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.
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.
My wife is reading This Holy Man, a book about Metropolitan Anthony by one of his spiritual daughters.
Met. Anthony was very warm to RC/Orth. relations early on in his episcopate, but towards the end he became much cooler after years of ecumenical relations. He made many statements, both private and official, that reflected this negative attitude. One of them was a private comment of what somone from the Roman Catholic "Secretariat for Christian Unity" is reported to have said on one occasion:
"Orthodoxy is only tolerated by Rome until that time when it shall have been conquered completely, and does not exist anymore."
He thus became less than enthusiastic about RCC/Orthodox relations.
We need to be honest about the past, but not feel that every injustice must be remembered for retribution. We must also be honest with and about each other, and this becomes difficult when the effects of such honesty can run counter to the intimacy and even repaired communion that the RCC and the OC both would like to have with one another. Further, we must be honest about the sins we both commit, without essentializing it and consigning either ourselves or the other to a bin of malign iniquity.
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.
An article was recently brought to my attention where an Orthodox priest in Russia, working with immigrants, was murdered - almost certainly by a Muslim angry about the fact that 80-plus chrismations of people from traditional Muslim societies had taken place under his influence and direction. The article does not say this, but it's difficult to see it from any other angle.
I wish very much to think well of Islam, but I am constantly thwarted by actions like this that seem to be motivated by the plain meaning of Muhammad's teachings, rather than being motivated by bad people hijacking a good religion.
I am more and more persuaded that the reason why people can live in Islamic societies at all, with any degree of humanity, is because, by the providence of the all-holy Spirit, good people are hijacking a bad religion. Thus the many good Muslims I meet. Christ God preserve such as these in their virtue from the poison that lies so close at hand, even if that venom is far from their hearts!
"You wish to comprehend the incomprehensible; but can you understand
how the inward sorrows with which your heart is overwhelmed overtake
you, and can you find, except in the Lord, the means to drive them
away? Learn at first, with your heart, how to free yourself from
sorrows, how to ensure peace in your heart, and then, if necessary,
philosophise on the incomprehensible, for "if ye then be not able to do
that thing which is least, why take ye thought for the rest? (Luke
12:26)."
St. John of Kronstadt
This word of St. John will rise up to judge me at the Last Day.
