Category: Orthodoxy

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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Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

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.

The Logic of the Incarnation

I was talking this week to someone who formerly had a socially respectable degree of Christian faith, but seems to have lost it to a socially acceptable degree now. He was patiently alluding, for the benefit of the folks he knew were more robustly religious and needed an analogy to raise their consciousness, to the equal absurdity of all religions:

We laugh at the idea of Joseph Smith finding stainless steel plates and translating them with special glasses and angelic assistance, but a virgin getting pregnant and bearing the Savior of the world seems perfectly logical to us.

Well, actually, no. It doesn’t seem logical at all. The Incarnation of the Second Person of the Holy Trinity is more scandalous than logical, and is at best a major paradox:

Today He Who holds the whole creation in His hand is born of a Virgin.
He Whose essence none can touch is bound in swaddling-clothes as a mortal man.
God, Who in the beginning fashioned the heavens, lies in a manger.
He who rained manna on His people in the wilderness is fed on milk from His mother’s breast.
The Bridegroom of the Church summons the wise men;
the Son of the Virgin accepts their gifts.
We worship Your birth, O Christ.
We worship Your birth, O Christ.
We worship Your birth, O Christ.
Show us also Your Holy Theophany!

Bah! Humbug! That sort of thing offendeds just about everyone who heards of it. God is god and humanity is humanity and never the twain shall meet in actual history. Everybody knows that. We really prefer it that way. There’s probably even something in the Constitution about it. It’s related to the ease with which we “evicted Him from public schools,” isn’t it?

The earliest pan-heresy, Gnosticism, tried in various ways to make Jesus’ incarnation logical – to take off the rough edges. The Proto-heretic Arius cleaned it up by making Jesus Christ a (mere) creature. Thomas Jefferson made his own spiffy little Bible that took out that parts that offended him.

That’s probably how most heresies start: trying to make things logical, as if we understood God well enough to tidy up after Him. (I owe that insight to Fr. Patrick Henry Reardon.)

So if you think that the event we Christians are celebrating today is logical, you’re probably celebrating some distorted and sanitized version. But if you think it’s shocking, you might just be onto something.

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Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Tuesday, November 27, 2012

I enjoy singing good Christmas carols about as much as I enjoy singing anything. With a bit of sentimentality, many of them communicate powerfully about that most transformative of events, God’s entry into human history, in human flesh no less.

But Tipsy’s URL is “intellectualoid” for a reason. As my amateur community chorus prepares for Lessons and Carols, the distinct flavor of Adam Lay Ybounden, a Middle English Christmas Carol – especially verses 3 and 4 – jumped out at me.

Adam lay ybounden,
Bounden in a bond;
Four thousand winter,
Thought he not too long.

And all was for an apple,
An apple that he took.
As clerkes finden,
Written in their book.

Ne had the apple taken been,
The apple taken been,
Ne had never our ladie,
Abeen heav’ne queen.

Blessed be the time
That apple taken was,
Therefore we moun singen.
Deo gracias!

There’s a common belief (not dogma, I don’t believe; how could a counterfactual become a dogma?) that “our ladie” would have “abeen heav’ne queen” even if the apple “ne had been taken.” I think that belief may be a bit more common in the Christian east than in the west, but it’s present both places. An opposite view is hymned in the carol:

The third verse suggests the subsequent redemption of man by the birth of Jesus Christ by Mary, who was to become the Queen of Heaven as a result,[6]and thus the song concludes on a positive note hinting at Thomas Aquinas‘ concept of the “felix culpa” (blessed fault).[5] Paul Morris suggests that the text’s evocation of Genesis implies a “fall upwards.[7]

It’s not a question to which it’s easy to find western and eastern answers counterposed on the web, so let me just echo an unauthoritative source, Batteddy of Combox:

that Christ would have become incarnate whether man sinned or not, and that this was the whole point of creation, and the occasion for the envy and pride of the devil.

Anything that offends the devil is good by me. I hope he’s mightily offended by our new bishop, enthroned today.

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Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.