Repentance, Simplicity, Gratitude

Lent is beginning to creep up upon us again.  In the Orthodox Church we are in the middle of what is called the Triodion, a period of preparation for Lent which is, in itself, a preparation for Pascha.  There are, aptly, three Sundays in the Triodion, all of which bring repentance front and center; last week was Zacchaeus Sunday,  tomorrow is the Sunday of the Publican and the Pharisee followed by a week free of fasting.  Next Sunday is the Sunday of the Prodigal Son, and the Triodion will be complete.  After that is Meatfare Sunday and Cheesefare week, where dairy is allowed but meat prescribed. This  completes the gradual descent into the full rigors of an Orthodox Lent.

Last year, I asked for suggestions about movies that might be appropriate viewing for the Lenten season.  I got a lot of recommendations.  Some were  classics;  Ben-Hur, The Ten Commandments, The Gospel According to St. Matthew.    Some were wonderful surprises; The Island, Godspell, In Bruges, Italian For Beginners, Tokyo Godfathers

There were some which were recommended for which I couldn’t discern any connection to the season; Au Hasard Baltasar, Ordet, Seventh Seal.    There were some that even interfered with my celebration of the season, although they are excellent films otherwise;  Gran Torino, Facing The Giants, The Blind Side.    I found Fireproof unwatchable.

Of all the films I watched during Lent last year, there are three in particular I want to take with me into Lent this year as being particularly reflective of three major virtues I am going to try to cultivate; Repentance, Simplicity, Gratitude.

Repentance:   Flywheel (2003).

Before culture-war Christianity there was just plain Christianity.  This comes out clearly in this first film by Sherwood Productions, a production company which has since gone on to release lucrative releases for the Evangelical market such as Fireproof and Courageous.  Flywheel was their first attempt, and it shgows, especially in the acting and in the production values.  The spiritual value of the film, however, is head and shoulders above its successors.

The protagonist is the church-going owner of a used car lot.  He takes pride in being able to milk more profit out of each transactions than any of his other salespeople.  His marriage is falling apart, but that doesn’t particularly concern him.  I don’t remember offhand what the crisis was that led to his repentance, but at one point he came face to face with the teachings of Christ.   He had to make a decision to cease his dishonest dealings and make costly restitution.  The struggles he faces while attempting to reorder his business in a way that would not be unfaithful to his faith are believable   This modern-day Zacchaeus re-emerges as a business leader in a way that is neither hokey or predictable.

Simplicity  Amal (2007) 

Truth be told, we Orthodox are proudly semi-Pelagian.   Inasmuch the whole nature vs grace distinction that so preoccupied the Blessed Augustine  makes any sense in our context at all, we are not so uncomfortable with nature as are many other Christian traditions  (Forgive me if appear as though I am speaking for the whole Orthodox Church here.    I am a layman, and not a very good one at that).  Natural human goodness was God’s original plan.  There is more of it than we have a right to expect, and wherever it is encountered, it should be encouraged.

This film is the story of Dostoyevsky’s Prince Mishkin on the crowded streets of New Delhi.  Amal is a rickshaw driver, who never complains when others abuse him, never charges more than his due, and who is honest to a fault.    Indeed, like Mishkin, he is thought to be a little  bit simple.  However, one day he gives a rich man a ride who is in the throes of an existential crisis.  Amal so impresses the rich man that the rich man determines to leave his entire fortune to the rickshaw driver to the despite of his dissolute and violent children.  Amal’s character illuminates the flaws of the other, more self-centered characters in the film, and many of them come to, if not repentance, at least a greater self-knowledge a lessening of their egoism.

Gratitude  Babette’s Feast (1987)

Two sisters, spinster daughters of the founder of an austere Protestant sect, take in as a cook/servant a worldly Parisian woman who is in some political trouble.   Despite the hard-scrabble lifestyle of the sisters and the  barrenness of their physical surroundings, the Frenchwoman does not complain and earns the respect and even the love of the two sisters over the years.

