Coming Soon...

…to a blog near you!

Many non-Orthodox, hearing the Orthodox take issue with Penal Substitutionary Atonement, have been scandalized and suppose we have rejected the notion of atonement altogether, or that we have emptied the Holy Cross of all meaning. Or at most, they think, we ascribe to the Cross some sentimental meaning, or admit that it showed forth exemplary love.

Of course the reverse is true: we recognize layer upon layer of deep, theological, personal meaning in the Cross, as attested by the fact that the Orthodox Church has not one, but two days devoted to the commemoration of the Holy, Precious, Life-giving Cross – and those are in addition to Thursday and Friday of Holy Week! (I refer, of course, to September 14, when the feast of the Cross kicks off the entire ecclesiastical year, and the Third Sunday of Great Lent.)

In fact, the Cross is so rich in meaning for us that I estimate it may take somewhere between 8 – 12 blog posts just to touch on them all, as well as to clear up some of what we do not believe happened there.

I’m going to try. And I'm going to try to make it readable, unlike (I'm told) some of the other things I've been writing.

Look for the first in this series on about Monday, God willing and there are no family emergencies. I'll call it, "Why Did Jesus Die?"

P.S.) Tad's comment to the previous post reminds me that we also recall Chist's Passion and Crucifixion every week as we fast on Wednesdays and Fridays.

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How to Send Someone to Heaven

Yesterday, my daughter sent me this account of the funeral of her husband's grandfather, and I thought it was so touching that I asked, and received, permission to post it here.

Luckily for me so far, I do not have a lot of experience with funerals. I went to several when I worked for the Sheriff's Office, when a fellow officer would be killed in the line of duty, and I went to my grandmother's and my uncle's funerals many years ago. Just recently my aunt died, way too young, and I went to her funeral. Yesterday, I went to Jeff's grandfather's funeral and now I know HOW TO SEND SOMEONE TO HEAVEN!

First, a little background on Grandpa N. (aka "The Fossil")....He was 87 years old, had 5 children, 12 grandchildren, and 15 great grandchildren--almost all of whom still live in or nearby the small town of Winsted where Fossil was born and raised and chose to raise his family. Grandpa N.'s number one passion in life was baseball. He umpired right up into his eighties and taught his son Dickie (Jeff's dad) and grandson Todd (Jeff's brother) how to ump too. Just 2 weeks before he died, Todd arranged for his grandpa to get to the town team's (Winsted Wildcats) ballgame in a special wheelchair and throw out the first pitch! That would be Grandpa's last game (on this earth anyway)! There was an article and a picture of him in the town paper, which was later displayed at the funeral home.

Grandpa N. was quite a character! He loved to go to the bar in town to hang out with other locals and tell dirty jokes. The one he told me EVERY time he'd see me was, "Do you know where they found the missing nurse? Underneath the Doc!" He loved to flirt with girls. But he loved his wife, a sweet Southern Belle from Alabama, and they were married for 65 years.

I imagine everyone dreads funerals, and admittedly, when I heard the arrangements I dreaded this one, particularly because I knew I had to somehow keep a 3 year old entertained during all of this. On Tuesday, there was a wake for Grandpa at the nursing home for an hour. All of the residents of the home who would be unable to come to the funeral and the staff wanted a chance to say goodbye and pay their respects. Grandpa's long time friend and roommate for the last 2 years at the nursing home, Henry, sat in the back of the chapel in his wheelchair and just bawled the whole time. So we did that hour--not so bad. Then we were supposed to go to the funeral home from four until eight. WHAT? Four hours?? Now I know why. That was barely enough time for everyone who came out to get through! I knew there'd be a crowd but HOLY COW! It seemed like a never-ending parade of people, each with their own funny stories about the Fossil. The Winsted Wildcats all came by in their baseball uniforms to pay their last respects.

It was open casket and I wondered how to explain this to my 3 year old. One of Sydney's second cousins, 5-year old Jack, walked into the funeral home and asked his mother, "Is this heaven?" His mother had told Jack, before coming to the funeral home, that Grandpa had gone to heaven and when Jack walked in and saw Grandpa, he figured he was in heaven! His mother said, "No Jack, we are in Winsted and that is DEFINITELY not heaven!"

