Second Terrace

The Election

If I was a candidate whose spouse
was diagnosed with a terminal thing, I'd drop out.
Well, I hope I would.

If I was a candidate who just birthed a child, I'd drop out.
Especially one with a PDD.
Well, I hope I would.

If I was a candidate who has to squint his eyes at infanticide
and maybe just maybe if you squint hard enough
(like the permanent impressionistic wince of pro-life democrats)
you can make that morbid d-word go away, I'd drop out,
before I started feeling like a sugar-coated-Herod.
Well, I hope I would.

If I was a candidate who was a Republican, I'd drop out,
because I'd be afraid to read the prophets.
Because of profit. (get it?)
Well, I hope I would.

If I was a candidate who depended on the shock jocks of the blogosphere
and the National Enquirer map of the "Culture Wars"
to delineate my constituency, I'd drop out
before either side started wearing black shorts and hairy knees
and greeting the podium with "Hail Spode."
Well, I hope I would.

If I was a candidate who could not control his temper,
or his despondency or concupiscence or cravings, I'd drop out.
Well, I hope I would.

If I was a candidate who didn't know the Testament, Old and New,
I'd drop out, especially if I ran afoul of my bishop's letters
and I had to say something awkward
about how the Wisdom of the Church would never inform my politics.
Well, I hope I would.

If I was a candidate who had a daughter
who's pregnant and unmarried, I'd drop out
seeing as I was conservative and Christian
and that seems to be the conservative Christian thing to do
Dobson notwithstanding (despite what he told us decades ago,
when then it was just child psyche and the Bible and the radio
instead of empire).
Well, I hope I would.

If I was a candidate who had to do what his handlers told him
or believed what his reality-handlers revealed to him, I'd drop out,
before reality reared up and did that ugly head thing.
Well, I hope I would.

If I was a candidate who was succeeding because
the populace "identified" with me because
I didn't use too many big words
and had as many soap operas as usual:
you know, a secessionist here, a dui there,
like a weekend of Lifetime movies, I'd drop out
because I used to think leadership is supposed to be better than the usual.
Well, I hope I would.

If I was a candidate who cannot debate too well but who suspects
at 4 am that fame
is like surfing and this election he hopes is just a big enough wave
before dissipation, I'd drop out
before bathos, bombast sputter as they must.
Well, I hope I would.

If I was a candidate who had to go to conventions,
pay my party dues, reward favors, make soul-sucking promises,
payback IOU's, like appointing a horse-philistine
as a disaster-response minister,
and a no-good-shot as secret director of everything.
I would drop out.

But life is all a convention, the world is,
the unseen is a rather large caucus,
and we are all candidates
who cannot drop out,
for there is, you know, an Election at stake.
And One Certain Vote is needful.

And since I am a candidate, I will stay,
in this campaign.
Well ...

Praying for the hurricane

I will pray for the people, packed in tin buses
Running away from the city, the towns, the leeward shore
Running, crowding, breathing hard with every lunge
And the taste of blood at the end of a gasp
The poor are running again.

I will pray for them,
For the horizon bodes blue-steel gray, flashing lasers
Rumbling the thunder of charged tornadoes at the core
The eye-wall, horror named and ghastly woe.

I will pray for them,
the running poor,
For I, too, fear the end of time
When darkness lurks moans at the boundary of mind
And scatters plans, good intentions,
Address books, calendars, and
Who will go to Starbucks tomorrow?
What about the swings and the new Sunday School?
And tomorrow, what about pot luck and the barbecue?
Is it off?

I will pray for them,
Huddled behind my radar screen,
Up here in my safety rust belt zone
When storms are only storms,
With rain & floods but never a terror a hundred miles high:
The Nephilim did not die out,
Mating with the djinn & efreet, banshee & nyad,
Shrieking fury, moan of dread
And lashing every house upon the sand.

I will pray for them,
Christian or no, friend or foe,
Those with a sense of humor and geniality,
Who would stand me a glass of lemonade,
A cup of cold water,
And those who would not.
I will pray for them and send them money.
I will build for them again.

But I will not waste time wondering why God
You did this, or allowed this,
Or included this in the best of all worlds.
I will not pray thus for the hurricane.
I will not waste time blaming Republicans or Democrats
Or the traffic jams and raw tempers.
I will not blaspheme with glee on the third anniversary
And how it serves cold irony to a certain meeting at the other end
Of the big river, the strong brown god.

I will not, for love and disaster paired make a square
Of silence, whispered Kyrie Eleison,

And God Jesus, if You need him,
Though I love him and require of him a guard from the Void,

Please take my own Guardian
To stand watch in the storm.

Presvataja Bohorodice, Spasi Nas

Even though the veneration of the Theotokos is old-fashioned and obscure in the modern world, this veneration and supplication for her intercession lie at the very heart of the Christian faith. Our fellowship with the Virgin and our communication with her are realities that exist at the center of life.

There is no such thing as Christian faith without regard for the Virgin Mary. Our supplications to the Theotokos cannot be optional or secondary. The reason why Orthodox Tradition gives so much devotion to the Mother of God is not because it is superstitious or obscure. It calls us to venerate the Theotokos, and to call upon her intercession simply because Orthodoxy is so completely Trinitarian and so fully Christological. We are Marian in the Orthodox Church because we are “conservative” in the best sense of the word – we maintain a deep fidelity to the Apostolic witness of the “theanthropos,” the “God-manhood” of Christ.

The Christian faith, which is fully realized in the Orthodox Church alone, is not merely a set of beliefs and propositions. Orthodoxy is better described as a “relationship” – and even this modern word is inadequate. It is better to use the old word perichoresis, or “co-inherence.”

This old Patristic term describes the current of love which flows within the Tri-Hypostatic Union of the Godhead, wherein the Father begets the Son, Who adores the Father and is glorified by the Holy Spirit, Who proceeds eternally from the Father. That Trinitarian love is the opposite of self-absorption. Instead, Trinitarian love proceeds in Grace, through an infinity of Names, to create the spiritual and physical universe, to redeem that which is lost in sin and death, and to set life upon the way of infinite perfection and communion. Trinitarian love is the source of all beauty and truth.

There is no determinism in the Divine plenitude of love. The Archangel Gabriel announced to the Theotokos, as the very first essentially Christian proclamation, “With God nothing is impossible!” (Luke 1.37). This crucial affirmation is the great theme of all prayer, supplication and intercession. Prayer is possible, simply because “with God all things are possible.” The future is not a prison in the apostolic testimony of the Orthodox Church – it is a mystery charged by the brightness of redemption, an endless set of possibilities that are always changeable by prayer.

That theme of “co-inherence” also describes the relationship of the Virgin Mary with her Son, Jesus Christ, the Son of God. It describes the mutual surrender and the gift of self to the other. Thus, it beautifully depicts the profound and life-long surrender of the Theotokos to her God, her Son and Saviour.

When there is this deeply psychic exchange of life, Mary represents her Son to humanity. She becomes the pre-eminent icon of the Christian, the example to us all in how life should be lived, and how holiness should be pursued.

