Sometimes the world seems to leave you no option but to ’spill everyone’s blood’, so to speak, no room for peace at all, because it will keep coming until you respond and leave you no response but to defeat it.

I think this is one of the great traps of the world. I don’t think the world always wants to win. I think the world sometimes wants you to do what it takes to defeat it, because doing that will be gruesome and require you to become something you don’t want to be – it pulls you into the battle, so you have to destroy your enemies in order to defend your loved ones.

This is how the world defeats strong men. The world wins by making itself vulnerable to defeat, but only by a bare margin that requires maximum suffering to accomplish, and then it attacks your loved ones until it leaves you no choice. This is, in fact, the theory of war currently at work in the world. I don’t mean that I sympathize with the Cheneys and Rumsfelds and the men behind the scenes (e.g. in The Family). I mean that even the innocent are pulled into the kinds of fights the Cheneys and the Rumsfelds wage, precisely so that we can cease to be innocent. It seems to be the goal to corrupt us all. If someone beats down your family member and makes it to where you have to become a beater to protect him/her, then it corrupts you quite successfully. Happy are the martyrs more than the fighters.

This is my Faith, that one definition of Death is that there is not always a just, good, or right decision. But that sometimes all decisions sully us, because what is broken, in Death, is not just our moral capacity, but the world itself, and all things related to our existence. Death is the great problem, not sin. Death causes sin, even unavoidable sin, because it has broken everything. This is why we pray “my sins voluntary and involuntary, in knowledge and in ignorance” – because even though Death breaks our will, it goes further to break the very possibility of a right choice – it leaves only ones, at times, that are all wrong. Likewise, Death doesn’t just break our knowledge of good and evil, but it goes farther to break the possibility of knowledge of what is good or evil in many cases. So we pray “voluntary and involuntary, in knowledge and in ignorance”, because Death didn’t/doesn’t just break us, it broke/breaks all our works, all we have made, all the processes involved in working and making, and it broke/keeps breaking the entire cosmos, and every principle of the cosmos, so that it turns in on itself, with decaying, entropy, dying, corruption, conflict, fragmentation, and dissolution. The volcanos rage and the hurricanes destroy and the species wipe each other out and we club each other and put each other in chains and make tools out of one another, defacing and depersonalizing ourselves and others, because of Death at work still unraveling it all – defacing and depersonalizing it all.

And when it’s all done, all that will be left of all that is in Death’s power is a void, and not even the void, because that at least is a concept of something. Death itself will remain, unable to find or consume anything left that is not Death, and endlessly consuming itself.

Death is therefore the one thing against which Christ set himself, the hero, to destroy – the Destroyer. Not the “world, the flesh, and the devil”, as the Protestants like to say, but Death. He both overcame the world and trampled the Evil One, by overcoming Death, which is why the enemy didn’t see it coming. Crushing one enemy and leaving another? No, Death is the cause of all our passions, and our complicity with the world and bondage to the enemy. The curse was not “you will be cast from Eden into the world” – that came after. The curse was not “the serpent will bite your heel” – that came after. The curse, as it’s often called, is Death – the meaning of all curses. The only possible curse. The definition of “curse”. But because of my sins and mercy, and as a mercy for space to repent, I live in Death, granted life in the world and a life of animosity with the Evil One, because any living at all is a mercy, because it is living in and through the energies of God. But I experience Death, in my sins – experience the brokenness, and so again… for what I have done, for what I do, for what I will do… with knowledge and without it, in my will and against it… mercy. Mercy.

Addendum: I recently became able to choose whether to be depressed. It’s hard to explain to people who are physiologically standard – I won’t say “normal” – none of us is normal – Death just wreaks upon us unique ‘kindnesses’ based on our unique personalities – hard to explain what it’s like not to have had a choice all one’s life – not to have the physiological conditions necessary to make a choice – so that Death gets in behind your will and owns you from there, like its puppet. You either know, or you can’t imagine. It’s not without the help of some pretty helpful supplements that this has been overcome – and no, I won’t write about them – I don’t make prescriptions – we are not generic, you and I, even if some people have standard equipment. But with this help, I have a choice now. It’s like being blind all one’s life and then discovering you were made for seeing, because there’s healing mud in your eyes. But seeing doesn’t take away what you saw with blind eyes – it enhances your vision, in fact. You see more horror, too, with open eyes than blind ones.

But while I have a choice, I have decided not to let Death have despair out of me, too. It is one thing to constantly get cut to one’s knees, and sometimes for some people all responses to it are equally devastating choices – depression, destruction, whatever. You can’t judge them – you would be foolish to do so. I have been foolish, in my life – I know. It is another thing entirely to surrender what you have a choice about surrendering, out of despair. Despair is not the same thing as what people call “clinical depression”. Both are results of Death, but they’re not entirely the same. The depressed person, physiologically so, has no choice about despair. His will is ravaged by Death. If you are granted life with a way to fight depression, you may begin to recover that choice – that ability to choose not to despair. And that’s what I’ve been given and what I’m not giving back. What is needed is acknowledgment of the gruesome truth of Death at work in the world, not pansy-ass prettying up the situation – not the “just think positive thoughts and Death will have no power…” Gee, Christ really blew it then, didn’t He? He didn’t have to die for all of us to conquer Death – he could have just thought some positive thoughts for all of us! What is needed is acknowledgment, but with defiance. Acknowledgment without willing surrender, where you can find your will. You set your will to fight whether you’ll win or not. Do you have the courage for that? Or do you have to win to have ‘courage’? That’s the question I put to myself when even the barest temptation to depression comes now. I find myself faced with untenable choices on all sides, but I have at last this choice. To make the untenable choice, to sin perhaps, but without despair. With sadness, with remorse, and to confess and to repent, but without despair. Glory be to God.

