Sarx

ARA MILES’ New book, Jesus Freak, is a blessing and a curse – both for the same reason: you have to sit down and think. You have to think all the way through. When Sara’s publisher offered to send me a review copy, I was very thankful. But I wasn’t expecting this much meat! Books that engage are a different challenge than those that are enjoyed or those that enchant or engross. Fantasy or Sci Fi, for me, is enchanting and engrossing, but it is a vacation for my brain from “real life”. Sara sits us down and forces us to look at real life. Real people. And a real Jesus. What does it mean to follow Jesus – to really follow him – as if he were real?

In today’s world how to follow Jesus is a serious question – there are at least 5 groups or collections of groups that I can think of claiming to be the “one true church” that Jesus founded – two of them claiming to go back 2000 years and others claiming to be “restorations”. There are something in excess of 20,000 denominations all with different types of theologies and doctrines, almost all mutually exclusive and there are enculturated tracks where “normal” Christianity takes on the flavours of African or South American or Chinese or Indian or First Nation cultures. Does the Pope belong to the same religion as a Yoruban priestess who venerates the Virgin of Guadalupe and her son? Does Sara Miles worship the same Jesus as the OCA’s Mtr Jonah or Pat Robertson? Is there room in the company of Jesus’ friends for a gay Orthodox priest and a pentecostal preacher who, shall we say, is less inclusive? Keep reading.

Continue reading Jesus Freak: feeding, healing, raising the dead

UN’S FUn, but now we’re done.

I thought about leaving personal messages to folks. Even surfed back through some very old posts and saw some comments last night that I wanted to recycle just to say “Love” or “Hugs” or, in not a few cases, “Bite me”. Some of you say things online that I’m sure you’re not saying in person: tone and or content comes off rather differently in text, sure, but as I’m learning at work daily, most people have trouble saying what they mean even in person. Of course that goes both ways. I’ve felt, at times, that I was ranting – and you have all been very charitable. Not heard the ranting. responded rationally.

If I’ve said anything that was a sin, or caused you in anyway to stumble, forgive me.

I feel I know some of you (in both the “love” and “bite” camps). I’ve walked short or long journeys with you. Fr Ernesto and William Tighe have been around my electronic journey since my days in the Africa/Asia/Middle East office at 815, using the Quest Network to debate with Odessa Elliott and the funders at Trinity Church Wall Street. And Odessa, whom I just found on Facebook, was my first sparring partner on the Internet – back in the days of “Prodigy”! She thought Bill Bailey was a Spy from 815!

I have crushes on some of you – warm fuzzies when your comments show up.

I would like to know some of you in person.

I’m glad I don’t know some of you at all.

Nevertheless, if you have ever posted a comment and should find yourself in Buffalo: I’m very happy to take a call from you have coffee or, perhaps, dinner. We deserve it to each other to meet once this side of Beaulah.

Yes, some part of this feels like I’m committing online suicide. In case you can’t tell.

I’m going to write a bit – including the book reviews I promised. I’ve been working on a liturgy book as well and a theology book. And I’ve been wrestling with some choices I want to make, some corners to turn and some passages I want to walk. I mentioned last night that when it comes down to making a choice between my Spiritual Health and my Blog… (ie, my ego) it should be clear which choice to make.

All Comments will be on moderation and – as always – will close after 30 days.

Last night, after posting the Earlier Palinode, (which still explains a LOT), I went downstairs, had dinner and watch a movie about hippies whilst knitting with a room full of hippies. Then I went to sleep. That sounds like a very healthy pattern to hold to for a while.

Chop wood, carry water.

and/or Bite Me.

(It’s hard to stop, you know…)

Last word.

Now.

I forgot this essay… reread it this afternoon. You know… it makes sense.

Originally published in 207, it makes a bit more sense of this journey and, I think, goes a long way to explain my departure.

Continue reading Former Palinode

Y SOME STANDARDS I’ve fallen off in recent years: I’ve stopped ranting about “modernists” and “heretics” and, even, managed to offend some of my anti-modernist, anti-heretical friends. By other standards – my own internal meter, my confessor, etc – I’ve managed to make peace with a few people that used to really dislike me. I’ve gained new respect/fear/understanding for the process that happens when one becomes a “virtual” person (I’ve watched it happen to several people) and I’ve gained a profound respect and love for those people who have avoided that process – either by running away or by having a strong enough center in themselves. I have also been surprised at who it does or does not happen to! But I’ve also been very reserved in my reactions: my own diagnosis of my own online persona is not to be projected out on others!

