Month: January 2013
Theophany 2013
On January 6, Eastern (Orthodox) Christians celebrate Theophany, not Epiphany. It is second only to Pascha (Easter) in importance, for it is the feast which celebrates the revelation of the Most Holy Trinity to the world through the Baptism of the Lord.
The major hymn:
When Thou, O Lord, wast baptized in the Jordan, worship of the Trinity wast made manifest; for the voice of the Father bore witness to Thee, calling Thee His beloved Son. And the Spirit in the form of a dove confirmed the truth of His word. O Christ our God, Who hath appeared and enlightened the world, glory to Thee.
In contrast, Epiphany for Western Christians celebrates the visitation of the Biblical Magi to the Baby Jesus, and thus Jesus’ physical manifestation to the Gentiles.
Secondarily, in the east, we recall:
When the Lord entered the waters of Jordan, He sanctified every drop of water on the face of the whole earth. Thus, water no longer is a mere object used or abused – some thing out of the tap. Rather, water is now a medium for cleansing the heart, blessing the soul, and healing infirmities; for every drop has touched the sacred flesh of the Lord Christ!
(Devotional for 1/4/13, italics added) So we also do on this day the Great Blessing of Water.
As a former Protestant of relatively “low church” sensibility, I must corroborate the devotional: we Orthodox Christians decidedly do believe that the Most Holy Trinity communicates grace through physical means, not just invisibly and spiritually. If you doubt, remember the woman healed merely by touching the hem of Christ’s garment, or the dead man raised when he touched Elisha’s bones.
It’s not magic, and sick people don’t typically leap up instantly healed after anointing with oil or holy water, but such parts of my Bible I didn’t underline as a Protestant amply attest physical means of grace.
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Postscript: My Priest is down with the flu, so a subdeacon and I must lead a Reader’s Typica – a service missing all but the “bones” of a liturgy. (You surely didn’t think we’d improvise, did you?) Here’s a meditation on some of what we’ll be missing, by a favorite priest/blogger, Fr. Stephen Freeman.
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Orthodixie
There seems now to be more than anecdotal evidence that Orthodox Christianity is growing rapidly in the U.S. I don’t recall whether the evidence is more than anecdotal that it’s growing especially fast in the southern states, but that certainly is a widely shared impression, and forms the basis of this video, which looks at two parishes of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR) in South Carolina.
Both parishes have a number of converts along with “cradle Orthodox.” The second is led by a Charleston-born, back-slapping, charismatic Greek restauranteur/Priest. Yup, a southern-fried Greek is Priest in a Russian Orthodox parish!
I don’t know for certain why Orthodoxy is especially appealing to Southerners, or why, again anecdotally, it holds special appeal for men – being one of few Christian traditions in which men appear to gain interest before women and to be quite faithful in attendance.
I suspect, along with others who have suggested it first, that it’s because Orthodoxy is demanding (whence the appeal to men) and congenial to people who have rejected consumerism to a greater extent than most Americans (concentrated in the south) and who have concomitantly tired of the marketing gimmicks of megachurches and their wannabe imitators. In Orthodoxy is found sobriety and orientation toward God, not to what research says are this year’s trending “felt needs.”
But just as Jonathan Haidt has found that political orientation is largely instinctive, with narrative explanations and arguments following and not always being very accurate, so my hunches may be tainted, as may even the bona fide explanations of male and southern Orthodox converts.
Apologies to Fr. Joseph Huneycutt for borrowing his podcast name for this blog entry, but it fit entirely too well to resist. And a H/T to the evocatively named, considering the topic of this particular entry, “Byzantine Texas” blog.
Too Big to Govern
Not too long ago, I encountered an item reminding me of a little-remarked feature of our national polity: the immense dilution of the meaningful individual voice in governance.
At our nation’s founding, each Congressman represented few people – 50,000 or something. Today he or she represents roughly 700,000. This historic figure may be wrong, but the difference is by orders of magnitude.
And even at that, with 435 members, Congress is pretty unruly. We really can’t grow Congress back to where a Congressman represents something like the relatively few of yesteryear. It would be totally unworkable.
This leaves voters alienated from the national government.
In contrast, I have for a number of years, on and off, participated in my local Chamber of Commerce’s “Third House” program. Every Saturday or two during the Indiana legislative session, the “Third House” meets to eat an excessively large breakfast, hear reports from our representatives and to give them feedback on Bills that affect us. They sit at table and break hash browns with us, sharing a common cup of orange juice. Thus there’s informal chatter as well as formal reports from them to us and votes by us to inform them. It’s not uncommon for as many as 5 State Senators and Representatives to be present, nor for our input to influence their votes.
So what if we broke up government and devolved power back to the states so as once again to empower and dis-alienate voters? We’d still need, I think, a national assembly to provide for the national defense and a few other limited functions, but there would be multiple more regional assemblies. Like, maybe, fifty of them. Doing meaningful things independently of what happens in Washington, DC.
This ought to appeal to the Left counterculture and to the Right as well. Indeed, although I still very much consider myself a conservative, I’m finding plenty of kindred spirits on the Left, courtesy of this wonderful gathering place of cyberspace.
But I just described (except for the cyberspace thingy) Federalism, the intent of the Founders. Somehow, some centripetal force has driven the real power toward Washington, DC contrary to the original design. We can argue about why (I have some half-baked theories, riffing off the trope “nation with the soul of a Church” the dogmas of that Church being “democracy” and “American Exceptionalism” and the undermining of Federalism’s political safeguards by the direct election of Senators), but it’s hard to argue that the effect has been entirely healthy (or so it seems to me).
