wherever you are to the good place He wants you to be. Our doors will be open as often as possible and our hearts as well. If the Easter service is your first of the year you are invited. If you only come to church when there’s  trouble, the invitation still stands. Of course we’re  open throughout the year but whenever you come you are still God’s, and our, honored guest.

Don’t  be ashamed. Don’t  be frightened. Don’t  worry about being perfect. Just come, and know that some of the greatest and most blessed things happen when you take walk in to an Orthodox church.