Kyrie, Eleison!

Embarrassing Admission

2012-02-02T00:02:00.000-05:00

Turns out our home, which we reported had been broken into and burgled, wasn't.

We were sure it had been, because our DVR was (and still is) missing. So, apparently, are our brains. The boy who mows our yard and has ever since he was big enough to puch a mower and is now a high school junior came over the other day and discussed with Demetrios his ambtion to be a doctor. Anyway, he also reminded us that we had packaged up that DVR and had paid him (handsomely) to mail it back to Verizon for us. Which he did.

Yes, of course! I do remember now. When I put our account on suspended status, a Verizon rep on the phone asked me to return the DVR and gave me the address.

Don't know why Verizon didn't receive it. Or why the rep wanted it back, as the rep more recently told us they wouldn't have needed or wanted it to be returned.

Anyway, it's all taken care of now, and it's nice to know our house was not burgled after all.

Now to camouflage my embarrassment, I'll pass on a joke my neighbor has sent me, about an even more embarrassing Senior Moment.

Several days ago as I left a meeting at our church, I desperately gave myself a personal pat down. I was looking for my keys. They were not in my pockets. A quick search in the meeting room revealed nothing.

Suddenly I realized, I must have left them in the car. Frantically, I headed for the parking lot. My wife, Diane, has scolded me many times for leaving the keys in the ignition. My theory is the ignition is the best place not to lose them. Her theory is that the car would be stolen. As I burst through the doors to the parking lot, I came to a miserable conclusion. Her theory was right. The parking lot was empty.

I immediately called the police. I gave them my location, confessed that I had left my keys in the car, and reported that it had been stolen.

Then I made the most difficult phone call of all, “Honey,” I stammered. (I always call her “honey” in times like these.) “I left my keys in the car, and it has been stolen.”

There was a period of silence. I thought the call had been dropped, but then I heard Diane’s voice. “Ken” she barked, “I dropped you off!”

Now it was my time to be silent. Embarrassed, I said, “Well, come and get me.”

Diane retorted, “I will, as soon as I convince this policeman I have not stolen your car!”

New Blog

2012-02-01T00:13:00.000-05:00

My niece Elizabeth, 11 (Barbara's younger daughter), has begun a blog to contain her poems and short stories. Most of her stories seem to be in the fantasy genre, involving her pet dragon named Destiny.

Have a look just for the fun of it. Especially if you are good at creative writing and care to offer a young girl your helpful hints, suggestions, encouragements, etc., check out Lizzie's Notebook.

Go for it, Elizabeth! I'm adding your blog to my sidebar.

God Rest You Well, Carol!

2012-01-31T13:04:00.002-05:00

Carol was a friend our our family's for decades; I think from the early '80s. After the death of her husband, she ate most of the holiday meals with us: Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter. (I don't know why, possibly her children lived rather far away.) She became a part of our famiy. She was also one of the first among my parents' circle of friends to move to Greenspring, the retirement community to which my parents eventually came. She gave us a little tour of it, together with a discussion of its pros and cons (mainly, that although Greenspring is a wonderful and downright luxurious place, it is still, as Carol put it, "institutional living, and you have to accept that if you come here.")

She was blind in one eye; we never knew why, but have heard it was due to that eye having been cancerous, or something. I remember when she had a cataract removed from the good eye, and how nerve-wracking that was.

She went on a trip to China with my mother in 1989 and on a cruise with Mom on the QEII, during which the ship's engines conked out and the vessel was adrift at sea for I forget how long. A day? Three days? Mom? So they shared many adventures.

Mom and I went to her memorial service Friday. May her memory be eternal.

I Did Promise to Avoid Political Commentary, and I Shall...

2012-01-31T10:56:00.005-05:00

...but from time to time, I still plan to point out items I consider important.

If you live in Europe or America and you value your country, here's the future planned for you, presented by the German Foreign Minister addressing the Brookings Institute on January 20.

To give examples of why this is important for you to know, below are a few excerpts from the speech, together with the minute and seconds where you can find them on this recording. Beware euphemism.

14:04 First we have to fix the flaws in the Eurozone’s construction. When setting it up shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, we were not able to go all the way and create a political union side-by-side with the economic and monetary union. It took awhile for the consequences of this failure to become apparent, because we enjoyed a decade of low interest rates and strong economic growth, especially in southern Eurozone lenders.

31:25 It would be wrong to deny that there are different visions of what Europe should be. There are those who do not want an open, tolerant, and integrated Europe; there are those who stress the differences by their ethnics of religious rather than what unites us. [Yes, this is what Minister said, word for word.] They are advocating a fortress Europe. This is a vision that we need to oppose forcibly. The re-nationalization in a time of globalization is a dangerous concept; and this is a message to whom it may concern.

32:55 Our European model of shared sovereignty can be an inspiration in a globalized world in need of order.

35:16 We stand firmly together in confronting Iran’s increasingly dangerous course, and for us, like for many of you, the security of Israel is raison d'être. The European Union will put into place a new and very substantial round of sanctions this coming Monday to forcefully make the point that Iran’s behavior in the nuclear issue is unacceptable and a danger to world peace. 35:50

37:00 Possibly the most important common task of all will be to restore the legitimacy and viability of our economic model. The proper regulation of the global financial system is still unfinished business. We have to continue to work on it together and in the G-20 framework. This includes making sure that the IMF has what it takes to play its crucial role in the global system.

Update on our Friend, John

2012-01-31T10:23:00.001-05:00

Thanks again and yet again to all of you who sent John your supportive messages. They have meant more to him than they would even to most people, I think. He has been deeply moved by your well-wishes and prayers.

Last night, we found John eating his supper, and he ate well, considering he wasn't hungry and it was hospital food, after all. (I did still have to cut up his pork chop for him, and open the little plastic tub of diced peaches and pears.)

He has been moved off the ward where he had been, since he no longer needs the telemetry available there. He is also no longer connected to an IV, we noticed. No extra fluids, no IV medications.

He reported having walked 85 steps yesterday, with a walker but otherwise unsupported. He sits up in a chair two or three times a day for half an hour at a time. He even cracked a joke or two.

He was to have been transferred to a rehab facility by today, but that isn't going to happen for a while. John is pretty closed-mouthed about his condition, so we don't know why or what this apparent set-back is. It still seems to us that every day is an improvement over the day before.

Thanks again for your support, which has unquestionably been a MAJOR factor in his recovery.

And a Little Child Shall Lead Them

2012-01-30T11:18:00.000-05:00

Yesterday in church we sat next to a girl about two and a half years old, we think, who looked at us with enormous, searching, soulful, serious eyes. After a few moments, she began talking to Demetrios, who was next to her, but as it was all babytalk he understood very little. Her mother said the child was asking Demetrios his name. So he told her and she continued the conversation. All he could do was beam at her. And somehow, the age gap melted away; this old man and this toddler were meeting beautiful soul-to- beautiful soul, as equals, in a communion that transcended all such matters as age or gender or nationality or language or anything else.

And no, it was not a distraction from the worship; it was part of it.

After church, I commented that it had been so beautiful it had actually brought tears to my eyes, and Demetrios said that was exactly how he had felt, like crying. And he wondered if that's how paradise will be.

Of course it will be - and is, for the Christian life is a large measure of paradise already!

Reviews: A Restaurant and a Movie

2012-01-29T23:51:00.001-05:00

Texas Roadhouse

We ate, with two other couples, at the Texas Roadhouse for the first time Saturday night. So if you've never been there, you may like to know our unanimous opinion: we don't ever plan to go back.

The Texas Roadhouse has the best steak I've eaten for at least 20 years (with the possible exception of David Bate's steak). That's important, of course, especially if you are a steak lover. And the prices are reasonable, too. But for us, the whole experience was a severe mismatch.

The first problem was that the restaurant has a highly misleading "call ahead" policy; you call an hour before you plan to arrive and tell them you're coming. It's not a reservation, but we did suppose it was worth something. Wrong. We waited more than another full hour before we were seated, and even then, only after we let our displeasure be known and said wwe were leaving if we weren't seated within 5 more minutes.

The second problem was the noise.  If you are in the twenty-something crowd, the music might have been just right for you; maybe even if you are thirty-something. As the manager put it, lots of energy going on in there. But if you're a senior citizens it's just noise, and far too loud at that. Because everybody has difficulty conversing with that stuff blaring, everyone has to shout to be heard, so the noise level from all the talking alone was terrible, unless you like that sort of thing.

The wait staff stops everything once per hour and stands in a line and performs some sort of silly little line dance for you. They seem to be encouraging everybody else to do the same, but nobody does. For one thing, there is no space wide enough. Meanwhile, of course, nobody's order is being taken, nobody is being served.

And then the servers have a nasty little habit of asking, for example, whether you'd like onions and jack cheese on your steak without telling you it costs extra, or whether you'd like your baked potato with anything more than butter, also without telling you sour cream, chives, and bacon bits are extra.

If it's your birthday you get to sit on a saddle atop a sawhorse, and the staff lifts that up and rocks you around a bit while singing something awful. Your small children may enjoy that.

But for us, the whole evening was an ordeal and we were glad to depart as soon as we had finished eating.

Iron Lady

We have long been Margaret Thatcher fans, so we looked forward eagerly to this film about her.

The movie consists of a series of episodes from Mrs. Thatcher's career as remembered through the dementia of her old age.  I would rather have had the story presented through the eyes of someone not demented.   It lacked coherence. I also would rather have had more details about her career than the gloss-overs this movie provided.   So as a story or as a documentary (take your pick) I rate the film a "C", as did the others with whom we watched it.

But my first reaction was, "That was SOME great piece of acting!" Meryl Streep's performance is simply superb.   It's definitely Academy Award calibre. And that makes this film worth watching and worth the price of the ticket.

"God Loves you, Period" - Isn't That Only Half the Story?

2012-01-29T06:16:00.043-05:00

No, it's the whole, entire, complete story. There is nothing else in God's attitude toward you but love. His love does not come alongside anything else that might dilute or alter or temper it, or overrule it or modify it in any way. Or even "balance" it or form some sort of polarity with it.   There is no tension, so to speak, between God's love and anything else. There is no dark side whatsoever in God's attitude toward you. It's pure love, infinite love, unconditional love.

But isn't He going to cast the wicked into hell, someone may ask? And come on, do not even try to tell me that is love.

Indeed, that would not be love. It would conflict with love. It would form a boundary upon the boundless, a condition upon the unconditional, a limit to the infinite. It would mean that at some point, God had turned on you.

God doesn't cast anyone into hell. God continues to love every single person completely, forever. Hell is what happens when He places you squarely in the immediate presence of that love and you can't stand it.

What? Not be able to stand God's love, are you serious?

It's true. Not everyone may want God's love. There can be serveral reasons for this, and they all have to do with the condition of the human heart, not with God's heart.

One reason is that God's Love is inseparable from God's Truth. It's clear not everybody wants to be confronted with the truth about himself.  While seeing our shocking ugliness now, while there's time to change it, is appalling enough, seeing it when we've become too hardened to change is infinitely worse. It's hell.

Another reason we may not like to stand in the sunshine of God's love is jealousy, as illustrated by the elder brother of the Prodigal Son.  A person may not mind if God loves him infinitely, but he does not want to stand around and watch (much less participate in) any love-fest involving God and that terrible other person. It would seem so wrong if, for example, that terrible other person were Stalin.   Such gross injustice, even if he did repent at the last moment! Of course, there isn't really any question of injustice; as Jesus pointed out, God has every right to do whatever He chooses with what is His own. (And this would apply regardless of how Stalin had come to be saved.) It's an unloving heart that resents it, and the resentment prevents a person from joining the celebration. That's hell.

Another example: if I did not take my well-deserved revenge upon so-and-so, it was because I fully expected God to do it for me, and now I find Him rejoicing in and with that miserable wretch? An unloving heart cannot bear this. It might be even worse for me if I did take my revenge and felt well-satisfied, to find myself now confronted with that person, standing before me in his glory, shining, and basking in God's love - my own burning astonishment, plus the satisfaction in the revenge I took, meanwhile keeping me out of the loop.

Then again, there may be some who are so heavily invested in "the flesh" that they have become blind to spiritual joys. While the saints rejoice in one another, in forgiveness, in praising God, in living His Life with Him, in creativity, in peace, we may speculate that others may miss bridge games or hot showers or pizza too much to care about the rest, and would be bored stiff if it weren't for resenting the absence of their physical pleasures.

Hell does not mean God sends someone to any separate place. Hell does not mean God tortures us, or has the devil do it for Him. Hell is something each person does to himself. As the saying goes, the gates of hell are locked on the inside.   It's our reaction to God's love that becomes our hell. There can be all sorts of reasons God's very Love becomes hell for us.    But God Himself harbors nothing for us but eternal, undiluted, steadfast, unchanging, infinite Love. Period.

About Prayer Chains and Prayer Requests

2012-01-28T12:25:00.005-05:00

What's all this, someone recently asked me, about prayer and prayer requests? Will God be more inclined to heal a sick child if someone prays for him than if nobody does? Or isn't God going to do His will in any case, with or without prayer? And what's this thing we so often hear said to someone in trouble: "Hundreds of people are praying for you?" What's the whole idea behind prayer chains; is it a massive lobbying effort, like getting as many signatures as possible on a petition? And how is it that even when hundreds or thousands of people are devoutly praying for the health of some small child, the kid dies anyway? Is that God's will, that we had all been praying must be done? The whole thing seems to make very little sense.

I don't have many answers and will welcome input from anyone who can add a new perspective to these issues. But I think I do have some items to offer as contributions toward the answer(s).

The first thing, perhaps, is, we do not know God's will. It seems to us it would be better if a sick child lived, but perhaps, in ways we cannot see, it is not the best, even for the child himself. Maybe being taken straight into the armns of God will be better for him than living a life of horrible suffering, or - what is so hard to imagine when beholding an infant - a life of horrible sin that would grieve us all. Perhaps your brother's death was better for him and his whole family than the wrenching, searing, years-long divorce battle and custody fight God knew would have happened in another few years, had he lived. Or maybe your aunt's dropping dead of a heart attack was better than dying of the cancer she had been about to develop. We simply do not know even what is best for anybody, and we need to be humble enough to acknowledge this; that is why the bottom line, in all our prayers, is "Thy will be done."

Yes, God is going to do His will in any case. But such is His love for us, that He wants us to participate in the doing of it. He wants to glorify all of us by allowing us to share in His Life, in all His doings, and to have that as the center of communion with one another. Prayer requests and prayer chains are about Christian communion, and especially about solidarity with the suffering among us. They are not about lobbying God, but about union with God and with one another.

So if God is going to do His will in any case, does that mean some innocent baby's misery and grotesque suffering was God's will? No, that was the work of the devil. That's evil at work, and not our all-loving God.

But God is still allowing this horror, isn't He? Why?

Yes, He is. And has been letting terrible things happen since the fall of Adam and Eve. And we don't know why. We do not know why. Period. We can speculate as to whether it involves chastisement to bring us to repentance or challenges to help us grow, or lessons in courage or faith or perseverance or practice in charity or resisting temptation or whatever. Sometimes a wise spiritual father or mother can discern these things for us in our own lives. But bottom line is, we either have faith or we don't. Faith in this context means trust that whatever the reason(s) may be, they are, despite all appearances, kind, compassionate reasons of the good God Who loves us better than we love ourselves and is infinitely wiser. In this warped world, "God writes straight with crooked lines."

And the basis for our hope, ultimately, is the death and resurrection of God-in-the Flesh. What could have been more immoral, more unjust, more obscene, than an innocent Man murdered by crucifixion? What greater victory could the devil ever have claimed than deicide? And this, despite every prayer from the disciples and from His mother? And in fact, despite His own, "If possible, let this cup pass from me!"

But God did let the catastrophe happen. And in and through it He did many wonderful things for us (type "Why Did Jesus Die?" in the search box, top right of this blog). Not that He needed this monstrous sin for the doing of His workl He never requires there to be evil for the sake of the greater good. But He saw fit to work through this crime, for whatever reason, perhaps because WE needed it to be that way.

And then He brought victory out of it. He didn't do away entirely with the devil and all his mignons, not yet, and we do not know why not yet. But the promise that He shall destroy them entirely, in His own good time, whenever He knows is best, that promise is in what He did do in His resurrection: He took away satan's main weapon against us. He took away death and the fear of death. He showed Himself stronger than death and suffering and wickedness. That's what assures us that ultimately, He will consummate His victory and shall "wipe away the tears from every cheek," and reveal that all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all things, in a hidden sense, always were well. We were always in His care, and we shall be able to see that everything that ever happened to us was for our good, and shall be able to give thanks in all things.

We either have faith in God, trust Him, or we don't. If we do, then we pray.

Blog Note

2012-01-26T16:44:00.001-05:00

I'm discontinuing political posts here. I may draw your attention to some news items from time to time that I find important, but I am going to refrain from adding any commentary.

Do I feel intimidated, you ask? Ummmm, well, not really. Has my husband put the quash on it? No, although I am following his advice here. What, then? This just wasn't supposed to be that kind of blog. If I decide I ought to do any political commenting, I would then consider starting another blog. But that seems highly unlikely.

Just please pay attention to what our politicans actually DO, not just what they say. Pay ttention to that, too, but only in the context of what they DO.

What a Horror

2012-01-26T13:49:00.000-05:00

A woman who lives a few short miles from me was in her home last night when an intruder came in and robbed her. That would be horrifying enough in itself, but that's just the beginning. The intruder beat the woman. And that in itself would also be horrifying, but it goes on. He then abducted her, took her to an ATM machine and eventually left her beside the highway. But it doesn't even stop there. He also set fire to her house.

There's a news story with video here.

Her brother, who recently so kindly sent a wonderful message to my friend John, now asks you, and I join him in asking, for prayers for this woman, who is his sister, Mary.

Thank you so very much.

Another Observation on the Latest Presidential Debate

2012-01-25T21:21:00.001-05:00

Did you catch what Newt Gingrich said? That he agrees with Ron Paul except on Iran (and presumably Israel, which I'm guessing he forgot to mention)? Agrees with Ron Paul! Yes, he said so.

Of course he was merely pandering to Paul supporters, but his statement cuts two ways: either people who think Ron Paul's stances are wacky ought not to vote for Gingrich, either; or else, if you think Gingrich isn't wacky, then apparently neither is Ron Paul.

????

Presidential Debate

2012-01-25T11:52:00.001-05:00

I used to suppose Rick Santorum was perhaps more honest than, say, Gingrich or Romney. Until two nights ago when I heard him say, during the debate, that the economic downturn was caused by a spike in oil prices in 2008.

He went on from there to tell two more lies in rapid succession, but I was so stunned by the first that I can't now tell you what those latter lies were.

Gingrich lied about having been a lobbyist and Romney lied by omission about his company. Bain Capital would acquire a company, borrowing the money to do it, and then take that money out of the bought corporation in order to repay the loan. On top of that money,Bain also sucked out of its acquired company as much profit for its investors as possible; whether the company thus treated survived or prospered was of no concern; the Bain people got unheard-of profit either way. That's called unscrupulous.

It seems such a bizarre thing, when people have right in front of their eyes someone everybody agrees is honest, yet they think they ought to see which of the others, the liars and crooks, is more suitable to be President of the United States. They will make better decisions, we are told. No way. Dishonest men never make the best decisions because every decision is colored by their dishonesty.

And every word out of their mouths, as Rick Santorum so vividly demonstrated.

God Loves You - Period

2012-01-25T10:52:00.001-05:00

You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven; for He makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet your brethren only, what do you do more than others? Do not even the tax collectors do so? Therefore be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect. – Matthew 5: 43-48

Outside of Orthodox Christianity, one often hears of a god whose attitude toward sinner changes once they repent. But such a heterodox idea flies straight n the face of everything Jesus said and did and taught. God's attitude toward each and every person (yes, even Saddam Hussein) is ever unchanging. How can the All-Good One, the All-Holy, love us who are so, well, so the opposite, so vile and so sick and so warped? He can and He does because that's the very meaning of Goodness and of Holiness: Love. That's what, rightly understood, the Law and the Prophets are all about: Love. That's the basis of morality: Love.

Even the tax-collectors (read, "worst sinners you can imagine"), says Jesus, greet those who greet them, and love their brethren. We should be better than that. Do we really want to suppose God isn't? But the very reason we ought to be better than that, says Jesus, is that God is, and we also ought to be, precisely so we can be like Him, as true children.

God in heaven is perfect, meanng His love is perfect. There is absolutely nobody God loves more than He loves you and me, because there is no "more" nor "less" in God's immeasurable love. That means He loves you as much as He loves, say, the Virgin Mary, and He loves such a villain as Osama Bin Laden as much as He loves you. (Sorry about that!, and sorry, dear government monitors, to be wasting your time here.) God loves you no matter what. No matter what!

