This is Life!: Revolutions Around the Cruciform Axis

20 Ways to Control Television in Your Family's Life

From Terry Mattingly here are 20 Ways to Control Television in Your Family's Life, or at least the ones that struck me:

1 - Have only one television set in the home. . . . Having only one set at least makes the family confront this imaginary [TV] world together.

3 - Children should never watch TV alone. If you stick with this rule, it will have an amazing impact on your whole family.

4 - Learn to program your VCR. Jay Leno says that whenever he visits his parents’ house, dozens of electronic gadgets are blinking “12:00, 12:00, 12:00.” That won’t do. If you can program your VCR, you can control what you watch and when you choose to watch it. You can mark up the local TV listings and tape the good stuff. This leads to the rule that we try to follow in our household. We strive to average watching only one hour of visual media a day—on tape. (As a journalist, I allow myself in addition one news show.)

5 - Have a greatest-hits shelf, containing taped programs that are worth repeated use. You might consider getting a “classic” movie cable channel, so that you can teach your children not to be prejudiced against the past.

8 - Talk back to the TV. Voice your opinions—especially on the moral and religious content in programs and even in advertisements. Let your children, every now and then, see you reject the content or the quality of a TV show or rented movie so completely that you turn it off.

9 - Allow no TV on Saturday mornings before noon. Ever. This is the time slot in which children are first hooked on niche culture, youth fads, and the idea that it is good for them to purchase their own identities at the mall. Saturday morning TV is a parent-free zone.

11 - Dare to consider this: No TV at all during Great Lent.

12 - Men! Dare to consider this: One sporting event a week on television. Women! Ditch Oprah, the high priestess of American pantheism.

13 - Whenever you can, read the books before you watch movies based on books, even if this means skipping a movie for some time. Why? You can teach children a great truth—that stories have creators that shape them and the values contained in them. Plus, there is more story in the book. That’s the real version.

14 - Understand what it means to purchase a VHS tape or a DVD. When you do this, you are recommending this movie or program to your children for repeated viewing. You are saying that there is something in it that we want to see many, many times. Why? Why is it that good? Have that conversation.

15 - It is good for parents to have a favorite TV show or movie and to explain to their children why it matters so much to them. We must confess that our entertainment choices affect us and say something about who we are.

17 - It’s okay to enjoy fun movies, even if they make little or no sense. God created fun. Silliness can be relaxing. Don’t let your children think you are a grouch all the time on media issues. Embrace the Pink Panther and Laurel and Hardy.

18 - Tell other parents about your rules and ask them for help when their children interact with your children. Share your rules with school personnel and after-school workers and ask for their help.

19 - Vocalize exceptions to the rules. We will all bend our media rules for special events, like the Olympics or “Alec Guinness Week” on Turner Classic Movies. But if we speak these exceptions out loud, it will only reinforce the rules and make them easier to understand.

20 - Demand positive, as well as negative, media feedback from your church leaders. Form an Internet circle for parents, in order to share info and views with friends. Post the addresses of helpful web sites on the church’s web site. Praise the good and pass on videocassettes.

And, yes, dare to talk to your priest about this part of your lives, including in confession. The condition that I call “separation of church and life” is a heresy.

The Fatherhood Chronicles XLV

Sofie has begun to be a bit more independent. Right now, this is a good thing.

A couple of examples. On Tuesday, Sofie took a long mid-day nap. Once she woke up, she spent most of the aternoon sitting on the futon next to Anna flipping through one of Anna's magazines and her own board books. They sat there together for most of the rest of the afternoon. Anna got up and did some odds and ends from time to time. Sofie stayed on the futon "reading." This would normally be considered unusual. In the recent past, when Anna's out of sight, Sofie is anxious--if she even let's Anna get out of sight.

This morning, Sofie got up at her normal time (five-o-dark-hundred). I knew she would be up till I left for work. I had hoped to pray the morning office, but was sure Sofie would demand my focused attention. Then I remembered Anna's recounting of Tuesday afternoon. So I thought I would try an experiment.

I sat Sofie on the futon with the "book of the morning"--the one she was attentive to today. I then lit the vigil lamp and invoked the Trinity. I crossed myself with the blessing cross and venerated it. Then it occurred to me: I need to include Sofie. So I walked over to the futon, signed her with the blessing cross and offered it to her to kiss, which she did. I then continued with the rest of my prayers.

Sofie didn't stay on the futon, but she did stay occupied, moving here and there playing with this and that. A couple of times she came up to me, wanting me to pick her up. While I continued to pray, I stroked her hair and signed the cross on her forehead. That seemed to satisfy her and she continued to play. Sofie played noisily, I don't hesitate to say. And with the need to keep half-an-eye on her to make sure she wasn't going to climb on or grab something that would result in her being hurt, I also don't hesitate to say that it wasn't an instance of the most focused attention I've ever given to my prayers. But maybe other parents out there will sympathize with me when I say that since Sofie was born, I don't often have the luxury of the sort of focused attention in worship that I once did.

Our prayers wound down. Sofie would sing in her own way when I sang the Gloria or other refrains and hymns. When it was over, I venerated our diptych of the Theotokos and the Pantokrator. I brought them over to Sofie where she was playing, and she kissed them, too.

Yes, this sort of independence is good. Call me in a decade and the sort of independence that will be on its way may not feel quite so good.

Thank God for everything.

The Coherence of Christian Theology V

The Incarnation and the Resurrection

The bodily Resurrection of Jesus from the dead follows necessarily from the Incarnation. If it was essential to God's work of accomplishing our salvation that Jesus be fully human and fully divine, that is to say, if it was essential that Jesus have a human body, then the human body is essential to the afterlife. We are not, after all, going to be disembodied spirits in heaven. If our salvation is accomplished bodily, then our resurrection from the dead will be a bodily one. This is borne out in the several resurrection narratives in the New Testament. In Luke 24:39-43, Jesus asks his disciples to “handle him” to see that it is he. He asks them for a piece of broiled fish, which he eats in their presence. In John 20:17, Jesus exhorts Mary Magdalene not to “cling to him” which she could not have done if he were an immaterial spirit. Later in the chapter, at 20:27, he encourages Thomas to put his fingers into the nail marks in his hands, and to place his hand into side. Given Thomas' reluctance to believe Jesus had risen from the dead without tangible proof, one would be hard pressed to understand Jesus' words in any other way than to indicate he is, indeed, a bodily presence. We may well question how it was the nail marks and the spear wound remained as tangible signs of the crucifixion in his resurrected body, but this does not take away from the central point: Jesus rose bodily from the dead. Paul himself continues in this tradition, in 1 Corinthians 15, explaining that the resurrection from death is essential to the Christian gospel, and that such a resurrection involves a body, though such a body is a spiritual one, different, if continuous, with our flesh and blood body.

