A March snow...

It looks like a night and day of snow here in Minnesota even as we're on the cusp of spring.

That's not unusual, though, because even as the daylight grows and the fierce northwest winds subside the snow still comes. Thick flakes today, wet with moisture and covering everything in a coat of white. By tonight most of it may be gone because the weather and the change of seasons cannot be denied but still in the small hours of the morning there is a kind of beauty to it all, a memory of the best of winter.

Being the stoic folks we are we often find ways to rationalize about the weather. In winter when the snow falls deep and travel becomes messy and the pace of our lives unwinds we often rationalize it all by saying "Oh well, we need the moisture." It's our way of coming to terms with a nature that's bigger then us and our own fragility in the face of it all but right now it's actually true as well. We're pretty dry. Most of the large snow storms this past winter have journeyed south of us into Iowa and through Illinois, nicking the edge of Wisconsin as they pass. We're below average, water wise, and every bit of wet we get will make a difference months from now.

There is a double blessing in a March snow. In a dry time it brings vital water and no matter how much we get in March there is a different sense about it. A March snow still brings things to a crawl, still messes up our lives, still makes everything inconvenient to us as defined by our current "gotta have it now " culture, but its different. A foot of snow in December means we have at least two months to deal with it. A foot of snow in March may be gone in two days. On occasion tulips will show their leaves right through a March snow, and our own hope emerges as well. Spring is coming and nothing snow can do will change it.

One of ours...

Yup, he's one of ours.

Icon from OCA.org

Math, Creation, and God...

From the London Times, a story of an award for a scientist working the math regarding creation.

Rules of the Fast...

The Lenten Fasting rules from Fr. Joseph at Orthodixie...

A good morning...

Among the simple gifts of life is a good sleep. The best kind is one reasonably undisturbed in a safe, warm, place, long enough to provide rest but not so long as to promote sluggishness. When you have two jobs such a sleep is near sacramental in its effect and the morning after is almost irrelevant because a rested body can easily face nearly any kind of day.

1 in 4...

1 in 4 American teenage girls has an STD according to this study. But wasn't all this supposed to go away when we had all those classes and gave everyone who wanted one a free condom and stopped making those inhibiting moral judgements?

Apparently not, and therein lies a lesson. Some time ago I heard a Christians speaker named Tony Campolo and among his comments was his belief the Christian life would be worth living even if there was no heaven.The story above is a case in point. The ancient wisdom of those Christian traditions and texts stressing faithfulness, chastity, and marriage, far from being some less enlightened notion, are proving to be the way of health and wholeness as disease responds to our lack of inhibition. Nothing but the Christian life will ever stop the ills of our indulgent and godless culture and even if we don't see ourselves as "religious" thier truths are still inevitable.

That all being said it's been one of the discoveries of my life as I grow older, how the Christian path just makes sense, how it flows with the rythms of nature and how its call to live in the world and with others is the way not just to eternal bliss, but to true contentment even in this broken world. How realistic Christian faith is, how practical, how life enhancing, how deep a well it is full of life giving water! My life is most at rest when it flows within this Faith and most troubled when it flows away because these truths were built into the very design of things by the Creator. And so it is, or at least should be, for the world as well.

On stem cells...

An article from First Things on stem cells.

Another thought...

Among the things that amaze me about God is His ability to both see clearly and love truly. Those who love me, even those who love me best, only love a shadow, an image, a bit of the substance with enough smoke and mirrors to hide the darkest things. God sees me in a total exposure, a way I don't even see myself, something beyond what ever cloaks of skin or soul or intellect I can produce. With God I am totally exposed, there is no hiding, no little white lies to keep others from seeing my illnesses. Yet I am totally loved even when those things, those deep pockets in my soul which repel me and would destroy the illusion others have grown to love, are open to the blinding sun. Unfathomable.

A feast beneath the snow...

Spring is starting to break out and as my car carried me over the miles in western Wisconsin I saw the signs of its coming feast.

Throughout the winter as the deer and the animals cross the roads they can fall prey to passing cars and trucks. Thrown violently into pieces they die and freeze and often get covered with snow. In the woods beyond others follow their natural course and pass away. The God who sees sparrows falling remembers but we care little and soon forget; until spring. As the snow retreats all the places where these animals were entombed are revealed again, deer with lifeless eyes peering from shrinking snowbanks, raccoons resting places uncovered by the growing sun.

And it is at this point, when winter has come to the end of its course and those animals who have endured are gaunt with it's scarcity that the feast is revealed. In the course of things fresh meals emerge with the lengthening daylight and between the harshness of winter and the renewal of spring there is enough to make the final push through to the thaw. Coyotes and crows, eagles and weasels and anything from bear to bug are fed by an invisible hand as death gives life in its timeless way.

Such is the way of things along the bluffs and in a hundred hidden coulees where the roads and the land and the river intersect. Such is the way of things, death giving life, in a more profound and heavenly understanding, as Lent blankets the world.

Post 500...

This is post 500 in the Traveling Priest Chronicles, a landmark of sorts I suppose.

I started this blog not knowing for sure what I was attempting to do and only certain there were things I'd like to say and perhaps it would be of some value to record life on the road and whatever thoughts came to me along the journey. I wondered if it were perhaps a bit pompous to think that what I had to say even mattered.

Along the way the blog has been kind of a diary that I share with whoever drops in, the book I intended to write but never quite got around to doing, and a log of the miles and people and miscellanea encountered on the road from St. Paul, Minnesota to LaCrosse, Wisconsin. It's rapidly approaching three years now of travels to St. Elias Church, three years of seven day weeks, three years of motels and its been an adventure. When I get older people make think I'm making it all up, some kind of "Fr John story" they can politely dismiss as an old man's fancy.

I've wondered, sometimes, what I will do if and when I ever actually live in the same vicinity of the parish I serve. What will I call the blog when there are no more travels? But right now its Monday night, I'm a bit road weary and getting ready for the First Sunday in Lent. Home seems like a long way off and I might have to make the run for who knows how long until I finally find it.

Until then I'll just keep traveling and writing and hoping that it blesses whoever comes along to read.

Privacy matters...

A story on the continued inability of the FBI to properly protect citizen's privacy in its investigations and another on the creation of a nationwide computer data system linking investigative organizations. Both beg the question, "Who's watching the watchers?"

Privacy matters, the ability to know that your life is free from undue scrutiny is a bedrock of a free society. Quite frankly this current administration has, in my opinion, significantly eroded the protections that ordinary citizens have from government and corporate interests having access to all kinds of details of our lives whether there is just cause or not. The current strategy of protecting against "terrorism" by leaving borders undefended and large parts of our commercial infrastructure uninspected while increasingly invading the privacy of people just trying to go about their lives seems to have left sense behind.

Someone once said that those who choose to give up their freedoms for security will end up with neither and government, with corporate cooperation, is in the process of making that nightmare come true. Sadly very few in the political class seem to care about this and the issue still hasn't made it above the horizon in the current campaigns. Too many people are focused on the details while the foundations are slowly being hacked away. What 's actually more important, that people have some help with a mortgage or have the freedom to live their lives without some government hack taking a cruise through your private life whenever they feel like it? Do the math.