Grandpa had told Grandma before he died that if she put him in a suit, he'd roll over and take it off! So the family decided to dress Grandpa in his umpire uniform and in the casket they placed a baseball, a bat, an umpire mask and an indicator (something umps hold in their hand to count balls and strikes, I think). Everything he'll need in heaven to umpire a game! Each of the children and grandchildren went up to Grandpa, one at a time, and talked to him, touched him, thanked him, told him how much they loved him and lastly, goodbye. I realized then how important an open casket was for everybody. Before this, I had mixed feelings about it but I think everyone really got a better sense of closure.

So after this long process, it's off to the bar! Grandpa would haved love to come too! Just a couple of years ago, Todd, who has always had a very special relationship with his grandpa, picked grandpa up, put an "Old Man" mask on him and took him to a Halloween party with all his (Todd's) friends! Still partying in his 80's! Everyone knows the N.s party hard, but love harder!

The next day, the family again gathered at 9:30 at the funeral home for one last chance to see Grandpa before the casket would be forever closed. Then we proceeded to the church for mass. The six oldest grandsons were the pall bearers and every one of their eyes were filled with tears as they carried their beloved Grandfather from the car down a sidewalk lined on both sides with uniformed men from the American Legion, all saluting, and into the church. (Grandpa had been in the military) There's just this awesome feeling you get when you walk by those men in uniform.

As we entered the church, I couldn't believe how crowded it was, especially for an 11:00 am weekday funeral. I'm sure if the funeral had been held on the weekend, there would have been standing room only, and Holy Trinity is a large church!

The entire service was absolutely beautiful. The music brought tears to your eyes. The priest was wonderful. He spoke so kindly to Grandma N. and then to the grandchildren. At the end of his speech, he looked at Grandma and said, while gesturing to the huge family surrounding her, "You two started all of this! I hope you're satisifed!"

The last, and hardest, part was taking Grandpa to his final resting spot. The American Legion men fired off shots. Taps was played. Not a dry eye anywhere. Finally the priest let each of the family members sprinkle holy water on the casket. Then it was all over. It felt like we had given him the greatest send-off to heaven! And I said to myself, "Now that's how you send someone to heaven!"

We were told that there would be a light luncheon after the funeral at the church. "Light" was definitely incorrect. I think every person in Winsted and the surrounding towns must have made food! It was a huge spread and everyone who came to the funeral also came to the luncheon! Small towns know how to do it right!

I didn't expect to feel this way at all. I've just never before seen a family and an entire community come together this way. I was overwhelmed with a wonderful feeling of love that's just hard to describe, so that's why I decided to write all of this.

And, of course, it was off to the bar again that night!

A family friend wrote a poem that was displayed beside Grandpa's casket and I liked it so much that I got a copy:


THE BROKEN CHAIN

We little knew that morning
God was going to call your name
In life we dearly loved you
In death we do the same.

It broke our hearts to lose you
you did not go alone;
for part of us went with you,
the day God called you home.

You left us peaceful memories
Your love is still our guide,
and though we cannot see you
you are always at our side.

Our family chain is broken,
and nothing seems the same,
but as God calls us one by one,
the chain will link again.

P.S. This is a good description of a proper Orthodox funeral, as well -- minus the Winsted Wildcats, of course!

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Your Own Sun Room

We love our sun room so much that I’ve become convinced everybody who can ought to have one. Even if you can’t afford one today, you can hope and plan for when times get better. Even if you have to convert some other room, you can never go wrong with a sun room, even if for the time being you must use it for a bedroom or living room. You'll like it better, sleeping or dining in a sun room. (And let's face it, a formal living room, these days, is superfluous anyway.)

Here’s what I consider desirable for a sun room to succeed in bringing you a great deal of pleasure.

If at all possible, it should face south. (But if it cannot, do not let the necessity of some other orientation deflect you from building it!)

It should have three glassed-in walls, ideally, but even if it can only have two, or one, making the sun room is still well worth doing. If you can't have three glassed walls, make the glass of the remaining walls floor-to-ceiling. If you can glass in only one wall, consider a giant bow window, perhaps with French doors in the middle. I don’t know why a bow or bay window lets in so much more light, but it does.

Walls, in my humble opinion, ought to be painted some very light color and the ceiling should be white – again, to maximize the sense of light. (Dark just doesn’t seem to go with a sun room.)

A high ceiling adds to the sunny, airy, outdoor feel.

