Dear Faithful Readers,
Please follow the link to a new faith-based tour company I am beginning tomorrow on the Feast of St. Botolph, Old Style. Won’t post there as often as I do here, but please pass along the word for those of you who might travel to our fair city and want a tour. It would be my greatest pleasure.
What Marilyn says here about hospital waiting rooms is capital pastoral theology. I have often had the same thoughts about riding the bus, except the stories are a little less desperate. Witnessing souls at the crossroads of their lives… Reminds me of one of my best beloved quotes:
There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilisations – these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit – immortal horrors or everlasting splendors. … Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses.
—C.S. Lewis “The Weight of Glory”
Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?” – Henry David Thoreau
Everyone should have to go into a hospital waiting room once a week and just sit – just sit and observe. I believe the results of such an experiment would be extraordinary.
Because it’s in the hospital waiting room where outward beauty is revealed for what it is and inward beauty shines.
It’s in the hospital waiting room where we are among those walking wounded. Those who bear their scars with nobility. It’s in hospital waiting rooms that you don’t try to hide tears; where you can’t hide anger or disappointment and where shock is just a part of the day’s story.
It’s in hospital waiting rooms where you realize that you share a lot more with fellow humans than you choose to admit. Where you realize that…
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Got a voucher from LivingSocial to go on a hay ride and receive complimentary cones of ice cream from a dairy farm in Framingham, MA. We already have a favorite apple and fruit picking farm in Northboro and a maple sugaring site that we blogged about for the early spring. Finding this wonderful dairy farm today in a place not too far from the city completes the tri-fecta of edible goodness. Continue reading
June 14- Repose of G.K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton
I always wondered what it would be like. In high school, I had a crazy Latin teacher who actually took all of us guys to Tosca, but the sub-title projector was broken so all that we understood of the story was that some guys were all after the same women and they were really disgusted about it. Tonight, though, my oldest daughter and I got our first taste of well done opera that we could understand.
Every year the Boston Early Music Festival performs a centerpiece opera that is recently revived from the Baroque period of classical music. This year’s opera Almira features a love triangle involving a newly crowned Queen (Almira) and her many exotic and mysterious suitors. Continue reading
I think I am on to a new personal favorite genre of spiritual literature: memoirs that tell the story of a person’s unlikely spiritual transformation in an environment very much unfamiliar and even inimical to the one in which he/she was raised. The market is flooded with conversion stories to Christ, but ones that tell the story in a grateful and truly humble way are few and far between. Eager new converts too often come across to their audience as, “I’ve got it, whatever ‘it’ is, and you need it, whoever ‘you’ are.” With hardly a note of personal connection, their plea for salvation falls flat as nothing more than a hawking of cheap furniture.
Two books that have come out in the last few years buck this trend, the first one by a man who remained a more informed non-believer and the second by a lesbian English professor whose transformation led her to become the wife of a Reformed Presbyterian pastor. Continue reading
What does the valedictorian of a prominent Orthodox Christian seminary do in her spare time? Many of her predecessors have written books that encourage more prayer, given rousing theological sermons that motivate people to action, and led whole flocks of faithful Christians into the Kingdom of God. This year, Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology graduated a valedictorian that started her own Orthodox Christian dance company a few years back, not just a company with a prayer or two before performances, but a beautiful and cultural outpouring of what the Church celebrates daily in her life in Christ. Tonight’s spring concert proved once again that her efforts have not only been successful but salvific to the soul. Continue reading
I once taught a history course in my former school entitled Traveling the World with the Apostles, in which we learned about the various and diverse cultures of the world through the perspective of the first Christian apostle to those cultures. While a lot has changed at the school since I taught there almost a decade ago, there is still a strong sense in the curriculum of the universality of the Christian faith and how Christ calls the whole world to new life in Him. In this season of the resurrection, the Church celebrates this universality by chanting the paschal (Easter) hymn in as many different languages as our local choirs can muster. Here is just a sample of that diversity: Continue reading
Reminds me of a quote from G.K. Chesterton, also about having breakfast (tangentially about the resurrection and a living church):
Plato has told you a truth; but Plato is dead. Shakespeare has startled you with an image; but Shakespeare will not startle you with any more. But imagine what it would be to live with such men still living, to know that Plato might break out with an original lecture to-morrow, or that at any moment Shakespeare might shatter everything with a single song. The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare to-morrow at breakfast.
– From “Authority and the Adventurer” in Orthodoxy the Romance of Faith
CHRIST IS RISEN!!
I love eating breakfast out at restaurants. Perhaps it’s because I rarely do it, but when I do, it’s always a vacation feel – a sense of the unexpected.
So it was with new eyes that I read the line “Come have breakfast” in the gospel of John.
The verse comes after Jesus has been crucified and has risen, appearing to different people. First he is seen by Mary, then by the disciples and finally by others. He’s on the banks of the Sea of Galilee watching the disciples fishing in a boat on the sea. They have fished the entire night and they’ve caught nothing. Their nets and stomachs are empty. But this man on the banks of the sea tells them “Just try it one more time.”
Just one more time.
So they do it. Weary, frustrated, hungry – they still try one more time. And the result does…
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Seems we are not the first to think of a Bright (Easter) Monday pinic.
Orthodox Easter, otherwise known as Pascha, was this weekend. This means that much of Christendom celebrated Easter after a Holy Week that led us to a final, triumphant service, beginning just before midnight on Saturday and ending around three in the morning. While this may seem daunting, I assure you – staying awake is not an issue. How can you doze off when a priest periodically comes into the congregation and with joy shouts “Christ is Risen!” to which you respond “Indeed, He is Risen!”.
As is the duty of those who call themselves Christians, the challenge is moving from Pascha into the week after. From celebration into the ordinary. From Sunday into Monday. It is easier to do this in some places than in others, and Egypt is one of those places where the Monday after Easter is Sham el Nessim – a national holiday.
So today I am…
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Great & Holy Pascha 2013
Time in this fallen world is often experienced as something we need to use up or even kill in our never-ending pursuit of pleasure and cessation from work. But the irony is that for however long or hard we work, leisure time, that supposed reward at the end of a day’s labor, ever seeks to elude us. Especially in America, we can never seem to work long enough or hard enough to reach it, if pleasure really is the goal we should be seeking at all.
The Epicurean philosophers and their modern Madison Avenue ad agencies bid us to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. The Lord Jesus Christ bids us, rather paradoxically, to take up our cross and die with him. And no one in the history of the world who has taken the Lord’s advice over the Epicureans has ever been sorry for it, for our crucifixion always ends, as His, in resurrection. Continue reading
Like Mendicant Monks... 