Eve of Thomas Sunday, April 25, 2020
We did it! We survived Holy Week, Pascha, and Bright Week mostly from our at home services and through live-stream on TV. The joy of the Resurrection and the growing warmth of spring naturally turns us outward, desiring to share the good news with others. But the continued COVID-19 quarantine still places limits on that desire.
A place in western Massachusetts that was bought by one of our parish deacons and his wife and transformed into a farm, retreat center, and sometime summer camp is now a fully-fledged, full-service spiritual oasis, St. John the Baptist Orthodox Christian Monastery. Our family visits the two monastic fathers who dwell here for a day trip that allows us to fulfill our desire to evangelize while obeying the strict rule of the government not to gather in groups larger than ten (7 + 2= 9).
This sanctuary in the least populated area of New England’s most populated state is a haven of calm while remaining a beehive of life and activity. I have personally visited these several acres of land surrounded by thousands of acres of state forest since it was acquired at the turn of the millennium and every time I am filled with a strange combination of comfortable familiarity and surprising wonder.
Now my children feel it as they disembark the family van and burst forth from their metal chamber to freely frolic in the meadow. The monastery chickens become playmates for the younger ones while garden work gives the older ones a chance to labor in the earth. We have all in our quarantine spent too much time in the second-hand life of the screen that this first-hand nature provides a much needed life that is direct and unmediated.
In the late afternoon, I climb the local mountain with my two oldest daughters. When life happens in a box, getting to your closest body of water or exalted landscape can help one gain a different perspective and breath different air. Mt. Grace, true to her name, is a friendly and forgiving precipice which can be agressively ascended and descended in just a few hours. The summit is very rewarding because even though it is heavily forested, the fire tower there helps the hiker see above the trees.
Glory to God for places of natural wonder to give solace to souls stuck in quarantine. Christ is risen!
Like Mendicant Monks... 
Everything is mediated.
Even an ordinary experience of a chicken. It’s just not mediated the same way as a screen. Mediation is universal.
Yes, but we Christians believe that things have distinct realities, not defined in opposition to other things. Things like chickens also have real freedom to choose and not necessarily dependent upon mediation. Everything is distinctly created with logoi given to them by the incarnate Logos and knowable thereby. Mediation has a telos (“end”) and does not simply lead to more mediation or a One above and beyond multiplicity.
We know, following Kant, that there is no direct access to “the thing in itself”. This applies to a chicken no less than a λόγος. The faculties of knowing, indebted to a biological, cultural, and individual history, structure the experienced object. There is no escape from this. Any knowledge of a chicken or a spouse is to be acquired with and through these mediations. That doesn’t mean the knowledge is “false” (though it may be poor or disfigured). It simply means it is not direct. – even for the λόγοι.