The floor should be of some durable material: tile or laminate or high quality vinyl. If it’s tile, be sure your structure is strong enough to support it. You may need to reinforce the floor by, for example, adding pilings underneath. Tile is fun because you can make your own design with it, using accent tiles, borders, mosaic inserts, whatever. Also, with tile, keep in mind that it will either soak up a lot of warmth from the sunshine (dark tiles) or reflect a lot, so you may like to take your climate into consideration.

Climate control. If this is a new room, you may need a separate heating and cooling unit. We have a heat pump to do both, with which we are very pleased. It’s called a “mini-split ductless system”. (Google those words to find some.) There’s an inside unit that mounts high on the wall and looks a little like a window air-conditioner but much better, sleeker. It is controlled by a remote gadget. Then there is the outdoor unit that sits on the ground. Cost can be as low as $700 plus shipping and handling but double that to include installation. A ceiling fan is also a plus, for when you just want a breeze.

Window Treatments? Whatever you like. We like our curtains. They are on clip-rings that slide over the curtain rods for easy opening and closing. First we put up the sheers, very plain, as sheer as we could find, to give us maximum viewing outside yet privacy in the daytime. That way, we can come to breakfast in our robes. Then, we put up – well, actually, in place of regular curtains, we put up more sheers! But this time, sheers with a lacy design. We needed 18 panels and couldn’t decide which (solid) color of four in that design we liked best, so we bought them all! Yes, we did, and alternated them. We’re debating now whether each window should have its own color, but the overall effect in either case is both festive and unique. It somehow gives the room more of a hotel or commercial look than a residential one, which is fine with us. The privacy factor at night is not 100%, but it’s still surprisingly good when all the curtains are drawn, as good as we need, anyway.

Furnishings? No opinion yet! We haven’t furnished ours very much. I was thinking wicker or rattan, but then Demetrios pointed out that we plan to use this room all year, and I do think few things are more dismal and forlorn-looking than summery items in the winter. Summer is my favorite season, and I dislike reminders that it is gone. One of our friends, though, has a sun room with white wicker furniture and hers doesn’t depress me in winter, so I’m still not entirely set against that idea.

In any case, at least a table and some chairs will be necessary, and probably some lamps. We just bought a floor lamp with five heads and five shades that match all the colors of our curtains. I’ve also bought a sparkly, blown-glass vase that accents some of the colors. We’ve also bought a small glass table.

This may be a good place for some fun furniture, such as a hanging “basket” chair or a hammock, although I fear the latter would spoil the looks. Well, we look forward to making this lovely space even lovelier.

Meanwhile, there’s a baby cottontail on my lap, licking itself clean, so I will stop now to admire what a good job he or she is doing.

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65 Years!

That's how long my parents have been married, as of today.

Happy anniversary, Mom and Dad, and congratulations! And thanks, from your grateful children, for having stuck it out together for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness, in health. That means a lot to us.

(Speaking of in "sickness," Mom, this time you've simply gotta get rid of those slippery pajamas, before you get hurt!)

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Sin and Immortality, Part 2

Sin is Suicide

Once we understand that our life, very literally, consists of communion in God’s own Life, then we are in a position to understand that death is being outside of communion in God’s Life. The soul, separate from God, is like a fish out of water, or a cut flower: not quite dead yet, but already dying. Eventually the dying soul separates from its body and the body, too, dies.

That is why every form of rejecting God is labeled, “sin.” To reject God is not sinful because His feelings are hurt; it isn’t as though His pride were wounded or His dignity insulted; God is far above all such self-serving concerns. Instead, to reject God is sinful because to reject God is to reject Life, His Life, the only Life there is or ever was. Sin is self-destruction. Sin is the destruction of God's handiwork.

To say “sin causes death” is a bit like saying headache causes pain. A headache is pain. Sin is death. Every sin is some form of rebellion, alienation, separation from God. And separation from God is the very definition of death. To sin is to cut your lifeline, to unplug your life support system, to trash your relationship with God, Who is your Life.

Sin, like jumping off a skyscraper, kills us all by itself, even if we don’t actually die until a bit later, when we hit the ground. Sin is self-punishing, destroying us body and soul, although often we do not notice the self-inflicted damage until it becomes full-blown death: how hardened our hearts are becoming; how eroded, our character; how false, our whole being. We do notice how lonely we are, how alienated and empty, but we fail to connect the dots and see how we are punishing ourselves. It is the lack of this insight that allows people to suppose there is some need for God to add yet more misery to our already miserable state, or to kill the already dying.