But there is another side to the exchange. Jesus, in turn, represents His Mother and all humanity to the Godhead. God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit respond to human need and concern. God responds because the Holy Spirit moves His creatures to pray – and the one who is most sensitive to the promptings of the Spirit is the Virgin Mary herself. She prays best, because she knows God best – more than any other saint, more than even the angels. She was the first to receive Jesus into her heart, and she bore Christ God in her womb, and suckled the Son of God in the Manger.

She knows God better than the Angels, because she knew Christ in His humanity. She knows God better than the rest of mankind, because she knew Jesus in His divinity. She adores her God Who is also her Son. Jesus, the Son of God, loves His Mother, who is also His creature.

In that singular perichoresis between God and the Theotokos, there is the tenderness of Mother and Son … there is also the compassion of the Infinite God for His creature, and the awestruck adoration of the deified Virgin Mary for the Everlasting God.

It is that singular relationship we appeal to whenever we pray. Our prayer to God is founded and rooted in this very first Christian “co-inherence.” Our supplications to the Theotokos rely upon the primacy of the Virgin Mary over all humanity, in her ability to intercede in her “maternal boldness,” with her Son Who is also God.

This we see portrayed in tender warmth in the very first of the Gospel miracles, the Wedding at Cana. In this homely and familiar story, we see the Mother of God become aware of a very human, humble concern. The problem strikes us as unworthy of a miracle. It is a wedding party, after all, and the problem seems not to be as serious as later needs for the miraculous intervention of Christ. The need is for wine, as it ran out prematurely. That does not seem so important as the need for healing or exorcism. But despite the smallness of the need, the Virgin Mary presents this request to her Son.

And despite the apparent priorities of the ministry of Christ, Jesus is moved by His mother’s maternal boldness to respond to the need. And, as is always true of His miracles, His intervention results in an excess of Grace. His miracles are always “more than enough.” There is never mere "efficiency" in Grace: the Trinitarian radiance of Love can never be characterized as "just enough." There are always leftovers in the aftermath of the Power of God. There is too much wine. There are twelve baskets of bread. There is 153 fish in a net. There are aliens, Canaanites and Samaritans who are accidentally healed, despite historical strictures. There are Messianic secrets that are always broken. Animals speak, the rocks cry out, entire storms are soothed into Peace.

This was always true in the earthly ministry of Jesus Christ. Now that Christ has ascended, and now that Christ has assumed His Mother into His fellowship in Paradise, the miracle of the Wedding of Cana is repeated over and over again. It is replayed, afresh, beautiful like the first time, established in truth in a myriad of enactments, every single occasion when we call upon the Virgin Mary for her help and intercession.

She is present with us, borne upon the wings and breath of the Holy Spirit. While she is not omnipresent and omniscient, the Holy Spirit certainly is. The entirety of the Theotokos’ intercessory ministry is enabled by the inspiration and fullness of the Spirit of God. It is by the Grace and Power of God that the Theotokos hears our supplication. It is by this same Grace and Power that she responds. And it is by her relationship with her Son – a relationship that is the example for all human adoration of God – that our prayers are answered.

I say all this, not only because of the moment this day's Feast of the Dormition of the Theotokos, but mainly because the intercessory ministry of the Virgin to us in the twenty-first century is crucial, and cannot be done without.

Can this be doubted? Are you surprised that I emphasize so strongly the necessity of the Virgin’s prayerful assistance? It is a symptom of the age, and how myopic and dark it has become, that it is possible to even consider that we could do without the intercessions of the Theotokos.

There is no such thing as Christian faith without regard for the Virgin Mary. Here, at the conclusion, I would go one step further. It is impossible to continue on as an Orthodox Christian in this age of idols and confusion, without the intercession of the Virgin. It is impossible to even “be” a Christian at all anymore, without the intercession of the very first and best Christian, who is the Virgin Mary and Mother of our God.

There are many today who try to be Christian on their own, in their own little self-enclosed, existentialist envelope. They try to live for Christ without appealing to the Saints and the Mother of God. Theirs is a desperate struggle that will grow all the more difficult as the years pass by, and as the future rushes toward the Day of Judgment.

As time goes on, I want you remember this: the coldness of unbelief, and the darkness of the modern age, will boil down the Christian options of civilization into only one hopeful possibility – and that will be the Holy Apostolic Church, charged with liturgy, hiearchy, sacraments and tradition, eternal order, and filled with the veneration of the Theotokos.

And the main reason for this single possibility is mainly because of the tender, maternal affections of the Mother of God, whom we glorify this day.

A new political party

The difference between "conservative" and "wise"

I confess that I would like to be conservative, but often let myself go with liberal enthusiasms.

In the last few decades, my liberal forays have been answered with disappointment. I found liberal experimentation in the usual quarters of sociological re-engineering and Rawls-ian fundamentalism.

But I have seen liberal ebullience too in surprising spots: the culture of globalized high finance, in particular, violates about every tenet of conservatism there is. Also, the neo-conservative penchant for Clausewitz-ian “war as politics” is more “neo” than “conservative.” “Libertarianism” is hardly conservative. Agro-businesses like ADM and Dole cannot ever be counted conservative because of their rapine of family and land.

Conservatism used to find the ilk of commerce pretty distasteful. The main care was for the people and the land, and for honoring the Divine Order. It was not for the state in centuries past. The enthusiasm for the nation or for one particular ethnicity is a more recent development. Statism, commercialism, nationalism and ethno-centrism – despite their untoward associations in the political market today – have no root in the conservative mind.

The agrarian sensibility, environmental stewardship and even the distributist agenda have more to do with real conservatism than the current Republican platform. If you could but close your eyes to the bunting and confetti, the big elephant and the maudlin sentiment, the only thing saving the Twin Cities convention from sheer Philistinism will be a few bones thrown to the pro-life crowd – and even those bones are getting fewer, probably stashed away with the obsolete and now-closeted critiques of the gay and feminist agenda. The future of the Republican Party is with the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Who is the personification of all that I will never vote for.

“Conservative” used to mean that you stood for the people and the land. You didn’t mind a few doles once in a while, to stave off hunger and to care for the hurts of time. You didn’t mind some old rules that protected the good earth, clean water and breathable skies. You sought in the law some prejudicial honor given to natural law. You knew that humanity was bent on evil and subject to death, but you also knew that people were not naturally depraved, that everyone could be likable, and was worthy of being saved.

But words change and so did “conservative.” “Words move, music moves only in time,” said one true conservative, who was also a Modernist (as Scruton so admirably remarked of Eliot). “Words strain, crack and sometimes break, under the burden, under the tension, slip, slide, perish, decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, will not stay still” (Burnt Norton).

So now there are no good old conservatives left who are genial, who know the Ancients and conversed with them, who sit on their shoulders and tell us what they see further into the horizon. No good pipe smokers who, with a pint, could talk of fairies, St. Gregory, and rail at the atom bomb all in one paragraph, then laugh again at some foible in Congress/Parliament. They are not in the Republican Party. And in case you were wondering, they are certainly not in the other Party either.

The only conservatives left are probably hiding out on some quaint porch, rocking themselves in contemplation.

