One of my chief resolutions for the year is to reset the ol’ schedule. Been there, done that without any luck most years, but this time I’m doin’ a bit more carving. And let’s face it, having gone from wishwashy to whatevery to Orthodoxy, change isn’t impossible, only hard. And I’ve learned a thing or two about hard in the transition that might come in handy.

For one, it all begins with the fact that I’m not as good at the “lifting up of my hands as an evening sacrifice” as I should be. Working late leads to late dinners, late dinners to late wind-downs, etc. All of which leads to a lack of sleep and a lot of other deficits that once you fall into, you just never seem to climb out from. So it’s time to start at the starting point of the day to regain control at the end. Maybe. Honestly, this time it’s gonna work!

But part of getting serious about getting somewhere is redirecting efforts… and that includes the whole of the internet, blogging and even Orthoblogging! Imagine that!

Since I’ve never found myself particularly good at leaving off with something without taking up with another, it’s fair to say first that this has been a great place to work a few things out, but the time has come to admit, I’ve found another adventure. Not gonna say I’m throwing in the towel per se… though I’m headed there, but just at this point, that the time looks increasingly at end when it will make sense to keep a single dimension in this sort of effort. Fact is, two things have happened. The first is that “working things out” has pretty much finished the easy work… the “stuff” we might actually write about. The more difficult part that might be of greater interest, well… “might” is probably a generous view of it. The fact is, the part about repentance that involves the real digging… just ain’t gonna be pretty. And I’m not sure it’s appropriate anyway to share that here as though some sort of spiritual exhibitionist… as though much could be claimed… which folks, if St. Michael were hangin’ around (which he ain’t btw) he’d post a sign along with the yellow tape to “keep moving, there’s nothing to see here”. They tell us sin is everywhere the same… except all the dirty details nobody really wants to know anyway. And writing seems too easily to tread towards material where the possibilities for expanding one’s participation in egoism and other unbecoming aspects we’re supposedly trying to exorcise from our lives… so it seems the time to shut that venue down is right. No great insight there.

But there is an alternative avenue, and that’s simply to follow St. Benedict’s guideline of complementing all our spiritual efforts with physical… the good works things. Yeah, those. Much as I’d like to push those to background, I have to acknowledge that the refuge of philosophy, theology and even excessive prayer can be an avoidance and fear of actually putting the Way of Life into practice. Like pretending to be a surgeon with no more than a Merck Manual or pretending to be a musician by doing no more than knowing the notes ruled on the five-line staff, there’s a long way from theory to practice. And I’ve done some practice, but y’know… there’s just not glitz to it, or reading about it. “Gee ain’t that wonderful!” just ain’t gonna do especially much for the connection between theory and practice other than “FAIL”… so it seems enough to let those things alone here, too.

So that tends to lead me to pausing on just about most of the material I’d tend to post here, and that’s been more or less where it’s been for the past year. Not sayin’ “Done”, just sayin’ maybe if we keep blogging, it’s time to look at a whole new way of toasting the things that come along. Maybe.

In the meantime, I’ll be babystepping the process of polishing up the tarnished likeness… more like it’s smoked over and covered with dirt, and we’ll need some “Top Job”!

But before I go or go elsewhere, let me say thank you! The net, blogdom and all… it’s not the pit of despair so many suggest, and in fact can have quite a savory effect in places. Can it be a well of sorrows you pour upon yourself? Sure. Doesn’t have to be, though. And I am happy to see that after some years where things seemed rather one-sided that the presence of many other voices have sorted out the shriller ones now gone… and even made it seem less compelling that we should even need to offer a counter balance (“As if”). So with the full knowledge that the blessings offered elsewhere make my voice here superfluous and that this is indeed a good thing, I’ve been blessed to find more fruitful pursuits. And since I’ve not been granted the blessing of 30-hour days (yet?), something has to give… and this seems one of those things.

To those whose blogs I’ve frequented, you’re better off with fewer of my comments. Please keep up what you do, and know that my silence is more due to awe and respect than to lack of interest. To those who have been kind enough to indulge me here from time to time, my thanks, but also… hey… at least I won’t be wasting your time with my pretense. No, I can’t claim to have lost my pretense or my proclivity to “share” it, only that the time has come to indulge others and yield the floor here so that I might offer better elsewhere… both in writing, but also in thinking, working, giving, serving and all the rest. Should I resurface on this media, I’ll post a link here.

