Death and Wisdom

~ Fr. John Chagnon ~ Leave a comment

In a little over a month three people in my parish have passed away. One was a venerable Archdeacon, a good man full of years. He had served His Lord and the Church for decades and passed peacefully in his sleep. The other two were young, a high school boy full of promise tragically taken in a car accident, and a man in his early twenties who reposed in the Lord after a brave battle with illness.

Three deaths in three different ways. Death is ingenious like that, it has the ability to come in as many ways as there are people to visit and no one, regardless of their age or station, is immune. We expect, in the normal course of life, for those along in years to die but even the young can, and do, leave this life. We have seen it, first hand, as December has given way to the new year.

There are no answers in all of this, at least not in the short term. We know, in each case, the cause of death but the greater questions of “Why?” will take time to ponder. It always does. Death challenges pious platitudes and easy answers because death has a profound depth to it, a great mystery in the best sense of that word, and easy answers seem to fall apart in the face of it.

Death is also, though, a forge of wisdom with the power to clarify the true value of things and burn through everything superficial. The knowledge that this time on earth is limited can be a source of frivolity where all of our efforts are focused on extracting fleeting glimpses of whatever we consider the good life in a mad dash before the deadline. It can also be a source of paralysis and despair where the idea of the inevitable end clouds every part of every point along the way. Or it can call us to something higher, to search for, and practice, the good, the true, the things that transcend the moment, and even life itself. If that is the course we choose, then, perhaps, even death, as mysterious and powerful and challenging as it is, has something to offer us in this life.

 

Time and the Dead….

~ Fr. John Chagnon ~ 1 Comment

In this past month we’ve had two sad deaths in our parish and the grieving has had me ponder what time must be like for those who are in the nearer presence of Christ.

First, though, a note. I used the title “Time and the Dead” for this post because it was kind of catchy, almost like a name for a rock band, but the Orthodox understanding of death is that the body dies, something we consider to be a temporary condition because we believe that the body will also, at some future time, be resurrected, and the soul continues on, for the faithful, in the presence of God. So we use the term “dead” not so much as the idea of being completely extinguished as an entity but rather as a temporary separation of the body and the soul awaiting the resurrection and the transformation of all of who we are to our final state.

What led me to ponder the sense of time for those who have passed on were quotes and thoughts that came from the events of this month and around Facebook at this time of year about those who have passed on spending Christmas in heaven. I understand the sentiment, when my father and brother died I thought of that as well, how they would be spending events like Christmas and Pascha in the presence of Christ. There’s a certain peace that comes with knowing that the joy that we can experience in these feasts is a foretaste of the joy of being in God’s nearer presence.

Still, those sentiments, as good as they are, come from the reality that we are creatures of time. Yes, eternity is in our hearts, but we live in time and so we see things that way. Yet, I wonder if those who are in the presence of Christ also see things that way? I’m inclined to believe they don’t, but what I am writing is speculation out loud and the reader should take it as that. The truth is that we’re never given precisely detailed descriptions of what life beyond this life entails and so our thoughts and hearts can travel to that existence but it would be hard to claim extensive knowledge. If only Lazarus had written a book!

From the stories of the Transfiguration of Christ we know that those who are departed to be with God have some sense of what is happening here. Moses and Elijah were speaking with Jesus, in one reading of that story, about what Jesus was to accomplish so there seems to be some kind of consciousness “over there” , as it were, of life “back here”. Over the centuries, as well, we, as Orthodox Christians have experienced the reality of the intercessions, not mediations, of the Saints, answers in our own lives of our requests for those who have gone to be with Christ to pray for us. The writer of Hebrews also uses the image of a stadium where people are in the stands are watching, as a cloud of witnesses, those of us who are currently living the Christian life. So, somehow, in a holy and blessed way, those who have departed this life have a kind of consciousness about what is happening here and, in certain cases, individual lives of the faithful.

