Category: Gospel

Scattered Thoughts on Liturgy, Saints, and Postmodern Discourse

On By JonathanIn Gospel, Patristics, Philosophy4 Comments

1. (With props to Ft. Stephen who initiated this idea for me): The Liturgy is pretty jarring. There are all sorts of things happening at once, there is an abundance of strange language (things we do not hear in our day-to-day lives), strange concepts, people standing about at odd angles, children making noise and running about, plus the abundance of icons that attract the eye and carry their own particular discourse (but more on that later God willing). We do not immediately fit into this construction, into all this language about the Kingdom of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, of forgiveness, of angels and archangels: the disjunction of imagery and sounds, the challenges and declarations (the mystery of the Holy Trinity is continually set before us). The “discourse” of the Liturgy clashes with our normal discourses, with our normal way of speaking, thinking, and acting in the world. We- our bodies, our words, our senses- are raised into Heaven, are moved onto a different level of discourse and being. This movement has the potential- if we embrace it and move with/within it, if you will- of opening up our “everyday” discourses, our everyday existence, to the radical new possibilities that are found within the discourse of the Liturgy. Of course, there is a danger that we allow the strangeness and radicalness of the Liturgy to become “normalized” so that we no longer notice it: instead of it challenging us and opening us and our ways of speaking/living up to God, we domesticate the Liturgy (or we simply drift off into our own mental world and act through the Liturgy without noticing it…), we domesticate the whole divine action and discourse that we are confronted with.

Rather, the “otherness” of the Liturgy should break into our language, into our ways of thinking in/about the world. For example, the language of loving one’s enemies, of forgiveness, is continually brought before us, clashing with our normal (unfortunately) discourse, in which forgiveness and love of the enemy is a foreign concept, an unsettling one, along with all those weird troparion abour martyrs and ascetics. What are we to do with this? If we simply “domesticate” it, if we do not accept it as a radical intrusion and opening up of our speech and our very lives, then that language, the Liturgy itself, becomes just an antiquarian artefact.

2. My web browser opens to the OCA daily calender of saints and festivals. Today’s saints struck me as particularly demonstrating the radical nature of not just the Liturgy, but of the whole of the faith. Today St. John the Merciful is commemorated: a saint who does violence to our conceptions of what charity should look like; his actions break through our bourgeouis sentiments and ethics and overturns them. How can you possibly keep giving money to a beggar you know is tricking you? My experience of St. John is similar to that which I experienced the first time I read Yoder’s Politics of Jesus: I hate what you’re saying because I know it is true and truly Christological, and it clashes so much with my assumptions, with the discourses I have assimilated and that keep me comfortable. Yet I cannot reject what he is saying (acting/doing): I see Christ in his actions, I hear the- radical and “breaking-in”- voice of Christ, reconfigured and redeployed in the saint. We need saints to speak into our lives, into our discourses, because we are always taking the Gospel and “normalizing” it, domesticating it, overlaying the words with our own comfortable assumptions. Saints like St. John overthrow this domestication.

Today the Fool-for-Christ St. John of Rostov (the Hairy!) is also commemorated. In the holy fool we find one of the supreme examples of God breaking into our “normalness” and disrupting pretty much every element of our discourse and self-image. What do you do with holy foolishness? What can we possibly do with it? By honouring the holy fool as a saint, the Church canonizes- declares to be canonical, a rule against which to measure our lives- his “crazy” life, his foolishness. Added up, the variety of “canons” declares an incredible plurality of possibilities of being-in-the-world-in-Christ, and this plurality clashes with our sensibilities of what is “respectable” and “allowable.” Again, our attempts at coopting Christ into our non-Christological modes of living are confronted and challenged. Our language of “normality,” of “sanity,” is shown to be inadequate, to be in need of a radical opening to the reality of the life of Christ. For in fact our “sanity” is so often revealed to be true craziness, to be even satanic “normality.” Our language is shown up, so to speak, for its disconnection to reality, to the inner truth of the world. The holy fool asks: who’s really crazy? Your hair is nicely trimmed and your discourse follows the expected parameters, corresponds- so you think!- to what is “real.” Yet- the holy fool in his humility (humility before the true Word) sees the world as it is, and his language is ultimately “truer” than yours.