God's relationship with each person is different, because each person is different. And of course any relationship is reciprocal, a two-way street. How He acts and interacts with each of us differs. God has a different relationship with St. Mark than with St. Luke, and with St. Luke than with you, and with you than with me. (The difference is possible because it isn't His unchanging Essence dealing with us, it's His Uncreated Powers.) But no matter what that relationship is, it always proceeds, from God's end, from perfect love. God's love is absolute, not relative. Absolute, not contingent. Perfect, not conditional. He makes the blessing of His rain to fall on the just and the unjust alike and His sun to shine on the evil and the good alike.

Yes, He is "angry" at the injustice in this world and the sin and suffering and sickness and death and every sort of evil, but that's precisely because He loves you and doesn't want you to be harmed by any of those things. He recognizes that every time you sin, you are not just a perpetrator, you are also, and more fundamentally, a victim of satan's. In the account of the first sin, Eve is deceived by the serpent. And we have been deceived ever since. And the idea that God's love toward us ever fluctuates or is tempered or diluted or spoiled by anything else is one of those deceptions.

God's love is infinite. Unchanging. Universal. Unconditional. Absolute. Indestructible. Stronger than death, more ferocious than hell, more tender than a mother's embrace.

Ponder well another saying of our Lord's:

But you, love your enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing again; and your reward shall be great, and you shall be the children of the Highest: for He is kind to the unthankful and [to] the evil. – Luke 6:35

Update and Thanks

2012-01-22T22:07:00.000-05:00

Thanks from the bottom of my heart to each of you who sent get well wishes to my friend John. It meant much more to him than you might suppose. As I said, he is alone and unused to people (other than his daughter) showing care. When I had read him all the messages, he murmured, "Beautiful." And then he added, "You've all brought some life into my life." (Ponder well what that means and how very important it is!) That was about the first full sentence he has spoken during this long and miserable convalescence.

He's on solid foods as of yesterday, finger foods because his hands, stiff from one of his medications, don't work well enough to handle a spoon or fork. He still cannot sit up without support, and has developed clots in his legs which cause considerable pain. He's on meds to dissolve them.

He is aware now of the call button and keeps track of where it is. (This is the first time he has ever been in a hospital.)

His face is less stiff today; it has expression again, so he can frown and smile. He smiled the whole time I was reading your messages.

He will be in the hospital another week, so I'm hoping to get messages from still more people, anyone and everyone who reads this. Don't be shy because you don't know John; that very fact makes it all the more touching for him.

Thanks again!

Persons, Nature, and Free Will

2012-01-20T13:45:00.000-05:00

Check out David Garner's musings on the subject. They're clear, easy to understand, and succinct thoughts. See why the Orthodox insistence on the necessity of doing good works has nothing to do with "works salvation".

Of Your Charity...

2012-01-19T23:16:00.000-05:00

...please pray for John. He has had to have major surgery a few days ago. He was already very depressed beforehand, and addicted to his medications as well, and those factors and others are complicating and slowing his recovery. Withdrawal on top of all the rest is not easy! He's an atheist and he is in a lot of pain, no family except a grown daughter, and I've finally identified that pathetic look I keep seeing in his eyes that tears at my heart: it's fear.

Also, if you would be so kind, may I ask you to leave him your greetings and well-wishes, either in the comments or at my e-mail address: anastasiatheo001 AT verizon DOT net or at anastasiatheo001 AT gmail DOT com. Either will work. John isn't used to having people care for him, and it occurs to me that if I could bring him a whole sheaf of such notes, that would probably do him very great emotional and spiritual good.

Thank you, and God reward your kindness!

On the Nature of Mental Illness

2012-01-19T14:58:00.003-05:00

...from a long discussion with my psychiatrist husband

There are those who think mental illness is a spiritual problem. Others say it is an emotional problem. Still others think it is a purely physical problem.

The truth is, none of these things can be separated in human beings, who are mind, body, and spirit. There are emotional and spiritual dimensions to any illness; for example, even chickenpox isn't something to which we would be susceptible if we were in perfect communion with God. For another example, depression increases our susceptibility to pain. So every dimension of the human being is involved in every disorder.

Mental illness doesn't necessarily mean you are weaker than anyone else, or have some greater moral lapse, or simply need a very holy spiritual father. The major difference between mental illness and any other illness is that it involves the brain instead of, say, the liver or the heart or the skin.

And it's not just your emotions or your spiritual life that leave their marks on the brain, either; else you'd suppose every gross criminal in history must have been a mental patient. Or that holy people, like St. Paul, never suffered any bodily defect. All sorts of other things can affect the brain. A very incomplete list would include: a severe knock on the head, alcohol or other drugs, tumor, insufficient oxygen supply, stroke, messed-up brain chemistry, an unfortunate genetic mix...

My point is yes, you do need a good spiritual father, of course; we all do. But as with other illnesses, you also do need a doctor! And maybe some prescriptions.

And you do not need to feel any more ashamed of a brain illness than of measles or asthma.

Back

2012-01-19T02:58:00.000-05:00

This blog was unavailable to any readers but me (see post below) for 24 + hours, but I'm back now. More to write, but it's 3 a.m. here and I've forgotten to go to bed, so carried away with a knitting design project. Gotta get some sleep before writing more.

From Wikipedia - VERY Important!

2012-01-18T16:12:00.002-05:00

Posted by Wikipedia Wednesday

Why is Wikipedia blacked-out?

Wikipedia is protesting against SOPA and PIPA by blacking out the English Wikipedia for 24 hours, beginning at midnight January 18, Eastern Time. Readers who come to English Wikipedia during the blackout will not be able to read the encyclopedia. Instead, you will see messages intended to raise awareness about SOPA and PIPA, encouraging you to share your views with your representatives, and with each other on social media.

What are SOPA and PIPA?

SOPA and PIPA represent two bills in the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate respectively. SOPA is short for the "Stop Online Piracy Act," and PIPA is an acronym for the "Protect IP Act." ("IP" stands for "intellectual property.") In short, these bills are efforts to stop copyright infringement committed by foreign web sites, but, in our opinion, they do so in a way that actually infringes free expression while harming the Internet. Detailed information about these bills can be found in the Stop Online Piracy Act and PROTECT IP Act articles on Wikipedia, which are available during the blackout. GovTrack lets you follow both bills through the legislative process: SOPA on this page, and PIPA on this one. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to advocating for the public interest in the digital realm, has summarized why these bills are simply unacceptable in a world that values an open, secure, and free Internet.

Why is the blackout happening?

Wikipedians have chosen to black out the English Wikipedia for the first time ever, because we are concerned that SOPA and PIPA will severely inhibit people's access to online information. This is not a problem that will solely affect people in the United States: it will affect everyone around the world.

Why? SOPA and PIPA are badly drafted legislation that won't be effective at their stated goal (to stop copyright infringement), and will cause serious damage to the free and open Internet. They put the burden on website owners to police user-contributed material and call for the unnecessary blocking of entire sites. Small sites won't have sufficient resources to defend themselves. Big media companies may seek to cut off funding sources for their foreign competitors, even if copyright isn't being infringed. Foreign sites will be blacklisted, which means they won't show up in major search engines. And, SOPA and PIPA build a framework for future restrictions and suppression.

Does this mean that Wikipedia itself is violating copyright laws, or hosting pirated content?

No, not at all. Some supporters of SOPA and PIPA characterize everyone who opposes them as cavalier about copyright, but that is not accurate. Wikipedians are knowledgeable about copyright and vigilant in protecting against violations: Wikipedians spend thousands of hours every week reviewing and removing infringing content. We are careful about it because our mission is to share knowledge freely. To that end, all Wikipedians release their contributions under a free license, and all the material we offer is freely licensed. Free licenses are incompatible with copyright infringement, and so infringement is not tolerated.

Isn't SOPA dead? Wasn't the bill shelved, and didn't the White House declare that it won't sign anything that resembles the current bill?

No, neither SOPA nor PIPA is dead. On January 17th, SOPA's sponsor said the bill will be discussed in early February. There are signs PIPA may be debated on the Senate floor next week. Moreover, SOPA and PIPA are just indicators of a much broader problem. In many jurisdictions around the world, we're seeing the development of legislation that prioritizes overly-broad copyright enforcement laws, laws promoted by power players, over the preservation of individual civil liberties.

Read the rest here, and do take the time to investigate some of the links Wikipedia has provided at the end of the article. If you aren't already informed on this, you definitely need to be. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.

Going Dark Tomorrow

2012-01-17T17:31:00.000-05:00

I'm shutting down this blog for 24 hours beginning at midnight and ending at 12:01 on Thursday morning, in sympathy with Wikipedia, which is going dark Wednesday. It's a protest against the latest ploy by Congress to curtail our liberties. The measure is SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act. Stopping online piracy would of course be a good thing, but the language of this bill shows it to be an excuse to shut down virtually any website the government doesn't like. It amounts to censorship of the Internet, in other words. Write your Congressman and Senators and urge them to vote against this bill. Keep the government's hands off the Internet!

See you on Thursday.

Land of the Free?

2012-01-15T14:03:00.002-05:00

Many thanks to John over at Ad Orientem for calling this to our attention. It's an op-ed piece by Jonathan Turley in The Washington Post and for it to appear in such a liberal paper is in itself remarkable (I think).

Every year, the State Department issues reports on individual rights in other countries, monitoring the passage of restrictive laws and regulations around the world. Iran, for example, has been criticized for denying fair public trials and limiting privacy, while Russia has been taken to task for undermining due process. Other countries have been condemned for the use of secret evidence and torture.

Even as we pass judgment on countries we consider unfree, Americans remain confident that any definition of a free nation must include their own — the land of free. Yet, the laws and practices of the land should shake that confidence. In the decade since Sept. 11, 2001, this country has comprehensively reduced civil liberties in the name of an expanded security state. The most recent example of this was the National Defense Authorization Act, signed Dec. 31, which allows for the indefinite detention of citizens. At what point does the reduction of individual rights in our country change how we define ourselves?

While each new national security power Washington has embraced was controversial when enacted, they are often discussed in isolation. But they don’t operate in isolation. They form a mosaic of powers under which our country could be considered, at least in part, authoritarian. Americans often proclaim our nation as a symbol of freedom to the world while dismissing nations such as Cuba and China as categorically unfree. Yet, objectively, we may be only half right. Those countries do lack basic individual rights such as due process, placing them outside any reasonable definition of “free,” but the United States now has much more in common with such regimes than anyone may like to admit.

These countries also have constitutions that purport to guarantee freedoms and rights. But their governments have broad discretion in denying those rights and few real avenues for challenges by citizens — precisely the problem with the new laws in this country.

The list of powers acquired by the U.S. government since 9/11 puts us in rather troubling company.

Assassination of U.S. citizens

President Obama has claimed, as President George W. Bush did before him, the right to order the killing of any citizen considered a terrorist or an abettor of terrorism. Last year, he approved the killing of U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaqi and another citizen under this claimed inherent authority. Last month, administration officials affirmed that power, stating that the president can order the assassination of any citizen whom he considers allied with terrorists. (Nations such as Nigeria, Iran and Syria have been routinely criticized for extrajudicial killings of enemies of the state.)

Indefinite detention

Under the law signed last month, terrorism suspects are to be held by the military; the president also has the authority to indefinitely detain citizens accused of terrorism. While the administration claims that this provision only codified existing law, experts widely contest this view, and the administration has opposed efforts to challenge such authority in federal courts. The government continues to claim the right to strip citizens of legal protections based on its sole discretion. (China recently codified a more limited detention law for its citizens, while countries such as Cambodia have been singled out by the United States for “prolonged detention.”)

Arbitrary justice

The president now decides whether a person will receive a trial in the federal courts or in a military tribunal, a system that has been ridiculed around the world for lacking basic due process protections. Bush claimed this authority in 2001, and Obama has continued the practice. (Egypt and China have been denounced for maintaining separate military justice systems for selected defendants, including civilians.)

Warrantless searches

The president may now order warrantless surveillance, including a new capability to force companies and organizations to turn over information on citizens’ finances, communications and associations. Bush acquired this sweeping power under the Patriot Act in 2001, and in 2011, Obama extended the power, including searches of everything from business documents to library records. The government can use “national security letters” to demand, without probable cause, that organizations turn over information on citizens — and order them not to reveal the disclosure to the affected party. (Saudi Arabia and Pakistan operate under laws that allow the government to engage in widespread discretionary surveillance.)

Secret evidence

The government now routinely uses secret evidence to detain individuals and employs secret evidence in federal and military courts. It also forces the dismissal of cases against the United States by simply filing declarations that the cases would make the government reveal classified information that would harm national security — a claim made in a variety of privacy lawsuits and largely accepted by federal judges without question. Even legal opinions, cited as the basis for the government’s actions under the Bush and Obama administrations, have been classified. This allows the government to claim secret legal arguments to support secret proceedings using secret evidence. In addition, some cases never make it to court at all. The federal courts routinely deny constitutional challenges to policies and programs under a narrow definition of standing to bring a case.

War crimes

The world clamored for prosecutions of those responsible for waterboarding terrorism suspects during the Bush administration, but the Obama administration said in 2009 that it would not allow CIA employees to be investigated or prosecuted for such actions. This gutted not just treaty obligations but the Nuremberg principles of international law. When courts in countries such as Spain moved to investigate Bush officials for war crimes, the Obama administration reportedly urged foreign officials not to allow such cases to proceed, despite the fact that the United States has long claimed the same authority with regard to alleged war criminals in other countries. (Various nations have resisted investigations of officials accused of war crimes and torture. Some, such as Serbia and Chile, eventually relented to comply with international law; countries that have denied independent investigations include Iran, Syria and China.)

Secret court

The government has increased its use of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which has expanded its secret warrants to include individuals deemed to be aiding or abetting hostile foreign governments or organizations. In 2011, Obama renewed these powers, including allowing secret searches of individuals who are not part of an identifiable terrorist group. The administration has asserted the right to ignore congressional limits on such surveillance. (Pakistan places national security surveillance under the unchecked powers of the military or intelligence services.)

Immunity from judicial review

Like the Bush administration, the Obama administration has successfully pushed for immunity for companies that assist in warrantless surveillance of citizens, blocking the ability of citizens to challenge the violation of privacy. (Similarly, China has maintained sweeping immunity claims both inside and outside the country and routinely blocks lawsuits against private companies.)

Continual monitoring of citizens

The Obama administration has successfully defended its claim that it can use GPS devices to monitor every move of targeted citizens without securing any court order or review. (Saudi Arabia has installed massive public surveillance systems, while Cuba is notorious for active monitoring of selected citizens.)

Extraordinary renditions

The government now has the ability to transfer both citizens and noncitizens to another country under a system known as extraordinary rendition, which has been denounced as using other countries, such as Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan, to torture suspects. The Obama administration says it is not continuing the abuses of this practice under Bush, but it insists on the unfettered right to order such transfers — including the possible transfer of U.S. citizens.

These new laws have come with an infusion of money into an expanded security system on the state and federal levels, including more public surveillance cameras, tens of thousands of security personnel and a massive expansion of a terrorist-chasing bureaucracy.

Some politicians shrug and say these increased powers are merely a response to the times we live in. Thus, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) could declare in an interview last spring without objection that “free speech is a great idea, but we’re in a war.” Of course, terrorism will never “surrender” and end this particular “war.”

Other politicians rationalize that, while such powers may exist, it really comes down to how they are used. This is a common response by liberals who cannot bring themselves to denounce Obama as they did Bush. Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), for instance, has insisted that Congress is not making any decision on indefinite detention: “That is a decision which we leave where it belongs — in the executive branch.”

And in a signing statement with the defense authorization bill, Obama said he does not intend to use the latest power to indefinitely imprison citizens. Yet, he still accepted the power as a sort of regretful autocrat.

An authoritarian nation is defined not just by the use of authoritarian powers, but by the ability to use them. If a president can take away your freedom or your life on his own authority, all rights become little more than a discretionary grant subject to executive will.

The framers lived under autocratic rule and understood this danger better than we do. James Madison famously warned that we needed a system that did not depend on the good intentions or motivations of our rulers: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”

Benjamin Franklin was more direct. In 1787, a Mrs. Powel confronted Franklin after the signing of the Constitution and asked, “Well, Doctor, what have we got — a republic or a monarchy?” His response was a bit chilling: “A republic, Madam, if you can keep it.”

Since 9/11, we have created the very government the framers feared: a government with sweeping and largely unchecked powers resting on the hope that they will be used wisely.

The indefinite-detention provision in the defense authorization bill seemed to many civil libertarians like a betrayal by Obama. While the president had promised to veto the law over that provision, Levin, a sponsor of the bill, disclosed on the Senate floor that it was in fact the White House that approved the removal of any exception for citizens from indefinite detention.

Dishonesty from politicians is nothing new for Americans. The real question is whether we are lying to ourselves when we call this country the land of the free.

Adds John (Ad Orientem): "Three guesses how many of our current candidates for president oppose all of this unconstitutional crap... "

Just an Idea (But I Quite Like It)

2012-01-14T17:15:00.001-05:00

People have often wondered what St. Paul's "thorn in the flesh" was, that he prayed three times should be healed, but God said instead, "My grace is sufficient for you, for My strength is made perfect in weakness." (see II Corinthians 12:7-10)

Well, I may be all wrong, and if so I hope someone will correct me, but recently this sentence by St. Paul struck me. He's writing to the Galatians (4:15): "I bear you witness that, if possible, you would have plucked out your own eyes and given them to me."

Apparently he had weak eyesight?

We know he wasn't blind, because we have the very moving story in Acts 9 of how he was struck blind on the road to Damascus, but then received his sight again (just re-reading it chokes me up):

10 Now there was a certain disciple at Damascus named Ananias; and to him the Lord said in a vision, “Ananias.”
And he said, “Here I am, Lord.”
11 So the Lord said to him, “Arise and go to the street called Straight, and inquire at the house of Judas for one called Saul of Tarsus, for behold, he is praying. 12 And in a vision he has seen a man named Ananias coming in and putting his hand on him, so that he might receive his sight.”
13 Then Ananias answered, “Lord, I have heard from many about this man, how much harm he has done to Your saints in Jerusalem. 14 And here he has authority from the chief priests to arrest all who call on Your name.”
15 But the Lord said to him, “Go, for he is a chosen vessel of Mine to bear My name before Gentiles, kings, and the children of Israel. 16 For I will show him how many things he must suffer for My name’s sake.”
17 And Ananias went his way and entered the house; and laying his hands on him he said, “Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus, who appeared to you on the road as you came, has sent me that you may receive your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit.” 18 Immediately there fell from his eyes something like scales, and he received his sight at once; and he arose and was baptized.

(I have actually known someone who was legally blind and was instantly healed after his parents, one a Pentecostal Christian and the other a Jew, prayed before the Iveron Icon of the Mother of God.)

So we know St. Paul could see, but from his letter to the Galatians, it seems he couldn't see very well, and they loved him so dearly they would have given them their own eyes. Maybe that was his "thorn in the flesh."

If so, it would indeed fulfill the humbling function St. Paul ascribes to it, to remind him of how he had been struck blind in the first place, and why. It was a constant reminder that he had persecuted the churches and delivered many Christians to death.

But more than that, if this guess is right, the weak eyesight shows you and me and the whole world something else very important. Namely, that what happened to this man on the road to Damascus was real. It was no hallucination or guilty imagination run wild or any such thing. He really was struck blind, and never fully recovered from it, but bore the sign both of his guilt and of his forgiveness and conversion all his life long. "My strength is made perfect in weakness," says the Lord. Indeed!

Atheism Deadens Everything

2012-01-10T17:52:00.003-05:00

If there is no God, then there is no such thing as Truth. If there is no ultimate truth (or falsehood!) then any searching for it is at best a waste of time. Then you have only data. You have nothing to give rise to science, except as data-gathering. But behind the data, there's no plan, no design, nothing to know. It's all just chance.

If there is no God, then there is no such thing as anything being good or bad. You may still have emotions, but they are entirely subjective; you cannot really experience anything as intrinsically good or bad, or as valuable or significant or meaningful. You moreover have no scale against which to recognize morality or immorality.

There's really nothing to think, nothing to know, nothing to feel, nothing to experience, so what's left? An infinite (maybe) void.

The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.

Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night declares knowledge.

There is no speech, nor are there words; their voice is not heard;

yet their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. Psalm 19:1-4

This Mortal Coil

2012-01-10T17:28:00.001-05:00

Once long ago I commented to Demetrios how cool his skin felt, although it was a hot day.

"Yes," he said, "my skin has always done a good job of keeping me cool."

And I was struck by how connected this man was with his body. And I thought that was rather a pity, as the body was mortal. He ought to identify more with his immortal soul. I was still an Episcohindubuddhapalian in those days.

Isn't our Christian teaching wonderful? We are not going to be forever cast adrift from our bodies, which are part of our very selves. We're going to have them back; we are going to praise God in our flesh, and see one another in our flesh. The body, too, is going to be resurrected and reunited with the soul. Transfigured and resurrected! It will no longer suffer the effects of time and grief and illness and old age, no longer be constrained by time or space; it will be young and radiant and glorious and instead of reflecting our sin, will show us to be the sons and daughters of God.

Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it does not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when He shall appear, we shall be like Him; for we shall see Him as he is. I John 3:2

Dream

2012-01-10T17:04:00.000-05:00

It was a big family reunion; several small children and Barbara were tussling on the floor. I reached over and tickled Barbara. She squealed and then, suddenly, she stopped and grew somber.

"What is it?" I asked, alarmed because I suspected what it was.

"My life wasn't planned to be this way," she said, quietly.

"I know," I replied, "but listen; right now, for this moment " - I already knew it wasn't going to be longer - "we can laugh and play, and I can see you and hear you, and I can feel your warmth and even the softness of your hair, and do you realize what a great thing, what an incredible miracle that is?"

And then, sure enough, the moment was over, because I woke up.

But it still is an immense miracle, every moment each of us, the living, can still see and hear and be with one another, for now.

And the blessed communion we have with the saints who have reposed is an even more stupendous miracle.

Just a Reminder

2012-01-03T22:44:00.002-05:00

I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America

and to the Republic for which it stands:

one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Now that's what I believe in; that's what I'm loyal to.

A republic, a real, genuine republic, not something else masquerading as one.

Under God.

Indivisible.

With liberty.

And justice.

For all.

Whatever happened to all that?

The Choice we Face in America

2012-01-03T09:41:00.010-05:00

Last night on television I heard one "news analyst" frame the question for Iowans today as between "sending a message" (voting for Ron Paul) or voting for someone "who can win."

Sorry, but that's not the real choice we face. Much as we may dislike President Obama, it's naive to adopt an "anybody but Obama" attitude. Why? Because that position assumes everyone else is better than he, while the hard, cold, sober fact is, it isn't so. Ron Paul MAY be better, but Gingrich, Romney, Perry, and Santorum will carry on the same major policies as Obama, just as Obama has carried on the same major policies as Bush. (Even most of the lesser issues will remain the same; you don't really think Gingrich, for example, is going to do away with homosexuals in the military, do you? Or that Santorum will reduce our dependency upon foreign oil where every President since Nixon has talked about this but not done it? Or that Romney will improve our education system where nobody else in thirty or forty years has done it?)

The real choice is not "anyone but Obama" but someone better than Obama. Merely to choose "someone who can win" is at best pointless if the only difference is going to be the skin color.

Now Obama is pretty gruesome, it has to be said. It was Dave Garner, I think, who first brought this article to my attention. It's written by a liberal, too! This excerpt from it lists some of our President's "heinous views" and heinous deeds.

He has slaughtered civilians — Muslim children by the dozens — not once or twice, but continuously in numerous nations with drones, cluster bombs and other forms of attack. He has sought to overturn a global ban on cluster bombs. He has institutionalized the power of Presidents — in secret and with no checks — to target American citizens for assassination-by-CIA, far from any battlefield. He has waged an unprecedented war against whistleblowers, the protection of which was once a liberal shibboleth. He rendered permanently irrelevant the War Powers Resolution, a crown jewel in the list of post-Vietnam liberal accomplishments, and thus enshrined the power of Presidents to wage war even in the face of a Congressional vote against it. His obsession with secrecy is so extreme that it has become darkly laughable in its manifestations, and he even worked to amend the Freedom of Information Act (another crown jewel of liberal legislative successes) when compliance became inconvenient.

He has entrenched for a generation the once-reviled, once-radical Bush/Cheney Terrorism powers of indefinite detention, military commissions, and the state secret privilege as a weapon to immunize political leaders from the rule of law. He has shielded Bush era criminals from every last form of accountability... He has empowered thieving bankers through the Wall Street bailout, Fed secrecy, efforts to shield mortgage defrauders from prosecution, and the appointment of an endless roster of former Goldman, Sachs executives and lobbyists. He’s brought the nation to a full-on Cold War and a covert hot war with Iran, on the brink of far greater hostilities. He has made the U.S. as subservient as ever to the destructive agenda of the right-wing Israeli government. His support for some of the Arab world’s most repressive regimes is as strong as ever.

Most of all, America’s National Security State, its Surveillance State, and its posture of endless war is more robust than ever before. The nation suffers from what National Journal‘s Michael Hirsh just christened “Obama’s Romance with the CIA.” He has created what The Washington Post just dubbed “a vast drone/killing operation,” all behind an impenetrable wall of secrecy and without a shred of oversight. Obama’s steadfast devotion to what Dana Priest and William Arkin called “Top Secret America” has severe domestic repercussions as well, building up vast debt and deficits in the name of militarism that create the pretext for the “austerity” measures which the Washington class (including Obama) is plotting to impose on America’s middle and lower classes.

The simple fact is that progressives are supporting a candidate for President who has done all of that...

Horrible, because these are the things that can bring our nation to ruin, and much faster, too, than, say abortion. But please do not make the mistake of thinking any of the other candidates for President will not do exactly these same things. To vote for any of them is to vote for Obama in another guise.

With the just barely possible exception of Ron Paul.

P.S.) This morning I heard on the radio (NPR, the station we love to hate) that the Obama administration is considering a deal with the Taliban which would involve, on the U.S. side, closing down Guantanamo. Oh, so it can be done, after all? So these inmates are not such terrible terrorists after all that we absolutely must keep them locked up forever? They're just pawns??? You mean Obama could have closed Guantanamo "on day one", as he pledged to during his campaign?

Poor Pets!

2012-01-02T13:37:00.000-05:00

How to drive your cat(s) crazy: Allow Santa to give each of your 7-year-old twin boys a remote controlled truck. The cats chase the whining trucks, the trucks turn around and chase the surprised cats.

How to drive your dog crazy: Have a New Year's Eve Party and on the stroke of midnight, have all your guests blow, (and/or rattle) the noise-makers, scream "Happy New Year!" and rush around hugging and kissing each other amid all this pandemonium.

More on the Importance of Jesus' Genealogy

2012-01-02T13:19:00.002-05:00

After our discussion a couple of weeks ago about the genealogy of Jesus in Matthew, my friend Daphne and I both realized this is the ancestry of Joseph. But since he was not Jesus' biological father, well, so what?

But I've been reading some Jewish apologetics recently, and now the significance of this genealogy is starkly clear. The Jews point out that ancestry is reckoned, in the Bible, through your father's line, and his father's, and so forth. So if Joseph is not Jesus' actual father in the flesh, then there's nothing to say He was descended from King David, as Messiah must be.

Ah, but that's just it! What does the Jew believe? If he believes Jesus was Joseph's biological son, then He was descended from David. Or if the Jew believes Jesus was born of a virgin - well, what does that say about Him?

So the genealogy makes its point either way.

Medicare

2011-12-28T23:37:00.000-05:00

Item: When my husband went on Medicare, we assumed our insurance costs, now being footed by the U.S. Government, would go down. Shouldn't they? They went UP. It costs us more to be covered by Medicare than by our private insurance alone. Who do you think receives the extra money?

Item: We saw on the news last week that if a patient comes in complaining of having fainted, Medicare pays "only" $7,000 to the health care provider. This low figure has been tempting some health care organizations to instruct their doctors not to call if fainting, but to call it central nervous system something-or-other, because that diagnosis brings in many times more dollars from Medicare.

Fainting is a complaint my husband says can be resolved in less than half an hour at a cost of perhaps $50 to the doctor or practice.

WHO PAYS SEVEN THOUSAND DOLLARS for a fainting fit? You? Forget it. Your private health care insurance? Dream on. Only the U.S. Government.

And why? I defy you to make any sense of it without saying it involves corruption. The answer is, a lot of congressional somebodies are being paid a lot of money to funnel these kinds of dollars to doctors and hospitals.

ITEM: When my husband had his carotid artery operated on in March of this year, he spent one night in the hospital. The hospital's charge for this (not to be confounded with the doctors' charges, which are separate things) was $5,830.00. For one night. Without any particularly complicated care, as all went smoothly enough for him to be discharged the following morning. Medicare paid $3,000, which is still outrageous. And the remainder? The hospital, we were told, would write it off. Meaning it would receive $3,000 but, come tax time, claim a $2,830 loss.

The truth is, a major part of why the cost of health care in this country is so high is the federal government's corrupt involvement in it. Therefore the probability is, we would all, from infants to seniors, have been better off had there never been a Medicare. So yes, in that sense, I am against Medicare.

Does that mean I'm in favor of just dropping it? No, definitely not, because that would leave seniors, largely on a fixed income, defenseless in a sea of sharks. It ought to be dropped, yes, but only in the context of an overall reform in the American health care system. A real reform, I mean, not Obamacare. A reform in which medical charges bear some resemblance to actual costs, in which profits are not outrageous or extortionate, in which doctors and hospitals and pharmacies are paid directly by the patients, without any price-gougers interposing themselves between and dictating treatments. A reform brought about carefully, thoughtfully, and gradually.

We'd all pay less, seniors included, seniors especially.

Oh, and we'd also be living more nearly by the Constitution, which does not accord the federal government the power to set up or administer a program like Medicare.

Twelve Days of Christmas Quiz

2011-12-28T20:40:00.000-05:00

By the Twelfth Day of Christmas, according to the carol, how many birds had my true love given me?

May the remaining 8 Days of Christmas be very merry for you and yours!

Christmas Music

2011-12-23T23:19:00.000-05:00

Least Favorite

1.) Blue Christmas
Too whiney, not at all in the right spirit.

2.) Feliz Navidad
Annoying tune, plus it tends to get stuck in the brain.

3.) Minor Alterations II
by David Lovrein, heard on NPR. A medley of seasonal songs transposed from major into minor keys that gives the distinct feeling Christmas is being mocked. (That's a feeling NPR conveys in various ways every year.) I wonder how the arranger would feel if someone transposed Hannukah songs into major keys and made them sound like Christmas carols.

Favorite

1.) Hark, the Herald Angels
Retains all the Christmas theology, expressed in rich paradox. He is born that we may no longer die, He is born once that we may be born twice, etc.

2.) Adeste, Fideles
Because of an event in my life with which I associate it, but that's a story for another day.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

The Heavenly Host

2011-12-23T00:13:00.012-05:00

Often at this time of year, when we hear so much about angels, I think of my Guardian Angel, who has actually spoken with me, twice. Aloud, I mean, so anyone could have heard.

That was back in the time I didn’t even believe in guardian angels, or in angels generally. I did sometimes go to the Greek church, but although my angel helped change this, I wasn’t planning to become Orthodox.

What I had tumbled to was that my then-husband’s new “best friend”, who went by the alias of George Homewood, was a con artist. Not that we had any money to speak of; we were very poor, but my mother-in-law had just died and left us a little something for a rainy day. My husband wanted to scrape together and give his "friend" what for us was a huge amount, including my next paycheck.

“George” had a plan (don’t they all!). He had invented a solar food dehydrator. Because it was inexpensive to use and could preserve food, it would be the salvation of the starving poor all around the world. He had already produced it once, spending his entire, vast fortune to distribute it as widely as he could when he had been a missionary in the Philippines. As a result of his over-generosity, he now found himself in need. (Here it comes.) He needed money to begin manufacturing his device again. But this time, having learned his lesson the hard way, he had developed a plan for selling it that would make him – and us, of course – fabulously rich at the same time it helped the starving poor. Oh, and by the way, he also needed some funds for food and a few other necessities, in the meanwhile. Just to keep him going in the short run.

When the realization came crashing down on me that this had all the marks of a scam, I tried to discuss it with my husband, but this possibility was too difficult for him to admit.

So I saw I would have to prove my point, and quickly, before everything we had should go to George Homewood. I took the next day off from work and spent it in my cubicle anyway, and the first thing I thought I ought to do was ask for help from the police, and that’s when I spoke, over the telephone, to my Guardian Angel.

I dialed the regular non-emergency police number and said to whoever answered (the Desk Sergeant, if TV police shows are to be believed?), “I think my husband is being conned, and I need some help to prove it.”

“Just a moment,” said the man, “and I’ll transfer you to Tel Com.” I assumed that was short for Telephone Communications. Anyway, my Guardian Angel came on the line, although at the time I just imagined her as a very large, black woman, from her voice. “This is Officer Childs,” she said.

I had my legal pad and pen ready. “Is that C-h-i-l-d-s?” I asked. She said it was and I wrote it down beside the police phone number.

“I think my husband is being conned,” I told her, and then provided a few details.

“Honey, I’ve been in pursuit of justice for a long, long time, and I can tell you this definitely is a scam. No question. But what you need to do,” she said, gently, “is talk to your husband. Cain’t you talk to him?”

“I’ve tried, but it doesn’t work. He won’t hear it; he just gets mad."

"Listen, you've got to quit playing the avenging angel [how did she know?]and play the victim instead, because that's what you really are in this situation."

"I'll try, but can’t you give me some sort of ammunition, some facts, maybe some criminal record?”

“Well, I’m not really supposed to be doing that sort of thing. But you give me half an hour, and I will call you back.”

Half an hour later, she did phone me back. “What have you got?” I asked.

“He was never a missionary in the Philippines or anywhere else. He isn’t a Mormon, either. Nor a Navy chaplain. His degree in theology is fake and he’s no lawyer. Never even studied law. He was in prison during the time he said he was in the Philippines. You got a pen handy? His date of birth -”

“Thank you! I don't think I'll need need to know his birth date!”

“Yes, you will. You write this down.” So I did.

If I wanted to learn more, she suggested, I should go down to the Courthouse and inquire.

“Okay,” I said, “thank you, thank you, thank you! I’ll check it all out.”

“And when you’ve finished,” she said, “and it’s all over, I want you to call me back at this same number and tell me. Promise.”

Of course I promised! It felt like some sort of a secret pact between us. And I kept my promise, too, or tried to.

First item on the agenda, according to her, was to get all our finances safely under my sole control: bank account, mutual fund, insurance. That took most of the day.

Then, with the help of a private detective, I methodically checked everything she had told me. I called the Church of the Latter Day Saints, and they said they didn’t have any such person in their records. But how old was he at the time? Because they didn’t sent out missionaries older than 25. I had my Dad, who worked at the Pentagon, confirm that George was not a Navy Chaplain. The law college George claimed to have attended turned out to be a correspondence school. He had registered, but never even completed the first course. His theology degree was from a basement diploma mill in California; write your dissertation in 50 words or less on Why Religious Freedom is Important and enclose $25, or $35 if you want your diploma mounted in a handsome frame. I telephoned various prisons nearby and said I needed to confirm the dates of the incarceration and the nature of the charges. The charges were always fraud and/or passing bad checks. One man I spoke to said, “Oh, yes, I remember him. He was quite a piece of work! He used to take on legal cases for the other inmates, cheap rates.”

A week or so later, when I had gathered all my evidence, including photos of the man in prison, and when the big fight was over, and when George had disappeared on a “business trip” to the Philippines, with all our luggage but without any more of our money, I called the police station and asked how to get a flower arrangement to Officer Childs.

There is no such person working here, I was informed.

“Yes, there is! I spoke to her last Monday!”

“No, ma’am.”

“Well, has she quit or been transferred since then?”

“No ma’am, there never was anybody by that name working here.”

“She’s in Tel Com!”

No, she wasn’t. “The only female officers working in Telcom are Officers Evans and Jones.”

“Is one of them black?” Officer Childs had had a distinctly black timbre to her voice.

“No, ma’am, both white.”

The private detective who had helped me follow Officer Childs' leads now tried to solve this new mystery, out of pure personal interest. Maybe someone had given me a pseudonym? But why? He tried every branch of law enforcement: city police, county police, sheriff. But he never solved the mystery. Officer Childs just didn’t exist.

Except that she had given me valuable information, and everything she had told me had proven true. She had given me courage, saved some of our precious little nest egg, and given our badly battered marriage another chance (even though, in the end, it still failed).

Oh, and everyone I had spoken to, every single one of them, had required George Homewood’s date of birth when looking him up.

It was the Greek priest who exclaimed, “My God, have you been talking with your guardian angel, or what?” And I looked at him for a long moment before I finally said, "Yes," with wonder in my voice. "Yes, I have.” Yes, just as almost everybody else including me has given up such quaint and curious beliefs, I told him, I find out this is one thing you have got right after all.

Glory to God, and fervent thanks to you, my own dear Guardian Angel! (Were you among those who sang Christ’s birth?)

Superego: Wrong Image

2011-12-22T17:15:00.006-05:00

Superego, of course, is a concept of Freud’s. It is often made synonymous with “conscience”. The superego is basically an image you have of Who You Are Supposed To Be. This image can be inculcated into you by your parents, your teachers, your religious leaders, and/or can even be constructed by yourself. Wherever it has come from, your heart has accepted it as your ideal.

The trouble is, that’s not who you really are, nor can be. You can’t live up to this ideal. And whenever you don’t, you feel pangs of remorse; you feel guilty and like kicking yourself, because you think you are supposed to be this other thing and you find you aren’t. It’s this phenomenon that gives rise to the “terrors of conscience”, the conviction that in all justice, you ought to be punished.

It happens all the time. I once knew a pious Catholic man who went off to a monastery to become a monk and came back six months later saying, “They wanted me to be someone I’m just not and I couldn’t do it.” He couldn’t be someone’s concept of the Ideal Monk. For him, perhaps that meant defeat, or perhaps it meant liberation, as it should for us. Because – take heart! – in reality, this is a mistake our hearts have made in accepting something not me as “Who I am Supposed To Be”.

Yes, it’s all a mistake. The superego is an artificial construct. Your true conscience is the Image of God within you that protests every time it is violated. Its reaction is sorrow, not guilt.

And you are not meant to be what you cannot be, nor to live up to any ideal. You are not meant to be anybody other than who you are.

And who is that? That’s YOU! You are a unique someone created in the Image of God. You are someone in whom that Image has become tarnished and battered. You are someone in whom God means to refurbish His image and make it brighter than ever.

That Image is the Image of His Son. And it’s not just another form of superego, either, because you aren’t supposed to be Jesus Christ, now or ever; you’re just supposed to try to keep faith with Him as He does His work in you, transfiguring you into your best self, your true self, which is to say, into a glorious but still unique member of Himself, living the life of the Holy Trinity. You are the raw material He takes and deifies.

And unlike the superego, this Image, not merely existing in your head, but as a facet of your own being, is non-threatening. This is the Image of the Creator of all the Galaxies, yes, but Who graciously condescends to be born as a helpless babe in a stable. This is the One Whom all the heavens could not contain, consenting to be wrapped in a human womb for nine months. This is the Timeless One, entering into time, the Immortal One, willing to be killed, the Judge of us all, which sounds so threatening, yet so meek is this Judge that He allows us to judge Him!

It’s the judgment we make of Him that ultimately will reveal most profoundly who we really are. Do you really, really, deep down, want Him or not? His dread Judgment will be:
to reveal this to you
and then to give you what you want
and to let you be who you want to be.

The hopes and fears
Of all the years
Are met in Him tonight.

May you have a very merry and blessed Christmas!

Being Lied to is Something I just Cannot Get Used To

2011-12-21T12:16:00.003-05:00

Check out the truth, as explained by Rep. Jerrold Nadler, here.

And the text of the section in question is here.

One World, One Government, One Religion

2011-12-20T20:20:00.000-05:00

There's a program on pulic television airing as I type, explaining why Islam, Judaism, and Christianity have more "commonalities" than differences. Really they are three versions of the same thing with slightly different wrinkles. They all do worship the same God, after all.

Wait, wait - Muslims and Jews have begun to worship the Holy Trinity???

Mysogyny is a Sin

2011-12-19T16:30:00.006-05:00

We had a wonderful discussion Saturday night with a group of friends from church, and the subject arose of how it very much appears the Orthodox Church has some sort of a grudge against women. This appearance kept me away from the Church for a while. Consider: women are not allowed to go into the altar. Women in some jurisdictions are asked not to receive Holy Communion during their menstrual periods. And it does seem there are an awfully lot of women saints who before their repentance were prostitutes! Women are not ordained priests, either.

Eventually I figured out that appearances do not add up to any imagined mysogyny, hatred of women. I was treated with great respect, and so were the other women I observed. There must be some other reasons behind these practices.

Going Behind the Altar

The truth is, nobody of either sex is allowed behind the altar screen unless he or she has some legitimate duty to perform there. Men don't usually know this, but they are also not supposed to be there without a blessing from the priest. Women don't usually realize it, but any cleaning lady can tell you she regularly goes there to vacuum and dust and clean up the wax.

Not Reciving Holy Communion During Your Period

This is a pious practice in some jurisdictions of the Orthodox Church (e.g., Greek); others (e.g., OCA) think it perhaps a bit over the top. Certainly it is not a dogma of the Church that a woman must not receive Holy Communion while she is menstruating.

The truth is, men aren't supposed to receive Holy Communion, either, if they have any significant bleeding. The reason, for men and women alike, is, of course, you are receiving the true Blood of Christ and you want to treat it more reverently than to let it seep out of you in undignified ways.