Addendum Too: By the way, someone once demanded an answer to this question: “If Christ has destroyed Death, defeated the Evil One, and overcome the World, in fact has redeemed the World, isn’t the World redeemed, and therefore shouldn’t we immerse ourselves in it? And why then do we still see Death? So either Christ didn’t do these things, or he did – either one leaves you saying things that make no sense.” Superficially, this is an intelligent question. But it contains some flawed assumptions, much like Origen’s problematic. He was proud of his question, but it was a false one. Protestants will tell you that you have to “accept” these things for them to be true for you – an ultimately subjectivist rendering which, if you’re paying attention to anything, can’t make any sense. So let’s just get it out of the way, I’m not going to say something like that. I can give a discourse on synergy, on free will, on theosis, and perhaps say some true things in response, but the asker of the above question won’t hear them, because the question itself is being asked from Death. Death is the condition out of which it comes, and into which all answers to it will be rendered. Sometimes answering a person is not as useful as responding. I will respond, tho frankly I don’t do it often, and probably won’t be doing it again soon. And I won’t use illustrations like tearing down a jail and the prisoners being unwilling to leave, or proving a concept untrue only to find that the other person wishes to keep believing it, or exposing a huxter only to have people still following him – even claiming they’re still hearing from him and his flying saucer after he died of some disease he wasn’t supposed to be able to get. We’ve all experienced those things or know people who have or know people who know people. What good will more illustrations do? If you can’t look around you for references, my description won’t help. I have given answers of all kinds in the past, and there are many, and many are true, but that doesn’t mean they’re doing the other person any good.

The question is based on a theoretical – if/then. I will simply respond that I don’t have to answer an if /then because I am not referring to merely theoretical events – rather, you have to answer a did / did not. If you determine, really, if the events I refer to happened, your question will change.  The same if you determine they didn’t. But I do not agree to what your question is really asking me to do – that is to stake historical events on a theoretical condition. In other words, I don’t have to satisfy your understanding of theoretical matters in order for historical events to be truthful or not – the order of priority in a sane epistemology is that what is governs and supersedes what I think – if it’s the other way around – if a did/did not actually depends upon a what if or an if/then as a rule – then we all become neurotic solipsists living in worlds we dream up in our heads. A thing is so or not so (did/did not) regardless of whether your understanding of it is satisfied. Get the so or not so first, then you get more understanding (or less, if you got it wrong).

So that’s it. Your question offers a false means of analysis – a false epistemology and, frankly, an ultimately subjective one. You would be more at home asking it to the Protestants who will likely give you exactly the kind of answer you are hoping for, one way or another. I will not pretend it’s a legitimate question. Again: you first answer the did / did not (Did Christ destroy Death? Did Christ defeat the Enemy. Did Christ overcome the world and redeem it?), and then ask questions appropriate to what is or is not. A question staked on a theoretical doesn’t yield understanding – it just yields another theoretical, and I’m not in that business. Once more, because some infernal wretch will insist I repeat it in different words, if I don’t do so from the outset, you do not, logically get an is from an if.  How you answer the historical questions will determine not only your next question but its context – whether it is asked out of Death or something else. And then again, if the order of your analysis is incorrect, I or hopefully someone else, since I was unlikely to do it even this time let alone later, will show you again where you have gotten the order wrong.

If you were looking for a profound answer, rather than a response, that presumes your question is meritorious – but it isn’t – it’s fallacious and cannot be met but with an answer that not only slanders our Faith, but also leads you astray in your own mind, thinking you know how to think. Your epistemology is just as affected by Death as everything else is, in other words. And I can’t help you with that. I can barely help myself. So if I seem a bit negative, it’s because I’m telling you I’m no guru and not going to have wisdom that I’d dare to share with you, lest it run out of my fingers, coil up and become a serpent, and strike us both dead. I have responded, which is what we do when to answer a question would be to falsely accept as real the ground presumed by the questioner, thereby fooling both of us, me into thinking I’m wise, and you into thinking you have figured out something real. Better we don’t understand one another at all, than that. Good luck, by which I mean without presumption, “God have mercy on us both, and by your prayers save me, the sinner.”

It astonishes me – the casualness, the callousness, the stupid matter-of-factness with which people can discuss euthanasia. People discuss putting their family members to sleep with only slightly more gravity than putting a pet to sleep. Why is abortion given a greater level of discretion in conversation than “pulling the plug”? Because starving someone to death and taking them off life support is considered a more humane way to kill them than vacuuming off their limbs and crushing their skull?

Let it be known that I don’t want anyone deciding when it’s time for me to die. I’ll fight to the last moment, thank you. And the same goes for my family. There’s all kinds of pious crap put out by religious fanatics (and they are fanatics, when we’re talking about neglect and murder) — all kinds of garbage about not using extraordinary means to save us. Who decides what’s extraordinary? The world? By this logic, why use CPR on a drowning victim? It may be their time, right? I hate this with my whole heart. I will fight to the end, I will sustain my family with everything in me, and I will not set an example of pushing myself out on an ice flow so as not to be a burden. That’s the culture of savages, not of Christ. People are not burdens, they’re not expendable, and they’re not ‘in the way’.

