Egyptian Coptic Christians Welcomed in Brooklyn
The Copts of Egypt have been on the losing side of Egypt’s revolution. They are being persecuted. Ethnic cleansing is all the rage in the country, and it looks like it will only get worse. Yet, the West looks on, murmuring concerns but doing nothing. If the shoe were on the other foot, and a large Muslim population was being persecuted, or were perceived to be persecuted, we’d be all over it.
As I continue teaching the Gospel of John, as an introduction to Christology, in my jail ministry, I am amazed at how critical this basic sort of teaching of Christianity is for the inmates.
The jailhouse environment both helps and hinders the inmates in their Christian study. On one hand, they have nothing but time to study the faith, read scripture, and pray. On the other hand, religions of all stripes and sizes run wildly in jail, without regulation. They receive an Orthodox bible study from me on Thursday, but on Monday there might be a nondenominational preacher coming in. On Tuesday, a Jehovah’s Witness, Wednesday, a Mormon, and Islam is all around, always challenging the gospel of Christ. Not to mention the dozens of other theories — of space aliens building Martian pyramids before colonizing earth, of Knights Templars and other global domination conspiracies, of televangelists who promise riches to those who touch their TV screens during their prayers.
So our only hope is to continue to teach and try to get the men to see the value of living a life of repentance.
So without further adieu, let us turn to the book. We are moving at a crawl through the Prologue, Chapter 1, because these passages are major tenets of the Christian faith and need to be understood properly. We must seek to apprehend clearly the opening statement of the gospel. We have spent weeks drinking it in and digesting it, and trying to allow it to make sense to us. We read with the Father’s commentaries nearby, so we don’t fall into the snare of private interpretation.
But first, about the writer. The Apostle John is known as St. John the Evangelist in the West. But in the East, he is regarded as St. John the Theologian. A “theologian” is among the highest honorifics that can be bestowed upon a man. John is the original theologian of the Church, outside of Christ, of course. He was to give us the most important literal foundations of the Christian faith.
The Gospel opens, In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning, with God. (John 1:1-2)
We know who recorded it, but who uttered this? Who conveyed that concept that the Word was a co-originate part of the godhead?
Answer: The third part of the godhead — the Holy Spirit. And for good reason too. St Basil the Great wrote, “The Holy Ghost foresaw that men would arise, who should envy the glory of the Only-Begotten, subverting their hearers by sophistry; as if because He were begotten, He was not; and before He was begotten, he was not. That none might presume then to babble such things, the Holy Ghost says, In the beginning was the Word.”
The Holy Spirit does not get discussed until later in the gospel, when Jesus says, “And I will pray the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may abide with you forever — the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees Him nor knows Him; but you know Him, for He dwells with you and will be in you.” (John 14:16-17).
We needed to know, also, that the Christ the Word was with God outside of time, before the beginning, so to speak. “From the beginning He is with God; and though independent of time, is not independent of an author,” said Hilary of Poitiers. St. John Chrysostom wrote that, “God was never solitary, apart from Him, but always God with God.”
Also, we must understand that although the Father and the Son share the same godhead, they differ in personal identity. “From the Word being with God, it follows plainly that there are two Persons. But these two are of one Nature; and therefore it proceeds, In the Word was God: to show that the Father and Son are of one nature, being of One Godhead,” wrote the Blessed Theophylact.
In a sense, it may be easier to comprehend the triune God in His role as creator of both space and time. Added St Hilary, “He is infinite by Whom everything, which is, was made: and since all things were made by Him, time is likewise.”
And a brief word on this concept of beginning. This prologue is a different kind of genesis account, far different in tone than the rendering in the Book of Genesis: In John’s Gospel, the emphasis is on the creator, not the creation. “Moses indeed, in the beginning of the Old Testament, speaks to us in much detail of the natural world, saying, In the beginning God made the heaven and the earth; and then relates how that the light, and the firmament, and the stars, and the various kinds of animals were created. But the Evangelist sums up the whole of this in a word, as familiar to his hearers; and hastens to loftier matter, making the whole of his book to bear not on the works, but on the Maker,” wrote St John Chrysostom.