Obviously, men dying on battlefields and dying women, bleeding from anywhere, do receive Holy Communion. The Church exercises wisom and compassion when an exception to the rule seem more likely than the rule itself to support a person's salvation.

Prostitutes

Yes, there are a lot of those in our Tradition! St. Mary of Egypt comes to mind, and the woman who anointed Christ's feet with oil, and the Hymn of Cassiani. Prostitutes are featured so often because sexual sin is such a big problem for human beings. It's also to encourage us, because when we see them forgiven, we understand that so can we be forgiven.

We also note that several people infamous for sexual sin are listed among the Ancestors of Christ in Matthew's Gospel. We have Tamar who had become pregnant by someone not her husband (Genesis 38); we have Solomon, whom King David begat by the wife he had stolen from Uriah (and had Uriah killed in the process); we have Booz, son of Rachab the, um, yes, prostitute. Sinners and scoundrels, yet here they are, made worthy to be accounted Ancestors of God-in-the-Flesh; and as the priest in Fort Wayne once told us, if they could make it, there's hope for all of us!

But guess what? Tradition has at least as many stories of fornicating monks as it does of wayward women!

And when Christ saved the woman caught in the act of adultery, what did He say to the men standing all around ready to stone her? If any of you is without sin, cast the first stone. So He taught them they were not better than she.

Women Excluded from Priesthood

This is a long, complicated topic, but perhaps we can summarize it here. The first thing to understand is that in Orthodox Christianity, "priest" does not equal "leader". Our leaders are men and women who are exceptionally Christlike. The office of priest is that of a servant to the servants of God; where it is adequately understood that we really mean this, it isn't just a matter of words, few feminists will covet the role.

There is no higher status accorded priests; instead, there is a special function, for the sake of which we show a priest respect. That function is to be the living icon of Christ, both inwardly and outwardly, for liturgical purposes. Christ Himself sends the Holy Spirit upon the waters of Baptism or into the bread and wine of Holy Communion, or into the oil for Unction; ministering alongside the Lord is the priest, doing the visible counterparts of what Christ is doing invisibly and being His visible counterpart.

The priest's functions, although indispensible, are not the highest ones in the Divine Liturgy; receiving the Body and Blood of Christ is the most important function, and it is no less available to women than to men.

In short, the Orthodox Church, recognizing that the sexes are not alike (and vive la difference!) has different roles for each, but not different statuses, because in Christ there is no inequality between male and female.

Baby Bat

2011-12-19T15:34:00.003-05:00

Bats are so intelligent that some scientists consider them primates, like gorillas and chimps, or at least very closely akin to them. They are warm, furry, very smart, loveable creatures.

They are susceptibble to rabies. One in every 200 bats, on average, has or carries it. For that reason, I'd like to point out that normally, bats are handled with GLOVES! This may be considered an exception because (1) the baby is from a zoo, where it is known his parents were healthy and (2) this is a very young baby, without teeth (and too young to be terribly fearful of humans, anyway).

I hope you enjoy this darling little video.

What Kids Say!

2011-12-17T13:17:00.000-05:00

This summer, Sydney, then still only 5, was sent to Vacation Bible School. One day she came home and asked her mother, "What does 'accept' mean?"

"It means you believe something is true," replied Erin.

Sydney burst into tears. "Oh, NO!" (You have to 'hear' the rest in a Southern accent.) "I messed up! I REALLY messed up!"

"Why, what did you do?"

"I told my teacher and my whole class I did NOT accept Jesus Christ as my personal Savior!"

All My Grandchildren

2011-12-17T13:03:00.027-05:00

Or, It IS Acceptable to Brag About Grandchildren, Isn't It?

This was Earlier this Summer; Below is
a very recent one of Jackson. Sydney is
so Thrilled with her Little Brother she
has Been Asking Mom and Dad for Another!

On the First Anniversary of the Day
Jackson First Came to Us

Kelly and Her Brothers at Hallowe'en. Kelly is the
Goddess Athena. Connor and Ryan are Transformers.
I don't have a recent shot that shows their handsome faces!

Kelly Having Tea at Biltmore House in North Carolina (Vanderbilt
Mansion) and Trying to Look Like a Flapper.

From one of our Senators from Virginia; no Word yet from the Other

2011-12-17T01:20:00.000-05:00

Dear Mrs. Theodoridis,

Thank you for taking the time to contact me with your views on funding priorities within the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2012. [Funding priorities were not my issue, but of course this is a form letter.]

We have placed great demands on our military in recent years, and the Department of Defense must be granted the necessary budgetary authority to fund essential and effective defense programs while also ensuring that our armed forces are properly equipped, cared for and compensated. For that reason, on December 1, 2012, the Senate passed the National Defense Authorization Act for FY 2012 (S. 1867) 93-7, with my support.

As we consider legislation during this time of fiscal strain, I believe it is important to consider that the ability of our country to field well-trained, fully-resourced and combat-capable military forces is dependent on a healthy, functioning economy. I recognize that addressing our debt and deficit challenges will not be easy; however, I believe it is imperative that we continue to engage in a civil and open debate as to what we need and what we can afford. This will require tough choices, but I believe that addressing our debt and deficit is too important for Congress to put off any longer.

Again, thank you for contacting me. For further information or to sign up for my newsletter please visit my website at http://warner.senate.gov.

Sincerely,
MARK R. WARNER
United States Senator

Photos With Stories, Part VI

2011-12-16T12:02:00.006-05:00

Don't have to tell you where this is, just when. When was 15. That's my brother with me, on our last vacation in Europe before our military family was to be transferred back to the States.

I have a guilty secret, shared by Michael and my other siblings, not shown in this photo. The secret is inside that large handbag you see me holding a bit too carefully. Where you see the bulge, there's a coffee can inside that bag, lined with kleenex and paper towels to make a nest for my pet rat, Gelati. Gelati secretly went with us all over Italy and was sneaked aboard the USS Darby when we sailed for New York. My parents had no idea.

Some kid on ship, um, ratted me out. I was summoned to the chaplain's office (!) and confronted with the charge that I was transporting vermin. Well, I had to defend poor Gelati's life, didn't I? So I lied. I said I had already tossed him overboard.

Other kids aboard backed me up. Yes, said one, I saw her throw it over the stern. Definitely, said another, I saw her throw it over the bow. We were with her when she tossed it over the starboard side. We were with her on the port side. Etc.

Meanwhile, though, the decision was made, since the rat could not be found, that when we arrived in New York, the USS Darby with all passengers would have to be quarantined there for 3 days. This was a military transport vessel, full of families who had been stationed abroad three or four years, all very eager to get back HOME. I was the pariah of the whole ship.

The decision, because of being so unpopular, was changed. Instead of quarantining the ship, each and every cabin would be thoroughly searched - and fumigated. That's when I really did tearfully toss Gelati overboard. I was relieved, but my parents were more upset than ever.

I could well understand their distress and fury, but it wasn't until decades later I found out the real source of it. My parents were smuggling alcohol in their luggage!

At least that was my understanding until a few days ago, until Thanksgiving.

"No," said Mom. "We didn't have anything in our luggage. We weren't smuggling liquor; YOU were!"

Beethoven

2011-12-16T10:50:00.003-05:00

"And now," said my then four-year-old niece, sitting at the piano one Christmas afternoon, "I'll play you some music from my FAVORITE composer, Beethoven." Whereupon she turned toward the keyboard and plunked out a few random notes. That was 12 years ago now; she's about to turn 16.

Anyway, if Beethoven happens to be your favorite composer, too, or at least one of them, he was born on this day in 1770, so that makes it, um, let's see, 241 years ago. (?)

So Happy Beethoven's Birthday to you!

The Most Radical, Most Inspiring Document ever Written, Other than the New Testament

2011-12-16T05:34:00.000-05:00

IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776.
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in
their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences

For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

And then Justice Sometimes Also Happens

2011-12-15T18:25:00.001-05:00

Okay, so it always happens, sooner or later. Just in this case, it was sooner.

The Smoking Gun

2011-12-15T18:01:00.001-05:00

It's hard to find this on the Web. It's been deleted from Youtube and therefore from everywhere that embedded the Youtube video. But here it is... Better view it now, in case it may also soon disappear.

The Bill of Rights

2011-12-15T12:14:00.000-05:00

Here is the text of the Bill of Rights, consisting of the first 10 Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

First Amendment – Establishment Clause, Free Exercise Clause; freedom of speech, of the press, and of assembly; right to petition

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Second Amendment – Militia (United States), Sovereign state, Right to keep and bear arms.

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Third Amendment – Protection from quartering of troops.

No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.

Fourth Amendment – Protection from unreasonable search and seizure.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Fifth Amendment – due process, double jeopardy, self-incrimination, eminent domain.

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

Sixth Amendment – Trial by jury and rights of the accused; Confrontation Clause, speedy trial, public trial, right to counsel

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.

Seventh Amendment – Civil trial by jury.

In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.

Eighth Amendment – Prohibition of excessive bail and cruel and unusual punishment.

Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

Ninth Amendment – Protection of rights not specifically enumerated in the Constitution.

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Tenth Amendment – Powers of States and people.

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Weirdness Happens

2011-12-15T11:02:00.001-05:00

Last night as I was typing the blog post, "The Lesser Evil is Still Evil", a creepy thing happened. I was typing it in Word, although yes, I was also connected to the Internet. Well, I had just finished typing one sentence when, to my astonishment, a voice that sounded synthesized read it back to me.

No, I don't have any voice recognition or any text-to-voice software on this computer. It's true that my finger had slipped while typing that sentence, but I can't imagine what I could have pressed that would cause this to happen.

Any ideas?

(No, I do not "hear vocies"!)

Really, Really Scary Stuff

2011-12-15T08:14:00.009-05:00

or, Liberty and Security are not Mutally Exclusive

This man is the author of several articles about the anti-American, unconstitutional provisions of the current National Defense Authorization Act. Read the first one here and then, if you care to, follow links.

The President has just withdrawn his threat to veto this bill. He says certain changes have now made it acceptable. They haven't. The major change is that if your innocent little self is arrested as a terrorist suspect, the power to waive the non-existent charges is now assigned to the President instead of to the Secretary of Defense. After today, would you trust this president to do that for you?

Consider carefully from now on what you say on Facebook or Twitter or on your blog. I can't believe I'm saying this. In America.

"But you must remember, my fellow-citizens, that eternal vigilance by the people is the price of liberty, and that you must pay the price if you wish to secure the blessing. It behooves you, therefore, to be watchful in your States as well as in the Federal Government." -- Andrew Jackson, Farewell Address, March 4, 1837

The Lesser Evil is Still Evil

2011-12-15T02:06:00.001-05:00

It isn’t good just because it’s the least evil possibility. It’s still evil. It’s what the Orthodox call “involuntary sin”. This term sounds weird in the ears of Western Christians, but it might perhaps be roughly, loosely, compared with the legal term, “involuntary manslaughter”, which means the defendant did something truly horrible but couldn’t help it. Sometimes the rottenness of this world puts us in situations in which we must try to choose the least awful, least damaging, least wretched thing to do. But it’s still awful, damaging, and wretched! It doesn’t morph into something good. It isn’t even, for those concerned with their moral status, justifiable. Why not? Well, because whose fault is it the world is so rotten that it only presents us with rotten choices? Have we not all contributed to making this world what it is? If we are anything short of perfect, of course we have.

In the coming election, it appears we are going to have some pretty rotten choices. Mitt Romney’s record as head of Bain Capital is at best morally mixed; google it. Newt Gingrich’s record on several things is at best morally mixed. Barack Obama has done nothing whatever to correct the policies of torture or rendition, nothing substantive to correct our broken health care system, nothing to curb our insane drive to secure and consolidate American control of the whole world. (When I was growing up, such an ambition was considered criminal, was associated with Hitler, and was consistently foiled by the likes of Batman or Superman or even – if memory serves, which it doesn’t always – James Bond.) Ron Paul so far appears at least an honest man, to support whom would not be morally objectionable – so far as I know now. Should he be elected (and contrary to popular perception, he is indeed electable), I think we'll still be safe from his more radical ideas, which will remain just that, ideas, because they will be non-starters in Congress.

But if he is not the Republican nominee and we end up having to choose between two crooks, there is another choice, albeit also a flawed one. And that is not to vote at all.

I was brought up to believe, and I still believe, that to vote is my duty as an American citizen, an exercise of a precious right. But that belief presupposes there will be at least one honest candidate. What if there isn't? I'm amazed how many people think a morally bankrupt candidate is in any way qualified to be President of the United States.

If there is no honest candidate, I believe my duty then is to withhold my vote, to refuse to put my support behind any of these white-collar gangsters. (And I do not believe myself qualified to decide which is the worse or which the better. It's like asking whether stealing is worse than lying, or whether avarice is better than lust.)

Would withholding my vote do any good? Probably not. (But if voting won't, either, so what?) On the other hand, just maybe it will. If a certain high percentage of all registered voters don’t vote, then the legitimacy of the election will be in question, which is a good thing. It at least registers our discontent.

As far as I can recall, there is no write-in option on Virginia ballots. But maybe I could just not punch out any of the holes, and write in ink across my ballot, “None of the above”. A lot of people doing that, or writing it in, would also send a message.

Perhaps this would be the least wrong of the available options.

UPDATE: Someone who voted for Ron Paul in the 2008 presidential race has reminded me that a candidate does NOT have to be his or her party's nominee to appear on the ballot, at least in Virginia. Probably everywhere??

Oh, by the Way...

2011-12-14T23:21:00.000-05:00

Today I went to the pharmacy to renew a prescription, and while I was there, I inquired about the price of those pills for which, in Greece, without insurance, I paid $2.34 for a month's supply. Here, without insurance, a month's worth of the brand as opposed to the generic version costs $27.99. That's almost 12 times more! (Okay, it's 11.96 times more.)

I don't think my health insurance company pays a cent. Simply the manufacturer "accepts" my $15 co-pay, which, figuring in the pharmacist's profit, is still six or seven times what the manufacturer could profitably sell it for. The drug company accepts 7 times what the pills are worth instead of 12 times. And the health insurance company keeps on charging me for this kind of coverage.

Call it "protection" instead of "coverage" and it begins to smack of racketeering, doesn't it? Pay up or else.

Something to Consider

2011-12-14T19:47:00.003-05:00

h/t Fr. Andrew Damick

I am not, or at least not yet, a convinced supporter of Ron Paul, but as I've said before (and will explain in more detail another time) I am unable to consider any of the others. John, over at Ad Orientem, has expressed my thoughts on this candidate very well.

This video is educational and sobering and well worth your attention.

Photos With Stories, Part V

2011-12-13T15:58:00.000-05:00

On the right, in costume, is our family friend, Clyde Friar, whom we have known since I was little. My sister was once in love with his son Larry, and both families rather hoped they would one day marry.

Anyway, Clyde's hobby was playing bit parts in movies and TV. His all-time "big" role was a one-liner in Hawaii Five-O. Here he is with the then star of that series, Tom Selleck.

Just Busy

2011-12-12T14:30:00.000-05:00

Not to worry, kind friends; no news is good news and all that. We are fine, just very busy getting ready for Christmas.

Still haven't gotten everything straight with the Dept. of Motor Vehicles, either. Our letter reached the Commissioner Monday. If we get no satisfactory results, our representative to the State Legislature will receive the next one...

Once we stopped to think about it, we thought it ought to be rather embarrassing to have someone break into your home and not find anything worth stealing! (The DVR didn't belong to us, but to our tv/phone/internet provider.) Oh, well, too busy to feel embarrassed.

It was announced yesterday that our assistant priest will re re-assigned as of 01 January; such short notice! I do hope our Bishop Evangelios will assign us another one very soon!

Whoa, Did Something Die in Here? Oh, It Was Freedom

2011-12-07T01:00:00.005-05:00

h/t to John at Ad Orientem

Congress has just passed a bill that, if if becomes law, will take away all your rights if you are ever accused of having anything to do with terrorism. Of course you are no terrorist, and would rather die than support any terrorist, so you aren't worried, right? You should be. Because it doesn't matter if such a charge is flat-out, obviously ridiculous and outrageous and you have totally been framed; you won't have a chance to defend yourself in a civilian court. And you may be incarcerated by the military without any charges indefinitely.

PLEASE READ THIS.

http://www.loweringthebar.net/2011/12/whoa-did-something-die-in-here-oh-it-was-freedom.html

P.S. It will be instructive to see whether Mr. Obama will veto this legislation. Don't count on it. Letters to him might be useful, though.

Calling all Conspiracy Theorists

2011-12-06T15:39:00.008-05:00

or, Ponder this Long and Hard, all ye Lovers of Freedom

Several years ago, when Vladimir Putin was visiting the United States, we were listening to The News Hour with Jim Lehrer on PBS when Mr. Lehrer ~~slipped and~~ said, in an aside to his guest, "Of course, we don't allow Putin access to the Western media anyway..." to which his guest quickly agreed and then moved on, as if not to draw attention to what had just been said. But you and I should definitely pay attention, because the implications are staggering.

Who is the "we" in that sentence?

My husband and I have been discussing this for years, ever since that show:

Who has the power to deny Putin access even just to the whole American press - as in censorship, as in unconstitutional - much less deny him access to all the international, Western news media?????

And not only who, but how? How is it managed?

And WHY?

And in what other ways may somebody or somebodies be controlling/manipulating the entire Western press?

Reflections from Fr. John Fenton

2011-12-06T11:23:00.000-05:00

Some years after his conversion from Lutheranism to Orthodoxy, Fr. John says his reasons have crystallized. Here are the big four, but do read his whole blog post.

In the final analysis, however, I would boil all the differences down to these main points:
The Church is not a Platonic Republic (i.e., intrinsically or primarily invisible); i.e., an assembly of believers. Rather, it is and must be a visible entity, traceable through an unbroken link to the time of the Apostles. (The Lutheran Confessions, in my view, speak with two minds about this doctrine.)
The end or purpose of salvation is not merely to be safe or make it to heaven, but to be in an undying union with God through Christ and the Spirit. That end or purpose is never fully achieved, just as a relationship is never exhausted. (This is a summary of theosis or, what "Lutheran Orthodoxy" called unio mystica.) This leads me to resonate with St Maximus the Confessor's speculation that sin and death did not necessitate the incarnation of the Son of God; rather, the original design, from eternity, was that the Son of God would become incarnate so that man could be in union with God.
Tradition is not a custom nor merely a lens through which the church reads the Scriptures; rather, Tradition is the ongoing life of the Church (the Spirit in and of the Church) which, of course, cannot contradict Scripture but which also amplifies Scripture. (The Lutheran Confessions state that some of Tradition - e.g., liturgy - is indifferent; and insist, for those who take a quia subscription, that it is a lens.)
Sin is certainly serious and is inherited; but it is not part of man's nature nor is it the primary problem. Rather, death is the primary problem, as seen by the fact that Christ purposefully took on passable flesh in order to suffer, die and rise. (The article on Free Will [FC SD II], when read understanding the philosophical underpinnings of the language, agrees that man is not by nature sinful.)
But the tipping point, Fr. John says, was something else. Check out his blog.

Sunday was St. Barbara's Day

2011-12-06T11:13:00.004-05:00

This feast has a lot of significance for me. Barbara is my mother's name, and the name of my sister who died in 2008. She had been received into the Holy Orthodox Church one year before, on the eve of the Feast of St. Barbara.

St. Barbara is also (at least in the West, not sure about in Orthodoxy) the patron saint of the artillery, and my father was an artilleryman, so I think of him, too, on the Feast of St. Barbara.

Memory Eternal to them, and Many Years to all of you named Barbara!

Happy St. Nicholas Day!

2011-12-06T11:10:00.002-05:00

...and Many Years to each Nick / Nicholas out there!

When the Stash Attacks: Creative Techniques for Concealing Your Yarns

2011-12-05T00:22:00.000-05:00

What every True Knitter needs to know. You are not supposed to take this article in jest, but it's okay by me if you do.

Ron Paul

2011-12-04T21:15:00.000-05:00

We listened to some news coverage after the recent Republican debate (moderated by, um, Donald Trump?) and two things stood out to us.

One was that the "issues" debated were education, the environment, and a couple of other secondary issues. The crucial, critical, urgent ones were not mentioned at all, at least by this report on NPR.

The other striking thing was that there was no mention of Ron Paul. We've noticed this before, how the press snubs him. Never mind he's a solid third in the polls among Republican candidates. The press covers candidates who are garnering much smaller numbers than his, but mention of Ron Paul is avoided.

Is this a clue that the powers that be don't want him? And is that, in turn, a clue that we do?

Could it be we have found an honest man at last? I'm skeptical, having been so disappointed in Obama, whom I thought honest. I don't even care any more if I agree with a candidate or not, so long as he is honest. Because I think it's dishonesty, corruption, that more than anything else is bringing down this country. Honest mistakes we can live with, but corruption can destroy it all.

So I'm going to keep an eye on Ron Paul. He's the only candidate I am even remotely considering so far.