In fact, when I hear the words of Christians justifying the Culture of Convenience, the Culture of “Don’t get in my way” (to borrow from Franky Schaeffer), of “Don’t burden me”, I breathe and spit. This is the Enemy we’ve known from of old, and it has infected the minds of the faithful with the silky foulness of the demonic.

It’s worse, of course, to kill someone or abandon them or neglect them to death than to talk about killing them. But the fact that there’s no shame, that’s it’s considered a normal part of polite conversation makes me want to vomit. And I’m supposed to express condolences at their loss? That kind of “sensitivity” is the same kind that would congratulate someone for fornicating, because they’re now in a meaningful relationship.

Human life is an absolute value. I really hate this culture, its transvaluation of ethics, and all it represents. Most of all, it represents a culture of sacrifice, as Rand pointed out. A culture of expending some for the sake of others. You see it in our resource wars, in the way we drive on the freeway, and in the institutionalization of medical care not as a saving charity but as a kind of semi-benign curse. After all, we’re the only country of this level of wealth where you can go bankrupt from receiving medical care, and die when the last pennies run out. Every other society with this much money, considers that barbaric. Here, we figure the laws of the market outweigh the cost of sustaining your existence.

Scorn, derision, excrement upon this culture.

Orthodox thinking doesn’t pair adjectives with the word “God”.

As I watch a spokesman for a group of fundamentalists talk about how “God is not a condemning god”, I realize that a simple way to express our apophaticism is to respond: Orthodox thinking doesn’t pair adjectives with the word “God”.

God is incomparable, indescribable, beyond understanding, not susceptible to analogy, and even these words cannot be considered attributes of God, but only descriptions of our unknowing.

The temptation in the culture is strong, to personalize and customize God, to make a god that does not worry or scare us, a god we understand, that fits our ideas, and fits our expectations. But there is no such deity. As surely as a stone idol, the god of our imagination is just that – imaginary. In regard to that, we can only be atheists.

People feel uncomfortable not being able to say “God is loving” or “God is just”, despite the fact that their own scriptures contradict them constantly, because they are referring to created concepts that exist only in their minds. But God cannot be expressed in Dixie Cup sayings or Hallmark sentiments.

The word “God” is not a name, but refers to our inability to know – to the impossibility of attaining to knowledge of God. The word “God” is a confession that there is something that doesn’t even share what we think of as existence. If God exists, then we do not, and vice versa.

If God could be contained in created human concepts, then he would be a small “god”, less than the concepts that contain him – he would be a homonculus, not God. But we reject as heresy the very attempt to approach knowledge of God through religious philosophy, which can only sculpt idols from ideas that were once carved out of wood.

God is so unknowable, that we cannot even refer to God as unknowable. God is so beyond the possibility of human knowledge, that if God were there, real, existed (all words we cannot use of God), it would be irrelevant to our understanding.

In fact, the only way for God to be known is to make Himself known, on his own initiative, and then to be known, since God cannot be contained in human thoughts, God would have to become man, and indeed make possible the union of God and man without the reduction of one or destruction of the other: The Incarnation, which only the Orthodox hold to in its fullness. Even then, we would have no understanding of God’s essence, but rather union with God through the person of the Incarnate One. We would know love, as God’s uncreated energy, which is God, but we would not know the essence. Rather, we would know love through the person, through Christ. The same is true of justice. And mercy. And so on. We would know God by grace, through grace, and in a particular person, Jesus Christ.

We would no then claim to “know God” the way it is common to do among the heterodox, proceeding to describe God’s attribues. We would, however, recognize the activity of God toward us, through Christ. God loves us, God has mercy on us, God chastises us, and so on.

This is why when many heterodox begin a conversation with “Do you believe God exists?” or “Do you believe God is a loving God?” or “Do you believe God is love?” I say “no”. Given what and how they’re asking, I prefer to swear off the wrong thing so we can talk about the true thing. Even when we Orthodox write that “God is love” we do not believe this refers to God’s essence, nor is this the name of a person. Rather, we refer to the energies of God, in humility, believing even then our understanding is neither comprehensive nor perfect. And any significant knowledge occurs only by interaction – synergy – and deep knowledge comes only to very advanced ascetics.

I was on the verge of coining a neologism: ethikotroge (or ethikotrogonist) when I discovered that I’m a flexitarian. I still might keep the overall neologism, since there is more than one reason for being a flexitarian. Someone looking at this in a public journal is likely to ask “What’s a flexitarian?”, so I’d better define it. A flexitarian is someone who eats a diet mainly without meat, but uses meat occasionally.

My reasons are ethical overall, and include reasons of good health. I’m a decided latitudinarian when it comes to being flexitarian.