May God through the Holy Trinity bless you and yours together with your pursuits through the coming year and always.

So often, reading more than writing is the thing. It is when we realize that what we offer best lies less in our mouths at the tip of our tongues or in our minds and through our hands, and more and more becomes lending an ear or reading the words of others whose hearts may be more spiritually attuned to our goals… it is then that perhaps we are stilled enough to recognize the image and likeness of its rendering and perhaps lift our own aspirations towards a more worthy goal than our own limits can conceive. And since we stretch this way and that, we share as best we can the gifts of others. Here are two that fell beneath my eyes recently:

“What shall we offer you, O Christ, who for our sake has appeared on earth as man? Every creature made by you offers you thanks. The angels offer you a hymn; the heavens, a star; the Magi, gifts; the shepherds, their wonder; the earth, its cave; the wilderness, the manger; and we offer you a virgin mother.” – from a prayer for the Orthodox Christmas Vespers service

“…from this day forth, from this hour, from this minute, love God above all.” – St. Herman

Yeah. I’d add one more from a favorite movie just to close (because, no doubt, in spiritual terms, by contrast with so many, there’s little doubt I am something of a pig stuck in the mud…sigh):

“That’ll do, Pig. That’ll do.” – The Farmer (aka “The Boss”) in ”Babe“

A Blessed Nativity to all, Merry Christmas to you and  yours, and a Happy New Year full of peace, prosperity, health and happiness!

I’ve been thinking about the Naked Man Syndrome. No, this does not mean I’m thinking about Penn State or any similar horrors, but something far more simple. In fact, the syndrome I’m thinking of is straight out of the Gospel of Mark:

“Then they all forsook Him and fled.

Now a certain young man followed Him, having a linen cloth thrown around his naked body. And the young men laid hold of him, and he left the linen cloth and fled from them naked.”

Mark 14:50-51

 

Oddly enough, as many times as I’ve read through the Gospels, my eyes never saw this before. And though I haven’t tried to make a poll of it, I’ve not found many aware of it either. We read these books looking for what we think should find there, but like the famous film of the gorilla walking through a gang of folks throwing a ball…. we don’t see what we’re not looking for. The notes to the Orthodox Study Bible detail that Holy Fathers suggest this is in fact an autobiographic comment where Mark admits his own shame in the arrest, but I wonder that there isn’t more here in a rather simple way – too obvious to these Fathers to comment.

I wonder that like the gorilla in the film example that this isn’t the measure (and an almost wordless parable of its own) of how difficult it really was for the Hebrews of the time and for us today… to see Christ, the real Jesus Christ son of God and all that. If we missed seeing the naked man in the Gospels, then maybe we can understand how easy it was for others to miss seeing God Himself. We see what we think we’re supposed to – and to those of us of the christian era the notion that God could become incarnate in the body of a particular person is not unimagined as it would have been for those of the time for whom their chief innovation was the unseen God for whom there was neither image nor substance nor idol. Consider that if it is this difficult for us to see something unexpected in either a text or movie in our own time, then perhaps it becomes easier to understand how those of an earlier era were similarly limited. What we see today as obvious in retrospect is/was far less so the first time.

But I also like the autobiographical note. The sense that Mark who was with Christ at the arrest may not have denied Christ as did Peter, but he certainly sought an earthly, temporal salvation as completely at odds with the preaching of Christ by saving his own skin in this way, by struggling so hard to get free of the hands laid on him, that he tore through his clothes and left them behind. I even wonder whether this isn’t meant to parallel the moment only a little later in Mark (14:63) where the high priest accusing Christ of blasphemy “tore his own clothes, and said ‘What further need do we have of witnesses? You have heard the blasphemy! What do you think?”

Indeed, what do we think? Clearly Mark’s action shows what He thought when push came to grab, clearly the High Priest thinks the same – and indeed his neck too is potentially on the line if he can’t satisfy the Romans that order can be kept. Can we really rest so assured that we would act (and therefore really think) differently from these two IN the story? We sit beside it as we read, and some of us enter it by choice or pretend as though we do, but the question comes straight to us.

