It’s been busy for a while and I’ve got things to say but little time to write. Hang in there and I’ll get on it, soon.

In a recent forum at Saddleback Church Sen. Barack Obama said, among other things, that the question of when life begins is “Above my pay grade…” I’m not sure why he said that, I presume that he may have been trying to be coy in front of an audience that consisted largely of more or less conservative evangelical Christians or perhaps he wanted to use ambiguity to move towards the center and away from what has been a consistently pro abortion voting record. I can only speculate but it begs some questions.

-Making profound, even life and death, decisions is part of being President. If a question like this is “above your pay grade” are you indicating your personal level of readiness for the job?

-If a question about when life begins is “above your pay grade” then why should it be left to people who presumably are less qualified to answer it then you?

-If you have doubts about when life begins shouldn’t you do everything you can to protect life in all its phases for the sake of the benefit of the doubt?

That I can rattle off these questions in less then a minute says something.

Perhaps the greatest challenge in becoming a Priest was the suddenness of my placement at St. Elias. I was ordained one Sunday, had one Sunday to practice a Liturgy, and then was sent to St. Elias basically to figure it out for myself. I had been a Deacon for two years, of course, but watching and doing are two different things and ever since then I’ve felt like I’ve been playing “catch up” when it comes to serving the liturgies of the Church.

Complicating it is the reality there are few standard forms for serving the liturgy. For whatever time you have to learn the liturgy you largely learn it in the “style” of the person who teaches you and so whenever Priests gather there can often be confusion about who is doing what. Yes, there are rubrics in the various texts, instructions for what you should be doing, but these are often amended or left out entirely depending on the “style” of who is serving and whole sections of the Liturgy, items like the ektenia before the Lord’s Prayer, can be dropped or added depending where you are and who you’re with.

Because of this it can be a difficult task thing to serve the Liturgy well when you feel like you’ve simply not had the training to do it or aren’t sure even what “good” is. Harder yet is serving with other Priests and feeling totally unprepared. If you make a mistake other Priests can be tough customers and I can’t wait to stop being the “junior Priest” at some of these gatherings so some of the tasks fall away from me. Add my bi-vocational status and its lack of daily preparation time to that and it can be quite frustrating.

So what to do? Well, I’m reading the Liturgikon over and over again and trying to make sure that what I’m doing up front is as close to conformity with it as possible. And I try to do my best in the place between knowing the extreme seriousness of what I must do and the reality that in heart, soul, and technique I may never ever be good enough. Oh, and I pray that the people of St. Elias are forgiving when I slip up while I’m hanging on for the ride.

Russian and Georgian troops are at war in Georgia. Pray for peace in the nation where the flag represents Christ and the Four Evangelists. St. Nina and St. Nicholas intercede for them!

Continuing on the theme of Sen. Barack Obama as a new secular messiah is this article about an ad agency developing a hand gesture in the shape of an “O” that it hopes will be used by people to greet each other and signal their vision for new things and a new hope with the Senator.

In postings past I have observed that the Obama campaign and its followers have used quasi-spiritual symbolism to describe their candidate and what they hope will be his movement as well. I have also observed that this could be, in some part, related to the fact that the political left, largely devoid of traditional faith, has a need to constantly create new faith and new traditions to compensate for that lack because people are inherently traditional and spiritual.

I’m not surprised, then, that the people attached to the campaign would seek to create a faux hand gesture to communicate their faith, an ersatz sign of the cross if you will. I think that it, like a lot of the ideas and images coming out of the Senator’s campaign, will come across to most people as kind of silly. But the hunger for meaning, identity, and transcendence that drives it matters and should be something we Orthodox think about as we live in this culture so rich in goods and poor in spirit.

That being said gestures, what we do with our body, matter, and its interesting that this campaign, as devoid of traditional faith as it is, understands this in a way that perhaps most Orthodox don’t.

Apparently he waved a gun and began cursing at a woman he claims cut him off on the way to church.

I don’t approve, but I do understand, especially when my route takes me down Highway 61 and the autumn “leaf watchers” are out in force driving 30 in a 55 mph zone staring out the window without thinking that someone else in the world may actually need to get somewhere.

Lord, have mercy.

Well its been a couple of weeks now since the new folks moved in next door and life is beginning to settle down. Its comforting, in a way, to have the noises of a family and children next door, the music of life’s routines.

I’m relearning some of life’s lessons along the way as well.