Death is not a response by God to sin, but is an aspect of sin itself. God, the Author of Life, did not institute death as a punishment. The murderer of mankind is and always was satan, not God. (John 8:44) He kills us by inducing us to kill ourselves; that is, to sin. Sin is suicide, unassisted suicide. Or at least it is unassisted by God.

It’s true that when God wanted to reveal to His people that there is a connection between sin and death, He put it into legal terms, offense and punishment. But we believe He did this in great and gracious condescension to stiff-necked and hard-hearted Israel. He put the matter in terms they could understand, who were not very spiritual-minded but were all too familiar with the concept of revenge. It was impossible, at that stage of spiritual development, for people to understand that sin in and of itself is lethal, before we even get around to considering God’s response to it. Yet that fact existed from the beginning, before the Mosaic Law. As St. Paul points out in Romans 5, during the time between Adam and Moses, there was no transgression similar to Adam’s (no transgression of any direct commandment), yet sin still killed everyone. And sin killed everyone, he says, even though sin was not being imputed. This means something else was going on, not God killing people as punishment. It means sin kills us unilaterally, without any help from God.

We do not worship some beastly deity who retaliates against sinners by killing them. Instead, sin kills automatically because to sin is to make oneself incompatible with God. The only way God could make sin non-lethal would be by making His own Life compatible with wickedness. Never going to happen! He remains holy and good; He remains the only Immortality; and if we would not die, we must tap into His Life, must be in communion with Him. It is not God who kills, but precisely the opposite: the lack of God. (God but determines the timing of our dying, according to what is best.)

The wages of sin is death
but the gift of God [is] eternal life
through Jesus Christ our Lord.
(Romans 6:23)

Sin pays us death; God, by contrast, gives us eternal life.

Sin pays us wages we earned; God gives us eternal life we did not earn.

This is the revelation we have in Christ.

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Eight Temporary Guests

Little balls of fur, ranging in color from pearl gray to charcoal gray, with long, white snouts, beady black eyes, and leathery black ears. EIGHT possum kittens! Their mother, who had built her nest in somebody's basement, bit the owner of the house to defend her babies. The Health Department has now dispatched her to possum heaven, and will test her brains on the off-chance she may have been rabid. Possums virtually never get rabies, but you still can't take even a miniscule chance with the life of the bitten woman.

So the Animal Control people brought the litter to me. They're adorable! Old enough to eat on their own, so they will require minimum work. Once I've examined each one carefully and am sure they are all eating well and are okay, I'll pass them on to Colleen, the Opossum Queen. She doesn't do intake, for some reason. She only feeds 'em and cleans up after 'em when they're healthy.

Yet she is a walking encycopedia on opossums. Get her talking to you and you'll learn much more than you ever wanted to know about opossums. She can keep going for at least a whole hour without even slowing down.

Enjoy, Colleen! And I'm going to enjoy them these next few days, too, before you get them!

I got this photo from the Internet. They aren't mine, but look very much like them. Except the ones I have are a little older and fluffier.



UPDATE: Well, Animal Control told me 8. There are actually only 7, now that I have checked them all over. They're about to get injected with Lactated Ringers Solution under the skin of their backs, for dehydration, and I'll try to sex them, too, while I'm at it. They offer to bite, as all possums do, even very small ones, but they don't actually do it. It's all show, empty bravado.

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Cat and Mouse

Cat: furry creature to be found on the wrong side of the door. Mine prefer human company to each others'. Gotta love 'em! Last night, as a special and rare treat, I allowed them to sleep on the bed. They were there for a while, but not for long. Sure sign something's out of the ordinary.

Mouse: smaller furry creature who leaves disgusting droppings in your pantry and other places, such as all over your knives, spoons and forks. In larger numbers, they spoil your food, make your house smelly, chew up things you wanted left whole, and spread disease. We called the exterminator at the very first sign, days ago; he's coming tomorrow.

Our Molly spent all of this morning staring into the narrow space between a tall bookcase and the wall. She never moved; only her ears and tail occasionally twitched. She may as well be a hound at alert. We always know, when she does this, she's watching a mouse.