Divine justice...

It was a beautiful Sunday morning, the air was clear, the sun was bright and Fr. Peter really just wanted to skip Liturgy and go golfing. So he hatched a plan.

He called the Council President and in his best hacking, sneezing, sick, voice told him that he was sorry but he was just so ill and although he really wished he could be there he just needed to rest and so he couldn’t serve that day. When the call was over he got into his clothes, slung the bag over his shoulder, and headed to the golf course.

Meanwhile in heaven the angels were watching the whole thing and reported the matter to God questioning Him as to what he was going to do about Fr. Peter. God calmly replied, “Don’t worry, it’s handled.”

Arriving at the golf course Fr. Peter stepped to the first tee, placed his ball, and swung. The ball exploded off the tee, straight and true over the entire length of the fairway, took three hops and plopped into the cup, the shot of a lifetime. At this point the angels were deeply puzzled. Didn’t God see what had happened and had He forgotten about what Fr. Peter had done? Sputtering and incoherent they asked God why he allowed a hole in one as a reward for such deeds.

God replied “So who’s he going to tell?”

Punishment for atheism...?

A soldier is claiming he was punished and denied promotion because he's an atheist.

It's important to remember that whenever you read about a lawsuit the coverage will be about the initial charges, the claims of the plaintiff packaged to make the most emotional impact possible. It's a strategy to gain publicity, sympathy, and in effect make the opening arguments of the case long before it actually comes to court. This effort is enhanced by the fact that many defendants, unlike plaintiffs, are bound by privacy laws which don't allow them to divulge information that would exonerate them before trial or the simple fact that a news story can come into play before a defendant has even read through the first documents of the case.

My guess is that in a couple of years when both sides have been heard the claims, as they often are, will be much less dramatic, hammered down to size by the cool process of law.

A thought...

Give your loyalty to your job, a fair day's work for a fair day's pay with a little extra in remembrance that in working well we, in a mystical way, also serve our Lord. But never give your job or your company your soul. There is no treasure of earth that is pay sufficient for even a fragment of it.

Religion and war...

Had a co-worker bring out the old "more people have been killed in wars over religion..." chestnut today and having grown tired of hearing stuff like this over time from folks who've combined over confidence and under thinking into the toxic soup of slogan I decided to answer back.

First, in the matter of sheer body count its probable the officially secular and athiestic regimes of the 20th century probably have the honors. The mechanized and systematic killing of the century past simply has no counterpart in human history and resembles something more like an epidemic illness in its gross killing power then the battlefields of even the prior century and certainly less then the supposed "dark ages".

Second, one needs to do some critical thinking and analyze the actual causes of war. There are many cases where religious belief was used by the prevailing authorities as one way to legitimize a particular war, and certainly people who were personally devout have fought in wars and perhaps even seen their involvement as a form of devotion, but not nearly as many cases where religion itself was the actual cause of the conflict. It is probably a fair criticism to say that too often religious groups have lent uncritical support to governments as they embark on wars but even that support does not mean a given war's source is religion, just that religion has allowed itself to become a tool of the larger effort to support a war. A small bit of rational investigation yields the conclusion that war is the sad result of many causes and effects and rarely is it so simple to say that "religion" is the single source of any conflict and often its not even a contributing cause.

The point in this is to help a person think beyond the sound bite and if you can they usually see the complexities of history and discover that a phrase like "More people have died in wars caused by religion..." is simplistic and functionally useless. It's also good for Christians to not be afraid of people making such claims because many who make them are simply regurgitating something they've heard over and over and assume that the repetition of an idea is related to its veracity. A little information beyond the sound bite can sometimes make all the difference.

As for the antagonist who just like to throw things like that in your face to justify whatever it is they're thinking at the moment just remember pearls before swine and such and walk away. That they feel this is some kind of conclusive argument against religion indicates a kind of shallowness of thought that should only be encountered if there is some reasonable hope of growth. If not, you just argue in circles and time and energy go to waste. Let your life do the debating and the Holy Spirit do His work. The harshest critics of our faith often make the best proponents when grace comes calling.

Moses high...?

An Israeli academic suggests that Moses was high on drugs when he saw God.

And, oh by the way, he bases this in part on his own chemically induced experiences. Are you suprised?

IPod...

I remember when IPods first came out there were articles where famous people were asked about what was on theirs. The music they chose, it was presumed, was a kind of window into their life, the unguarded place behind the public persona. There's a truth to that.

This past evening I was reformatting and loading my own IPod, a 30gb U2 signature edition I purchased because it had a last generation price. A quick look at the playlist shows I have a lot of Mozart, a whole bunch of Orthodox chant, and then anything goes from the Ramones to Janis Joplin, the Allman Brothers, and Nat King Cole. What does that say about me? Maybe I'm a bluesy sort of classical chant guy who every once in a while likes to rip it up with best punk band ever. Who knows?

Some things, though, are certain. I find the playlists on most commercial radio to be garbage, whiney pop singers or rap music, country singers who haven't a clue and millionaire rockers complaining about the darkness in their lives. So I like the ability to pick and choose, to not have to take what they think is best for me and like it. Perhaps its that, and not the songs per se, which reveals the most about me. Somewhere in all the craziness of the world I want at least some little world where I call the shots and control the switches. Maybe that's why IPod s are everywhere.

March...

March is here and in these northern climes it means that snow is coming, but winter is not forever. The days are just too long and the Earth is inevitably moving its way through space to the end that sunlight with all its affects cannot be denied.

And so it is with the Kingdom of God.

On media and vision...

Waves of information wash over our personal shores every day. Our world is a world of millions of simultaneous electric conversations flowing through wires, in and out of space, and typed into the glow of computers everywhere there is power. Everyone seems to have 200 channels and yet nothing is on and wading through it all is a kind of martyrdom for the faithful, the running of a profane gauntlet who's blows are as unavoidable as they are unexpected and uncontrolled.

Although the solitude of a monastery beckons in such times it is not and cannot be the world for all, not even most. Those days ended when message and electricity were harnessed at the beginning of the century past and only catastrophe would bring us back to a simpler time. And while we have choices to make and actually have more power in all of this then we think we still participate, in one way or another, in the inevitable media culture.

But we can participate with discernment, in fact we must. As with everything there are larger principles at play and when we understand them we can navigate through these times and how the story of them is presented to us with a kind of insight that leaves us able to survive it all with our soul intact and our realities undistorted.

For Orthodox Christians in a media culture the first of these principles is to understand that our Faith and its object, our Lord Jesus Christ, are more than just ideas or rituals to which we give homage but a matrix through which we screen all the information that comes to us through the course of our lives. The success of any media is rooted in redirecting the way its consumers "see" things, to change the lens through which information and reality itself is perceived. The commercial first wishes you to become aware of your breath and then, in the awareness of it, purchase their mouthwash. For Orthodox it is crucial to understand that our Faith is, among its other attributes, a way of "seeing" ourselves, the world, events, and everything that is with a kind of vision transformed by the Holy Spirit. We understand that as this transformation happens we see things with clarity, observing everything, including ourselves, both for what it truly is and what it could truly become.