The Frenchwoman wins a sum of money in a lottery, and everyone expects her to return to Paris and resume her life.  Instead, she spends the bulk of her winnings on a single night’s dinner for the sisters and  surviving members of their sect.  Indeed, the major part of the film is food porn at its most lascivious – the Frenchwoman is a master chef and she lavishes all her considerable skill on this single meal.

When the food and drink finally arrives at the table, it works an almost Eucharistic spell; old wrongs are forgiven, lapsed friendships are renewed, paths not taken are reopened and cherished for what might have ensued.   Briefly, earthly food and drink becomes the transmitter of grace, and the barrier between the sensuous and the spiritual dissolves.

Avoiding “Jesusism”

I responded to the late Michael Spencer, of Internet Monk fame, when he posted a couple of years ago about the lack of sacramentality in Evangelical worship:

But evangelicals are in sacramental chaos, and the results are quite obvious. Evangelicals are “re-sacramentalizing” in an uncritical and unbiblical way. The Planetshakers article was good evidence, but you can see and hear it everywhere. What are our evangelical sacraments? Where will evangelicals defend the idea that “God is dependably at work?”

We have sacramentalized technology.
We have sacramentalized the pastor and other leaders.
We have sacramentalized music. (i.e. the songs themselves and the experience of singing.)
We have sacramentalized leaders of musical worship.
We have sacramentalized events. (God is here!)
We have sacramentalized the various forms of the altar call.
We have sacramentalized the creation of an emotional reaction.
We’ve done all of this, amazingly, while de-emphasizing and theologically gutting baptism. We’ve done this while reducing the Lord’s Supper to a relatively meaningless, optional recollection. We’ve done this while removing any aspects of sacramentalism from our worship and even our architecture. (Public reading of scripture, hymns, tables/altars, baptisteries, pulpits.) And we’ve given over to whomever wants to speak up the power to say what God is saying, what God is doing, what God is using, what God thinks of whatever we’re doing, what the Spirit is up to and so on.

 

My response:

I hadn’t been Orthodox a year when all of a sudden it hit me why Evangelicals, my former self included, believed that Catholics and Orthodox **worshipped saints**, statues, icons and Mary. We treat them the way Evangelicals treat God. That is to say, we do religious acts in their presence, directed to them. No wonder. Since there is no [official] sacrifice in Evangelical worship, there is just “dylia” offered to God, religious acts done in His presence, directed to Him.

Any Cathodox would be aghast, and rightly so, at offering the Eucharist to anyone except the most Holy Trinity. Without the Eucharist properly understood… You have kind of a Jesusism, an ideology extracted from a text, subject to all of the vicissitudes and mutations of any ideology.

Ortanne Laivino! Anwa ortanne Laivino!

Apparently, that is the Paschal Greeting in Tolkien’s constructed Elvish language Quenya. It was fun tracking down the exact translation of this phrase. Apparently, it comes from Tolkien himself, who also translated several Christian prayers into Quenya, such as The Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary.

Naturally, this leads to some speculation as to what significance the Incarnation, Passion, and Resurrection of Eru Ilúvatar has for the Elves. There is precious little to go by either in The Lord of the Rings or The Silmarillon. Human piety or apostasy is measured in these works by the human group’s faithfulness to the alliance with the Eldar, and by extension, to the Valar.  Yet there is a line drawn between the Elves, who are bound to this world and cannot transpass it, and Men, whose fate lies “beyond the circle of the world, and what it is, even Mandos cannot tell.”

Nevertheless, Tolkien constructed his mythology to be, at the least, compatible with the worship of the Blessed Trinity.  I view the Valar as Elementals, roughly corresponding to the των στοιχειων του κοσμου ["the elements of this world"], mentioned so coyly in St. Paul’s Letter to the Colossians (2:20).  Alas, the Elves never finish their apprenticeship.  The virtual immortality in this world which is so coveted by the fallen Numenoreans, turns out to be a perpetual submission to the Valar.    Men would eventually come, because of their participation in the Divine nature, to overshadow their titular overlords.  So, the First would be Last, and the Last, First.