3. Hopefully the reason I included the nebulous word “postmodernism” in the title of this post is by now clear. Orthodoxy reveals itself to have long been “postmodern” in the sense that it has always sought to confront and open up received discourse. Orthodoxy- in Liturgy, prayer, saints, icons, etc- destabilizes our language, destabilizes our view of ourselves and the world, and inserts the supra-reality of Christ: He who comes with a sword, a sword that cuts and divides and in so doing allows us to move beyond what are so often false constructions. And whereas structuralism and poststructuralism tend to move the reader towards a point of no reality, of nothing beyond constructions and their deconstruction, Christ posits reality and life beyond the ruins of our inadequate and falsifying language. Yes, our words fail (witness apothetic theology). Yes, our language is a mode of power, of coercion and falsification: but it is possible to break through that, into the true Word “spoken in silence” Who breaks up and re-assembles our discourse in the light of His Gospel and saints and in prayer and so on. Where deconstructionism proper can lead to nihilism or irrationalism, the “deconstructing” of Christ leads into the Resurrected Life, from the “death” of language (and author and subject!) into the true life of the Word.

At the Time of Prayer

On By JonathanIn East & West, Gospel, Patristics, PrayerLeave a comment

O Christ who are covered with light as though with garment, who for my sake stood naked in front of Pilate, clothe me with that might which you caused to overshadow the saints, whereby they conquered this world of struggle. May your Divinity, Lord, take pleasure in me, and lead me above the world to be with you. O Christ, upon you the many-eyed Cherubim are unable to look because of the glory of your countenance, yet out of your love you recieved spit upon your face: remove the shame from my face and grant an open face before you at the time of prayer.

St. Isaac the Syrian

On Miracles and Wonder

On By JonathanIn Culture, Gospel, Patristics, PhilosophyLeave a comment

“The miracle indeed of our Lord Jesus Christ, whereby He made the water into wine, is not marvelous to those who know that it is God’s doing. For He who made wine on that day at the marriage feast, in those six-water pots, which He commanded to be filled with water, the self-same does this every year in vines. For even as that which the servants put into the water-pots was turned into wine by the doing of the Lord, so in like manner also is what the clouds pour forth changed into wine by the doing of the same Lord. But we do not wonder at the latter, because it happens every year: it has lost its marvelousness by its constant recurrence. And yet it suggests a greater consideration that that which was done in the water-pots. For who is there that considers the works of God, whereby this whole world is governed and regulated, who is not amazed and overwhelmed with miracles? If he considers the vigorous power of a single grain of any seed whatever, it is a mighty thing, it inspires him with awe. But since men, intent on a different matter, have lost consideration of the works of God, by which they should daily praise Him as Creator, God has, as it were, reserved to Himself the doing of certain extraordinary actions, that, by striking them with wonder, He might rouse men as from sleep to worship Him.”

St. Augustine, On the Gospel of John

How often do we become caught up in the day-to-day mendacity of our lives, as we shuttle back and forth in our closed-up automobiles to and from closed-up spaces filled with the hum and glow of our computers and televisions and whatever other gadgets we have? If it was easy in St. Augustine’s time for people to lose sight of the wonder of creation, of the natural (or, for St. Augustine, supernatural) world all about, how much easier it is, who live in a universe that is consistently stripped of wonder?

