perhaps more has been raised with the idea that the validation of any idea, proposition, or theory is firmly rooted in the emotions. Evidence is irrelevant. Logic is unimportant. The precedents of history are meaningless. If I “feel” something then it is true to me and the larger culture is obligated to endorse and support my convictions. The problem with this is that emotions are unreliable, easily manipulated, and subject to frequent change. Of course they’re important but when elevated to the level of deity they are a compass with no true north, an anchor with no rope leaving the person who lives their lives solely on them perpetually adrift.
A Thought…
The mind of a utopian needs a scapegoat, something or someone other than the failure of their own ideas to explain away the difficulties in their perfect world. Increasingly in this culture that role is being assigned to observant Christians who are considered to be enemies of progress, people whose quaint ideas and regressive lifestyles stand in the way of achieving, in real life, the utopian world of the imagination. Words like “tolerance” and “diversity” in this utopian realm have become, over the years, detached from their normal meaning and instead have become an ideology of exclusion, a marker of those who belong to the new order and a tool for the marginalization of those who for whatever reason disagree. The idea is that if these people are rendered marginal, ineffective, or become objects of cultural scorn that the hoped for ideal world will emerge. It won’t, of course, because the core of a utopian world view is a primal selfishness and eventually consumes itself but many may have to experience extreme hardship until the people who have ignored history relearn its very basic lessons.
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Interesting…
“Philanthropy in Byzantium was not practiced as a result of coercion on the part of State machinery or the Emperor as is sometimes the case by socialist societies today. It was a voluntary manifestation of love and human consideration. The Byzantine Empire was not a socialist state. Its welfare program did not destroy self-reliance, self-respect, or initiative. Byzantine phlanthropy did not make the poor servile and dependent, weak in charcter, resigned or parasitic….the Byzantines believed that ‘if anyone will not work, let him not eat,,” – Byzantine Philanthropy And Social Welfare; Demtrios J. Constanelos; page 203.
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A Little Political Humor…
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My Band…
At the St. George Antiochian Orthodox Church Festival this past Saturday. I’m on the far right with the white pants, playing the bass.
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Forgiveness…
the story is here.
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The Festival…
is over. The tents and tables and chairs are moved. Things that can wait will be taken apart as time provides. The dumpsters have been taken away.
Festivals are places where people plan together, work together. and serve together. They can raise vital funds and put a public face on the parish. My parish and its Middle Eastern Dancers made the largest paper in Minnesota. People working together build bonds with each other, their guests, and put their best foot forward.
Festivals are also a ton of work, months in the making, and often just pure sweat. A handful of people are driven to exhaustion one weekend a year because people want, no need, help to pay for their parish. Tempers build. Relationships are strained. Towards the end there are a lot of tired eyes and faces. Sigh,
I haven’t figured it out yet. I like all the good things and dislike all the bad stuff. Where does that leave me? Pretty much where I was before save for one important thing. Every festival we have reminds me of the fact there are people who truly cherish their church home and are willing to sacrifice and give of themselves in extraordinary ways to see that it survives. There’s a raw pool of energy there that hooked to the right things could change the world and in time by grace it will.
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I am convinced…
that, in the end, a Christian sexual ethic will triumph. This is because it most agrees with human happiness and design as it comes from the Designer. The problem is that we currently live in an age of arrogance, an age when all prior wisdom is considered suspect and knowledge that may appear to have spiritual sources even more so. So the ideas and wisdom formed over millenia of human experience are being disregarded in the belief they are shackles to progress rather than wisdom transcending time.
Of course it’s not so. Every generation thinks they invented sex and yet somehow doesn’t recall how they themselves got here. There is nothing new under the sun and our religious belief that somehow there is something new under the sun and that we are its source will eventually play out under the constant barrage of historical truth rooted in actual human experience and not utopian desire. We’re already seeing that happen in the great silent experience of people who’ve bought into our lies and have yet to voice their struggles.
Yet to get back to that place of respect and understanding, that place where we come to realize that the ideas that became traditional may just have become so because they, in fact, work in the world as it is and not as we think it should be, we are going to suffer. History is going to repeat itself because we are refusing to listen. Our current generation of lonely, broken, STD ridden people thinking that just breaking down one more barrier will be the key to love and happiness are going to find out they are wrong as have every generation before them which tried the same experiment. We will learn, the old lessons will be reaffirmed, but it will be by hard trial and painful experience and who knows how many generations and lives it will cost before sanity returns?
In that day the people now called homophobes, prudes, and regressives will be considered prophets and sages and those who continued to observe the Christian sexual ethic in the face of society’s barrages will be considered the forerunners of a new and better way of life.
Those who decided to flow with current will, if they remain alive, need us to help them pick up the pieces and try to make some sense out of the damage. And we will, because the love of Christ that motivates all true chastity also calls us to bind the wounds of those who have experienced the pains of its abandonment.
Until then we wait, watch, pray, and work for the greater good, even if the “greater” hates us for doing it.
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Can Liberal Christianity…
be saved? A story of the Episcopal Church that calls to mind the general decline of mainline Protestant life. Some years ago I had hoped that perhaps there would be a place for me in the Episcopal Church. Alas, I was not a Patristics scholar but I knew that where I was headed and where this church was headed were two different directions. Still, there is no joy in this. A venerable community of faith is in the process of collapsing both in faith, life, and numbers. A cautionary tale, as well, for us all.
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I Wish…
I could have been in this picture. These are the clergy of the Diocese of the Midwest gathered in late June at the Parish Life Conference. I couldn’t stay because I needed to come back to serve St. George, also a very good thing. Such is the life of a traveling Priest. This Sunday? LaCrosse, Wisconsin.
The Beautiful Path 