The End of History

Life | Quotations

Today God hits reset.
Today is the end of history and the beginning of eternity.
Death is turned inside-out and runs backwards on itself.
No more hiding in your sins.
Come out, come out wherever you are.

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The Bridegroom

Life | Theology

Last night I went to the Presanctified Liturgy at St. Paul’s Orthodox Church, the last one before Easter. Or Pascha, as the Orthodox are prone to say, even though I prefer to use the normal English name. Anyway, it was wonderful and striking and all of the things that the liturgy usually is, but a few things stood out to me:

The Bridegroom icon. The juxtaposition of theme and name is a theological treatise of its own: Christ in his passion, wearing the crown of thorns, dressed in the red that the soldiers mocked him with. This is the Bridegroom, and this is His wedding garment. I found the piety associated with this particular icon to be profound as well: the icon was placed on a table in the middle of the room with thorn branches on either side of it, and the people prostrated twice before venerating it and once afterwards.

The Psalms. We sang fourteen psalms in their entirety. That was a lot of psalms. Despite having never heard the particular chant melody before, I found it simple to follow and was quickly able to sing along with the rest of the congregation.

The antidoron. All of the antidoron I’ve ever taken was chewy and tasteless. St. Paul’s, for some reason, used a spiced, slightly sweet artisan bread. It was delicious.

And best of all, they anointed everyone with oil at the end, including me.

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Prayer Before Confession

Theology | Quotations | Good Ideas | Limba română

Translated by me from my Romanian Orthodox prayer book:

Hear me, my Lord and my creator,
Hear me again, a sinner and Your unworthy servant,
For many times I have promised to change my wicked life
And never have I changed it.

I have erred, O Lord, I have erred
and I know my errors
and I regret that I have done them
and I am ashamed to come before Your face
For so many times I have broken my word
Having not abandoned my sins.

And what will I say of my unthankfulness,
and whither will go?
For so many iniquities have I committed!

To You I will go, my most merciful Master
and I fall with great boldness at Your feet,
For I see that for my sins You took up
the humiliating death of the cross
and you call sinners to you with your Scriptures
and you call out with your voice:
He who comes to Me I will not turn away.

Indeed, O Lord, accept even me
Though I am unworthy, and forgive me all my sins
and give me Your grace and blessing
in Your great and immeasurable mercy.
For I am greatly penitent
For I have sinned against You and angered Your goodness
With word, with act, and with thought
Willingly and unwillingly.

Indeed from today forward I truly promise–
with Your gift and Your help–
to not return to my former sins
and to not break Your commandments.
I choose to hear You,
Now and forever to worship Your holy name

My sweet Jesus

To magnify you, world without end.
Amen.

Original:
Ascultă-mă, Domnul meu şi Ziditorul meu, ascultă-mă iarăşi pe mine, păcătosul şi nevrednicul robul Tău, că de multe ori Ţi-am făgăduit să-mi schimb viaţa cea rea şi nicidecum nu o am schimbat. Greşit-am, Doamne, greşit-am şi cunosc greşalele mele şi îmi pare rău că le-am făcut, şi mi-e ruşine să vin înaintea feţei Tale, de atâtea ori călcându-mi cuvântul şi nepărăsindu-mă de păcate. Şi ce voi zice de nerecunoştinţa mea cea mare, şi unde mă voi duce? Atâtea strâmbătăţi am făcut! Către Tine vin, Stăpânul meu mult-milostiv, şi cad cu multă îndrăzneală la picioarele Tale, de vreme ce văd că pentru păcatele mele ai primit înjositoarea moarte pe cruce şi pe păcătoşi îi chemi la Tine cu Scripturile Tale şi strigi cu gura Ta: Pe cel ce vine la Mine nu-l voi scoate afara. Drept aceea, Doamne, primeşte-mă şi pe mine, nevrednicul, şi-mi iartă toate păcatele şi dă-mi harul Tău şi binecuvântarea Ta, întru mare şi nemăsurată milostivirea Ta. Că eu sunt foarte căit; că am greşit înaintea Ta şi am mâniat bunătatea Ta cu cuvântul, cu lucrul, şi cu gândul, cu voie şi fără voie. Drept aceea, de astăzi înainte cu adevărat făgăduiesc, cu darul şi ajutorul Tău, să nu mă întorc la greşalele mele cele dintâi şi să nu mai cal vreuna din poruncile Tale. Şi hotărăsc să Te ascult, şi acum şi pururea şi să mă închin numelui Tău celui sfânt, dulcele meu Iisus, şi să Te măresc în vecii vecilor. Amin.

