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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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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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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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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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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Bad Icons

Theology | Quotations | Good Ideas

My blog is turning into a clip blog, it seems. Ah, well. Today we have another tasty tidbit from Fr. Stephen on Bad Icons:

And so the mystery of the holy icons seems to work from both sides. For the viewer, the icon is a window to heaven (if the viewer is indeed looking for heaven). And for those who are not looking for heaven, icons, including their human forms, become opaque, and we see only the reflection of our sinful self….

What seems inescapable to me is that there be icons. If you outlaw them in the Church, they will still occupy the Church in the persons of the congregation. We cannot say, “Only read the Scripture, do not look at me as an icon.” Nobody gets that kind of free ride as a Christian. You’re an icon whether you like it or not. And there will be other images as well - either well done reflecting heaven itself - or poorly reflecting everything other than heaven. But there will be icons. God give us grace to rightly honor the windows to heaven He has opened for us, and to be a window to heaven for all who see us.

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Dix Dixit

Theology | Quotations

Chris Jones has invited comments on a paragraph from Dom Dix, a famed Anglican liturgical scholar. I will reproduce the entire quote here:

We know now, too, that the Apostolic paradosis of practice, like the Apostolic paradosis of doctrine, is something which actually ante-dates the writing of the New Testament documents themselves by some two or three decades. It is presupposed by those documents and referred to more than once as authoritative in them. This paradosis of practice continued to develop in complete freedom from any control by those documents for a century after they were written, before they were collected into a New Testament ‘Canon’ and recognised for the first time as authoritative ‘Scripture’ beside and above the Jewish ‘Scriptures’ of the Old Testament, which alone formed the ‘Bible’ of the Apostolic Church. Now that the history of the Canonisation of the New Testament is better understood, we can begin to shake ourselves free from the sixteenth century — or rather the mediaeval — delusion that primitive Christian Worship and Church Order must have been framed in conscious deference to the precedents of a New Testament which as such did not yet exist. The purely occasional documents now found in it do not contain, and were never intended by their authors to contain, anything like the Old Testament codes of prescriptions for the rites of worship. That was governed by the authoritative ‘Apostolic Tradition’ of practice, to which it is plain that the scattered Gentile Churches adhered pretty rigidly throughout the second century. I am not for a moment seeking to question the authoritative weight of the New Testament Scriptures for us as a written doctrinal standard. I am only trying to point out that there is available another source of information on the original and authentic Apostolic interpretation of Christianity, which the Scriptures presuppose and which must be used in the interpretation of the Scriptures. I do not deny that in time the recognition of this fact will be bound to lead to some considerable readjustment of ideas for more than one set of people. But tonight all I would say is that the liturgical tradition can be shewn to be older in some of its main elements than the New Testament Scriptures, and that down to the end of the second century, at least, it was regarded as having an ‘Apostolic’ authority of its own independently of them. We cannot look, therefore, for any attempt in this period to conform the practice of worship to them artificially. Nevertheless, the two do illustrate one another in a remarkable way.

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Mud on its way to God

Theology | Quotations | Good Ideas

There is a beautiful post today over at Glory to God For All Things title “Things Are More Than They Appear”:

Things are so much more than they appear. A little girl is the longed for bearer of the Word. She will be the Mother of God. This little girl is the one of whom the prophecies of old, given to Eve, were spoken. Her seed will indeed “bruise his (the serpent’s) head.”

Our own lives have their irony, an irony too often lost on us. “Man,” said St. Gregory of Nyssa (I do believe), “Is mud who was commanded to become god.” The irony that we are commanded to become god is lost on us - we usually just think that we’re mud, or worse.

The greatest irony of all, perhaps, is that we are loved so infinitely, so beyond measure, while we still feel so unloved. We are lonely in the midst of all the company of heaven. We are hungry in the middle of a banquet. We are naked while the glory of God waits there to clothe us.

Things are so much more than they appear. My neighbor, who seems so well described by the term, “mud,” is himself as much destined to glory as myself and all I can see is mud. Walking in the finite, created walls of an old temple, I would easily have mistaken a young girl of three for just another mud child. Would I have known the Mother of my God?

C.S. Lewis said the same thing in his essay The Weight of Glory.

It may be possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter; it is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbour. The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbour’s glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken. It is a serious thing
to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.

Lord, have mercy on us, and help us to know You that we may one day be like You.

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Theology | Quotations | Good Ideas

I very much appreciated this post by ye olde fearsome pirate:

Challies’ objection comes from that same, tired, old attitude so common in evangelicalism that the stories of those whose lives have been hurt by sin simply should not be told. Sin is always something that happens to “them,” and talking about it like it’s something that happens to one’s hearers is simply not “uplifting” or “glorifying to God.” If the verbal marginalization of the sinners goes deeply enough into the psyche, they simply cease to exist. I’m sure Challies feels quite compassionate for all those kids out there in the broken homes. Out there. Not in here. The kids in here have good little Protestant families where they have family devotions around the table every night based on the Westminster Catechism and sing the Doxology before bed.

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Augustine on the Word

Theology | Quotations

If, therefore, in order that heaven and earth should come into being, you spoke in words which sounded and then died away, and if this was the way in which you created heaven and earth, there there must have been some material thing created before heaven and earth, something which, by its motion in time, could lend itself as a mouth-piece through which those words could be spoken in time. But there was no material thing before heave and earth; or if there was, you must certainly have created it by an utterance outside time, so that you could use it as the mouthpiece for your decree, uttered in time, that heaven and earth should be made. For whatever you might have used to produce the voice by which the decree was uttered, it would not have existed at all unless it had been made by you. But to create a material thing which could be used to give voice to the decree, what Word did you speak?

It is in this way, then, that you mean us to understand your Word, which is God with you, God with God, your Word uttered eternally in whom all things are uttered eternally. For your Word is not speech in which each part comes to an end when it has been spoken, giving place to the next, so that finally the whole may be uttered. In your Word all is uttered at one and the same time, yet eternally.

St. Augustine Confessions XI:6-7.

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