In pondering that, though, I speculate that those who are with Christ, even as they can, as God allows, be witness to us as we live out lives in time are probably not aware of time as we are. God has no time in the sense that we measure  it as one moment processing on to another. I don’t think there are clocks in heaven. Perhaps in hell although I can’t say that for sure, but probably not in heaven. To God, if I understand this correctly, all of what we call time is present. There is no past as we understand it with God, or for that matter the future. Now that doesn’t mean that God isn’t aware that we live in time or that God is incapable of entering human time, but rather that God isn’t bound by time and God’s vision of existence and reality isn’t necessarily framed by what we call time. I remember in my seminary days of one professor describing God as “timeful” that is everything in existence is always present to God.

So my presumption, and presumption it is, is that those who have departed to be with God in a state of blessedness also share in that timefulness. Their consciousness, I believe, is not limited by time as we understand it. So, for example, when the time comes for us to repose from this life those who know and love us who proceeded us won’t be saying “It’s been thirty years, glad you finally made it” because there the idea of anything like “years” is something that simply doesn’t exist. I think, by the way, that this is one reason those who have departed this life can be very effective intercessors for us, because they can pray for us with an understanding of existence not limited by our moment to moment sense of time and events. They can see a larger picture, a vision of things not trapped by our understandings of time and the meaning of things within that context, but rather with a “God’s eye view” of the entire panorama of existence where all events are present from the creation of everything that exists to its fulfilment in God at the end of time as we understand it.

Such heady things to be pondering in the wee, small, hours of a Sunday in December. And if these are only glimpses, what must the fullness of what God would have for us in His presence be like?

I Was Serving the Liturgy…

~ Fr. John Chagnon ~ 2 Comments

at Holy Resurrection Church in Fargo, North Dakota yesterday and as I was serving I heard the voices of children who had joined in with the choir. They were not polished voices, they were simple, pure, pious, and innocent voices which is much to be preferred if a choice must be made, and they reminded me, as well, of those days when I had a simple, and unsophisticated as the world would see it,  faith. Could it be possible that the whole point of this beautiful path, this life of Faith, is to, even knowing what we all do in the complicated adult life, get back to that place where our faith is like a child’s and we can sing from our hearts the songs of Faith?

 

Many Years Ago…

~ Fr. John Chagnon ~ 2 Comments

guns were available at hardware and sporting goods stores, no background check and all the ammunition you could afford. Walk in, buy, walk out. You could even order them via catalog if you didn’t want to leave the house. My grandfather, as a young man, even had access to dynamite to help remove stumps from the ground.

Yet, no mass shootings basically anywhere. So what’s the difference between then, in the freewheeling bad old days of virtually no gun control and now? I don’t think its the guns. I do think its us.

The one difference I can see between then and now is that back then there was a larger moral framework rooted in a Judaeo Christian ethic where “Thou shalt not kill (murder)” was still taken seriously, and even the mobsters took care to follow it in their own way by trying to minimize “civilian” casualties.

Leap forward to now and that narrative is largely gone, done in by a culture where even some sense moral and social caution is identified as repression, where human identity is entirely divorced from any concept of the image of God and reduced to a basic consumer equation, and violence as a routine solution to human challenges has filled the moral vacuum with a hundred little deaths and, from time to time, explosions of death that make the headlines.

Politicians, bathed in this culture, see only more and different kinds of laws as the solution because they have forgotten about, or deliberately sought to undermine, the law inside a human heart. A moral human, properly formed, encouraged, and supported by a larger spiritual and ethical imperative, will hesitate to do violence even when its tools are close at hand but a person who has no  proper morals, and lives in a culture where there is no larger context than how a person feels at any given moment, will use any tool at hand and no law can, or will, stop them. Witness the couple in San Bernadino who obtained the weapons used in the horrific crime outside of the existing laws.

No, I’m not advocating a weapons free for all. What I am advocating is something that most politicians, pundits, and sometimes even preachers have forgotten. We need a moral revival, a return to a larger moral narrative that affirms human life, impresses a moral responsibility on its members to strive above all to do no harm, and calls us away from our consumer driven, violence saturated, world. That revival will start when Christians decide to be Christians again and churches do the same.

 

 

 

 

There’s a Beautiful Thing…

~ Fr. John Chagnon ~ Leave a comment

that can happen in the life of a parish. Its not something that can be manufactured or sold because its a God thing, a spark of life from the Holy Spirit with the power to transform people and in transforming people transform a parish.