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The Word of the Lord

Life | Theology

Today the Gospel reading was the story of the prodigal son from Luke. It’s such a familiar story that it sometimes seems to have lost most of its impact. However, today the Holy Spirit chose to make the reading alive to us. As Fr. John was reading the story began to weigh on my heart, and I closed my eyes. Then Fr. John began to weep as he read the words of the father at the end of the story: “This brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.”

This is the Word of the Lord.

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Everywhere has to start somehwere

Theology | Quotations

Seth posted a link to this article about the art and the church, which contained the following invaluable quote:

Let me state it the following way: the liturgical and sacramental richness of the ancient faith makes it possible to worship God everywhere. We don’t think in those terms, as influenced as we are by our non-sacramental, non-liturgical, rationalism that shapes our Christian lives. But this belief saturates the Scriptures themselves, which is often overlooked by high churchers as well as the low. We have to reconsider the fact that we can only utter such praises as Psalm 24 (“the earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it”) and Solomon’s temple dedication (1 Kings 8:27) in which he testifies to the fact that nothing made with human hands can contain God, if we also recognize that God indeed wants us to worship in specific ways, in specific places. We are too quick to quote Jesus’s statement to the Samaritan woman (John 4:21-24) that God is worshipped only in “spirit and in truth” that we forget that Jesus can say this only after he has told her that she must worship in Jerusalem—that the Samaritans do indeed worship in ignorance. Solomon can praise God that he can’t be defined by a building only after he has built the Temple. We can look forward to the New Jerusalem when there will be no need for the Sun because the Lord’s uncreated light will shine on us only when we follow Asaph and exclaim that we only know the truth of the world when we “enter the sanctuary of God” (Psalm 73).

How can we see Christ everywhere, as Alexander Schmemann once wrote, when we don’t first recognize that we see Christ in a special way via icons, and receive him in a special way through the Eucharist, and meet him in a special way at church? The “everywhere” has meaning ultimately when there is a “somewhere.”

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Not everything is understood

Life | Theology

Larisa’s father grew up in an orphanage in Romania. He swears that during his time there, there was a boy there who would crawl on the walls and the ceilings in his sleep. If you called out to him or otherwise woke him up while he was doing this, he would fall to the ground, and he was never able to repeat the trick while awake. Her father says that the boy was well-known in the orphanage and that he was seen by dozens of people during his nocturnal crawls.

I was reminded of this reading the following story:

With the high ranking position I had as a teacher of this oriental magico-mystical science, I felt that my supernatural power was greater than that of anyone else. Through my years of training, I could even knock a person out and he would fall to the ground without a single touch, only by striking the empty air so that the energy of the air did the rest. I also had the ability from my training that no weapon could easily harm me, because my skin, by virtue of my magical power, became as hard as iron. In addition, another supernatural power I achieved through training and the use of talismans and mantras was that I could make my body so light that I could jump in the air as though I were flying, as long as my feet could touch something, such as on a flying leaf or on the leaves on the trees. I felt that I was invincible.

But this was the most impressive section:

I stood up in front of the icon-screen, which was made from simple plaited-bamboo material. Actually, it was easy for me to knock it down by simply stomping my feet on the ground and hitting my fist in the air toward the icon-screen, but what happened then was shocking to me. Instead of knocking the icon-screen down, the power of the energy of the air that I sent to the icon-screen bounced back to me, and hit me so hard that I fell on the floor. I went out from the Church, but I still could not believe what had happened. Next, I tried my supernatural power against an electric bulb outside the Church, and it broke into pieces, which meant the power was still there. I entered the Church again, and tried again to knock the icon-screen down, but the same thing happened. Repeatedly I tried, and over and over I was knocked down to the ground.

The man later converted, was exorcised and baptized, and became a priest. I strongly urge you to read the entire article.

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When everything’s holy…

Theology | Quotations | Good Ideas

Fr. Stephen hits one out of the park.

To be more blunt, we in America have imported our sense of “democracy” into our liturgical sensibilities. We believe that nothing should be secret, nothing hidden, nothing marked off as set apart. We are a nation that witnesses people on Jerry Springer saying things that should only be said in confession. We have no shame.

