Thursday afternoon bass...

A worthwhile article...

From the Heritage Foundation, an article on the positive personal and social benefits of religious practice.

November 12...

As I'm writing this is in the early morning hours of November 13th I can see a picture of my father on a mantel in my living room. He would have been 74 yesterday but he barely made it to sixty.

After my brother died I told my remaining brother that in our family we have "big hearts but not good ones" and the shadow of these two early deaths, my father and brother, has become part of our life. A co-worker of mine is in her middle 50's and looks like she's in her late 30's with aunts and uncles well into their 90's but we can't seem to make it past 60, not my grandfather, not my father, and not my brother. And I suppose that even though I've inherited most of my genetics from my mother's and not my father's side, the clock is ticking for me as well.

Yesterday's reading for the morning prayers in the Orthodox Study Bible was Psalm 90 where the writer contemplates the brevity of life and asks God for the kind of wisdom that comes from understanding our days are numbered (v 12). I'm trying to learn this because that wisdom often comes at a very high price, a cost our family has incurred not once but twice.

I remember someone once joking about how religious older people were by saying "It's because they're cramming for final exams...". But the truth is that test is often a surprise test, a pop quiz that comes when we least expect it. The only way to be ready is to live as Christ would want and make every day count.

In a family full of bum tickers that's more than a platitude.

The Chilling Times...

We're getting in to the teeth of autumn up here in Minnesota, the daylight savings times when the sun is down by 6 pm and the cold starts to settle in. It's probably my least favorite time of the year.

I call it the "chilling time" because for a week or two I literally get the chills as my body adjusts to the new lower temperatures and my brain gets used to the dark. The brightness and warmth of summer is gone and the color of fall has faded and now only bare trees, cold winds, and early sunsets remain.

Christmas (Nativity) saves this time of year with its preparations, its lights, and its joy. But I can see how my pagan ancestors would make the emergence of the sun at the winter solstice a holiday. After all how depressing could this time have been in the wilds of northern Europe in the days without either lights electric or the light of Christ? It must have seemed a dark vision, like the end of the world.

An irony of it all may be that this warmer climate cycle we're in actually makes it all a bit more bearable. I can recall in years past being snowed in on Thanksgiving but today the forecast is for nearly sixty degrees with sun and so I can at least take a walk and get outside. I may even do some chores outside the house after work so we can get things buttoned down before winter sets in with a vengeance.

And set in it will...

Joys of this work...

This past Sunday I spoke with the mother of a young parishoner who just turned seven. She told me about how her daughter told her she was glad to be seven so now she could fast.

Out of the mouths of babes...

Disappointment...

My house is being painted at an achingly slow pace.

When the saleman from the paint contractor came to us he assured us that it could be done quickly and even in this cooler weather. And I wanted it done. I wanted it done so it would nice for my next door neighbor who plans to sell his house in the next few months. I wanted it done so that I wouldn't have to cram the work into my own crowded schedule. I wanted it done because in the Priest business your house should always be in good repair as you can be one phone call away from it being on the market. I wanted it done because I wanted it to look nice.

And I spent a good amount of money on it all, more than I paid for my first few cars. Now its mostly done but the upstairs windows are still covered with plastic, the window frames are unpainted, the basement windows are still undone as are some of the soffits and all of the facia. Yesterday it snowed, just a tiny bit, and that means time is running out and so is my patience.

I still struggle with the balance between speaking my needs and patience. Where is the line between not being anxious, trying to see the big picture, and trusting and making that phone call to get things that need to be done completed? The truth is it takes a while for me to trust. I've been burned too many times and that history has made my window of trust very small. People have a short amount of time to follow through before I close the door and when that door is closed it's more often than not nailed shut. I'm on the edge with these folks right now and I want to see some paint on some places without it before too long or I'll take that big step over.

