My nine-year-old son to one of his siblings: "You touch that last cupcake and you'll enter a world of pain." Survival of the fittest.
My seven-year-old son, who had been sick for a few days, was asked if he felt better: "Yeah, except when I stand on my tippy-toes my leg wiggles." . . . uh, okay then . . .
My five-year-old son had tripped on the game controller cord twice in one day. A little later, one of my other sons was telling jokes and asked, "What has four legs but doesn't walk?" The correct answer is a table, or perhaps a chair. My five-year-old sadly replied, of course, "Me." Four legs, son, four legs!
My three-year-old son came into the living-room in tears, saying, "Mom, I need a dwink."
"Why can't you get a drink?"
"Cause I need tea, and Gregory [the baby] is on the fwiderdayder." Really, it's not as bad as it sounds. He can't literally get on the fridge, at least to my knowledge.
My nine-year-old son: "Ewww, there's something floating around in the fishbowl." To which my eleven-year-old daughter (and the fishbowl's owner) replied, "No duh, they're fish." Sometimes you just make it too easy.
My sixteen-year-old daughter, while we were watching Prince Caspian: "That's a really tall midget!" Everything is a matter of perspective, I suppose.
Best of any song
is bird song
in the quiet, but first
you must have the quiet.
We live by mercy if we live.
To that we have no fit reply
But working well and giving thanks,
Loving God, loving one another,
To keep Creation's neighborhood.
God is searchlessly great. We hear and read of His greatness but it is quite another matter to live it, this greatness. No one and nothing can in any way diminish His eternal Sovereignty but He, even God, made Himself lowly to a degree that we cannot understand: in our frail flesh He attained absoluteness. Now I know from my own experience: He hungers for our perfection. In sanctioning our grievous struggle against the enemy and against our own selves in our fallen state, He would have us victorious. If we do not abandon Him in the worst moments of our humiliation by the enemy, He will most certainly come to us. He is the conqueror, not we. But He will attribute the victory to us, because it is we who have suffered. (Fr. Sophrony, We Shall See Him as He Is, p. 84)
A few weeks ago I wrote a post complaining that people misunderstand Kierkegaard. This past week I received verification that my complaint is correct, from a very unlikely source.
This session I’m taking a philosophy class; our focus is to examine the role religious belief plays in theory-making, and to that end we are reading Roy A. Clouser’s book The Myth of Religious Neutrality, Revised Edition. Clouser is professor emeritus of philosophy and religion at The College of New Jersey, Trenton, and is a Reformed Christian—or he is, at least, firmly in the Dooyeweerdian philosophical camp. In Chapter 5, Clouser gives his synopsis “of the [3] major positions which have been taken in the history of western thought concerning the general relation” of religious belief to theory-making: religious irrationalism, religious rationalism, and the biblical. I fully expected him to lump Kierkegaard with the first grouping and I was not disappointed. Rather than trying to explain the complexities of Kierkegaard’s thought, he gives three quotations from Kierkegaard’s writing that seem to prove his irrationalism, and moves on.
What was surprising, however, is that Clouser footnotes his Kierkegaard quotations with this revealing note: “Several Kierkegaard scholars have informed me that the position expressed in these quotes is actually misleading, and that his real position is more like my own [the biblical, of course]. They admit, however, that statements such as those I’ve quoted here certainly seem to indicate his position is as I describe it, and also that this (mis)understanding of him has long constituted his intellectual legacy. Since that is the case, I will leave the quotes as examples of the position being described, with the acknowledgement that they may not be accurate as to what Kierkegaard himself intended” (p. 344).
Read that again, because what Clouser is saying is mind-boggling. Clouser’s main argument in the book appears sound, but how am I supposed to take him seriously when he intentionally perpetuates a misunderstanding of another thinker, just because this misunderstanding is widely accepted??!! Clouser’s treatment of Kierkegaard’s thought in the first edition of the book is excusable, since he evidently didn’t know better. But after being informed by people who do know better, instead re-writing this section for the revised edition to more accurately portray Kierkegaard he buries a lame explanation in an endnote. Shame, shame, shame on him.
. . .