I am not a conservative because that word has simply died. And maybe this is a good thing.

Christian Conservatives in America have been confounded by a number of tenacious puzzles. One is that the American appearance of religion was mostly Protestant, and that a-traditional movement with its individualistic hermeneutic and experiential piety has been at frequent odds with Christendom.

Another puzzle has been the apparent – at least – tradition of democracy in America. Try as you like, you will not find the concept of government-by-plebiscite in the Bible or the Fathers. Please do not say that democracy was anticipated by the conciliar nature of the Church: it was not, because conciliarity assumes and depends upon holiness and eldership, not coalition. Christians really do not know how to vote as Christians in particular, or in general how to be Christian citizens of a country that calls itself a democracy. There is very little in Scripture or the Fathers that gives much guidance for involvement in modern politics: there is a lot about government to be sure, but not government as produced by the polls. The silence about democracy in Holy Tradition we have taken, usually, as license for full participation and an unreflective pragmatism. Moreover, real Conservatism can only falter in a political environment that obscures memory, and that is ever set in motion solely by the utilitarian intent for “goods.”

And finally, Christian Conservatives are flummoxed by a problem inherent in Conservatism itself. As a political philosophy, it succeeded only because it was predicated upon a culture that still honored the Divine Order. But when that Divine Order – and its articulation of Natural Law – is decisively ignored – as has happened in the West – then Conservatism is shown to be profoundly incomplete. It cannot stand as a political philosophy, because it relied upon the tacit understandings of Natural Law to undergird it: without that bedrock – which has been eroded away – the structure of Conservatism has toppled, and its ruins are populated by genial ghosts like Patrick Buchanan and mangy louse-ridden temple-cats like Rush Limbaugh.

A complete political philosophy, at the very least, ought to establish ethics for public life. It may or may not say anything about ways and means in a democratic government. But it certainly will have a lot to say about balanced scales, honoring the field, gathering green grass from the mountains, drinking from your own cistern, contentment in simplicity, chastity, protecting the poor and the powerless, inflicting ancient ways upon innocent children and wiping off their blank slate as soon as possible, not giving yourself as surety, the general and felicitous practice of “shutting up,” loyalty to the King, the sanctity of marriage and family, the necessity of stability for those in power, the danger of riches, the blasphemy of bottom-line thinking and the wretchedness of usury, familial “small is beautiful” enterprise and the concomitant peril of corporate profiteering.

A complete political philosophy may leave ambiguous the choice for candidates, but it is clear about never "erasing the boundaries," thereby defrauding orphans. It is clarion about never ever removing the "eternal landmarks" (Proverbs 23.10). The orphaned poor today are property-less and enslaved in debt. The landmarks of gender are erased. Marriage is fogged. State governments fund themselves on lotteries. Abortion is considered a right. The oil barons bathe in black gold, and Conservatives have nothing to say.

This complete political philosophy is called Wisdom, and when Conservatism was ever good at all, it articulated Wisdom, but only in part. Wisdom, however, went much farther, and it is this farther extent that used to form a foundational bedrock that is now absent. Wisdom went beyond the joys and sorrows and “goods” of this life. It perceived a Reality beyond the sense perceptions and the demotic experience of this world. At this point of “beyond” the likes of John Rawls is certainly silent, but so also are the likes of John Stuart Mill, Adam Smith and Edmund Burke.

The “beyond” of Wisdom lies in its seamless reference to the unseen world. Wisdom does not divide ethics and philosophy, theology and politics. Wisdom, as Wisdom, cannot be relegated to some biblico-literary category of “Wisdom.” There is no “Christ and Culture in Paradox” in Wisdom. The political world is discerned as subject to the ordinance of God, and affected by the powers and principalities. The demonic is not just relegated to a sociological or even Jungian symbolic status: it is accounted as a real existence (if no longer an essence). Evil, abuse and oppression are warned against not because they are inexpedient, or because they conflict with the evolutionary progress of things, but because they will incur the wrath of God and the onslaught of nature’s ire.

Wisdom knows that at the core of lawlessness is Antichrist. You cannot get away from this single, offensive point. The attempt to understand evil in defiance of this fact is the main reason why Conservatism has failed in the West.

I am not hopeful that Wisdom will ever be noticed as a political platform in America. It is not only that America will probably never listen to the Apostolic Church, which is the articulator of that Wisdom: after all, America needs its Christ to be a cheerleading pop-psychology friend, and a hero for all who want to parlay their “consciousness” into a “liberation gospel.” America – at least the one on TV – will never be interested in the real Christ, Who is the Wisdom, Peace and Power of God.

It is not just this. There is another reason why America will not listen to Wisdom as Politics from the Church.

And this reason really offends.

We in the Church are simply not speaking Wisdom – not because there is no one listening, but mainly because we are not wise. We are too busy answering other calls, learning other things, getting mad, practicing the art of fools.

Duncan's horses

Desire for Wisdom leads to a Kingdom (Wisdom of Solomon 6.20)

I will be voting this November for whoever I think is the wisest man. My vote will not be determined by party, coalition, movement, voters’ guides, or campaigns. It will not be influenced by the DayGlo stickers “Conservative” and “Liberal,” for those two words are meaningless, especially in America. It will not even be established by the Christian affiliation of the candidate: both are Christian, in the heterodox sense of the word, and for that we should all be thankful.

I say this without any irony, and I am prepared to name either one in prayer out loud, in Liturgy and Vespers.

Once again I ask some of my more earnest correspondents to quit sending me secret reports that “prove” that Obama is really a Muslim. Quit sending snide remarks about McCain’s age and his upper-crustiness.

Wisdom is that solidarity with the Word of God that fends of the darkness, and recognizes the Light that reigns throughout the totality of Creation. Even politicians are somewhat able to perceive this, and this perception of Divine Wisdom is necessary to the task of government. Those who have power and riches are those who affect the poor and weak, obviously, but they are also those who attract the bodiless powers, for good and ill. Confusion, darkness, and baleful cries will swirl like a maelstrom around them, and if they do not heed the witness of Wisdom, and God’s Order in Creation, then they shall founder like flotsam and jetsam, “cast to and fro on every wind of doctrine.”

Decisions require discernment, and discernment is produced by a life of wisdom. I expect this of a man who is candidate for any position of authority, over any group, whether familial, political, or even ecclesial. I expect him, as wise, to be completely in charge of his emotions. We are right to expect complete stability of anyone in leadership. I expect him, as wise, to look beyond appearances and superficialities, to think beyond clichés and slogans. I expect him to never be motivated by “hurt feelings” – that most modern and idiotic of complaints that have no place in adult life, especially Church. I expect him to detest all PACs -- the NEA, the NRA, NARAL and NOW, all things Corporate (usually Republican) and Corporate Foundations (usually Democrat, isn't that odd?). I expect him to know more about the humanities than about technologies. I expect him to be wary of riches and cynical about atheism, consumerism, materialism, eugenics and Darwinism.

