Dear Friends,

I am now a father. Posts will follow.

It's been a very long break but I believe the break is breaking itself. So.... discipline.

I don't know if I will tag anyone. I'll be an annoying little boy who subverts and ruins the whole game of tag by getting tagged and then promptly walking home.

1. One book that changed your life:

For the Life of the World by Alexander Schmemann

What can i say, it sounds cliche coming from an english speaking Orthodox Christian who attends an OCA church, but it's true it changed my life. God is truly among us. That is to say, God truly loves us. I don't think I really believed it before reading this book. Perhaps I should also give an honourary mention to existentialist canon - Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Kierkegaard, Hiedegger and of course everyone's favourite, Nietzsche. I suppose change does not necessarily mean positive change and these guys had a profoundly negative and positive effect on me. Merleau-Ponty and Kierkegaard are among the best because there is an understanding of mystery in them. For Kierkegaard there is the mystery of love and one's movement toward God and in Merleau-Ponty there is the mystery of the visible and the invisible. It was these chaps who both tore down my faith in God and also moved me toward an appreciation and love of the physical body. In a very round about way, these guys taught me more about the incarnation than any evangelical theologian I had read up until that time.


2. One book that you’ve read more than once:

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

A short and powerful book about light shining in the darkness.


3. One book you’d want on a desert island:

Let me be completely honest here - I would want the Gospels AND the SAS Survival Handbook.


4. One book that made you laugh:

Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol. As is the case with all the books I've which happen to be authored by Russians, I have yet to finish it ... and I've started it 5 times.


5. One book that made you cry:

The Chronicles of Narnia by Mr. Clive Staples Lewis. There's something about being transported back into childlike imagination that opens the heart to what is real.


6. One book that you wish had been written:

Living The Faith: How to Live the Fulness of the Faith without Becoming Full of Myself


7. One book that you wish had never been written:

The Gospel of Thomas

And all the other pseudo-spiritual misrepresentations of our Lord that came after it.

8. One book you’re currently reading:

Orthodox Psychotheraphy by Metropolitan Hierotheos Vlachos. Yes, Phil and Biss, it's your copy.


9. One book you’ve been meaning to read:

The Ante-Nicean and Post-Nicean Fathers

Fr Thomas Hopko visited the Cathedral last weekend. He gave the homily at both the Saturday (nativity of John the Baptist) and Sunday liturgies and was the main celebrant on Sunday morning. It was great to have him around. When he prays and leads the faithful in prayer during liturgy, he has such spiritual conviction, force and sincerity. And the choir sang well both days. Two absolutely beautiful liturgies.

John the Baptist is truly a saint among saints. "And the violent take it by force." John the Baptist truly took the kingdom of heaven by force through living a severe life of fasting, preaching and what must have appeared to most people, complete madness. With his whole being, he laid hold of the kingdom of heaven in both the figurative sense of having seized it through the practising and preaching of repentance but also even more literally, by baptising the very Lord of the Kingdom for whom he was the forerunner.

In the prayers for Theophany we say that John the Baptist was not only the forerunner in this life but also on the other side of the grave, that he even preached the gospel to those who were in Sheol. After wandering in the deserts of this world, preaching the coming of the Kingdom and baptising many, he wandered the deserts of Sheol preparing the way for Jesus Christ. This is the kind of life of holiness, when contemplated, that twists my stomach and makes me feel small.

I can only hope to prepare the way of the Lord in my life and the lives around me and in some small way say, "Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world."

I have received some encourgement from a good friend to blog. The email I received that encouraged me to do so read something like this - "Zeke - blog ...blog." And that was it.

So here it goes. With this same person I seem to have an ongoing discussion concerning ecclesiological issues, namely, the Orthodox Church's claims to being the "true Church" or the "one, holy, catholic and apostolic church" or the very "fullness of Christ." Now this is a complicated issue that receives altogether too much attention and results in altogether too much pride. I'm not saying that making these claims is necessarily prideful or arrogant - I really do believe that the Orthodox Church lives in the fulness of Christ - but what I am saying is that too much of this talk amongst us Orthodox folk puts us in the wrong frame of mind. There is a time and a place for argument and even polemic but generally speaking it gets out of hand and begins to control us.