What remains in Orthodox liturgy (and was once present in Roman Liturgies and even some forms of Anglican liturgies) is a deep sense of the Holy. The movement from Old Testament to New Testament has not democratized worship or destroyed the need for priests (Protestants are quick to speak of the “priesthood of all believers” but end up with no priesthood of any believers). Protestant reform movements that utterly destroyed Rood Screens and the architecture of medieval worship succeeded in a drive to declare that “all things are holy.” But just as the Puritan abolition of Christmas did not succeed in making everyday as holy as that day, such iconoclastic actions succeeded only in creating a secular world where nothing is holy and no day a holy day.

I’m reminded of the quote from The Incredibles: “When everyone’s super, no one will be.” The desire to recognize all things as holy is good, but it’s often implemented by treating nothing as holy. So we tear down the iconostasis, the rood screen, the altar rail, and sometimes even the pulpit, since these are all things that priviledge certain places as holy. Then we discard the elaborate vestments, then the preacher’s robe, and eventually abandon even the suit and tie, because they set people and vocations apart. Then everything is holy, and because everything is holy, nothing is.

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Wisdom of Solomon 14:17-21

Theology

I read this passage this morning from the Wisdom of Solomon:

17 When people could not honor monarchs in their presence, since they lived at a distance,
they imagined their appearance far away,
and made a visible image of the king whom they honored,
so that by their zeal they might flatter the absent one as though present.

18 Then the ambition of the artisan impelled
even those who did not know the king to intensify their worship.
19 For he, perhaps wishing to please his ruler,
skillfully forced the likeness to take more beautiful form,
20 and the multitude, attracted by the charm of his work,
now regarded as an object of worship the one whom shortly before they had honored as a human being.
21 And this became a hidden trap for humankind,
because people, in bondage to misfortune or to royal authority,
bestowed on objects of stone or wood the name that ought not to be shared.

Now, unless I am grossly misreading this passage, the author here does not condemn paying honor to the image of an absent monarch as idolatry. This isn’t the same as saying that he approved, since he calls it “flattery” and says that the image-worship begins with “bondage… to royal authority”, but the charge of idolatry only seems to apply to the last stage when people “now regarded as an object of worship the one whom shortly before they had honored as a human being.” Furthermore, he calls this a “hidden trap”, and recognizes this slide into idolatry as accidental.

The Wisdom of Solomon was a late work, which makes me suspect that this discussion was more than theoretical. Images of the Roman Emperor were used throughout the empire, and it was customary to offer homage to the image of the emperor as if to the emperor himself. In the ante-Nicene Christian church, offering a pinch of incense to the image of the Emperor was one of the standard tests that Christians were given as a way to escape death. This passage suggests that it wasn’t the image per se, but rather the emperor’s supposed divinity that created idolatry. Which, in turn, suggests that there was a ready-made argument for the continuation of image-adoration under the Christian emperors, as happened, and which may have provided an important step in the development of Christian iconodulia.

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A Waste of Time

Life | Bad Ideas

Evidently there exists a site called Conservapedia. As of this moment the site appears to be down, probably because some leading bloggers linked to it. To mock it. Which it so richly deserves. Language Log has a post fisking some language-related entries, which are appallingly

The about page begins with the phrase, “Tired of the LIBERAL BIAS every time you search on Google and a Wikipedia page appears? Now it’s time for the Conservatives to get our voice out on the internet!” This is bizarre. First, I’ve never detected any liberal bias on Wikipedia. Second, anybody can edit Wikipedia. If you think that an article displays liberal bias, edit the article to remove that bias. Wikipedia even has a special mechanism for disputing articles that aren’t deemed neutral. Why do you need a separate source for articles with conservative bias no bias at all?

I ask because in several political dimensions I still am a conservative, and this sort of thing just embarasses me.

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The mark of Christianity

Theology | Quotations | Good Ideas

This is the mark of Christianity — however much a man toils, and however many righteousnesses he performs, to feel that he has done nothing, and in fasting to say, `This is not fasting,’ and in praying, `This is not prayer,’ and in perseverance at prayer, `I have shown no perseverance; I am only just beginning to practice and to take pains’; and even if he is righteous before God, he should say, `I am not righteous, not I; I do not take pains, but only make a beginning every day.’

– St. Macarius the Great

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