And the thought that Mark accompanied Peter, that his Gospel reflects Peter’s preaching… only makes this more powerful. Mark stands in for all the other disciples who fled. He admits it, and surely his admission reflects his repentance. The question of whether we see ourselves in this naked man’s admission… that he ran, that he was afraid to offend by admitting his Christianity, that he preferred his own skin in this world and in this moment to the uncertain promises of a darkening and violent future concretely bleeding into his present. What is the armor that protects us from this? or is there none? Have we made ourselves as literally naked of pretense before the Lord as Mark has… and has this come through our shame and repentance or some other means. Following is hard work, and FWIW, I don’t find I’m doing such a great job of it. Show me a naked (somewhat) fasting man… and I’ll show you a dude whose sins are plainer to see than he’d like.

Like many, Fr. John Oliver’s “Giver of Life” is a short book that basically walks through the Prayer to the Holy Spirit reflecting on it more or less line by line. A common technique, in an age where notions of the Holy Spirit tend to go off the rails in many places, this keeps Fr. John’s book on solid ground. A good writer, his gift in this book is to carefully layer his reflections mostly with quotes from the services of the Orthodox Church together with those of the Holy Fathers, but with a very modest sprinkling from others more contemporary as well. He manages to accomplish this without affectation and soon enough I found myself dog-earring pages with good quotes and where the authors quoted seemed worth another look.

And yet there is more to this book and the author’s own contribution than simply sending us to other authors and their works: For this work will leave you wondering whether indeed you have the desire to offer more to God than you have, whether indeed there are fruits of the spirit or a foretaste of the fruits of the spirit in your life, and whether or not you’re on the Way, taking a breather, or what have you. This is good, and it is a fine thing to have a broader look at one’s spiritual life and take stock. It’s a fine thing for Lent, for our present “Winter Lent”… or for any time, and though I’m not sure you’ll read and re-read this book, if all it does is re-point a small part of the mortar cementing your faith, prayer and spiritual life, that’s a fine thing as well. I’m glad I stumbled across this book!

Like the Moscovy Duckiflower, the American Turkiflower is a most tasty and unique hybrid of the genus vegetable ever known or tasted. As best as we can tell, it’s origin dates back to those hallowed days of yore – aka AFTER Halloween -  when a wild turkey one day died in an extremely fertile field of potatoes and green beans up on the Cape near a cranberry bog full of bread crumbs. This blessed event happened long about 1622 or 1623…. the date being somewhat obscured by the fact that the version of Microsoft Outlook then employed didn’t work very well on the handheld devices at the time. The virtual machines of the day… well… they were no better than the kludges we use today:

“Yo’ Cap’n. What time dast thou havest chalked on thy i-Blackboard?”

“Forsooth, I-est canst say. Yonder device willst not to scroll off the start-up screen.”

“Hast thous pounded its buttons?”

“Perhaps thy leather case has obscured the protrusion of thy mitt-ends from thy pounding?”

“Nay…. thou dast credit me more than my card wouldst…and maxed it t’were before shipment.”

“Perchance thy batteries have morted ?”

“Nay. ‘Tis a device most knavish… me thinkest t’is merely possessed of some foul demon.”

“Or peradventure… a virus.”

“Nay…. surely a witch hath cursed it!”

“Ah… an’ me, too!”
“Make it three, brother.”

“Than a cursed virus it must be! Let us send for the Barber and his tech leeches!”

“Bleed the thing! Bleed it dry!”

 

Gurus back then being about as schooled in device rehab as they are today, the foundation of the school of hard knocks for handheld devices was founded when yonder Pilgrim did shortly attach leeches, and when that failed, as did the dropping of goat entrails, the burying of the device for three weeks under the mold of a stinky cheese, it was decided…

“Kickest thy device with thy foot as if thou werest a Ninja.”

“Aye… Squanto sayeth ’tis the magic healing potion first worked on yonder i-Pepsi device which failest to exchange wampum for kickapoo-juice jar…. iffest thou knoweth what thou meanst.”

“LOL-est!”

“ROTFL-est!”

“Heyeth, yonder device worketh!”

“Quick! Chalkest thou the date!”

“Indeed….for this must be the world’s first re-boot!”

 

But since the i-Blackboard was subsequently thrown against a tree and then burned….

“As iffeth!”