More to the point, without the Incarnation, the Resurrection is a useless and unnecessary addendum. If there were no Incarnation, then either through moral striving, or through noetic enlightenment, or both, we have our salvation. We need no Resurrection because we need no bodily salvation. It is the bodily aspect of the Incarnation that demands a bodily Resurrection, even if that body is of a kind Paul can only describe as spiritual and heavenly.

Non-Christian religions, and Christian heresies, very much want to downplay or dismiss the Incarnation for an emphasis on the immaterial soul. The material world is maya, or worse, concretely evil. But this sort of understanding doesn't stand up to the sort of unconscious counterevidence we live each day. While many of us may prize, admire, and even envy, the intellectual acumen of our beloved, or the purity of their soul, in point of fact, we also want the body that goes along with that mind and soul. We may well one day discover what it is like to kiss telepathically, but I rather suppose few of us would enjoy it as much as the more conventional kissing we do. We may well miss the mere presence of our beloved when they are absent from us, but it is not a mere presence we wish to embrace. We prefer the warmth of body pressed to body, the tautness of the muscles executing the embrace, the scent of the hair, the fragrance of the perfume. We may occasionally engage in mental fantasy, but what we truly want is the humiliating joy of the sexual embrace. In short, our joy and satisfaction in our beloved is tied to a body. Does it not make sense that our future hope will not be something disembodied, but more truly embodied? I understand both the Scriptures and the Church Fathers and the Saints to affirm that there will be no sexual intercourse in heaven. But I cannot imagine that there will not be embrace.

But my own predilections aside, the logic of the Incarnation and the explicit texts of the Scriptures necessitate a bodily Resurrection. The Church Fathers have said emphatically that nothing that has not been assumed can be saved. Jesus, being fully human as well as fully divine, is the reality of not only a mind, a heart and a soul that is filled and transfigured with Life, but so, too, the flesh, the body. Union with God must include the transfiguration of the physical, if the Incarnation is what Christians claim it to be. God does not merely save our souls, he saves our bodies as well. We see this in the biblical accounts of Jesus' own bodily Resurrection, but in the accounts of the lives of the saints whose bodies withstood impossible physical travails, seeming impervious to the elements. Limbs did not freeze in subzero temperatures. Extremes of fasting did not destroy the flesh, for Life transfigured them and made real Christ's own words: they had food of which we do not know, for their food was to do the will of God.

The Resurrection, just as the Incarnation, is not only about the body, but it is not not about the body. Just as death involves soul and body, so the Resurrection involves soul and body. The principle of death lives in us physically, as well as morally and spiritually. Though we live in a society that takes great pains to hide the fact of death, we do not escape it's reality. We fall sick. We age. We grow old. But the grace of God is that from the moment of our new birth, we begin to experience the Resurrection. Death must still take its toll on us, just as our Lord had to suffer death. But just as death has been swallowed up in the death of Christ, so too, our baptismal death gives us a pledge of our inheritance, so that though outwardly day by day we waste away, inwardly we are being recreated in the new man (2 Corinthians 4:16).

More on Christ's Essential Maleness

Jennifer has an understandable reaction to the following piece from Touchstone's Mere Comments of 22 September. The author of the post, S M Hutchens writes:

The argument, made in the name of realism by a number of Evangelicals, that English is changing, so reason demands Bible translations must be altered to reflect changing usage, refuses to face head-on the essential question of whether these changes are being forced upon the culture by an anti-Christian ideology to put forward its views, and if so, what should be done about it by Christians. This position reminds me very much of the Christians who were willing to give the Hitler salute because the changing culture demanded it and they didn't really intend anything unorthodox by it. The question for both is, what do these changes stand for, and what is the Christian response? In our view, the grammatical changes in the TNIV reflect egalitarian ideology, which is not Christian, and is, indeed, the principal heresy the Church has been called upon to deal with and reject in this age. . . .

At Touchstone we rarely use the word "complementarian" because it seems to steer a bit shy of the rock of offense, which we believe needs to be clearly identified lest it be missed in all the fog thrown up by egalitarians: Christianity is a patriarchal faith which teaches that the Image of God is perfectly and completely expressed in a male human being--indeed, that maleness is the very sign of sexual inclusiveness. If one believes that in, by, through, and for Christ, none of whose characteristics, including his sex, are superfluous to his being, everything was made, everything subsists, and everything will be consummated, and understands the implications of this belief, he will reject egalitarianism and its grammar.

Whether or not this is a true example of Godwin's law (as the first respondent to Jennifer's post suggests), I'll leave for others to evaluate.

But the point Mr. Hutchens raises is germane: is egalitarianism Christian? If it is not, then the translations which reflect this theology are promoting heresy. If it is, then what does one do with a biblical text that is so often patriarchal? It would seem that it is encumbent upon Christians to alter their own sacred texts. But on what authority do we do that?

The Coherence of Christian Theology IV

The Incarnation and Union with God

The Incarnation is the lynch pin to the Christian understanding of union with God. In some religions, union with God is accomplished through the acceptance of esoteric doctrines regarding God. In other religions, union with God is accomplished by the divesting of the illusion of selfhood and personhood, the melting, as it were, of oneself into the divine and impersonal essence. But in Christianity, union with God is accomplished only through the God-man, Christ. As Christ, himself, declared: No one comes to the Father, except through him (John 14:6). Union with God is accomplished in and through a particular Person.

