An interesting article on the religion of enviromentalism and global warming.

And another here.

A thaw is on the way and winter is slowly releasing its grip one finger at a time. That’s a good thing around these parts where spring, because of its scarcity, is a treasured commodity.

Those who’ve never lived where the snows flies horizontally propelled by cold winds screaming south from Canada may not realize that the charm of winter diminishes exponentially by its distance from Christmas. What’s scenic and beautiful in a Currier and Ives sort of way on December 24th becomes an annoyance by the middle of January, veritably loathsome when March rolls around and capable of making decent Christians swear bloody oaths if it lasts to April, which it often does.

So when the warm winds start rolling up from Colorado and begin their path through Nebraska and the Dakotas to us we wait with anticipation and track them on the weather reports with an intensity that rivals brokers scanning stock tickers. That warm bubble of orange, and sometimes even red, on the weather maps is our beacon of hope, our sense that we can, even for a moment, shrug off the cold, see each other without sweaters and remember what grass looks like. People’s moods actually improve and the slog leaves and bounce returns to our steps.

So this Thursday it may crack 30 degrees farenheit and by the weekend 40 and next week perhaps even 50. Every street will be wet with little rivers trickling down their sides. Roofs will reappear in patches with icicles growing and then finally dropping to the newly exposed lawn. Heat begets heat and with the insulating snow gone even the air will grow warmer and stay that way. By the end of March a few courageous tulips will already have stuck their heads above ground and the sidewalks will be open enough for kids to ride their bikes. People who huddled around their tables in the dead of winter with seed catalogs for consolation start thinking about real gardens and their faith returns. Birds stop huddling in whatever shelter they can find and start staking their claims to this tree or that.

Its always been that way. Winter, no matter how long it seems, gives way to spring and the intensity of winter amplifies the passion for its arrival. There’s something in that all about life and death and resurrection and Pascha (Easter) but I’ll let you decide what you think it may be.

The truth is I’m not in much of a hurry to get home on Sunday afternoons. I have one world in LaCrosse and one in St. Paul. Each has their own joys and struggles and both demand something from me with the time in between often the only time truly my own. So why hurry?

I suppose it would be different if there was nothing to see, but the road along the Wisconsin side of the Mississippi River from St. Paul to LaCrosse is among the nicest trips around. Everywhere there are trees, bluffs, sleepy farms, quaint river towns with names like Maiden Rock and Alma, and old houses with fresh coats of bright paint clinging to the hills. On its best day Minneapolis seems contrived and mechanical compared to, say, Trempeleau or Stockholm. More often than not a part of me just wants to pull off the road, find a job, and spend the rest of my life looking at the river, writing poems, and watching the sun set.

The truth is that I’m charmed by it all and the vision of quiet nights listening to nothing louder then the bugs on a front porch swing. Life seems to be too precious to blow it all on commutes and standing in long lines at enormous stores. As my car moves along the road thoughts like this tug at me and touch a place inside that’s beyond the reach of the various roles I’m asked to play in a production not of my own choosing.

And its not the first time I’ve felt this way and it probably won’t be the last. Some day, when the time is right, I’ll park my car somewhere along the river, say “enough” and find an old house with a big window for the cats, floors that creak in all the right places, and walls full of time.

If not now then at least in my dreams…

My weekends are filled with the tasks of serving St. Elias Church but my weekdays take me to an assisted living facility just outside of Minneapolis where I oversee the activities program. It’s good work, work that helps people, work that pays the bills. And every so often I pick up on something.

Several days ago I was tending “Valentino”, our facility hamster, and a thought returned to me. “This animal” I thought, “is my moral superior”. In his life, however long it is, our hamster will do nothing to deliberately offend God or neighbor and anything he may do that we would consider to be “wrong” is nothing about intent and all about an instinct broken, not by his beligerance, but by that of my species. If it were a matter of simply stacking up good things versus bad our hamster would make it to heaven with saintly speed and the best I could do was hope to pick the lock on the gate.