 

…the date of the blessed event, much less the nature and manner of its origin remains…

“Sketchest!”

 

…and the best we can say is that we know the real story of the Pilgrims was graffittied on the i-Blackboards…. all sadly replaced with i-Pen and i-Paper some years back… that were undoubtedly half the price and

“Madest in the Orient!”

 

And we would have had the date from those devices, too, were it not for the work of the Luddites who crumpled the devices and threw them in the i-Fire.

“Dast thy i-Blackboard have an app for that?”

 

So we don’t exactly know how it happened, but the Turkiflower did indeed sprout the next spring facilitating the Indian-Pilgrim first annual multicultural seminar on throwing dead stinking fish after dead stinking turkiflower seeds until a whole feast-in-one was harvested and consumed in the first vegetarian Thanksgiving. Yes, the carnivorians did intervene:

“‘Tis not the nature of the almighty to grow franken foods…”

“Ah, thou speakest forsooth… and yet…’tis tasty and convenient.”

“Didst thy forebears bearest the name Gloria Swanson?”

“Nay…”

“Ah-est Ha-est!”

“To be or not to be a Pilgrim… is indeed to sayest nay… aye! Alas!”

 

Meanwhile, Squanto was extremely irked that patent law hadn’t even been invented. And thus to this day do his descendants contend he was quite sadly and unfairly cut-off from the patent rights. But for many, many, many decades… centuries even… it mattered not… not at least until the advent of the convert to the Advent Fast did it indeed become material…but now as it stands…

“Me thinkest yonder rat doth break through yonder window glass ceiling and preventest our royalties.”

“Mmmmm…. Franken food. Mine favorite!”

 

But a clever native american remains a clever native american, and the secret of the Turkiflower was suppressed for over four centuries. Now with many finding themselves in the middle of an American holiday feast in the middle of an American (Orthodox Christian) fast, the sheer antimony of the moment is not lost in its unholy wholiness. Squanto’s descendants stepped out of the shadows of history and offered to save the American bacon… er… holiday feast once again by planting the secret Turkiflower.

And so as we come to Thanksgiving, we give thanks for the veritable vegetable medley found in the hymnody of life, of the seedling to table sprouting, fertilization, flowering, and harvest of Turkiflowers everywhere… so much healthier than Cauliflower and Broccoli… for truly it tasteth right good, looks good, smells good, and must be good for both body, mind and that extra thing that extends “both” to “both plus”… by tasting good as well while remaining entirely a vegetable… not JUST or an HONORARY vegetable… but an actual, true vegetable. But don’t take my word for it…. ask Squanto.

 ”Come and See that the Turkiflower is good!”

My best wishes for you and yours for a blessed Thanksgiving! There is so much we are thankful for, we can’t begin to even utter the smallest portion of that which God has given to us all…. but let us all do as we can in gratitude… least of all to Squanto and his inventiveness and to God for all His bounty, our nation, our family and our faith… even if we slip in it sometimes .

 

 

 

The other day, Halloween even, we sailed up the Bay past the White Rocks to our winter storage in Oak Harbor. It was brisk in the morning, but clear… with good wind and blue skies… and it warmed through the day. Managed to get underway by 11:00 and put to bed by 3:30pm. Not far to go and a good sail – even if in a relatively unfamiliar channel… the one that heads up past Fr. Smallwood to Fr. McHenry (eventually).

Not knowing the waters, and having been warned of the shoals off the White Rocks well into the channel, we stayed in the ship’s channel. This made our course a downwind dogleg back-and-forth that tends to slow a guy down. But as they say, everything has its reward, and ours was the privilege of finally seeing the Lady Maryland. She’s a real beauty.

I’m told she’d been playing in the Magothy with her playmate, the skipjack Sigsbee, which trailed along after her. Skipjack’s are skipjacks… and sweet lines even to the point where in a moment of weakness I almost bid on a midget one years and years ago… but was gladly brought to my senses by my saner half.

“How can you not love a skipjack? Of course, everybody needs one!”

“Uh… huh. Everyone… but us.”

Well… so maybe not. All that wood and all…

So we waited and went fiberglass when the wallet was a little healthier, and patience is a virtue… if you know what I mean… and equally hard to come by! Yes, I used to read “Wooden Boat”…. but honestly, wooden boats are for the heart and the eyes… but not the wallet or the knuckles.

