It’s been a good day today and the ice is thawing.

Yesterday was spent making fruitcake and having a good conversation with my mother. Today comes good news from the doctor regarding my cholesterol levels which have taken a dramatic decline (almost fifty points). The schedule is starting to get under control and the mandolin practice is starting to pay off as I practice carols for the folks where I work. A good sleep last night makes a difference as well.

I think everyone in our family knows this will be a hard Christmas. My brother’s death will touch everything but that’s not bad because it means he’s missed and we’re inconvenienced and lost in a certain way without his presence. It would be more frightening if all of this had happened and it meant nothing. The irony is that in some ways he will be more present to us in his absence then he was when he was with us and we sort of took things for granted. In the normal course of life we often are not truly present to each other because we never ponder that things can end. When they do we seem to value what, or who, was lost in a different way. Death and loss are a jolt that wakes us from the slumber of the everyday and teaches the value of what matters. But it does so at a horrific cost.

So Paul will be there in every gift, every thought, every moment of our time together in a way that he should have been, and each of us should have been to each other, had we not just made the assumption that everything will be as it is always has been world without end. Again that is as it should be because he mattered and still matters and will always matter. While the years may change the way we understand this the fact of it will remain.

The moral of this story? Whenever and however you and yours get together at Christmas go beyond the gifts and the food and the parties and be present with those who share your life and this moment. It goes by too fast to just put everything on autopilot and assume there will be some future time when you can put in the time and effort to bind your heart to those you love.

Now and only now is available. Always has been, always will be. World without end. Amen.

A link to a story about a larger Episcopal Church in Virginia that has voted overwhelmingly to leave that Church.

I spent several years recovering from life as a Baptist Pastor in a wonderful evangelical and charismatic Episcopal Church in St. Paul. Church of the Messiah was a healing place, a place that helped me understand liturgy and began the process that brought me to Orthodoxy and for which I will always be grateful.

And what has happened to ECUSA grieves me. The leaders and members of that once great body have traded thier inheritance for a bowl of pottage, or better said a thin watery soup that has no ability to nourish or sustain the soul. There are, of course, individual parishes where the lights are still on but they are like healthy tissue surviving in gangrene and every day the illness threatens to consume it.

I have acquaintances who are Priests in ECUSA and a sister who remains there and all I can do is hope for the best. God can do great things but in a church fascinated with baptizing whatever the culture sends and symptomatically celebrating anything, it appears, at variance with historic Christian faith it would seem to be an uphill thing. It is one thing to be a church that has struggled through persecution from without and another to be a body of people grossly deformed by choice.

My best hope is that this is a temporary thing and somehow something good and decent and dare we say even Christian emerges from the ashes. Some people gloat over what has happened to ECUSA and point fingers and say “See, I told you so…” In one sense they’re right. Having left, for the most part, the historic faith or any pretense to it the church is in a death spiral and it may be only a few years before the numbers and the declining endowments mark the final fiery crash. But what joy could there possibly be in that? ECUSA’s decline means that souls are being lost and faithful remnants stretched to the breaking. Taking a perverse pleasure in that is at least as bad as the heresies that made all of this happen.

Until then we can only pray.

The Christmas spirit hasn’t hit yet, but at least there’s a sense of hope.

Of course that hope isn’t about the world, or at least the way it is at present. This “post Christian” era has become the era where things like common sense, decency, intellectual rigor, and civilization have joined faith as a thing of the past. And we’re paying for it big time. Having cut ourselves from the moorings of that worldview (Christianity) which made us civil, prosperous, educated, and less prone to say, running into battle naked and painted blue, we now are what have conned ourselves into thinking is “free”, that is we are adrift on an ocean of our own thoughts, emotions, hungers, and deficiencies in a rudderless ship with no sails. I sometimes wonder why God hasn’t just taken a look at all of us and decided for the sake of mercy and the good of this planet to hit the “delete” button and send humanity back to wherever failed experiments go. That is if we don’t do it ourselves first.

So I don’t have much hope in people, myself included. We’re just at a real stupid stage right now and the best I suppose we can hope for is getting out of it without a wholesale slaughter. And anyone who claims they can solve it only indicates thier delusion.