The following will probably only be of interest to any Orthodox readers of this blog, but read on if you wish. I have gone a little bit ahead of the class, and I find this isn’t the end of Clouser’s misreading and misrepresentation of other thinkers. Later in the book, while arguing that one’s view of the nature of God forms a presupposition that regulates one’s theory-making, Clouser defends what he calls an “alternative” view of the nature of God—“the view of God that was elaborated by the Cappadocian Fathers of the Greek Orthodox tradition, rediscovered in the west by Luther and Calvin in the sixteenth century, and championed by Karl Barth in the twentieth century. (I’ll call this Cappadocian and Reformed position the C/R view for short)” (p. 203).
Hmmm, I see a problem with historical accuracy here, but if Clouser actually takes the Cappadocian position I’ll overlook this inaccuracy. Clouser opposes his position to the view of Divine Simplicity as taught by Aquinas and most (if not all) of western Christianity, by adopting the essence/energies distinction found in the Cappadocians. (He more frequently uses the word “attribute” in place of energy, but he means the same thing.) So far so good.
However, as I read him, Clouser represents the Cappadocian postion (even quoting Lossky and St. Gregory Palamas!) as teaching that God’s attributes or energies are the created means by which God communicates himself to humankind, so that only God’s essence is uncreated. The whole point of Cappadocian theology, especially as represented by St. Gregory and the “Greek Orthodox tradition,” is that God’s energies are uncreated! Needless to say, I have cleared my final research paper topic with my professor, in which I hope to clarify the real Cappadocian/Palamite position against Clouser’s serious misunderstanding.
I suspect this will be an exasperating eight weeks for me.
Important information to remember: Pixy Stix powder burns like the devil when you get it in your eyes.
Tonight my son Symeon wanted to have a couple of Pixy Stix after supper, and brought them to me to have them opened. I distinctly remember, from my childhood, pinching the tops of the tubes and vigorously shaking the powder to the bottom in order have more room to tear the tube open without spilling anything. Evidently my ability to vigorously shake has increased with age, because after the tube whacked each side of my hand a few times the dad-gum thing exploded in my face, getting Pixy powder in my eye, ear, my keyboard, all over the couch. My oldest son, who was innocently sitting next to me on the couch, got it in the eyes as well. (He whined more than I did, big baby.) I have pretty long facial hair, so I had to use the vacuum attachment to suck out all the dust. Why doesn’t Willy Wonka put a warning label on these things!?!
But he was stained with evil.
There was something genuinely old and corrupt
At the sources of his life and spirit.
It had got into his blood,
His bone, his flesh.
It was palpable in the touch
Of his thin, frail hand when he greeted you,
It was present in the deadly weariness
Of his tone of voice,
In the dead-white texture
Of his emaciated face,
In his lank and lusterless auburn hair,
And, most of all,
In his sunken mouth,
Around which there hovered constantly
The ghost of a smile.
It could only be called the ghost of a smile,
And yet, really, it was no smile at all.
It was, if anything, only a shadow
At the corners of the mouth.
When one looked closely,
It was gone.
But one knew
That it was always there--
Lewd, evil, mocking,
Horribly corrupt,
And suggesting a limitless vitality
Akin to the humor of death,
Which welled up from some secret spring
In his dark soul.
I just finished the book Ecclesial Being: Contributions to Theological Dialogue by Constantine Scouteris. Professor Christopher Veniamin has done a wonderful job in collecting and editing some of Professor Scouteris’ finest work, both old and new, concerning the nature and purpose of the Church. Prof. Scouteris has a remarkable ability to define Orthodox ecclesiology not only as it is in itself, but also as it is in relation to other Christian faith-groups, with wisdom and graciousness. In the chapter “The Church, ‘Filled with the Holy Trinity,’” Prof. Scouteris writes:
. . . the Church is not some closed religious corporation, a closed isolated religious community, but rather an open embrace, since God is the “Saviour of all men” (1 Tim. 4:10) and “will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim. 2:4). Often, in Christian circles there seems to be a sense of caution and introversion. Perhaps this is from the suddenness of rapid social transformation, maybe even today from some inclination towards self-defence in the face of the manifold provocations brought about by secularization and globalization on a material basis. It is an unjustifiable feeling of self-complacency, and a contraction and lessening of the Church. Thus, an insurmountable wall is raised, which isolates the Church and alienates it from its universal dimension. (30)
Whether he is writing about the ground of unity in the Church, the necessity of theological language based on worship rather than speculation, the role of the Church in justification, the importance of the priesthood, the significance of icons as a witness to the reality of the Incarnation, or more touchy subjects like the Orthodox approach to the World Council of Churches or common prayer, Professor Scouteris’ words are worth reading.
