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.
This is a common perversion of the holiness of the Church in Revivalist Protestant Churches -- holiness is affectively and practically understood (generally) as judgment, dissent, and aloofness. This is a component of its widespread elitism and misanthropy, regardless of the happy faces worn.
The Catholic monk who recently converted to Orthodoxy speaks about it here, and about more pressing matters, as well:
Q: If you could and wanted to give contemporaries a very short piece of advice about organizing their praying life, what would you say?
A: If you want to learn to swim, jump into the water. Only that way you can learn. Only the one who prays will feel the meaning, the taste and the joy of prayer. You can't learn to pray sitting in a big warm armchair. If you are ready to kneel, to repent sincerely, to raise your eyes and hands to Heaven, then many things will be revealed to you. Of course you can read many books, listen to lectures, talk to people - these are also important and help to understand more. But what is the value of all these things if we don't take any real steps afterwards? If we don't start praying? I think you must understand this, too. Obviously, you are asking this question from the position of one who does not believe...
Q: Exactly. Our magazine is for those who doubt.
A: There is nothing wrong with doubts, they are even useful. One should not search for them, however. But if they do appear, one must simply recall that we all have a chance to hear, "Reach your finger, and behold My hands; and reach your hand, and put it into my side: and do not be unbelieving, but believing" (John 20: 27).
This issue of Sola Scriptura dogmatic reflexes is rather vexing, and makes any arguments on this matter very difficult. Usually, in my conversations with Protestants, any attempt to show, on good historical grounds, that there was a mainstream historical practice of addressing the angels and the departed faithful during public worship is cut off at the knees with a Sola-Scriptura argument that relies on anachronistic imports, rather than real historical or theological ones. Getting past this dogmatic gag-reflex is difficult. There are scriptures (in the psalms) that explicitly address angels, but they need to be set within the wider context of Israel's worship tradition (i.e., within the context of what the purpose and practice of worship was within the 2nd Temple) to make sense, to be seen for what they were (and, through the mediations of the Tradition that has preserved them, to see what they are). Protestants generally do not wish to allow history to be a more comprehensive category that can help reveal the meaning of the scriptural text. They wish to nullify the relevance of history and historical situatedness through the self-sufficiency and clarity/perspicacity of the scriptures. It's dishonest, for several reasons, some of which I shall briefly cite below.
In the conversations with Protestants that I've had over earlier incarnations of my argument (that the invocation of the saints is an apostolic practice), Sola Scriptura becomes the main problem. On one hand they claim that the meaning of the scriptures is the meaning that the authors gave them, and that this meaning is historical. This is a necessary stance to take if they are to use the scriptures as critical tools to rally against the Church and her Tradition (claiming that they're deviant), and to dissent on the basis of a private judgment that presupposes the alleged "clarity (or perspicacity) of the scriptures." In order to have a crowbar give some leverage to move an object, one needs to find a space or a crack big enough to insert it into, and they think they can find this by showing discontinuity/difference between the text (or the text's original meaning) and the later tradition. Today, this amounts to Protestants showing the difference between a Protestant reading of the text and the Orthodox Catholic reading of the text. Unfortunately, this was anachronistic from the beginning, the Reformers relying on a Rennaisance humanistic cultural bias (emphasis on private reading and judgment, together with an emphasis on individudal morality in such a way as to have a tendency to minimalize or eliminate ritual) and Nominalist philosophical concerns (i.e., there are no transcendent essences which multiple things participate in, but only names that function as unifying conventions: as there is no essence or interiority, justification must be extrinsic and forensic) to insert themselves as original to Christianity, as apostolic.
On the other hand, the anachronistic imports show that the doctrine of the clarity of scripture merely privileges the reigning mindset of whatever group happens to be reading the text, and, through a sleight-of-hand technique, inserts this as the authorial intent. This is what disables the Church's Tradition from having any authority for them, and it's what makes talking about the scriptural evidence regarding the pracitce of the invocation of the saints so frustratingly difficult. The scriptural evidence is immediately assimilated to the dogmatic consciousness of the group/individual reading the text, bypassing the historical context and historical arguments (i.e., either the reply is, "no, that verse means X," or else "God would not require us to need sources outside of the bible to shed light on the bible. The bible says that it is sufficient for all things. Are you calling God a liar? Why would He play these tricky games with us if He wants everyone to read the bible and know His will personally? It doesn't make sense..." etc.). I'm not sure how to properly address the obstacle of this dogmatic gag-reflex without writing another paper, frankly.
In the comments of this news article, there is a great story explaining one element of disunion -- or a grave obstacle to union -- between the Orthodox Catholic and the Roman Catholic Churches.