There have been very few posts in the last few years that rank as “greatest hits”. I don’t doubt this is because there are too many bloggers now: it’s far easier to stand out when there are nearly no others! I remember when the entire ortho-bloggopsher – minus LJ, which still doesn’t count – was Clifton, James, Karl and me. Then David and John. Serge, I’d add you to the list, but I’ve never been very clear as to what denomination you belong! Then (thankfully) some women signed on. Then there were billions. My mediocre quality is more evident now: so it is harder to be a large fish in a huge pond.

So I’ve nothing to add to my series of Greatest Hits, today, although there is a whole page of essays (linked in the menu above) including the Essays I am most proud of: my series on Trinity, Incarnation and Eucharist.

Tomorrow I’ll post a bit of an adieu, but today here’s a taste of the future:

Even during the sabbatical, the two annual series will continue (1) the daily post of the WR Lenten Liturgy (which I’m already scheduling) and station church “virtual pilgrimage”; and (2) the advent meditations on the Great O antiphons.

Also, during Sabbatical, I will keep this blog active by doing something I love to do: read and review books. I realise that sounds odd, but I’ve not had time to read a damn thing, recently. So I can review books, post essays, and maybe make some money – or at least get free books! (I’ve signed up to be a reviewer for Thomas Nelson and I’m also getting Sara Miles’ new book soon.)

Personal stuff will go away as will spontaneous essays and blogging/conversing about the hot topic du jure. I’m going to try, at least for a little while, to avoid even commenting on other blogs. I’m debating, at this point in time, turning off comments entirely or just leaving everything in moderation. Maybe. You’ll know when I know: tomorrow.

Yes: I’ll still be available on Facebook and Chat, t his is not an online suicide! But my goal is to move the internet into the same space as TV currently has in my life. Maybe. We’ll see.

HE NEW MILLENNIUM Brought me to several surprising changes all at once. My job at the California Institute of Integral Studies allowed me to take classes at a discounted rate so I used my benefit to finish my BA. The BA Completion Programme at CIIS spent a good deal of time discussing why it was that I’d not finished in the first place. I’ve compared this to group therapy: 15 people sitting in a circle, twice a month, discussing things that needed to change in order to let one finish. What changes in life had happened since one failed to finish? What was new now that caused one to want to finish were, before, one only wanted to run away?

At the same time, I was wrestling with the vocational discernment team at St Gregory of Nyssa Parish. Was I called to the priesthood? I’ve also compared this to group therapy: once or twice a month, 15 people sitting in a circle, discussing things that need to change in order to let one finish. Except where CIIS was group therapy, the Discernment Team felt like working with 15 therapists.

These two therapeutic processes played out in a complex way on my own internal dialogue which was, at the time, covering a number of mid-life issues. (I was 36 in 2000.) It felt like my life was looping itself (like it does today, to be honest). Somehow I had been dealing with the same set of questions since moving to SF in 1997 and it was all coming to a head. What was a relationship? What was GOd? What was I doing in Church? What was I doing in bars? What was I doing in bed? What was I doing at the altar? What was love? Why did men constantly treat me like a cute, huggable (but not dateable/marriageable) Teddy Bear? Why was I about as rootless as I could be?

The month I first moved to SF, I met a man in a bar. For the next 5 years we flirted off and on as he moved to Sacramento and then Seattle. Then we forgot about each other. We met, again, in December of 2002 – just as I was planning to move to Asheville, NC. Things continued to evolve and soon my own desire to leave SF was struggling with my desire to stay with RJ. My issues with theology and sex were coming up more and more and it was harder to deal with any of them.

While becoming Orthodox was, I still believe, the right thing, nearly all the rest of the decisions made in those succeeding months were based on my own unwillingness to communicate in-person with anyone. Writing was about the only method I had, but my blog had no audience – certainly not the people to whom I needed to talk.

Follow this: I needed to have several serious conversations over the course of two years, with my discernment team, my college classes, my partner, my confessor. But I was afraid to talk to them. So I used my website, my blog to vent. For example: for a while I had a “book blog” where I posted as-it-happened reactions to the books we were reading in class. These were filled with all the usual liberal arguments, all the usual clap trap about peace with no Jesus, love with no sin and sin with no guilt, so I vented a lot. At the same time my reaction to things in my parish community were much the same. But ididnt tell anyone. I was afraid they wouldn’t let me be a priest. But after converting to Orthodoxy – in a parish with several gay couples – I was, myself, continuing to struggle with the difference between things as they were and “things as they should be” in my head. Dating a man – then living with a man in my own apartment on Minna Street, wanting to leave, wanting to stay, wanting to have to stop wanting. I kept writing about the people I should be talking to… And got an audience of people that were also venting about the same people.