In the Syriac tradition, as exemplified by Sts. Ephrem, Jacob of Serugh, John of Apamea, Isaac the Syrian, and others, wonder- at creation, at God, at God’s special actions on behalf of our salvation- is one of the keys of true theology. For Jacob of Serugh especially, without wonder theology is pretty useless- it is dry and without real connection, without real penetration of the heart and mind. Only in love and wonder before the beauty of God, manifested in His creation and His divine economy in Christ, can we truly understand, can we truly live the life of Christ. That is one of the reasons that Christ calls us to be ‘as little children’- to re-open our eyes to the wonder of God, to the wonder of life. This is not an easy thing to do- it’s far easier to settle into comfortable cynicism and detachment, which are fair enough attitudes no doubt for many aspects of contemporary life (or any period’s life), but are destructive if extended to all of life. When we grow so detached, so numbed to the world beyond our reductive science, our electronic screens, and the mundane tasks that we tend to have to engage in, we are not merely losing connection with nature- we are losing connection with God, with reality, and with the possibility of true humanity.

This is not to disparage as sinful or only destructive things like science, technology, work, and so on- but rather to suggest that we must constantly be careful to draw back from those things at times, to have our hearts and eyes open to the wonder inherent in the world that is, for all our concrete and fiber optics, still around us and visible. If we stop to contemplate things as simple as trees- we discover there is nothing simple or reductive about them, but, as St. Augustine tells us, they are a cause for wonder and adoration towards God, as exemplars of His creative power and sustenance. From there we can begin to re-engage wonder at the mystery of salvation, of God’s divine economy in the world. I think that if taken from this tack we are less likely to reduce those mysteries to mere dictum, objects to be analyzed and mechanistically digested or accepted. Instead, we begin to realize, with Jacob and Ephrem and Augustine, the wonder of the Incarnation of Christ, of our Lady, of the Divine Liturgy and the mystery of prayer. From there we have greater hope of doing true theology, of truly delving into the divine mysteries with our hearts and minds, beholding God, not in detachment, but in loving wonder.

As A Living Fire

On By JonathanIn Gospel, PatristicsLeave a comment

As at the rising of the sun over the horizon the shroud of darkness is removed from the face of the earth, so that it shows itself in all its beauty, so likewise when the love of Christ shines forth in the soul and the veil of the old nature is taken away, the light of Christ shines forth in it, and the hidden things that were not visible before are now seen by it. And as iron when placed in a fire has the fire pass into it to become one substance with it, the iron united with the fire assuming its likeness and colour, no longer appearing in its former aspect, but becoming like the fire, because they have become absorbed in each other and have become one, so it is when the love of Christ has come into the soul as a living fire which burns away the thorns of sin from the soul; it becomes one substance with him and he with it; then the soul which was old, becomes new; dead it comes alive; and the likeness of its own nature is changed into the likeness of God. And now everything it see appears to it as the likeness of God (for it is granted to created beings to behold the works of God spiritually), and it becomes absorbed in love for all humankind, so that if it could it would let itself perish, so that all humans might live.

St. John of Apamea

Why I Am Not Voting In This Election

On By JonathanIn Culture, Gospel, Politics, War4 Comments

(Disclaimer: the following may offend you, and if it does, and you find yourself vehemently angry at me, forgive me. Pray for me a sinner.)

I occasionally mention to people that I do not plan on voting in the much-vaulted upcoming election, and could really care less which candidate wins- a proposition usually taken with curiosity, at the least. I suppose I owe an explanation of sorts for this shockingly heretical attitude- no, I’m not a full-fledged anarchist, though perhaps of the Dorothy Day sort… Rather, in appraising the two candidates, I cannot support either one, for reasons of the deepest importance. One may ask, why not vote third-party? For one thing, I am not all jazzed about anyone running- Chuck Baldwin is apparently a moral majoritarian sort, the Libertarians have fielded what seems like a Republican-lite candidate, and so on. Besides, let’s be quite honest, voting for anyone apart from the two is quite pointless no matter where you live. As it is, a vote for either McCain or Obama would probably be pretty pointless here, Tennessee being a state pretty well placed in McCain’s column. But regardless. Why then can I not support either candidate?