John’s Gospel is far different from other books compiled in the Bible, because it is interested in the spiritual before all else. It begins the foundation on the eternality of God and the reality of the godhead. All else follows from that, and the story of Christ’s emergence into His ministry flows from this purest form of theology.
Creation Icon
Christ the Word
The other day I began teaching a new jailhouse group my Christology 101 course. We start with John 1 and go from there. I decided to keep it simple and spent the entire session focusing on John 1:1: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
Suffice it is to say, in the ensuing hour we did not even finish discussing the sentence. I must say, such a small portion of scripture yields such a great expanse of truth. What blew the inmates away was the expansiveness of the identity of the Word — the co-eternal, pre-eternal, pre- and post-Incarnate Christ. Bible-only believers claim that the Word of God is the Bible. But we Orthodox know that Word to be Christ. Holy Scripture tends to be looked on as an organizing feature of the Church.
The “who came first, God or Christ” discussion that had plagued Christianity since its inception was a moot point because God and the Word are timeless and the concept of Word, or logos, Word and Reason, move beyond human reasoning. “The Word is not a human Word,” said St. Basil the Great. “For how was there a human word in the beginning, when man received his being last of all?”
In this eternal setting, before the establishment of time, God chose to introduce His pre-existent Only-Begotten. “But why omitting the Father, does he proceed at once to speak of the Son? Because the Father was known to all; though not as the Father, yet as God; whereas the Only-Begotten was not known,” said St. John Chrysostom. Unknown does not mean non-existent.
Humans have always known that something else lurks beneath and beyond our existence. Atheists and others deny it, but buried deep in even the most staunch nonbeliever’s being is the concept of this radical deep underpinning of the cosmos. Why is it that man has religion? Because we are rational beings. Embedded within this rationality is God Himself, Who is revealed only partially and on a subconscious level to those unaware or unconvinced of the Word.
Still, the Word Himself, as the Only-Begotten, the God Who walked in the flesh upon this earth to save all, invites lengthy discussions when discussing the pre-New Testament Word. The pre-Incarnate Word that was not yet Christ born to the Theotokos Mary. Only perfect understanding of God’s universe will “get” this aspect of God, but a deep oceanic sense of mystery pervades the discussion. Chrysostom wrote, “As then when our ship is near shore, cities and port pass in survey before us, which on the open sea vanish, and leave nothing whereon to fix the eye; so the Evangelist here, taking us with him in his flight above the created world, leaves the eye to gaze in vacancy on an illimitable expanse. For the words, “was in the beginning,” are significative of eternal and infinite essence.”
St. Augustine’s reflections on John 1:1 excite the intellect as it moves into this ocean beyond the port of understanding. “The Word of God is a Form, not a formation, but the Form of all Forms, a Form unchangeable, removed from accident, from failure, from time, from space, surpassing all things, and existing in all things, on a kind of foundation underneath, and summit above them.” Thus, Christ, as the Word, gives us the firm ground of our existence, filling the void of knowing the Who of Creation, and giving us the journey’s goal — the summit — so plainly in view that to stray from it is to die partially. Thus, we must be faithfully adrift, heading always towards Christ, living fully in the light of the Word.
A fellow Christian asked me on this blog to include a statement of why I left the Roman Catholic Church. I answered it briefly on my bio page, but now I realized that the answer I gave was perhaps too brief. Here is a little more meat on this chapter of my life, which has become a cobwebbed room in the not-too-distant past for me.
The truth is, I never officially joined the Roman Catholic Church. I grew up nominally Catholic, but my family was non-practicing. We typically went to church twice per year (if that) — Christmas and Easter. I was never catechized, never confirmed, never received Communion, and really had no idea of the tenets of the Christian faith. I could not have told anyone who Jesus was, was clueless about the Trinity, and didn’t care too much about it. I usually sat in church restlessly, annoyed at all those dour scripture readings during the mass and wondering why people’s names were on each pew.
By my teen years, the mandatory trips to the C&E masses dried up and they became optional, which means, from around age 16 or 17 on, I stopped attending mass altogether. I remember turning up at midnight mass a few times in my later teens on Christmas Eve, for kicks, after I’d had a few drinks. Maybe I was checking out the Catholic girls out in their nice Christmas get-ups, but I don’t have total recall of the situation. It was a hazy time.