There are painful moments when wisdom is thrown over, when democracy turns into something like the French Terror. In the years before the march of Babylon into Judea, the Lord proclaimed through Isaiah, “I will make boys their princes, and babes shall rule over them … the youth will be insolent to the elder, and the base fellow to the honorable” (Isaiah 3.4,5b).

In the tragedy of Macbeth (which I rather think is a comedy, sometimes), an old man remarks to Ross on the aftermath of the assassination of King Duncan, and the rise of the monster Macbeth to tyrannical power:

OLD MAN: ‘Tis unnatural,
Even like the deed that’s done. On Tuesday last
A falcon, tow’ring in her pride of place,
Was by a mousing owl hawked at and killed.

ROSS: And Duncan’s horses (a thing most strange and certain)
Beauteous and swift, the minions of their race,
Turned wild in nature, broke their stalls, flung out,
Contending ‘gainst obedience, as they would
Make war with mankind.

OLD MAN: ‘Tis said they ate each other.

ROSS: They did so, to th’amazement of mine eyes
That looked upon’t.

I’ll have to ask this of the Bard to be sure, next time I see him, but I suspect that old Duncan, King of the Scots, was probably guilty of the usual royal peccadilloes, including financial malfeasance, concupiscence and fandangos of other sorts. We never saw him in battle, after all, so is he shy? Sending out better, more qualified, men to do the hard work? Perhaps the new Thane of Cawdor had enough votes and commendations from the field and the void, enough “factual” justification to mull over the insinuation (i.e., logismoi) from the three Bearded Weird Sisters.

Perhaps there were many Thanes, other than Cawdor, who were posting long messages on how that situation had affected them, and recommendations for new, more open, amenable structures.

He was not stable, Macbeth was driven. “Driven” is from the lexicon of passion and humanity defiled. He was passionate and spurred by the demonic lust of his OCD spouse.

The horses of Duncan ate each other. Macbeth rehearses the thoughts of darkness. Duncan may have been regrettable in his leadership, but Macbeth was a fool in the very worst way.

This is ever the danger when it comes time to unseat Kings. At Conventions in August, and at Conferences at year’s end, you will hear the echo:

… Present fears are less than horrible imaginings. My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical, shakes so my single state of man that function is smothered in surmise, and nothing is but what is not (Macbeth I, 3).

A moral for Pittsburgh in November, upon Georgia and the other little fish

THIRD FISHERMAN: Master, I marvel how the fishes live in the sea.

FIRST FISHERMAN: Why, as men do a' land: the great ones eat up the little ones. I can compare our rich misers to nothing so fitly as to a whale: he plays and tumbles, driving the poor fry before him, and at last devours them all at a mouthful. Such whales have I heard on 'i th' land, who never leave gaping till they swallowed the whole parish -- church, steeple, bells, and all.

PERICLES: A pretty moral.

-- Shakespeare (of course), from Pericles, Prince of Tyre

Wisdom, Fools and Priests

Thy Word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path. (Psalm 118[119].105)

    It follows from this that reading the Word and meditating upon it is to avail oneself of the light, or, as St. John would say, to walk in the Light.

    It also follows that without reading and studying, without meditating upon the Word that one’s feet will step out into the dark and an “edge” will be walked over. Who knows, then, what abyss will be fallen into? It follows that there will be no clear path, and one will proceed through the days and nights spiritually witless, wandering the dark wilderness of the haunted badlands without compass, guide or star.

    I will leave it to you to wonder whether it is possible for a cleric to suffer this malady. A deacon or a priest, or anyone in the minor orders, should think it a fearful thing to take one step away from the lamp of “Thy Word.” Truth be told, the horrors of scandal, financial malfeasance and pastoral imprudence are produced not by lack of education, cultural difference or difficult personality, but instead by sheer foolishness. Some of the tragic headlines of late would never have happened if clerics would have read a lot more of Proverbs, and a lot less of the Internet, a lot more of Sirach and St. James, and a lot less of gossip and TV.

    In the Orthodox priesthood, the only antidote for foolishness is wisdom, and that is found only in the Word Himself, and His Tradition in Scripture and the Fathers.

    In the Book of Proverbs, Solomon says that “… the ways of the righteous shine like a light; they go before and give light until full daylight” (Proverbs 4.17). The shining of the righteous is the transfigured light manifested by the good works of Christians who are being deified: this is the quality of their “preservationist” function as “salt,” and of their “truth-telling” vocation as “light.” They do this, Solomon says, giving light to all who are bound in darkness, until that moment of “full daylight” when the Lord returns at the great Restoration of all things.

    In the Sermon on the Mount, the Lord called His Disciples – all who followed Him along the Way to theosis – to a life of becoming and actually being “salt and light.” Salt and Light are ecclesial symbols for the Christian work of prayer and wisdom. The prayer of the Christian as “salt” saves and sanctifies his particular world. The wisdom of a Christian as “light” reveals truth to that world.

    Even so, the prayer of the priest participates in the salvation and sanctification of his people. The wisdom of a priest reveals truth to his parish. The Word, the Son of God, uses the witness of the priest as the chief means of spiritual perception for the faithful. This is why the priest really ought to be the one who fulfills the office of prophecy most immediately and intimately for the faithful. It is the preaching priest who witnesses to the Word of God and the Lord of Holy Tradition to his contemporary parish, so that the Orthodox Christian – coming to the Temple fresh from work, school, the ballfield, or even hours floundering in the fetid swamp of the electronic media – may witness the Transfiguring Wisdom of the Word.

    It has always been this way. It remains so, even today. Today, more than ever, the hope of “Thy Will be done” must come true, for there is much that is at work today that is contrary to God’s Will: that contrary work is the summary of antichrist and the meaning of “lawlessness.” This essentially Christian hope comes true if Christians come to know God’s Will in the first place: “I pray,” St. Paul says to the true believers, “that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give to you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him, the eyes of your understanding being enlightened; that you may know what is the hope of His calling, what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints, and what is the exceeding greatness of His power toward us who believe” (Ephesians 1.17-19).

    It is the job of the priest to reveal God’s Will to his people. He is their prophet, moreso than any other, and he can fulfill this charge only by a lifetime immersion in the Bible and the Fathers.

    The Word of Scripture and the Fathers is the substance of Wisdom for all Christians, but it is especially so for the man who is most responsible for the articulation of that Wisdom in the parish: and that man is obviously the priest. He distributes the Eucharist at every Liturgy, just as our Lord multiplied the loaves amongst the five thousand. But first, just like our Lord, he distributes the bread of truth and meaning: he speaks wisdom to the flock of Christ entrusted to his care. Before every revelation of the Kingdom – like the Transfiguration, the Resurrection and the Mystery of the Eucharist – there is the articulation of the Word, and the bestowal of Wisdom. Signs and miracles are not the substance of faith for the Orthodox Christian: wisdom is, and the vision of wisdom is life. “Without Vision (i.e., of Wisdom and nothing less),” the Wise King Solomon said, “the people die” (Proverbs 29.18).

    Wisdom is the revelation of God’s Grace in the Cosmos. It is not only the perception of what is real, but the understanding of how and why a thing is real. Wisdom is the unveiling – the apocalypse – of “meaning.”