With the Saints give rest, O Christ, to the soul of Your servant where there is no pain, nor sorrow, nor suffering, but life everlasting. (Orthodox Memorial Service)
Rolling stones
looking for life,
rummaging in
moist soil, finding
cricket, earwig,
pill bug, millipede;
every square inch filthy rich,
super-abundance,
profusion of existence,
even the dust seems to breathe.
Why? For what? Organisms
small and large, with no
apparent purpose.
The Divine Maker could have
created a simpler world—
colorless, tasteless, monotone—
not nearly so beautiful,
not nearly so alive,
but such is not His way.
No, His way is that
when you roll stones over,
life explodes. Lazarus also
knows of this, but from
the other side of the stone.
It is not easy to learn to weep properly. If we weep on the psychological level, we shall wither and quench all life in us; whereas if we weep spiritually, not only will we suffer no harm, but we shall be regenerated. In We Shall See Him as He Is, Fr. Sophrony explains the difference between spiritual and psychological mourning. According to him, psychological mourning is a matter of our confining life to the visible plane. Spiritual weeping occurs when we refer every experience of ours to God, on Whom we depend for everything, for we can only lament the distance that separates us from Him.
We frequently suffer pain and hurt on the psychological level when we encounter energies that crush our heart. But we must rise above these negative experiences, and we do so by exploiting the heart-felt pain of a particular incident and convert it into spiritual energy. Fr. Sophrony often stressed that we must learn to transfer every psychological state--whether due to illness, the scorn of other people, persecution, or the incapacity of our nature--onto the spiritual level by means of a positive thought. And we do this simply by keeping our mind in the place where the Son of God is. We think on those things that are on high, as St. Paul advised the Philippians (cf. Phil. 4:8).
A brother says a harsh word to me and wounds me. There are two ways of reacting to this energy that so crushes my heart. I can react bitterly and say, "How ungrateful of him! I have been so kind to him for years, I pray and care for him, and look how unjustly he treats me! He is a bad man." That is the normal psychological reaction of people in the world. But, there is another reaction. The pain is real and goes straight to the heart, but without even thinking about where this pain came from, I change the direction of my thought and I say, "Lord, You saw my indolence and my negligence and You sent Your angel to wake me up. Have mercy upon us." I use the energy of the emotion and I direct my thought to God and pray for the things I am in need of. We can always use that bitter energy within us to pray for the forgiveness of our sins. So I convert the psychological energy into spiritual energy, and I enter into dialogue with God, and at the end of it I feel refreshed and I do not even remember from where I started, or who dealt me the blow.
I know of nothing that so strongly calls into question our ability to care for the world as our present abuses of our own reproductivity. How can we take care of the other creatures, all born like ourselves from the world's miraculous fecundity, if we have forsaken the qualities of culture and character that inform the nurture of children?
Maybe it is because our society is so dominated by the economic ideal of productivity that we have no time for people who are not highly productive. Or maybe it is because of our rather frivolous idea of personal freedom that we shrug off the claims of those most in need and most deserving of our care. Or maybe it is the fault of an economy that now requires both parents of many families to work away from home. Or maybe it is the increasing commercialization of family relationships, according to which nobody, not even a husband or a wife, should do anything for anybody else that is not compensated by a price agreed upon in advance.
Whatever the reason, it is a fact that we are now conducting a sort of general warfare against children, who are being abandoned, abused, aborted, drugged, bombed, neglected, poorly raised, poorly fed, poorly taught, and poorly disciplined. Many of them will not only find no worthy work, but no work of any kind. All of them will inherit a diminished, diseased, and poisoned world. We will visit upon them not only our sins but also our debts. We have set before them thousands of examples--governmental, industrial, and recreational--suggesting that the violent way is the best way. And we have the hypocrisy to be surprised and troubled when they carry guns and use them.
There are of course many parents who care properly for their children, and traditions of good upbringing still survive. But, like the local traditions of good land-use, these traditions of family life have become subordinate. As a lot of parents have found out, it is not easy to bring up your children in a way that is significantly different from the way your neighbors are bringing up their children.
A child psychologist told me not long ago that he frequently sees four-year-olds who, when asked, "Who loves you?" reply, "I don't know." If we have even a suspicion that we must not exempt anything from care, how can we bear this? And yet this neglect is hedged around on every side by talk of rights and freedoms and careers and professions.