Even hazier days followed in subsequent years, and I totally forgot about church while I became a party animal. After hitting bottom, I sought help and eventually acquired a “higher power” per recommendations from people in various programs I attended. I remained an agnostic, created a God of my own understanding which was nothing more than a version of me (a truly frightening “higher power”!), and I drifted around on such New Age platitudes throughout my twenties into my thirties. Then, years later, brought to my knees again by poor choices, I picked up a bible in a rehab and became interested in Christ’s salvation.
Around this time I happened into a black Pentecostal church in the Bronx, and realized that this was the first church I had gone to since my youth in the Catholic fold. As I waited in line for the laying of hands, a young girl behind me asked me if I was Catholic. She said I carried myself like one. Must have been the way I folded my hands or something.
A few months later, I decided that I wanted to become a church man. I had been “saved,” but the only real experience I had was with the Catholics, so that was where I went. I knew nothing of different Christian denominations so to me Catholic Church was the same as nondenominational evangelical. Plus, I had a mystical side of me that didn’t sit right in a conference room church.
I joined the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults (RCIA) program at my parish and quickly became one of the star students. I began attending masses and for several months, I coveted the Eucharist that I couldn’t receive. I awaited my Confirmation with great joy. Then, paperwork intervened. The clergy didn’t like the fact that I was divorced and wanted me to get an annulment. I disagreed: I hadn’t been married in a Catholic Church. I had been married abroad in front of civil authorities in a different country. Definitely not in church. But the church basically told me, “Prove it.” Therefore, a few weeks before First Communion and Confirmation, I was informed that I would not be allowed to participate in the service because of my marital situation. I argued with the priest to no avail. I was essentially blocked until I dotted the I’s and crossed the t’s to satisfy the Church. There was a money issue involved, but I had no money and no means to go back to the foreign country and get whatever documents the church wanted just to prove that I had not been married in a R.C. church. I was crushed. I came to the beautiful Easter Vigil service, saw my RCIA friends and colleagues baptized, confirmed and fed the Holy Eucharist, and attended their party afterwords in the Rectory. There I did something I’m not proud of — I’m not sure why I did it — but when I attended that party, I began to inform everyone there that I would be checking out other denominations. I wanted communion badly and I was ready to shop around. So, in the space of one long and sad evening, I left the Roman Catholic Church I never joined and ventured further out into the rather confusing world of Christian heterodoxy. Sure, I was filled with pride and envy, anger and vengefulness, but I was hurt. I thought that churches were supposed to be nice to their flock.
That began a long period of searching through biblical Protestantism — mostly with churches run by bible-wielding Baptists, actually, and then, without going too far into it here, being led to my real and final Church home, the Holy Eastern Orthodox Church.
I now understand that this is the closest thing to the ancient church and is the least “modern” of all organizations calling itself Christian. This piece is not an attempt to compare and contrast other Christian branches with Orthodoxy. It is really just to provide a better answer for why I left the Catholic Church.
There are other important personal considerations as well. My family, although nominally Catholic, stemmed from the Former Yugoslavia. In fact, my heritage as Croat and as a Serb is both Catholic and Orthodox. On the Orthodox side, in fact, there was at least one priest. And then if you mix in my mother’s pedigree — standard American stock, heavily Protestant — and it becomes evident that my roots embrace all three major branches of the Christian faith. I like to say now that I chose the branch with the best music — something about Russian choral chant sends eternal chills throughout my spinal region. I believe that this is the music that one hears upon entering heaven, and, with all due haste, I would reiterate the famous quip from the envoy of St Vladimir the Great upon experiencing his first Orthodox Divine Liturgy: “We knew not whether we were in Heaven or on Earth… We only know that God dwells there among the people.”
The reason I left the Evangelical/Fundamentalist fold is just as complicated, and probably not worth getting into because I have found my home in Christ. And perhaps most importantly, we’ve got the best tunes!
Double-headed eagle -- Russian symbol
O Lord, rebuke me not in Thine anger, nor chasten me in Thy wrath. For Thine arrows are fastened in me, and Thou hast laid Thy hand heavily upon me. (Ps 37, 1-2)
If we do not agree with the evil thoughts suggested by the devil, we do good. — St. Seraphim of Sarov
“Too late, Mr. doorkeep! You heeded too late to the Word. Now your bed is made — the rubble outside is your bedroom, now lie in it.”