I just now moved the bookcase out from the wall to expose the wee, sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous beastie. It didn't seem very lively; perhaps it was Molly's toy overnight, accounting for her defection from the bed. I laid a grocery bag, narrow side down, before the mouse and with a yardstick chased it gently into the bag. Now I've transferred it to a plastic aquarium, where it sits.

What to do? It reminds me of Tiki, the mouse I raised this Spring. (Except she was a Deer Mouse, while this is a House Mouse.) If it were a baby mouse, I'd give it anti-biotics for three days (because cat saliva contains the bacterium Pasturella, toxic and fatal to birds and small mammals) and then keep it until it was ready for release. But an adult mouse! That's an escape artist par excellence, with mean teeth besides. The teeth I can deal with, by wearing gloves, but if she escapes from my hand, the exterminator is coming tomorrow.

I suppose her best chance is if I do treat her before releasing her (far away from human houses!) but take the aquarium outside each time. That way, if she escapes, at least it won't be in my house - for the moment, anyway, or for very long.

It happens every time. I don't rehabilitate baby wild mice every year, but when I do that invariably is the year they also infest the house and we are forced to call the exterminators. (And I release them very far away, I promise you. MY mice do not get into the house!) Raise one or two Deer Mice, kill perhaps a dozen House Mice ... perhaps its because they are all more than usually plentiful some years, but it seems so ironic.

I'm truly sorry man's dominion,
Has broken nature's social union,
An' justifies that ill opinion,
Which makes thee startle
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
An' fellow-mortal!

(Find the whole poem here.)

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Sin and Immortality, Part 1

Adam & Eve and Immortality

The Orthodox believe that immortality is strictly a divine attribute, just like knowing everything or being everywhere at once. God alone has it. “I am the Way and the Truth and the Life” (John 14:6) and “I am Resurrection and Life” (John 11:25) and “In Him was life; and the life was the light of men” (John 1:14) and “Who only hath immortality.” (I Timothy 6:16)

We hold that Adam and Eve were not created with this divine attribute. The Life they had was specifically God’s Life, shared with them. Their Life, we can say, was derivative, was borrowed, was God’s Life breathed into their inanimate clay. No, God does not have lungs or gills, has no need of oxygen, and does not literally breathe, but the idea is that Life is His, and He shares His Life with Adam and Eve (in a unique way not granted to animals) for as long as they will have Him. It’s as if He were the Fountain of Immortality, and they were merely dipping their straws into it.

Of course the Life they had, being God’s Life, was indeed immortal life, but their hold on it was not yet firmly established, for they were, as St. Irenaeus is fond of telling us, but spiritual infants. Because they were not yet perfect, they were still capable of falling into slavery to the devil. Because they were not yet wise, they were still able to pull their straws out of the Fountain and throw them away.

Had they remained in obedient communion with God, eventually that communion would have matured into something permanent, immune from assaults by the devil, at which point they would have been sealed with immortality. In more mythological terms, God would have allowed them to eat of the Tree of Life (and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil!) when they were mature enough to handle these. As it happened, though, He drove them out of the Garden specifically lest they eat of the Tree of Life and sin dwell forever and ever in their immortal bodies.

But notice carefully: they had not yet eaten from the Tree of Life (Christ). They were not yet confirmed in immortality.

Thus we say that Adam and Eve were created neither immortal nor mortal, but instead, with the capacity to become either.

This is very important because it is part of what underlies a horrible Western error with grave implications concerning who God is. I mean this: if one believes Adam and Eve were created mortal, then God is the Author of death. But also, if one believes Adam and Eve were created immortal, then by definition nothing and nobody can cause them to die – except almighty God. Thus, one will be forced to conclude that, literally, God killed them as punishment for their sin. And of course, a god who creates death or who literally would kill us for revenge or retaliation is not the true and living God we Orthodox know, not the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ. I will have more to say on that in the next post.

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What is the Experience of God?

Matthew Gallatin, in one of his podcasts, has an interesting question he used to ask himself before he was Orthodox: "If I ignore what I believe about my God and set aside everything that I feel about my God, what is left of my experience with God? And the answer was nothing."

HT: Petronia

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Intercession of the Saints

Fr. Stephen has an excellent post on this topic here.

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Dance Recital

Here is beautiful Kelly, my eldest grandchild, striking a pose just before her recital on Friday night.