A curious transubstantiation took place.

The more I said the things my audience wanted to hear the more applause I got. The more applause I got the more I wanted to say those things. And wanting to say those things is the same as believing them. Life soon follows wanting. My own sense of self was changing. I wasn’t a conservative but I played on on the Internet.

This is the mindset (in hindsight) of the person who wrote “I was in Hell” whilst living in a passive agressive argument with his soon to be ex-lover in SF. (Please read all the follow-up posts and comments over there.) I earned $200 for this piece of writing, the only piece of my prose ever to get published-for-pay.

It’s interesting to note: “I was in Hell” blames everyone else for the choices and struggles I was making. That’s not very Orthodox. Not at all. But Frederica Matthewes Green called it one of the best examples of Orthodox Spiritual Writing she’d ever seen. Get that? It’s all your fault… But when I later discovered that it was my fault that I’m a self-centered ass… and that you are Christ, even if you’re dancing naked in a gay pride parade… she said my metaphor was weak. No one liked this article as much. Not at all.

So there I learned, right there. My crowd didn’t want to pay for me to be a sinner. They just wanted to pay for me to blame everyone else because it supported not their religion but rather their politics.

And, ironically, that was the beginning of my coming out.

My conversion was real. I’m still wrestling with that. But my conservatism was not. The slow, dawning realization that Red Staters had hijacked my Chrismation Process for their own purposes was a bit painful. What was real, what was not? What was chrismation? What was conversion? What was important? Questions are more important than answers, I think. I’ve been blogging my way through that since 2005.

ETWEEN THE POST On my grandmother (above) and January 1999, a number of things happened. My roomies asked me to move out – and I moved in with Rick, a friend I knew from St Gregory’s Church. At the same time, I was wrestling with what church means, what Christianity means. I’d made a big deal about leaving Church ten years earlier to become a pagan. Part of my blog was a daily meditation on the Sabian Symbols and I was, at best, not very friendly to Christian thought. In the wrestling (and in the comments I received from readers) I made discernment choices.

Part of my experience as a Pagan in San Francisco was the total lack of community. You can do pagan by yourself so you don’t need to sit still when someone does something you don’t like: go next door, go to your own basement. I came from “back east” where traditions pagan “Denominations” were very important forms of Identity. So doing it “by myself” was awkward at best and frustrating most of the time. Going back to church was a way to get community back in my life, and a sense of accountability too.

Donald once told me that what makes us a Christian community was gathering in Jesus’ name to do the things he commanded us to do. And, week after week, gathering to sing and dance as Jesus leads, breaking bread and feeding each other, makes us Christian. After a while, my daily meditations on astrology gave way to a daily meditation on the lectionary which went out on a mailing list – 30 or 40 subscribers at its max. I can trace there the evolution of my own sense of radical gospel – of Christarchy, of AnarChristos, etc, of inclusion and exclusion… it’s all there. You can, ironically, see the evolution of my Eastern Orthodoxy there too. My friend Damon was on my vocational discernment committee and he says that, reading these daily meditations, he used to wonder, “Why are you not Orthodox?”.

There’s no “Greatest hit” entry from this period, just a note about what was going on. I think it’s interesting that I feel many of the same energies now, present and active in my life: the desire for community, the urge to “go it alone” coupled with the strong desire not to be alone. I blogged it last time. Don’t want to this time.

FTER MOVING To San Francisco in 1997, the purpose of my electronic journalling changed and moved entirely online. Even earlier, I began sending out the weekend report from the Church Center to friends of mine, but the primary purpose of that production was internal – a bunch of coworkers communicating. The news from San Francisco, The Diary, Report and Picayune, was broadcast to a wide audience via an email sent from AOL. Over dial up. Remember such things? There was only one essay from those days that fits in the “Greatest Hits” section, but it skips over the whole email phase.

By October of 1998 I had purchased the Doxos domain, and I’d sifted through several different ideas about what to put on the page. Then I discovered a website called “PlanetSOMA” which no longer exists as a live, updated site. The Author, David, is now in Pittsburgh, oddly enough: North Carolina, SF, and now Rust Belt, we seem to be on some odd parallel – and we’re the same age, same month, if memory serves. Astrology, anyone? ANYWAY, David had an online journal. His diaries were all there for the reading and edification (or not). His personal evolution was traceable. And I immediately figured out what Doxos was for – my journal. I did write David to tell him that he inspired me. We did correspond a couple of times but we’ve never met. He’d only know Bill Bailey from SF.