Anyway, so my sweetheart for the afternoon was the Lady Maryland…And I’d heard so much about her for so many years, it was a distinct pleasure at last to see, court and dance with her along the waves. I’m afraid she was a tad bit shy, knew the steps a bit better, and took the inside route hugging the shore like… well… a wallflower or someone in her own element… her home waters. Left us out in the channel…. all alone. And so rather than making a pass, she passed us by.

Here’s a shot of her in her glory…. much as she had that day. She’s a replica of a pungy schooner, the sort of boats that hauled the skipjack’s catch back to Baltimore much as her more famous cousins would race their catches back from New Foundland… first boat in gets the best price. She’s 104 feet over-all, and topmast more than 85 feet off the water. Drawing only 7 feet, she’s right for the shallow waters of the Bay. Oddly, she really is pink and green- even as she appears in the photo… so it’s not your eyes fooling you. Oxides for pure white were too expensive or unavailable back-in-the-day, so in true “authentic” colors, she’s a replica through and through.

“Ah… so my lass t’were barn a preppie. Figgers she’d freakin’ run away fram the likes o’me! Rrrrr!”

 

She’s now in dry dock for a refit, and will be launched again in a few months to fill out Living Classrooms’ 2012 schedule. If ever you have the chance to see her, ride on her, or meet one of her crew… it’s the chance of a lifetime. I’ve never met a member or ex-member of the Pride of Baltimore crew, the Lady Maryland or any of the other schooner sailors for that matter who weren’t first rate in seamanship, skills, and character. It’s a service of its own and a very tight community.

As darkness falls earlier these Fall and early winter months, the light shines more readily where it will.

It has been an amazing couple of weeks since I last posted. The beauty of this Fall has been outstanding… the carpet of leaves, the blue of the sky, the bright morning and soft evening light have seldom seemed so wonderful! You can hardly wipe the smile off my face.

Death will do that of course…. and there has been cause for weeping, and sorrow for those whose lives have been cut short (or just cut), or whose joys have been forever (or at least for a very long time) ruined or stained like soiled linen. And there is pain that we have failed in so many ways… but mostly in turning to God and to each other where and when we need it most.

A few weeks back now, I’d run short of sleep for a good long while. And then one day, as I came to the Lord’s Prayer, I stumbled to a point where I heard, “and forgive us our trespasses, as we trespass against those who forgive us…”.  And I stopped short thinking, “How ’bout that?”

How true this is…. that we seem in fact to trespass precisely against those folks who forgive us so much, so often and so willingly… and because they do, we seem to think so little of it. It’s their nature… they’re just good to us, they’re close to us. We love them, and we hurt them… even when we don’t want to.

Least of all, there’s those times where through lack of sleep, lack of focus or just not thinking… we find ourselves doing something, saying something… and just as with those around us, we wonder, “Where is this coming from? What is this about? How did I get here?” Maybe it’s just me, but it seems the enemy has set his trap and we’ve gone and fallen into it. One minute things are going along swimmingly, the next, we’re sifted like wheat.

Yet even catching ourselves at this juncture… BEFORE it’s too late, the sense that our prevailing presence together, our communion, has been interrupted. “Where are you? Why aren’t you here?” In fear of further trespass and overcome with the fruit of unknowing, our inability to swallow deeply, drop it all and throw ourselves on our knees and beg forgiveness. And yet their love prompts us with further kindness. How can we not? “Sure, because I am weak, and thus alone. Help me out of this, please.”

The Good News is that if we are truly made as creatures that can drop with our doing something… even something good… we can equally drop with doing something bad, something that is our will and separates us. We can even drop the notion that it IS our will…. because so often it really isn’t. Doesn’t mean we can stop ourselves… at least not now or yet, but it does mean we’d like to… and that’s a start.

I believe the typology of the Old Testament because it is our Life… we live these chapters, these books… we will or we may… or at least I have found it seems so… even if in a small peripheral or metaphorical way. And if we can understand them through the Light of Christ, we have a chance of living the gospel rather than just knowing the gospel, of living in the presence of God rather than running from Him. And we have this chance because it is the birth of the spiritual life, of living a life which is both here and now, and set in another way… another story. And this pairing itself is what allows our spirit to release a vice-like grip on this thing we call the present that so enamors, ensnares and entraps our thinking, our feeling, and our hearts that we tend to think there’s nothing else. There is. But without training ourselves through these stories and seeing ourselves within them, or more readily, their plots within our own lives…. we cannot free ourselves to an awareness of much, much less the least edgewise notion of the spiritual realm on whose borders we so often verge and shy away.