I think that sometimes when we, as white people in this country, interact at close quarters with people of different races we feel there is some “special’ way we must act. The casualness and comfort that marks the way we deal with others like us disappears and is replaced by an internal editor who watches over our speech, our actions, our emotions, and makes us more cautious then we need to be, more unlike ourselves.

I remember a scene from the old Archie Bunker television show where Lionel Jefferson, an African American, is with Mike, Archie’s son in law, and they’re playing one of those table games where you have to tell the truth. Lionel draws a card and tells Mike he wishes he wouldn’t always talk to him about “black issues”. When Mike challenges him about this and asks him what he’d rather talk about, Lionel responds, “How about the weather, you know black people have weather too…” And therein lies the point.

Among the worst things that have happened in this country is that people like the character Mike in that long ago TV show have grown up and taken control of the way we speak and interact with each other. The effect has been not to increase dialogue and friendship but rather to create barriers out of words and the constant potential for offense that actually drives people apart. People of different races have stopped learning how to speak with each other because the negotiations for what it acceptable language are ongoing and the cost of a mistake is high. Being politically correct has taken the natural interactions between us and turned them into potential flashpots.

Yes its wrong to be derogatory and mean but we’ve become so sensitive that we’ve retreated into silence rather than risk even the remotest possibility of harm. The result has been that we’re stilted and careful when we interact with others and the normal bonds that would help us grow together are replaced by increasingly longer periods of social negotiation before we can grow comfortable with each other and become simply neighbors and friends.

The answer, I think, is just to be yourself. Don’t be a bigot but don’t also presume that you have to be the same. After all you’re not identical to people of your own race so why should you expect to be the same as anyone else? Two people comfortable in their own skin will be able to bridge the gaps between them in a way almost all of the artificial “diversity” programs will never accomplish. Talk about the weather, sports, cars, or nothing at all and tell that silly editor in your head, that product of the Mike’s weird utopian vision, to take a hike. After all black people have weather too and when they live next door its the same as yours.

Rod Dreher reflects on a lecture by Terry Mattigly on the topics of converts to the Orthodox Church.

If you’re a convert to Orthodoxy what do you want? For me I had hoped that coming into Orthodoxy I would find a community whose life carried the same depth, passion, and vigor of its theology. But having been in a number of faith communities I knew, somewhere, that much was probably going to be the same, some people passionate about their faith, some lukewarm, and some just along for the ride. Theologically Orthodoxy is a shining city on a hill but practically we’re often just a little house with a flickering light at the bottom of a valley.

Was I disappointed? Not too much because I’ve been a Pastor before and I’m well aware of the gap between what should be and what actually is, even in myself. I would rather work to return a sense of passion and purpose in Orthodoxy, and myself, then be in the biggest “purpose driven church” in the world. Events, people, movements, they all ebb and flow but you can’t replace truth and Orthodoxy has truth in spades.

Now it should be noted that a sense of passion, purpose, and mission is part of the “truth” of Orthodoxy, at least it should be and there are many Priests who would probably wish the people they serve were as “up” for proclaiming and living their faith as they are for a good discussion about falafel. But context is everything and many of the places where people are “up” have issues where they are sometimes in direct conflict with revealed truth and its much easier to restore passion from a basis of truth then to get passionate people steered towards orthodoxy. I’ve been in more then a few churches where people have been totally hyped but in that frenzy have come up with some pretty strange ideas and I’d much rather try to put some air on the coals of a tired Orthodox church then try to handle that kind of raging fire.

This, I presume, is what it means to have a mature faith. Certainly I would have liked to see Orthodoxy be more of a “movement” and less of a collection of parishes, but at the same time you love something as it is and hope that you, by your presence, can help bring out its best. Whether Orthodoxy will be better for me so is still up in the air but I’ll give it my best.

Ironically, you can read about it here.

I wonder if I’m spending more time on the www or just replacing the time I would normally spend reading newspapers and watching TV news with the web. My guess, though, is I’m probably on line way too much. Blame it on curiosity or laziness or whatever but I know that if I don’t get away from the screens every once in a while I could turn into Jabba the Hutt.

Apparently frankincense, a major component in many liturgical incenses, helps you relax and feel calm. I personally enjoy the “pine” incense we use at St. Elias and also like encountering what other churches use when I travel. If I go to a church where incense is not used it smells, for lack of a better word “bare” and something seems missing. I also feel at peace with the sight of it coming from the censer and ascending.

What do you like about incense? What scent? What aesthetic?

Hat tip to westernorthodox