Now this is up by Duluth, a couple hours north of here, but it gives you an idea of what I’m looking forward to on the same Highway 61 when the snow starts falling in earnest. By the way, this isn’t me on the video, and therefore the dog isn’t mine, and the country music, well…

Your odds of winning an imperishable reward from giving alms is insurmountably greater than winning a perishable reward from playing the lottery.

I was just about to go to sleep when an odd idea struck me.

You know how so many times conservative, traditional, and Orthodox Christians just look out west at San Francisco and shake our heads? Now I do agree there’s a fair amount of what we would consider curious and dare I say even dangerous and sinful about that town but what do you think would happen if observant Christians all across America just started praying for it? I mean bathe the whole place with prayer, every time you see something crazy or wrong happening there just pray and pray even when the place isn’t in the headlines.

Has anyone ever tried it? Could it be that we’ve spent so much time reviling the place, making fun of it, and just frankly hating it that we’ve forgotten to pray for it? And what would happen if a few thousand fervent Orthodox Christians starting asking for the intercessions of the Mother of God, or perhaps St. John of San Francisco for that city? After all the Scripture says we’re not fighting against people but against spiritual principalities and powers.

If you’d like to give it a try pass this along.

Has returned to Orthodoxy and no longer provides abortions…

The activity of people who do not understand the true meaning of life is always directed at the struggle of existence, acquiring more wealth and pleasures, and not getting rid of their sufferings and preparing for eternal life. The more people are busy with this in their daily lives, the less time they will have for the only true pleasure that man has, love.

Leo Tolstoy

Hat tip to Dick Staub

It’s about 6 am in the morning on Monday and I’m up and bright eyed. That’s largely because I went to bed around 7 PM last night and slept through until a little after 5 this morning.

My normal routine after driving through the afternoon would have been to arrive home, have a little supper, and then catch the football games and whatever else is on. Sometimes I’d stay up until midnight. But last night I just went to bed when I was tired and slept as long as I needed since I have Mondays off. When I was finished sleeping my body woke up, no alarms and no weariness. I’ve noticed this in other times when I’ve cut myself away from the box. I sleep better and after a time of catching up on my sleep feel rested and alert. We’ll see if this happens again.

And BTW here’s an article regarding children under the age of two and television.

PS – As I’ve stated before I’m not talking about this because I’m some super saint. If the truth be known I’ve just gotten tired of what I was becoming after attaching myself to our culture’s umbilical cord / sewer pipe and decided to take myself off the grid.

It looks like its going to be a tight Nativity this year.

Already the stores are starting to advertise merchandise at deep discounts but people watching the markets dive and spin are holding on to whatever money they have left. The next few weeks might be some of the best in years to buy a TV but I doubt you’ll be going elbow to elbow with other shoppers at Best Buy, let alone the now bankrupt Circuit City. Some of the fancy people are even swallowing their pride and taking that first big step into WalMart or the local thrift store.

This is all new to us, or at least to some of us, this insecurity, this sense of limits, this realization that there’s a ceiling above us and that times can take a sudden turn. Of course, what we feel now is business as usual in most of the world, in fact its better then the day to day life of many who live with fluctuating politics, uncertain economies, and what we would consider deprivation as a matter of course. But we’ve been cocooned in our prosperity, wrapped up in a same warm blanket that, until now, has largely kept us out of the cold. Perhaps there is someone now, in some forgotten part of the third world who’s looking in on all of this and saying “Perhaps now you’ll understand…”

With this sudden and new feeling of vulnerability coursing through our souls we’ve called out to our leaders to save us but the truth is that ones departing and the ones arriving are basically helpless and somehow deep inside we know it. They’re helpless because the whole thing is a house of cards, an illusion, a scheme where we can borrow, beg, or steal our way to ever increasing prosperity and leave the bill for someone else. Well the repo man is here, now, and he’s not taking “The check’s in the mail” for an answer. And in the face of this uncertainty we might even shake our fists, as it were, at the sky and ask “Why, God? Why this turmoil and why now? Why this disturbance in the quiet comfort of my life? Why these foreboding times?” The answer may have two parts.

First, we’re going to rediscover that the god we worship, the god of suburban comforts, the giant ATM in the sky who loves America, and has his name on money is not the God who actually exists. That god is an idol, always was, a projection of ourselves and our culture on the skies above and our prayers to such a god echo in an empty room. The God that exists is a fire, powerful, awesome merely at the mention of his name, and calls us both to account and to salvation for the sake of a love that defies our attempts to measure. The life he calls us to is a life completely alive, completely human, a life where we are transfigured by divinity and called to shine with perfect light even in a world darkness often seems to rule. And second, this God loves us so much that he may even allow our money, our security, and our earthly stability, to be taken away from us so that we discover, again, those things that are eternal, those things that last, those things which make us human, those things which can never be taken away. In short, to rediscover God. We may have to lose the whole world, as Jesus tells us, to save our own soul.

So now the fast is upon us, not a fast as a ritual exercise or a convenience, but a fast we cannot escape brought on by forces beyond our control but not God’s. In times past we cut back, we shared, we gave to others and prayed for ourselves and each other from the scraps of our table, from the excess of our abundance. As the times unfold and the larger bills come due we may find every day to be a kind of fast, a disciplining of ourselves because we cannot afford anymore to live in excess. But in this time devout hearts will also discover again the true meaning of things; the clinging to that which lasts and the discarding of that which does not matter, the reality that in giving to others we provide for ourselves, the truth that our ultimate hope is not in those who would lead us for a time but rather in our Lord Jesus Christ who has overcome all the world.

If we come to understand this the days ahead may be, for us the holiest times of our lives, the days when we as the comfortable Christians of America awoke from our dream and saw, again, the truth of Bethlehem’s star.

If this story and others (Google “Bob Marley Christian”) are true this would be wonderful in so many ways.

A silence has settled over the house…

O.K., not really, but the TV isn’t on and I’m going to try my best to see how things go without TV for the duration of the Nativity Fast. I just had a concern about how much precious life I was burning in front of the box and what it would be like if I spent some time without all those frantic pulses of information charging through my head.

Already I’ve realized how automatically I would turn to the TV for background noise, something just to fill the spaces in the day. And I wonder what I’ll do with those spaces. I have some plans, more music, more reading, more attention to my business. But plans are plans and we’ll see how things go after a while. The first days of a fast are always easy, in some ways, because your motivation is high and one can generally hold back an urge for a while. I can tell you, though, that the stuff inside of me will probably want to come out somehow, somewhere, so a few days from now the battle will be on. I’ll put my book down because I’m tired of reading and my hand will move to the remote to get a dose of that mindless TV input.

Then we’ll see what I’m made of!

PS I know you’re not supposed to tell people about your fast and the truth is this has nothing to do with my being some super Christian and a lot more to do with coming to terms with the junk I’ve been putting into myself and how its made a mess of me. Who knows? I might end up as a slobbering fool flat on my back in front of the box about a week from now, but I’m going to give it my best shot.

Bishop JONAH of Ft. Worth has been selected to be Metropolitan of the Orthodox Church in America. Here is the story. My brother, who is in the OCA, called with great joy following his election and many are hoping for a new future under the guidance of Metropolitan JONAH.

May God grant Him many years!