Nothing we hold firmly has room to grow, yet nothing we hold too loosely can carry us very far. As I read on the Holy Spirit and the discussion falls to antimonies, it seems to me the whole of the Christian life is summed in these paradoxes. Big whup? Sure, but it also summed up in the smallest of these as well. As I’ve said, if I can’t loosen my vision looking for my car keys, there’s not a chance in the world I’ll ever relax my grip on those things that I think are the ways “things should be” long enough to ever find Christ in my neighbor.

Through the course of the other night, I found myself drifting on the edge of sleep with the word on my lips, “…more honorable than the Cherubim, and more glorious than beyond compare than the Seraphim…” and as much as I’d rather needed to catch uninterrupted forty winks, I felt blessed and well rested in many ways despite the hard and long days and nights these weeks have seen. Sometimes, we simply don’t know the joys we have… even as they’re given to us in our sleep… or sleeping softly next to us, or in the next room(s).

And so as the darkness gathers in the light of our prayer candles this Advent, it is my prayer that you and yours will be gathered in by the Holy Spirit. Let Him loose in your life, and hold fast to His love as you can… that He may breathe into your life that sweet foretaste of which our hymns so often sing.

I  love the sense that the Divine Liturgy officially begins with the Deacon saying to the Priest, “It is time for the Lord to Act”. Here we engage with the divine, absolute Other in order for the Liturgy to happen, and it is a synergy between the two rather than one on its own that makes it.

These simple words set the sense that we aren’t merely offering worship or giving praise – though we are, or that this is happening in a one-dimensional it’s-all-in-my-head thing, but that there really is someone so completely beyond us, beyond our control and quite independent of ourselves… someone we need to make this happen who’ll show up on their own… and then we’ll begin this together.

And it’s not that we’re ready so it’s time for God to start, but more that we’ve gathered knowing when He would, and we gather and begin together. And while the whole of the company of Heaven is already present in its ever streaming worship where it is always “now”… here it is just in the next moment where the Kingdom comes and the Lord who is always acting comes to us…. and we to Him as though joining with our voices in a quartet already in progress, as though “…With the next beat!” And so we have remembered in our realm, and He in His Kingdom, and the two come together in this work of the people… that is really so much more.

That’s a picture that feeds a more sacramental view of far more than just the Divine Liturgy, but of every day, of every moment… and our selves in every breath. Think, if this is how we begin the Liturgy, why don’t we begin more things this way? But of course we do… and then our awareness drops as become engaged, and rather than encountering everything together in a deep divine-human synergy between the present and eternity… we separate and move as though we travel alone.

That’s not necessarily an ugly or lesser thought… I mean there is still much beauty to behold in Ginger Rogers dancing alone (or Mikhail Baryshnikov). But I imagine if we stopped to wonder over everything as though we were some sort of perpetual ingenues we’d probably drive everyone around us batty. I mean, perhaps every now and then we can get away with it… with a brief pause for remembrance and thanks. But while the saints may be wired up this way… and given the scope to pursue their treks with all the gold leaf and all, we’re not really there… or at least not yet. And were we to “wonder as we wander” like the old hymn, we’d more likely fall into some narcissistic interlude.

“I mean really, can’t you just pass the butter? Do we have to wonder over the plate, the butter, how it got here, it’s “meaning” and ontological sense of being? I mean seriously… if it ain’t “being” on my plate pronto…”

Yeah. “It’s wildness lies in wait.”

And so unless the Deacon says, “It is time for the Lord to Act” perhaps our illusion of traveling alone continues. But instead, his gentle call wakes our obedience to the presence of the moment and the Lord himself.  Indeed, “now is the time”. And unless these words come from somewhere, from someone… and maybe the still small voice heard in the silence as though it were the light that binds matter and darkness into the forms of this life… for it does… if ever so delicately… perhaps we’d miss it. Lord have mercy, what a blessing we’ve been given. Thanks be to God.

