George Herbert: Herbert: The Complete English Works (Everyman's Library) I used to pace back and forth in my room reading passages from this aloud, and they left a strong impression in my soul. Heterodox on some points, but the work as a whole is of such quality that those passages should simply be overlooked.
The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha, Revised Standard Version, Expanded Edition (Hardcover) The notes are sometimes way off, the translations I sometimes disagree with and sometimes are simply erroneous (most of these errors are traditional English-speaking bible translation errors), and the cross-references are often lacking, but it's much better than most of what's out there, has the full canon, and is leaps and bounds better than the dreadful NIV that is, sadly, regarded so highly in some Protestant quarters and which has reached near-saturation in the online biblical search-tool sites.
editor Hieromonk German Ciuba: Old Orthodox Prayer Book (Russian Old Believer) Everything in traditional English with Slavonic on facing pages.
Morning and Evening prayers; the first, third, sixth, and ninth hours; prayers before and after receiving the Eucharist; multiple canons, the weekly and festal troparia and kontakia; the Divine Liturgy; Vespers and Matins.
There is not a better Orthodox prayer book in English that I have found (the Jordanville prayerbook, though wonderful in many ways, is inferior, though very much worth owning as a secondary and supplemental prayer book), and this has all of the hours in it - not chopped, in their proper integrity of form and meaning.
"We don't live in the Byzantine Empire anymore," some people I once associated with would occasionally say derisively about others. At face value, it is clearly true. We do not live in the Byzantine Empire.
Looking at various Greek parishes, the Church building would not always reflect this. Often it is drawn from a definite tradition of Church architecture that is distinctly Byzantine. The same could be said, perhaps, about some canons that (so I'm told) presuppose the Empire is in place, though I know less about that. Most likely we could extend this to other features of modern Orthodox Church life, both within the geographical area formerly belonging to Byzantium, or at least falling in or near its heart, and well beyond, in places such as the United States, Canada, Western Europe, Australia, and Africa.
We should not be so strict with the Greeks on this, though. Byzantium may have fallen, but it is also true that Byzantium has fallen. People remember this. They remember. Cultures have memories and traditions -- it is how they persist as a singular culture through time, and part (only part) of how they enjoy communion with those who have gone before, and how they allow those who have gone before to enrich them even at the level of their secular life. This tradition, this chain, bears one into the present, and in many ways establishes one's identity. To break this chain is akin to mutilating one's own body. The Greeks should not forget -- particularly in Greece and those other ethnoi in traditionally Byzantine areas. They should, of course, remember intelligently, and not select only certain moments for poorly-remembered and drably-rehearsed tawdry festivals of memory to connect climactically with this heritage while kitsch overruns the bulk of their lives in so many other ways, leading to kitschy expressions of kitschified memory.
However, we American converts are only rarely Greek, and so are not in any way Byzantine, and we have our own cultural memory/memories. Often we connect to Orthodoxy because we see that it is closer to certain features of our cultural memory -- which is also not a dead thing. What I have an objection to is the forced assimilation to a foreign memory via structures that displace our own heritage and memory, which memory is often the basis of our appreciating Orthodoxy to begin with, whether it serves as a basis via negativity (i.e., because we see how this heritage fails) or via positivity (because we find that Orthodoxy is the best place to preserve this memory). Unfortunately, Orthodoxy will not be the best place to preserve this memory, this Western heritage, if it insists, either explicitly or simply de facto, on every jot and tittle of the Byzantine patrimony.
A more profound unity is needed than what we have, or else we are simply assimilating to the outposts of a foreign memory.
We are a barbarian land. This is not a historically Orthodox country, and the population is not a majority Orthodox.
We are a diaspora Church. Russian, Serbian, Arab, Greek, Georgian, Romanian, Albanian, etc.: there are a few Western Rites. Even those parishes and jurisdictions that are mostly-English or all-English are transparently, if not self-consciously (*cough* OCA), inheritors of one of these traditions. That there has been no attempt, as with the Byzantine mission to the Slavs, to translate the Church's heritage into a cultural idiom appropriate to the various regions of the U.S. (with Alaska the sole exception), it is clear that Orthodoxy in the U.S. is not a mission phenomenon, but a diaspora phenomenon. We are a diaspora Church, no matter how many generations into the diaspora we go. There is no way to avoid this. Succeeding generations of American-borne ethnics will not change this. Neither will a steady influx of converts.
When Anglo-Celts stop naming their chilren after Russian and Greek saints to the neglect of their native traditions, and Churches in the U.K. and the U.S. are dedicated to Anglo-Celtic saints, then we'll have some initial movement to approach becoming a local Church.
The fact that converts willfully give up on this matter -- and that those spouses, who do not want to give up on naming their children according to saints that are part of the local cultural heritage, usually concede to their (sometimes ethnic, sometimes not) spouse who do -- this is not a mark of the Catholic Church, but of an ethnic sect, an exotic bird. And locals, even if they get their Divine Liturgies in English, are being assimilated.