Christianity is different from other religions in that union with God is accomplished by grace through faith. It does not preclude human striving, for Christians are called to work out their salvation with fear and trembling (Philippians 2:12-13). But it precludes any possibility of that union on the basis of human effort alone (Ephesians 2:8-10). Christianity is different in that, though it does require the acceptance of certain doctrines, of certain ways of life, for Christ called all Christians to be taught everything he commanded (Matthew 28:20), salvation is not accomplished on the basis of the acceptance of these doctrines alone. It is not merely an intellectual faith. It does not compartmentalize the intellect off from the body, the mind from the heart, the soul from the spirit. It is different also in that, though it does require the taking on of a certain form of living, for Christ called all Christians to obey everything he commanded (Matthew 28:20), salvation is not accomplished on the basis of human effort alone. It is not merely a religion of good deeds.

Christ is neither merely a divine Teacher, or merely a moral Exemplar: he is the Author of Life. Being the Second Person of the Trinity, the Word in whom all things were created, all that he says and does is Life. If we are in union with him, we are in union with the Father and the Holy Spirit, we have life in ourselves. This union with God, this indwelling within us of Life, is accomplished in a synergy of grace and faith with our free will. We will to receive him who comes to us. We will to partake of the divine nature revealed to us and manifest in us. This union is accomplished by grace, not by our mere human striving, through the means of faith, which we both freely will and freely receive as gift.

Contact with this Life within us does not leave us the same, but changes us, transfigures us. We cannot partake of the holy without ourselves being sanctified. We cannot be given life without becoming ever more alive. We must strive always to fight the principle of death which has infected our flesh, soul and spirit. And that striving is painful and costly. It is death to the death which infuses us. We must strive because the principle of free will is never abrogated. We may as freely reject the gift as we freely received it. Union is a process, a way of life, that cannot be said to have been accomplished until we are finally resurrected in the consummation of all things.

Just as Jesus is the union of the human and divine, and in this way, our only way to union with God, so the union with God is a transfiguration in that Life that affects heart, soul, mind and strength. It has been said that nothing that has not been assumed can be saved. Jesus, being fully human as well as fully divine, is the reality of not only a mind, a heart and a soul that is filled and transfigured with Life, but so, too, the flesh, the body. Our striving is not merely one of moral effort, of spiritual war, but a striving that involves “strength” our body. Christian theology is completely holistic: every nook and cranny of our lives is invaded by God's gracious energies. And that invasion, that whole union results in the transformation of all that we are, all the we do, all that we say and think.

This union with God, in short, is pervasive, involving the whole of a human being, body and soul, mind and heart. We know that it is completely transformative because of the relation of the Incarnation with the bodily Resurrection of Jesus from the dead.

Talk Like a Pirate Day (19 September)

Ooops. I missed it. Talk Like a Pirate Day was a week ago Sunday. I first learned about Talk Like a Pirate Day while listening to the radio on my morning commute to work when I lived in Baton Rouge. Unfortunately, I failed to write the date in my planner, and have, ever since, forgotten when Talk Like a Pirate Day was. Well, that, and it hasn't been marketed by Hallmark yet.

But thanks to a little googling, I came up with Dave Barry's column on Talk Like a Pirate Day from a couple of years ago. It gives some of the background.

So, I'll have to give a hearty "ARRRR!" to my mateys out there in the blogosphere and look forward to next year.

Oh, and you can call me:

My pirate name is:

Iron Tom Kidd

A pirate's life isn't easy; it takes a tough person. That's okay with you, though, since you a tough person. Even though you're not always the traditional swaggering gallant, your steadiness and planning make you a fine, reliable pirate. Arr!

Get your own pirate name from fidius.org.

The Coherence of Christian Theology III

The Incarnation and the Trinity

Without the Incarnation, we would have no certain knowledge of the Trinity. We would have hints and indications, for our Christ-centered reading can now see them in the holy texts of the Old Testament. But we would have no clear revelation from God. Only the revelation of God in Christ makes known to us the fact that God is a Trinity of Persons. In the Son, God is revealed as the Father; in the Son we are given the promise of the Pentecostal advent of the Holy Spirit. Christ, himself, testified that he and the Father are one (John 10:30), and took on himself the holy Name, “I AM” (John 8:58). In Christ's birth, the Holy Spirit overshadowed the Virgin Mary (Luke 1:35). In Christ's baptism, the Holy Spirit manifested himself with the Father and the Son (Luke 3:21-22). Apart from Christ there is no revelation of the Trinity.

This means that attacks on the reality of the Incarnation, arguments which seek to diminish the truth about Christ's Person, are also attacks and arguments against the teaching of the Trinity, and similarly, arguments against the Trinity are an attack on the Incarnation. If one seeks to diminish the Personhood of Christ, one will also diminish the Personhood of the Father and the Holy Spirit. But if we diminish the Personhood of the members of the Trinity, we no longer have a Trinity, but a variety of modes in which God manifests himself. We may still ascribe Personhood to God (as does Judaism and Islam), but we have no Trinity.

Yet if we have no Trinity, we have no Christianity. The belief in the Trinity is inscribed in the Nicene Creed, the only affirmation of faith accepted universally by all the Church. I do not mean to denigrate the other creeds (such as the Apostles' Creed) which have come down to us, but rather to emphasize that the one Creed which has universal acceptance from all the Church necessitates a Trinitarian understanding of God for all Christians. So, if we deny the Incarnation, we deny the Trinity which Christ revealed to us, and, in effect, we deny the Christian Faith.

I have drawn some sharp lines of demarcation here, with regard to the implications of the Incarnation and belief in the Trinity, a line which says, “This is Christian” and “This is not Christian.” But I want to emphasize why the conjoining of the Incarnation and the Trinity is both important and a blessing to us.

If God is not a Trinity of Persons, as Jesus revealed, then Christ is little more than an avatar, the embodiment of a divine principle or force, but not fully God. God is making a revelation in Christ, if Jesus is nothing but an avatar, but is not revealing himself (Hebrews 1:3). Furthermore, Jesus cannot be a unique manifestation of God, since there can be many avatars of God without diminishing other manifestations. Yet if Jesus is uniquely God, not only can he reveal God's Person, God himself, to us, but there can be no other manifestation of God that attains this revelation or reaches this height of glory. In other words, if there is no Trinity, as classically understood, then Jesus is not uniquely God in the flesh. He may be an avatar, but there may be greater avatars to come. Jesus need hardly be considered the last and greatest. Furthermore, if Jesus is only an avatar, he does not fully manifest God or the divine principle. He may represent the highest revelation yet known, but this hardly need be a complete and final revelation. Furthermore, if there were no Incarnation, we would have no knowledge of the Trinity. The two doctrines are inseparably connected at the point of the Person of Jesus.