Newt Gingrich

2011-12-04T21:05:00.000-05:00

I think Mr. Gingrich stands a strong chance of being the next President of the United States.

We watched/listened to his speech a couple of nights ago, and his oratorical skills match or perhaps exceed Mr. Obama's. (Plus, he's more of a thinker.) He knows how to give a feel-good speech. He invokes Lincoln, Franklin, Jefferson, tells you heartwarming stories about them. He invites us to join him in "rebuilding that America".

Fat chance. That America was two centuries ago; we need a new America that lives up to those ideals. We need to look forward even more than backward.

How to get there? Mr. Gingrich didn't say. There was not a single mention of any of the issues that concern most Americans today. Nothing about the economy or the banking system or Wall Street or the crisis in Europe or jobs or home forclosures or ... well, you name it, he didn't mention it.

I'm all in awe and admiration at such consummate skill in sounding wonderful and saying nothing. He does it even better than Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton and that's saying a lot.

It will be interesting to see if he improves over the course of the campaign.

Of Men and Angels

2011-12-01T11:59:00.002-05:00

We are not going to turn into angels in the next life. We have a much higher destiny than that, for angels, although glorious beings, are still inferior to a glorified human being.

The first glory God bestowed upon mankind was to create us, and only us, in His own Image. No angel has that honor.

Again, God bestowed the highest honor upon humanity by becoming one of us. When have we ever heard He became an angel?

The God-Man laid down his own life to conquer death for us. For which angel did He ever die?

When the God-Man ascended into heaven, it was in His flesh, in His full humanity, to “sit at the right hand of the Father”. With which angel did the Father ever share His throne? In the Person of Jesus Christ, our humanity is perfectly united with the Godhead, without compromise to either. No angelic being has that honor.

We become, even in this life, members of Christ, grafted into His Being by Holy Baptism. Are angels baptized? We take God’s own flesh and blood into ours and mingle them together; do angels receive Holy Communion? We share the Body and indeed, the whole Being, of Christ, who is “so much better than the angels, as He has by inheritance obtained a more excellent name than they.” (Hebrews 1:4)

Our destiny is to become deified and to share forever in the inner life of the Holy Trinity. We are sons and daughters of God’s; angels are and forever remain God’s servants – and ours.

For to which of the angels did He ever say:

“You are My Son,
Today I have begotten You” ?

And again:

“I will be to Him a Father,
And He shall be to Me a Son” ?

But when He again brings the firstborn into the world, He says:

“Let all the angels of God worship Him.”

And of the angels He says:

“Who makes His angels spirits
And His ministers a flame of fire.”

But to the Son He says:

“Your throne, O God, is forever and ever;
A scepter of righteousness is the scepter of Your kingdom.
You have loved righteousness and hated lawlessness;
Therefore God, Your God, has anointed You
With the oil of gladness more than Your companions.”

Hebrews 1:5-9

One-Word Summaries

2011-11-30T08:16:00.000-05:00

A Catholic friend of ours here attended a several-sessions-long seminar on Judaism. In the last session, the Rabbi asked people how they would summarize, in one word, what it meant to be a Jew. The rabbi's answer: "Covenant." Jews, he explained, are the People of the Covenant. They have this contract with God that nobody else has, in other words, I suppose he meant.

He summarized Islam in the word, "Obedience", which I suppose is fair, as the very word "Islam" means, "submission". I might have said, "Koran".

And then, asked to summarize Christianity, the rabbi said, "Sin".

!

Thanksgiving: Gratitude for So Much

2011-11-30T00:43:00.002-05:00

Oh, stuff and bother! I’m not minded to bore you with all the details of our wonderful Thanksgiving. I’ll just say it somehow all came together at last but I was grateful, once we had all been seated at table, to accept Daniel’s offer to take charge from then on. (He’s my brother-in-law, Barbara’s husband.) He organized the transfer of various dishes to everybody’s plates.

Next day, Friday, I drove down to North Carolina with my daughter and her family to visit my son and his family. They’d also had a big crowd, mostly Katherine’s wonderful family, and had celebrated Thanksgiving with – are you ready? – a whipped cream fight! Yup. They chased each other around the house wielding squirt cans of whipped cream, and when they had thoroughly covered some family members with it, those people chased the others around and gave them big hugs.

It’s amazing how quickly whipped cream turns sour and smelly. And gluey…

Anyway, the weekend was full of fun: contests on the trampoline, cooking s’mores over the grill, going to Tanglewood to see the park’s elaborate Christmas lights display, and a shopping trip in which I bought all my 5 grandchildren belated birthday gifts and all their Christmas gifts as well, except Connor’s because he couldn’t find anything in the whole toy store he liked all that well. That was probably because he wasn’t feeling well, but he was better by time I left.

The grandchildren snuggled and sang and told stories and drew me pictures and allowed themselves to be chased and tickled, and the hole in my heart from grandchildren deprivation closed right up. Although it’s already beginning to open up again, God willing we’ll be back together before it widens enough to hurt very much.

Now it’s back home and back to settling in after our long absence. We finally put in a police report on our stolen DVR and we have composed a letter to the Commissioner of the Department of Motor Vehicles requesting justice be done concerning the situation that developed while we were away.

Baby Jackson, 1, needs a Christmas stocking. My mother used to knit them but doesn't anymore. Barbara took over some years ago but now that she has reposed, that leaves me. Okay, yarn all bought.

Everybody in our extended family has some variation of this stocking. Pattern here.

British Humour

2011-11-30T00:08:00.000-05:00

I forgot to tell you earlier about the bus driver we had in London. He was driving the shuttle bus, taking us from our hotel to the airport. As we arrived on the grounds of Heathrow, we heard:

"Ladies and gentlemen, out the windows to the left, you will notice what appears to be an enormous mound of earth. It is not simply a mound of earth; we are building our own volcano. When it is finished we are going to blast it and send all the ash to Iceland. We shall find out how they like it."

Then, when we came to the first stop: "Ladies and gentlemen, this is Terminal 2. For those of you who don't speak English, this is Terminal 2 - por favor."

What do You Want to be When You Grow Up?

2011-11-29T05:19:00.004-05:00

Once I told my priest I never had deciphered God’s Plan for My Life - to which, I received his usual who-do-you-think-you-are? kind of answer. Not everybody can be a hero, he pointed out; not everybody can lead an illustrious life brimming with world-shaking accomplishments. Just take care of your home and your husband, he advised. Maybe that’s “all” you are called to do, he said. But if and when God deems you have done this well enough, He may add something else, in small increments.

But Sarah in Indiana has another answer. She left it in my comment box when I urged people to read Chloe’s post, “Jesus Does NOT Have a Wonderful Plan for Your Life”. Sarah passed along what she had heard in that week's sermon, that Jesus IS God’s wonderful plan for your life.

So, so true! In Romans 8:29, St. Paul writes, “whom He foreknew, He also predestined [to be] conformed to the image of His Son…”

In Ephesians, the Apostle prays, “that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with might through His Spirit in the inner man, that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height— to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. (Eph. 3: 16-19)

“To be filled with all the fullness of God;” or in other words, be conformed to the image of the Son; or in Orthodox parlance, to be deified: this is the wonderful plan for each of us. This is our calling, and it is the most glorious imaginable one.

And that’s a blessed comfort for people like me who never did figure out what we wanted to be when we grew up. This is what every single one of us really, most truly, most deeply wants, the vocation for which we were all created. That's what our lives are all about.

Yes, THAT is what I want to be someday when I grow up.

I'm Alive and Well...

2011-11-28T17:20:00.000-05:00

... and very busy with, well, er, um, real life!

Will post more soon as I can, starting with our wonderful Thanksgiving weekend.

It's a Scam

2011-11-23T13:18:00.000-05:00

Help Needed!!!

Help! I'm sorry to be emailing you like this, but I am in need of some urgent assistance. As you have know, I've been traveling through Europe. But last night in Scotland, my worst fears came true. As we were headed back to the hotel, we were robbed but a crazy man with a GUN. He took our bags, wallets, and phones.

We have no credit cards or cash. Thankfully, we had left our passports in the safe at the hotel. We need to get back home, but we have no way to get to our flight in Germany that leaves for home today.Right now our only option is to fly home from here.

We need some money so we can purchase tickets to get to JFK, and then fly home from there. As soon as we get back home, I can repay you, I just need to get some cash to get there. If you can help, send me an email back, we have internet access from the lobby in the hotel. I'm sorry to bother you, I just didn't know how else to contact you quickly. Thanks! Rachel

Having seen and spoken to my friend Rachel on Sunday, I knew she wasn't traveling in Europe, nor could afford to, nor could drop her obligations at home. So I called her anyway, and she's right here. Someone has hijacked her e-mail account and she can't get into it. Apparently everyone in her address book has received this e-mail.

She says the same thing happened to Vangie (Evangelia) last week. What Rachel and Vangie have in common is, they go to the same church, the Greek church, where we also go.

So if, in the near future, you should see anything similar to this that purports to be from me (or Demetrios) it isn't. We are not in Europe; we are here in Richmond to stay until further notice. The best thing you can do, should you receive an e-mail like this, is to ignore it. Do not reply, lest you annoy the scammer and s/he attack your account next.

Of course, none of the foregoing means you cannot send us money if you like. Post office box number available upon request.

:-)

Can the non-Orthodox be Saved?

2011-11-22T05:23:00.014-05:00

Last year, our dear friend Vasilea, in Greece, raised this question over dinner; for a summary of that discussion, see here. This year, she did it again, mostly to pre-empt another endless discussion of politics.

The Orthodox Church has never taken a position on this matter. Therefore, the only correct answer an Orthodox Christian can give is, "We don't know." We_do_not_know. Truly. There is no "official" teaching of the Holy Orthodox Church.

There is reason to doubt they can be saved; for example, they are not members of the Body of Christ, they do not, so far as we can tell, have truly Life-giving sacraments, etc., etc.

And there is reason to believe they might nevertheless be saved, if for no other reason than that we have known God, Whose mercy is always endlessly astonishing, His ways, mysterious, His judgments, unsearchable, His Holy Spirit unconfined and unconstrained.

But we do not go by reason; we go according to revelation; and so far, the Holy Spirit has not revealed this to the Church. So if any Orthodox Christian tells you yes, the non-Orthodox can be saved, or no, they cannot, that person is expressing his own opinion and nothing more. Nothing more exists on the subject. We are allowed to hope, but not to proclaim our opinion as Truth.

My own hope, my own belief, my own opinion is a resounding yes. Yes, it is indeed possible for a non-Orthodox person to be saved. Extra difficult, but not impossible. Why do I think this? Simple: I have known Carl Harris. And others like him. And I think it would be blaspheming the Holy Spirit to suppose Carl did not belong to Christ.

I have known Salmon, too, who is Muslim, and my heart, with wonder and awe and joy, recognizes in him another heart belonging to Christ, even though not conceptually, for fear it would make him a polytheist. (Yes, I do know my heart can be mistaken. I just don't think it is, in this case.)

But don't they have their doctrines all wrong? Sure. But what are doctrines for? For guiding our feet into the way of peace, which means into the way of Love. And Love, be it carefully noted, is what we were created for; in other words, Love is built into our human nature. Granted our nature has become corrupted. Granted, correct doctrine and practice are incalculable advantages in overcoming that corruption; but it is not impossible, and indeed appears to me indisputable, that certain people who may not even regard themselves as Christians have nevertheless (not without Grace) found their way back to their true, natural selves, which is to say, back to Love, which is to say, to Christ. To some extent, that is - just like you and just like me. And to the extent they have done this, it just doesn't matter about all their mixed-up doctrine. The purpose for which true doctrine has been revealed has been accomplished in them without it. (Compare the passage in Romans in which St. Paul mentions that Gentiles who are without the Law [of Moses] can do "by nature" the things that are in the Law.) At the Last Judgment, we are not going to be given a theology quiz. We are going to be carefully examined to see how closely we resemble Christ. It's a tautology to say those who resemble Him are the saved; that's what salvation IS, being made like Him.

But they haven't been baptized, someone will say. They aren't members of His Body, aren't incorporated into Him or into His Life, Who alone has immortality. Well, Christ can baptize whomever He pleases, whenever He pleases, however He pleases. Who can say He will not admit certain people into His Church, into His Body, on the Last Day, just as He will cut off some of the existing, dead members?

Recently, I caught Santa Claus traveling incognito. I really do believe Christ sometimes travels incognito.

Lead, Kindly Light

2011-11-21T05:29:00.025-05:00

In posting this hymn on Saturday, I meant to honor my dear friend, mentor, and teacher, who loved it so well. Carl loved this hymn because his life's burning desire was to follow Christ no matter what. To him, "th'encircling gloom" symbolized life's trials and sorrows, of which he had his share, or more; and his faith was to follow Christ in spite of them; and his hope, that Christ would bring him safely through them.

But I hasten to add that by posting this hymn, I did not mean to endorse its content, although it's a lovely hymn, emotionally appealing, pretty music, devout-sounding words, quoted below.

The words were written by John Henry Newman. That's John Cardinal Newman, who so famously converted from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism. That rather puts a new slant to the words, doesn't it? He's talking about what followers of the pope so often do: blind obedience. Just obey, and if you can't see the sense of it, or where you are going, or why, your submission is all the more virtuous. Wanting to choose or see your path is viewed as pride in this hymn. Cardinal Newman is here speaking of his pre-Catholic days. But now God (through the pope) will tell him where to put his foot next; mustn't inquire further, simply do as you're told.

What's the difference between surrendering all your responsibility, giving it all over to someone else in blind submission versus simply being led by Christ? Well, it's the difference between night and day. It's the difference between walking in the darkness and walking in the light, and that's why this hymn is full of "dark", and "night" and "encircling gloom".

But blind obedience is no Christian virtue; it's just plain irresponsibility; it's ducking adulthood, and Christ never asked for it. In fact, the opposite: "I am the light of the world: whoever follows me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life." (John 8:12; see also 12:46)

In Christ, we can indeed see where we are going. We can see the whole path because He is the path. "I am the way," says He, "and the life and the truth." In Him, we can even see "the distant scene", which is why St. John was able to write the Apocalypse, for the distant scene, too, is Christ, the Beginning and the End of everything. We do not walk blindly, but with clearer sight than ever before. We understand where we're going and what is required to arrive there and why. We do not simply go by another's say-so; the Truth has been revealed to us first-hand; we can say, with Job, "I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now my eye sees thee." (Job 42:5) We walk by grace and by open-eyed choice (which is to say, by faith). As St. John declares, "the darkness is past, and the true light now shines." (I John 2:8)

Here are a few more wonderful things Holy Scripture has to say of light and darkness. You can find many more like these.

Isaiah 42:16 And I will bring the blind by a way [that] they knew not [says the Lord]; I will lead them in paths [that] they have not known: I will make darkness light before them, and crooked things straight. These things will I do to them, and not forsake them.

Isaiah 9:2 The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light: they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them has the light shined.

Luke 3 1:78-79 …the Dayspring from on high has visited us;
To give light to those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death,
To guide our feet into the way of peace.

2 Cor. 4:6 For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, has shined in our hearts, to [give] the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

Ephesians 5:8 For you were sometimes darkness, but now [are ye] light in the Lord: walk as children of light:

I Thess. 5:5 You are all the children of light, and the children of the day: we are not of the night, nor of darkness.

___________

Lead, Kindly Light

Lead, kindly Light, amid th’encircling gloom, lead Thou me on!
The night is dark, and I am far from home; lead Thou me on!
Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see
The distant scene; one step enough for me.

I was not ever thus, nor prayed that Thou shouldst lead me on;
I loved to choose and see my path; but now lead Thou me on!
I loved the garish day, and, spite of fears,
Pride ruled my will. Remember not past years!

So long Thy power hath blest me, sure it still will lead me on.
O’er moor and fen, o’er crag and torrent, till the night is gone,
And with the morn those angel faces smile, which I
Have loved long since, and lost awhile!

(We won't bother, here, to deal with the curious idea that human beings turn into angels upon entering heaven.)

We Caught Santa Traveling Incognito

2011-11-20T15:04:00.004-05:00

Yes, there he was, in the same room with us! Santa Claus walked right into the little pancake house we frequent after church. He was obviously trying not to be recognized, wearing jeans and sweatshirt, but there was no mistaking who it was, with his fat belly, his white, curly hair, white beard, sparkling blue eyes, wire-rimmed spectacles...

I waited until after he had ordered and then walked up to his table and said, "Good afternoon, Sir!" (Probably should've said Your Grace or Your Eminence or something, seeing as he's a bishop...)

He smiled up at me.

"I didn't expect to see you here until just about a month from now," I said, breathlessly.

"Well, I got my notice in the mail this week," he replied. (I've no idea what he was thinking at this juncture.)

I handed him my pen and a clean napkin, which was all I had to write on, and said, "Could I just trouble you for your autograph before you disappear back to the North Pole?"

"To whom shall it be addressed?" he inquired cheerfully. I hadn't thought of that. Um, well, okay, youngest grandkid who could appreciate it, Sydney. So he wrote this note:

Dear Sydney,

Christ Mass is in sight
And I am watching.

Santa

"That should be 'LOVE, Santa'," I protested.

"That's okay," he reassured me. "She and I have met before and she knows I love her."

Then I asked whether many people had recognized him in his disguise. "No," he said, his blue eyes twinkling. "You're actually the first - this year, anyway."

So I walked back to our table congratulating myself on my astuteness as a detective, but then I re-read the note and began to have some qualms, because as everybody knows, St. Nicholas was/is an Orthodox saint, and, well, does that note sound to you perhaps just a bit Lutheran?

UPDATE, November 28: My qualms about this Santa Claus have proven well founded. Six-year-old Sydney saw through him right away. "He can't even spell!" she said, reading his autograph to her. I hadn't noticed it, but sure enough, he had spelled her name incorrectly.

"And he doesn't know how to spell Christmas, either," said Sydney. And although I assured her "Christ mass" was the original spelling, she didn't buy it. She didn't like the tone of the note, and tossed it aside as a fake.

I thought maybe there was something just a bit seedy about this imposter but I just didn't want to admit it to myself; he did look perhaps in need of a job. Well, maybe my mistaking his identity gave him an idea, at least, for some seasonal employment.

Jesus does NOT Have a Wonderful Plan for Your Life!

2011-11-20T07:06:00.000-05:00

Please read this debunking of a persistent contemporary heresy. I do not know who this Chloe is who wrote it, but it's very well said.

Thanks to Marsha on Facebook for pointing it out, and also for the warning that the language is just slightly rough. (Read it anyway!)

Partial List of Things That Happen While You're Gone Six Months

2011-11-20T05:48:00.035-05:00

By the time I'd come to the end of typing this, I had to laugh. No comedy script could beat this, I'll wager!

Your DVR is stolen.
Your driver’s license is suspended.
Your vehicle registration is revoked.
Your fines accumulate compound interest.
Your so-called right to a hearing or appeal expires.
Your cars stop working.
Spiders take over your house.
Your children and/or grandchildren have birthdays.
Friends die.
The Internal Revenue Service discovers an error on your 2009 tax return, and you owe $300, counting all the piled-up penalties for not having replied by sometime in July.
You are summoned for jury duty and are informed there may be an arrest warrant out for you, as you never appeared. (Suddenly, we seem to have become outlaws in every respect.)
Your digestive system rebels and you contemplate setting up a cot in the bathroom.

(Hint from Helen: Next time, you MUST hire some sort of service to go through your mail and notify you of anything that looks important.)

These are the issues that have occupied all our time since we came home; we haven’t even had time to begin planning the big family Thanksgiving to be held here. Oh, well, it’ll all come together one way or another, and we’ll still have plenty for which to be most grateful.

P.S. Although we haven't had time to hook it up yet, our new DVR has arrived. Things must be looking up, mustn't they?

His Other Favorite Hymn

2011-11-19T22:06:00.000-05:00

I think Carl's choice of favorite hymns shows his character so very well. To be led by God truly was his life's aim, and God honored that deep desire and did it.

And of course, Frank Patterson sings it even better than Carl did! Carl would deeply approve of this rendition. Please listen, in his honor.

Lead, kindly Light, amid th’encircling gloom, lead Thou me on!
The night is dark, and I am far from home; lead Thou me on!
Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see
The distant scene; one step enough for me.

I was not ever thus, nor prayed that Thou shouldst lead me on;
I loved to choose and see my path; but now lead Thou me on!
I loved the garish day, and, spite of fears,
Pride ruled my will. Remember not past years!

So long Thy power hath blest me, sure it still will lead me on.
O’er moor and fen, o’er crag and torrent, till the night is gone,
And with the morn those angel faces smile, which I
Have loved long since, and lost awhile!

Memories of Dr. Carl Harris

2011-11-19T11:25:00.005-05:00

You loved him, loved him, from the first day of class every semester, when his lecture was always, “Learning for What?” I sat through 4 of them myself, and took notes every time. He spoke without notes, commenting on how education was not a value in itself, but was for improving virtue – or it could worsen evil. He pondered aloud the Socratic question whether virtue was more caught than taught. ("Virtue" was therefore the first Greek word every class learned, to be followed, in the same lecture, by "moderation" and "justice".) He spoke of “the golden thread” that ran through all branches of learning, uniting them, and urged us to search out and understand that thread. And you sat there feeling sort of radiant inside, even if it was the third or fourth or sixth time you’d heard this lecture.