    Wisdom is what a sermon is. Wisdom is what pastoral counsel is. Wisdom is what mundane conversation is. Wisdom is what teaching is in an adult class or a youth retreat. Wisdom is whatever the priest says and does, in one single unbroken continuum of art. Wisdom is (or should be) the behavior of a priest in his home, at the Altar, in the hall, at the grocery, even on the ballfield, and – most challenging of all – in committee meetings, especially those closed-door sub rosa sessions where wisdom is most needed, and sometimes most absent.

    The Wisdom of the Word, Scripture and Fathers, should be all these things. If it is not, then that right there is the problem of Orthodoxy in America. Foolishness is the chief pathology of our generation. Not jurisdictional ambiguity. Not rubrical inaccuracy. Not the lack of monastics or staretsi. Not too much of Russian or Greek or too little. Not even the presence of liberals or absence of morals. The lack of wisdom is a fumbling meander in the darkness, like sleepwalking in Sheol: but the reading of, and meditation on, and memorization of, the Bible and the Fathers is “the lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path.”

    There is first thought, then there is speech, then there is action. All movement in a home, a parish, and town and a nation begins with movement in the soul. It is up to the cleric, in his moral freedom, to heed the Word and Wisdom, or to lurch into foolishness and shadow. By the choice for repentance and grace, the cleric participates in the fulfillment of “Thy Will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

    The Word of Wisdom is rich and abundant. It is like God’s mercy, which is not strained. It is a treasure -- where outside, in the nihilistic and materialistic world of fools, there is only kitsch and plastic. The Treasure of Wisdom must spring out from the heart of a priest, who has communed, body and soul, of the Word. The priest is wise not because he is smart, not because he is degreed, or because he is sophisticated. He is wise because he has obeyed God’s command to His servants: “Study to show thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth” (2 Timothy 2.15).

    Then, and only then, he is able to offer the riches of Wisdom to a foolish world, and to the faithful who need to be guided through the tracks of time: “A good man out of the good treasure of his heart bringeth forth that which is good; and an evil man out of the evil treasure of his heart bringeth forth that which is evil: for of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaketh” (Luke 6.45).

    Whatever is in the heart will come out, no matter what. The Bible and the Fathers will come out in thought, word and action, if that treasure is there in the first place. But if action, speech and thoughts sound and look like run of the mill politics, superstition and frothy opinion, then something else has taken first place in the devotion of the cleric. Whatever is in the heart will come out. The proof is in the pudding. “By their works ye shall know them,” Someone once said in Matthew 7.13.

    The Fathers of the Church are a continuing school that unfolds the Word of Christ Who is Wisdom.

    In Proverbs 4.24, Solomon advises us to “Let your eyes look straight forward.” In the same mindset, but centuries later, St. Hippolytus says this: “He looks straight forward who has thoughts free of passion, and he has true judgments, who is not in a state of excitement about external appearances. When he says, ‘Let your eyes look straight forward,’ he means the vision of the soul.”

    The Christian orders of the episcopacy, the priesthood, the diaconate, and the minor orders of the sub-diaconate, the reader and the acolyte can only “look straight forward.” The soul of the Christian cleric must be filled with the Word. He must know the Bible even better than the “Bible Baptists” do: it is an intolerable thing that the heterodox could ever be more familiar with Holy Writ than the descendants of the Orthodox Counselors who established the Writ in the first place. The stories of the Patriarchs and the Prophets, the teachings of the Apostles and the sayings of the Sages ought to spring like an artesian well from the lips of anyone in orders – whether he is a Reader, a Seminarian, a Deacon or a Priest. He should take up the healthy and ancient habit of reading Scripture out loud to himself daily, so that the very sound of God’s call will echo in his ears and settle in his brain. Reading silently was a bad invention. Poetry cannot be understood unless heard aloud, and all Scripture is poetry of the highest order.

    And to understand Scripture, to interpret it, to discover its meaning in the existential context – this task is not an individual undertaking. The foolish and subjectivist habit of determining “What does Scripture mean to me?” is of even less value than the speaking of tongues in Corinth. What mattered most of all to the Apostolic leadership of the Church was the clear articulation of ecclesial wisdom: “He who prophesies is greater than he who speaks in tongues” – or, in this case, than he who interprets the Bible willy-nilly on his lonesome (1 Corinthians 14.5).

    This requires a disciplined intellect which seeks the hard knocks of Wisdom at all costs. The disciplined apostolic mind works harder than the lackadaisical motions of mere convenience, enthusiasm, expediency, nostalgia or fad of the moment: “The spirits of prophets are subject to the prophets, for God is not a God of confusion but of peace” (1 Corinthians 14.33).

    The Orthodox priest, who is preacher and prophet and fervent intercessor, is subject to the prophets of Orthodoxy, and these are the Fathers of Holy Tradition. The priest recognizes the icon of Christ in every phrase, word and letter of Scripture, only because he is only a student in the Great Schoolhouse of the Fathers. It is from them that we preachers learn our exegesis. It is from them that we gain our rhetoric.

    There is much, I am sure, that can be gleaned from the amorphous mass of Biblical criticism: but the library of modern Biblical criticism is like the Internet – there are some flashes of wisdom, but there is a lot more of the darkness. I prefer that seminarians first learn all they can about Moses, the Proverbs of Solomon, and the apostolic dogma enshrined in Romans – and only after they have attained this proficiency should they even attempt to read the modern skeptical murmurings on authorship, redaction, Marxist & feminist deconstruction, the Graf-Wellhausen hypothesis, and the non-Christian blatherings of the Jesus Seminar.

    Better to have knowledge of the Bible and the Fathers, and to risk some ignorance about the mainstream of current thought. Better to not be “current,” than to know all about Bultmann and Tillich but nothing about Jephthah and Ehud. Better to give up on a Ph.D. than to miss the secrets of the Orthodox pastorate hidden away in the recesses of Second Corinthians. The hyper-liberal trend of the Protestant movement has its roots in the tragic fact that in the so-called Enlightenment, philosophical theology took primacy away from the Bible and the Fathers. That is the main reason why the Protestant movement is not sacramental, and why its pastorate is no longer sacerdotal but only ministerial. Let us not follow their example, God forbid.

    The best theologians have already walked on this earth, long before the modern published mavens ever spoke at their first conference. Never again will we see anything like these great Apostolic giants, they who saw the Vision and extolled it in the clarion song of true theology. We have them in our hearts: the treasured words resound from the Three Holy Hierarchs, and St. Gregory of Nyssa, St. Maximos the Confessor, St. Gregory Palamas, even St. Augustine (some, not all, of his writings), to name just a few. There is no modern writer, current or recent, who even comes close to these.

    But even though we will never see anything like them again, it remains that we still see and hear them. They have not left us. We Orthodox clerics and faithful are all witnesses of the Holy Spirit moving among the people of God. We have received the Word, spoken by these mystical contemporaries: we address them and the Theotokos in troparia because they are present, and we are in their midst. We have the successor to the Apostles for this Diocese, our Most Reverend Metropolitan Nicholas, who – as we pray in Divine Liturgy – is blessed to “rightly divide the Word of Truth.” They – the Fathers and their successors -- teach us how to read and understand the Bible. They teach us how to articulate the Wisdom of the Word to a foolish, wordless Age.