Father John Jillions addressed this issue in a beautiful way in his homily last Sunday. He said that a lot of people are trumpeting the Orthodox Church as a the "true Church." He said that an undue emphasis on these issues misses the true question and that is "Does our Church show the love of Christ? When a person walks into the door of the Church, do they see people aflame with the love of Christ?" Too much talk of the "trueness" of Orthodoxy is tainted and disfigured by a corelative and parallel discussion of why other Churches are not true, what they do that is so bad, and it is often quite poisonous to ourselves and to others. I'm thinking here of Matt 23:11-15 -

11 The greatest among you will be your servant. 12 All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted. 13 But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you lock people out of the kingdom of heaven. For you do not go in yourselves, and when others are going in, you stop them. 14 15 Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you cross sea and land to make a single convert, and you make the new convert twice as much a child of hell as yourselves.

The problem comes when we make ourselves look good in comparison to all others.

And for converts to Orthodoxy, such as myself, the discussions of the truth of Orthodoxy and the things lacking in other Churhces, manifests itself is a hatred of our past. To be sure, there are certain things in my past Church experiences that I hate with a passion but it seems to me unjust and triumphalistic to forget the places that have nourished me long before I became Orthodox. To forget what has already been preparing me is to knock out the rungs on the ladder by which I was enabled to climb to the Orthodox Church.

What really drew me to the Orthodox Church was the prayerful life, the inner life, the liturgical life, beauty, the saints and the loving condescension of Christ made manifest at each and every eucharistic gathering of the faithful. It primarily wasn't polemics against the Pope or women priests or gay priests or Vatican II reforms or Evangelical styles of worship or anything of the sort that drew me in - they may have played a part because these were questions I had. What drew me in was the realization that in the Orthodox Church, there is the beauty, the grace, the saints, the love and the very vision of God that transfigures people in a way and to a degree that I simply could not see in any other place. In short, the love of God drew me in.

Even though we don't have instruments in our liturgical worship, maybe we toot our own horns a bit too often. This is something I'm desperately trying to change within myself. I still let people know what I think, especially if I think it wounds the heart, but I'm trying to do it differently. I'm trying to conduct these convesations as though the ideas with which I disagree have a face. Many ideas have a face who honestly and sincerely believes in a given idea and when I remember that, it changes my approach from polemical dismisiveness to real engagement with the heart of another human made in the image of God.

We experienced a beautiful service on Holy Saturday. We had the Holy Saturday Vesperal Liturgy of St. Basil celerated at 10:00. Unfortunately, no baptisms or chrismations of catechumens - that was done on Palm Sunday for some reason. Not quite as majestic or fitting as if they had been performed on Holy Saturday.

However, what was absolutely beautiful, humbling and moving was how the liturgy was celebrated on Saturday morning. In stead of celebrating the liturgy on the altar, the liturgy was celebrated on the tomb in the middle of the nave. So at the great entrance, the gifts came down from the prothesis table and were placed on the tomb in the middle of the Church. The entire liturgy was celebrated on the tomb in the midst of everybody. It was the most profound liturgical image of the Word's divine condescension and self-emptying I have ever experienced.

Here in the nave, as in the midst of the world, the Lord himself is crucified and tastes death in the flesh for the salvation of humankind, lies dead for 3 days and in the midst of this death, God and his life still reigns and sustains. Here, in the midst of the us sinners, Jesus Christ lies as a lifeless corpse in a tomb and we celebrate the eucharist on that tomb thus proclaiming the life bearing death of God become man.

There was something about celebrating his life giving death in the middle of the nave that pierced the heart and brought tears to many in the Church. It is a wonderful tradition and one that deserves to be seen and maybe even practised in more places because of what it communicates - here, in the midst of the world, Christ died for us while we were yet sinners and in that death and among us sinners, Christ gives himself to us.

I sincerely hope this tradition spreads to other places. I have been told that some parishes do this as a teaching tool for the laity (which I'm a bit skeptical of) on different days during the year but at our aprish it was not a teaching tool but a powerful liturgical image difficult to adequately express in words.

Has anybody ever heard of "U2 Eucharists?"

U2 is great but I don't think Bono has written any anaphoras.

Every time I sit down to blog, it seems I have nothing but some kind of lamentation to offer. Grief is a complicated thing. I think I've been getting stuck on the anger stage. I even told this to the bishop and he said, "drink a little holy water every day," and he made the sign of the cross over my heart. To my shame, I have not obeyed this very simple and immeasurably helpful spiritual directive.

Cheryl needs encouraging but my mind only wants me to say unhelpful things like "don't think that way" or "don't do that." That's all garbage. To hell with negations. What I need to say are things like "do you remember when Fr. John said or did ..." or repeat back what it sounds like she is saying to make sure I understand or ask if I can get her a cup of tea.

On a side note. Blogging is helpful but I'm slowly convincing myself it's a better idea to do some journaling with a pen and paper before blogging. But at the same time, I really want to keep people whom I love up to date on my life and inner-monologue. I'm not sure what I think about it just yet.