The truth is that we humans are what’s wrong with the world. Absent our presence this planet would still be an Eden floating in space with clear skies, peace, and lambs sleeping with lions in the noonday sun. Everything that makes life here insufferable has a single cause, us. In our baser moments we are a virus infecting this world, a virus with the capability to wipe out all existence by virtue of the heights of its technology and the depths of its pathology.

Most of us rarely stop to think of how far we’ve sunk or how much damage we’ve caused or how even the best of still often slash and burn our paths through life. Most of the time I just go with the flow myself and madly shop without a care or let any potential deep and transforming thoughts be carried away on the sea of daily noise. I’d like not to think there are parts of me as ugly as that, a little Hitler just beneath my skin.
I’d rather not see the truth because it would be overwhelming.

But sometimes it shows up anyways, the uninvited guest crashing my party, the pain beyond medication, the inevitable morning hangover. Some times I can’t trick my eyes into seeing illusions. Some times I can’t drown out that still small voice that speaks veritas in my ear. Some times I don’t see through a glass darkly and there is no comfort in this clarity. Despair is the inevitability of the honest soul, even if that honesty only lasts a moment.

It would be easier, probably, to be like our hamster whose life is all of eating, sleeping, and making more of the same without the burden of even recognizing the face in the mirror. It would seem a kind of blessing to not even care about life in a cage or what happens when everything finally goes dark one day. But such is not to be. In the scheme of things the benefits and the terrible cost of intellect and conscience and responsibility has fallen to all of us near naked bi-peds with the glory of language and the curse of knowing we are going to die.

Yet hamsters are as hamsters will always be but within us is planted the understanding that we were to be something more. That we were designed to be so gnaws at us with a primal despair. That we could be greater than angels but are often the cruelest of beasts tears at us in any moment when even one second of truth is within us. But we can be transformed as well, the one benefit of the kind of knowledge that separates us from our pets.

And if that is also true just imagine what could be…

A must read article for those who have come to Orthodoxy, myself included.

In my just over half decade as an Orthodox Christian I have had many opportunities to observe “Syrian Time” in its operation.

For those who aren’t Orthodox “Syrian Time” is the rather casual relationship of the faithful to the starting times of services and sometimes attendance in general. Depending on where the immigrants in a parish may come from it can also be called “Greek Time” or “Slavic Time” or, you get the drift. But its not unusual for people to trickle in and out of liturgies at will and if you’re twenty minutes late or so, well that’s just the way it is.

Now anyone who has been Orthodox for more than a day or two knows the services of the Orthodox Church, even thought they are often the condensed versions, are still long and especially so by our everything has to be done in microwave time culture. If you think for a moment you’re going to get out in an hour think again, we’re just warming up, and if you visit an Orthodox church in tight clothes and bad shoes you won’t do it twice. Depending on the ebb and flow of things and what time of year it is the services, which on Sunday morning basically flow into each other, may not start right on the dot either.

But there are starting times and if morning prayer runs a little long it doesn’t hurt to catch that service as well. I believe there are many Orthodox who’ve never attended a complete Matins (Orthros) Service. Its sad that this great service, rich with prayer and scripture and time to let the world out there slip away, is often about a Priest and a chanter or two or the odd visitor who is under the impression that since the liturgy is scheduled it would be good to be there. And as to the starting times…

Apparently that’s another story. Somehow the normal rules of life seem not to apply and what would be considered rude if done in the business world or even a casual affair is apparently appropriate for our dealings with God. There are a lot of reasons, of course, but about 99 percent of them are pretty much just air. Occasionally the weather is bad, sometimes there are emergencies, a few parishoners may be on call or medical personnel but mostly its just about the will. If a person wants to be on time they will make the adjustments.