• Often it’s just a matter of eating a much smaller portion of meat, and more vegetable matter, on the European mode, refusing to make meat the center of the meal. It’s a more balanced approach.
• Sometimes it’s leaving meat out of some meals altogether, refusing to treat it as less than a meal if it lacks meat. The hegemony of meat is irrational, and is repudiated, along with its basic contribution to the passions.
• Sometimes, it’s refusing to eat certain kinds of meat (like poultry), or any but free-range eggs. It has to do with ethical treatment of animals.
• It’s often refusing “meat products” that aren’t whole cuts of meat. No processed lunch meats, hot dogs, etc. Occasionally, though, I’ll do sausage as a cultural concession to Italian food.
• It includes avoiding establishments that specialize in particularly heinous use of meat, such as restaurants that serve shark fin, dog, lobster, or specialize in high-production poultry farming, or are McDonalds.
• It’s refusing meat when there’s a choice between low grade meat and high grade vegetable matter. For instance, Taco Bell is out (as essentially garbage-meat), but I’ll eat a steak on occasion.
• It’s refusing to eat meat that comes from severe environmental disruption, such as Brazilian beef.
• It’s refusing to over-complexify food (e.g. with processed food) with too many ingredients at once and, even in gourmet cooking, specializes in a form that uses few ingredients at one time.

It’s an attempt to reduce harmful impact on nature, some of the agony caused to animals, over-use – the gluttony of production, subterfuge – the mythology of ethical animal product production, subordination to passion-bearing foods that captivate and dominate the soul and senses and lead to various social ills as well as personal failings, an attempt to reduce negative health impacts from harmful feed and hormones (including natural feeds and hormones), an attempt to avoid excess and irrationality, and a repudiation of the basic assumptions of the dominant culture (which is always a good and healthy thing – in that regard, I tend to share the opinion of some fathers that even when the culture does good, it’s doing evil). Finally, I believe all death to be the result of my sin, and so to be evil, and want to keep this in mind, and keep an eschatological attitude, looking to the end of death, for which creation groans, and the peace between lion, lamb, and child.

At the same time, I have certain dietary needs tied to my own chemistry and physiology that generally require animal products, especially dairy. And there is a sense in which, unless it’s a fast, I think it can be a conditional good to participate in the feast (e.g. kill the fatted calf). I think, in fact, there’s a general duty to feast (on fish, at least), when it’s a Feast, in the same way it’s a law of the Church to fast during the Fasts. For these reasons, I eat some animal products.

The ultimate reason I’m a flexitarian is to assert, with action, and keep in mind always, that eating is not a n ethically neutral endeavour. Ethics are just as necessary and important there as in driving, investing, etc. So I’ll keep my new word, too, as the overall explanation.

Meanwhile, this also does two things in regard to Great Lent, Little Lent, and the other fasts. It means that it’s not such a horrible impact to “switch”, because it’s not switching, it’s a slightly more severe modification. And it carries the meaning and purposes of the Fasts into the rest of life and time, including the Feasts. So, I think there’s a strong religious benefit.

So that’s it, I’m either a very liberal flexitarian or a strict ethikotrogue.

References

• Wikipedia Entry
• About.com Entry
• Medicine.net Entry
• Associated Press
• American Dialect Society

Note to self: next entry is on ethical shopping (or non-shopping).

The TV news programs are drumming up the seige mentality again, for the nation of gluttony, over the growing starvation with which it has afflicted the world.

It blames high fuel costs, and blames those costs on China’s industrial growth rather than on America’s wars, before which fuel was reasonaby priced. It omits the fact that all US aid is required by federal law to be purchased from US farmers (at prices inflated by exports to wealthy countries), shipped on US carries (mega-conglomerates who charge a heady premium), and then (at high cost) transported inland for distribution. In other words, instead of supporting the local economies, buying local food, local transportation, creating local jobs, and unlimately distributing 80% or more on the dollar, we’re content through this graft to give all but 16% or so on the dollar, as a boost to the US economy while claiming it aids the poor of starving nations. In other words, the bulk of the charity makes US rich richer, and the US economic climate more comfortable, prices lower, access to goods easier, all on the backs of those dying every day from starvation.

This is the corrupt nation, beyond all corruption. The whore of history.

And now, too, biofuels are being blamed for sucking up grain (which is true to some extent, you eco-warriors!), but there’s no mention of where the lions share of grain goes – namely into high fructose corn syrup and syrup solids and other such products that now make up the bulk of the American food supply – from its corn-fed cattle, who would die from their diet if they weren’t slaughtered after being artificially fattened, to its corn-fed butterball children, crunching on McDonalds fries cooked in that oil, hamburgers fed on it, bread made from it, and so on. The majority of grain that could be used to feed the world, in other words, is going into pseudo-foods to fatten the already fat of the fattest nations – the ones that can afford such complex products.

So the truth is, this nation is starving the peoples of the world, the poor, the powerless. And it is this nation that possesses the guns needed to protect that hegemony. It is the law of the jungle, the law of baboons, sitting on top of food hordes, luxuriating in food products, and freely, intentionally starving its brothers, who could eat forever off our waste.

The processed food industry and the national obsession with meat is just part of the sickness. Warlike, militant posturing is the other part. And national pride and patriotism is the hellish doctrine at its root. We don’t see ourselves as part of everyone else. Christian doctrine is that we are. And so, ultimately, this behavior is heresy, apostasy, blasphemy.

That’s the truth about global starvation. And I don’t apologize for uttering it.

You know, in America, we’re all born into a culture of “once saved, always saved”. A Protestant-evangelical culture so strongly influenced by this tenet of Baptist religion, that even we Orthodox tend to think of ourselves as “in”, as somehow saved by affiliation, and somehow being of the Faith is reduced from a continual pattern of behavior to merely belonging to the right group.