Abortion, for instance, which might be defensible as a tragic choice acceptable in the most straitened circumstances, is defended as a "right" derived from "the right of a woman to control her own body." The right of any person to control her or his own body, subject to the usual qualifications, is incontestable--or, at any rate, it is not going to be contested by me. But the usual qualifications hold that if you can control your own body only by destroying another persons body, then control has come too late. Self-mastery is the appropriate way to control one's own body, not surgery.
I am well aware of the argument that a fetus is not a child until it can live outside the womb, but I am aware also that every creature is surrounded by such questions of dependency and viability all its life. If we are unworthy to live as long as we are dependent on life-supporting conditions, then none of us has any rights. And I would not try to convince any farmer or gardener that the planted seed newly sprouted is not a crop.
Tick-tock.
The glinting steel
That slices through life--
Slow death, quickly realized.
And it takes time,
Dark, delicate time,
The little ticking moments of strange time
That count us into death.
If pride blinds our eyes to the infinite reality of God, humility makes them see it. So, whatever we do, as long as we lack humility, as long as there is a trace of pride in us, we lack the thrill of contact with God; we lack the profound consciousness of a deeper relationship with God, and neither do we make others feel it. Where humility is lacking, there is superficiality, the commonplace, a closed horizon, the kind of conceit that provokes a smile of pity. Only the humble lives in the immeasurable depths, full of mystery, in God.
This past Memorial Day I was doing a little work on a house we are building (the same house that prompted this post) and noticed a bird’s nest in the garage, tucked in the corner of the breaker box. I was curious to see if there was anything in it; as it was fairly dark I had to duck very close, close enough that the brim of my hat was touching the wall, leaning far in to see what the nest might hold. I shouldn’t have been surprised when a little Carolina Wren exploded in my face, scaring the heck out of me and making my work-mate laugh. The wren had been incubating four eggs, and just as I startled her the eggs began to hatch. Tiny, raw life, hungry and peeping madly for attention. With all the obstacles the chicks faced (it’s hard enough for me to survive on a construction site!) I honestly didn’t give them much of a chance for survival.
Yesterday I went back to patch some sheetrock (dang electricians—it’s OK, though, since I cut one of their wires trying to square up the hole for the patch), and the little fellers are just fine. All mouth, just like my little one. If they can only hang on until the beginning of next week, they should be strong enough to leave the nest and start their own life. I sure hope they make it.
I’m not a tree-hugging animal-rights fruitcake, and I have absolutely no problem killing my own food, plant or animal; but I believe God intended humankind to care for life in all its forms, and needless suffering or death is a pity. God has shown His glory in creation, and has gifted us with an immeasurable responsibility to care for it. Wendell Berry once said something that applies:
If we believed that the existence of the world is rooted in mystery and in sanctity, then we would have a different economy. It would still be an economy of use, necessarily, but it would be an economy also of return. The economy would have to accommodate the need to be worthy of the gifts we receive and use, and this would involve a return of propitiation, praise, gratitude, responsibility, good use, good care, and a proper regard for the unborn. . . . Mostly we take without asking, use without respect or gratitude, and give nothing in return” (The Agrarian Standard).
And this from Elder Sophrony:
The Staretz [Elder; he is speaking of St. Silouan] used to say that the Divine Spirit teaches us to spare every living thing, and so not needlessly harm leaf or tree. ‘That green leaf on the tree which you needlessly plucked—it was not wrong, only rather a pity for the little leaf. The heart that has learned to love is sorry for all created things.’
The longer I clop around on earth, the more deeply aware I become of our place (I mean our as in humans) in the order of creation: a place of honor, but a place of accountability; a place infinitely above the rest of creation, ordered to “have dominion” over it, but so much the more responsible as stewards over our domain. This attitude of grateful, reverent, responsible stewardship goes against the modern consumer lifestyle, but it is a necessary part of fulfilling our calling.
I know it is a humorous example (the more so because it is a bit exaggerated), but if you have ever watched the movie The Gods Must be Crazy you have an idea what I am getting at here. The bushmen in this make-believe documentary hunt for food, but instead of just killing the animal outright they first shoot it with a numbing arrow so they might explain to the animal the hunter’s need to feed his family and thank it for providing for them. With the added proviso that we also offer thanks to God, this seems just about right to me.
