of goodness in the world is more than a mere kindness. It is a militant push back against the darkness. It is the retaking of our humanity from its fall and struggle and returning it to God.

I’m trying to wean myself off from blogs.

I suppose this is an odd place to say that but the truth is I’m looking for solutions and so much of the blogosphere is about questions and not answers. It’s easy to critique, but hard to propose workable solutions. It’s like “I get it, you think the President is terrible but what I want to know is how you would make it better.” It’s at that point that many blogs just go silent. What we end up with is an electronic sea of critique but no one who has anything better to say, do, or a direction to help us out.

Way back when I started this blog out as “The Traveling Priest Chronicles” as a way for people to have sort of a rolling diary of an Orthodox Priest. Too many times people see us as this presence in black and I felt it would be good to pull the curtain back a bit so people could see the “John” behind Fr. John. Along the way I’ve picked bits and pieces of stuff from the sacred to the profane in the hope of adding something people might enjoy. My audience is small, I’m no internet celebrity Priest, but I do cherish the visits and the comments.

Most of all I wanted to avoid just griping about the world without at least attempting to provide some answers, even if the answers are encased in stories. Above all I’ve attempted to direct people to Jesus, who is THE answser, not just in some spiritual ethereal way but for everything that happens from the moment you wake up in the morning. That has never changed.

Yea, the world is nuts, probably always has been and probably always will be to the very last day. There isn’t a day that goes by without me wishing I had the power to change things. If I could only be emperor of the world for one day! Yet, thank God that I’ll never have that opportunity because I doubt I would be any better than any of the people who tried to take on that role before me. I just see Jesus and I hope I can crawl along through all of this with enough awareness of who He is and what He means to make me less a part of the problem and more a part of the solution.

In the end that’s enough. It’ll have to be because its all I can do.

I’m always a little suspicious when a government that owns a car company (GM) also regulates the car companies with which it competes. Truth be told there’s a reason the government had to buy GM and prop up Chrysler (twice) while Toyota win awards. Of course, if Congress is holding hearings on the topic it must be because of the deep public need and not because of the cameras. Smile. The game continues.

The greater truth, though, in all of this is that nothing is perfect and the expectation of perfection will always bang its head against the wall of reality. It is not possible to produce millions of cars and expect each and everyone of them to be made without flaw. We may think, in our culture of entitlement, that we have a right to a perfect world all the way from the highest level of government to the car in our garage but frankly we gave up that right in Eden and we’re just going to have to live with it for now. Cars with bad gas pedals are just one way the whole creation, as St. Paul says, is groaning in its unnatural state.

This is a lesson worth learning not because we need to be passive in the face of human brokenness but rather to give us true insight about the world we live in and each other. It’s all flawed at the primal level and it colors everything. If you understand that you can understand why we Orthodox say “Lord have mercy” so many times. We need to and if we somehow found a way to do it perpetually we would still not begin to cover the reasons why.

We’re all angels with dirty faces. We’re all people designed for so much more constantly coming to terms with everything less that is inside of us. The promise is that one day we will shine with eternal light but for now even the best of us seem to wander in shadows. In a thousand ways we mourn the loss of Eden. We become frustrated with the invisible hand that keeps us somewhere less then heaven. We fear the end of our breath. Each day is just enough a mixture of glory and annoyances to remind us of what could have been.

Still, the Light shines in the darkness and the darkness has never overpowered it.