Both men represent systems of doing things that are rooted in fundamental violence and oppression; they both reflect and do not question in their own way- alike though not identical- the culture of death that both supports and informs that American State (not that it’s unusual in that). A vote for either one is a vote for continuing systematic, intense, State-funded and supported violence and aggression. They only differ in their preferred targets, and that is all. Obama, to begin with, is not and has never been the “peace candidate,” even excepting his undiminished support for abortion-on-demand. While his early rhetoric sounded anti-war and even slightly radical, he has long since obediently and probably willingly shifted into the usual centre-right position, an advocate of American exceptionalism- one supported only part of the time, in certain places, by bombs and bullets, you understand. Mr. Obama would have us leave off one war- that in Iraq (though not too quickly!)- in order to escalate another, in Afghanistan and Pakistan. That even more civilians are being slaughtered by American “smart” bombs in the latter places seems to be of little importance; it is the good war, after all, and that no one disputes. Besides those stated objectives, Mr. Obama would have us continue to proselytize the world for democracy etc etc, and in those promises the threat of force is never far behind, even if the Democrats at the moment prefer to not emphasize it.

As far as Mr. McCain’s approach to foreign policy goes, one hardly need say anything. Obama at least wraps his imperialism in lofty rhetoric and sometimes anti-war sounding evasions; McCain stands on a stage and sings about obliterating brown people with his bombs. He fully and unapologetically embraces the war machine; hatred of the enemy and mass violence are necessary for his campaign’s success after all.

But that is not the only issue in which the two candidates embrace systems of brutal violence and oppression. Obama is an unapologetic, if not particularly outspoken, proponent of industrialized abortion, the systematic violence against unborn child and mother. Not only are we asked to tolerate this subculture of death and violence, but we are asked (well, with the State there isn’t “asking,” only telling) to support it. This violence is in fact made sacrosanct, in one of the great perversions of modern life: the “right” to destroy is not only important, but essential, the underpinning of the all-holy human (well, the right sort of human that is) ability to control all things, from unwanted children to unwanted nations. “Consumer choice” invades the womb and bombs the world.

Neither candidate has seriously challenged or even discussed the ongoing violence and destruction propagated in the name of the “war on drugs.” Its victims do not enter the national discourse; Obama has given vague soundbites about “reforming” in some vague way the war, but just as in his foreign policy, this only means a shifting a resources, the dropping of bombs on a different group of the poor. As for McCain, again, there is nothing hidden here. Both candidates leave unquestioned the pervasive evils of the drug war; neither can imagine or desire to imagine alternatives to this great projection of deeply violent State power. Why should they? Again, State violence becomes virtually sacrosanct: the drug war, the war on terror, are all holy wars, the fight of noble Civilization against its dark, murderous enemies.

McCain, despite having once sought immigration reform of a sort, is now parroting the xenophobic lines of the hard right, endorsing yet another system of dehumanization and violence, yet another front for creating enemies and targets. Racist tactics are, as politicians have long known, particularly in my part of the world, one of the most effective ways for stirring human passions and fears, and directing them into creating you more power.

Knowing all this- that to endorse either candidate is to endorse systematic violence against my neighbor- how can I in good conscience vote for either? How can I listen to the words of Christ, how can I claim citizenship in the Kingdom of Heaven, and give my assent to these sorts of things? Do not suggest to me the lesser of two evils- am I too choose which forms of violence and evil I reject less strongly?

Am I suggesting running away from the world because it’s messy? No- instead of voting, do something that matters, go get messy, stand up against the currents of violence and despair, rebel against the culture of death: go find a homeless person and buy him lunch. Befriend a lonely person. Plant a garden. Go to church. Go find your neighbor, talk to her, love her. Go find the closest nursing home and visit the elderly. Volunteer at a crisis pregnancy centre. Treat the immigrant like a human being. Pray. Forgive your enemy. Love him, however you can. Don’t vote for his annihilation.