And I know I need to be better than that. I need to be wiser, more discerning, less vulnerable to being jerked around by people and events. I hate the part of me that relishes the opportunity to send a nasty note and make someone's life a living hell by badgering them. I hate that when it happens to me and I hate when I feel like doing it to someone else. But I hate being played for a chump as well, of being marked as a person to whom things can be done and considerations not given because they won't do anything about it. And all of it has made this encounter with the paint contractor just a pain when I had hoped I could just send a check, wait a few days, and have everything handled.

Oh well...

I guess that's why we always pray "Lord have mercy..."

I wonder sometimes...

It was an early morning (4:30 AM) drive yesterday, south on Highway 52 to Interstate 90 through deer country. It's fall and deer are in the rut, moving across the countryside at sunrise and sunset. It's hard to drive for any distance without seeing a deer splayed on the side of the road, the victim of a car.

Something puzzles me. Whitetail deer are swift, possessing of keen eyesight, an enhanced sense of smell, and the ability to hear a twig snap at distance. Hunters seeking deer must be stealthy, cover their smell, and often spend long hours in a single place nearly motionless. So what is it about cars, loud, fast, and bright with lights that seems to defy them? What makes this normally hyper vigilant animal such easy prey for something so obvious?

I'd like to think that somehow after more than a century of cars they would have figured it all out. And I have a picture in my mind of a bambi kind of scene where the wise old deer speaks of the dangers of cars in hushed tones to a rapt audience of fawns. Alas it is not to be and as the road descended from the prairies into the river valley on the shoulder lay a buck in full horn and strength, dead. Sad.

The baby who refused to be aborted...

An amazing story about one of a set of twins selected for abortion.

Every Orthodox needs this...

Here is a link to the book that should be on every Orthodox Christian, and inquirer's, shelf!

The complete Orthodox Study Bible can be pre-ordered now with a substantial discount from Conciliar Press.

A radical idea...

Every year the exhausted gather up the remains of Christmas like morning after drunks and vow never to do it again. And like the addicts they are they will, same time, same place, next year.

But here's an idea, perhaps a radical one. What would happen if devout Christians simply opted out of our culture's notion of Christmas and practiced the Church's?

"Impossible" you say and I would respond "Why?" "Well, there's too much hype, to much commercialism, too much of that syrupy music." And I would say "Are you that weak that some advertiser somewhere can so easily pull your strings?"

Now in some parts of the Muslim world people would riot and kill off a few dozen people to respond to a challenge to their sacred days. That's off the option list for Christians even through we do have some folks trying to ride the "the culture is attacking Christmas" bandwagon to notoriety and financial success and ironically aping the commercial culture's desecration of this day by still making the season all about their needs. The truth is that if we feel strongly about this sacred season being hijacked by a morbid commercial culture we simply need to start actually approaching it as Christians and not Americans.

Start slowly by cutting down on the gifts and ramping up on giving to the poor. Decorations don't have to go up right after Thanksgiving and if you can't find your way to fasting at least say no to a cookie once in a while. It's about a change of focus towards the One whose arrival we celebrate and away from ourselves. towards the truly hungry and away from our own shallow cravings, towards the celebration of Christ and away from self indulgence.

You see the reason the holiday has been polluted is that for too long Christians have been willing dupes in its desecration. Oh we may gripe a bit when Christmas displays are up in October, or earlier, but we're there shopping with the rest of folks and buying in to it all. What difference does it make to complain about the holiday being removed from the schools or government offices when the true spirit of the holiday has long ago been removed from us? What right do we have to expect the pagans to be more faithful then we are?

The actual truth may be that we really do enjoy the chaotic consumer mess that Christmas has become in this country. We have come to accomodate ourselves, as we have in so many things, to the dictates of a broken world and that brokenness has become normal, even desireable to us in the same way that addicts enjoy their terrible pleasures. But if there is a part inside of us that still thinks something is wrong about it all, that there must be a better way, we should quiet ourselves and listen. Perhaps we may discover in that silence a still small voice challenging us to something better, something more holy, some more real about the season soon upon us.

That may make all the difference.