He taught Greek, but his field was patristics, and he especially loved Origen for his allegorical interpretations of Scripture. He now and then remarked aloud how, when he grew up, the Bible had been something to cherish rather than to dissect. It was something you let judge you, instead of you judging it.

He spoon-fed us Greek, sort of one bite at a time, chew it well, digest it thoroughly, take another spoonful. He made us parse every single verb. Once on an exam I labeled a certain verb form “future subjunctive” and afterward said how idiotic I felt, because there is no future subjunctive in Greek. His comment, beaming, was, “But it’s good this happened, because now you’ll never forget it again.”

Once I had a dream in which Dr. Harris’ mother died and he was departing for home from a train station, and I ran up to him and said, “You are not to worry! Remember that whether in life or in death, there is no separation for those who are in Christ.” When I woke up, I had an incredibly strong urge to go and tell him this dream, but of course that was stupid, so I didn’t. The next night I dreamed it again, and then a third time, and each time, the feeling I should tell him about it strengthened, until finally I did. I found him in his office and I blurted out the dream and I said, “I know it’s just dumb, but somehow I had to tell you.”

He said, “You see this band-aid on my cheek? I’ve had a growth removed. That was done Monday (the day I’d first had the dream) and now I’m waiting for the results of the biopsy. I’ll find out on Friday. But meanwhile, I won’t worry. I’ll remember, there is no separation.”

So we both stared at each other with tears in our eyes.

And from that day, there was this mysterious connection between us. I can’t remember all the ways in which this would show up, but I can remember the peskiest one: I could always tell, even before I saw him any given day, whether his arthritic knees were hurting, because my own, non-arthritic knees would hurt when his did, and only when his did. And I was glad to be there, more than a decade later, when he had the surgery to replace both knees.

He had a good singing voice, so I once asked him to sing at a social event, but he declined. I said I was hoping he would sing, “Balm in Gilead,” and he looked startled and said, “That’s my favorite hymn!” I had not known that, but he sang it after all, and beautifully, too. (His other favorite hymn was, “Lead, Kindly Light.”)

Our class, which had been together for two years by the time we finished New Testament Greek, all chipped in at the end of the year to buy Dr. Harris a full set of The Interpreter’s Bible, and each student inscribed one volume of it.

That was mostly just for love, but also partly to make up to him for pranks we had played. In one of them, we all agreed to sit up and look alert and interested whenever his pacing would bring him to the right side of the classroom, and to slump and look bored and sleepy whenever he moved to the left. Before the class was over, he was standing almost exclusively on the right, much to our amusement.

Like very, very many of his students, I kept in touch with him for many years after I had graduated. Our correspondence only tapered off when Demetrios and I began going abroad every year; that made things more difficult.

All the good things said about him in the obituary are gross understatements. He didn’t just have a “genuine concern for the people around him,” he was madly in love with everybody. He didn’t just have good manners; he was the sort who, before you’d sit down, would pull his handkerchief from his pocket and dust off the seat of the chair. He didn’t merely see beauty and love in his life; he saw Christ, and followed Christ, and Christ shone from him to all those around.

He had some heavy crosses to bear, and he bore them with patience, love, gratitude, and unblemished character.

Refrain

There is a balm in Gilead
To make the wounded whole;
There is a balm in Gilead
To heal the sin sick soul.

Some times I feel discouraged,
And think my work’s in vain,
But then the Holy Spirit
Revives my soul again.

Refrain

If you cannot sing like angels,
If you cannot preach like Paul,
You can tell the love of Jesus,
And say He died for all.

Refrain

Please excuse me now, while I limp off toward Gilead.

My All-Time Favorite Professor, Whom I am so Blessed to Have Known

2011-11-19T09:57:00.001-05:00

Retired professor Carl Harris dies
August 25th, 2011 | Faculty News

Professor Emeritus Carl V. Harris (’44), whose gentle ways and love of the classics inspired generations of students, died Aug. 9 in Winston-Salem. He was 88.

A memorial service will be held at 3 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 24, at Salemtowne Retirement Community in Winston-Salem.

Harris taught Greek literature and language in the classical languages department from 1956 until retiring in 1989. He is survived by his wife, Lucille, a retired music instructor at Wake Forest.

A native of Morganton, N.C., Harris attended Mars Hill College before majoring in Greek at Wake Forest. While at Mars Hill, he received a medal for “scholarship, character and manners,” words that just as easily described him 70 years later.

“He was devoted to learning and teaching in an especially commendable way,” said Provost Emeritus Edwin G. Wilson (’43), who met Harris when the two were students on the Old Campus. “He found beauty in the Greek classics, and he believed in the presence of beauty and love in his own life. He was a remarkably gentle and loving person.”

Associate Professor and Chair of Classical Languages James Powell became close friends with Harris and his wife when he joined the faculty in 1988. “He was a gentle man, very thoughtful, with a sweetness of temperament. “There was an extraordinary warmth about him. He had a genuine concern for the people around him.”

Powell said Harris considered himself a teacher first, and a classicist second. “He was very good at teaching Greek, but what really stood out to me was his belief in teaching the whole person and his concern for students as human beings. The level of devotion to his students was quite remarkable. He embodied a lot of the old Wake Forest in that.”

After graduating from Wake Forest, Harris received a Master of Divinity and the Master of Sacred Theology degrees from Yale University and his Ph.D. from Duke University. He taught briefly at Mars Hill, East Carolina University and the University of Dubuque in Iowa before joining the Wake Forest faculty in 1956, the first year on the new campus.

When he retired in 1989, Harris said, “I could never say that I have been bored in teaching my subject, Greek, all these years. I have not been bored because I have had different students and every day presents a new challenge… For me, teaching is not so much an occupation as a way of life.”

- By Kerry M. King (’85)

http://inside.wfu.edu/2011/08/retired-professor-carl-harris-dies/

Insider Tidbit

2011-11-18T16:02:00.003-05:00

Oh, and by the way, would you like to know what brand of detergent the White House laundry room uses? It uses Cheer. That’s why the President’s French-cuffed shirts smell so heavenly when they’re hung out to dry.

– from “My Week at the White House”, the first-person account I wrote and was going to post for you in its entirety, but that was before I woke up. I've forgotten the rest.

(In waking life, I have no idea whether Cheer laundry detergent smells particularly good or not.)

To Further Disabuse You, Maybe

2011-11-18T15:17:00.000-05:00

A couple of hours before we left Greece, we went to the pharmacy across the street from us and I got a flu shot for six Euros, which is something under $9. That's compared with $25 here in Richmond, a couple of years ago, anyway.

(And as the pharmacist wasn't there to administer it, Demetrios did it instead. And it never hurt, during or afterwards. I thought at least my arm might be sore the next day, but no.)

Homecoming Part I

2011-11-18T08:08:00.001-05:00

15 November, Tuesday

Coming home from Greece we had the best trip ever. We had no bad weather, no long lines, no missed connections, no delays, no baggage, no circuitous routes, and overall it was very nearly an ideal trip.

Demetrios has the feeling something is wrong. Our toolbox is not in its place, but I think maybe we just failed to put it away or something. The sheer curtains are all open, and he thinks he drew them all before we left. One cabinet door is open, but I said there was an earthquake, after all, while we were gone.

The main problem I see is spiders! It happens every year; they take over in our absence. You have to go through the whole house with a broom in front of you, so it catches the cobwebs instead of your face or hair getting them all.

We dragged ourselves to a grocery store to buy some things for breakfast and lunch tomorrow.
Too tired to bother with anything else now; time to tumble into bed.

16 November, Wednesday

Demetrios was right after all. Someone has been in this house. Our brand new DVR is missing, the one that actually belongs to Verizon. The front and back doors both open and close with difficulty, as if someone had forced them and now they don’t work as well as they should.

We’ve looked around and so far haven’t found anything else missing. Our TV is too old and too heavy to steal; it isn’t even a flat-screen. Ditto our stereo equipment, which consists of a turntable (yes!) and tuner and speakers. Our microwave oven is so old nobody would want it. Oh, and there were no power tools in our toolbox. We are not handy people, and we only have a very few basics.

Verizon says they’ll ship us a new DVR, but if the other isn’t found, it’ll cost us $300.

We think we know who took it, but there’s no point in saying who, in case we’re wrong.

Never mind; all this was the least of our problems today!

The biggest problem was what we found as we settled down to peruse our six months’ worth of mail. Ninety percent of it is junk, of course. (Demetrios once made the mistake of giving $5 to every charity that asked, naively supposing maybe this would satisfy them, get them off his back. He never dreamed the reverse would happen.) But in with that junk was a letter from the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles. It demanded proof that my automobile was insured as of September 28. I must reply by November 10 or my driver’s license would be suspended, my vehicle’s registration would be cancelled, plates invalidated, I would forfeit the right to a hearing or appeal, and would have to pay $645 and provide proof of residency in order to reinstate any of the above.

A telephone call to the DMV provided no satisfaction. Okay, off to the DMV in person, armed with the appropriate insurance policy, to clear up this mistake and explain we were out of the country. Had to go in Demetrios’ car since my plates were invalid.

Oops. His car wouldn’t start. Should we go in mine after all, taking the chance? Oops, no, the rearview mirror has fallen off – again. For the third time. (The earthquake shook it loose, or Pep Boys doesn’t know how to re-attach a mirror??)

Okay, drive my car across the edge of the flower bed to bring it near enough to his car to jump-start it. That worked and only harmed a few plants.

So we get to the DMV and things go from bad to worse, because it turns out all the same issues pertain also to Demetrios’ driver’s license and plates and car registration and fine and so forth. This, although we never received any notification or correspondence concerning it.

We dealt with two clerks, the first of whom told us things that made no sense and were completely contradicted by the second clerk, who explained that (a) the first clerk was NOT the supervisor, as she had claimed to be and (b) these letters demanding proof of insurance are sent out at random. Can you believe that? In this computer age, the Department of Motor Vehicles has no better way of knowing whether a car is insured? I think it is sheer harassment; that’s the only explanation I can find that makes any sense, and it makes very little.

The second clerk is also the one who informed us that Demetrios was in the same situation as I; the first clerk never bothered to mention that little twist.

In the end, we got the two $500 fines waived, but still had to pay $145 each to reinstate our driving privileges and vehicle registration and all. Demetrios, however, had to get a brand new license, new photograph and all; his current one is permanently suspended, AND the suspension goes on his record. He also had to make a trip all the way home to get his passport, which was accepted as proof of residency. ???? The DMV has been corresponding with us annually for nearly 21 years now, and receiving checks with our home address on them, and they didn’t know we were residents????

It’s small but heaped-up injustices like this that make one begin to doubt the legitimacy of ones government.

All this took us until after 5:00.

At six o’clock, in the dark and in the rain, we set out to meet Nick and Sharyn, to drive together to the other side of town, where Nick had arranged a little get-together at the newest Greek restaurant, owned by a friend of ours. Ahhh! To reconnect with friends! Balm for the weary soul.

Except that on our way to Nick and Sharyn’s house in Demetrios’ car, our headlights failed. We limped along, using the brights, which however only worked as long as you kept holding the switch with one hand.

I didn’t even have a chance to call Kelly, my oldest granddaughter, on this, her 10th birthday. Happy birthday, sweetie! I love you.

Blog Note

2011-11-13T05:08:00.001-05:00

Our time in Greece is winding down rapidly. In your kindness, do not be alarmed at the silence there may be on this blog for a while; we shall be very busy now. Even after we get home, there will be a whole checklist of chores like reading 6 months’ worth of mail and making our annual medical appointments.

When we get back to Richmond, guess what’s the first thing I’m going to do? Take a bath! A real bath, after six months of showers only, in my extra-deep soaking tub, with lavender bubble bath.

To Disabuse You, Maybe

2011-11-12T05:14:00.000-05:00

Thursday I bought a whole year’s supply of one of my medications for the equivalent of under $39 ($3.24 per month). That’s without any health care insurance. Back in the States, I pay $15 for a one-month supply. That’s more than four and a half times what I pay here. And that’s my co-payment, supposedly after insurance. And it’s for a generic version, not the brand name I buy here.

You didn’t really think Mr. Obama had reformed the American health care system, did you?

That absolutely cannot be done unless you eliminate this sort of price gouging by pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies, hospitals, and doctors. Otherwise, the tinkering you do around the edges of the health care system will be purely cosmetic, never substantive.

It’s a huge scam, and the biggest change is that now everybody must buy into it.

A Challenge for Bird Lovers

2011-11-10T06:06:00.002-05:00

Katerina has a bird in a cage that she says was originally wild. She says he was a baby when she first got him this Spring and it’s a male, so obviously the sexes of his species are different. I can’t find anything even similar to him in my “Birds of Europe” book, and I’ve searched carefully, twice. Can you identify the mystery bird from the following description?

He’s smaller than a sparrow, with a long, slender build. His feet are for perching (not webbed). His legs are not unusually long, so he isn’t a wader. His beak is straight and slender, needle-like. It isn’t long or heavy, like a woodpecker’s, nor hooked like a parakeet’s, nor triangular, like a sparrow’s, and (I won’t swear to this, but I think) it’s dark. He is mostly black, or at least very dark, with white or light underparts. He has black cheeks, the black curving down along either side of his throat, but the throat itself is white. (Yes, definitely.) He has a small, distinctly rust-red dot on each cheek, like a cockatiel. He has one or two bright yellow feathers in his otherwise dark tail. He carries his tail down, not cocked like a wren. The light in which I was observing him wasn’t the best, but I couldn’t see any speckles or bars on his breast at all; it appeared solid white. He has no crest, or perhaps I imagined the merest hint of one, nothing prominent like a cardinal’s. He has a pretty, melodious voice. He is very active, nervous, and not fond of his cage. He eats seeds, in captivity at least. I watched him tuck eagerly into a fresh cabbage leaf, too.

That’s it, but you should note I’ve probably missed something important, like wing patches I didn’t notice, or whatever. I thought I’d observed enough to distinguish him easily enough, so I didn’t pay attention to everything you would have.

Anybody?

Ingenious

2011-11-10T04:10:00.000-05:00

Wednesday, 09 November

It’s so magnanimous, isn’t it, for the ruling political party to decide to share power with the minority party? So bi-partisan, so patriotic.

Or is it? When you merge a nation’s two (or three) major political parties, viz., the only ones that much matter, you get

(1) a government no one elected – and no one likes

(2) no opposition left in Parliament

Of course, the so-called opposition was only that, only so-called to begin with, but that was at least something. Now there’s nobody in government left to point out the other side of any argument, to suggest a possibly better plan, to challenge the leaders, to say, “Wait just a doggone minute!”

Well, okay, there are the Communists. The Communists are actually speaking for the people just now, and they’re the only ones. How’s that for a jolly mess?

This will be the status of Greece if the politicians succeed in forming a joint government, which as of this moment they haven’t.

It they do, the scarier question for the Greeks is, What Next?

Kastoria for the Weekend

2011-11-09T06:51:00.002-05:00

Or, Carrying Charcoal to Newcastle
Talk about beautiful. Everything about Renna and Theodosios is beautiful. Their souls are beautiful. Their children are incredibly beautiful. Their grandchildren are beautiful. Their village, Petrokerassa (“Cherrystone”) is as beautiful as anywhere in beautiful Greece. And Kastoria, the town where their daughter and son-on-law and grandchildren live, is beautiful. It surrounds a large lake and is closely hemmed in from behind by mountains. It’s a very old little city, with quaint architecture all its own and at any rate used to be a very rich city, although times there are as hard as elsewhere. People made fortunes from the fur industry. Kastoria is the fur capital of the world. Or perhaps not so much any more; that was before the Chinese came with their tons of questions and such great interest (how flattering!) and their video cameras… Kastor is “beaver” and I suppose the beautiful city is named after that furry creature.

Renna and Theodosios went there earlier in the week to help their Katerina with the grandchildren, while Nikos was away in Athens to give a lecture. (And while he was there, his sister, who is one of the Prime Minister’s innermost circle, got him into the Parliament where he was able to observe firsthand all the amazing things going on there in the last several days.)

So Renna and Theodosios invited us to come for as much of the week as we liked, and we accepted.

Turned out Mena and Kostas had a wedding there on Saturday night, so they cadged us an invitation and we all went to Kastoria together on Saturday and stayed until Sunday evening. Katerina got us rooms in the Hotel Kastoria, which sits right on the lake, and both our rooms overlooked it.

Of course we didn’t know how to get to the hotel. I’m finding out more and more people have the same habit as Demetrios, of going somewhere without first figuring out where it is. That’s hard for me. My father was the sort who consulted a map days ahead of time and then highlighted the route with a marker, and even figured out where he was going to stop for food and fuel. He once drew Demetrios a map of the route from my parents’ house to the subway station, 6 blocks away. The printed map wasn’t detailed enough.

However, by asking our way repeatedly, we found our hotel, and were pleased that our rooms both overlooked the lake and had huge bathrooms.

Katerina hosted the midday meal. Katerina has succeeded her mother as the most beautiful woman in Greece. She and Renna served some delicious salads, one with pomegranate, and rice and heavenly, heavenly chicken in sauce. Mena had brought a “sausage” for dessert, a sausage of chocolate. “Just for you,” she told me with a smile. I said, “As you know, I don’t eat chocolate, but since you made it just for me…” There were two or three other sorts of chocolate, as well.

Little Spyros, who is six now, still has blond hair and enormous blue eyes with very long lashes, and his sister, Semiramis (accented on the second syllable) looks just like him. She’s three, and we hadn’t seen her since her baptism in June, 2009. Though the children are shy about speaking English, they both understand whatever you say. That’s because their other grandmother, Norma, makes a point of speaking to them in English all the time. She lived in Canada for 12 years when she was young.

Norma and her husband, Spyros, the other grandparents, came over in the late afternoon. I was very happy to see them, partly because they are such kind, good people, partly because of having another person with whom to speak English (though Renna and especially Katerina both speak it well, too), and partly because I was worried about the senior Spyros, who has Alzheimer’s. I stayed and conversed happily with them while Mena and Kostas and Demetrios went to the wedding service.

Spyros is at that stage at which he no longer takes part in conversations; if you say anything to him he will answer very briefly (and very politely) but you can’t really have a dialogue with him any more. He still looks very dashing though, dresses nattily and is handsome, with bushy white eyebrows over very blue eyes. And as I pointed out to Norma and Katerina, the good thing about dementia (if dementia can be said to have anything good about it), is that although his condition is breaking your heart one piece at a time, the patient himself is not unhappy. That’s some consolation, especially if, like me, you wonder whether the condition is hereditary.

The others returned form the wedding by about 6:30, and as the reception wasn’t until 8:30, we had time to chat. I had a look at the wedding invitation, trying to see if I could understand where the reception was to be held, as nobody else seemed to take an interest. The Hotel of the Lake, the Swan Room. Wherever that was.

The invitation was engraved on very heavy cardboard, and besides announcing the couple’s parents, also announced the koumbaroi, the best man and maid of honor. Bottom right corner had telephone numbers for RSVPs, and down on the bottom right corner, for your convenience, was the couple’s bank account number.

Norma said I should go to the reception. She knew the parents of the bride, and they were very rich, so it would be a glamorous affair. So at about quarter to nine, we set out, having only a vague notion, from Theodosios, where we were going, but asking our way.

It was only as Demetrios was helping me off with my coat I realized my huge gaffe. Here we were in the fur capital of the world, and my coat? It was of fake fur! With large, rhinestone-studded buttons. The other ladies were wearing diamonds, probably flawless, priceless ones, but only one per person. Understated elegance, I saw, was the theme of the evening among the glitterati. (Oh, and the fashion in women’s hair, for anybody interested, is long and straight, blonde if you can get away with it, and worn back or up, if you’re over 50. Well, I got the blonde bit right…)

There were 44 tables, each decorated with white roses and many candles and each seating 11 guests.

The people at our table were all very friendly, with big, welcoming smiles. In fact, all weekend long we had the impression the Kastorians were people of exceptionally good character. Demetrios remembered having that impression on our previous visits, too.

The bride was beautiful, the groom, dashing, and as they danced their first dance, he sang the words to her. They were a sweet, sophisticated couple. Don’t ask me to describe the dress; it was so simple I hardly noticed anything about it except the overall, elegant effect. She looked like a princess, as a bride ought to. She was the kind of bride you look at and think, “He’s a lucky man,” and he was the kind of groom that makes you feel she is a lucky woman, too, and you feel so pleased, so happy, to see them united in holy matrimony.

There were waltzes and cha-chas and Greek dances, and we danced until we were all exhausted and had to go back to our hotel.