Perhaps this is why so many of the saints and ascetics of the past seem to have a kind of holy indifference to the things that trouble us so, the times, the events, the images that push us this way and that. After much struggle they began to acquire a vision of the world as the Holy Spirit would see it and with it came a kind of wisdom and peace that allowed them to see the world and care for its ebbs and flows but not be swept up in it. When eternity is part of our perception of things everything changes.

And in these times this kind of vision may be the most valuable commodity of all. All of the darkness of our culture is presented to us in never ending living color, it's materialism, its wars, its values, its panic, its hungers, and its false hopes. And if our own vision, like St. Peter's on the swirling seas, is captured by it we too are caught in its storm and at peril. Our hope lies in one thing, that the illumination promised to us in our baptism and sealed in our chrismation is made real in us and that as we cultivate it we can stand in a room of televisions and still see the Light.

Memory eternal...

I learned today that Larry Norman has passed away.

For many of us in the 70's and 80's his Christian rock music was a kind of soundtrack, his songs sometimes gritty and passionate but also hopful and uncompromising. Long before Christian contemporary music became a multi-billion dollar industry he was just a man who loved the Lord and wanted to put his faith to the music he loved as well.

In so many times of my own life, especially in times of struggle, I found his music to be a balm, a gift given to me to help make it though another day. And when I heard this morning that he died the words of one of his songs immediately came to mind...

May this good life be the life I lead
May my faith grow like a mustard seed
May Your love be all the love I need
To carry me all the way home....

Too cute...

I was serving the Liturgy yesterday and I stood in the Royal Doors extended my hand for a blessing and said "Peace be with you all..." at which point a young girl of about 3 or 4 in her father's arms in the back of the church flashed me a peace sign.

Gotta love it...

Orthodox Study Bible...

I received my Orthodox Study Bible last Sunday and have been busy opening it up, taking a look around, and seeing how it works.

The Bible itself has been a long time coming and it definitely fills a need. Orthodox Christians seeking a Bible of their own, as it were, in a sea of study Bibles ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous had really nowhere to go until now. Prior to its arrival Orthodox woud need to read these other Bibles with a kind of internal editor in their head, a basic sense of the Tradition of our faith that could filter through the various notes and maps and comments to sift the wheat from the chaff. It could be done but this is so much better because now you can read for the sake of it and with more focus because that editor has a whole lot less to do.

Among the things that many Orthodox will find new is the use of the Septuagint for the Old Testament and what has been called the "Deuterocanonicals" books such as Maccabees and Tobit which, of they existed at all in Bibles were often put in a separate section between the testaments. In the Orthodox Study Bible they are placed where the Septuagint placed them and so they flow right with the books more familiar to many, especially to Protestants who have come to Orthodoxy. For example First Maccabees is right after Esther and Tobit follows Nehemiah.

The order and naming of the more familiar books is also restored to the original flow of the Septuagint so if, for example you've been used to seeing Isaiah right after Song of Solomon you might be suprised to find it after Malachi which many of us had simply assumed was the last book of the Old Testament. It will take some time to get used to but it does illustrate how great the need was for a Bible that reflected historical order and the Orthodox context. Some of the names of the books are slightly different as well. What many of us had learned as 1 and 2 Samuel are named 1 and 2 Kingdoms according to the Septuagint's usage. 1 and 2 Kings are identified as 3 and 4 Kingdoms in the study Bible. The New Testament bookd retain their familiar titles.

I was fortunate to have purchased an Orthodox Study Bible in advance at a discounted price but I would still reccommend the leather bound which is initially more expensive, just under $70, but if properly cared for (which for Orthodox means opened frequently but never abused) should last for years. I never mark up my Bibles or use highlighters first because individual verses, while emotionally and spiritually significant, should never be divorced from their context and second because it just cruds things up. It's also good to keep the Bible is a safe, dry, place appropriate for the storage of a fine book.

It should be noted that there are two great pleasures with owning a new Bible. The first is that initial opening up of the book, the new book smell and gently separating the gold leafed pages. Even if you've read the Bible many times there's something about a new one. The second will come over the years as you and the Bible share your life together. It, and you, will wear with age but those age marks in your Bible are the marks of how the precious things inside have journeyed with you over the years. An old Bible is like an old friend and when the new is gone everything valuable still remains.

There is a myth out there that the Orthodox church and Orthodox clergy don't want you to read the Scriptures. This is simply untrue. For many centuries Bibles were not widely available to the masses because they were hand copied. At times widespread illiteracy also played a part as did the oppression of the Orthodox Church in Muslim and Communist cultures. Sometimes, too, it was simply a matter of Orthodox being spiritually asleep. But the truth is that our faith is a biblical faith and if the opportunity is open each and every Orthodox Christian should be well versed in the Holy Scriptures, interpreting them in the larger context of their Tradition, and applying it's truth to their lives. I would dearly love for my entire parish to read, understand, and live the Bible, the book of books, even as I work to do so myself and I am convinced that the Orthodox Study Bible is an amazing gift for times such as this.

You can get the Orthodox Study Bible at http://www.concilliarpress.com/

Other views on Serbia and Kosovo...

Sadly the whole affair in the former Yugoslavia has often been presented as "Serbs are the bad guys, everyone else is a victim". Here is an alternate view worth considering. In this strife torn part of the world where inter-cultural and inter-religious conflict has gone on for centuries nothing will make sense without a larger picture. As always remember this region in your prayers.

5000....

My thanks to the 5000 and more who have visited this site. Whether by accident or intent I am grateful for your passing through and even though I'm microscopic in terms of visitors compared to many, perhaps most, blogs I hope that what I've done has made some difference.

Some thoughts on Kosovo...

Some thoughts on Kosovo that should be mentioned as context in the larger discussion of Europe creating a Muslim dominated state within its sphere. It would be good for Orthodox Christians to really gain an in depth understanding of that area of the world, its history of inter-religious conflict, and the consequences currently being experienced by our Orthodox brothers and sisters in that area. For the most part we American Orthodox have been very under-educated and silent on these things and our brothers and sisters have been and will bear the cost.

Picked up a CD...

I picked up a CD today "Janis Joplin's Greatest Hits", something I've meant to do for some time. Hers is a tragic story, the downside of all the peace and love stuff people talk about when they idealize the 60's. It seems she had neither but she also had more soul then any ten current female singers combined. Good bass lines, too, for a guy who still loves to play.

Picks up on a theme...

Charles Krauthammer picks up on the Obama religion theme...

A really funny blog...

If you haven't been to http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com/ you're missing a treat. Just be preapred to have your nose tweaked. You know who you are!!

A possible clue...

His record as a Senator is average, which it should be for someone in their first term. He has no military experience. He has little foreign affairs experience. He has never administered any government agency of significance. A visit to his website reveals a platform cobbled together from excerpts of speeches and standard liberal boilerplate. So why is Sen. Barack Obama so popular?