So intones that voice. It never wants us to do well. I think you know who the “it” is that I’m talking about. It kicks us when we are down, and doesn’t want us to get up (which is proof of the grace of God).
How long can I listen to that voice? It is the voice of unreason masquerading as human reason, as moral logic, but in reality it is the opposite. It tells me I cannot accomplish anything good or worthwhile again. In a sense this is true when I am not asking for God’s help, but God wants us to know that His help is always available. He doesn’t want us despairing or doubting His power to work through human hands.
I had tried to take God out of the picture and gone off on my own. Then I fell subject to the worst vices that the evil one had drummed up for me and I fell hard and there are consequences that cause anxiety and distress.
But I’m not giving up on the joy, because the Lord rescued me out of my desolation and performed miracles to get me where I am now and I will not forsake Him again.
This change of heart came in the Church, after I heard the Six Psalms at Matins like I had never heard them before:
Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me bless His holy name. Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all that He hath done for thee, Who is gracious unto all thine iniquities, Who healeth all thine infirmities, Who redeemeth thy life from corruption, Who crowneth thee with mercy and compassion, Who fulfilleth thy desire with good things; thy youth shall be renewed as the eagle’s. (Ps 102, 1-5)
Countless times have I stood in prayer on Saturday night vigil in Church, and heard these psalms, with the candles extinguished and everyone at their quietest, save the whimpers or playful entreaties of our young. But I must add how those words never spoke to me like this before, because I had lived them all too viscerally and now I needed His voice to call to me and save me from this spiritual death that had been threatening.
Now I was young again, like the eagle, tearing high above the crouch of the doomsayers, flying through the sorrows of faithlessness and heading towards home. Again.
St Peter -- an older icon from the Levant
And immediately, the cock crew. And Peter remembered the word of Jesus, which said unto him, Before the cock crow, thou shalt deny me thrice. And he went out and wept bitterly. (Matthew 26:74-75)
I made a decision recently to go against God and now I am choked with thorns and have had to repent. How does one properly repent for all that he has done? Better yet, how does one repent when he has gone off the deep end and sits at the bottom of the abyss, looking up at the towering and brilliant cliff from which he has just leaped?
Indeed, my latest apostasy would give the young St. Peter, Chief of the Apostles, a run for his money. (From previous posts, many of you could have seen that from this site.) A couple of months ago, I began to grow tired of church and all the time I was putting into it. I began to complain, and think ill thoughts of the church and the clergy, and the traditions, and the rules, and eventually, the Bible itself and religion in general. I dropped out of most of my church activities and subsequently fell into my worst behaviors. Ashamed, I refused to go back to church to repent. I rebelled instead. I began to explore going back to my life as an agnostic and hung out a shingle that said, “Under New Management: Me.”
Sounds good, except that living under a Me-Management program would prove dangerous, costly, and unmanageable. After a few months of heady rebellion and contumacy, I nearly lost it all. Ultra-addictive and destructive behaviors came back and saw me take a very quick plunge to a point lower than I had gone before. The cackles of the devil and his minions were heard everywhere.
Flash forward to last week. I walked out of the city, the part of the city that’s dangerous and decrepit, weeping violently, crossing myself, and saying the Jesus Prayer, knowing perhaps for once the true fruits of repentance. Next, I found myself crawling back to church, gored, bruised, and dazed, wondering how it could have all gone so wrongly so quickly.
Late one night, a few weeks before the Reunion of the Christ and Me, I am standing in front of the icons, praying. Except that I am unable to pray smoothly, because I am weeping between many of the lines. I make it through the evening prayers — the first time I have done them in their entirety in months. By Saturday I am in the nave, crying in front of the icons of Christ, unable to make it through prayers without sobbing, knowing that I have wronged not only myself and those loved ones around me, but God as well. I am confessing with my priest, and receive absolution. Then, on Sunday, back in the choir, and I am receiving the miracles.