The Wrong Message

On By JonathanIn Culture, Gospel5 Comments

I was driving on the interstate the other day when I noticed a big billboard for a church. Now, here in the American South religious oriented billboards are nothing noteworthy, but this one stood out. It read: “Real. Comfortable. Church.” in big letters, next to a picture of a couch, along with the name of the particular church being advertised. I was floored- comfortable church? My initial thought was, man, at my church we stand up for the entire service, I wonder if we could figure out how to get that on a billboard- maybe a guy standing and another prostrating, someone having an allergic reaction to the incense, with a caption like “Orthodoxy: Real. Uncomfortable. Church.” Fr. Justin and I talked about the sign this evening- he had noticed it also- and he suggested, in a more serious vein, “Real. Martyred. Church.”- but more on that in a moment.

On further contemplation, there are a multitude of things that greatly bother me with the image of a “comfortable church.” Now, I suppose someone could construct a justification for the term, how it’s meant to attract people turned off of church by all the various things that turn people off to Christianity. There are types of discomfort that should, must be avoided in church- the discomfort of vicious politics and character assasination, the intercine struggles and nastiness and internal schisms, the hurt feelings and the ruined relationships over petty things- all the things I’ve seen in church life (I grew up literally on church property as a pastor’s son, and got to see all the dark secrets from the inside), all of which cause intense discomfort and should be avoided. But there are also numerous, absolutely vital ways in which we ought to be intensely uncomfortable when we go to church- indeed, if we are not somehow discomforted, then we are missing out on the whole point of the Gospel! Christ did not come to tell us all how wonderful we are, and how we can just go on doing what we’re doing- and oh if you’d like and you’d say your quick prayer you can come chill with Me on my couch in Heaven after you knock off down here.

No! Sed contra, Christ declares to the world as a whole and to each one of us- look at your lives! Look at the sin, the injustice, the violence, the oppression, the self-destruction you’re perpetrating on yourself, on everyone around you! Repent! Is the call to repentance comfortable? Does it make us feel good when someone calls us on our actions? Why do you think they threw Jeremiah in the pit? Why did they- we- crucify- still crucify- Christ? Because He, and all the saints and prophets, disturb our comfort, our cherished love of our selves that will brook no one telling us otherwise. Because the prophets come telling us we have blood on our hands, that our comfort is paid for with the blood of the oppressed. Because Christ comes telling us that our comfort in our selves will lead us straight to Hell, that we are living, not the life of God, but the unlife of the Enemy so long as we linger in our drugged out comfort built on sin and deceit.

Christ came, as was said of Dorothy Day, “to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable.” Why? Because we- the comfortable (and that includes most of us living here in the West, where life is handed to us on a silver platter, compared to the plight of people in much of the Majority World)- must be afflicted with the truth if we are to wake up to our true state, and seek repentance and the genuine life of Christ.

And that life- once we have been jarred from our sleep, rolled off the couch into the light and truth of Christ- is not easy, is not cozy comfort. Christ gives us consolation and relief from the despair of sin and the blindness of the world and its comforts (which really are no comforts at all but mere opiates)- his yoke is easy and his burden is light- but he also calls us to a very specific form of life. He calls us to pick up our Cross and carry it with Him- and as the Apostles who first heard that message would have known immediately, carry a cross means getting crucified, it means death. Crucifixion is not comfortable. Getting martyred is not comfortable. Christ calls us to spiritual combat, but it is not push-button bombing from an armchair. It is the warfare of love, our weapon is the cross, the weapon of peace, and our tactics are turning the other cheek, forgiving our enemies, dropping the literal sword, cutting off our anger and our hatred and turning to love. This is not comfortable! God knows all of this is hard, it sounds hard, and it is hard- loving your enemies, living a life of constant prayer, rejecting the opiates of the world- if it was easy, if it was comfortable, we’d all be doing it like we should, I’d be doing it like I should and not slipping back into the blissful ignorance and sleep of the world. Christ calls us to look our sin in the face and call it what it is- extremely uncomfortable. Christ calls us to look the homeless man on the street and call him human and mean it. Christ calls us to look at those icons of the saints and the martyrs and embrace them and seriously imitate them- even to death. It is not comfortable, it is not easy, it is at variance with a world that embraces the grossest extremes of comfort, that has desensitized itself to the killing of the unborn and the killing of its enemies in distant lands, that dresses its worst and most brutal violence in comfortable tones and images. The Church is not called to be a comfortable church, a church that exists to affirm the violence and sin of State and Society. The Church is called to be a martyred Church, one that stands against the comforts of its age and suffers for its witness.