Theodosios was to meet us in the hotel lobby to take us to church in the morning, but somehow we all found ourselves in the dining room, helping ourselves to a buffet breakfast and looking over the lake. It was shrouded in fog and the whole world looked white, even the trees, just now in their peak autumn glory (even though it’s already distinctly winter in mountainous Kastoria). Colorful little boats were bobbing near the shore.

There are all sorts of water birds on the lake: cormorants, gulls, white geese, assorted ducks, coots – and a flock of White Pelicans. We watched them in amazement as they gathered near us, flying in formation, small groups at a time. They glide very near the surface of the water, scarcely moving a muscle, so they look like planes landing. Then their legs, tucked under their tails, come down and forward, and the pelican lands heels-first in the water, sending up a spray like a water-skier and spreading its wings in a braking action. Of course, nearly all birds, from pipits to parakeets, land in pretty much this same way, but the pelican does it in slow motion, and he is very large, so you see it all much better. And not many birds can glide as far and as perfectly as the pelican.

We did make it to church, albeit late. It’s a new church, all in red stone, and it comes complete with beggars outside the door. These, however, were not the usual beggars. Oh, no. These were fat, twin puppies, wagging their identical tails, looking up at you with soft, brown eyes, and begging for a master or a mistress. They were 9 or 10 weeks old, black and tan, and marked like dachshunds but not at all shaped like them. We wanted them both. Too bad. Serious cases of heartbreak.

Inside, the church seems smaller than it looks from outside. That’s probably because it’s five stories tall, counting the dome. It’s new, so the walls, although well decorated with frescoed icons, are still mainly white and bright. There is no iconostas yet and the dome and other high places where frescoes will eventually go have been left unpainted meanwhile.

I looked around at the people. One man was wearing a fur coat. Several men wore suede jackets. Other than that, there was none of the famous local fur or leather in sight, except my fake fur. Of course not; fur is generally thought too showy to wear in church. Besides, in Kastoria, the traditional way to wear fur is INSIDE your coat, where it can really keep you warm. It took me a while to get over my stupid self-consciousness and focus on the prayers.

Downstairs there is a chapel to St. Anastasia that Theodosios wanted me to see, so we went down there—and encountered the family of one whose memorial we had just sung, who showed us the chapel and bid us eagerly sit down and eat a little something with them. So we did, Greek coffee with spanikopita and cake.

Wherever we go, when people find out Demetrios is a psychiatrist and see his kind face, there are women eager to tell him their problems. I’m used to it and don’t mind any more (if I ever did). But these problems were really wrenching, because they were economic at root. These were people feeling they were going crazy from worry about mortgages and bills they normally would have paid in full and on time, but today cannot pay at all. These are hotel owners and shopkeepers whose businesses have flat-lined. (Who can afford a fur coat today? Who can afford a holiday?)

Again, we had the strong sense that people in Kastoria are extremely kind, good, and friendly. So that made their plight extra sad.

Next, we met everybody (Norma and Spyros, Renna, Katerina and little Spyros and Semiramis) for a snack and coffee at a little waterfront café. I never know how to describe these convivial gatherings, but again I think they are foretastes of heaven.

We missed Nikos (Katerina’s husband) even more than we normally would have, because he is a professor of sociology and – guess what? – political science! The latter is his passion, and I’m sure I wouldn’t have been the only one eager to pick his brain on current events in Athens, which he has been witnessing firsthand this whole last week. (Plus, like this whole family, he’s a treat for your soul and a treat for your eyes, as well.)

The fog lifted, the sky and the lake turned blue, and all the colors of foliage glowed, so we enjoyed one last stroll along the lake before going home. Little Spyros set up quite a ruckus by tossing a stone into the air, which every bird for a quarter mile around mistook for food; they all mobbed him, honking, shrieking, quacking, flapping. (Pelicans sound approximately like a foghorn.) He got a big kick out of all this and did it another time or two.

Then, back to Thessaloniki, again not knowing beforehand how to get to the highway, but asking our way as we went. We had remarkably little trouble and were home two hours later, very tired, very sleepy, and greatly rejoicing.

As the World Turns

2011-11-08T07:51:00.000-05:00

Wednesday, November 2

Today was a fascinating day in Greek (and European) politics. The Prime Minister has announced a referendum on the austerity measures (or something) in January. Thing is, he has already signed all the agreements with the Europeans, so as one old lady put it, “Why is he asking us now?”

Except for the Communists, the other political parties here are against the referendum. Their opinion is that the current government should get out and national elections should be held. Fat lot of good that would do, get rid of crooks X, Y, and Z and put in their places thugs A, B, and C.

The European leaders were startled, too, but after expressing their alarm, back-pedaled some, because of course they can’t be seen openly opposing a democratic process.

Stock markets dropped precipitously all over Europe and in America.

One effect of this proposed referendum is that the agreements with the EU aren’t going to be implemented now until after it. After all this great hurry, after even flouting the Greek Constitution because allegedly the agreements had to signed NOW, after all this scrambling to meet some deadline, now nothing will be done until January, if then. January! Why wait that long? How will Greece manage without those funds from Europe?

Another effect of the referendum will be to help rehabilitate America’s man here, the Prime Minister, together with his cronies. They’ve all been publicly and repeatedly called traitors, and now they’re ostensibly willing to consult the will of the people.

What in the world is going on? (One theory we can safely rule out is that the P.M. has had a change of heart and is on the people’s side after all. They can’t pay him enough.)

But this is not all that happened here in today’s episode! No, there was another major twist in another plotline. Today the Minister of Defense called together his joint chiefs of staff, together with other senior military officers, and he fired them all. It was announced he would replace them all with totally inexperienced people. This on the day some of their Turkish military counterparts were in Athens. Does their visit have anything to do with it? I don’t know. The Minister says he fired them because of insubordination shown in the parades on Ochi Day. But I think it’s all part of the government’s now thirty-year-long campaign to destroy Greece as an independent nation. They had already gutted the armed services years ago. (Why, you ask? Because this government does America’s bidding, and America has to placate her much-desired ally, Turkey, and Turkey wants Greece back. Mr. Obama called the Greek islands “Turkey’s necklace.”)

Either that or else the Minister of Defense was afraid these senior officers might be plotting a coup. Well, if they weren’t, they may well be now!

Strange, all very strange! Soap opera on a world stage.

UPDATE: The Puzzle Solved! (Summary of Friday’s Episode)

There isn’t going to be any referendum after all. What was going on has become obvious now: it was a very deft piece of shadow theater by the Prime Minister.

The opposition parties cried out against the referendum and clamored for elections, for a new government, and scheduled a no-confidence vote in Parliament. They were sure to win it as, combined, they are a majority. Mr. Papandreaou made them look ridiculous which, of course, they are, so that wasn’t difficult. He said well, you can’t have it both ways. You’re against our agreements with Europe yet you don’t want a referendum (which everybody knows you would win).

Then he met with them and made a shrewd deal, a sort of blackmail. He said he would call off the referendum if they would vote for him, but otherwise, well, he was in such deep political trouble he had nothing to lose in any case. They were desperate to call off the referendum since they, too, are the henchmen of foreign interests and all the differences with the Prime Minister are no more than theater. In reality, they’re all in cahoots and the last thing any of them wants is the Greek people to speak their overwhelming “Ochi!” to what all the parties are paid to achieve.

So the P.M. (1) got to cancel the referendum he never intended to hold in the first place, (2) got his vote of confidence in exchange for it, and (3) gets to blame the opposition for there being no referendum. He himself, like a good democrat, tried to have one, tried to let the people speak, but was thwarted by the bad guys. This is the response to the nation-wide protests a week ago today.

I really do stand in awe of the cleverness of it all.

But he underestimates the Greek people; I do not think they will be fooled. No, his days as Prime Minister are numbered,

Of course that’s not at all a bad deal for him because he can retire and try to enjoy the wealth for which he sold his country and himself, while another member of the same gang shoulders the workload. And gets more chances to dip his own finger into the honey pot.

Hot Preview of the Next Episode: A New Government for Greece

Oh, never mind. Some times soap opera plots become just too unbelievable. Anybody remember when Ridge told Brooke and Taylor (the two women who had each been married to him at least tiwce), he couldn’t decide between them until they got over their mutual hostility, so he had them holed up in the family vacation cottage together with a psychotherapist to teach them to get along, using a bunch of silly gimmicks? Yeah, right. Greece’s new coalition government, the one the politicians are trying to form, is about as believable as that.

Well, it’ll accomplish at least one useful thing, which is to demonstrate more clearly than ever that both parties are working the same dirty deals. Only now, instead of competing to see who will get to do it, they will all sell out Greece together and share the spoils – and the blame, but that won’t much bother them.

I shall not burden you or myself with the grubby details. I plan simply to remember that God in heaven does not approve of these sorts of things, He does not allow them to go on forever. His justice brings mercy and his mercy brings justice for the oppressed.

“Traitors”?

2011-11-03T05:35:00.003-04:00

No, no, no, no, no. To call your leaders “traitors” gives away the fact that you are still buying into that whole antiquated, anti-progressive, benighted, backward concept of “nationhood”. Nationhood? Separate countries, each with its own language, its own currency, its own ways, its own values, its own identity, its own laws, its own food and music and art and dancing, etc., etc., etc.? That’s what throughout history has caused wars and imperialism and genocide and innumerable other evils. The idea of nationhood is chauvinistic, small-minded, very bad for business, and downright fascist! Enlightened people today are citizens of the world, like Socrates. Outgrow the idea of separate, competing countries and you’ll easily perceive that betraying ones country is impossible. No such thing. The only traitors are those who betray the world community: you, for example, if your loyalty is smaller than that and you are still holding out for your own country.

Excuse me now, while I go learn how to sing the Internationale. Anybody want to join me? No? I somehow didn’t think so. Maybe I won’t, either. I’m feeling rather too nauseated to sing.

Mega-toasters

2011-11-02T05:38:00.002-04:00

Do you remember when banks used to offer incentives (aka bribes) to potential customers in the form of little gifts? As in, “Open a checking or savings account with us and receive a free toaster!”? Nowadays it’s, “Open a credit card account with us and you can transfer you debt to our card and pay it off interest-free,” or “and get a round-trip airline ticket to any U.S. destination.”

Well, that’s what banks also do with big, BIG customers, such as national governments. Except it’s on a far bigger scale than toasters. Make sure, Mr. Senator and Madam Representative, to support a bill for the government to borrow $100 million from our bank this year, and if the bill passes, a million or so will go to your Swiss bank account.

Thus, the real problem our politicians face is the opposite of what they tell us. They’re always moaning about how to find enough money to cover expenses. Their real problem, though, is to find uses for all that money they borrow in our name. That’s why there’s so much pork in all the bills. That’s why there are items such as that bridge to nowhere Sarah Palin made infamous, and other idiotic programs. That’s why even politicians who lambast “big government” keep on voting for it. That’s why each cabinet minister here in Greece has on average a hundred paid advisors among his family and friends. Up to now, at least, they literally have borrowed more money than they knew what to do with (other than fight over how to divvy it up) and yet, no matter how much a government borrows and no matter how much it taxes, the money is never enough.

Does anybody remember Mr. Obama’s campaign promise to veto any bill that had any pork in it? Has he done that? Well, he can’t, because big money has to keep on being borrowed; therefore, there has to be pork to list on the expense accounts; expenses must in this way be exaggerated to “justify” the loan. And why must the big money keep on being borrowed? So the legislators can receive their “toasters”, so the banks can collect their interest, and eventually, so the whole house of cards can come tumbling down, as it has in various European countries, and a new international order can be imposed to “fix” the problem (preserving, all the while, the interests of the banks). You see how sweet all this is for what the Greek Prime Minister called, the “rich ruling class”? They make huge profits short-term, long-term, every way, all around.

In fiscal 2009, the U.S. deficit tripled from the year before.

Clean-up!

2011-11-01T05:47:00.001-04:00

30 October, Saturday

Things are pretty bad when your best dreams at night are that a garbage truck has arrived. I’ve had that dream twice this week.

But today, at long last, the dream has come true. The garbage on our corner was been collected and hauled away. It took two trucks to do it. Apparently the first one ran out of room, so another one came by a couple of hours later. Ours was the last garbage to be seen anywhere in our neighborhood.

Thing is, some who had their garbage collected a week earlier have told us they haven’t seen a garbage truck since. So, although before the strike garbage pick-up was daily (and needed to be!), now there’s no telling when it will happen again
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The Best Lies Are the Ones all Jumbled up With Truth

2011-11-01T05:38:00.003-04:00

I’m a sucker for conspiracy theories. The only conspiracy theory I never fell for at some time or other was that Roosevelt knew in advance the Japanese were going to bomb Pearl Harbor. It’s the only one I never believed and it turned out to be true beyond dispute. A few years ago a man named Robert Stinnett wrote a book, “Day of Deceit”, which proves it conclusively. Roosevelt was tracking every movement of the Japanese Navy, which, contrary to what was said at the time, did not maintain radio silence. Roosevelt not only knew what was coming (hence, moved all the modern warships out of Pearl Harbor days before, for “exercises”, leaving only outdated ships in the Harbor), he’d deliberately provoked it.

But don’t call the political ideas I’ve been espousing of late conspiracy theories. Last night on television, I actually heard the Greek Prime Minister, Mr. Papandreaou, say it aloud. In his perfect American English, yet, because as you may know, he is a Greek American, educated at Berkeley (and Harvard, I think). He said the financial problem is not just in Greece, but in many countries, and it isn’t just within the borders of the countries, but crosses borders, is an international problem. True, so far. The problem, he said, is a system by which some countries prosper and others don’t, and in which there is a big divide between ordinary people and – I quote – “a rich, ruling class.” There it is, openly stated: there’s an international gang of rich elites who are the ones who really run this world. Okay, Mr. P., I’m with you so far. You of course have to admit all this, because you’re aware the people here have already figured it out.

But then comes the Big Lie, in his assertion that this is the problem “we have to fix.” Yes, but…

But who’s we? The “rich ruling class”? As they indeed rule, aren’t they the only ones who could “fix” the problem, and does anyone really believe they want to reform the very system that has made them rich and powerful? OH, and by the way, Mr. Papandreaou himself is actually one of the rich ruling class. Has he ever been known to work in the best interests of his people? No, he is the one who brought about the current crisis, and did it deliberately, to pave the way for this proposed fix. It was rather naïve, perhaps, for him to think we should trust him to fix the problem he himself precipitated.

(To be fair, whatever I say about him or his party applies equally to the other political party. They’re also bought and owned and run by the “rich ruling class”.)

So for him to imply he’s on our side is the first part of the Big Lie, and the second part is, of what does this proposed “fix” consist? Why, of course, it’s going to be an international something that consolidates and strengthens and protects and enhances the wealth and the power of the “rich ruling class”. A tiny bit more specifically, it’s going to be what one Greek politician calls a “pan-cosmic economic government”, meaning world-wide, although I think they’ll settle for a pan-European economic government at first. Ahhh, a centralized economic/financial system. Does that sound familiar? Um, isn’t that what the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics tried to do, so disastrously? (Mr. Papandreaou calls himself a Socialist.)

By its very nature, there’s only one thing such a “fix” could be, behind whatever Halloween costume they use to dress it up, and that’s a pan-European dictatorship. The EU is already talking about putting an international (but mostly German) “Troika”, such as now directs the Greek economy, in place in other countries, such as Spain, Portugal, Italy, to manage their economies as well. And by “Troika” we do not mean merely the three men at the top; we mean people who come and sit in every ministry of the government and tell it what to do; we mean a whole foreign administration. The Greeks (and other countries, if the EU has its way) will now be governed with German efficiency. That’s what people here are calling the “Fourth Reich”.

I don’t know, but would like to find out, who will be paying all these people. I suspect the German taxpayer will be. German taxpayers are already being soaked for bail-out money, which is why they, too, are unhappy. They are no more interested in paying to acquire colonies than Greeks are in being a colony.

A Hint for Lace Knitters Especially but not Exclusively

2011-10-31T08:20:00.001-04:00

The following are hazards when working lacy patterns (or when knitting anything, really):

Untrimmed fingernails and hangnails

Buttons on cuffs

Buttons down the front of your shirt (You can tie an apron around your neck.)

Jewelry: watches, bracelets, brooches

Another Hint for Lace Knitters

One of my lace pattern books admonishes me that “lace is worked in white.” Well, white or off-white, traditionally. Nobody knows why, and today we are allowed to work lace in any color, although white is still usual. If you tuck into your knitting bag a cloth of contrasting color, perhaps a napkin or placemat, you will be sure to have something upon which to lay your work and see what it looks like.

And do stop to admire your work often. Very often.

Another Hint for Knitters

2011-10-30T08:17:00.000-04:00

How large should your gauge swatch be? Standard advice is, at least three repetitions of the pattern, or four inches square. I think it should be more. I think you may as well make more use of your swatch than merely to get the correct gauge. You should use it to test your pattern in various ways: to find out what sorts of mistakes you tend to make and where, to find out if you actually like the pattern and enjoy knitting it or whether it turns out to be a crashing bore, and to get the pattern properly into your head. Keep working your test square until you know what you’re doing instead of the instructions being just abstract words, until you have worked out your little cant (what you will recite to yourself to keep track of what you’re doing): “first decrease, first hole, second decrease, second hole, knit four …” that sort of thing. Keep working until you can recognize a mistake within a few stitches after you make it or at least by the next row instead of 26 rows later.

It’s well worth the investment of time. Plus, you’ll end up with a potholder, a little doily, a pillow cover, a quilt square or a pretty mat. Or at the very least, you’ll have a sample to pin to the instructions afterwards before you file them away.

Friday, 28 October: The Best Ochi Day Ever!

2011-10-29T08:56:00.001-04:00

(And I’ve experienced some wonderful Ochi Days, too; see here.)

Ochi is the Greek word for no. It’s what the Greek ambassador to Italy said to the Italian foreign minister on this day in 1940, when the Italian said, “Surrender now, or we invade Greece at dawn.”

OCHI. NO. The 28th of October has been celebrated in Greece ever since, with speeches and church services and especially with parades. There’s even a street in our neighborhood called “Twenty-eighth of October Street”.

I should tell you first that in recent years, people have been discouraged from attending the parades. The parade in Thessaloniki has been made into a shadow of its former self. When I first came to Greece in 2005, it included roaring tanks and jet fighters screaming overhead, and it was a long parade, and it began in the center of downtown. More recently there have been no tanks or jets; the parade has been considerably shortened, and it has been moved from the gracious and elegant downtown to our own poor, rather shabby little neighborhood.

Well, the first thing that happened here in Thessaloniki was, Greek flags bloomed all over the city this morning, more than I’ve ever seen before. Next thing that happened was, the churches were well attended. After church, a multitude began gathering along the parade route, not the few hundred souls of recent years, but tens of thousands. We were sitting at a corner café there, having our after-church snack, and watching the people assemble, but then, as the parade was still an hour away, we walked home for a little rest beforehand. (That’s an easy 10-minute walk or a brisk 5 minute one.)

We had just gotten home when the President of Greece arrived with his entourage, to take their places in the reviewing stand, a few yards from where we had been sitting. We were unaware he was coming, or we might have hung around (at least I might have), just to boo him a bit.

Never mind; others did it for us. No sooner had the politicians appeared than the crowd began to shout them down, yelling, “Traitors! Traitors!” and “Thieves, thieves!” and they kept up the shouting, ever more loudly, more and more people adding their voices, until guess what? The President of Greece and all his bodyguards and all his cohort departed. Yes, they simply stood up and left, under military escort.

(Ironically, Anthimos, Bishop of Thessaloniki, was among them, although he has been a strong opposition leader. He’ll no doubt have some choice comments about all this, which I wish I could hear, but he’ll probably keep them private.)

Fear for the safety of the politicians was of course not unfounded, as an angry crowd can so easily turn into a mob, and once they’ve branded someone a traitor they may feel justified in giving him what traitors deserve. I’m pleased to tell you, this crowd preserved its self-control.

We were watching all this on the local television station, which announced that with the departure of the officials, the parade had been cancelled.

I said to Demetrios, “I can’t stay here another minute! No matter what happens, good or bad, I have to be there with the people!” So out the door I flew, carrying three small Greek flags in my hands, while he couldn’t unglue himself from the television. (He did come 15 minutes later, however.)

On the way I met an old man and wished him Many Years, which is what you say to people on feast days. He smiled and asked, “What happened down there?” meaning down by the sea, where the parade route was. I said, “I wasn’t there; I’m going there now.” Then I gave asked him if he would like one of my flags and he said yes, so I gave it to him and said, “The flag is very precious, you know, because it’s a symbol of freedom.” Freedom, not fascism. He nodded and took it happily and said, “Be well!”

The crowd at the parade site was milling about restlessly, not knowing whether to stay or go home. The police were out in very large numbers. Some of the people were carrying painted protest signs. One showed the Greek flag with a black swastika superimposed on it and the words, “NO to the Fourth Reich!”