One of the finer things of the Western Rite is the continuous engagement of worship with the Psalms. In the past year, my switch to the OCA and the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom has meant that my experience of the broader church has found this less accessible as part of my worship. So at last I’ve taken up working through the Psalter on my own. Frankly haven’t done this in a long time… like since back when I was an actual Anglican. Problem is my favorite Psalter, the handy small one from Holy Transfiguration Monastery, is divided into 20 Kathismas.

Now I don’t know just quite what a Kathisma is, but whatever it is, it’s too long for a working kind of a dude. And the given schedule of running through the whole in a week… ain’t happening. But the good news is that each Kathisma is in turn (in this publication) divided into thirds. Now we’re talking. Fact is, a third works about to almost the standard Morning/Evening Prayer three psalms I was used to. Working it out, if you take 20 K’s by thirds, you end up with 60 thirds. Amazingly, doing two-a-day gets you to that nice 30-day ish-month.  Since ish-months happen only five times a year, you have to come up with a plan for the six that are a day longer (easy) and the one that is two days shorter (unless it’s leap year). Standard practice used to be to repeat the 30th day on the 31st and just truncate February. Given that February cuts off only two days, we’re talking about four thirds, and you could easily add one third to each of the Sundays (or your pick of days) during the month to speed things to the end… if you happen to have that sort of compulsion or just can’t bring yourself to skip a day or two without the guilts. But the key is simply taking this thing one third Kathisma each morning and evening.

So far this month, it’s worked pretty well. I’m on track, and every now and again when I have the time and inclination, I pull out the old notebook and note down the few phrases from a session’s Psalms that stick with me. Once after reading through Archimandrite Zacharias’s (Essex) “Enlargement of the Heart”, I went through all the Psalms looking for variants of “englarged” and frankly was amazed how often it occurs. Same can be said indeed for many other phrases, and I think it helps switch our ever so analytic brains sometimes to note that yes, scripture is actually trying to point out something to us… over and over… but isn’t it amazing how if we are unattuned to its rhythms how we simply don’t notice them? They glide by  as just so much language under the dam. Indeed.

And yet there is a balance in any method of going through scripture between too much and too little. Do too much and it all just becomes words to be rushed through. Nothing adheres and there is no change. All we manage is another “accomplishment”. Yep. Tick down another one on the “Do List” and let’s move on. On the other hand, if you do too little, perhaps the passage is so short that day after day, nothing stands out and you begin to inculcate a similar sense of “nothing ever happens”. And yet like the poetry, the heart is deep. I find that if you come to this with an intent to find something, looking, listening, hearing yourself… being attentive not just to what your mind seems preoccupied with, but that here you stand preoccupied in the presence of God’s word, you cannot help but be humbled and begin to listen beyond yourself.

Yet I’d add that the presumption that we can know and observe the changes in ourselves is to miss the fact that so often changes in others happen before our eyes so gradually that unless we take a picture and compare it, the day-to-day familiarity blinds us to the momentous but natural course of our lives. A friend once told me that after her husband died quite suddenly as it seemed, she went back and looked at photos of him over his last year, and it was clear he was dying before her eyes… almost unobserved. She was heartbroken with how she had been preoccupied, and the treasured moments that were allowed to slip were something she now struggled to recover and recall.

We need not face the same thing, for before us on these pages lies an opportunity to focus on remembering God with our love, here and now… in these little things. We may not see the changes in ourselves, or even know how the words that seem to flow by affect us, but they do in ways we cannot even comprehend.

My soul refused to be comforted; I remembered God and I was gladdened; I spake in idleness and my spirit became faint-hearted. Mine eyes were wakeful before the watches; I was troubled and spake not. I thought upon the days of old, and the years of ages past I called to mind, and I meditated. By night I pondered in my heart, and my spirit searched diligently.

And I said: Now have I made a beginning; this change hath been wrought by the right hand of the Most High. I remembered the works of the Lord; for I will remember Thy wonders from the beginning. And I will meditate on all Thy works, and I shall ponder upon Thy ways.

O God, in the sanctuary is Thy way. What God is as great as our God? Thou art God Who workest wonders. Thou hast made Thy power known among the peoples; with Thine arm hast Thou redeemed Thy people, the sons of Jacob and Joseph.

