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.
More wisdom from the Liturgy…
No one bound by worldly desires and pleasures is worthy to approach, draw near or minister to You, the King of glory. To serve You is great and awesome even for the heavenly powers. But because of Your ineffable and immeasurable love for us, You became man without alteration or change. You have served as our High Priest, and as Lord of all, and have entrusted to us the celebration of this liturgical sacrifice without the shedding of blood. For You alone, Lord our God, rule over all things in heaven and on earth. You are seated on the throne of the Cherubim, the Lord of the Seraphim and the King of Israel. You alone are holy and dwell among Your saints. You alone are good and ready to hear. Therefore, I implore You, look upon me, Your sinful and unworthy servant, and cleanse my soul and heart from evil consciousness. Enable me by the power of Your Holy Spirit so that, vested with the grace of priesthood, I may stand before Your holy Table and celebrate the mystery of Your holy and pure Body and Your precious Blood. To You I come with bowed head and pray: do not turn Your face away from me or reject me from among Your children, but make me, Your sinful and unworthy servant, worthy to offer to You these gifts. For You, Christ our God, are the Offerer and the Offered, the One who receives and is distributed, and to You we give glory, together with Your eternal Father and Your holy, good and life giving Spirit, now and forever and to the ages of ages. Amen.
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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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Some more insights…
on the decision of the Holy Synod of Antioch from the Ochlophobist and Frontier Orthodoxy. Worth a read.
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Wisdom from the Liturgy…
Remember, Lord, all Orthodox bishops who rightly teach the word of Your truth. Remember Lord, my unworthiness according to the multitude of Your mercies; forgive my every transgression, both voluntary and involuntary. Do not take away the grace of Your Holy Spirit from these gifts presented because of my sins. Remember, Lord, the presbyters, the diaconate in Christ, and every order of the clergy, and do not confound any of us who stand about Your holy altar. Visit us with Your goodness, Lord; manifest Yourself to us through Your rich compassion. Grant us seasonable weather and fruitful seasons; send gentle showers upon the earth so that it may bear fruit; bless the crown of the year of Your goodness. Prevent schism in the Church; pacify the raging of the heathen. Quickly stop the uprisings of heresies by the power of Your Holy Spirit. Receive us all into Your kingdom. Declare us to be sons and daughters of the light and of the day. Grant us Your peace and love, Lord our God, for You have given all things to us.
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I have a question…
and I’m sincerely in search of an answer. Honestly, I’m not interested in snide remarks or personal attacks, just an answer to the following. What is the benefit to the Church of the recent decision of the Holy Synod of Antioch regarding the status of the Archdiocese of North America? If someone has insight or an answer for this question please comment and remember no personal attacks.
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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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Open Stage…
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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!
The Beautiful Path 