Somewhere along the line in the business and routine of being a parish there will be a someone, or perhaps a group of people, who will take a step out from business as usual and ask “Where is God in all we’re doing?” Now, most of the time that pause will be drowned out by the systems, structures, and business as usual and everything returns to what is considered “normal”.

For that rare person or person, though, the question remains and it begins a quest to seek out and draw closer to God in everything, including their local church. After years of doing things for the sake of doing things they will start to ask about why and to what end and the lure of something more, something holier, something deeper, will start to capture their imagination. Faith begins to emerge, not faith in an institution and its plans but rather faith in God and the sense that they, and their parish, were created for something far more wonderful than what they see around them, more wonderful than even their own imagination.

As this fire sparks and then smolders to life inside of them, they start to look for answers to their questions and search for examples of the dreams growing within. The Bible, the ancient writers, the lives of Saints, all of these start to take on a new life not just as relics of some long ago past but rather as real possibilities in the present. They seek, as well, to know if there are others like them, people who are starting to welcome and listen to the Holy Spirit, people with a holy discontent and a spark of heavenly life seeking to actually live the promise for which they were baptized. It may take days. It may take years. Still this life, because it comes from God, has a quality that endures.

At first the expressions are personal. Prayer becomes more important. Being at church for worship becomes increasingly joyful. The awareness of, and repentance for, sin increases but in a freeing and not a morbid sense. The Eucharist stops being a formality and its power to give life becomes more apparent. There is a hunger there, but its not a bitter hunger but rather a hunger for that which is the best, namely God.

Then personal action follows, an increase in quiet charity, a care for people in hard circumstances, a growing list of godly behaviors that become part of the routine of everyday life. From the inside the person, down to their daily habits, is being transformed. Some in their parish will dismiss these things as the person being “religious” and they may even criticize because the light beginning to shine is exposing them, but others will recognize, instinctively, what is happening because it is also happening with them.

From there come the quiet voices speaking up. “What happens if instead of having a festival where we charge people we decide to have a meal where we invite the poor to come to our church without charge?” They’ll start to ask if their church has done anything, recently, to spread the Gospel to those who may not have heard it. They’ll wonder, out loud, why there’s no Bible study. A host of questions will emerge, and these questions are not, as some would think, about a dislike for their parish but rather a desire for that which they already love to become what God would wish it to be.

At this point the trouble may start. Priests and councils and people can become wedded to an order of things. This is not necessarily due to malice but rather the power of a routine to take the place of Faith. It can happen to the best of us, people with good intentions that have somehow gone into auto-pilot without even being aware of it. These new ideas, which are actually the real content of the historic Faith, can be troubling, seeming to be risky, extravagant, and unwise in the ways that the world measures wisdom. The world of balance sheets, reports, and keeping the lights on can be deeply challenged by a vision rooted in the Word, the Tradition, and the living reality of the Holy Spirit in the life of the parish. Those balance sheets and reports can, over time, become masters of a parish and they will relinquish their rule very grudgingly.

Still, even a small risk of faith, a willingness to see both our personal and parish life as being first and foremost about God and a heavenly way of existing, can move a parish to a next step, one after another, until the people discover something that has always been both true and widely ignored. This Christian life, this beautiful path, is dynamic, powerful, life giving, even enchanting in the best sense of the word, and in  living it fully we begin to realize what God, as our Faith and Holy Tradition guide us, designed us to be.

If you are the person with a holy discontent inside of you, and you will know its holy and not just simply discontent if it draws you closer to God,and fills you with enduring love and deep peace, stay the course. Don’t give up on your parish or any of the people who worship with you. Pray for them, for your parish, for your leaders, and be an example in your own life of the kind of parish you would like to see. Seek out kindred spirits to share the journey.

If you are still going with the flow, stop for a moment. Imagine that there are possibilities in life and faith for both you and your parish that are greater than your imagination. If you hear that still, small, voice, inside of you calling you to draw close to God, to the higher, better, and blessed that your heart tells you might be inside of you waiting to get out, listen. You may be one step at a time away from the most remarkable and beautiful life of faith.