The number and depth of human-Elvish relationships show that the Elves have at least a capacity to enter into the communio sanctorum, except that they would be participating from the streets of Tirion and Alqualondë, rejoicing in the good fortune of their younger brethren and awaiting their own eventual redemption.  I am certain that the learned among them, on this bright Feast of Feasts, would greet each other with the Paschal greeting:

Ortanne Laivino! Anwa ortanne Laivino! 

laivë noun “ointment” , hence Laivino, “the Anointed, the Christ”

orta- vb. “rise”, also transitive “raise, lift up”, pa.t. ortanë (Nam, RGEO:67, ORO; misreading “ortani” in Letters:426). According to PE17:63-64, this pa.t. form ortanë is only transitive (*”raised”), whereas the intransitive pa.t. (*”rose”) is orontë. 

anwa adj. “real, actual, true” 

From an online Quenya dictionary

A Tale Of Three Parishes – A Prolegomenon

Since my family’s Baptism and Chrismation into Holy Orthodoxy in 2006, we have been involved in a number of parishes; OCA, Greek and Antiochian.  Since we are converts ourselves,  we feel most comfortable where there are a lot of other converts, especially those coming from an Evangelical Christian background.

However, this can sometimes lead to a niggling suspicious feeling that I as a  convert am just “playing Orthodox”  I have a bad   self-congratulatory attitude about being in the “true Church” which feeds my ego at both ends; first, for having been an Evangelical Protestant and so understanding the concept of regeneration and enjoying a facility with the Bible, and second, for being Orthodox and knowing about the Saints and the disciplines and all the panoply of historic Christianity.

The Ochlophobist has a friend, Samn!,  that left the following comment on his blog amidst all the flotsam and jetsam concerning the current malcriadez in the Antiochian Archdiocese:

+Philip and his clerical friends are quite anomalous even in their generation of Arab Orthodox because they for whatever reason missed out on the revival that came from the Orthodox Youth Movement and were already in America by the time the Lebanese monasteries like Dayr el-Harf really started bearing fruit. And so, like Jewish actors acquiring waspy surnames, they went out of their way to trade in Orthodox ways for the ways of the perceived American elites of the early sixties, Episcopalians. (I’m glad I’m not the only one who has seen this)

And so, when converts came, they were unable to transmit the heritage of the Church of Antioch to them, but rather allowed a trial-and-error approach to figuring out what a lived Orthodoxy is. The anti-monasticism and the America-firstism that have been signature traits of much of the Archdiocese’s leadership… have served to hinder spiritual bonds and bonds of affection and communication with the mother church. In the aftermath of this current crisis, those are the things that need to be cultivated, regardless of the Archdiocese’s ultimate autonomy, both for the sake of having a healthy and fruitful relationship with Damascus and for the authentic transmission of Antioch’s ancient heritage of lived Orthodoxy to all those who come to her thirsting for it.

And, just in case you are thirsting to know more about Antioch’s ancient heritage of lived Orthodoxy,  Samn! offers his own Arab Orthodoxy blog, and it is first-rate.

Please visit and encourage.

Ways Of Knowing

Before I converted to Orthodoxy, I did due diligence on both the Orthodox and the Catholic churches. I attended services in both churches, read the obligatory apologetic works from both sides, and even read harrowing critiques of each church from the point of view of the other.

I do not want to go into the reasons I decided for Orthodoxy. What I want to do is present a mental exercise. Long before I even felt the pull towards Ancient Christianity, I heard a musical production by a Romanian group called Enigma, which enjoyed some success in the Eurobeat-techno 90s scene.

The name of the song was “Mea Culpa”, and the artist produced what he called an “Orthodox Mix” and a “Catholic Mix”. All of the subsequent reading I did while investigating the theology and practice of both churches only clarified what I learned, on an emotional level, as being the difference between the two ancient Churches. Click on the two churches below to hear the different versions of the same song:

Clicking the link should invoke a media player that will allow you to listen to the song. I invoke the Fair Usage clause

Preparing For The Coming Global Lent: I – Church and Empire

For the world is changing: I feel it in the water, I feel it in the earth, and I smell it in the air.