Another was a big banner that simply said, OCHI, “NO” in letters 18” high. (That was my personal favorite, because it couldn’t be faulted. NO is, after all, what this day is all about, yet everybody knew that this NO didn’t so much refer to 1940.)

A few people were leaving, small children in tow. I asked one of those, “What’s happening?” and he said, “Nothing. The parade is cancelled.”

When a TV reporter asked one young man the same question, the young man said, “What’s happening? Can’t you SEE what’s happening? They’re all working for foreign interests, and the Greek people have found it out!” And he shrugged and walked away from the camera.

And then—drums! Not on Alexander the Great Boulevard, where the parade was to have been; that street was blocked by police cordons and official vehicles. But on Queen Olga Boulevard, the next parallel street, the street where I was standing, came a loud, defiant, BOOM! BOOM! BOOMDITTY BOOM! and one lone band marched past us, a look of determination and perhaps unease on their faces. And ahead of them, ordinary people, clearing the streets for them. Then they struck up the music, which for once I recognized: “Macedonia the World-Renouned, home of Great Alexander…” People clapped and cheered and I waved my two flags.

I walked behind the band some blocks, as far as I could, the ferocious BOOM of their drums resounding in stomach and ears and down to the tips of the toes; but they were marching faster than I could walk, and I can still walk pretty fast, for my age. I had the impression they were eager to do their bit and then get out of there, before they might get into any trouble over it.

And THEN, I don’t know what happened; perhaps I’ll find out from the television, but it seemed that this one, solitary marching band, and the cheering and applause it engendered, heartened other elements of the parade, because then, along Alexander the Great Boulevard (the planned parade route, now somehow unblocked), came an echoing reply, “Macedonia” being taken up by another band, this one holding up signs on tall poles that read, “Greeks, Save Macedonia!” And the people cheered wildly and yelled, “Bravo!” and clapped and waved their little flags, as behind it came more marchers, and then more.

Every group that marched, every single one, was preceded by the Greek flag. That was never so, as I recall, in previous parades. There were various organizations, each carrying its banner, and groups in various sorts of traditional Greek dress. The men in traditional fighting attire were loudly cheered.

There were even a few modern-day military units. I don’t know what (if anything) that says about their loyalty to this government, but there were Navy SEALS (or the Greek version thereof), and Army nurses and Alpine troops. (There are no Alps in Greece, of course, but you know what I mean; soldiers in white camouflage with skis strapped to their backs. You can see them in the video below.) Demetrios says the Greek military has traditionally stood by the Greek people. The people evidently thought this was what was happening, from their enthusiastic applause and cheers.

Many of the marchers had a solemn expression on their faces, but some, seeing their heartfelt and more-than-enthusiastic reception by the people, were grinning broadly. There was one contingent of young people with Down’s Syndrome, and they had the biggest grins of all, as if to say even they could understand enough to want a free Greece, like the rest of us, and they wanted to do their part, if only by marching. They received some of the biggest ovations.

In the final two groups, which may have been Girls Scouts and Boy Scouts, every single girl and boy was carrying a large Greek flag on a very tall pole – topped by the Cross, no less, another touch which has been discouraged by the government of late. They made a perfect grand finale.

Here are a couple of minutes of video from our parade.

It was a micro parade, a third its usual size, but that didn’t matter. That it took place at all, minus the government officials and without their blessing, was the important thing. A small victory for the people, but even a small victory seems so major.

When the parade was over, the crowd spontaneously burst into the national anthem.

I went home literally wiping away tears.

UPDATE:

We’ve learned from the television news that the same thing has happened today all over Greece. In towns and villages the length and breadth of the nation, the people have chased away their members of parliament and proceeded to have their parades without them. In one village, they threw coffee all over the politicians. In another, the people never even let them take their seats, but blocked the reviewing stand the whole time.

In Corfu (I think, but can’t remember for sure), the people let the parade proceed as usual, more or less. But as the marchers passed the reviewing stand, instead of turning their heads to face the officials, they turned their heads the other way; and school boys were filmed making a certain contemptuous Greek gesture as they marched past the politicians. The crowd waited until immediately after the parade and then turned on the traitors to assault them, but the police intervened and the officials got safely away.

You can see more videos of parades in more cities on this blog.

Today, the Greek people said a new OCHI. Today, the whole Greek people, as one, humiliated their government and drove it physically from public view and symbolically out of office. I’m so, so proud of them! They also seem proud of themselves, and much heartened. There’s a celebratory feeling in the air along with a grim certainty that all this patriotism, all this passion for freedom, cannot really be completely useless. As God is still in heaven, it will count, somehow, some way, in the end.

OH – and of course today, in Greece, is also the Feast of the Protection of the Theotokos, no small factor in what has happened. Other Orthodox Churches celebrate it October 1, I believe, but in Greece it has been moved to Ochi Day because World War II is commemorated here on Ochi Day, and because during that war, the Theotokos was so often seen hovering above the Greek troops and spreading her mantle over them.

I think today even an atheist could hope the Theotokos might somehow protect Greece again.

Not only her prayers, but your prayers count too! Wherever you live, please add Greece to your prayers for your own country.

St. Demetrios Festivities

2011-10-29T08:33:00.001-04:00

25 October, Tuesday

The Feast of Great Martyr Demetrios fell on a Wednesday this year, and since we knew some of our friends would not feast on a fast day (which Wednesdays are), we planned a small get-together the evening before and a big gathering the day after.

The evening before, we were to meet Mena and Kostas and Pelagia and George at our favorite café, Maxim’s. Mena and Kostas were to pick us up at around eight o’clock.

We waited until 8:40 and they didn’t come. We tried both their home phone and Mena’s cell phone, which she always has with her, but there was no answer on either. We tried Pelagia and George on their home phone (we didn’t have their cell phone numbers) but there was no answer there, either. So we decided we’d better walk over to Maxim’s, which after all isn’t far, to see if any of them might be there.

Approaching Maxim’s, we found Pelagia and George, who were just leaving, having given up. So back inside we went, to try to sort it out.

Nobody knew where Mena and Kostas were, and Pelagia had tried Mena’s cell phone at least 20 times, with no result. (And Mena always, always answers her cell phone, even if she’s in the middle of a meal with her guests and her mouth is full.) Our own cell phone had mysteriously stopped working. What to do next? Finally, Pelagia had the idea to call her own house, where her son was, and get him to look in her phone book for Elpida’s number, Elpida being Mena’s married daughter, and the one most likely to know anything.

“Where’s your mother?” asked Pelagia.

“At my mother-in-law’s,” said Elpida, “Having her hair done.” (That’s where I went recently to have my hair done, too, so I’m aware that it takes much longer there then you had expected.)

“Where’s your father?”

Elpida didn’t know.

Okay, here’s where things get a bit complicated, and I’m not sure I have it all straight. But Elpida called Soula, her mother-in-law, and found out Mena had been under the hair dryer for the past half hour, so hadn’t heard her cell phone. Soula got Mena to the phone.

Where was Kostas? Mena said he had come to our house, by bus, to pick us up and walk with us to Maxim’s. Except that he had never arrived there.

So we sat around and worried for a while. Then Pelagia tried one more time to get Kostas on his home phone, and this time he answered. He had gotten off the bus and the wrong stop and had gotten lost. He went up one street and down another, hither and yon, but never could find our apartment. Finally he had given up, and had just arrived back home. (This is a bit worrisome, because Kostas has been visiting Demetrios’ house since they were teenagers.)

“Come here by taxi!” said Pelagia. “Tell the driver Maxim’s, behind the hospital, at the corner of Karamanlis Street.”

Then Elpida had to be called, to inform her her father had been found, and Soula had to be called as well, and then Mena, who had just left from Soula.

At last, everyone arrived and we enjoyed nice cups of coffee or chocolate over our little reunion, We stayed together until midnight, when everyone wished Demetrios Many Years for his name day, and we all went home, Kostas and Mena by car and the rest of us, together, on foot. (Pelagia and George live a couple of blocks past us.)

Christos called and, and hearing about our malfunctioning cell phone, gave Demetrios some instructions and it miraculously began working perfectly again. We still don’t know how Demetrios had turned it off, but now we do know how to turn it back on next time.

26 October, Wednesday

With horrible memories of attending the Church of St. Demetrios on the Feast of St. Demetrios some years ago, we were reluctant to go there again this year. Instead, we went to St. Sophia. (I read recently that when St. Sophia was first consecrated, the Byzantine Empress Irene was in attendance.) It was half full, unlike St. Demetrios, which would have been tightly packed. And of course its other major advantage was the cantor, Charilaos, who is eighty-something and still has the most incredible voice, so sweet, so rich, so full, so expressive.

After the service, Demetrios went up to the cantors’ stand just to be near him, and you could see a sort of reverent glow from his face. There he stayed until everyone else had received their antidoron from the priest; then he went up to the priest and asked if he could have a copy of the sermon, which, he tells me, was exceptionally beautiful. That of course sparked a little conversation, the upshot of which was, Father Lazaros invited us to go to his office, where he would join us later.

So we did, and shortly after we got there, in came Charilaos with three or four other cantors. Charilaos took the big chair behind the desk and a young woman named Anastasia served coffee and water, while the cantors began trying out on The Teacher (Chariloaos) their thoughts on Byzantine music. “The words of the hymn,” said one, “are just dead text. It’s the voice, the voice, that gives them life!”

Charilaos corrected him: it’s the Holy Spirit gives them life, sometimes through our voices.

Fr. Lazaros arrived a bit later, with a half loaf of bread from the same dough, he said, as this morning’s communion bread. Sitting on a hard chair on the wrong side of his desk, he cut this into thin slices on a plate and passed it around. Somebody else had tiropita, cheese pastries, to share. Then another Demetrios arrived, the step-son, I think, of Charilaos (who is widowed and recently remarried), with a box of chocolates to be handed around. Fr. Lazaros could see I love chocolate, and he put three in my hands.

So we passed an hour or so with these most delightful people before going home for our nap.

Over at St. Demetrios, we learned, the government bigwigs, who always come from Athens to attend, had been very heartily jeered and booed outside the Church. Just as I’d hoped, but we were doing something even better at the time, sitting with these glorious people. We exchanged contact information and hope to meet some or all of them again.

27 October, Thursday

We had our big feast for St. Demetrios the day after, or rather the night after. George and Pelagia came to pick us up in their car, and we drove toward the taverna in Kalamaria.

Nobody in the car knew quite where the taverna was, never mind we'd been there last year. AHHH, so this habit of setting off for somewhere without finding out first where it is is not peculiar to Demetrios!!!! That was worth finding out.

We arrived in the right neighborhood; the three of them were all sure of that much. Finally, Demetrios called the taverna and found out it was one diagonal block from us, so we got there only a few minutes later than most of our guests.

There were 20 of us altogether, Demetrios and I and some of the dearest, kindest, best people on earth, which guaranteed it would be a wonderful evening. And for icing on the cake, almost all of them had been not only Demetrios’ friends, but each others’, from childhood, or had at least known each other that long.

Nikos, a pathologist, brought his German wife this time. Brigitta is a lovely woman, and she and I could chatter away in German (although sometimes my words still came out in Greek). She told me she had grown up in Stuttgart. I said, “Oh, Demetrios once lived in Stuttgart, about forty years ago, though, now.”

“I know,” she said, a twinkle in her pretty eyes. “That’s where I met him!” And tonight was the first time she’d seen him since those days in Stuttgart, so it was another happy reunion.

I stood up, halfway through the meal, to propose a toast. I don’t often have much to say, on account of my very limited Greek, so when I do speak, people stop to listen out of plain curiosity. I said, as I now always do, “To freedom! Hail, hail, Freedom!” and everyone shouted, “Bravo, Anastasia!” and clinked their glasses together.

Then we sang. Well, mainly the men sang. I don’t know why, but it’s usually the men who sing at table, although the women sometimes join in. As there were ten of them, and at least half of them are cantors in church, they all sounded very, very good together, like a choir.

It was the best time I’ve had this year in Greece. Mena puts on a mean feast, and Vasilea has the mother of all meals, serves (I counted, this year) 15 dishes plus the desserts, which are 5 more, but tonight all of us were together, housewives and schoolteachers, poets and painters, theologians and lawyers, doctors and authors, all delighting in one another. Tonight my tongue loosened up (without benefit of alcohol) and I was able to converse fairly freely with a number of people, sometimes in English, sometimes in German, sometimes in Greek. Tonight, the topic was love, love, and love. The food was great, the company, better. We all just glowed. Tonight was a foretaste of heaven, as we all agreed.

Twenty Questions

2011-10-29T05:11:00.000-04:00

Or, How Free Are You?

The forms of freedom, of democracy, of a republic, do not necessarily indicate the reality. Even China calls itself “The People’s Republic of China,” and even the Soviet Union had elections. There are elections in Iraq, too, but hardly anyone is naïve enough to suppose any government there is not going to answer to the United States.

So how can you tell how free and independent you really are? Here’s a quiz I hope will help.

1.) You are allowed to vote for Candidates A, B, or C. But are you allowed to select which candidates will run in the primaries? Whoever gives the go-ahead to would-be candidates are the real power brokers. Can anybody run, or are there party bosses whose behinds must be kissed first?

2.) Do your newspapers and television networks give equal coverage to third-party or obscure candidates, and are these allowed to participate in televised debates? Or is that much power is being denied to third parties?

3.) Is there any limit on how much an individual can donate to a candidate for public office? If so, does this limit, by being high, discriminate too much in favor of the rich?

4.) Are corporate entities (companies, banks, unions, etc.) barred from contributing to a candidate for public office? Or is there a limit to how much they can give? Or can they contribute a couple of million or so for every thousand you donate?

5.) Must candidates for public office disclose all contributions; instead of there being so-called “soft money” that does not need to be disclosed?

6.) You are allowed to debate the issues of the day, but who determines what those issues are? Whoever does that is exercising power.

7.) Is there any legal limit to how much of your money your government can take from you (taxes, fees, etc., etc., etc.)?

8.) Can labor in your country organize itself into unions if it desires, so they hae some leverage with management, or has that become a useless idea since most of those kinds of jobs are have been exported to other countries?

9.) Can a laborer in your society work without joining a union if he so desires, and without undue pressure to join one?

10.) Newspapers and television networks wield enormous influence, meaning power, and can also become powerful propaganda tools, especially when concentrated in the hands of a few. Do only a handful of corporations own most of the news outlets in your country? If you don’t know, find out!

11.) Are there companies in your country “too big to fail’, thus requiring the people (you!) to bail them out as often as their executives ruin them (for their own personal enrichment)?

12.) Does your government, without a court order, listen in to your phone calls or intercept your e-mails?

13.) Does your local library spy on you, report to your government, upon request, what books you have checked out?

14.) Is your doctor required to supply your medical information to your government upon request?

15.) Is it legal, in your country, for you to disappear in the middle of some night, without access to a lawyer, without your family knowing where you are, and to be held indefinitely without trial?

16.) Does your government use torture, even if they call it something else? Or does your government hand over suspects to be tortured by other governments, to maintain appearances? (You can be sure any government that crosses this line will be equally willing to torture you, should it ever deem this necessary.)

17.) Is your country free of any significant dependence upon foreign aid and/or loans from other countries or big banks or the International Monetary Fund? My husband once had coffee and doughnuts with a banker who remarked, “I’d love to give you a mortgage, the bigger the better!’ And when asked why, the banker said, “Because then for the next thirty years, you’ll be working for me!”

18.) Does your country have separation of “church and state” (the word “church” to include mosque, synagogue, or temple)? Can your country tax religious institutions or otherwise regulate them, or does your country officially support one or two religions only?

19.) Are members of certain religions treated as second-class citizens by your government or in your society?

20.) If you vote out (or force out, as in Egypt) one government in favor of another, do any of these things actually change? In other words, ignoring the lip service, which is often just theater, is there in practice a dime’s worth of difference? Or do your political leaders all behave as if they were all in the pay of the same elite clique?

Do Just as You Please; Makes no Difference

2011-10-28T05:33:00.001-04:00

Tuesday, 25 October

The garbage strike is over. The garbage collectors lost, predictably. The strike, like the protests, was predicated upon the mistaken assumption that the government was accountable to popular opinion and could perhaps be influenced it. The gang that runs things doesn’t care even if you vote out the current office-holders; they have more of their own (in both parties) waiting in the wings.

Anyway, it’s over, and just in time, too, because by now the garbage is beginning to smell. We are grateful to observe that it has been collected from various neighborhoods, although not yet ours. On our corner, the garbage heap is as tall as a person and by now is blocking one lane of each street at the intersection.

Tomorrow is the Feast of Great-Martyr Demetrios, the patron saint of this City. It will be a national holiday and there will be huge crowds at the Church of St. Demetrios (and the other churches). All the highest-ranking Greek politicians will be at St. Demetrios, including the President and Prime Minister. I’d like to go there just to boo them, but there’s no point. (I still hope somebody does, though.)

Last year, at this time, Greek flags were blooming all over town. This year, from our balcony, we can see exactly 3 in the one direction (not counting our own) and two around the corner in the other direction. I don’t know what this means. Perhaps the propaganda has taken hold, which says the national flag is a symbol of fascism. And racism, implying that one thinks the Greeks are better than everyone else. (As you will know, if you watched My Big Fat Greek Wedding, there’s a grain of truth in that! But the racism bit is a canard, is nonsense.) This flag was carried by the heroes of the wars of liberation, when Greece liberated herself from Turkey; it symbolizes freedom and independence. It was carried in World War II to symbolize the same. THAT’S what it’s all about, just as the American Flag is about freedom and independence and bravery, and not about the jingoism and chauvinism in vogue with flag-wavers recently.

Is the Bible True?

2011-10-27T08:26:00.000-04:00

Check out Fr. Stephen's post on whether the Bible is true.

It is, of course -- but not in the sense usually thought of by believers and unbelievers alike.

Aspasia’s Marrying!

2011-10-27T05:34:00.000-04:00

Monday, 24 October

She’s the daughter of Thomai and Zisis, our downstairs neighbors, and she’s forty-something, so her parents have worried for years about her getting married. But she has found and/or been found by a wonderful young man in Constantinople, who works in the Patriarchate and is very devout and good-looking, as well. (A couple of weekends ago, I asked Pelagia and George if they knew the fiancé, and Pelagia said, “Of course. Everyone knows him. He’s a good boy.”)

The engagement ceremony is tomorrow and the wedding is to take place in Constantinople next month (a few days after we depart for Richmond). Thomai and Zisis have engaged four buses to take people from here. More are coming by airplane, paying their own fare. Thomai ans Zisis are going to have 200 guests, and the bridegroom is going to have 200 more.

And guess who is going to preside over both the engagement and the wedding? Patriarch Bartholomew. The Patriarch, when he was introduced to Zisis as “Aspasia’s father,” said, “Oh, Aspasia! I love Aspasia as if she were my own daughter!”

We are absolutely thrilled for them all.

Greek Funeral

2011-10-26T05:32:00.002-04:00

...or Rather, a Greek Burial
Thursday, 20 October
Last night, Ianna’s mother died, at the age on ninety-something. She had lived a good life and even had her husband with her right up until last year.

So we got the word in the late morning and the funeral was to be at two o’clock. (Bodies here are not embalmed because that’s not actually the Orthodox way, so they are put into the ground with all due haste.)

Well, due to the strikes, there was no bus or taxi service for us, so Mena agreed to come pick us up; that would only make us a tiny bit late, she said.

What she hadn’t realized was, her car was out of gas. Long story we can skip, but refueling the car caused more delay.

Then the traffic was heavier than usual, as everybody who couldn’t use a bus or taxi was driving a car.

So the upshot of it was, we missed the funeral service altogether, and only arrived as the coffin was being carried from the on-site chapel to the grave. The graveside service consisted of one short prayer by the priest. Then the coffin, still open but with the body wrapped in a sheet, was lowered by hand into the ground. I was surprised to see the grave was no more than four feet deep. People threw flowers on top of the body. Then the lid was put on, and then the shoveling commenced, while we were still standing there.

We moved on over to the reception hall, where we were all seated at one very long table. They don’t have a *makaria* the way Greeks in America do, no huge meal, just cognac,coffee, water and coffee to drink and small muffins and chocolate candies. You sit there for a while, you sip, you munch, you stand up eventually and go hug the family and take your leave.

I have to tell you, this cemetery is a full-service place. It not only has a real church on site, it also has a bus stop, a café set up for receptions, and a flower shop. Maybe they even sell caskets; I don’t know.

The memorial stones are not like ours. These are thick little monuments, with built-in glass chambers where you can put your icon/s, and some of them even contain a box with a lock where you can keep candles and incense, for when you visit, or a vase for fresh flowers. You can also have a photo of your loved one somehow made permanent, printed on stone it looks like, attached to the marker.

I think Ianna was still in shock; I mean, there had only been a few hours between the death and the burial. The whole thing’s over with before there’s even been time to quite realize it.

She’s doing okay, though. It’s not as though we grieved the way pagans would, who have no “sure and certain hope” of the resurrection.