    We should read them first before any other, before Elder or modern theologian, certainly before anyone popular or best-selling. We should read the Scriptures and the Fathers, “when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise” (Deuteronomy 6.7). After all, “Does not Wisdom call, does not Understanding raise its voice? … I love those who love Me,” calls Christ Who is Wisdom, “I love those who seek Me diligently and find Me” (Proverbs 8.1,17).

    It is dark tonight in the vale of fools, and the world needs the light to find its way. It is dark, there is a multiplicity of paths. And in the darkness and confusion, there is a certain foreboding that something is about to happen, and that the darkness may come to an end. We need a lamp in the night, and that Lamp is our Friend Christ and His Apostolic Priesthood. We need a lamp trimmed and lit, so that we may meet the Bridegroom when He comes.

    “And we have the prophetic word made more sure,” St. Peter wrote in his second Epistle (1.19-20). “You will do well to pay attention to this as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the Day dawns and the Morning Star rises in your hearts. First of all you must understand this, that no prophecy ever came by the impulse of man, but men moved by the Holy Spirit of God.”

    It is up to the Orthodox cleric to make sure that this prophetic word is more sure, so that when the Morning Star rises and the Day dawns, that “Lamp unto his feet” will have turned out to be a reflected gleam from the never-setting Son.

An Anglophile Correction

In the likely event that the last post might lead one to suspect an "America First" predilection, I rush to add that  I am beholding, morally, more to English writers than American. I am either not fond of nor am I sufficiently familiar with American Christian writing. A sample note of my feelings: "Christian romance paperbacks" are an unfortunate homegrown (and viral) production that should be, for the convenience of the trade, printed with the front cover already removed.

I think, although I'm not certain of this, that Emerson's transcendentalist legacy insinuated a great simpering fog bank into American religious thinking, at least in the literary tradition. Once in a while, great sparks like Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy and Ron Hansen leap out of the otherwise mouldering mass of the Christian American bookshelf, which is usually weighed down by the gospels of self-improvement, marriage techniques, and get-rich-quick schemes.

Even with the likes of O'Connor, I confess that the clarity of Christian literature is found more easily on the English shelves. Maybe this is due to the residual effects of Christendom on English literature, especially that writing that is self-consciously Christian. It may also be that American Christian literature suffers from being thoroughly, and inherently, protestant -- that is, devoid of a sacramental reference, and without the traditional lineaments of anthropology and, even, Christology.

Is it just me? or is there a lot better satire and burlesque on the other side of the pond, at least in the Christian library? are the Christian sentences more limpid in Oxbridge?

In any case, here is a very short list of English Christian books. They are more my favorites than they are a helpful bibliography:

• Hilaire Belloc, The Four Men.
• Hilaire Belloc, The Path to Rome.
• Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday.
• Chesterton, The Everlasting Man.
• Chesterton, The Flying Inn.
• Msgr. Ronald Knox, Let Dons Delight.
• T. S. Eliot, most everything, especially The Four Quartets. Is he American? Is Auden English?
• J. R. R. Tolkien, everything.
• C. S. Lewis, most everything, especially Till We Have Faces, Perelandra and The Discarded Image.
• Charles Williams, The Figure of Beatrice and All Hallows' Eve.

I know there is more. I know that I missed your favorites. Remember, too, that this is a short list of English writers. It is not meant to list the most important spiritual texts, especially for Orthodox Christians.

I should note that some of these volumes are out of print and hard to find. Out of insane neglect, one of the most beautiful reveries of all time, The Four Men, is available only in crumbling paperbacks from the miscreant sixties and seventies. Used copies of Let Dons Delight are available for around $40. In both cases, the authors are being suppressed.

Heretofore, I have prattled long on the Thunderer, who is a lot more bittersweet, smoked with sunset-wisdom than his nickname suggests, especially in The Four Men. It was providential this last year that I came upon this little book. I have encountered such depth of sweetness and awe only in Tolkien before, and that was an altogether different sort of writing. In this book, I have found traces of someone who really knows what it is like to wander meadow and field in the gloaming, with the haunted, sentimental wind.

With regard to GK, The Everlasting Man must be read again so that we, like innocent children, can see (and tell) that the pompous emperor has no clothes on: the naked doctrines of evolution and scientific materialism are being foisted upon us, and we trample the hypersensitivities of the age when we appear less than chipper about the foisting. Evolutionism is the pernicious suppression of Christian anthropology and, ultimately, of Christology. The Everlasting Man demands attention.

The Flying Inn manages to uncover the spiritual DNA double helix entwining wahhabism, boorish secular puritanism, and political arabesque. It fails to resonate, nowadays, because most people think of Inns as "Holiday Inn," and not as a place substantiated by a wheel of cheese and some ale (and a few raucous songs).

And GK's masterpiece? "... it remains the most thrilling book I have ever read," Kingsley Amis once wrote of Thursday. (I would so much like to hear D. B. Hart's take on Sunday.) Thursday needs read by everyone nowadays, if only to hear  this particular setting of the words, "Can ye drink the cup that I drink of?" (get The Annotated Thursday, provided through the kind offices of Martin Gardner, from Ignatius Press, for all the bells and whistles). Thursday is current events, like you can't believe.

If I could suggest two books to you, apart from Scripture and the Fathers (oh, and yes, Florovsky, Lossky and Hart), then get the pages of Thursday and The Four Men.

Day of Arrival: the Now and Not Yet of American Orthodoxy

Has Orthodoxy arrived in America? And has America arrived in Orthodoxy?

We can say yes to both questions, in a way. There are many Orthodox Christians in this country, and there are many more parishes now than there used to be. There are seminaries, magazines, internet communities, organizations and even controversies that serve (at least) to make us more self-conscious. Admittedly, there are not enough monasteries, but now, at least, we have a nice translation of the Scriptural Canon.

In another way, no, for it has not yet arrived completely. Orthodoxy disembarked on these American shores in a piecemeal fashion. It was not like the deliberate mission of Sts. Cyril and Methodios to a single culture. The coming of the Orthodox Gospel to this land has been more a complex series of introductions to various settings and groups of people. In Alaska, the mission was deliberate and apostolic. On the east coast, however, waves of immigrants arrived, feeling the necessity of the Church keenly, and frequently establishing and building their own missions without much support or guidance.

The arrival of Orthodoxy in America is an ongoing process of introduction that is far from over. Sts. Cyril and Methodios, as did all the Apostles, established the fullness of the Christian faith at the very heart of their destination. For St. Paul, this obviously meant Athens and Rome. For the American Orthodox Christian, however, this destination remains unknown. We probably know more about America than we did a century ago. But we do not know nearly enough, not yet.

“America” is a term that defies capture. It is an elusive word, like a greased pig. Fall upon it, squeeze it, and it shoots through your arms.