Unless the Orthodox Church can accomodate other cultural histories other than the ancestral lands that the Churches come from -- especially when these cultural histories are Christian -- it can never claim to be Catholic.
I do not want to be a distracting Celtic sideshow in an exotic bird zoo.
I saw this on Amazon.com, and I think it may repay a look-at for a better perspective amid the recent online debates regarding the issue of homosexuality, or rather, the canonical status of the sanctioning of same-gendered amorous relationships.
How is it that the Orthodox Church can no longer simply call herself the Catholic Church in the English speaking world without fear of misrepresentation or of being misinterpreted? Why are we unable to speak with our own natural voice without constantly modifying it for the sake of our audience, or else hedging it with lots of editorial caveats? Reading the acts of synods only 400 years old, this was not the case in the Synod of Jerusalem. There, the bishops were perfectly comfortable calling themselves the Catholic Church or the Orthodox Church; further, they were perfectly comfortable talking about their faith as the Catholic Faith or the Orthodox Faith. They didn't feel the need to modify it further -- i.e., they didn't feel the need to distinguish it by calling it the "Orthodox Catholic Faith" or the "Orthodox Catholic Church." They did not say such stupid and ignorant things such as "St. Maximus the Confessor was not Orthodox, he was Catholic!" or visa-versa. That St. Augustine calls himself Catholic does not mean he is a proto-schismatic; that St. John of Damascus writes about The Orthodox Faith does not mean that he is not Catholic. Yet if one wishes to be published today, one will be forced into clarity* for the sake of readers who are forced to accept conventions they may not wish to have, but which they nonetheless come to defend because they are fed them. Assuming people are stupid and unable to interpret things may make them stupid and unable to interpret things.
*i.e., say either that something is Catholic or that it is Orthodox, or else use lowercase and uppercase letters to distinguish Catholics from the catholic Church or the catholic Faith, and Orthodox from this or that orthodoxy and/or orthodox faith, or some such tedious and pathetic distinction.
I was flipping through a book on Tolkien today, which I remembered liking for its straightforwardness and sort of semi-polished un-polishedness, and came across an assertion to the effect that Aragorn embodied the barbarian virtues, the classical pagan virtues and the Christian virtues. I then realized that I love the so-called barbarian virtues, barbarian literature, and being of barbaric stock, and that I shall be sad if and when the day ever comes that the Ecumenical Patriarch no longer considers this land barbarian territory.
I do not wish to be a Greek. I do not mean to be cruel or rude or uncharitable. I cannot close my eyes to what seems obvious to me, though: their affluent history somehow seems to have disposed them to a spiritual/ethical/religious softness and pastoral Disney-speak and a love of comfort and kitschy Italianishness and clip-art tombstones and schlocky domestic statues of various Greek goddesses that I can't really take. I think this is one reason why the Slavs feel more like a place where I can be at home, because they are generally too barbaric to be taken in by this.
At the beginning and end of both the morning and evening prayers, the Old Believers' Prayerbook I use prescribes a series of prayers -- the same set of prayers function both as introductory prayers and as closing prayers. One of these prayers is:
It is truly meet to bless thee, O God-birthgiver,
the ever blessed, and the most immaculate, and the Mother of our God;
More honorable than the Cherubim
and incomparably more glorious than the Seraphim
thee who without corruption gavest birth to God the Word,
true God-birthgiver, thee do we magnify.
This prayer appears during the Divine Liturgy. I'm not sure how far back one could trace this prayer, but I doubt that the documentary trail leads past the fifth century.
There are many who would, on this basis, doubt the prayer, question it's place in the Church. Is it original? Does it conflict with our "foundational documents?" These questions are raised even by some Orthodox, mostly those who were former Protestants, but on rare occasion I have heard Orthodox who were never Protestant raise them (likely through Protestant influence, but not necessarily). One does not necessarily need to subscribe to some model of "Sola Scriptura" to raise these objections.
Several hasty comments: does the Spirit move history and the Church? Is the Spirit the Church's fount? Would the Spirit allow for a prayer that militates against His movements and life to enter into the Church? Some Protestants would say "yes," and then say that they themselves either resist or are the Spirit's resistance to human corruption. Some (almost exclusively ex-Protestant) Orthodox might say that we need to purify the Church from disfiguring accretions that have crept in, much as one might remove plaque from teeth or grime from a relief-heavy statue. Other similar models might be employed.