The blessing of the revelation of the Trinity in the Incarnation is that God is revealed as both a unified essence and as a union of Persons. God is a unique being, a singular essence, of which like there is no other. If God were not a Person we would be hard pressed to avoid the risk of failing to distinguish this essence from any other unique physical or metaphysical essence. For all we know, God may just be something like gravity, or the mystical aether once thought to form the essence within which the universe existed. But if God is a Person, even a Person distinctly different from our human experience of personhood, then not only is he supremely unique, as he may be as a force, but more to the point, it is possible to have fellowship with him, for only persons can said to be in fellowship with one another. I have accidental encounters with rocks. I do not have fellowship with them. I may “know” rocks, but not in the same way I know my wife. Or, for that matter, God.

In other words, the Incarnation opens up the reality of the Trinity to us—dimly as we can comprehend it—which itself opens up the real possibility of relationship, fellowship with God. We can relate to God as persons. We need not annihilate our personhood so as to achieve some sort of impersonal union with an impersonal force or principle. We may, as it were, become ever more human, not less, in our fellowship with God.

Which brings me to the next implication of the Incarnation: the accomplishment of union between ourselves and God.

The Coherence of Christian Theology II

The Reality of the Incarnation

Let's be absolutely clear on this: if one does not understand the Incarnation correctly, one will not live correctly other Christian doctrines. If one tends to emphasize the divine attributes of Jesus (and thus in some way to deny the human aspects), in sort of a Gnosticism or adoptionism, then one will emphasize belief over action, inner spiritual-emotional states over the pragmatic struggle of living in the ways Jesus lived, and participating in his life. If one tends to emphasize the human attributes of Jesus (and thus in some way to deny the divine aspects), in a sort of docetism, then one will emphasize the more superficial behavioral states of Christianity, indeed, to steer towards chilianism (the heresy of utopia) over the proper adherence to the Faith once for all delivered to the saints. Only a correct understanding of the Incarnation can keep the human being whole and avoid the anthropic schism which dehumanizes. Of course, being correct on the Incarnation does not guarantee correctness on other doctrines; one may still go wrong in some way. But the centrality of the Incarnation necessitates proper fidelity to God's revelation in Christ: it is the plumb line of the Christian Faith.

God's supreme revelation to humankind was not given in a nation, nor in a written text. God's last word to us is his Son (Hebrews 1.1-4). The fulfillment of his Covenant is the Person of Christ. There is nothing else left for God to do: his final will has been accomplished in Jesus of Nazareth, though it is clear that this accomplishment is even now being worked out in the final consummation of all things.

It is precisely this single ultimate revelation in Christ that is the focal point, the beginning and the end, of all Christian theology. If God did not take on human flesh in the Person of Jesus Christ, then all that Jesus said and did, however we may construe it as noble and exemplary, is empty of meaning and promise. But if Jesus is whom he claimed to be, if the Second Person of the Trinity did, indeed, receive our humanity from Mary, then everything he said and did changes everything we say and do, all our thoughts and inner passions. If Jesus is he who is from everlasting, then every particle of our physical being, all the invisible inner stuff that makes us uniquely who we are, soul and spirit, thought and energy, bone and sinew, every breath and surge of blood, is changed, transfigured in the glory that is his.

The Incarnation matters. On it depends everything that ever was, is, or ever shall be.

The Ascetical Life of Blessed Seraphim (Rose) of Platina

From The Ascetic Life of Fr. Seraphim Rose, by Father Seraphim's spiritual son, Father Alexey Young:

I had the privilege of knowing him from 1966, around the time of the repose of St. Archbishop John Maximovitch, who was his spiritual father. Fr. Seraphim was a layman at that time--he didn't even have the famous beard of his later years, yet--, and then he became a Reader in the Cathedal shortly after I first met him.I do not know what his Cell Rule was, nor how many prostrations he did. He never spoke of it. He was a very private man. But I and others who were close to him know that he said The Prayer unceasingly and was probably a full hesychast in his last years. I never saw him without a prayer rope moving through his fingers.

He was extremely calm and peaceful at all times. I never saw him angry or agitated about anything (and I saw him in many different situations over the years), and only once ever saw him laugh. Yet he wasn't sour and downcast, either. Just very "still." He wasn't particularly outgoing, but always participated "normally" in situations, although he didn't dominate conversations. His voice was very quiet; you had to really listen in order to hear him, and his singing voice was tenor.

So far as I know, he kept only the usual monastic fast, which included the Fast of the Angels on Mondays. I was present at many, many meals over the years at the monastery. He always ate whatever was on his plate but never reached for seconds. Of course he never ate between meals, and always observed the monastic practice of never having food in his cell. Sometimes, when he was alone at the monastery (which wasn't often), he skipped meals, but this probably had more to do with being an "absent minded professor" than with any ascetic practice. In my home he ate normally, not skimping, but also never having seconds. I once asked him if he had any favorite food, favorite dishes, and he said that he didn't. When I asked the other monks they said they never had any idea of a favorite food, that he never spoke of food at all.

As an ascetic exercise, however, he wore a very heavy scratchy wool neck scarf around his throat, under his cassock, even in very hot weather. I didn't know about this until his last years when, once in a while, it would peek above the level of the neck of his cassock. When I asked the other monks about it they said it was an ascetic practice--like a hair shirt. He felt that unusual or extraordinary ascetic practices were not for our times, however. He said that just to be a good and decent and pious Orthodox Christian was already a huge "ascetic practice"! So he never gave a blessing to any of his spiritual children to do much beyond the normal fasting rules of the Church and the Morning and Evening Prayers in the prayerbook. He allowed me, at that time, to say The Prayer for no more than one half hour a day, and never assigned prostrations (except as appointed during weekday and lenten services) except as a penance. He felt that converts in particular tend to go overboard very easily and then they end up with what he called "spiritual indigestion." Better to go very slowly, he said, and always just "from strength to strength."