I know that something has been missing in my life, and terribly missing, yet I didn’t want to do much about it because I was giving my sick and sinful side a chance to go off on its own. The idea of “it doesn’t matter anymore” underscored all my decisions. And soon, I was going at sin without hesitation. Wishing to be struck dead because of the horror that I had put myself and my family through.
But that is not the way God would have it. He wants to give us all a chance to repent.
The Lord is not slack concerning His promise, as some men count slackness, but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. (II Peter 3:9)
It had been said to me that perhaps the Lord because of my pride would let me act out in unseemly ways, for a while, then would let me fall hard in order to get a good crack at my pride. Indeed, it looks as this is what has happened. By no means can I sit here from a loft and proclaim repentance to all who will listen because I have had to repent. This is pure vanity. But instead I wish to let my readers know that repentance is come to one sinner, and hard repentance, and if I had not gone so wild into my pride and sin, I might not have lost as much as I did. Still, these losses notwithstanding, the Lord will have me.
While I may agree with Michelle Bachmann on more points than I disagree, her religious views vis-à-vis the latest meteorological two-punch called the 5.9 D.C. Rattler and hurricane Irene somewhat perturb me in thinking about the GOP field for 2012.
Her initial comments that the hurricane and the quake had something to do the wrath of God were simply ludicrous — especially from a Christian point of view. She was quoted as saying:
"I don’t know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians. We’ve had an earthquake; we’ve had a hurricane. He said, ‘Are you going to start listening to me here?’"
Later on, pressed by putatively outraged liberal punditry, she said this was a joke. But I suspect that initially she was being dead serious. In fact, her comments likely won praise over at Westboro Baptist, where God is regularly hailed for bringing calamities on nations, families of fallen soldiers and other innocents because they accept homosexuality and other No-Nos.
Or, her remarks would have earned kudos with certain Muslims who blogged a connect between the miniscule e-quake in D.C. with Allah’s disapproval of Washington’s supposed anti-Muslim policies. To this I tweeted: “I do not believe that #God causes e-quakes, floods, diseases, wars ,nor prosperity, victory nor any natural or economic fortune.”
Well, let me further expatiate on that proclamation:
I do not believe that God causes earthquakes, floods, diseases, wars, economic disasters, revolutions, lost wars, lost battles, victorious military campaigns, touchdowns, goals, world records, or any other remarkable feat or famine. Perhaps the lack of God in our lives causes that, but God in my understanding has never been about that.
Frankly, I’m dead tired of hearing Evangelicals (and Muslims and Mormons and others who like to tie human and natural fates to divine declensions) harping on in their best Old Testamentese about the wrath of God.
If God is that angry and vindictive, then could He be God? I would imagine that the god that these people imagine who dispatches hurricanes, earthquakes, twisters, and nuclear catastrophes to punish sin is more like Devil Incarnate. Or even worse, a madman (or madwoman) on a Mission.
Some advice for Bachmann: Keep the "jokes" off religion. Take as many jabs at jobs, money, and economy and all will be right… The voters will chuckle all the way to the polls next year. But as for serious religious beliefs, best to keep them personal. The social issues will be take care of themselves, and trust you me –God has His mind on bigger issues than weather. Otherwise the independents may bold the GOP field in ’12 because of Wackophobia. The Independent Bloc is kingmaker and it fears leaders who might occasionally amen the latent desire of mentally disordered preachermen to take out their childhood S&M fantasies on homos, creeps and druggies more than it does community organizers who follow Fascist social gospel profiteers like Jeremiah Wright. Tone it down, Ms. Bachmann, or the street thugs will win. Again.
After eating a good supper last night, I decided to walk a bit to burn calories and to have a good look around at the post-Irenic devastation of our land. (I’m leading with understatement.)
The trek to the market from my house is around 2.5 miles, so it makes a pretty good workout on a rest day. For a guy of my age and my eating habits, I have to exercise away a lot of calories just to break even, and normally I am semi-psycho at the gym, but this walk provided a good cap of a weekend spent lolling around the house waiting for the winds to subside.
The first thing I noticed was not how much my immediate neighborhood got spared. A few trees were downed, some areas were flooded. More than few neighbors were shop vaccing their basements. More than quite a few were without power. Nope — I could not help but observe how beautiful a work of natural art it is to experience the outrush of a hurricane met with the influx of a cool high-pressure system. Whether the work of God or Mother Nature or a collaboration, the only word utterable during my sojourn was bravo.