And here she is afterward, with her two brothers trying to get into the act. That's Connor in the bluegreen plaid, and Ryan in the orange and brown plaid shirt.

They both enjoyed the show.



And here she is with her parents, Mark and Katherine.




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Orthodox Monasticism

It’s very different from Western monasticism.

In the first place, we don’t have orders. There aren’t groups analogous to Dominicans or Franciscans or Benedictines. Our monks and nuns are just – monks and nuns.

Secondly, Orthodox monks and nuns do not have secular missions. They do work to support themselves; they do such things as write books, make greeting cards, weave baskets, and grow their own food. But they do not, for example, work outside their monasteries as nurses or doctors or schoolteachers or social workers or community organizers. They stay in their monasteries, although some few priest-monks work outside their monasteries pastoring parishes. They are all what Catholics would call “contemplatives,” devoting themselves to prayer, worship, study.

Orthodox monks and nuns practice asceticism, but not with any idea of gaining “merit” thereby. (We do not believe salvation is a matter of merit in the first place; therefore, we are not concerned with how or by whom it is supposedly earned.)

Orthodox monastics may even whip themselves raw, but not seeking to punish themselves, as if punishment could somehow purge or atone for sins. Instead, they deny themselves physical comforts in order to wean themselves from addictions to the things of this earth. They do it in the course of battling the demons. (Nobody knows what a demon is, who has not set out to conquer it. Most of us are at best only dimly aware of the demons we serve.) They seek to learn to be content in any situation, resting always in Christ, living only for Him. And if they inflict actual pain upon their bodies, it is to counteract temptation, especially lust. (Fact is, sexual desire is easier to control when your body is in pain.)

And if some are severe with themselves, it is because that is the degree of severity they have found necessary to gain mastery over their minds and bodies. You cannot give to God what is not yours to give, cannot consecrate to Him that over which you have no control. So monks and nuns seek to be in command of themselves, that they may live only for Christ, and not in slavery to anything or anyone else.

The monastic lifestyle aims at making it easier to grow to the full stature of Christ, which is the goal of every Christian life. The monastic life removes distractions, such as romantic involvements, and cares, such as rearing a family or pursuing a career, to make it easier to concentrate on developing in Christ. It provides much more time for prayer and worship than is usually possible in secular life. In that sense, we do consider it the superior lifestyle; we call it “the angelic life.” That doesn’t mean it has any spiritually or ecclesiastically higher status, just that success in living as a Christian is easier for them than for the rest of us. That’s the whole idea of monasticism, in fact: to make it as easy as possible, to provide the soul every advantage.

Can’t the rest of us also become saints, in our married and family lifestyles? Certainly, we can. It’s just harder for us (and therefore, more commendable for those who do become deified). Are we second-class Christians? Not at all! Well, at least if we are, it’s not by definition because we are not monastics. If we are second-rate Christians, it is because we haven’t tried hard enough.

A note for those concerned about rank: a monastery for women is ruled by our rough equivalent of a “Mother Superior.” Everybody in her monastery is subject to her; within the monastery, she even outranks visiting bishops.

I don’t know anything about the process of becoming a monk or a nun, such as how long it takes, whether there are vows, what the intermediate steps may be. Perhaps if someone reading this does know, you’d be kind enough to educate us via the comments box.

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The Old and New Covenants

In response to some questions I have received privately about my earlier post, "God is God!", here are some clarifications. I wish I had written that post more clearly to begin with, so that these issues would not have arisen.

First, it's true; we aren't under the law. St. Paul explains this quite well, I think, in the first half of Romans, Chapter 7.

But does this mean the Law of Moses just vanishes?

No! What happens to it is a bit like what happens to a caterpillar when it becomes a butterfly, or an egg when it becomes a bird. The caterpillar and the egg can be said to disappear, in a sense, but then again, they didn't just vanish, either. Instead, they matured into something else. And that's what our relationship with God does. It starts out based upon Law and then matures and morphs and is now, for the Christian, based upon love. (Love naturally does the right thing, without the Law needing to tell it to.) The old makes way for the new, and in that very process, is fulfilled.

"Fulfilled," in the Bible, means "is given its ultimate meaning" or "achieves its ultimate aim." An egg which never hatched would be a failure, and a caterpillar which never made it to the butterfly stage would likewise have failed to achieve its purpose. Similarly, the Law, which could never produce love or faith in our hearts, would have been a failure had it not given way to Christ. That was its purpose. (Galatians 3:24-25) In Christ, and in those who are His, the Law's purpose, which is to relate us rightly to God, is fulfilled by faith and by love. It's in that sense the Law is actually established in us: its purpose is achieved.