I do not need any more comfort. I am stupidly comfortable in my quiet little mostly untroubled existence. I get up, go about my business and if I avoid the homeless men over in Downtown and don’t pay too much attention to my prayers I usually manage to feel pretty good about myself every day. May God save me, save all of us, from feeling good about ourselves, from being comfortable with our sin and the violence and despair around us. May God wake us up, roll us off the couch, and may we pick up the cross and really, truly, follow after Christ. May God grant us to live as a martyred Church, a Church that has died to the world and is living the difficult, demanding, but true, life-filled and life-affirming, the light-filled life of the Crucified Christ.

It Is Like a Great Poem

On By JonathanIn Gospel, History, Patristics, PoetryLeave a comment

John Scotus, influenced by Pseudo-Dionysius, considered the area of Scripture in its origins and in its end term, in the first, fresh simplicity of its beaming divine radiance and in the rediscovered unity of all things in it. What is simpler than the Word, what is more one than what he gathers together for eternity? But in coming to us simplicity is fragmented, or, rather, simplicity becomes fecund and fruitful, it opens itself up to the multiplicity that it engenders, so as to gather it up at later stage and contain in it in its bosom: “in that whole notion of simplicity, however, there are to be found many facets of speculative thought.” This whole intermediate area, comprised as it is of multiple sacraments that are united in the sacramental mystery of the flesh of Christ, is given to us, during our terrestrial existence, for our varied and many-sided contemplation. Thus, without losing the primordial unity that it possesses in the Word, Scripture does not discourage our making use of a whole gamut of senses, which are as numerous as the many colors of a peacock’s tail. This is an image that John Scotus could have received from Cassiodorus, who made a special application of it to the Psalter. To speak in more concrete terms, the interpretation of Scripture is indefinite, being as it is in the image of the infinity of its Author. It is like a great poem, with a pedagogical intent, whose inexhaustible significance leads us to the pure heights of the summit of contemplation.

Henri de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis, Vol. 1, p. 77

This Heart is Filled With Pity For All God’s Creatures

On By JonathanIn Gospel, Orthodoxy, Patristics, PeaceLeave a comment

I am stealing the quotation below from Fr. Stephen; it sums up the way we must relate to a very unjust and violent world, stuff like this and this and this and…. Those injunctions about loving your enemy, putting down you sword- they seem easy enough when we’re just talking about personal enemies (not that they are easy in those instances, even), but they’re even harder when we’re talking about genuinely evil actions, systems and pervasive patterns of injustice- shooting wars, not just the personal verbal battles we fight all too often. What is the way the St. Silouan offers? Pick up the sword only when a really genuine revolution summons? No- pray for the evil people (yourself included), feel the deepest compassion for them. This is the only way, the only way really to truly and authentically resist evil. Lord knows I’ve often felt the urge to pick up the sword, to want to see the powerful evil-doers pay, here, now, to not get away with it. According to St. Silouan- and he has Christ Himself backing him up- that is the wrong spirit. Only love can overcome, forgiveness and compassion- for all- are the only real way.

Lord have mercy on us.

If you think evil of people, it means you have an evil spirit in you whispering evil thoughts about others. And if a man dies without repenting, without having forgiven his brother, his soul will go to the place where lives the evil spirit which possessed his soul.

This is the law we have: if you forgive others, it is a sign that the Lord has forgiven you; but if you refuse to forgive, then your own sin remains with you.

The Lord wants us to love our fellow-man; and if you reflect that the Lord loves him, you have a sign of the Lord’s love for you. And if you consider how greatly the Lord loves His creature, and you yourself have compassion on all creation, and love your enemies, counting yourself the vilest of all, it is a sign of abundant grace of the Holy Spirit in you.

