Category: Faith & Ideology

The One True Sadness

The one true sadness is “that of not being a saint,” and how often the “moral” Christians are precisely those who never feel, never experience this sadness, because their own “experience of salvation,” the feeling of “being saved” fills them with self-satisfaction; and whoever has been “satisfied” has received already his reward and cannot thirst and hunger for that total transformation and transfiguration of life which alone makes us “saints.”

Fr. Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World.

Demonology Lives

According to some modern interpreters of Christianity, “demonology” belongs to an antiquated worldview and cannot be taken seriously by the man who “uses electricity.” We cannot argue with them here. What we must affirm, what the Church has always affirmed, is that the use of electricity may be “demonic,” as in fact may be the use of anything and of life itself. That is, in other words, the experience of evil which we call demonic is not that of a mere absence of good, or, for that matter, of all sorts of existential alienations and anxieties. It is indeed the presence of dark and irrational power. Hatred is not merely absence of love. It is certainly more than that, and we recognize its presence as an almost physical burden that we feel in ourselves when we hate. In our world, in which normal and civilized men “used electricity” to exterminate six million human beings, in this world in which right now some ten million people are in concentration camps because they failed to understand the “only way to universal happiness”, in this world the “demonic” reality is not a myth.

Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World.

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Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Stay off the Roof

Rachel Held Evans committed the kind of painfully protracted performance art that happens when Evangelicalism has utterly lost its sense – of decorum and of how to read scripture – and its publishing houses have become a commercial racket:

Intrigued by the traditionalist resurgence that led many of her friends to abandon their careers to assume traditional gender roles in the home, Evans decides to try it for herself, vowing to take all of the Bible’s instructions for women as literally as possible for a year. Pursuing a different virtue each month, Evans learns the hard way that her quest for biblical womanhood requires more than a “gentle and quiet spirit” (1 Peter 3:4).​
It means growing out her hair, making her own clothes, covering her head, obeying her husband, rising before dawn, abstaining from gossip, remaining silent in church, and even camping out in the front yard during her period.

Evans’ schtick incited Deborah Cruz at The Stir, reportedly secular herself, to indict her for making a mockery of the Bible:

Here’s my issue — isn’t it better to just be honest about your beliefs in the first place? I may not be living biblically, but I am living honestly. I’m not so sure the same can be said for Evans. She appears to be poking fun with her book, though she vehemently denies that she is. But you don’t make a spectacle, write a book, and make videos in a “poking fun” manner if you are taking a challenge seriously.

But Cruz, while right about Evans making a mockery of the Bible, may have inadvertently become a bedfellow (if that term isn’t too evocative) with Evans, says Strange Herring:

Interesting that that’s how the book is being read by some, although Cruz is making the same mistake Evans is. Which is to say, by trying to follow Old Testament precepts only to show them up as unrealistic in 2012, Evans has succeeded in proving absolutely nothing. Like the people who demand that Christians endorse “X” because we no longer stone adulterers or forbid the eating of shellfish — and those things are in the Bible! So it’s all relative!
As if the “New” in “New Testament” really meant “Same Old.”
…
If you have to “assume” roles — whether you believe them to be biblically based or culturally normative for a 21st century couple — you sure as hell aren’t being you, something is being buried or ignored, and your marriage is doomed, I don’t care what you call it.
…
Say the Creed, say your prayers, go to work, feed your face, and try and actually enjoy your life together.
Flip the bird to the rest of it.
And stay off the roof.

Is Evans really crazy enough to think that her mocking (or is it merely “playful”?) treatment – of the Bible, of marriage, of sex roles – builds up marriage, which as a married, albeit “feminist” Christian, she presumably supports?

Maybe I should add Judaizing to my list of blows by the 98% to traditional marriage.

(For the record, I’d have seen none of these trendy young websites were I not following the Tweets of MZHemingway.)

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Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Modern Ironies

Two of the ironies of our era:

  • Newspapers unmistakably designed for people who can’t or don’t want to read.
  • Churches unmistakably designed for people who can’t or don’t want to worship.

(H/T Terry Mattingly in a talk from several years ago.)

It’s thus no coincidence that 20% of Americans now identify as religiously unaffiliated. If worship is merely a second-rate rock or smooth jazz show with a moralistic therapeutic deist “be nice now” admonition (or political exhortation) thrown in, then to hell with it. Homo adorans needs more.

That 20% unaffiliation makes us, by the ironic way, more irreligious that our old atheist nemesis Russia, where believers of one sort or another are 88%. Might it have something to do with the dominant religion there being famous for the profundity and beauty of its worship?

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Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Fear of Flying

“Do you know what that means?” he asks. “That feeling at takeoff?”

“Transformation,” I say. “It’s a leap of faith, perhaps a leap into faith. It’s your mind telling your body to relax. the physics and the math work pretty well.”

“Some people never get over that fear, though,” he says. “Some people can never make that leap. Just like some people sometimes in the religious life never get over certain fears, they build up regulations and walls and rules. They do things that keep them from flying.. And it seems to me that the spiritual life is about letting go, is about being free and trusting. There is a sense of mystery about it. There is always a sense of mystery ….”

Thin Places & Thick Time, Saint Katherine Review, Volume 2, Number 3.

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Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.