Treebeard – from The Two Towers; presciently used as an introduction to the Extended Edition DVD of The Fellowship of the Ring

I am sorry I have been so remiss in working on this blog this year. The things I want to say I struggle to find among kindred minds the vocabulary to express. With the infosphere so full of disheartening political and economic news, the signal-to-noise ratio remains appallingly low. Nobody within earshot of me seems to be saying anything useful or encouraging except for the Orthodox, some of the better Catholics, Wendell Berry, the Scylding, and, surprisingly, some granola-crunching New Agers.

Oh yes, Tim Enloe is doing some important work digesting primary sources which can act as signposts especially to those whose interest is in the development of what can only be called the Mind of the West.

I can only hope my problem isn’t selective hearing on my part; what the Reformed refer to as “judicial hardening”.

One of the reasons I had for reading Owen Barfield was the hope that he would have:cleared a path for me through the intellectual thicket in which I currently find myself The Western world in general, and the United States of America in particular, appears to be approaching an impasse to which no easy solution presents itself. There is a dislocation on the horizon that will be certainly uncomfortable, probably grueling, and possibly violent. If the current “common sense” consensus prevails, we in the USA and aligned countries will find ourselves on an unsustainable trajectory where we are competing with the rest of the world for a dwindling amount of resources. By the current “common sense” consensus, I mean the pragmatic, objectivizing, particularizing, quantifying, and now digitizing impulse that produced both the Scientific and the Commercial revolutions, and led to us organizing ourselves into, and relating to each other primarily through the mediation of, corporations that act as vast Turing devices acting only for the quantification and increase of Capital, now expressed primarily as a series of 1s and 0s on a digital medium somewhere.
Recently , I read an interesting online essay by Jim Davis, Globalization, Romanticism, and Owen Barfield. Even though Mr. Davis’ presuppositions and concerns are not my own, I heartily recommend the essay. Summarizing Mr. Davis is a little difficult, not entirely because of the subtlety of his arguments, but also because of the surprising eclecticism of his sources. He draws not only from the Usual Suspects in Barfield studies; Eliot, Auden, Steiner, the German Naturphilosophen, but also Karl Marx and William Blake.

The connection with Karl Marx struck me as being interesting. Marx was, after all, a Romantic at heart, and the Romantic concept of the Eternal Return was deeply embedded into his narrative. However, it was the mention of William Blake that most ignited my imagination. Blake was present at the birth of a particular sort of Imperial consciousness, that of the regnant Whig classes in Great Britain. There appears to have been a kind of energy which was liberated by the disposal of the Catholic, medieval-minded James Stuart, which energy manifested itself in both the Scientific and Commercial revolutions of the 18th Century, and the establishment of the Whig Empire.

That Empire, with a very few modifications, is the very same Urizenic regime currently in power, which, in Blake’s poetic vision, was a metaphor what was occuring as a result of the Commercial and Industrial Revolutions; the dilution of risk through the use of joint stock corporations, the commoditization of labor in the “dark Satanic mills”. Artisianry, whereby a particular suit of clothes was made for a particular man, was sacrificed for the mass production of abstract “clothes” for abstract “men”.

It is not to lament the “world that once was”, but rather to show how a particular consciousness engenders a particular state of affairs in the so-called “material world”, that world which is characterized by the words “politics” and “economics”. In this sense, essence precedes existence; the Interior is anterior to the Exterior, nothing emerges in the technosphere which did not previously exist in the imagination, but a particularly focused kind of imagination.

The Church is not the interior of the Empire, the Empire is the material expression of the Church. Man was created to live and move and have his being in this Empire/Church which was intended to mediate the life [energies?] of the Blessed Trinity to the whole of Creation.