Fr. Seraphim took a "sponge bath" at a basin in his cell from time to time, but always took a thorough shower once a year, just before his annual visit to his mother. He never smelled and never looked unclean or dirty. As far as keeping "healthy" in any other ways, I was aware that he took a daily multi-vitamin, only out of obedience, but otherwise he had no interest whatever in health matters. I once asked him if he or the monastery had health insurance. He pointed up with his index finger and said (indicating heaven), "THAT is my 'health insurance'."

I had one or two experiences of his clairvoyance, where he literally read my mind (or rather, read my heart), but this was not a constant or frequent phenomenon in my experience. However, his prayers for someone were very powerful, and after his death I know personally of a very dramatic healing of someone from terminal cancer as a result of his intercession. He clearly is a man for our times. The late Archbishop Anthony of San Francisco said that he was the "first" genuine American "podvizhnik" ("righteous struggler"), and so therefore an example to us all. On the fortieth day after his repose, the late saintly Bishop Nektary--who knew him very well--spontaneously sang a "Magnification" to him as a monk-saint, so this constituted the very first "local veneration" of him. Fr. Seraphim was probably the first authentic patristic scholar in the English language. He would never have said this about himself, of course, but it's true.

13,515 Days Ago, in a Kansas Town Far, Far Away . . .

At 11:09 in the a.m., on this date way back when, I came into the world prematurely. At five pounds, fifteen inches, I was a tiny thing, and had to be on oxygen for a couple of weeks. I was two weeks old before my mother could even hold me. But I clearly survived my beginnings with plentiful food, plentiful hugs, and just darn good parenting. I sure ain't the tiny thing I once was.

For all the good that my life has been, thanks be to my parents and to God. For all the bad, well, that's my fault.

Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm VI

Annie Dillard ends her meditations with a prayer for Julie.

There is Julie Norwich. Julie Norwich is salted with fire. She is preserved like a salted fillet from all evil, baptized at birth into time and now into eternity, into the bladelike arms of God. For who will love her now, without a face, when women with faces abound, and people are so? People are reasoned, while God is mad. They love only beauty; who knows what God loves? Happy birthday, little one and wise: you got there early, the easy way. The world knew you before you knew the world. The gods in their boyish, brutal games bore you like a torch, a firebrand, recklessly over the heavens, to the glance of the one God, fathomless and mild, dissolving you into the sheets.

You might as well be a nun. You might as well be God's chaste bride, chased by plunderers to the high caves of solitude, to the hearthless rooms empty of voices, and of warm limbs hooking your heart to the world. Look how he loves you! Are you bandaged now, or loose in a sterilized room? Wait till they hand you a mirror, if you can hold one, and know what it means. That skinlessness, that black shroud of flesh in strips on your skull, is your veil. There are two kinds of nuns, out of the cloister or in. You can serve or you can sing, and wreck your heart in prayer, working the world's hard work. Forget whistling: you have no lips for that, or for kissing the face of a man or a child. Learn Latin, an it please my Lord, learn the foolish downward look called Custody of the Eyes.

And learn power, however sweet they call you, learn power, the smash of the holy once more, and signed by its name. Be victim to abruptness and seizures, events intercalated, swellings of heart. You'll climb trees. You won't be able to sleep, or need to, for the joy of it. Mornings, when light spreads over the pastures like wings, and fans a secret color into everything, and beats the trees senseless with beauty, so that you can't tell whether the beauty is in the trees--dazzling in cells like yellow sparks or green flashing waters--or on them--a transfiguring silver air charged with the wings' invisible motion; mornings, you won't be able to walk for the power of it: earth's too round. And by long and waking day--Sext, None, Vespers--when the grasses, living or dead, drowse while the sun reels, or lash in any wind, when sparrows hush and tides slack at the ebb, or flood up the beaches and cliffsides tangled with weed, and hay waits, and elsewhere people buy shoes--then you kneel, clattering with thoughts, ill, or some days erupting, some days holding the altar rail, gripping the brass-bolt altar rail, so you won't fly. Do you think I don't believe this? You have no idea, none. And nights? Nights after Compline under the ribs of Orion, nights in rooms at lamps or windows like moths? Nights you see Deneb, one-eyed over the trees; you vanish into the sheets, shrunken, your eyes bright as candles and as sightless, exhausted. Nights Murzim, Arcturus, Aldebaran in the Bull: You cry, My father, my father, the chariots of Israel, and the horsemen thereof! Held, held fast by love in the world like the moth in wax, your life a wick, your head on fire with prayer, held utterly, outside and in, you sleep alone, if you call that alone, you cry God.

Julie Norwich; I know. Surgeons will fix your face. This will all be a dream, an anecdote, something to tell your husband one night: I was burned. Or if you're scarred, you're scarred. People love the good not much less than the beautiful, and the happy as well, or even just the living, for the world of it all, and heart's home. You'll dress your own children, sticking their arms through the sleeves. Mornings you'll whistle, full of the pleasure of days, and afternoons this or that, and nights cry love. So live. I'll be the nun for you. I am now.

--Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm (Harper & Row, 1977)

Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm V

Today is Friday, November 20. Julie Norwich is in the hospital, burned; we can get no word of her condition. People released from burn wards, I read once, have a very high suicide rate. They had not realized, before they were burned, that life could include such suffering, nor that they personally could be permitted such pain. No drugs ease the pain of third-degree burns, because burns destroy skin: the drugs simply leak into the sheets. His disciples asked Christ about a roadside beggar who had been blind from birth, "Who did sin, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?" And Christ, who spat on the ground, made a mud of his spittle and clay, plastered the mud over the man's eyes, and gave him sight, answered, "Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the words of God should be made manifest in him." Really? If we take this answer to refer to the affliction itself--and not the subsequent cure--as "God's works made manifest," then we have, along with "Not as the world gives do I give unto you," two meager, baffling, and infuriating answers to one of the few questions worth asking, to wit, What in the Sam Hill is going on here?

The works of God made manifest? Do we really need more victims to remind us that we're all victims? Is this some sort of parade for which a conquering army shines up its terrible guns and rolls them up and down the streets for people to see? Do we need blind men stumbling about, and little flamefaced children, to remind us what God can--and will--do? . . .

Esoteric Christianity, I read, posits a substance. It is a created substance, lower than metals and minerals on a "spiritual scale," and lower than salts and earths, occurring beneath salts and earths in the waxy deepness of planets, but never on the surface of planets where men could discern it; and it is in touch with the Absolute, at base. In touch with the Absolute! At base. The name of the substance is: Holy the Firm.