Some have proposed a kind of "Clinton fatigue" among Democrats. The party faithful have had enough of Bill, and Hillary, who's ascendence was in his wake, is descending accordingly. Some have thought her votes for the Iraq war have cost her dearly among the well organized and financed anti-war leftists who control large sections of the Democrat machinery and by and large flocked to Sen. Obama. Others have speculated that in the PC culture of the Democrat party Sen. Obama has the personal demographics to make him a multi-culturalist's dream candidate. There's as many ideas as pundits but perhaps there's something more.

People who measure such things have increasingly noticed that the Democrat party has become the secular party, a place where non-believers and liberal believers have found a home and one that has grown increasingly intolerant of traditional or historic faiths and the idea of transcendent truth. Surveys on religious affiliation and political party trend, as a rule, sharply to identifying the party as the choice of non-believers, agnostics, and liberal believers of all stripes. Anecdotally it would be hard to identify, for example, a single prominent national politician of the party with a consistent pro-life record and the party as a whole is moving as quickly as it can without incurring the wrath of the folks back home in embracing an agenda of marriage and family unmoored from historic norms. It could reasonably be said, except for perhaps the interesting fixation of African American evangelicals and pentecostals in the Democrats, that the party is a kind of political wing for the unitarian universalist movement in this country. And therein lies a possible clue.

Could it be that Sen. Obama's success comes from his ability to, perhaps even unconciously, tap into the spiritual hunger of a group of people who've long abandoned traditional forms and create a kind of spiritual energy with vague catch phrases like "We are the change we've been waiting for..." and a kind of elocution and energy long on emotion and short on troubling things like substance that fills a void of the increasingly secular Left? Has Sen. Obama, in fact, created a kind of "political pentecostalism" complete with an emotional contact to a kind of transcendency that allows the fervor of religion without having to actually believe in anything other than believing, a perfect kind of faith for a party increasingly faithless in the traditional sense?

This at least is an interesting possibility. People who wouldn't be caught dead at a Benny Hinn event or in the mega pews of a Joel Osteen have perhaps found in Sen. Obama the preacher they've been looking for, someone like them who makes them feel good, insists on little except supporting the preacher, and requires none of the contemplation or sacrifice that comes with maturity in faith or politics. Whether he stumbled on this by accident or it's a product of purpose and design it may be possible the Senator has effectively taken the the ethos of so much of our current Christian culture, shallow, emotional, form without substance, and grafted it to a kind of generic secular vision laced with words evocative of spirituality and in doing so created a hybrid packing all the emotional wallop of a camp meeting but with no larger altar call then to vote for him.

Will it work? We'll see. But in a time such as ours it could happen and that says a lot about where we are, how far we may have to travel, and what tasks lie ahead for us as Orthodox Christians.

The hits just keep on coming...

More on the cult of Obama, this time it's MSNBC journalist Chris Matthews falling under the spell.

This has sort of taken a life of its own from curious news item to cultural fad and its getting both fun and wierd to watch from a distance.

From Holland...

Lent rebranded as "Christian Ramadan"...

That sound is me banging my head on the table.

Son of the cult of Obama...

This time women are acting like Sen. Obama is the Beatles...

Imagine how different the world really would be if those who follow Christ had the same passion, minus, of course, the whole Beatles fan thing.

More on the cult of Obama...

This time from Australia.

Now if you wonder why I'm linking this I'll explain. People, I believe, are naturally "messianic" that is they're attracted to people who they perceive are larger than life or larger than themselves or who they see as the solution to their problems or providing some other kind of solace.

This can be fairly harmless as in kids pretending to be their favorite football player or even positive as in our Orthodox openness to embracing and emulating Saints as they model Christ. There's a line, though, sometimes nearly invisible, between a normal human admiration and transcendent veneration and as that line is crossed danger is not far behind. The danger is rooted in our own human brokenness and the reality that both we, and those we consider heroic, are still human and transcendent veneration will always bump up aganst that humanity and sometimes with horrible effect.

In the article linked above the author contemplates what may happen if a surge of people actually propel Sen. Obama into the presidency only to discover that this larger than life image, skillfully crafted, disappears into the real world of actually running a government. What will happen when they discover that this person, so eloquent in front of cameras, is, in actuality, a person and not the "one" who will change everything they think is wrong with this country and usher in a new shining era? After all could anyone be? Where will all that affection go? Where will the emotion of the moment travel? It might be something even the Senator should contemplate.

And less you think this is just about Sen. Obama and the current fascination of the political left one only needs to recall the kind of adulation spent on Ronald Reagan during his term and after with some even suggesting his visage be placed on our Mount Rushmore! Even today his memory is cited by the political right and his veneration continues. We all do it, and we all need to be careful as well.

We humans know we need a savior. Instinctually inside of us we, whether we are religious or not, are convinced there must be something, someone, outside of us with the capacity to deliver us from our nagging doubts, our sense of futility, the awareness of our brokenness. But to give that kind of veneration and power to a fallible human of any kind, including clergy, is fraught with peril. Perhaps the rule for we as Christians should be to not give anyone that kind of worship unless and until they die and rise again.

A little heat...

The Archbishop of Catnerbury is beginning to feel a little heat for his remarks on the inevitability of Islamic Sharia law in Britain. It appears all hope is not yet gone. But as I've said before perhaps one of the greatest benefits of the rise of radical Islam in the world is that Christians will realize the value of Christian influenced culture on their lives. Sometimes we forget what we've got until it's gone.

Imagine a world ruled by the likes of Osama Bin Laden or any of a hundred would be caliphs and you'll quickly understand that actually all religions don't teach the same thing but they do matter and the trajectory of a culture and all who inhabit it often hang in the balance.

Now if we could just get our politicians to wake up and smell the coffee...

Last of the headaches...

The doctors report is in, chronic sinusitis with a deviated septum. Prescription? Levaquin for ten days and then a visit to an ENT to check things out. Thank you Lord.

The cult of Obama...

An interesting article here. People without a messiah will create one because they still have that inherent need. And therein lies a lesson.

One of the things Christians, I believe, have to remember is that politics is always about choosing the best option among a group of persons who are, like us, sinners. Sometimes we get more, sometimes we get less, but we never get perfect, should never ask for it, never expect it, and certainly never place our trust in any person as if they were.

With friends like this......

The Archbishop of Canterbury says that implementation of some aspects of Islamic Sharia law in Britain is "unavoidable". With that attitude thank goodness he wasn't serving in the late 1930's.

It's sad to see that some in the Church seem to be unable to stand up for the values that underline Christian civilization. Quite frankly we've seen so many examples of the harshness and brutality of Islamic Law that I can't imagine why anyone who could avoid it doesn't or what possible value or benefit it would be to any society where it is now not present. The larger irony is that many things of value in countries where Sharia Law predominates, from electric lights to airplanes to oil wells, are the result of importing the fruit of predominantly Christian cultures. Can anyone even imagine someone living in traditional Afghanistan inventing television?