Charles Williams saw, no, felt this acutely, and called it the “Web of Exchange”, “Co-inherence”, or simply “the City”, and hinted that it was intended to encompass the entirety of Creation. Indeed, we see that one of the gravest problems that we are facing is an ecological crisis, whereby the Web of Empire, that portion of the Web of Exchange which organizes the energies of men, is returning material to the Web of Physical Nature, that portion of the Web of Exchange whose interchanges and sacrifices we describe as chemical reactions, in a condition unusable by it. What men call “the economy” has its inputs from this other, more elementary Web, and its impact upon this Web is considerable, but the terms of Exchange have not hitherto been charitable.

The changes we desperately need at this juncture will have to come from a change in Church. There are a lot of conflicting voices out there, and most of them are clamoring for a preservation of the status quo, with which voices I certainly sympathize, because it is comfortable for me.

But I don’t know whether that will be a option for us very much longer. As our Lord put it

A woman when she is in travail hath sorrow, because her hour is come: but as soon as she is delivered of the child, she remembereth no more the anguish, for joy that a man is born into the world.

It’ s always like that;  we’re comfortable, and we begin to feel  constriction and the pressure, until suddenly light and cold burst in on us, and we are thrust into a larger world.

St. Columba’s Day

Today is the day that the Church commemorates the falling asleep of St. Columba of Iona. He was an Irish princeling who went out and killed hundreds of men because one of them had borrowed a book from him and not returned it. After having been shriven by St. Finnian, he swore never to return to home until he had claimed as many souls for Paradise as he had sent to Hell in the battle. In discussing this with my wife this morning, the recent tragedy at Virgina Tech came immediately to mind.

People haven’t stopped committing barbarous and murderous acts. What we have stopped doing is repenting and bearing fruits of repentance for those actions.

A Minor Bestiary

 

The parking lot of a suburban Central Florida community college was the last place I ever expected to find a peacock, and yet there he was, picking about the dumpster like a rooster and gobbling down stray grains. Looking back in retrospect I probably should have called security and found out where the poor bird had escaped from. His long tail feathers (peahens have no such decoration) dragged along in the dust behind him. I was in an awful funk. I had been laid off the previous year and was struggling to make ends meet working in positions that I was not good at.

Fortunately, I found a position teaching computer programming at the above mentioned community college, the stipend of which went a long way towards alleviating my financial burdens and for which I remain grateful. Nevertheless, it was a very dark period in my life and that particular day was darker than most. I don’t remember now what had occurred to precipitate such a dark mood, but I do remember the peacock. At first, the bird paid no attention to me, continuing to pick out grains around the dumpster, but when I turned to look at him, he turned to look at me, opened his tail feathers in a magnificent fan, and began strutting towards me. After a few paces, I guess he figured out that I wasn’t a peahen, folded his breathtaking plumage, and returned to his supper. I went on to my class. The words of the Beatitudes presented themselves immediately to my mind:

For this reason I say to you, do not be worried about your life, as to what you will eat or what you will drink; nor for your body, as to what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?

Look at the birds of the air, that they do not sow, nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they? And who of you by being worried can add a single hour to his life? And why are you worried about clothing? Observe how the lilies of the field grow; they do not toil nor do they spin, yet I say to you that not even Solomon in all his glory clothed himself like one of these.

It was if the illustrations concerning the birds of the air and the lilies of the field were accordioned together into this one gorgeous animal: I had nothing to fear, finally. I and mine would be taken care of, perhaps not in the style to which we had become accustomed, perhaps not in the way we were accustomed to expect, but we would be cared for.

In a similar way, beasts have often accompanied me in prayer. Before becoming Orthodox and introducing icons into my prayer life, my greatest preference was to pray outdoors. This is a habit that I acquired in college, in the acres and acres of orange groves that surrounded the Central Florida campus. Once, there was a time when a very close friend needed prayer. I found a little bench next to a small drainage pond and began to pray. It was one of those times when prayer wasn’t work, when I didn’t have to “prime the pump”. By the grace of God I was allowed to pray with great liberty and boldness for my friend for an extended period of time. When I finished, I found myself surrounded by a menagerie; a pair of squirrels, a heron, a butterfly, several small birds of the sparrow or finch type, and a pesky bee buzzing around my head. All of these animals were closer to me than animals usually approach. The squirrels and the heron were practically in my lap. When I finished praying they went their own ways.