It’s important to belong to the right group, but that doesn’t keep me from being a tare, a goat, and kindling for the fire. It doesn’t ensure that my lamp is trimmed and full of oil when the Bridegroom comes. It does not mean that I have visited Christ in prison, or given him a place when he was a stranger. And it won’t keep me from going into the Great Apostasy which is comprised not of heterodox, but of Orthodox Christians. In short, being Orthodox, if that’s a static affiliation or mere attendance at liturgy, or even being admitted to Holy Communion – won’t save me. Being Orthodox will save me, surely, but that’s because being Orthodox is so much more than that. The struggle is not to be called Orthodox, not to be regarded as Orthodox, not even to regard myself as Orthodox, but rather it is to actually continually BE Orthodox. There is no “saved”; there is only “being saved”. Often that phrase is used in the “I’m an unfinished work” manner, as an excuse, but there’s no excuse for lack of progress, for indolence, or for at any time being un-Christlike. There can be no excuse, since we are given what we need.

This leads us, with the fathers, to say “God knows his sheep; I am one of the goats.” and “All will be saved, while I alone am condemned.” and “Murderers will be saved before me.”

It is not really our business to apply these sayings to others – only to ourselves. The occasion I find to wonder what makes others tick is when they are Orthodox and persecuting me, or persecuting those I love, or persecuting each other. I watch them, and think about what they’re doing, and try to imagine what must be going on in their minds. And I think I have come to a conclusion, based on my own experience. They don’t fear judgment. They know, doctrinally, that there’s a Judgment. But they don’t know it prophetically – they don’t know it in such a way that it strikes to the heart the way it did David when, after he’d pronounced what should happen to the evildoer, the prophet replied to him, “Thou art that man!” And he was cut to the quick. He trembled, struck to the core. The words cut to the bone. They were a foretaste of the fire that burns away dross, be it flesh or soul.

When I see them come with the coals and pincers, I see that they don’t fear judgment. They feel secure. They do not believe that God is watching them, and will repay them as the sown wind reaps the whirlwind. They are not afraid; they are heedless. Their eschatology has fallen by the way. Indeed, they do not fear God. God who will bring vengeance and the sword. God who will judge us by the measure we use to judge. God who remembers our words so that we will hear them on that day, and records our deeds in the book of Judgment, so they will be recounted. God who preserves the witnesses, indeed our victims, great and small, who though they are going into the fire, will first turn and point the finger at me, and their punishment will be less, because I have caused them to stumble and harden their hearts against God. I may have been correct, but I was wrong; I may have accurately judged their sin, but mine was greater; they may have deserved judgment, but I presumed to be the Judge and meet it out to them, and so now I will receive such attention to my more numerous sins. And if I can’t see that my offenses are countless by comparison, then, say all the fathers, I am deluded, but even that delusion, brought on by my passion, will not save me.

Judgment comes. The Judge will sit enthroned. And all my life will be sifted. Weighed. Tried in a furnace. Melted away where it is dross.

I speak of this, because I know that I have not feared Judgment nearly as much as I would be wise to do. But when I see those who seem not to fear it at all, I am amazed. They do not believe the flood of fire is coming. It’s a vague theory, not a present reality. I don’t see how they can live – how they can bear an existence, actually, in which there is no Judgment. Truly, if there is no final accounting of all that men have done, then life is absurd, and all of us are madmen in a grand asylum, muttering useless convictions about nothing. Only where men give account of it all does life make sense, is rational worship possible.

Somehow, if we say that justice will be done, if I use that word, I seem to let myself off the hook – is it just that I will account for every little thing? But God’s justice is not my justice. It will indeed be every little thing. Every thing I’ve willingly or heedlessly forgotten. The mote I see as a speck. And there is a very real possibility I will go into the fire. Our teaching makes no bones about this. We are not guaranteed deliverance if we just attend liturgy some. We are told that the means of salvation is genuinely forgiving one another, not repaying evil for evil, loving the poor and outcast of the world and persecuting no one, treating others as we prefer to be treated, indeed loving them as ourselves. Without this, not to fear judgment is insane. I would believe that the persecutors have done all these things, since they seem to think so, except that they again bring the tongs and the flame, and wreak pain on their brothers.

Lord have mercy. I am kindling who desires to be useful wood, but am fit only for the fire. Burn me by their tongs, and purify me, that I might be saved from the eternal fire, forgiving them as Thou dost.

It’s an amazing thing. I live near two Orthodox mega-churches. They’re even on the same side of town as the other mega-churches. And they actually work the same way. There are a gazillion programs for people 20-40, for teens, for feminists… you name it, there’ a committee or a program for it. I think they have well over 2 dozen committees alone. But matins, served once a week, draws 3 people, 2 of whom are the reader and most junior priest. At the 20-40 group meetings, they eat and have cocktails, but there is no prayer, none at all. And if anyone tries to talk about Faith, they either get nowhere or are greeted with such misunderstanding of the doctrines and attitudes of the Church, that it’s almost better not to bring it up. Vespers, and other such services are similarly unattended. On Sunday, everyone sits in pews and watches the service. The choir sings invisibly from the sides, but most people don’t pray with them, or realize that’s a tradition – they seem to think it would be interrupting, or that they would miss the singing if they prayed. There are no icons except on the iconostasis. Even in the gigantic eating hall, there was only recently a single icon installed. The interior is whitewashed – whitewashed of the Saints. There are numerous windows, but far fewer Windows to Heaven.