Is "America" the new New Rome? For many reasons, America is the center of the world’s agora, and this is usually the subtext undergirding discussions of Orthodoxy's "big picture" (i.e., the Prester John search for the fourth or fifth Rome). America is the place of worldwide commerce and the global “commercial culture” – this truly is the real name and character of the culture in which we now live. Whatever the term “globalization” means, the meaning of that dratted term must be anchored in this nation. The America of Madison Avenue, Hollywood, Silicon Valley and the chattering news is, whether we like it or not, the "America" the world thinks it knows: "first world" nations in Europe and Asia may huff and puff about this juvenile, sophomoric culture, but despite its complaints, the world has become this American brand of secular commercialism and will not stop buying at WalMart.

Unfortunately, that base culture is the very thing taken as “America” even by Orthodox Christians – who, of all people, should know better. This debasement of America produces either the misbegotten entrepreneurial forms of evangelicalism that litter our highway billboards, or -- and more likely for us -- it invites a "substitutionary mission ethic," where not only the old country faith is proclaimed, but also old country devices like language, ethnic custom and political agendae are packaged confusedly with doctrine. The result is that the usual American who is practically unchurched (despite whatever protestant exposure he has accumulated) will assume that the Trinity must be some Eastern European or Mediterranean invention, instead of the crucial foundation of human life that it is.

The America of commerce and politics can never become a missionary destination, and cannot be the aim of the Gospel. It seems to me that this patently secular ideal of America has been responsible for the unsettling and the overthrow of many evangelistic plans. One may look to the sorry state of the Dobson enterprise, which started out as a decent resource for childrearing, and stands now as one of the jostling mouthpieces of "conservative Christianity" on the political scene.

So let us, instead, try to think differently of the place we want to go. Let us lay aside, at the nonce, the earthly cares of administrative unity, or autocephaly, or autonomy, or the American Patriarchate. Let us think of these shores, and what and who lie between.

It is possible to think of America without WalMart or CNN, without assaulting the land or its people with plastic templates, corporate charts and partisan colored maps. It is even possible to do this without consulting the Pew surveys or Gallup, Drudge or Politico (imagine -- consider religion and country without sociology -- how sweet the air smells ... how clear, for once, the horizon).

Indulge me, then, with a little sentimental journey:

I love America, but I do not put my trust in mortal princes, or parties, or new management techniques, or shiny business designs. I am fervently patriotic because my country shines through my father’s arms. I hear him singing about the little brown church in the vale from his pulpit at revival meetings, cutting grass in June and eating hot dogs in July at minor league baseball parks. I disagree over and over with politicos and I am petulantly bored with every political party (both parties signal the first decline of patriotism into boorishness, and soon become a systematic rejection of classic and civic education). But I imbibe American history and her literature, and love the people and the land. I grow sentimental when I sing “America the Beautiful,” even though my voice cannot range the rigor of the “Star-Spangled Banner.” I read, like Chesterton did, Whitman’s Leaves of Grass whose pages are chock-full of Americans busy at planting, plowing, piloting barges and driving teams, cooking on hot stoves and picking corn. I read the mystic sonorities of natural law, family and the ages in the images of Faulkner’s Big Woods. I join the throngs at football games and rock concerts and note, in its sublimity, the myriad display of a single, fractured human nature, whose persons are known to and called each one by the Word to participation in Triune Grace.

I mention this personal excursus because I have found these ways helpful in my search for America, and the place where Orthodoxy must go. The Orthodox Church is “here” without having yet “arrived.” It speaks the gross tongue of “television American," but does not yet know the grammar of the back yard, the church parking lot, or the town or union hall. We Orthodox, in our Greek-ness and Russian-ness or whatever-ness, are too practiced at looking upon the hoi polloi as just so many bumpkins. We either follow the mainline tradition of trampling down the grass roots and taking up the ghastly denatured tongue of academic anti-christianity. Or, if we're still Christian, we adopt a Greek or Russian accent, grow a long beard, and preach Orthodoxy as if it were a new alternative (and very chic) ethnicity.

But it is not enough to shake one’s head at a drunkard in a trailer park: what must needs be is an Orthodox parish that can teach a unwed boy with children how to grow up and become an Orthodox man. For it will soon be that the only way a boy can become an American man, in natural law, is through Orthodoxy: so it will be for a girl to become a lady, a house to become a home, a social security number to become a Christian citizen, a pensioner to become an American Saint.

And God knows we need more of these.

It is this loyalty, this old-fashioned love of people and the land, and this devotion to the native Natural Law written in America’s past and her majestic landscape that stand, as the man from Macedonia, as the modern call to the Orthodox Church: “Come and help us!” It is this love of the American people and the American land that the Orthodox Church must travail toward before the Church can lead American sinners to Jesus.

It goes without saying that evangelism wedded to secular commercialism – no matter how dyed with red, white and blue – has nothing to do with the people and the land.

It also goes without saying that the repertoire of foregone “gospels” are losing their hold on the American mind. A majority of Americans now believe that other faiths, besides their own, are salvific: this is a wretched failure of catechism and a sure indication that Christian dogma has been squirreled into some dank Sunday School closet, right next to the moth-eaten CEF flannelgraph figures and the concrete-hardened plaster of paris sack from VBS 1965. Americans also suspect – deeply – any recruitment drive, fund drive, ad campaign, dial-up campaign, e-mail-chain-mail that attempts to lasso them into an institutional association. Americans cannot stand institutions. “Health and wealth” is falling like Lucifer. Americans understand that God and Mammon cannot mix: the day is coming when the quasi-gospels of “needs-based ministry” and “personal development” will no longer “work.”

When the Apostolic Church calls the people, it calls them to a faith that already exists, to a Wisdom that is Personal. It calls them to repentance, prayer and worship. It calls them to the only Will of God that we know, and that is not to go to a particular place or to entertain a certain number of people, pandering to their felt needs; neither is it to establish centralized offices to bullhorn our opinions to politicos and the cognoscenti. The Will of God for the American Orthodox Church is to call Americans to repentance and to theosis. Nothing less.

I think that in the grand ecclesial calendar, we are, in American Orthodoxy, still very much in the Upper Room, waiting upon the Lord to be empowered. For surely, we have not had our “moment.” There has not been, yet, that Pentecostal outpouring, that Orthodox Revival sweeping the land that was seen in the Conversion of the Three Thousand (at Pentecost) or the Conversion of the Slavs (with Sts. Cyril and Methodios, and Vladimir). Let us be honest: we, who carry the Full Gospel, are often stymied by the apparent success of lesser modern-day-Frankish missions that truncate the faith, that publish a Readers’ Digest Condensed version of Christianity, and offer a full panoply of member-services and creature-comforts to boot. We possess neither gold nor silver, neither do we have fountains in the atrium, synthesizers and celebrities on widescreen: we have, however, the Tradition which enables us to say to America, “In the Name of Jesus, rise up and walk.”

That time has not yet come. America, as yet, has no desire to walk in the Name of Jesus.