This gives me great appreciation for the wisdom of the Founders, who gave us a Republic, if only we’d kept it.
These thoughts brought to you courtesy of a goading by this Wilfred McClay article on Federalism.
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Obama’s statist “religious freedom”
This, from Heritage Foundation’s Dominique Ludvigson via the Wall Street Journal, fleshes out what I mean when I call Obama’s insouciance on religious freedom “statist”:
Religious institutions and individuals should not have to sue the government to preserve the freedom to define their own missions. But they’re left with little choice in the brave new world unleashed by the national health-care law.
The HHS mandate breaks with our best traditions of recognizing the free exercise of religion as a public good and broadly accommodating religious practice and expression. It sees religion as “in the way” and interprets religious freedom as narrowly as possible – as freedom for worship and religious exercise within the walls of a church or only among its members.
The requirement also commandeers and marginalizes some of the very institutions of civil society that help preserve limited government.It’s the symptom of a broader disease – the Obama administration’s belief that government has unlimited power to curb freedom at will. Religious liberty is just the first casualty of that unchecked power.
Please remember that I’m pretty sparing in my criticisms of Obama and don’t just emote for or against this.
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Enduring Wisdom for Any Year
In 1991, Russell Kirk (venerated especially among traditional conservatives; I don’t know what neocons think of him) gave a speech to the Heritage Foundation, large portions of which are too good not to pass along at the start of a new year:
It is possible to describe certain attitudes that make up America’s conservative mentality, even though not all Americans could express coherently their belief in such general principles, and although some conservatives would dissent from one or more of the general assumptions or principles I now mention.
First, belief in some transcendent order in the universe, some law that is more than human: a religious understanding of the human condition, if you will; a belief in enduring moral norms. As the national pledge of allegiance puts it, “One nation under God…. ”
Second, opposition to totalist ideology and the totalist political order. The American conservative rejects the notion of a future earthly paradise — which the ideologue promises to attain.
Third, confidence in the American Constitution — both the written national Constitution and the intricate fabric of custom, belief, and habit that makes up the underlying “unwritten” constitution of a nation-state. Many decisions of the Supreme Court in recent decades are bitterly resented; nevertheless, attachment to the Constitution itself remains strong.
Fourth, maintenance of the rights of private property and of a free or competitive economy, as contrasted with a directed or socialist economy. This healthy prejudice persists despite the increasing consolidation of business and industry into large conglomerations or oligopolies.
Fifth, suspicion of central political direction, and preference for state and local powers: insistence upon private rights.
Sixth, a deep-rooted patriotism, joined to uneasiness at “entangling alliances”; this latter attitude, nevertheless, modified by determination to resist totalist powers that menace the American national interest.
Seventh, an awareness that change is not identical with healthy improvement; a relish for the American past; a genuine preference for the old and tried.
Such is the consensus of that very large body of Americans who choose to call themselves conservative in their politics. Within this crowd of conservative citizens exist various factions, each emphasizing some aspect or another of the general conservative attitude. There exists no “party line” to which conservatives of one persuasion or another are compelled to conform.
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There have been ages when custom and inertia have lain insufferably upon humankind; and such an age may come to pass again; but such is not our age. Ours is an era when the moral and social heritage of many centuries of civilization stands in imminent peril from the forces of vertiginous indiscriminate change. Resistance to the folly of such change is the primary duty of the … conservative.
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The critic Eliseo Vivas wrote once that “It is one of the marks of human decency to be ashamed of having been born into the twentieth century.” Spiritually and politically, the twentieth century has been a time of decadence. Yet, as that century draws near to its close, we may remind ourselves that ages of decadence often have been followed by ages of renewal.
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The Roman Stoics taught that some things in life are good, and some are evil; but that the great majority of life’s happenings are neither good nor evil, but indifferent merely. Wealth is a thing indifferent, and so is poverty; fame is a thing indifferent, and so is obscurity. Shrug your shoulders at things indifferent; set your face against the things evil; and by doing God’s will, said the Stoics, find that peace which passes all understanding.
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I am heartened from time to time by a stanza from Chesterton’s long poem, The Ballad of the White Horse. Chesterton is describing the prophets of doom, who tell us that nothing in life is permanent; that all is lost, or is being lost, in our culture; that we totter on the brink of an abyss. Such prophets of doom think themselves wise. Chesterton has in mind the typical intellectuals of the twentieth century, but he calls them the wise men of the East. Here I give you Chesterton’s lines:
The wise men know what wicked things
Are written on the sky,
They trim sad lamps, they touch sad strings
Hearing the heavy purple wings,
Where the forgotten seraph kings
Still plot how God shall die.Such despairing souls, though possessed perhaps of much intelligence, in truth are not wise.
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[T]he best way to insure a[nother] Generation of intelligent young conservatives is to beget children, and rear them well: the wise parent is the conservator of ancient truths. As Edmund Burke put it, “We learn to love the little platoon we belong to in society.” The institution most essential to conserve is the family.
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I conclude with an exhortation which Orestes Brownson, that redoubtable conservative reformer, scholar, and journalist, delivered at Dartmouth College in 1843. His topic was “The Scholar’s Mission.” He concluded, as follows, his charge to the rising generation:
Ask not what your age wants, but what it needs, not what it will reward, but what, without which, it cannot be saved; and that go and do; and find your reward in the consciousness of having done your duty, and above all in the reflection, that you have been accounted to suffer somewhat for mankind.
You may find even brighter gems should you wish to read it all.
Happy New Year.
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Tipsy Teetotaler ن 