During the substantial meals/buffets served after sunday morning liturgy, an aged junior priest has to run over and quickly say a blessing, so that it can be done before most people have started eating, but no one pays him any mind. There’s a general sense of the absence of God as a daily reality in our lives. There’s little prayer. There’s every manner of religious or atheistic theory from the culture, from heterodoxy, but very little understanding of Orthodox thinking. Enquirers classes for prospective converts focus mainly on the externals of how one gets received (Chrismation, etc. Almost never baptism.). What holds it together is the activities and groups, which provide social interaction for the members, but certainly not the services and vigils of the Church. There’s no sense of the basics going on; one may easily be invited out for steak dinners during Lent, etc. Eventually, tho, despite continual well-attended inquirers classes, chrismations, and new members, they reach an apex of their maximum size, because likewise there’s a steady stream of people that can’t figure out why they’re there, and attend less and less, and eventually drop off. Somehow, it doesn’t sustain them. So despite the huge influx that their size, programs, and marketing creates, their size remains fairly constant. You can determine size, incidentally, either by attending, by reading the headcount figures, or by the number of cars in the parking lot being ushered in or out by security guards on Sunday.

Now typically, if someone were to say all the above, he’d be considered judgmental. We don’t want to hear it, to believe it, to consider it, or to think about it’s implications. But this only underscores how unacceptable it is to have such a thing as the Orthodox Church. Perhaps I’m judgmental, but this doesn’t mean what I’ve described isn’t exactly what’s happening. We like to re-focus on the critic rather than the things being critiqued. So I don’t say it. Not much. Like so many other things, I keep fairly quiet about it. But it is painful to watch hungry souls slowly starve to death. Again, that will seem judgmental. I can only say that they actually describe this, fairly often, and don’t seem to know why it’s happening, because, after all, this is the Orthodox Church, right? They are convinced it’s the right place, but can’t figure out why it’s not sustaining them. And how can anyone tell them, without criticizing the Church, or the people that run it? What can one do?

I can only save myself, and my family, and with me those around me who want to save themselves, and we’re not trying to create an ‘alternative’. But we can’t survive at the mega-church, so we go elsewhere. There are almost no programs, and maybe one committee, but the full range of services is held and are well-attended, prayer accompanies everything, and icons and the attitudes and pieties that go with them are everywhere. It’s a safe-haven. A place of refuge. But more than that. The less we look behind, the more it really is for us just the fullness of Faith, in the Church. Perhaps I’m judgmental, but I don’t think it’s just a matter of preference, like a buffet, or a matter of misunderstanding, or of personal character; I don’t think it’s all about me, or all about the others finding the same experience. I think there really is something objectively wrong in large sectors of Orthodoxy, perhaps the largest sectors. And to express it objectively, I seize upon the most obvious objective facet – the absence of prayer. Where we eat, learn, gather, or do anything without prayer, that’s an objective absence of something that all the fathers and the scriptures warn against. That then, is what I consider typical or symptomatic of the larger issues which might be more subjectively defined. When you venture into a Church that doesn’t pray, you don’t have to judge, but you can say (just as at a meal where there is no food, or a bath with no water) that I have noticed something very important missing – perhaps the most important thing.

Welcome is Prayer.

The other night I went to hear a speaker at a local church, and they had me fill out a “visitor’s slip” for their database, and they expressed welcome both personally and corporately. They served an excellent meal. They had a renowned speaker. The priest introduced himself and took an interest. They seemed to go out of their way to make me feel welcome. But I didn’t feel welcome.

I felt like an outsider – somehow fundamentally outside the community. I felt like an outsider when prior to the lecture, they introduced the speaker, but there was no prayer. How does one share in listening, perhaps learning, without invoking the One it’s all for, and without whom it’s all vain? The speaker finished, and we were invited to eat, but there was no blessing of the food. Again, I felt outside – an outsider who had to say his prayers privately, as I do when I’m among the heterodox. Indeed, it felt a little like either I was heterodox, or they were. What had I done? Then the Q&A session began, again without prayer, so that we’re into a third hour without ever asking God’s help, his protection against passions, his guidance for our minds and ears, his strength against pride. And it quickly became an occasion for very uncomfortable comments that certainly were not fitting the piety of Holy Orthodoxy.

One can only hope that it ended with prayer; I can’t know, since I felt compelled to leave sometime during the questions, as did many others. I left even more an outsider. I was welcomed with words, but not with fellowship. I was welcomed with food but not with the blessing, without which food is just a passion. I was welcomed to learn, but not in the Name of the Teacher. I was asked to check a box, declaring my religion, but I was not invited to share in any religion. None at all. I was at Church, but I couldn’t think why. I heard a lecture, but I can’t think to what benefit. I was filled with delightful and expensive foods, but left empty and feeling bloated on regret. Not to be harsh, but: Christ was not in our midst; for where two are more are gathered, we did not ever invoke His Name.

I do not mean to condemn. But I remember well the last time I went on a lengthy trip, and we twice ‘forgot’ to say our travelling prayers. Forgetfulness like that is always a delusion brought on by the passions. We did not forget; we were forgetful – heedless of the one important thing, the one thing that matters. We had a wreck. Not a small wreck, but a spectacular pileup with 17 vehicles, including a semi-truck. Our lives were spared, but not without learning that our lives are contingent, and our continued carnal existence is less important than our remembrance of heavenly salvation.