Stories of saints and animals have always moved me deeply. St. Seraphim and his bear was one of the first I learned about in an Orthodox context:

Saint Seraphim began to go to a “far wilderness,” which was a desolate place in a forest 5 miles away from the Sarov monastery. He reached great perfection during that time. Bears, hares, wolves, foxes and other wild animals would come to the hut of the ascetic. One day, Matrona, one of the nuns, saw him sitting on a tree trunk in the company of a bear. Terrified, she let out a scream. The staretz turned around and, seeing her, patted the animal and sent him away Then he invited Matrona to come and sit beside him. ‘But’, Matrona relates, ‘hardly had we sat down when the animal returned from the wood and lay down at the staretz’ feet. I was as terrified as before, but when I saw Father Seraphim, quite unconcerned, treating the bear like a lamb, stroking him and giving him some bread, I calmed down. When I was wholly assured, the Father gave me a piece of bread and said ‘You needn’t be the least afraid of him, he won’t hurt you.’So I held out the bread to the bear, and it was such joy to be feeding him that I wanted to go on doing so.’

The bear became a frequent traveling companion of St. Seraphim, placid and gentle with those who loved the Staretz from the heart, but threatening to those who wished him ill.

The story of St. Francis and the penitent wolf of Gubbio is also well known, as is that Saint’s love of animals. I do wish we Orthodox could venerate Saint Francis officially, but that will have to wait until we have achieved a greater degree of unity than we presently have. In the meantime, his sanctity and example illumine our Catholic brothers and we rejoice.

While Francis was staying in Gubbio, he learned of a wolf so ravenous that it was not only killing and eating animals, but people, too. The people took up arms and went after it, but those who encountered the wolf were killed.

Francis took pity on the people and the wolf as well and decided to go out and meet the wolf. He was desperately warned by the people, but he insisted that God would take care of him. Suddenly the wolf, jaws wide open, charged out of the woods at the couple. Francis made the Sign of the Cross toward the wolf who immediately slowed down and closed its mouth. Then Francis called out to the wolf: “Come to me, Brother Wolf. I wish you no harm.” At that moment the wolf lowered its head and lay down at St. Francis’ feet, meek as a lamb.

St. Francis explained to the wolf that he had been terrorizing the people, killing not only other animals, but humans as well. “Brother Wolf,” said Francis, “I want to make peace between you and the people of Gubbio. They will harm you no more and you must no longer harm them. All past wrongs are to be forgiven.”

The wolf showed its assent by moving its body and nodding its head. Then to the absolute surprise of the gathering crowd, Francis asked the wolf to make a pledge. As St. Francis extended his hand to receive the pledge, so the wolf extended its front paw and placed it into the saint’s hand.

Then he offered the townspeople peace, on behalf of the wolf. The townspeople promised in a loud voice to feed the wolf. Then Francis asked the wolf if he would live in peace under those terms. He bowed his head and twisted his body in a way that convinced everyone he accepted the pact. Then once again the wolf placed its paw in Francis’ hand as a sign of the pact. From that day on the people kept the pact they had made. The wolf lived for two years among the townspeople, going from door to door for food. It hurt no one and no one hurt it. Even the dogs did not bark at it. When the wolf finally died of old age, the people of Gubbio were sad.

Pigeons are a particularly despised bird. Like other animals such as squirrels and rats, they have learned to thrive in the artificial urban environments man has created for himself. Most people look upon them as disease-ridden pests, even though our Lord the Spirit chose their form in which to descend upon our Lord Jesus Christ in his baptism. St. John Maximovich, in his final troubled years, found consolation in the company of a small pigeon he took in and nursed back to health:

This particular day I noticed a white pigeon with a reddish pattern in its feathers, making pigeon noises outside the window on a specially built ledge. It was pacing back and forth, obviously not intending to fly away, but, as I assumed, waiting to be fed. As it seemed no stranger to her, I paid little attention then.