But note, the egg, in the very act of hatching, breaks. Similary, the Law as the basis for our relationship with God had to end. The Veil of the Temple had to be torn, from top to bottom.

Or, for another couple of analogies, consider that a two-year-old child is a wonderful creature, but if you come back to visit him in 15 years and the now 17-year-old child still looks and acts exactly the same, exactly like a two-year-old, something is very wrong. The toddler must give way to the teenager. Elementary school is something we have to leave behind to enter high school, and high school we leave behind to move on to college. Yet grade school being "established" in us is prerequisite for higher education: you have to know how to read, write, and do arithmetic. Grade school lives in us all our lives.

So there's a lovely paradox there. The very factor that establishes the Law, namely the Holy Spirit in the Church and in our hearts, also transcends it, moves past it.

But didn't at least some of the people who lived under the Law love God already?

Yes, they clearly did, but this assertion needs to be qualified.

First, they didn't know God as Christians do, because Christ had not yet come and taught and lived the Divine Life among us and died and risen. The Law was only a preliminary, preparatory revelation; Christ is the fullness of revelation. There's a lot more about God to love than people suspected in the days of the Law! Perhaps some of the prophets are an exception.

Second, we love God differently. Under the Law, God remained a deity external to His people. But since then, the Holy Spirit has been sent, who makes His home deep within the heart of the Church and of each Christian. We have this intimate sharing of His very Life within us. We are the branches and He is the Vine; or He is the Head and we are the rest of His body. Our encounter with God is no longer legal, but personal. The Holy Spirit prompts us, from within, to do whatever is right. There is no law, as St. Paul says, against the fruits the Holy Spirit within us bears.

God indeed created us to love Him; and in that sense, loving Him is natural. Yet, in our fallen condition, loving Him is not as easy as loving ourselves instead, not even for a Christian, not even assuming regeneration, that is. Nor did our fallen hearts, before the Holy Spirit took up His abode in us, guide us in HOW to love Him – in a concrete way, I mean, in the real world as distinct from in our imaginations. (In our imaginations, we love God so very deeply, but let a real-life situation or temptation arise to challenge that fantasy, and how often our love fails!) Now when our hearts did not spontaneously tell us what to DO in the way of loving God, that's when and why the Law was needed. It taught us how love behaves – again, in a preliminary and preparatory sort of way, until Christ showed us perfect love and perfect faith and perfect obedience.

And all the same things can be said about loving our neighbor. That, too, God created us to do, so it is a part of our true nature. Yet our true nature is so swamped by all the carnal baggage we now carry that to love one another hardly seems natural most of the time. Much less do our own hearts tell us, anymore, such things as that true love includes our enemies.

So yes, to the extent they knew the true God, people under the Law were not incapable of loving Him. King David comes especially to mind; who can read his Psalms and doubt he loved God? There were many others as well, exceptional people whose love of God transcended the Law. Yet their relationship with Him was still based upon the Law of Moses, whereas today, the Holy Spirit in the Church is its foundation, Who sheds abroad the love of God in our hearts.

And, by the way, the love we share with God and one another is NOT just another piece of Law! We are not doing it simply because God commands it. True, the Law does command us to love and so does Christ: love one another as I have loved you, He says, and He explicitly calls this a commandment. Nevertheless, there is a deeper dimension to Christian love than that, so much deeper it makes the legal aspect appear trivial in comparison. And burdensome, too, as everything law-based is.

Far from being a legal matter, genuine Christian love is something the Holy Spirit prompts in our hearts. And although it is a struggle to carry out His promptings, when we have done so we realize we have but fulfilled, in some degree, our own truest nature, the nature with which God orginally endowed us. We find it a matter of matchless joy. And that, rather than any law, is really the whole point. That is our restoration, liberation, re-creation, Christification, salvation. I do not say participation in God's love results in our salvation, as if salvation were earnable; it is it. Communion in God and one another in love is what salvation looks like.

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At the Beach

Here is my son's family, pictures taken last week. I'm currently visiting them in North Carolina. You can click on any picture if you wish to see it enlarged.