These events are similar. The Q&A, and indeed the evening, was a wreck. A pileup of ill-considered words and heedless commentary. If the goal had been to make me feel at home, it had the opposite effect, for indeed: home is the heart of prayer, and the heart of prayer is home. Going home was the only thing that gave relief. Lord have mercy.

Tomorrow, I will go and pray at this Church. In the quiet of early-morning Matins, where only three or four gather. I want to redeem my thoughts about this experience and this place – to think well of it, if I can. The prayers matter more than anything, and I want and need what I missed.

It is better not to eat, than to eat and not to pray.

- unworthy

This broke my heart today: “You who sit there in utter misery, look up and show your friend your face. There is no darkness bears a cloak so black as could conceal your suffering. Why wave your hand to warn me of the taint of blood? For fear your words pollute me? I am not afraid to share your deep affliction with you…” – Euripides (quoted here). Break my heart, Lord.

As we begin Great Lent, giving alms to the poor from what we do not eat, be not afraid with me, friend.

From the same site, this excerpt from The Visionary by Rilke.

How little are the things with which we wrestle.
What with us wrestles, how much greater is!

When we victorious are, it is over the small things,
and though we won, it leaves us feeling small.

This is an entry in the comments of another article. It seems like it might also make a good article.

Each Winter stray cats starve and freeze to death in agonizing pain, whether in the country or in ordinary residential neighborhoods, right outside of abundant shelter and food. I always wanted to help, but I couldn’t think of the right way to do it, the correct way, the best way. So I did nothing. And that was more about my needs than the cats. I had it in the power of my hands with things lying around the garage or the house to deliver God’s creatures from torment, and I didn’t, and I am supposedly a Christian.

This year, I was talking about it with my friend, and she said simply, “Don’t let obsession w. doing it perfectly keep you from doing anything. Do something.” First, I made one from a box and a towel – which is a very BAD cat house – even harmful. But then I decided that however long it took, this year, I’d do something, and do it well. I missed the first freeze from my absence of concern and attention, and I’ve no doubt some cats lost their lives. Then I researched feral cat houses online, and found that towels wick away body heat and get damp and cause hypothermia. And that there’s a right way to build inexpensive cat houses for strays and a whole community of people doing it. I built two of this kind. I got righteous, to use a surfer term. And the cats are using them.

There’s a sin the fathers warn us of: “Gluttony of delicacy.” It is the sin of choosing not to pray or approach the holy things because of the dept of my sin, when in fact praying and returning to God is what would save me. It’s a form of despair. Overmuch (gluttony) of delicacy (the need to have it all just right – perfect – before I will act or do anything). It is a grievous sin.

Writ against the world of loving others, how grievous and most grievous. That I would fail to give to the poor because I couldn’t be 100% certain they wouldn’t buy some booze, or because some of it might go to administrative costs, or what have you: I am guilty of that sin. I spent years not giving, because I couldn’t find the ‘right’ charity, and I was afraid of throwing my money down the toilet.

We must remember that Christ doesn’t need anyone to give to the poor for him. He owns everything. He wants us to give to the poor for our sakes and, when we don’t, we don’t learn how to love, and we don’t remember that all things are his, that He is the Lord our God, and we don’t live in the reality of the Kingdom of his glorious redemption – we are lost men.

Well, I don’t like organizations that exploit the poor, that take 80% or more of the funds I give for new flat panel monitors and high-end stacking trays for the office and top-dollar, new, full-price file cabinets by Hahn. I don’t like it. So, as with the cat boxes, I had to work. I went researching, and I found exactly what I wanted.

• GlobalGiving.org
• GiveMeaning.org
• Oxfam.org
• Kiva.org

These are my babies. My adopted projects. The first two are simple: they are online catalogs of charities with a payment system. You select the orphanage or other charity you want to fund, and 100% of the money goes directly to that orphanage, hospital, hospice, school, or what have you. All of it. Since it costs them money to take your credit card, paypal, or check, and give that payment to the charity, they request (it’s optional) that you give them a little bit too. 10% is normal (like a finder’s fee). So maybe you give $50 to the charity, and choose to give $5 to the facilitator. You see? You control how much is given for administrative costs.

Now true, you don’t control what the orphanage spends it on, but they post frequent reports, and you can watch them get funded and see what they’re doing, and decide for yourself.

Personally, two projects I favor in particular are:

• The New Futures Orphanage and Khmer School in Cambodia
• The Dazzling Stone School and Orphanage in India

I also like Oxfam, for the following reason:

Food aid policy in the United States, for which the total 2005 budget was $1.6 billion, is largely dictated by an “iron triangle” of agribusiness, shipping magnates, and charity foundations. Studies demonstrate that the most efficient way to deliver aid is to purchase food locally rather than buy and ship it from the donor country.
But Washington insists that food aid must come from the United States, be shipped on U.S. carriers, and distributed by agencies like CARE and Catholic Relief Services. As a result, 60 cents out of every aid dollar goes to middlemen for transport, storage, and distribution.

Four companies and their subsidiaries, led by agri-giants Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill, sell more than half the food used by the Agency for International Development. Five big shipping companies dominate the transport side of the equation. And relief agencies, like CARE and Catholic Relief Services, generate up to half their budgets by selling some of the aid food.