And so: in early October of 1998, my weekly report appeared on the web. Doxos has been here ever since. By Mid-October, living in the Mission on 24th St and working two jobs, never having the time to write, I faced my first deadline with nothing to talk about. Again, I pulled out the Garrison Keillor voice and wrote this piece about my late Grandmother.

Big hit. Sappy. Tear jerker. Needs editing now – and the David mentioned at the end of the essay is not the David of PlanetSOMA, but rather my BF at the time, David C. Grandma, however, is still deeply loved. And still deeply missed.

Continue reading Columbus Day

ere’s the second “greatest hit” from the Early Years. More Garrison Keillor, more sap. THis time, I was hearing about the first opening of a KK in Manhattan. I’m thinking it was 1996 still. This one also got me emails from all over the place. And, in case your wondering, yes, in a couple of days I’ll post “that” essay as well – but we still have a few more “greatest hits” to get through in the next 7 days.

Continue reading Krisp Memories

URING THE Period of the weekend e-newsletter at the Church Center, I had two moments of internet fame – at the time when very few of us understood what the internet did. The first was this post on Baseball’s Opening Day in 1996. I received email from all over the country as people reported “I sent this to my friend…” I got notes from preachers who used it, from church secretaries who put it in their bulletins and from sports fans who showed to their widow/spouses.

This was the first time I used my mental Garrison Keillor to tell a story. Folks seem to like it. It’s dated (remember Ross Perot? Ken Griffey? Huey Lewis?), But I think it still works. The second post hit was a post on Krispy Kremes… I’ll run that up the flag pole later.

This was the first chance I had to feel the effect of words on the net. By this time I’d been going for a year in journalling and the Episcopal Church also joined Ecunet. This essay first circulated there…

Continue reading Greatest Hits

ISTORIANS Discussing the origins of Christmas on the Church’s calendar will sometimes focus on the date itself (not quite the solstice, not quite not the solstice, etc) but I’m rather partial to the work of Fr Thomas Talley, a liturgical scholar and, in retirement, a resident of Asheville, NC, and member of St Mary’s parish. His book, The Origins of the Liturgical Year is one of the seminal works in this area, focusing on the historical evolution of the various celebrations. He tracks the various community celebrations (and the reason for their timings) that evolved into the festivals we celebrate today. He skips over pneumatic reasonings that can’t quite be verified and, like Blessed Alexander Schmemann and Canon Hugh Wybrew, would rather see and track the historical process.

Today is one day when that process (rather than the Holy Spirit, per se) rears its head in the most annual direct form. And it is one day that I rather love. It is interesting: through the historical evolution, it is the Spirit’s action and the Church’s teaching that we see.

In the West, today is the feast of the Epiphany, or manifestation: the day that commemorates the visit of several astrologers to the birthplace of the infant Jesus. The theological import is that here the Jewish Messiah is being worshipped by Gentiles but more – and perhaps most importantly – and it was their own religious traditions that brought them. In the East the title of the feast is “Theophany” and, more clearly, it points to the Manifestation of God. The Gentile religions had in them the logos, the Mind of God, present wherever there was Truth. The Tao te Ching is, for them that can read it right, an “Old Testament” as well. The stars and astrological mindset of the Persians bring them to a place of preparedness, and – as St Justin the Philosopher makes clear, even the philosophical ponderings of Plato and Socrates prepared them for the Gospel. Theophany reveals that truth that they have always known to be Who He Is.

In the Christian Orient, using a different calendar, January 6th is the only feast there is: today is the Nativity and the Theophany all at once. The manifestation of God is, once and for all, accomplished today. Communication between the Roman World and the Orient was so weak that the new-fangled feast of “Nativity” never made the journey that far east before political squabbles killed it outright. They only have the Theophany.

For those hundreds of millions of Eastern Christians using a different Calendar, today is 24 December, Christmas Eve. The entire Christmas/Theophany cycle is preparing to play out again for half the Christian world.

Crossing the streams, East and West, Oriental and Byzantine, Gregorian and Julian, you can see, today and tomorrow, a huge swath of Christian history and theology laid out with all its beautiful and complex patterns made clear and simple by repetition.

This is, really, only a position available for someone in a post-modern, internet connected world. In “the Old Countries” everything is just as it always was. In pockets of hold-out modernist Fundamentalists in the Church various parties fight over the calendar as if it was a matter of Doctrine and Salvation.

But from another point of view (not more enlightebed or “better”, just another) the Internet – a window into the world next door – becomes an Old Testament, an historical preparation offering us a chance to see the Manifestation of God in the overlapping chaos of a liturgical and historical kaleidoscope that suddenly – for two days – manifests an icon of the Nativity.

A blessed feast!