Of course we in cultures significantly influenced by Christianity have made mistakes, sometimes terrible ones, and continue to do so (we also have, because of Christianity, the mechanisms of positive change). But does anyone with a shred of common sense think the world should look less like the European / American democracies and more like Saudi Arabia or Iran? Why can't the Archbishop of Canterbury crawl out of his multi-cultural relativistic mind hole and think that perhaps the reason his country is being flooded with Muslim immigrants is precisely because they're fleeing such places for something better, the very place he thinks will be improved by importing the ideas that turned those places into cultural rubble centuries ago.

Perhaps its only at the first beheading, sadly perhaps his, that he'll understand.

Just a thought...

I was listening to the radio on the way in to work today and there was an ad for a sale on seafood. It brought up a question.

Why is it on sale and does a person really want to eat discount seafood? Every once in a while I see people selling shrimp, for example, out of the back of a truck on a hot summer day and I have to tell you that while the price is good there's something about shrimp in the summer sun that's less than enticing.

Just a thought.

Headaches part four...

8:00 AM and laying on a movable bed, face down, chin up, arms at my side, looking for all the world like a ski jumper being shot through a magnetic doughnut. In and out in a little around 15 minutes after the first try was unsuccessful. Now comes the worst part, the waiting time when every little thought finds its voice.

Headaches part three

It's about four in the morning and I've been up a while with a headache so I decided to take a few migraine type over the counters and hang out with the cat.

Yesterday I was at the doctor and he took a look at me, prescribed a rather powerful and expensive medication, Imitrex ($231 for nine pills thank goodness for insurance) and scheduled me for a CAT scan this morning at 8 AM. He thinks there may be a chronic infection of the sinus in there somewhere that the usual antibiotics can't touch and so he wants some pictures. If I can get a copy I'll post them here so you can see what's really inside my head.

Headaches part two...

In a few hours I'll be paying a visit to a new doctor. The new year apparently is the time when your HMO gets changed and so I have to start all over again with an unknown doctor and he, in this case, with me.

It's about the pesky headaches that arrived the day after Christmas and still seem to be lingering around. I've had the chiropractic work done and its helped some. I've treated the sinus infection and that has made things a bit better. I've even stopped the meds. Yet they're still there, bearable by their familiarity but still a nuisance.

The truth is I'm not a big fan of the medical industrial complex even though I've made my living within its embrace for many years. To get to the bottom of this we're going to have to question, poke, and prod. All along the way there will be forms to fill out and rooms in which to wait. In the end we still may fing no immediate answer or worse yet the doctor will give up and say "It's all in your head", which, of course, it actually is but there's no comfort and no resolution in that. Regardless I've brought a book to pass the time.

I've thought about all the scary options like "What if it's a tumor?" and that seems so unreal it would take me a moment of two to focus if I actually heard those words, some seconds to absorb it as something other than abstract. I suppose if that were the case I'd at least have a target to shoot at, a direct cause and effect and in some sad sort of way an answer. These things happen and why should I be exempt?

But in truth the chances are slim and what's more likely in store for me is the presence of a new malady in my life. When I talk about this with the folks who live where I work they tell me of a lifetime of migraine headaches and how it impacts their life. I remember having these headaches occasionally as a child. I would call them "light headaches" because I just wanted to close my eyes and stay in the dark hoping for some relief. Perhaps they're back to stay, given a new lease on life by virtue of old accidents and injuries, new stresses, and who knows what else. I suppose I have Adam and Eve to thank for this, welcome to the mortal world.

The one blessing in this is that it has drawn me closer to God. I'm not saying I'm some sort of saint or anything like that. I've got a long way to go. But illness has the power of clarifying things, of providing focus, of shedding all that is less and directing the heart to all that matters. At two in the morning when I'm awakened by my head hurting very few things other then prayer make sense and the realization that, whatever the diagnosis, I truly am mortal and subject to all the laws of age and decay that temporarily rule this world really does set my sights on higher things. I wouldn't want the pain if I could help it but it seems that this kind of insight and pain somehow are part of the same package and so the trade, for now, seems at least sort of fair.

That all being said it's a pretty good day today, no splitting headache and just the usual sort of pressure feeling that's been my companion now for over a month. My eyes are a little out of focus but not so bad that I can't drive or work. In a little while the search for answers begins. I'll have my book ready for the waiting room and my prayer rope if things get rough.

1984 redux...

I'm always cautious when the State offers the promise of security for just a BIT more survelliance.

Does anyone really think that a convinced terrorist will say "I'm sorry they have an iris scan of me so I guess I can't blow myself up?" Meanwhile a whole bunch of folks who had background checks because they wanted to be Scout leaders and such will have loads of personal information just sitting there for what???

There are risks that come with being free people, sometimes dangerous people can manipulate freedom to their own ends, but they are small compared to the burdens of those who live with the all seeing eye of the State. God help us if this is a lesson we're going to have to learn for ourselves.

The Everlasting Man...

I've just begun reading G.K. Chesterton's "The Everlasting Man" and like "Orthodoxy" its shaping up to be a magnificent read. If you haven't read either of the two I'd highly recommend them but be prepared for some serious reading, these books come from a day when writers and readers both had educated tastes.

Sadness...

Apparently Muslim terrorists have used one, perhaps two, women with Down's Syndrome as unwitting suicide bombers in Iraq, possibly denotating the devices by remote control.

The saddest thing is that this made sense to someone, somehow, some way.

Weather...

The weather is getting fierce again. Blizzards and whiteouts (a whiteout occurs when the wind blows snow and drastically reduces visibility) with temperatures dropping down to -15 or more farenheit with windchills (windspeed increasing the impact of the cold on skin) dropping down to -40 and more. Highways have been closed and National Guard armories opened to accomodate the stranded travelers.

One of the interesting things in all of this is that despite LaCrosse being several hours south of the Twin Cities the weather in winter is often more difficult. Cold winds blowing down from Canada meet warm air coming the southwest US in Iowa and southern Minnesota / Wisconsin. The result is snow and while there wasn't a bit of it here just an hour south of us roads were closed because people couldn't see. Add the hills, valleys, and generally rural topography around LaCrosse and things can grind to a standstill quite quickly.

Of course there's very little to be done. Everyone just needs to be careful and wait for things to blow over. This is the least charming part of winter. There's nothing of the Currier and Ives gentle winter scenes in all of this. It's just flat out cold and brutal. I wonder on days like this how the first people to live in this area ever survived things like this and the settlers who followed as well.

What else can be said? It's just a good day to be somewhere else.

Middle age most depressing.,..

It seems the experts now think that your 40's are the most depressing time of your life.

I'm 47 so I'm apparently working my way out!

A short piece on stress...

On which I myself must resonate...

Missing church...

For the first time in some time I will miss church today. The sinus infection I've been working though this past week, and perhaps for some weeks prior to that, has won this round and I'll be at home with the cats on Sunday morning.

From the time I was a child I remember going to church, without fail, every Sunday morning. For want of a better term it has been the one consistent habit, excluding sin, of my life, transcending all the years and with me wherever in the geographical, spiritual, and social sense of that word I have lived. Being in church on Sunday is like a metronome in my life, setting the rhythm every seven days and allowing me to keep a steady pace.