Kelly Anne, oldest grandchild, age 6 and a half





Connor Gordon, three and a half





Ryan Paul, three and a half





Mark and Katherine with all three children

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Orthodox Priesthood

The very first thing to be said about the priesthood is that it belongs to Jesus Christ. It is entirely His. Therefore, nobody, but nobody, male or female, straight or gay, has any "right" to it. Ordination is therefore not an issue of women's rights or gay rights or anybody else's right. In fact, when a person is ordained, his attitude should never be, "Thank heaven I've finally achieved my right," or even "this privilege." Instead, his attitude should be one of awe, even fear, at being called to minister alongside Christ at His altar.

A candidate for priesthood in the Orthodox Church must be a man but definitely not because men are considered superior beings; in Christ there is no male and female. And indeed, the greatest saint is a woman, the Theotokos. But a priest is to be a man because one of his roles is to be for his parish a living icon of Jesus Christ. (And yes, that is why he ought to have a beard, too.) Okay, technically it is the bishop we call upon to iconize Christ for us, but the priest, too, as his stand-in or delegate.

But isn't what a person looks like on the inside far more important than what he looks like on the outside, one may ask?

Yes, it is. Therefore the candidate must be of sound and solid faith with a character well-formed in Christ. Nevertheless, what he looks like on the outside is still very important to us as well.

The person to be ordained must either be celibate or the husband of one wife. He must have no sexual past that post-dates his baptism, no previous wife or lover. If he is married, his wife must be Orthodox. He must also have no human blood on his hands. If he served his country in the military and was in combat, that was his duty and to fulfill it is commendable, but he is ineligible for priesthood. Even if someone has died from an auto accident in which he was driving, he is still ineligible, not because we don't forgive him -- we do! -- but because the shedding of another's blood compromises his ability to be for us the living image of Christ. The potential priest must also be approved by the people, who at his ordination shout, "Worthy!" If even one person shouts, "Unworthy!" the proceedings are supposed to stop.

And quite likely, there are other requirements, too, of which I am ignorant.

Next, it is important to note that for the Orthodox, at least among those who rightly understand, priesthood in itself is neither a matter of status nor necessarily of leadership. Priests who do treat their office as such are going to have plenty of trouble getting anyone else to recognize any higher status, or getting folks to follow them, or gaining much respect among their people.

Priesthood does not necessarily entail leadership, because for us, the people we are willing to follow are those men or women who best show forth Christ in their lives and in their persons. It is much to be hoped that a priest may also be a good leader as well, but that role does not automatically come with ordination. It comes, instead, with sanctity. Among the Greeks here in Richmond, the most influential spiritual leader is a woman named Adamantia.

Priesthood is not a superior status in Orthodoxy. It is a service, which is another reason women so infrequently seek it. Servanthood, after all, for a feminist, is the same old, same old, precisely what she is trying to escape. A priest's service is indeed highly valued among us, indispensible, but it is still thought of as service.

Priesthood involves special functions within the Church, functions we cannot do without. Yet the highest, and most important function in the Divine Liturgy is to receive the Body and Blood of Christ. Even our babies, including girl babies, can do that.

Priesthood carries with it limited, spiritual authority. The priest has, for example, the authority to forbid chit-chat within the sanctuary, or to decide how strictly to enforce such things as modest attire in church. It is his charge to safeguard the spiritual order and well-being of his parish. But if the issue is not specifically spiritual, if it has to do with such things as having the parish hall painted, or arranging for the grass to be mowed, those sorts of tasks fall under the authoriy of the parish council. These things a priest only at his peril attempts to dictate, unless they have clear spiritual ramifications. (And here is another reason feminists usually aren't particularly attracted to Orthodox priesthood; a priest's authority is much more limited than that of his Catholic or Protestant counterparts.)

Any further authority a priest (or anyone else) may have comes from our love of him or her. When we look at someone and see Christ looking back at us, we want to weep for joy, weep for repentance, weep for sheer love. We would follow such a person almost anywhere, or at least wish to, as St. Peter wished to follow the Lord to His death, before the cock crowed. We feel honored if such a person asks from us a glass of water, and shamed if he should have to ask twice. THAT is authority! What such a person says, our hearts leap to do, and the only regret we have is that we didn't think to do it before being asked or told, or didn't know to do it before being advised.

To this aspire, clergy, Christians, men, women, feminists, all.

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