Holy the Firm: and is Holy the Firm in touch with metals and minerals? With salts and earths? O fcourse, and straight on up, till "up" ends by curing back. Does something that touched something that touched Holy the Firm in touch with the Absolute at base seep into ground water, into grain; are islands rooted in it, and trees? Of course. . . .

But if Holy the Firm is "underneath salts," if Holy the Firm is matter at its dullest, Aristotle's materia prima, absolute zero, and since Holy the Firm is in touch with the Absolute at base, then the circle is unbroken. And it is. Thought advances, and the world creates itself, by the gradual positing of, and belief in, a series of bright ideas. Time and space are in touch with the Absolute at base. Eternity sockets twice into time and space curves, bound and bound by idea. Matter and spirit are of a piece but distinguishable; God has a stake guaranteed in all the world. And the universe is real and not a dream, not a manufacture of the sense; subject may know object, knowledge may proceed, and Holy the Firm is in short the philosopher's stone.

***

These are only ideas, by the single handful. Lines, lines, and their infinite points! Hold hands and crack the whip, and yank the Absolute out of there and into the light, God pale and astounded, spraying a spiral of salts and earths, God footloose and flung. And cry down the line to his passing white ear, "Old Sir! Do you hold space from buckling by a finger in its hold? O Old! Where is your other hand?" His right hand is clenching, calm, round the exploding left hand of Holy the Firm

--Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm (Harper & Row, 1977)

Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm IV

Facing squarely the rock mountain and the salt sea, the airplane fallen from the sky, and little Julie Norwich burned, Annie Dillard is ready. Am I?

I know only enough of God to worship him, by any means ready to hand. There is an anomalous specificity to all our experience in space, a scandal of particularity, by which God burgeons up or showers down into the shabbiest of occasions, and leaves his creation's dealings with him in the hands of purblind and clumsy amateurs. This is all we are and all we ever were: God kann nicht anders. This process in time is history; in space, at such shocking random, it is mystery. . . .

There is one church here, so I go to it. On Sunday mornings I quit the house and wander down the hill to the white frame church in the firs. On a big Sunday there might be twenty of us there; often I am the only person under sixty, and feel as though I'm on an archaeological tour of Soviet Russia. The members are of mixed denominations; the minister is a Congregationalist, and wears a white shirt. The man knows God. Once, in the middle of the long pastoral prayer of intercession for the whole world--for the gift of wisdom to its leaders, for hope and mercy to the grieving and pained, succor to the oppressed, and God's grace to all--in the middle of this he stopped, and burst out, "Lord, we bring you these same petitions every week." After a shocked pause, he continued reading the prayer. Because of this, I like him very much. "Good morning!" he says after the first hymn and invocation, startling me witless every time, and we all shout back, "Good morning!" . . .

The higher Christian churches--where, if anywhere, I belong--come at God with an unwarranted air of professionalism, with authority and pomp, as though they knew what they were doing, as though people in themselves were an appropriate set of creatures to have dealings with God. I often think of the set pieces of liturgy as certain words which people have successfully addressed to God without their getting killed. In the high churches they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a strand of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it any minute. This is the beginning of wisdom.

--Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm (Harper & Row, 1977)

Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm III

Julie Norwich lies burned in the hospital. Annie Dillard continues her meditation.

So I read. Angels, I read, belong to nine different orders. Seraphs are the highest; they are aflame with love for God, and stand closer to him than the others. Seraphs love God; cherubs, who are second, possess perfect knowledge of him. So love is greater than knowledge; how could I have forgotten? The seraphs are born of a stream of fire issuing from under God's throne. They are, according to Dionysius the Areopagite, "all wings," having, as Isaiah noted, six wings apiece, two of which they fold over their eyes. Moving perpetually toward God, they perpetually praise him, crying Holy, Holy, Holy. . . . But, according to some rabbinic writings, they can sing only the first "Holy" before the intensity of their love ignites them again and dissolves them again, perpetually, into flames. "Abandon everything," Dionysius told his disciple. "God despises ideas."

God despises everything, apparently. If he abandoned us, slashing creation loose at its base from any roots in the real: and if we in turn abandon everything--all these illusions of time and space and lives--in order to love only the real: then where are we? Thought itself is impossible, for subject can have no guaranteed connection with object, nor any object with God. Knowledge is impossible. We are precisely nowhere, sinking on an entirely imaginary ice floe, into entirely imaginary seas themselves adrift. Then we reel out love's long line alone toward a God less lovable than a grasshead, who treats us less well than we treat our lawns.

Of faith, I have nothing, only of truth: that this one God is a brute and a traitor, abandoning us to time, to necessity and the engines of matter unhinged. This is no leap; this is evidence of things seen: one Julie, one sorrow, one sensation bewildering the heart, and enraging the mind, and causing me to look at the world stuff apalled, at the blithering rock of trees in a random wind, at my hand like some gibberish sprouted, my fist opening and closing, so that I think, Have I once turned my hand in this circus, have I ever called it home? . . .

Faith would be, in short, that God has any willful connection with time whatsoever, and with us. For I know it as given that God is all good. And I take it also as given that whatever he touches has meaning, if only in his mysterious terms, the which I readily grant. The question is, then, whether God touches anything. Is anything firm, or is time on the loose? Did Christ descend once and for all to no purpose, in a kind of divine and kenotic suicide, or ascend once and for all, pulling his cross up after him like a rope ladder home? Is there--even if Christ holds the tip of things fast and stretches eternity clear to the dim souls of men--is there no link at the base of things, some kernel or air deep in the matrix of matter from which universe furls like a ribbon twined into time?

Has God a hand in this? Then it is a good hand. But has he a hand in it at all? Or is he a holy fire burning self-contained for power's sake alone? Then he knows himself blissfully as flame unconsuming, as all brilliance and beauty and power, and the rest of us can go hang. Then the accidental universe spins mute, obedient only to its own gross terms, meaningless, out of mind, and alone. The universe is neither contingent upon nor participant in the holy, in being itself, the real, the power play of fire. The universe is illusion merely, not one speck of it real, and we are not only its victims, falling always into or smashed by a planet slung by its sun--but also its captives, bound by the mineral-made ropes of o ur senses.

