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.
As I was ranging over one of the courses I took this past semester, I thought about the title to a book that came out not too long ago: War is a Force that Gives us Meaning. In the class I took, historical material was covered in the most superficial way, and contemporary texts (which were often enough nothing more than news-media articles about social justice issues) were brought in to supplement these and to give them historical "relevance."
It's this social justice element that caught my attention. I would have taught this class differently: the students would have been thinking about theology, and no women's rights or power-issues or whatever. They would have had a robust exposure to each period and the issues that were native to each context: I would not have used these ancient writers as a foil for reinforcing and clarifying pre-existent prejudices.
Then I realized: it's war. The social-justicy stuff is simply a conflict to amp-up emotional force to keep some kind of motive power up so that the institution can justify itself. It gives a sense of meaning.
This gave me a window into modern sports culture and reality TV: in the absence of real meaning, people line up behind their favorite sports team or their TV idol to emotionally invest, not in the cause, but in the team or individual's conflicts. Meaning is simple, and is determined by the projected goal of victory.
Then I realized that although the monastic ideal sits rather precariously within the context of the modern academy, which has no ethical commitments or ascetical practices or spiritual ideals, a particular form of the monastic ideal does lie at the root of all of our modern forms of academic pursuit; without this foundation, however, the abandoned child of the academy can only seek shelter in the adopted arms of industry, or else adopt social justice as its pet ascesis, or as its ascetical chatter.
"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.
Moments ago I rose up to play the Mediaeval Baebes album containing the song below, drawn by memory of it. Say what you will about their voices, the arrangement, etc. -- I enjoy it (I was initially put off by the marketing schtick used to try and sell this group as sexy, so I avoided them until I finally listened to them).
I don't know how much prep time went into rehearsing this music before it was recorded. I think it can be reasonably assumed that they spent at least a week, though that may be an over- or under-estimation. I can play any track on this CD and instantly access the fruit of this prep-work. I do not need to find and organize local talent, or organize the schedule of many people to make it happen. In short: I do not need to wait for an important occasion when local people might prepare for something like this and perform it, I do not need to wait for a festival.
Why the absence of festivals in this Secular Winter? Because we can access many of the features specific to a festival at our leisure. There is no need for a festival, there is no demand for aligning the experience of things like this with public rhythms, since they are available at any moment in the idiosyncratic rhythm of my daily life, which dances to other tunes than that laid down by our public life (no matter how many signs they put up, I always miss voting days) or the cycles of creation.
The absence of festival is isolating. Private consumption of music media always has a perverse and isolating element to it, like masturbating. It's not the same as singing a tune solo in echo of such occasions, or songs meant to be sung while one is daily laboring (I think of the psalms and their appointed hours). The component parts of a public festival have been stripped from it and made goods to be (optionally) bought for private consumption. Even the presentation of an otherwise wonderful song (the video below) must dance to the tune of conventions created for isolated viewers, conventions completely at odds with the spirit of the song, or the spirit of song per se.
I am greatly consoled that people still get together to form music bands, and that people still go out to see them play live. Unfortunately, this is still not quite festival, though it touches upon it. Bars and pubs have always been a bastion of a certain kind of festival, even if an alien element has been introduced to pub festivity since the rise of easily portable media forms.
The only real Festival I know of is the Divine Liturgy. Although the Divine Liturgy is no longer public in Secular Modernity, but the activity of a private, voluntary association, this voluntary association still has much the same form as a family group -- that is, though one can leave it, it still has some involuntary elements to it, keeping it from simply being the idiosyncratic preference of a consumer group.
My car was hit last night by a drunk driver. She was taken into custody for DUI. My daughter and I are both well, though my back hurts, my leg hurts, my hip hurts, and I feel a little stupid. Pray for us, and for the other driver -- her name is Nicole.
This past Friday my Godparents visited us. It was delightful to see them, though it's difficult to know how to spend time with them since it's been so long -- years, really, and both of them were raised in very different family cultures then I was (very much traditional American Anglo-Saxon Protestant and a restrained liberal American Jewish family cultures, respectively, which work well together, but are very different from the crass heart-on-sleeve Welsh/Irish amalgam I was raised in). I love them, and after not very long at all things started to take a certain shape -- the conversational tone found a comfortable spot, the topics drifted into and out of each other smoothly, there was a good give and take (and probably an extra give on my part), but all went well. It was a delightful visit, especially after so long (two years or more, I think).
I was cleaning up the kitchen somewhat after they left, and as my wife and daughter had gone off to bed, when I emptied the pot of "Ancient Trees" tea that we had let brew that evening. They both had a cup of tea, and so did my wife, so it was not wasted, but there was so very much tea left over, and it could probably have had hot water added to it two more times before really diluting.
Something about the leftover tea bothered me. It wasn't that the tea is expensive, though that somehow contributed to the sense of the tea being "important." It wasn't that there was a wasted resource there, though that somehow registered a problem, that the wasted tea was merely collateral for something else. I think it was the formlessness of the whole thing that bothered me.