Is the Church (or "Christianity" or "Orthodoxy") a series of interlocking "truths" built one atop the other, built by men? Those who would be vulnerable to being so characterized would assert that these "truths" are God-given truths, that they are divinely revealed, and so the rhetorically charged phrase that "man builds" the system is unfair and misses the point of human stewarship of divinely given truths.They would say that "we can be sure of such and such things, because we know that God teaches them (it is written in the bible or clearly evidenced in the earliest authoritative extra-canonical documents), but we cannot be sure of this prayer to the Mother of God, because it cannot be justified based on what we know, and even contradicts the principles in these texts."
Nonetheless, I cannot help but think that this whole approach looks suspiciously too skeptical, using certain "texts" (or the interpretation of those texts) as bludgeoning weapons, while attempting to artificially immunize these texts from being themselves bludgeoned by the same skepticism. I cannot help but think that this is too much a critical model, that it is fundamentally a project of men building, or thinking and acting as though they themselves recognized and assembled together, the truths comprising the Church's teaching. It is granted that these texts are given by God, and since they do not give us an exhaustive theology and service of worship, we use these texts to build a model of divine truth. What is then left for God to do? The Secularists can look at these texts and can honestly not see God in them, can see them as purely secular, human products. Why then think they are divine?
If we take this approach (of assuming that "we can be sure of this, because God has given us this text, but not of this prayer, because it is not in the text or clearly justified by it"), we soon run into trouble. How might the Lord and/or Church not be accused of negligence in this model? How, in this model, can one distinguish between the Spirit's harmonious activities in both the text and the Church and all-too human interpretation of merely dead textual material? If the text is the revelation, then...
It is 2AM. That didn't come out correctly. Forgive me.
I am putting these three articles here because I jotted them down a year ago, thinking (if memory serves me) they were splendidly helpful as introductions to the meaning and value of tradition. Worth re-reading, if I recall.
I have often heard various persons note, with a tone of shock and even outrage, that in the Roman (Byzantine) Empire, marriage and procreation had as their aim producing more citizens for the Empire. I jotted a note about the relation between procreation and culture here. "The more, the merrier." The more people populate a family, the more that family is a real family with its own culture, the more clear the personalities of each will emerge, and the richer will each person be -- even in conflict and suffering. The absence of these things is only desirable if isolation-as-the-norm is somehow mistakenly elevated above relationships with others to privilege of place for disclosing the truth about oneself. There is truth in aloneness, there is wisdom in it and there is a need for it, as George Herbert says:
by all means use sometime to be alone,
salute thyself, see what thy soul doth wear;
look into thy breast (for 'tis thine own)
and tumble up and down what thou findest there.
There is something else that happens in families that have single children, or in liberal circles where people cultivate friends at a distance and limit the number of children they have - they must go outside the family, and they wish to, only they do not wish to get too terribly wrapped up in these other people. They don't wish to be tied down. They do not wish to get too close, and so the cultures that are formed in these places tend to be based on entertainment or else are very thin.
Back to the Byzantine empire, though. After noting the role of procreation in generating more citizens for the empire, the supposedly "Scholastic" definition of intercourse as properly having only children as its outcome (that is, the idea that sex, morally speaking, should be restricted to a man and a woman who are married and who engage in it only for the purpose of procreation) is often brought out onto the conversation's stage to be ritually flogged. The funny thing is, though the supposedly Scholastic definition that "procreation is the telos of sexual activity" is often portrayed as cold, deathly, mechanical and inhuman, it is precisely these things that the definition seeks to eliminate from genital activity; it is precisely the mechanization or animal or even vegetable elements of eros that this definition guides us beyond.
I wrote here about the optics of lust -- lust would abstract the lusted-after object from its native context and involvements and history, and tear it away and situate it within the context of the desire of the luster. This is not an eliminable aspect of lust, and all sex has some element of lust involved. The Scholastic definition of the goal of marriage militates precisely against this, by situating the sexual act within the context of the effects it comes packaged with before the arrival of humans, by the Providence of the Creator; the Scholastic definition liberates sexual desire from Lust's delusion, and makes it life-giving and personal, as it is structured to be.
If the marriage embrace -- or any genital embrace whatsoever -- does not have children as a real possibility that is held forth as a desirable and proper result of it, there is no way that the act can be adumbrated by a life-giving regard for other people who make up one's community, and a beneficent gratitude for that culture in which one discovers oneself as a person in the midst of that community. This is why there is a sense of duty about genital relations in marriage to produce children -- the more people are about, the richer things are.
No matter how much consideration there might be otherwise for the other person as person outside of genital relations, as soon as lusting begins (consciously or unconsciously -- I write nothing about the genital act itself), this regard for them as persons has a weed choking it and bending it out of shape. In sex, there is always an element of power involved, because it is moved by a desire to possess the body of the other person. There is no such thing as two rational adults engaging in it consensually -- as soon as they engage in it, they've moved out of the possibility of considering each other as people, and have moved into a more animal sphere where the world and the objects in the world are tools for the attainment of or obstacles interfering with the satisfaction of some goal and intent. It does not feel like it when it's consensual, and so people are usually not aware of it, but it is always the case that the other person is reduced to a tool (that this is the case is really only made manifest to someone when they begin approaching genital relations with someone who thwarts it soon after physical relations start quickly approaching it, and the disappointed party is given signals that things will be consummated -- once disappointment sets in, the disappointed party may be very respectful and compassionate and considerate, but there is always another current that is anything but these things, and that is the current that moves the genital encounter forward and is its driving force; that people can swiftly transition out of it should not blind us to the presence of that current).
