[We] find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books.

Ahem. Is Hitchens somehow unaware of the fact that Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky were both devout Orthodox Christians? I don’t see how anyone could possibly read The Brothers Karamazov and not realize that it is a work of a religious mind, and that its ethical vision is inextricable from its religious setting. Likewise for Anna Karenina. Now, it may be that Hitchens appreciates these books despite their religious content, but that would contradict the subtitle of his book: How Religion Poisons Everything.

Except, I suppose, for the great religious writers that Hitchens admires.

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.

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.

The first draft of my novel is done!

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.

But Turkia seemed anomalous to me. To try to figure out why, I rummaged through my mental list of toponyms to examine the distribution of -y vs. -ia in place names.

Obviously this is a pretty short list, but I observed the following: Toponyms with Germanic-style initial stress take the ending -y. Conversely, all of the toponyms ending in -ia have Latinate antepenult stress. This appears to hold even when the root to which the toponym is applied is monosyllabic, in which case the resulting toponym can only end in -y.

There are some exceptions (e.g. Parthia), but they tend to be learned words that seem to be internalized as foreign terms, and so not subject to normal English morphemic rules. For toponyms that have been completely nativized, it seems to hold that -y and -ia are allomorphs whose realization depends on the stress pattern of the word.

This in turn explains why Turkey is Turkey and not Turkia: since the stem is monosyllabic, only the -y pattern can apply. The spelling “-ey” appears to be a fluke, perhaps influenced by the unfortunate homophony that got me thinking about this in the first place.

This is the Word of the Lord.

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.”

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.