But how do we know--how could we know--that the real is there? By what freak chance does the skin of illusion ever split, and reveal to us the real, which seems to know us by name, and by what freak chance and why did the capacity to prehend it evolve?

I sit at the window, chewing the bones in my wrist. Pray for them: for Julie, for Jesse her father, for Ann her mother, pray. Who will teach us to pray?

--Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm (Harper & Row, 1977)

Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm II

I continue to swallow the necessary medicine. Dillard continues:

Jesse her father had grabbed her clear of the plane this morning, and was hauling her off when the fuel blew. A gob of flung ignited vapor hit her face, or something flaming from the plane or fir tree hit her face. No one else was burned, or hurt in any way.

***

So this is where we are. Ashes, ashes, all fall down. How could I have forgotten? Didn't I see the heavens wiped shut just yesterday, on the road walking? Didn't I fall from the dark of the stars to these senselit and noisome days? The great ridged granite millstone of time is illusion, for only the good is real; the great ridged granite millstone of space is illusion, for God is spirit and worlds his flimsiest dreams: but the illusions are almost perfect, are apparenntly perfect for generations on end, and the pain is also, and undeniably, real. The pain within the millstones' pitiless turning is real, for our love for each other--for world and all the products of extension--is real, vaulting, insofar as it is love, beyond the plane of the stones' sickening churn and arcing to the realm of spirit bare. And you can get caught holding one end of a love, when your father drops, and your mother; when a land is lost, or a time, and your friend blotted out, gone, your brother's body spoiled, and cold, your infant dead, and you dying: you reel out love's long line alone, stripped like a live wire loosing its sparks to a cloud, like a live wire loosed in space to longing and grief everlasting.

--Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm (Harper & Row, 1977)

Little Things

The routine: supper, bath, book, Our Father, lights out, Church hymns, bed. This is what it takes to get Sofie to sleep, though by seven or so in the evening, she's a willing accomplice to the whole thing. And really, once the bath is over, the rest takes just minutes.

In a darkened nursery, with your daughter in your arms, having prayed the Our Father, with the Phos hilaron and the Nunc dimittis on your lips, sometimes the questions are stilled. At least for a while.

One is not wrong to take brief comfort in that.

"Surely I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with his mother; like a weaned child is my soul within me." (Psalm 131:2)

Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm I

In 1975, Annie Dillard spent some time on the islands of Puget Sound. In the course of a Wednesday, Thursday and Friday in November, a plane crashed on the island. From the events of that week, she wrote a book, Holy the Firm. I am reading it now because I need to. Here are some excerpts.

I came here to study hard things--rock mountain and salt sea--and to temper my spirit on their edges. "Teach me thy ways, O Lord" is, like all prayers, a rash one, and one I cannot but recommend. . . .

Into this world falls a plane.

The earth is a mineral speckle planted in trees. The plane snagged its wing on a tree, fluttered in a tiny arc, and struggled down.

I heard it go. The cat looked up. There was no reason: the plane's engine simply stilled after takeoff, and the light plane failed to clear the firs. It fell easily; one wing snagged on a fir top; the metal fell down the air and smashed in the thin woods where cattle browse; the fuel exploded; and Julie Norwich seven years old burnt off her face.

Little Julie mute in some room at St. Joe's now, drugs dissolving into the sheets. Little Julie with her eyes naked and spherical, baffled. Can you scream without lips? Yes. But do children in long pain scream?

It is November 19 and no wind, and no hope of heaven, and no wish for heaven, since the meanest of people show more mercy than hounding and terrorist gods. . . .

The volunteer firemen have mustered; the fire trucks have come--stampeding Shuller's sheep--and gone, bearing burnt Julie and Jesse her father to the emergency room in town, leaving the rest of us to gossip, fight grass fires on the airstrip, and pray, or wander from window to window, fierce.

So she is burnt on her face and neck, Julie Norwich. The one whose teeth are short in a row, Jesse and Ann's oldest, red-kneed, green-socked, carrying cats.

--Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm (Harper & Row, 1977)

The Coherence of Christian Theology I

[Note: This is the first post of a multi-part essay on the Incarnation.]

Introduction

It all starts with the Incarnation. Take away the Incarnation and all of Christian theology falls apart. Christianity is utterly unique—whatever similarities it shares with other faiths—on this one point alone: it teaches as non-negotiable dogma that Jesus is God-made-flesh. Take that away and the doctrine of the Trinity falls apart, as does the promise inherent in Jesus' bodily Resurrection from the dead, and of union with God in Christ. So, too, does the doctrine of the Church and her Sacraments, as well as the proper understanding of Mary. All of these uniquely Christian doctrines, these ways of life, are emptied of any reality if the Incarnation is taken away.

This is why insistence on absolute fidelity to the Christian teaching and way of life on the Incarnation is crucial. Everything uniquely Christian about our faith depends on it. If you go wrong on the Incarnation, you cannot go right on any other doctrine. In terms of the standard on Christian teaching on the Incarnation, one must look to the definition given at the council of Chalcedon (here):

Following the holy Fathers we teach with one voice that the Son [of God] and our Lord Jesus Christ is to be confessed as one and the same [Person], that he is perfect in Godhead and perfect in manhood, very God and very man, of a reasonable soul and [human] body consisting, consubstantial with the Father as touching his Godhead, and consubstantial with us as touching his manhood; made in all things like unto us, sin only excepted; begotten of his Father before the worlds according to his Godhead; but in these last days for us men and for our salvation born [into the world] of the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God according to his manhood. This one and the same Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son [of God] must be confessed to be in two natures, unconfusedly, immutably, indivisibly, inseparably [united], and that without the distinction of natures being taken away by such union, but rather the peculiar property of each nature being preserved and being united in one Person and subsistence, not separated or divided into two persons, but one and the same Son and only-begotten, God the Word, our Lord Jesus Christ, as the Prophets of old time have spoken concerning him, and as the Lord Jesus Christ hath taught us, and as the Creed of the Fathers hath delivered to us.

Simply put: in Jesus' one Person are two natures and two wills, human and divine, operating in perfect union and harmony, providing for us in his Person a bridge to the Father, and not a bridge only but the single means of union with God, of a partaking of the divine nature.