. . . the greatest and continuous obstacle in the way of our progress to love is egotism. Until egotism completely dies, you can't have true love for anyone. You must leave far behnd you the billows of the ocean of egotism, so that you can bask in the air which comes to you from the kingdom of love. He who loves himself, who is full of self-admiration, who considers himself as the most important of all, can't love others. To love others means to forget yourself, to always go beyond yourself, to consider yourself as nothing. The love of others is consolidated in us by uninterrupted repentance and humility. Egotism sees itself inflated to the extent that all reality is hidden. It thinks that it should own everything. It weighs every person to see how to use him, or at least it tries to avoid the danger which might come from his supremacy. In all things, in all actions, the egotist projects his own person; he sees and serves nothing else; he worships it, to him it is a god, or better said an idol in place of God. His own authentic nature is drowned in egotism. His concern for others is only a tactic, in order to really serve his own interests. Thus in a false way he fills his whole horizon with his inauthentic ego. He walls himself off on all sides with his false self. It's clear then that he can't see others for themselves, in a disinterested way, with true love, just as he can't see his authentic self within the framework of the loving community of all. Love is the exit from the magic and illusory circle of egotism, a circle which I extend to the infinite, as in a delusive dream. It is a breaking out into a true relationship, in communion with others. It is an exit from the shadowy prison of the ego and the entrance into the life of the community, of solidarity, into the kingdom of love, which includes everyone.- Fr. Dumitru Staniloae, Orthodox Spirituality
An AP report from today’s paper noted that 111 nations formally adopted a treaty that “would outlaw all current designs of cluster munitions and require destruction of stockpiles within eight years.” We all know what cluster bombs are: big bombs containing a number of smaller bombs, which greatly enhances the effectiveness of the intended result. Of course, they also greatly increase the chances that an undetonated bomb will remain long after the cluster was deployed and blow up civilians—farmers, children, innocents of every kind—and who would want that, right?
The story goes on to remark on the leading opponents of the treaty, which include Russia, China, Israel, India and Pakistan. Oh, and our own United States of America. “All defended the overriding military value of cluster bombs, which carpet a battlefield with dozens to hundreds of explosives.” U.S. spokesperson Tom Casey said that “the treaty would not change U.S. policy and that cluster bombs remain ‘absolutely critical and essential’ to U. S. military operations.”
I know, it may seem that the maiming and blowing apart of human beings is unspeakably horrible, but thank God we can be reassured of the “overriding military value.” What are the 111 nations complaining about?
Peaceableness toward enemies is an idea that will, of course, continue to be denounced as impractical. It has been too little tried by individuals, much less by nations. It will not readily or easily serve those who are greedy for power. It cannot be effectively used for bad ends. It could not be used as the basis of an empire. It does not afford opportunities for profit. It involves danger to practitioners. It requires sacrifice. And yet it seems to me that it is practical, for it offers the only escape from the logic of retribution. It is the only way by which we can cease to look to war for peace.
Our perfection, or our union with God, is . . . not only a goal, but also an unending process. On this road two great steps can be distinguished: first, the moving ahead toward perfection through purification from the passions and the acquiring of the virtues and secondly a life progressively moving ahead in the union with God. At this point, man's work is replaced by God's. Man contributes by opening himself up receptively to an ever-greater filling with the life of God.
If the love commanded of us in the Gospel were natural to us in our fallen state, it would have been unnecessary to bid us 'Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind . . . Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself' [Matt. 22:37-39]. When that love touches the heart, our spirit in Light beholds God, and lives by Him and in Him. He surpasses all human thought. Not a single one of our abstract conceptions is applicable to Him. He - lives. His might is incalculable, His love inscrutable. To dwell with Him is ineffable riches. When I was a painter I never achieved satisfaction because the means at my disposal were impotent to portray the beauty of creation. And now all the words that I can find to express my wonder before God are quite futile.
To be blind is a great deprivation. But there is no greater affliction, no more bitter pain, than not to know God.
Question: Why is hope so sweet, her discipline and her labors so light, and her works so easy for the soul?
Answer: Because hope awakens a natural longing in the soul and gives men this cup to drink, straightway making them drunk. Thenceforth they no longer feel the wearisome toil, but become insensitive to afflictions, and throughout the whole course of their journey they think that they are walking on air, and not treading the path with human footsteps. . . . For this hope so inflames them, as with fire, that on account of their joy they cannot rest from their incessant and headlong course. There comes to pass in them what was spoken by the blessed Jeremiah, "I said, I shall not remember Him nor speak His name. And there was in my heart as it were a flaming fire and it entered into my bones". Such is the recollection of God in the hearts of men who are drunk with hope on his promises.