I have to throw my hope in with God. Although from my little world the current evidence for some sort of control in all of this is not at a high point I still believe. I still think that Jesus just plain makes sense and although I’m far from a perfect example of what that means I’ll still give it my best shot. And as to Christmas, well, devils in human form visit us all the time and do thier worst so why couldn’t God visit and give His best?

After all it would only take once…

I must confess there is a part of me that sees the Middle East and the struggles of these times with a jaundiced eye. On the way to work today I said to my wife “Maybe what we should do is realize the Iraqi’s are just not intellectually, socially, and emotionally capable of civil government and put Saddam back in power.” Perhaps, I think in dark moments, they need to feel the iron fist and hear the sound of the chipper shredders at work again to realize that using thier freedom to settle centuries old grudges is just plain stupid.

And I think sometimes as well about what would happen if Christians stood up and administered the same kind of harsh justice and retribution that seems to be so much a part of the Islamic world these days. When the Pope is insulted by Turks just do what thier mob would do and rampage in the streets a while and burn the embassy to the ground. The truth is the Islamic fanatics are able to do what they can do because they have only felt the smallest edge of our power and truthfully have no idea what hell could be unleashed if were truly angry.

But therein lies the point, we are not called to anger, to destruction, or revenge. It is not our way and when we resort to it we degrade ourselves. Our Lord, our Prophet, our King calls us to a different way of life and it’s not always an easy way because we must sift everything, even our thoughts and emotions, through His teachings. In a broken world this puts us at a short term tactical disadvantage against any agressor even as we hope for the salvation of the world and the Kingdom come. At times that Kingdom has come only through our own bodies being broken, like His, for those who hate us.

I will tell you that I do not always understand this. I know it in my brain as factual but it does not always touch my heart and certainly often misses influencing my attitudes. Can I truly, as Jesus asks, love someone like Osama Bin Laden and any number of those people in the angry mobs who really do want to hurt me and make my life a kind of slavery to thier warped vision? Can I pray for them? Will I be strong enough? And what happens when push becomes shove and they are not somewhere over there but right here and in my face?

I have no answers. I probably won’t until the time comes. But faith is only true when its challenged and these are challenging times indeed.

An interesting article, actually a review, of a book that addresses this issue.

A link to this story of one Somali town’s methods to encourage daily prayers…

An article with some seldom heard insight on Constantinople, Islam, and double standards with regard to holy places.

Free Constantinople items available here.

Lost in the shuffle of the press coverage of the Pope’s visit to Turkey was the actual purpose of the visit, namely to meet with the Ecumenical Patriarch and continue dialogue aimed at healing the rifts between the Roman and Orthodox churches.

From the Orthodox side of the divide there are still issues of substance that need to be resolved in all of this, pesky things that can’t simply be covered over by theo-speak papers and pronouncements. Ironically the very concept of what the Pope has become is one of those things. Yet pressed by secularism in the West and the rising tide of angry Islam in the East the divides are getting smaller, the inconsequential issues are losing thier power, and there may be some movement towards talking about and dealing with the major items like Creed and Papacy that won’t be settled by “live and let live”. We’ll see.

And therein lies a related point. What crisis, what threatening horizon will finally force the various jurisdictions of Orthodox Christians in North America to return to unity? Its obvious that in peaceful times with the cash still flowing the people who can make a difference on this issue seem to be moving very slowly. Everyone agrees the current situation in North America is non-canonical, even sinful, hampers the work of the Church, and keeps us from having the resources, will, and voice to truly impact our culture but when push comes to shove there is neither.

They say these things take time and there is a truth in that but time for what? I don’t believe its about the time needed to negotiate the merger of structures, the arrangements of dioceses, and the building of a cohesive national church. We could live with that. I think it’s more about ethnic turf, hanging on to sentimental old world arrangements, money, and the fear of change even for the better.

The worse part about it may be that it will take some catastrophe, some threat, some real harm to provide the impetus to make unity happen. What could be done peacefully, deliberately, and with care may have to be put together at the last moment under the gun and at terms not nearly as favorable as those which presently exist.

Regardless I believe God will guide us and bring us together. It is His will that Christians be one. I just hope we are blended together by joyful obedience to His desire and not melted together in the furnace.