The comments of one Glen seem to hit the nail on the head with regard to differences. As discussion of the merits and possibility of a reunion between the Orthodox and the Roman Catholics was underway, Glen wrote this:
I’d like to interject a bit of practicality in this discussion as well. My wife is Polish. We met in Poland and married there while I was an assistant professor at the University in Poznan. She was raised as a devout Roman Catholic. I had been raised as a Protestant fundamentalist. We didn’t discuss religion much while dating (I know, bad mistake.)
After marriage, we moved to the U.S. and started attending church with my family at a Pentecostal church. A short while later, we moved away from my hometown for me to pursue a career, and we stopped going to church at all. A few years back, we started planning a baby, and my wife said that she would not even consider a child until we rejoined a church.
I said, okay, and started shopping for a protestant church. My wife went into full-scale rebellion. She absolutely refused to join a protestant church again. She had been miserable the first time, and saw no reason to revisit the experience.
To make her happy, I agreed to visit a Roman Catholic Church. I had attended mass frequently in Poland, and figured I knew what to expect. We attended a local Roman Catholic Church in Orlando, Florida for the mid-afternoon mass on Sunday.
The church was extremely modern, and looked more like a protestant church than the churches in Europe. The mass started with the priest, barely vested, walking around and talking to the vistors with a microphone. The mass proceeded with a few rock-n-roll songs and then the Host was distributed – by female Eucharistic ministers. My wife came UNGLUED. She started yelling at me in Polish that this couldn’t be a Roman Catholic Church. I told her to calm down. After the mass, we left and my wife kept asking, “Does the Pope know about this? Does the Pope know about this?”
Eventually we found our way into Orthodoxy. I’d like to say that it was for some kind of grand attachment to Orthodox Theology, but I can’t really. While I do think that Orthodoxy has superior merits in many regards to Roman Catholicism, I wouldn’t have stood on such principles had my wife been happy to be Catholic in the United States. Really, it came down to the fact that my wife was disgusted by the liberal church practices in the U.S., and didn’t want to be part of it. At the same time, I saw no real reason to join a Roman Church whose mass was little different from the rock-n-roll revivals I had grown up with. I figured that I might as well stay protestant if the Romans were going to offer me the same thing.
In Orthodoxy, my wife believes that she has found the church in which she was raised. If we lived in Poland, we would most likely simply be Catholic. As we are in the United States, we have to either be Greek Catholic or Orthodox to find the mystery and the majesty of the Divine Liturgy. We have no interest in being Greek Catholic, because we know many of them (including not a few priests), and they are among the most miserable people I know. The Roman bishops do not value their uniqueness or the traditions, and they spend almost all their time complaining about their treatment by the Roman Catholic hierarchy.
In short, I know that there are real Theological differences between the Orthodox and Roman Catholic Church. These are important, but for a lay person like myself, they are not the primary problem. The primary problem at this time for us in the pews, is that the current debased liturgical practices of the Roman Church are an embarrassment. They are, in fact, a scandal. The Roman Church must repair these serious deficiencies before I could ever partake of a chalice offered by a priest of the Roman Rite.
As a lay man, I don’t have the background to discuss ecclesiology, or purgatory, or the Immaculate Conception. Not really. But I do know if the liturgy inspires me and facilitates an encounter with God, or if the blaring of electric guitars is a distraction followed by being offered the Holy Host by a female lay woman.
After the conversation went forward some with a dozen or so posts by a dozen or so people, he responded to an accusation that he was anti-Catholic by writing:
I don’t have anything against the Roman Catholic Church. I have immense respect for Pope Benedict, as I had for his predecessor. Not being ‘ethnically’ Orthodox, I don’t have a dog in these Orthodox/Catholic struggles which are historically rooted. I understand the bitterness, as a historian, of the Catholic Poles versus the Orthodox Russians or the Catholic Italians versus the Orthodox Greeks. Understanding, however, is a long ways from condoning the ongoing bitterness on both sides. Eventually, you have to forgive and forget, which I think was Pope John Paul II’s message when visiting Greece.
I don’t consider your comments to be Catholic apologetics in any fashion. The Roman Church is important, and has contributed a great many things to the world that are positive. It is a bedrock of resistance, at least as far the Vatican is concerned, to the relativism that Pope Benedict XVI has decried.
Yes, my wife and I did try some other masses at other churches. The fact was, however, that every parish in our area sponsors ‘charismatic’ masses or ‘polka’ masses, or ‘Latin’ music masses. Every parish we looked at had women Eucharistic ministers. We even attended some baptisms of family friends, and were immensely turned off by the casual, non-sacramental way in which they were conducted.