Starting the Next Decade

On a Saturday a lot like this one, eleven years ago, one Anna Geno said "I do" to this ol' goof. I've been counting my blessings ever since.

Praise the Lord for a good woman!

On the Male-Only Priesthood

In the provocative Priesthood and the Masculinity of Christ, R. Mary Hayden Lemmons argues the following point:

The refusal of the Catholic Church to ordain women as priests has left many feeling that the Church considers women to be inferior to men. They have difficulty reconciling the Church's proclamations of sexual equality with the 1994 papal argument of Ordinatio Sacerdotalis. In that document, John Paul II reaffirmed the 1977 teaching of Inter Insigniores and proclaims that the Church lacks the authority to ordain women, since Christ did not appoint women as apostles and since the historical tradition has restricted priestly ordination to men.

These papal arguments have not been very persuasive due to the common conviction that equality requires gender neutrality--even within the ministries of Christ. If this were so, masculinity would be irrelevant for the mission of Christ. But this is not true. The masculinity of Christ is crucial to his mission of remedying the effects of original sin.

According to Genesis, original sin deprived the human race of its original unity with God and deeply affected the original unity of man and woman. As a result, Christ had an humanitarian mission to restore unity with God and a gender mission to restore heterosexual unity. The humanitarian mission required that Christ be fully human and fully God. Accordingly, since women are as human as men, God could have incarnated as a woman. A female Christ could have restored the human race to its original unity with God. It is not Christ's humanitarian mission that required Christ to be male.

The maleness of Christ is required to restore the unity between men and women disrupted by original sin. Genesis 3:16 says, "Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you." This passage indicates three gender consequences of original sin: the excessive desire or obsession of women for their men, male domination over women and sexual inequality. Freeing the human race from these consequences of original sin constitute Christ's gender mission.

These consequences are significant. In his letter On the Dignity and Vocation of Women, John Paul II identifies male domination with chauvinism and blames it for the many ways in which women suffer from the lack of proper appreciation for her equality and dignity. Chauvinism—as a consequence of Original sin—required that the Christ be a man. Due to chauvinism, a female Christ would not have been recognized by men as being their lord, their rabbi, their savior. Christ exemplified sacrificial love, which chauvinism identifies as a weakness and as a peculiarity of women. According to chauvinism, maleness is about power, independence, and control. Not so, taught Christ. Rather, masculinity is for the sake of pouring out one's life for another in love, not for the sake of dominating self-gratification.

Fallen women also needed Christ to be incarnated as a man-and not only to teach men a lesson. Original sin weakened femininity to the point where it blinded women to the truth about her desire for love. Original sin derailed woman's transcendent passion for God with an egocentric passion for man-for a Mr. Right able to satisfy the yearnings of her heart. Fallen woman thus assumes either that Mr. Right will be perfect or that accommodating his chauvinism will be the sacrifice that enables her to be loved. Thus, woman needs not only to be freed from the harms of chauvinism but also from the misdirection of her desire. Women need to learn not only that there can only be one perfect man, Jesus Christ, but also that men need not be chauvinistic. If Christ had been incarnated as a woman, these lessons would have been untaught. Thus, the gender mission of Christ required Christ to be incarnated as a man for the sake of women as well as for the sake of men.

If Christ had to be incarnated as a man in order to fulfill his gender mission, then it is not possible for women to undertake this mission. If it is not possible for women to undertake the gender mission, then it is not possible for women to be ordained Catholic priests. For the Catholic priest images Christ in his gender mission as well as in his humanitarian mission. This is particularly the case since the Catholic Church was founded to counter the effects of Original Sin.

[Via Touchstone's Mere Comments (third item down).]

Notes one respondent to this article at the Touchstone blog: “This argument is literally nonsensical to our contemporaries, including our Christian ones.” Writes Fr. David Mills: "A good friend, an 'complementarian' [one who holds traditional sex distinctions] Evangelical who lives and works in egalitarian Evangelical circles, sometimes sends similar articles to his e-mail circle. He always gets snarky responses like 'The road of sanctification has nothing to do with gender' and pseudo-scholarly rebukes that he is 'privileging' the 1950s or the Victorian period, which were supposedly the origin of the conservative view of 'gender relations.'

"The answers are often revealing. His perky friend mapping out the road to sanctification did not seem to realize that her statement is straightforwardly Gnostic. I mean, how can sanctification have nothing to do with sex, when we are embodied, therefore sexed, creatures?

"And if that is true, might it also be true that as the sexes are different, so their ways to sanctification might be different? And if that is true, might it also be true that each has a role to play in the sanctification of the other? As God made sexual difference necessary to the regeneration of the species, indeed to the creation of new human souls, might He have made sexual difference necessary to its redemption? The Christian mind, uninfluenced by modern ideas of sexual identity, naturally answers yes to the second and third questions, I think."

Boys Will Be Boys--Oh, and Girls Will Be Girls, Too!

From the Zenit News Agency, an article citing research establishing the biological foundation of behavioral differences between the sexes:

Nevertheless, Rhoads argues that "Men and women still have different natures and, generally speaking, different preferences, talents and interests." In support of this affirmation he cites research from a number of sources demonstrating that the behavioral and psychological differences between men and women are in fact real, and not due to social conditioning.

Some sex-difference research has identified the hormonal environment of fetuses in mothers' wombs as a factor explaining differences between male and female behavior. And neuroscientists have found that men have fewer connections between the left and right hemispheres of the brain, with men's brains in general being more compartmentalized than women's.

Male-female divergences are evident from the earliest age, notes Rhoads. Even 1-day-old infants show behavioral differences, with females responding more strongly to the sound of crying. Three-day-old girls maintain eye contact with a silent adult for twice as long as boys. And 4-month-old girls can distinguish photographs of those they know from other people, something boys are generally not capable of doing. Boys, on the other hand, by the age of 5 months are more interested than girls in three-dimensional geometric forms and blinking lights.

Once infants are a year old they can rapidly distinguish between the sexes of their playmates, preferring to associate with those of their own sex. Tests have shown this to be the case even when the newly arrived infants are dressed in the clothes of the opposite sex. Thus, baby girls quickly identify as female another baby, even if it is dressed in masculine clothes.

He goes on to show how these difference continue to manifest themselves into adulthood.