On the feast day of the Baptism of the Lord, I chanced to be in St. Tikhon’s for the Blessing of Water. To my great surprise, as St. John was blessing the water, a dove flew right out into the courtyard. It flapped its wings and actually soared over the basin of holy water, I was amazed, as I had never seen such a service with a live dove hovering over this holiness.

After the service I learned the following touching story of Archbishop John’s “heavenly bird.” Once Archbishop John came home to discover that a pigeon was hurt, his wing was damaged, and was sitting outside the window. He opened the window and let it in. The bird could barely flutter, and Archbishop John bound its wing and fed it. That was enough to make it feel adopted. The bird stayed around, especially when the Saint would arrive and would feed it. Actually it remained a mystery how both of them conversed. But one thing we knew: the pigeon reacted to the words of St. John as if it understood what he said. I was told that both of them would sit facing each other, the man softly speaking and the bird making its pigeon sounds in agreement and peacefully walking to and fro, as if memorizing what it was taught.

On the day Archbishop John died, the bird began to pace the window and flutter in agony, as if knowing about its master. When the death knell announced the earthly end of Archbishop John, the bird was frantic. It fluttered in agony, missing the Saint, and its little heart also stopped a few months afterwards, to our deep sorrow.. I remember Archbishop John’s words to me when I used to complain that in some cities birds are removed from the streets: ‘Yes, now throughout the whole world, attacks are carried out against all living beings that surround us.’

It remains only to point out the obvious: the fantastic way of life we have chosen in the six or seven generations since the advent of Industrial Revolution has estranged us from Creation in ways we can scarcely imagine. We grow more and more estranged from each other as we attempt to make our lives conform more closely to the images that are projected into our craniums during practically every waking moment. If some of the current research into the interface between the human nervous system and the cybernetic networks we have recently created ever bears fruit, we may be tempted to dispense with the natural world as much as possible and take up residence in a fantasy of our own devising. One can only hope God will the cast that particular Tower down before it is ever constructed, but our servants the beasts have never forgotten their blessedness in Paradise, nor do they ever cease to yearn, in their inarticulate way, for the restoration of their communion with their Master Adam.

The Pillars Of Heracles

When I was five or six years old, my troubled parents moved to the nation’s capital in a fruitless attempt to halt my father’s descent into mental illness. Within a year they were divorced, and somehow, I discovered church. My mother brought the three of us every Sunday to Westminster Presbyterian Church, which at the time was located close to us in Silver Springs, Maryland, being just across the state line in the District of Columbia. I was unceremoniously dropped into the nursery where, with dozens of other Baby Boomers, I was left pretty much to fend for myself.

There was a book of Bible stories in that nursery. It is likely familiar to many because I have seen the same volume in doctors’ and dentists’ offices. I believe it is published by the Seventh Day Adventists, and it is richly illustrated. At five years of age, the book’s illustrations seemed to me to be backlit with the very Uncreated Light of Tabor itself. The account of the Creation, the Fall, and the Flood, ignited my young imagination and made me an instant evangelist. There was a young teenaged girl watching us in the nursery that Sunday, and I approached her with the book opened to the account of Noah and the flood. Breathlessly, I retold the story of how a man built a boat and God brought all the animals to him, and then He made it rain a long long time…

The teenaged girl looked at the book and smiled at me. With the all authority early adolescence could muster over against the earnestness of childhoold, she informed me: “That’s like a fairy story, you know. It’s a nice story but it didn’t really happen.” When I returned to read the book, the light had died on its pages. I threw the book into a corner and picked up some plastic dinosaurs.

There are a lot of things I don’t remember from my very early childhood, but I do remember that incident. The idea that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, so long discredited in biology, seems to me to have some bearing in spiritual formation, so that at the tender age of five or six, I had thrust upon me the soul-choking infidelty and unbelief of mid twentieth century liberal Protestantism at floodtide. Interestingly, that particular congregation takes great pride in the continuity of this particular mindset in its midst down to the present day.