Dan – converting to Orthodoxy was the hardest thing my wife has ever done. Her family was upset and angry for months. They accused her of turning her back on her nation and her heritage. For a Pole to become Orthodox was tatamount to renouncing her Polish citizenship and seeking to become Russian, in the minds of her family anyway. This was not done lightly, I assure you. Even today, in the OCA, my wife finds herself feeling uncomfortable with the Russian-feel of so many small ‘t’ traditions.
If we could have spared her this by joining the Roman Church, then we would have. Believe me.
The problem, as I said, was the degradation of the Roman Catholic worship. We couldn’t get past it. We looked at various ‘resistance’ Roman Catholic Churches that still practice the Tridentine Mass, but what was the point of that? We also considered Byzantine Rite Catholic, but that seemed to be a blind alley. As I said, we have numerous friends (many clergy) who are Uniates, and they were all miserable.
We originally came into a Greek parish. We stayed there for about four years, but eventually got tired of the Greek language and the Greek ethnic superiority. We are happy with the OCA, having been there now for almost a year and one Pascha. I love the Orthodox Church, its liturgy and its beauty. My wife is happy also. We worship liturgically, respectfully, reverentially, and in English. We have all that we need.
Could things be better? I believe that the Roman Church as shown in the funeral of Pope John Paul II is a place I could be at rest. It is the church whose masses I attended in small villages in Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. If that Church comes back to American shores, then we will have something real to talk about. As long as the Roman Church is riddled with liberal bishops and clergy who are trying to protestantize the faith, unity will be an impossiblity.
Yes, I know that political liberals abound in Orthodoxy, and they bother the stew out of me. But they have had precious little impact on the worship of the church. We have no electric guitars, we still fast, we still practice ascetic discipline, we still take up our cross. The Romans need to re-learn these things in the U.S., and the Orthodox can teach them.
On the other hand, the Romans can teach the Orthodox many things as well. As I said, I don’t have a dog in the Roman-Orthodox fight, I’m just a lay schmuck trying to raise a family and prepare for eternal life. As far as I’m concerned, I’d like to see these problems behind us and all of us on one team, just not at the expense of the things that really, really matter.
I can't offer a more hearty "Amen" to this.
I wish things were different, too, but I can't sacrifice the truth of the faith and the fullness of life in Christ for what I have found in every Roman Catholic church I have attended. Every time I go, I really want to be surprised and won-over.
But Glen is correct about Tridentine Rite parishes: what's the point? What's the point of being a minority that's officially considered "just an option" when the "option" you represent is really normative and Spirit-given, as opposed to what has inserted itself as normative. There's no point in staying.
It's the same way in the Anglican communion for Anglo-Catholics. Really, what's the point? You're just tolerated. The traditions represented are indeed beautiful, but under such conditions, one can really only be a sectarian, along with all the psychological, social and spiritual baggage that brings. Isolated and alone, the good things that Tridentines and Anglo-Catholics stand for become the occasion for the strangest kinds of things and some very odd sins. If one is to grow in Christ, one needs a healthy church family which has the Church at its back, which has all who share in the One Cup in spiritual "solidarity" with each other, in Christ as He is known in the apostolic teaching.
If one is to focus on the Person of Jesus Christ, to keep His commandments and to follow in His paths; if one is to struggle to acquire the Holy Spirit and to keep oneself from the stain of sin; if one is to learn to love one's brother with Christ's love; then one cannot be part of some threatened minority community whose identity is rooted in liturgical and ethical (concerning one's ethos) differentiation from a larger community that one is nested within and which is hostile to the exotic marks of distinction that one's sub-community holds to. Those distinguishing marks may be well and good, but by living within such a tension, these very things become perverse, they swell out of proportion and become grotesque.
The Revivalist Protestants I know wisely call this "majoring in the minors." We might rightly accuse them of throwing out and being hostile to many of the sacramental means Christ has instituted by which He moves into our lives, but at least their focus is not on digging their heels in on right liturgical rubrics in the face of a sea of opposition. That makes for an environment that is not livable. I suppose this post is, in part, about a major reason why I left Anglo-Catholicism to seek all that it taught me to love in a place where those things thrived, and were normative, not the eccentric teachings of an ecclesioclique.
Two Sunday evenings ago I had a conversation with a Calvinist friend of mine about several areas of mutual interest.
One interesting thing he said to me was that I was "much better read" than him in the scriptures, and in general. I said, with a loving grin, "but you still don't trust me." He replied that it's not that he doesn't trust me, it's not about him vs. me, it's about the disagreement he sees between me and others whom he is very confident in -- Calvin, Edwards, and some other names I can't recall.
There is a different canon of saints in our respective ecclesial lives. This has broad implications. I have a paper written about this somewhere. I should dig it up.
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.