And now about the bugs. Hurricanes seem to bring with them not only high winds, ridiculous rainfall and ample danger, but a helluva lotta bugs too. An untold number of pest species abound and Irene, as with other hurricanes I have experienced, carried a few them in her unyielding blows. First, hurricane bugs often come in bewildered and out of place. The next question is where do they come from? I used to believe that they came from way down south — Florida, the Caribbean, and the Carolinas — dislodged by Category 2s, 3s and 4s, magically and mystically carried on the stratosphere to our cold northern habitats, but now I suspect something a little less stupendous. These bugs probably hail from the swamps and creeks and protected natural areas of the state. Since New Jersey is a essentially a swamp papered over with McMansions and ghettoes, there are a lot of bugs out there just waiting to blow in. And since mankind is aware of only a sliver of the species on this planet, every time a major warm storm comes in from the south, it empties the forest of thousands of swamp critters — representatives of bug-kinds we’ve never seen before. I would image that entomologists have a sort of field day during hurricanes or tropical storms chasing bugs. During my stroll a strange fly — more like a miniature donkey than a horse — perched on my arm momentarily bug-eyed and surprised after a gust. It didn’t bite me, because I think it was in a kind of shock. Imagine the Great Wind from a bug’s perspective and you’ll see more than the hand of God active in such a momentous event. Next let’s actually imagine that we control over the forces of nature and we can sit comfortably back in our recliners and count the drippings from the ceiling.
A few months ago I would have sent out a posse to anyone writing this, but I have done a bit of thinking lately on the subject of religion and natural disasters.
I realize that I find it distasteful to seek God’s will in a hurricane, a tornado, or any other force of nature. Because even if it God’s will to accomplish anything using nature, it would be man’s will to interpret this particular act of volition and man, no matter what creed he professes, is invariably wrong.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Irene, we could easily presume that God is slightly pissed but not too angry at us godless and immoral inhabitants of the northeast. Earlier in the week, pre-Irene, a cabal of Muslim dunkoffs said this weeks measly e-quake epicentered near D.C. was proof that Allah was angry at Amerika. Indeed — if the magnitude of earthquakes was any indicator, God hates the Muslim world, which has suffered a ton more huge earthquakes over the millennia than the Western infidel world (not counting the Left Coast, which I believe should be acceded to the Dar al Islam immediately just so us righty wackos can soak in the pleasure of seeing the heads outspoken libs, homos and other dhimmocrats get plunked en masse by bearded savages).
But let’s speak to the familiar rant of home soil religiosity. As one who has once decorated the pews and hotel room seats of revivals and amen’d raging preachers’ correlations between force majeur and the plight of soulless sinners in the claws of an angry God, I must now repent. I frankly do not believe that God operates like that. Indeed, I bet he has more fun seeing what happens when a hurricane charges up the coast and looses all kinds of unknown species of bugs from the swamps on a pampered populace living in the burbs. Having pulled off strange looking vermin from my skin after tropical storms many times, I can bet that He does indeed enjoying the buzz of creation swarming in the tropical haze like that.
Well, before I inspire a religious posse to come at me with their godly wrath, I better leave it at this and continue to hunker down while God finishes his latest and breathy rebuke over O Canada. Enjoy the sunshine, my beloved!
A lot of you are probably (not) asking, where has this doorkeep! blogger been lately? Here is the answer:
I have been hiding out. In caves larger than shopping malls, with a constant stream of the day’s events and nonsequitirs lacquered upon each briny stone.
Many changes have chanced upon me and I stand on the shore watching boats going by, wondering.
Where is God now in my life? Why has He hidden Himself? And why can I now feel nothing stirring? Why has the great faith, which I once joyfully trumpeted throughout these weeks, months, years, on this blog and elsewhere, seemed to moved on?
Perhaps I do not want to reveal too much of myself here and now. That is why I choose to keep mostly silent and well-hid. The day will come when I shall choose to come out of this shadowed land, but I have not heard that moment announce itself. I beg your patience — and I will do my best to keep. writing. something.
Highway Zero Podcast