Of course its not always been as ideal as that. I remember coming to church, especially as a teenager, in what I would've described in those days as "duress" which really meant, in retrospect, any situation that disallowed the full flourishing of primal selfishness. I've also been to church hungover on a number of times in those 'glory days" if not from Saturday night at least from the truth of what I had done. But I still showed up, without a wedding garment of virtues for sure, but at the door of the feast hoping, I guess, to slip in unnoticed.

In my charismatic days I remember going to church hoping for something, that mystical connection that everyone else seemed to be having but eluded me. I would stand silent and wondering as a sea of glossalalia ebbed and flowed about me wishing for a bit of that rapture for myself. Alas, it was not to be and rightly so. Looking back I could see myself just stuck in that place going from week to week looking for the "buzz". Intoxicants, spiritual or otherwise, seem to keep people as children in the worst sense of that word.

In these last years the rhythm and habit have taken over again. I realize I simply have to be there, to acknowledge at least once a week that I am not God and there is much in this universe larger than me. My mood at any given day matters little, although I should strive to be at peace within and without. Whether I am charming or profound means basically nothing, that I am tied into the eternal pace of the presence of God means everything. Whatever state I find myself in I need to at least be present to holy things and in doing so my life is changed for the better whether I immediately see it or not.

But today I will not be there. And perhaps this is to teach me, to call to my mind the longing of every heart to be with God and make next Sunday, presuming good health, more precious. I'm still pondering this, and may be for some time.

Utopian evolutionary psychology...

An article worth reading.

You must see this...

A weekend off...

I don't like this but I think my body is telling me to rest. I have a sinus infection and the antibiotics are just starting to work and more are on their way. If I don't stop, rest, and let this thing run its course it just won't go away. Looks like a weekend in the house, blankets and recliner. Sigh.

Parts that don't work

I think the hardest thing about getting older is that your parts start breaking down. There are distinct advantages to age. Time and experience are tremendously valuable and very few people would like to have an 18 year old's maturity. But a lot of folks want an 18 year old's body, firm of skin, easily recovering from injury, and slim of figure. That seems to be the ideal combination, an 80 year old soul in an 18 year old body. I'm working on the soul thing, but sadly I think the body is beyond hope.

Some Middle Eastern stuff...

An interesting article on Iraq from Atlantic magazine.

For some time now I've posited that the single largest failure of our efforts in Iraq was not about military strategy. We really did "win" for want of a better word the major military portion of the war, and quite easily for that matter with, in military terms, a very low rate of casualty. Where we have failed is in the cultural part of the battle, failing to take in to sufficient considerations the full measure of the social, political, and religious fabric of the societies where we chose to insert ourselves.

My feeling, and its just an opinion, is that we were very much involved in how to get division a to point b to the extent that we didn't even consider factors such as clan, tribe, religion, culture, and the effect our incursion would have on these relationships. We seemed genuinely suprised when all of the sudden Sunnis and Shiites, freed from the strong arm of Saddam Hussein, would use that freedom to settle centuries old grudges. And wouldn't just a bit of study have quickly revealed that Kurds, and Iranians for that matter, aren't Arabs and may have little in common with "Arabs" even if they shared the same religion? Is there even such a thing as a central casting "Arab" at all? Like Gulliver we are being held down by thousands of tiny threads, the threads of the tapestry of culture, religion, and history we ignored for the "big picture" of our own understandings of how things should be projected on to a part of the world that, despite our hopes, is rooted in understandings of faith, culture, and humanity that are sometimes very different from our own.

Perhaps in the future it would be good for our leaders, thinking about war and peace and foreign policy, to have not just generals and politicians in the loop when decisions are made but also experts in religion, culture, language, and history as well. Had people such as these been given a real voice we might have made different choices about Iraq or not made the mistakes we did in the former Yugoslavia or saved ourselves a world of hurt in who knows what other places where we've acted as world police. Knowing the cultural/spiritual/social map of a place seems to be at least as important as the physical map, and perhaps in the long run, as we seem to be discovering, even more valuable.

Clergy bless Planned Parenthood building...

Story here...

Every once in a while you need to see a story like this to remind you of how good you have it even on the worst day of being Orthodox.

Cold!

It's been the coldest weekend in a while in this part of the world with temperatures in LaCrosse dipping close to -20 Fahrenheit. It looks like we're getting real winter back and even as I type away the temperature is sipping back below zero again.

I admit I'm kind of a fanatic about caring for my car. I wash it, alot, and keep everything in the best possible form. But in times like this it can mean the difference between being stopped on the side of the road hoping for help to arrive before frostbite or making it home safe and warm. It's amazing what just a slight drop of temperature can do to the various pieces of metal, plastic, glass, cloth, and rubber that make up a car. It's also amazing at how well it will respond with just a little bit of care.

I'm also feeling a bit better. The headaches I wrote about earlier, thanks to the chiropractor and some exercises / cold packs / aspirin are not as frequent and I'm starting to get over being dizzy all the time. I have an appointment with the chiropractor tomorrow and I'll be seeing an MD early next week. I still don't feel up to snuff and the truth is at least part of it has to do with just being flat our exhausted. Another part is weaning myself off a medication I was taking. I loved how it helped me but I couldn't take the side affects. It's so hard to find a medication that does good without making you pay for it somewhere else and it seems that often you to negotiate how much good is balanced by the negative.

The one thing about this time of feeling unwell is that I've been trying to pray more. Being ill makes me think about things and that usually draws my mind to God. I try to pray more, I need to, and I've become aware, again, of how this body is wearing out over time no matter how well I care for it. I work among older people and as I get older I get more of a taste of what they must go through as age takes its toll. Being ill reminds me that I won't be living forever, at least not in this present form, and even as my head sometimes aches and I feel like I've just gotten off a carnival ride other things have become more precious.

I feel, too, an urgency of time. Some of this, of course, is pride, my thinking that what I do and who I am is so important that time has to accommodate it all. But most of it, I think, is about my being a person of the horizon. I hate to sleep because I think of the things I'll miss and I don't like the thought of one day dying because even with all its struggles there is still a sweetness about life and the potential of discovery that fascinates me. I think about the places I've not gone and dream remaining to come true and a certain sadness sets in.

As messed up as life can be sometimes I have come, over the years, to understand that it is still a gift of God and something to be enjoyed whenever possible. All of the good things in life are a foretaste of even better things to come and sometimes I drive and see great beauty in nature and think of what it will one day be like when it is finally freed from its mortality. I think about that for me as well. I'm a messed up sinner, I've done some terrible things and a whole lot of tiny terrible things as it were, and I hate everything I've done wrong even when I find myself doing it again and again. I just pray that God will have mercy on me at some future time and see that inside of this messy broken frame there is a heart that, however imperfectly , still desires Him.

One day I will have to stand before Christ and it will be a painful exposure at times, to see my life recalled in detail beyond my imagination and there will be times when I will be deeply ashamed. There will be only one thing to say "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner..." But I believe it will be enough, not because of me, but because of Him. Even now it is often the only prayer I can say in my weakness and I trust that God, the lover of mankind, will be able to fill in the details in ways only He knows.