Now our lust, if "normal" and "healthy," desires its object to be both moving and responsive to us, reciprocating our desire. Usually this is tied up with the fact that for most people, an act of lusting is tied up with a desire to belong and be affirmed -- just as many people "consume" other human beings in various metaphoric ways to break their sense of isolation and aloneness, so too many people have this desire for union and intimacy with another human being con-fused with their genital appetite, so that often the one entails the other.
In this, however, and in the con-fusion I mentioned in the paragraph above, still show how much the "baseline" form of lust de-personalizes that-which-is-lusted-after. The need for genital relations to be liberated by the consequence of children is paramount. "The more the merrier."
AN AFTER-WORD
I do think that sexual relations can lubricate a relationship to remove friction and increase care, attention, intimacy.
I do not think that barren couples are thereby, on the ground of their barrenness alone, morally obligated to abstain from sexual relations. That cross can be life-giving to them and those around them in other ways.
I do not think that marriage is merely a nest for raising children.
I do think that marriage is a kind of arena for spiritual growth, God-like charity, first of all.
Procreation does not validate lust. I did not intend to write about the validity (or invalidity) of lust, but about the difference between fructive and sterile joys.
In the end, I was simply exploring the dynamics of two different parishes I know, one where procreation is low and various forms of birth control are used, and one where procreation is high and few forms of birth control are used. In the first case, people tend to keep each other at arms length, and to approach one another only through various protective sheaths such as chatting about this-or-that standard topic. In the second, there is affective immediacy, directness (and caution), and generosity on so very many levels beyond what exists at the first.
I strongly suspect that the different forms of life in the two communities reflect different ideas of the human person, and that this is reflected in different ideas about sexual relations, gender, reproduction, and community. That is what I was trying to write about.
In one parish, people wish for more people to be around, it would seem, whether by influx of visitors, transferring members or by birth. The other parish seems to largely just appreciate births the way that suburban neighbors appreciate one another through their windows, and puts more emphasis on cultivating a certain kind of subjectivity and praising a certain way of life. Despite all the freedom claimed for that kind of subjectivity and the liberty and richness of that way of life, the talk about it leaves me unsated and the kind of community that grows up around this form of individualism leaves me feeling isolated.
I am on an e-mail distribution list for a parish near me that has a tradition of keeping watch over the Lord's tomb during the end of holy Friday into holy Saturday. They did not have enough people and were in danger of canceling the watch, and I offered to keep watch.
After chanting the psalter for two hours in the dark of a Church located on a busy bar street, it was very strange to be chanting the psalter over the Lord's tomb while the world went on without a care. It might as well have been a brothel district in the Roman Empire.
The Lord's tomb, however, seemed as though it was keeping watch over my watch -- it's power and its sweetness seemed to fill the sanctuary at times. What a pathetic man I am, and so very unfit to be keeping watch alone at the Lord's tomb! I know the others who kept watch, and they are far more worthy than I. Let their prayers, their attention, their presence dispel the stench of my wickedness at that place. My mind so often wandered during the chanting to details about how I was chanting or the wording of the psalm or its typology or just drifting to attend to where I was (instead of to what I was chanting) -- to the quietness of the nave with the tomb in its midst. There were moments where a real attention to Christ's presence stirred and made a beginning of prayer, but then I took that moment and drowned it in distractions of lesser things. Despite it all, I could feel the Lord's kindness flowing toward me from the life-bearing tomb, I could feel his divine hospitality welcoming my attempt at a watch. I know how nauseatingly saccharine and falsely pious this all sounds. Forgive me -- I do mean it honestly, and I don't know how to pray this, so I am blogging it.
A powerful and humbling experience. I cheapen it by attempting to write about it, capturing so little, and watering down the rest. God grant you all grace for the remainder of the Lord's Passover from Death to Life.
"It goes without saying that neither merciful men nor angels need to inform God of what is happening in the world, that God should know in this way, for the most high God is all-knowing and all-seeing. All that they see and understand they do by God's help. Why, then, does it say that the servants saw what was done by their merciless fellow-servant and told their lord? In order to show the compassion of good men and angels. Because it is the will of God Himself that all His faithful servants rejoice in good and grieve at sin. God's sorrowful servants, then came and informed their lord of what was happening. (Mt. 18:31) "