But I remembered the Light I saw on the pages of that book. All my life, whenever I had to make a conscious decision about divine or moral things, I have had to choose between moving towards that Light or away from it. In my early twenties, early in my conscious Christian walk, I was given a package of Watchtower material to read. It contained a lot of teaching about the Bible, but the Light wasn’t there, not like it was in the Baptist, Pentecostal, and Catholic material I was devouring at that time. It was as if someone was trying to dance a waltz while the orchestra was playing a quadrille.

I shudder to say that I didn’t immediately sit down with my Bible and a Strong’s Concordance and puzzle through every Scripture reference in the Watchtower material to see, like the Bereans, if these things were so. Had I taken such a puntillistic approach at that time, who is to say whether I would not have ended up as a Jehovah’s Witness. Subsequent contacts with members of this sect have shown them to have a strong belief in the power of argument, debate, reason, comparing text to text, and acrimony to establish the truth of Scripture, and subsequent experiences with the Scriptures have informed me that they do not yield their treasures easily to the disputers of this age.

The Garden Of The Hesperides

I have in my possession a bulletin of the order of service for Hope Reformed Church, Holland, Michigan, on January 2, 1952, the day of my baptism. Since the Reformed Church In America doesn’t celebrate Epiphany, I will assume that the service was a standard one for Ordinary time. There was an introit, an invocation, a Kyrie, an Old Testament reading, a Gloria Patri, a New Testament reading, and Offertory, a sermon, and me, red, misshapen, and howling, according to my mother, being subjected to the waters of Baptism.

Now, it wasn’t until my father died in 2005 that I learned that the reason I had been present on that undoubtedly cold and blustery morning was because my great-great grandfather had no desire to walk 130 miles in a Wisconsin winter.

Arend had come over from the Netherlands in 1848 with his brother Jacob on the promise of a job in Chicago. During the months that they were crossing the Atlantic and portering up the Saint Lawrence and into the Great Lakes to Chicago, the brothers’ sponsor had passed away, and no one met them at the pier. Jacob decided to try his luck in the Yukon, and left, disappearing into the northern mists and most likely from the gene stream as well. His brother never heard from again, but his name lingers on in the family. ‘Jacob’ was my grandfather’s and my father’s middle name.

Arend, whose name means ‘eagle’ in Dutch, was Catholic, although his grandmother was a Huegenot refugee. He knocked around Chicago for a while until someone told him there was a colony of Netherlanders about 60 miles up the shore in Kenosha, Wisconsin. He walked there, arriving in late October. It turned out that the colony was Reformed, and if my ancestor wanted to stay, he would have to convert to the Reformed faith. There was a colony of Catholic Hollanders up near Green Bay, about 120 miles north, but an early winter was and setting in, and besides, one of the Reformed maidens had caught his eye. Arend decided that my great-great grandmother was worth forgoing a Mass, and accepted the Reformed faith.

He outlived my great-great grandmother and two other Protestant wives as well, who are buried in the Reformed churchyard in Kenosha. Interestingly, he requested that he be buried apart from all of them, in unconsecrated ground.

There is no evidence that my ancestor was particularly devout, either as a Catholic or as a Protestant, but his choice sealed the religious destiny of my family for five generations, and nobody deviated from the norm until I came along. This is interesting to me because it speaks to me that no one makes decisions entirely for one’s own self.

Baptism has fallen on hard times recently. A lot of Christians in the United States would maintain that the baptism that I was surrendered to by my young father and my even younger mother, on that cold January morning accomplished nothing at all. Funny, the less baptism means, the keener people seem to be that you have done it “by the book”. I have been baptized twice, as has my son, my daughter, and my wife. We just barely escaped a third baptism as well. Between the four of us, we have probably spilled enough baptismal water to regenerate a small Germanic tribe in the fifth century. My first baptism, though, fixes me in time and space and history as a member of a family and as a member of a clan, a gens, and an ethne’ in a way that none of the subsequent laverings accomplished. I’ve been all over the map since then, both geographically and ecclesiastically, but my roots are there, and as the Psalmist says, “all my springs are in her”.