Fall is starting to mark its place here in Minnesota and some of the trees are already changing. Soon the road south will be filled with tourists and the advent of “good sleeping weather” will be with us.

There will be much to do in the weeks ahead, buildings to erect, cleaning to do, and preparations for the visit of our Bishop. We race the onset of winter in these parts and the shorter days and cooler breezes lends an urgency to things.

But larger changes loom ahead, changes that involve not just buildings and paint but the transformation of our hearts. We must become something that to date we’ve never been taught to be or experienced, a vital movement of belief rooted in Gospel values. The situation is close to the edge and on our willingness to move beyond the safety of our small circles, both personally and as a parish, hangs the life of our church.

I’ve spoken of it before and will again but time is short. Demographics are not on our side, each person who moves, each person who opts for a casual relationship with the parish, and those who are present in body but not spirit, exponentially impacts what happens. What happens in the next few months will profoundly determine whether our parish is in a death spiral or emerging from the bottom of a trough towards better things.

So each trip along the river road has become a matter of mixed emotions for me. I do really care for what happens to St. Elias and the people who have stayed faithful all these years. They are good people and the potential of this little church remains large. I’m hoping for that change of spirit, that spark that lights the fire that gives these good people the will to become special, to step out of the comfort even a small and struggling parish can provide to something new and better. I have that hope inside but sometimes I wonder and that wonder leaves me struggling with large questions.

If God weren’t involved in all of this…

A great article from WesternOrthodox on the Fathers and abortion.

An interesting, short, and first look at the faith of the woman who may be Vice President.

Wisdom from Dennis Prager…

What one almost never hears described are the deleterious consequences of secularism — the terrible developments that have accompanied the breakdown of traditional religion and belief in God. For every thousand students who learn about the Spanish Inquisition and the Salem Witch Trials, maybe two learn to associate Gulag, Auschwitz, The Cultural Revolution and the Cambodian genocide with secular regimes and ideologies.

Hat tip to Orthodoxy Today

People wonder why we can’t just “get over it” and often we’re slandered as religious nuts or rubes attached to a single issue. But what a politicians believes about abortion matters, and often in a transcending way.

First it says something about the person’s own spiritual and religious life. A person who claims Christianity as their faith and supports abortion is a person who either is willfully ignorant of the historic and continuing understanding of the Faith on this issue or is a person who’s faith, in the end, is of the kind where it doesn’t matter much in their day to day existence. That speaks to their character, whether their convictions are firm or malleable and what they would be willing to sacrifice in the short term for the sake of their own power and prestige.

Secondly a politician’s stand on abortion says something about how they view the power of government. Our constitution was founded on the idea that human rights come, not from governments, but from God and that the government is instituted to protect those rights. This reasoning is why slavery, rightly, collapsed. The people who were enslaved were clearly human and thus were endowed, like everyone, with rights from God, rights that superseded the whims of politicians or courts, rights that needed to be recognized.

Whether you’re the person who buys a pack of condoms or a scientist in the lab peering into the small smallest crevice of the human genome the debate over the beginning of life is over. At conception an entity is created and that entity, despite its size or appearance is human, a being awaiting only nine months of safety and care to emerge. Therefore that being, despite its pre-born status, has human rights. Just as slavery was morally wrong because the humanity of the slaves could not be denied so abortion is wrong for the same cause. A politician who supports abortion is saying, like the slave holders before them, that rights are bestowed by government, not God, and that government can decide that certain people are not allowed the full spectrum of rights not because of their behavior but because of their essence. This is a radical departure from the vision of the Founders of this country and people often hear the “choice” rhetoric without hearing the sinister implications behind it. Without the basic right to life of all humans every other right, every other ideal of our country, is meaningless.

It is quite true that the Faith is about more than the politics of abortion. There is a wide spectrum of issues about which our Faith can guide us and they all should be addressed. Each Christian, before they are anything else, is a member of the Kingdom of God and each should participate in the civil affairs of their nation with Kingdom values transcending all others. But very few issues cut to the heart of a person’s inner most reality then the issue of abortion, where life and death can be decided on a whim and over 50 million have already perished by “choice”.

It used to be that people were known for being heroes. Doing something noble or worthy of praise would be reason for someone’s popular acclaim, but with the advance of mass media, a new phenomenon arose within American culture. People began to be known—just for being known. In media studies we’ve come to know this phenomenon as the rise of the celebrity.

Read more here…

Hat tip to Orthodoxy Today

It was a harder sermon than most to give last Sunday.

I reminded the church of a simple fact; as we’re remodeling our building we need to remodel ourselves as well by making our parish a central part of our lives and reaching out to our community in word and deed. Our little church, like many other Orthodox parishes, can suffer from that kind of laxity that comes with age. Everyone likes the general idea of having a church but few are willing to produce the kind of effort it takes, the kind of personal responsibility required, the kind of vision turned into action that makes a parish thrive. Without it all our efforts at remodeling our building may simply mean we’re preparing it for someone else, for the church, group, bookstore, or whatever that buys it when we’re closed.

That’s a hard thing to say, and the truth of it doesn’t make it easier.

There are many things a Priest can do to help a parish but one thing always remains out of our grasp. We cannot create the will, the drive, that invisible something where people say “This is important to me, important enough for me to commit myself, my talents, my gifts, my energy, my resources, to make it happen.” That will cannot be taught, it must be caught, and without it life in an Orthodox church can only be about holding on for as long as possible before time and demographics work their decay.

It’s one of the stranger illusions of life in American Christianity and Orthodoxy in particular. People know if you don’t feed a goldfish it will die and if you don’t invest passion, time, and energy into your business it will go bankrupt. Yet that common sense often seems lost when it comes to our churches where the expectation of high returns on small investments is the order of the day.

Some of that seems to be the rancid fruit of centuries of either being a state church or a persecuted church. In the first few had to invest deeply of themselves because the church was always there, in the second the church was always in some kind of captivity so the idea of a horizon, of a dynamic, was often lost. The Orthodox who immigrated to this country largely brought one of the two of these visions with them and the combination has been poisonous to us in this land where parishes are free from persecution but required to make their own way in the world as well.

One would think that after a century or two of existence in this country we would have “gotten it” but apparently we often still miss this basic lesson, that in this country what you put in to anything often has a direct relationship to what you’ll receive. And that’s a hard thing to tell the people for whom you care, for whom you pray, and for whom you sometimes spend sleepless nights. I wish there was something I could say, something I could do, something to ignite an enduring passion for our little parish in people’s hearts so they would find the way to reach down inside and draw on the gifts they were given in their baptism and chrismation and be what God would have them be. I know they would be better, happier, more alive, and closer to Christ. At times I ache for this in their lives.

Sadly, though, there are no words, no magic formula, no sure fire way for me to help light the spark of hope in these good people’s hearts. I’ll do my best to point the way, and everything else is in God’s hands. But just in case you’re reading this, please God, give these good people who’ve endured so much a glimmer of what could be and the courage to reach out and grasp it.

As to the question when human life begins, the answer to which is above Mr. Obama’s pay grade, oh, let’s go on a little tear. You know why they call it birth control? Because it’s meant to stop a birth from happening nine months later. We know when life begins. Everyone who ever bought a pack of condoms knows when life begins.

Read more here…

This article reminds us why we should be careful consumers of media, especially when it comes to statistics, numbers, and polls. Don’t forget that much of the media exists not for the sake of truth but rather for revenue. The scarier the story, the more the threat, the more likely you’ll look and watch the ads. Because of this the truth is often subservient to the impact of the potential story.

Hat tip to Five Feet of Fury

Hat tip to Craig for the dose of truth.