I've been reading pieces from Adam Gopnik's book Paris to the Moon lately for a paper I'm trying to bring out of rough draft form. One of the passages in it is telling (even if oversimplified and exaggerated):
New York is devoted to the cult of busyness, but like all cults, it has as its heart the worship of a single, unforgiving idol, the office. After the idol has been served, life can be pretty formless. The things Americans miss [when they leave the States] tend to involve that kind of formlessness, small, casual, and solitary pleasures.
As I emptied the teapot I thought of a tea-ceremony that was somehow aborted, never having arrived. There is something wonderfully liberating about ritual, something that is usually missed by modernist Americans who can only see in ritual a kind of stultifying "formalism" (when it's not Asian, that is). I remember an acquaintance of mine, Ray, mentioning this problem after reading Adorno's Minima Moralia: one of the centuries following the Enlightenment (the 19th?) decided to throw off the constricting role of ritual in social relations, thinking that spontaneous and authentic forms of interaction would follow, that people would be freed to truly be present to one another by abandoning these traditions. It turned out that when the rituals were done away with, there wasn't even a common language in which to signify the consideration they hoped would be ungagged and unshackled by this "liberation."
Something about that tea signified the presence of that "freedom," and the dearth of richness that social visits often seem to suffer from as a result. My wife seems to feel the truth of this in her heart, for she tries to impose a form to visits that are often rejected by Americans as awkward and artificial (even if they capitulate). There's something to be said about traditions when one visits. My prayerbook says that the same prayers one prays at the opening of the morning and evening prayers should be prayed when one enters a Church. The prayerbook also says that they must be prayed when entering a Christian home, and only after they are prayed should one turn to greet the other person.
Friends! For the sake of hospitality, for the sake of true communion, let us do what we can to recover these things. Let us not make the extra energy involved, the initial awkwardness, or our exhaustion from the other predations of modernity a pretense for leaving off from this work. It happens now, or it does not happen. The iron is hot. It will grow cold. We must strike now.
I was in the local Whole Foods last night, picking up 4 pounds of 85% Lean Ground Beef, when I saw this very handsomely arranged troupe of Black Forest Ham slices in the display case. As I looked, I wondered: where is the Black Forest after which the ham is named? Is there such a place, or did Black Forest Ham get its name for another reason?
The whole encounter (at a very standardized and well-organized store that caters generally to a trend across the population of all States in the US) left me longing for two things -- for local culture, and for a world in which such enigmatic and legend-laced places such as The Black Forest were local places, and places actually different from every other place.
Everything seems so homogenous, it makes man homogenous, one dimensional, and easily manipulable or at least easily arranged so as to have predictable success in selling to him.
Industry and commerce have homogenized man by homogenizing his world. You can get Black Forest Ham anywhere.
Behold, children are a heritage from the LORD, The fruit of the womb is a reward. Like arrows in the hand of a warrior, So are the children of one’s youth. Happy is the man who has his quiver full of them; They shall not be ashamed, But shall speak with their enemies in the gate.
(Psalm 127:3-5)
There are too many entropic forces working against a family - or a tradition - for it to survive with a minimal crew.
A family tradition is impossible to maintain without a large family. There will always be attrition from the family tradition (and from the family), and so there must be a large stable trunk of a population to maintain the tradition. Further, for a tradition to be maintained as a culture, it must be shared, and shared widely. Thus, the more members of the family there are, the more of a clear sense of belonging there is, the more opportunities for clarifying and embedding oneself in it, etc. In a secular modern culture, where families are small and geographically separated, they can only share a life by coming together, and they can only come together in certain contexts, and in secular modern culture those contexts are determined by powers that do not wish for you to have a family culture, but wish to generate homogeneity that allows for economic and political stability via an engineered route. In a secular culture, small families will never have enough of a population to be satisfied amongs themselves, and the the individuals who compose them will constantly be transgressing the boundaries of the family to seek fellowship and belonging outside of themselves. That would be fine if there was a clan or a tribe which shared a large tradition, but it does not work in secular modernity - the context becomes the school, which is itself largely enslaved to the limits set by the conditionings that the media provides.
Stable families and their traditions offer the stable basis for society, but they are a threat to alternative forms of stability and unity, and so they must be crushed. A wonderful vehicle for this destabilizing is the commodification and exaltation of romantic love, which was _never_ thought to be a fulfilling force before. Look at the Greeks. Listen to traditional Irish music. It usually ends in death, though it now ends in divorce, and the death of things that can't be dissected with a scalpel, so we don't recognize the kinds of deaths that it wreaks nowadays.
I had one previous post and another about Voiding. The Void has a poliltical and an economic manifestation: it wills to break up all things, and to be the only stability around. It is a rapaciously hungry god, and it cannot ever be sated. We have known him, or his father, for a long time by another name than "Void."