In the meantime, we should become Orthodox, body and soul. We should pray, and then wonder that we haven't completed even a single word in the greater realm. We should repent in a personal intense manner, and leave off the nonsense of bewailing social, national or cultural sins. We should criticize and judge social problems and political chicanery: but we should not fail to assault and batter our own sins, our passionate idiocies and our personal loyalties to selfish entanglements. We should pray and seek the Holy Mysteries at all costs. We should read the Bible first and the Fathers more than any other literature, for the Bible is mysterious and perfect, and the dogmatic words of the Fathers are clarion in this morass of modern ambiguity.

We should learn of the Holy Trinity and force and pound our minds into meditating upon this supreme and sublime mystery. It is altogether possible that the main reason why American Orthodoxy has not yet “arrived” is simply because we have neglected the Dogma of Theology, which is the Doctrine of the Most Holy Trinity. Then, when we have meditated, and learned of God Who is Above All Names, then and only then will our fellowship begin to look like an icon of the First and Consubstantial Tri-Personed Koinonia.

Only then, on the day we become penitentially Trinitarian, will God allow us to enter into that fabled and autocephalic unity: until then, He will assuredly frustrate each and every attempt at a negotiated settlement, out of His well-known penchant for babel-ization.

And at the same time, we should learn something of America. We should read her good books, even when she no longer teaches them. We should learn to talk again, and become real conversationalists, instead of simultaneous soliloquists who cannot listen because we are busy preparing our next brilliant point. We should learn the stars again and how to nurture a thorny rose, as these two activities are, actually, linked in twain. We should plant a few gardens, can a few preserves, raise a compost heap, fix a car, attend a July 4th Parade, take part in a Pro-Life March, even (perhaps) watch the View now and then, to see what it's all about. In all of this, we will lay aside our old world-ness, and let our ethnicity recede into a happy avocation where it belongs. Our ethnicity, for American Orthodoxy, must be American, even as our Christianity, for American Orthodoxy, must first be Trinitarian.

Without saying it too loudly, I think we should get ready to help Americans down gently, off and away from their false lifestyle of consumerist addiction. It is a difficult thing to live poorer than one's parents, but that is precisely what the Orthodox pastorate must prepare their American people for, en masse. The day is coming, and may now be here, when Americans will no longer be consumers (and not by choice) -- they will be forced instead to accept themselves as simply human, and simple “people of the land.” Our cultural options may become dichotomous (excepting, of course, the insignificant delirious rich): ours will be to choose the agrarian society, even in the city, or the lifeless aspect of soylent green. The Christian Faith will inform that choice surely, but only in its fullness.

The times may get harder for the American dream, which may prove as ephemeral as all dreams turn out to be. It may be at this moment, on that cold gray morning when the dream has passed, that Orthodoxy in America will have finally arrived at the heart of America, and America will finally see a Church that knows the way to repentance and theosis, and sings the cosmic song of the Holy Trinity.

And that Church will sing all this out loud, of course, not in English, but in the American tongue of Hawthorne, Twain and Faulkner, Ellison, Angelou, Borges and Paz, and hopefully (still) Eliot, Frost and Wilbur.

That Day will come when the dream has passed, when America will not be satisfied with information anymore, and can no longer get all the “things” her consumers demand. Then she will seek wisdom, and then, pray God, the Church will have learned Wisdom enough to give Him away.

On Madcap Proposals and Pentecost: in the Upper Room

Here is a comment from a good friend. It is found in the last post called "Wait." I think it refers to another comment, which itself was commenting on the "Madcap Proposal" about expunging rubber chicken banquets from our memory (as in Bertie Wooster to Jeeves: "Expunge the poet Burns from your memory. Curse Shelley and all vegetables!" -- quite a winning motto, I think).

So then. How do we get the money to pay the clergy and maintain the church buildings, unless we have these money gathering events such as bingo, pirohi dinners, auctions, and what not? Do we ask people to just hand over their Social Security check and by-pass the fundraisers? I'm confused. I know that becoming obsessed with hoarding is not the thing to do, but where do you draw the line?

In response, I almost said something trite here, like "Ideally" or "In a perfect world, the Church would receive only offerings for income." And it would have been just as much a cliché to add that “It is not a perfect world, so the Church should do whatever works.”

The antinomy of idealism vs. realism is not helpful. One usually smells this polarity in the rearguard rhetoric of modernism, as it reacts to traditionalist critiques.

I do not advocate any finance ethic here, which is usually passed off euphemistically as “stewardship theology” (a non-apostolic term at which I shudder as it is patently Orwellian). I do not see a single, simple income “program” in the New Testament or in Church history. What I see instead, over time, is a complexity of offerings, legacies and even moneys from the state.

So by that I plead to be taken seriously as a realist instead of a simplistic radical. At the same time, however, my sympathies run close with Neal who is tired of banquet fundraisers (in the comments above) and Fr. Gregory who, like me, harbors agnostic thoughts about wedding receptions (in the Madcap post). I think we have to admit that there is too, too much fundraising. I know some groups whose sole raison d'etre is to raise money for itself: essentially, the organization raises money so that it can, you know, raise more money. And there is no excuse for certain egregious fundraising programs (I will leave you to decide which are these).

An example: years ago, an acquaintance of mine wanted to raise money for his church’s building fund, so he staged a “kidnapping” of himself by a couple young men, whereupon they hauled him, during the morning worship service, up to the steeple, where he was to stay until the good parishioners paid his “ransom” by pledging $10,000 to the campaign. He was set free. This loony plan actually worked. He said that the Lord gave him the idea. How could I argue, since at that time my brain was imprisoned in the scull of sola scriptura.

But fundraising was not my main point in the last post. I was pointing out the sad and realistic fact that when the Church fails to attend to the Ascended Christ and to wait for the empowerment of the Holy Spirit, then no matter what it does, it falls flat. Recent events, no less, should have made this obvious.

Fundraising, without the experience of Pentecost – a penitential “realization” of the Mystery of Chrismation – turns into worldly assessment, taxation, and top-down levies, with all the usual reactions of bitterness and contempt. Preaching turns into liberal radicalism (think Wright), fundamentalist legalism (think Hagee) or quasi-Christian psychotherapeutic self-improvement (think Swindoll). The Church recedes from Trinitarian koinonia and lapses into vain institutionalism.

Apart from Pentecost, leadership falls from sainthood and degenerates into a coterie of executives and wannabe board members, who know enough business to be dangerous, but not enough to avoid the pitfalls of character assassination, political infighting, and looking upon the membership as a constituency that must be pandered but not deified. Non-repentant trustees might as well go to motivational seminars and pay for consultants: no mystique nonsense for them, thank you. Expunge that from the memory.

This little essay here is really an exposition, if you will, on the logion “seek those things which are above, where Christ is, sitting at the right hand of God” (Colossians 3.1). This is the Upper Room meditation on and prayer to the Ascended Christ in the ten-day interregnum before Pentecost. That Jesus is now understood as Cosmic Lord: think about that, and all its existential ramifications: “set your mind on things above, not on things of the earth. For you died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3.2-3).

The Orthodox Church exists to witness to the Holy Trinity, and to fold humanity into that Trinitarian Community of Grace. It can only do this and nothing less. And it can only do this through the gates of Pentecost, after the Ascension, in the Upper Room.