Oxfam has long lobbied for putting cash directly into the hands of local farmers rather than handing it out to agricultural and transport corporations, but most U.S. aid groups support the current system and so has the U.S. Congress. CARE, however, recently broke ranks and endorsed the Oxfam initiative.

Source: Conn Hallinan. July 19, 2006. Foreign Policy in Focus. The Devil’s Brew of Poverty Relief.

You see? I don’t want to dump it all into propping up the military-industrial state in the West: when I think I’m giving it to the poor, it’s actually going to their oppressors. Oxfam to me is a good deal. Besides, polite guests don’t go to another town or country and go to the chain-store restaurant (Olive Garden, TGI Fridays, McDonalds); we eat their local food, buy their local products, stay in their local hotels, support their local mom and pop gas station. And for the same reasons. Why should 90% of it go to Olive Garden, and 10% to the employees? I’d rather eat a the local hole in the wall diner and enjoy the unpredictability and inconsistency of real food. It’s only civilized. Same thing w. Oxfam and the above charities.

Lastly there’s kiva. I got so excited when I found kiva that I nearly peed myself. But I found I had to remind myself that I was lending to the poor – something Christ commands, but that I needed the other charities too, so I could give to the poor. But this, this way of assisting the working poor, to pull them out of poverty, is a great compliment to putting food in the mouths of the destitute. I like this – orphanages and hospices with the one set of organizations, addressing mass starvation with Oxfam, and turning desperate families into surviving families with Kiva.

Here’s the gist: I’m watching a CNBC news piece about kiva.org – this is a microloan charity. You lend a small amount (e.g. $25) to help someone in another country, and kiva.org combines it with other gifts and lends the money, and the lending partner gets the interest, while you get the funds back. The CNBC reporter chose a man off the site who could barely support his family with a bicycle taxi. He wanted to borrow $800 to buy his wife a restaurant. Yes, $800 for the whole thing. The reporter gave $25. Then he waited and flew to Africa to find this man and see how it worked. The man had bought his wife a small restaurant, and they had moved from living in a dark one-room mud/stick shack to a place with electricity, room for their six children, and a locking steel door. They’re still poor – she uses an old water bottle for a rolling pin, an inverted plate for a grill, and a plastic bag for a cash register. She makes flatbread, tea, beans and rice, and has people lined up outside to get it. The place is small, but it has completely changed things for their family. $800 total from a few dozen individuals like us who lent small amounts (e.g. $25) and this happened. Now they’re a two income family, and the kids are growing. He’s making his monthly repayments on time. His children look happy. They repeated this with another small gift, this time to a coop of African women who are supporting their tribe and, again, verified it’s being used exactly as described. kiva.org takes extensive pains to make sure the requests are legitimate and the money is used as indicated. In fact, they depend on it.

If you go this route, be aware of how the interest works first, so you won’t be disappointed: Personally, I select lending partners that have interests rates around or below the average – 22%. I have loans out at 10%, 12%, 14%, 36% (it’s high in Cambodia, but I remember the genocide there, and my country’s role in it, and I can’t look away), and we even helped a man get a more reliable taxi in Togo at 1% interest! I won’t subsidize a 40% interest rate, even if that’s the going rate and the local loan-shark rate is 120%, but that’s just me – some of this, too, is WHO you select to help – you listen to someone explain their situation, and sometimes you just have to. It’s $30 for a movie and dinner, or you can eat ham sandwiches and lend someone $25 who will open a restaurant with it and raise a whole people out of poverty.

Remember: the interest rates are higher than we’re used to: The reason is simple – the microlending partners don’t have major bank backing, the risk of default is higher, and they have to pay the same loan origination fees regardless of loan amount. So if it costs them $50 to set up a $500 loan, and it costs them $50 to set up a $1500 loan, the interest rate has to be higher on the smaller loan to recoup their costs and break even, before they even make anything. Since most loans are typically small loans (”microloans”) the interest is higher than we’re used to.

I’ve got funds out on loan to people that, as they get paid back, will be used (if I’m not starving) to re-fund other enterprises of the working poor. In the case of the lady from Kenya I mentioned on the blog, most of us requested Kiva to have our part of her loan forgiven, due to the burning down of whole areas of small businesses there and the killing of so many people.

I can’t tell you how it has been saving to me to be able to pray for these people. To have their photos and know their situations and be able to help them, and to ask God to save me by their prayers. I wouldn’t trade this for anything. The riches of being able to reach the world, to reach into areas that I couldn’t otherwise go, and to help… I’m in Kenya, Tajikistan, Ecuador… but also to learn more about daily life for the poor in each area (can’t get that from TV), and the situations of ordinary people there:

It has affected my prayers in the litanies. When we pray “for good weather and abundant crops” and “for peaceful times”, we are really praying for the very survival, the very question of whether they will live another day, of these people. By their prayers, cast me not away with the dead wood, but save me.

It changes one’s attitude. It brings peace. It teaches me that God merely allows me to give to these people, that my proper attitude is thanks for allowing me to give to them. It is not the usual “good feeling” thing – it’s a sense that I wasn’t a human being until I began to love the poor – and that I am only now starting to become human. I was shapeless, and void, a shadow and wraith. I was in form like the demons, with no body, but now the poor are my body.

May God save me along with them. Mercy. Mercy.