It's still cold outside and the snow is falling. There's a cat on my bed and even though its early I feel like I need to read a little and get some sleep. Imagine that! There will be enough things to do tomorrow and God will be there when I wake up to face the new day.

An article on the origins of the Koran...

An article about the rediscovery of an archive of documents purporting to provide evidence of the development of the text of the Koran over time.

Why is this important?

For over a century the Bible has been subjected to many different kinds of analysis as to sources, historical settings, literary forms, and language. In some cases this has been helpful providing insight into the truths of Scripture that had not been explored before such as the relation of the wording of a text to its cultural setting. In others it has been used as a tool by skeptics to dispute the truths of Scripture by viewing them simply as cultural or linguistic constructs unattached to any larger or transcending reality.

For the most part Christians understand that there has been a certain development of the text in the sense that God inspired writers who used the words and images of their times to communicated larger truths. There is an interplay, in the Christian understanding, of God, the author of a Scriptural text, and the times in which they lived. Not so with the Koran.

The prevailing understanding of the Koran among Muslims is that it is a direct dictation to Mohammed and word for word a replica of the perfect word of God. If it can be shown that the text of the Koran has undergone revisions, compilations, or other kinds of adjustments over time it would be a crucial readjustment of what is probably the central tenet of Islam, that Mohammed was a direct revelator of God's word. The implications could be staggering.

Keep your eyes open for this story.

An interview with Metropolitan Kyrill...

An interview with Metropolitan KYRILL. Thanks to Paradosis.

Good luck guys, hope to see you in the Super Bowl!

I couldn't resist...

A wife invited some people to dinner. At the table, she turned to their six-year-old daughter and said, 'Would you like to say the blessing?' 'I wouldn't know what to say,' the girl replied. 'Just say what you hear Mommy say,' the wife answered. The daughter bowed her head and said, 'Lord, why on earth did I invite all these people to dinner?'

Left, Right, and hate...

A study of who "hates" more, those on the political left or the right.

I think the results extend to the theological as well. From my own experience going through seminary with the evangelical/liberal American Baptist Churches and then moving towards historic Christian faith while in Clinical Pastoral Education I can at least anecdotally say that I have encountered more derision from those who claim a theology of "tolerance" than any other kind of person, even those who weren't Christian. I suspect that many conservative or traditional Christian students who have run the gauntlet of life in a mainline seminary or CPE would say a silent "amen" as well.

I remember Clinical Pastoral Education and a discussion about the historic position of the Church regarding gender and ordination. I explained where I was moving and began to explain some of the reasons when a UCC student got a snarl on her face and said "That's just bull****"." So much for listening and responding to ideas with ideas. What was worse was that the director of the CPE program, a Lutheran clergy, was too cowardly to intervene, having been so cowed by years of feminist rhetoric that he could not even stand up for civility in disagreement.

In seminary I remember being called out by a female professor for the crime of not adding the word "sisters" to a Bible passage that read ironically, "How good it is for brothers to dwell together in unity..." Never mind that as Baptists we were supposed to have the freedom of handling the Scriptures for ourselves, or even that it was clear, and had been since those words were first penned that they included everyone. Those were logical, thoughtful, arguments that were met with anger justified (from a white woman who had graduated from both Wheaton and Harvard) by her "oppression. "

The truth is when people come to Orthodoxy they often discover the first place in their whole careers where they can breathe free air and not have to tip toe around the politically correct and emotionally brittle hardliners that dominate so many Christian communities today. It can be just a relief to hear God described as "Father" without anyone scrunching up their faces. Imagine believing what the Church has always taught without fear of a hysterical attack. It's why so many have come, why it takes them a while to understand they have nothing to fear, and why they think they've discovered the haven of their souls after years of voyaging on stormy seas.

Bible accurate again...

Here's a link to another article about historic information in the Bible validated by archaeological discovery. The list just keeps on growing as does the list of 1800's vintage "higher critics" of scripture spinning in their graves.

Watching over you...

Our current director of the CIA is proposing having our government expand its capacity and gain the ability to monitor all US internet traffic. Is anyone getting the irony of such things?

We always, as Christians, strive to be loyal to our government, to pay our taxes and give honor to its laws. But it's never an unthinking allegiance, an allegiance without understanding. The threat of terror is real, but is expanding the reach of the government into every nook and cranny of our lives the solution? Can one defend a society by ignoring, even betraying, its original principles?

These are important questions that even Christians, who in this country are often inclined to give our government the benefit of the doubt, need to ask. Like those who designed this country we need to trust those who lead, but with our eyes wide open.

Headaches, pt. 2...

I had the day off to visit the chiropractor regarding my headaches and discovered the return of an old acquaintance from 2000.

That was the year I was struck by a drunk driver and thrown off from my motorcycle while it was stopped at a traffic light. For the most part the injuries have subsided but every now and then a reminder from that time returns in the form of neck pains, headaches, numbness in the arms, random pain. They gave me money in the settlement but I would rather have never been there in the first place and avoided all of this.

Anyway, it looks like aspirin and ice packs on the neck with special exercises for a while to get all of this under control. It also means an extra wide strap for my mandolin and a reminder for me every time I look at a motorcycle with that old familiar longing.

Headaches...

The day after Christmas I began to have headaches, migraine type headaches, and off and on they've been with me since then with the added touch of nausea and dizziness. At first I thought it was about a change in diet and then perhaps about a side affect of medication. Not so, apparently, as I've made the investigatory changes and the headaches continue. Tomorrow I'll be off from work and visiting various medical folks to check up on things.

This is not the first time I've had a series of headaches. In 2000 I was on a motorcycle at a stop light and a drunken driver hit me and sent me to the pavement. On occasion after that I've had times when a cluster of headaches has hit and I either ride it out or go to the chiropractor and get my neck adjusted. Perhaps this is another of these times.

Regardless tomorrow will be a day of rest, a sabbath for someone who should probably have a few more of them. I need it to find out what's making my head hurt and get some rest.

Good luck Packers!!

Images of controversy...

These are the images, published some time ago in Denmark that have spawned riots around the world and have at least one person in Canada brought before a "human rights tribunal" in Alberta for publishing them. People have died because of these images. In some places in the world I could be killed simply for posting them.

Christians around the world, of course, will be suprised at how tame these pictures actually are compared to the constant barrage of pornographic images of Christ and Christianity regularly presented in all kinds of media and sometimes supported by government agencies funding the "arts". Caricatures of Christians, obscene works of art based on Christian themes, jokes and put downs directed at things we as Christians hold sacred are more common then ever and in certain parts of our culture are considered evidence of spohistication and educated cynicism.

So why did I post those pictures?

I don't hate Muslims. I disagree with some of the claims of Islam but I don't hate those who practice the faith and have interacted with Muslims all my life without incident. I plan to keep it that way. This is America and people have the right to practice any religion or none and to convince others, if they can, to do the same. This is how it should be in all the world.