In the sea are Thy byways, and Thy paths in many waters; and Thy footsteps shall not be known. Thou leddest Thy people as sheep by the hand of Moses and Aaron.” (taken from Psalm 76)

Glory to God for all His puzzles! May you find him not just in the Psalms, not just in the Church, but in the sanctuary where you worship with your heart (in all the places that may be) and in each other, that He may lead you along the hidden path, along the path through the seas… and wash your earthly cares behind your footsteps as you follow.

Fr. Stephen Freeman’s “Every Where Present: Christianity in a One-Storey Universe” does a great job at offering a vision of the catholic mind. This is neither a catechism nor a conversion story, but a discussion of how our earlier efforts to broaden faith’s accessibility instead led not to its intended result (at least as proclaimed), but to its complete opposite: the descent of the faith into an inaccessible dwarfed and/or foreshortened caricature of itself. Today, so much of what we witness in the name of Christ while intended all for the good, so often comes off flat not because it is consciously distorted for the most part (though there is some of that when it becomes a business), but because we have lost the full sense of the interrelationship of the constituent parts and their tight integration into the fabric of faith. Unfairly, we often sense something isn’t quite right, something’s left out, or unbalanced, and often as not, we may end up blaming everyone and even ourselves, and even give up on the whole enterprise.

And so this book begins a path of trying to find a way to open the subject without the common animus or stridency that so often accompanies what might easily become a polemic as one separates what has become the common practice from its original formulation. As a result, I think the book accomplishes its end in establishing a place to start reweaving the fabric back into our spiritual lives. Of course, I have to admit I read much of the backstory to this book as Fr. Stephen blogged his thesis into being and so I can’t fairly say that I come to his thesis without being predisposed to his conclusion. In fact, in all candor his writing played a fairly significant part in my own journey precisely along this recovery we might call the journey from CCA (Comfortable Christians Anonymous or something like that) to the Orthodox Church… if only it HAD been comfortable.  The fact is that I long referred to myself as a christian heretic within the Episcopal Church (as it strayed from its foundations) begging someone to ask, “Soooo, what do you mean by that?” only (thankfully!) few ever did. Given that my answer would have started with Meister Eckhart run through a misunderstood clash between the Saintly Bernard and Peter Abelard and on to Thomas Merton, and so on… losing them long before they cared… I was lucky, huh? God’s providence reserved my energies for a bigger struggle with myself rather than others. Again, thanks, Big Guy! And yet given my predisposition toward awareness of an inner imbalance, I’m not sure I’m terribly representative and a good sample for those trying to ascertain whether my positive review means much. Fact is the wife and kids not to mention the ‘rents and associates would probably swear I’m so decidedly off the offbeat, I’m not just a bad example, but precisely the sort of guy who’d likely to go off the deep-end and go ‘dox… which while better than “Go gators!” (for an Alabama Roll Tide kind of a dude) and good enough for me, what I’m saying is that I’m not all that sure anything I do ever swings that well outside of Muddville… where the Mighty Casey still strikes out.

But here in Muddville and as part of a broader catechesis and particularly as part of an introduction as to why we become catholic, or what we seek in a catholic way of being christian… I think this book offers much. It won’t replace Fr. Meletios Webber’s “Bread and Water, Wine and Oil” which has a richness as an introductory book one seldom finds, but for it’s intended complimentary purpose, this is a wonderful and awesome contribution. Indeed, in many ways it stands alone as something for the aspiring christian akin (in a different way) to necessity an aspiring medievalist finds in C.S. Lewis’s “Discarded Image“. In fact, I think this is precisely the analog… and wouldn’t have been a bad subtitle. And no, you won’t find your old friends and favorites – Fr. Stephen’s greatest hit blogs – among these chapters: The material has been integrated with more scripture and into a more comprehensive deeper view. I’m a bit mixed on this because, yes, I have my favorites and leaving them alone among his blog’s archives dooms much to those clouds of unknowing we call the internet these days that in a way still seems far less secure than that terribly outdated thing we call a book. But I’m sure these days there’s probably not an editor alive who’d be willing to run with internet published material as the basis of new book – especially based on material already as widely read as the material on “Glory to God for All Things“. Why bother? Why indeed. In sum, if you’re teaching adults, I should think this book should be added to the reading list.