There is more. There is so much more. Seek, as our Lord says, and you shall find.

 

 

 

 

For Your Consideration…

~ Fr. John Chagnon ~ Leave a comment

If you are looking for a charity to support or an almsgiving opportunity as you prepare for Christmas please consider Jakob. This young man is a member of the parish I serve and his cause is the real deal. His struggle with illness defines courage and whatever you could do to help would be appreciated. Thank you.

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https://www.gofundme.com/sh6z66ad

 

 

Pray for Charlie…

~ Fr. John Chagnon ~ Leave a comment

Pray, first, because we are more alike than different. Given the money, fame, and access, which one of can say with certainty that we could have kept the powers of sin, struggle, and addiction away from our lives? Even without them we often fall so it is perhaps a grace that we don’t have more and thereby increase our risk.

Pray, again, because more than likely that wealth and access will be quickly gone and the fame will grow very shallow. There will be lawsuits by those who were deceived and damaged. There will be opportunities lost and expenses incurred. When the good times stop the good time friends may disappear, replaced by a kind of loneliness softened only by the discovery of those who were true and good all the time.

Pray, some more, because these wonderful drugs that keep people alive also rule the lives of those who take them. Life is measured by the dates and times and doses and everything must be done with great precision and little spontaneity Far away from the lights and the public persona there will always be a Charlie who knows that his life hangs by a pharmaceutical thread and even the lowest of viral loads doesn’t mean that this infection is gone, just hidden somewhere in a quiet spot where the current tests still can’t reach. This will be his life.

Pray, as well, because the potential of his life is still enormous. Sanity, health, and wholeness are often found through difficult circumstances and as long as there is life there is always hope. Truly, as St. Augustine is reputed to have said “There is no Saint without a past or a sinner without a future.”  God is not done with any one of us and neither is he done with Mr. Sheen.

Pray, finally, for ourselves. Seeing someone struggle and bear the consequences of that struggle should never elicit any thought or emotion in us save for humility in knowing that we, too, are capable of our own kinds of struggles, sins, and darkness. Yes, perhaps this was not our particular sin but we each have our own and in their own way they are deadly to us as well.

If he were here, I guess I would say only this to Charlie,  “God loves you more than you can possible imagine and His grace is greater than any darkness you or I may wrestle with in our lives. There is better for you if you want it and God’s door is always open.”

I Live in a World of Rage…

~ Fr. John Chagnon ~ Leave a comment

born of selfishness and entitlement unfulfilled. All around me the world I live in shouts “What you feel is what is real and what you feel you need is what the rest of the world is obligated to provide.” When this is not true, which is more often the case than not, I am told that raging against whatever is outside of me that has failed my feelings is my right, my obligation even, until the ever-changing feelings and needs inside of me are satiated.

I reject this even as I understand that in doing so it can be like a fish rejecting water. This is the ocean I swim in, the river that is my home, and the pond where I was born, and yet I know this, all around me, is not the real world even as it surrounds me everywhere. So I resist as I can, asking God for peace, for insight, and a sense of eternity in the world of time. My own world is too small and it is constantly unsettled and angry because of its smallness and in moments when I am distant from the Truth I can feel the anger of my tiny world’s unfulfilled entitlement swelling inside until I am ready to burst.

I must die, daily even, to this small world and its rage. Daily I must recall its illusions, its shadows, and its emptiness. Instead of the thousand shouting voices all around me telling me  to burn and hate and consume and make war I must listen to the one voice that matters, the still, small, voice that comes after the storm and earthquakes and fire have passed. That is the voice of God. The rest is madness.

 

 

Sometimes Faith…

~ Fr. John Chagnon ~ Leave a comment

is really just patience, the art of not trying to make things happen before the times and seasons that God, and only God, knows are best. It is the act of surrendering agendas and timetables of our own design to the better plan of the One who sees everything from a better vantage point, namely eternity. Such a surrender can be a difficult thing because it means giving up the cherished sense of identity we ascribe to the illusion of being in control of every aspect of our world.