And part of that freedom is that sometimes faith is ridiculed and people and things close to us are held up to critique and mockery. I don't enjoy it when people say ridiculous things about Jesus and make fun of my Savior. It hurts. But the freedom that allows this to happen is still important. For every unkind word said about Jesus I can counter because I have the freedom to speak a rebuttal. Freedom is messy sometimes, rough and tumble, and people and feeling get damaged. Outrages happen and we all, in some ways, have to swallow and take it for the sake of the larger principle. Frankly, as well, there are times when our critics are actually more honest about us then we are and their arrows stick in us because they reflect a truth we'd rather not see. But even if they're just malicious fools I'd still rather put up with them and preserve basic freedom then live in a world where only one idea was allowed and all dissent was crushed. After all, no one is ever in charge of anything forever, and today's emperor is tomorrow's slave.

Now I would like to speak to those who are Muslim and may view this blog from places around the world. You may be very offended by those pictures or you may care less. But to be in a free society means that you'll sometimes have to face uncomfortable things. Freedom comes with the risk of being offended, sometimes daily, and sometimes by people who are just doing it because they get their kicks that way.

But it's still good to be free. We have discovered in this country that faith unconstrained by the state is actually deeper and more fervent then faith coerced by the authorities or maintained by social fear. People in this country, with all its faults, still have the right to choose their belief and because they do its often more precious to them because it belongs to them by a commitment of their will.

Yet in some places in the world there are people who want to control you, to gain power and influence by pandering to your basest fears, by exagerating and demagoguing and playing your emotions so they will have what they crave. It happens everywhere, even among Christians, but right now in the Islamic world they have, in some places, tremendous authority. They want to rule you and use your faith as a tool to bend you towards their dreams. And you have a choice to make.

If you are confident in your faith and its values then all the critique in the world, whether justified or not, won't make a difference, in fact it can't make a difference. You may not like the pictures I've posted any more than I would enjoy looking at a picture of the Virgin Mary covered with feces but the truth is that such a thing has no effect on my faith, not even a bit, and never will, and I refuse to give power to any man who would use such a thing for his own aggrandizement.

If you truly believe that Mohammed was a prophet of God then what difference does what some person puts in a paper make in relation to that belief? Does it change it? Is he less of who you believe he is simply because somebody drew a cartoon image of him? Is the deepest belief of your heart so flimsy that one man in Denmark can unsettle it? What could that man do that would threaten God? And what idolatry is it to give him that power by virtue of your response?

The truth is that you and I and every person of faith can choose what we do when faced with provocative, even offensive, words, images, and ideas directed at us and at our God. And when you or I or anyone else succumbs to violence we reveal that our faith is shallow, our belief brittle, and our actions unworthy of the higher good we claim to seek in our faith. In fact the person who makes such scandalous things actually achieves victory because of our reaction.

Right now its a pretty chaotic world out there and we're in desperate need of clearer and calmer heads to keep us from turning our earth into a never ending conflagration. We will probably never agree on the details of theology, but if we do agree, whatever faith we have, to not give way to our darker sides, even if provoked, we will go a long way towards making the peace and sending those whould manipulate us for their own ends into history's rubbish.

Dear God...

Orthodox resources re pornogrpahy...

From the Greek Archdiocese, a list of resources for people seeking help dealing with pornography.

Women stuff...

My "other" work, as it were, is in the health care field providing services to seniors in an assisted living setting. It's a largely matriarchal culture and so the odd male working in my field gets some real insight into the lives of women as we spend the greater portion of our day in and among them.

Now I may be getting skewed feedback but it seems like its an emotional, physical, and spiritual minefield out there for the single woman living in this time and place. The need seems to have remained the same over time, to be authentically loved and give love in return. The achieving of that ideal, though, seems ever more elusive because the rules have changed and women seem to be getting the short end of it.

I wonder about the cause of it all sometimes. Is it feminism gone awry? Moral decline leading to an "everyone for themselves" attitude that leaves women more vulnerable? Some other thing that I can't possibly know because I'm a male? I wish I knew for sure.

What seems to be happening, though, at least from my point of view is a kind of "Hugh Hefner has hijacked the women's movement" sort of thing. Let me explain. It seems like today's women have been indoctrinated into the idea that sluttiness is part of being equal with men. Casual sex, with all its potential physical, emotional, and spiritual harms, seems to be part of the required items women must carry in their portfolio. Now please understand that casual sex is dangerous for men as well, but men don't get pregnant, and men give more than they get with women in the STD arena, and let's not even get into heartbreak.

Women are looking for real love but the prevailing cultural ethos of easy sexuality and its demands that women emulate all of their male counterparts worst attributes in this makes war against that basic hunger. Putting out is expected and right now there are millions of women all over the country on their backs hoping that the guy on top of them may the one, or perhaps they've already just given up and hope he's good for whatever they need for the moment. The result always seems to be the same, women growing cynical and bitter about men, the natural and created complement of the genders poisoned by repeated let downs. Women who want to love men and be loved by them start to think of them as jerks looking for nothing more than a place to get off.

We, and especially women, have been lied to. We've been given an image of our sexuality and how we are to relate to each other as men and women that is literally killing us body and soul. The bill of goods we've been sold has not produced what we deeply desire, true love and has given us a hellish oversupply of what we do not need, heartache, loneliness, illness, and just plain messed up lives.

What to do?

At this point I suppose the reader is looking for a brief lecture on a return to Christian values in love and marriage. That would be a good place to get to, the destination of it all. But I think first a revolution is in order, a revolution led by women. Behind the scenes, out of the sex obsessed media's eye there are growing number of women who realize that something is dreadfully wrong and in their pain are having their eyes opened to the great lies of our time. Somewhere along the line those small fires will kindle into a conflagration and more and more women, even if its just for the sake of avoiding disease and emotional destruction, will begin to say "I want love, the real thing, the kind that respects my dignity and reflects more of the great human desire for two souls merging and a whole lot less of our society's vision of two people bumping in the night. I want someone to know me in every real sense before they "know" me in the Biblical one. I want men to see me for everything I am and not just as the life support system for my genitals. And I'm not going to be lied to again."

And when women want, yes even demand something better and refuse to accept anything less men will follow. We may howl and protest at the dying of a falsehood that allowed us easy access to unconditional orgasms via women conditioned to believe that being a whore was being liberated, but we will follow. When women in large numbers demand higher standards from men they will get them.

You see men desire real love as well. We, too, are caught up in the endless cycle of one nighters, victims of the cynicism and jaded reflexes that so characterize the relationships between the sexes. We may not know because we've bought into the whole thing even more then most women have, but somewhere inside of us we know something is really messed up about the way things are and we need some help, your help, finding our way back.

A quote from G.K. Chesterton...

"Men are ruled, at this minute by the clock, by liars who refuse them news, and by fools who cannot govern." - The New Name, Utopia of Usurers and Other Essays, 1917

This is why you should read Chesterton, if you haven't already.

More wisdom from Dawn Eden...

From Canada's National Post.

A little wisdom from Peter Hitchens...

An article on Christianity, Islam, and Britain.