He who has the Holy Spirit in him, to however slight a degree, sorrows day and night for all mankind. This heart is filled with pity for all God’s creatures, more especially for those who do not know God, or who resist Him and therefore are bound for the fire of torment. For them, more than for himself, he prays day and night, that all may repent and know the Lord.

Christ prayed for them that were crucifying him: ‘Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.’ Stephen the Martyr prayed for those who stoned him, that the Lord ‘lay not this sin to their charge.’ And we, if we wish to preserve grace, must pray for our enemies. If you do not feel pity for the sinner destined to suffer the pains of hell-fire, it means that the grace of the Holy Spirit is not in you, but an evil spirit. While you are still alive, therefore, strive by repentance to free yourself from this spirit.

St. Silouan

Good Counsel

On By JonathanIn Current Events, GospelLeave a comment

Hattiesburg, MS, August, 2008.

Please pray for the Gulf Coast region, especially New Orleans, as yet another hurricane bears down, maybe worse than the last one. I only moved from South Mississippi a few weeks ago, and in the intervening space it seems like my home region can’t stay out of the news, and it’s not been good news.

Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy.

St. Moses the Ethiopian

On By JonathanIn East & West, Gospel, Orthodoxy, Patristics, Peace, WarLeave a comment

Today is the feast-day of St. Moses, who had led a life of crime and violence before renouncing the sword and entering a monastery in the Egyptian wilderness. Thinking about his story and his example makes me wonder- how do we renounce the violence and injustice in our lives? Sure, I might not be going around beating people up and stealing their money literally, but what am I doing- or not doing- that perpetuates violence, whether it is through my unforgiveness, or resentment, or my lack of concern and love. That, and how much are we culpable for participating in the unjust structures we live in? The other night I was re-reading the book of Revelations, as part of a class assignment actually, and in doing so I was struck by how incredibly political the book is. God judges the systems and ways of the world- a world that is bloated with injustice, with greed and consumption, not just of goods and capital, but of humans. The saints are called out of that system, out of that world- they refuse to participate in it, and for that they suffer. Those who refuse the mark of the beast- participation in the evil and injustice of the world- suffer for it.

I thought while reading, how do we refuse that injustice, how do we refuse to take the mark of the beast, as it were, while living lives in the world? How do we reject the callous and bloodthirsty ways of the world- what is the correct path? Does the fact that I pay taxes, for example, make me complicit in the wars and intrigues of the government I thereby support? What I am going to tell Christ when He asks about the homeless living a mile from my house, the panhandlers I meet on the sidewalks and do my best to get away from? Sorry, Lord, they were the wrong sort of poor? I’m sorry, God, I disagreed intellectually with the evil I ignored/was complicit in. Will that cut it? For St. Moses, living a life of Christ’s peace in the world was, in some ways, very straightforward- he put down the sword, literally. In a less obvious way, he taught and modeled forgiveness, the root of the peace of Christ. There is a story in which a brother is brought before the community for judgment; St. Moses comes to the church carrying a jar of water with holes in it. The brothers ask about it, and he replies, my sins are like water- they run out behind me and I cannot number them. How am I to judge my brother here then?

He lived the life of Christ’s peace and forgiveness, of his rejection of the methods and systems of the world. He, like Christ, died- not just the death to the flesh, to the ways of the world, but literally. What are we called to? What am I called to in this place I live, in this city, now, to live in a concrete, painful if need be, the life of Christ, the Prince of Peace, in a world of war and hate and violence? That is the struggle- and it is the most important thing, to live-in-Christ, here, now. St. Moses, pray for us who live in a world of drawn swords and angry hearts- pray that we would be blessed with the wisdom and the peace of Christ, our God.

Troparion (Tone 1)

You made the wilderness your dwelling, O our Father Moses, the Bearer of God; you became an angel in the flesh and a wonderworker. Through fasts, vigils, and prayers, you obtained from God special graces to heal the sick and sanctify the souls of those who come to you with trust. Glory to the one who gave you strength! Glory to the one who crowned you! Glory to the one who, through your intercession, grants healing to all!