Now beyond the normal inconveniences to others that comes with being late there is something more important. In coming to Orthodoxy you cannot imagine how relieved I was to know that all I needed to do was be at the Liturgy. The success of the services had nothing to do with whether I “felt like it” or not or my emotional state. I need not generate any false enthusiasm. I could be tired or less than happy to be there. And if all I could do was just stand there on any particular Sunday morning at least I was there in the presence of holy things and even if I didn’t leave emotionally “charged” or changed in some life shattering manner I was still blessed just for being there in ways that I could not always understand. If only one short phrase or word mattered that day it was still time well spent. What a joy it was not to have to pretend or feel bad about not being able to conjure up the appropriate feeling for the day. What freedom to come, even if I was a mess, to worship. No matter how I was at the moment, even if my worship was through clenched teeth, just being in the presence of God in some small way was all that mattered.

And you miss the fullness of that if you come late or wander in or out. What hymn, what prayer, what word did you miss when you decided to hit the snooze button on Sunday morning? When you left to have a cigarette what part of the feast that God provides for even the least grateful of us passed you by? In the casualness of your attendance what benefit from just taking an hour or so out of your day to acknowledge God was lost forever? That’s the real reason a person should come to every Liturgy they can at the right time. Anything less means fragments, scraps, or sometimes an opportunity to bless or be blessed that may never come again.

And, oh by the way, don’t forget to set your clock one hour ahead (in the United States) this coming Saturday or you may be later then is usual even for you. : )

St. Paul is covered in snow today, a foot or so already and some inches to come. The Global Warming event planned by the good folks at Public Radio was cancelled. I guess there’s nothing like the actual weather to get in the way of the best laid plans.

The secret to handling a big, heavy, wet snow like this is to take it a little at a time. Some folks may look out the window and see the person pushing a shovel or walking behind a snowblower while the flakes are falling and think “What a fool”. But the next morning when they’re out there with an enormous shovelful and a later aching back they’ll get the wisdom of lightening the load a bit at a time over taking one large painful scoop.

Same thing with sin, by the way, since I should be writing about something to tie this in to Lent. It takes us a while to get in to a sin and therefore a while to get out, a little at a time sometimes because it may be too much for us to handle at one time.

Ask me how I know this.

The weather reports are out and another big storm is on the way.

During last week’s storm the LaCrosse area took the brunt with almost 30 inches of snow but now its our turn, just a few hours north but a world away in weather terms, to take the hit. Rain, sleet, and then up to 20 inches of snow in the next three days. Snow banks will look like they did when I was a kid. The commutes through Minneapolis will be legendary in their crawling horror. Tow truck drivers will circle the streets like vultures seeking unfortunates who didn’t understand the snow emergency rules.

Yet we need the snow. Snow is water and water is life. So we’ll put up with it all and do the best we can. In the end, no matter how big we think we are or how important we imagine ourselves and our technologies to be, creation still calls the shots.

Alwasy will.

Lent is underway and the struggle is on.

Now it’s not about the meat. As I have gotten older I eat less and less of it and it wouldn’t be unusual to go without it for months at a time. But would to God that I could control my sins in the same way, that I would know they, like meat, would taste good at first but then sit in my stomach like a rock. How is it that I’ve learned that lesson with meat but not with the sins which could kill my soul?

Being who I am, of course, I’ve been able to for the most part master the appearances and mostly avoid, as it were, what my pride would consider to be the “biggies”. But in my heart its another story. There are things inside that need to go, things dark and miserable so deeply imbedded their removal could even damage what little is healthy. I invited them in, or they came in disguised as something else, or hitchhiked their way along, but the door was mine to open and now it looks like they won’t leave without something more than a subtle hint. The party is long over but some guests just don’t want to leave.

And I don’t know how that’s all going to work out. I just know that I don’t like to feel the way that I do, helpless and under the control of small and vile things. There are times, as well, when I wish that God would simply remove them from my life but there must be something important for me to gain in the struggle.

In it all I gain glimpses of why people of true Christian faith would be unafraid of death because they embrace the release from the struggle against the darkness within and the realization of mercy to come.
And that’s where my hope probably should be as well, not in death, not in my own abilities to conquer the demons within, but in the mercy of God that can somehow transform the mess that I’ve made of things into something good and holy even as I have only a small idea of how and basically no idea of the why.