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Posted by Eric (April 3, 2006 at 2:50 pm)
Last Thursday, we chanted the Great Canon of St. Andrew of Crete at St. George Church. This matins service, typically done on Thursday morning in the fifth week of Great Lent, takes about three hours and includes some 220-odd prostrations—down on your knees, face to the floor. Through haunting odes, refrains, litanies and canticles, St. Andrew reminds us, first, of our own sinfulness despite the example of the patriarchs, prophets and holy men of old, and then of the hope offered us in Christ.
It’s a pretty hard-core, Marines-boot-camp sort of service. Not being a complete idiot, I did have a Clif bar and a tankard of coffee before hand. Pretty hungry by the end and scarcely able to walk—going downstairs was particularly difficult.
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Posted in Byzantine, Faith | Comments Off on Have Mercy on Me, O God!
Posted by Eric (April 3, 2006 at 1:40 pm)
Looks like all the clever Da Vinci Code puns are taken—”Decoding Da Vinci,” “The Da Vinci Con,” “The Duh Vinci Code,” etc.
No, I haven’t read it. Life’s too short. I tend to agree with Barbara Nicolosi that “we should all just agree to ignore it, and put our efforts into praying for the people who hate Jesus and us, His disciples, so much that they would make this film.”
My entire commentary on the Da Vinci phenomenon is this: that having failed to “prove” that Jesus never existed, that the Gospels are a fraud, that Christianity is a plague upon mankind, and all the rest, the enemies of the Church have resorted not just to making stuff up out of thin air, but to declaring that, really, this whole “truth” business, this slavish submission to “facts” and “historical data” is just so narrow and, let’s face it, intolerant of “alternate views” and “new ways of understanding.”
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Posted by Eric (March 29, 2006 at 2:21 pm)
I listen to a lot of public radio. The political bias drives me mad, of course, but nowhere else can you hear people consistently speaking in complete paragraphs and employing polysyllabic words. The freedom from ads is another plus, and with your liberal-bias-filter set to 11, you can actually learn quite a lot from public radio.
(As to why there is no conservative version of public radio, I would suggest that there is no viable market for any intellectually rigorous radio; such programming must be subsidized to exist at all, and whereas liberals tend to embrace government subsidy, conservatives tend to eschew it.)
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Posted by Eric (March 21, 2006 at 5:54 pm)
This morning I walked down the block to the local Latin Rite church for Mass and Confession. The Gospel for today was Matthew 18:21-35, the parable of the unforgiving servant.
I wonder why the servant whose massive debt was forgiven was so ready to demand repayment of the debt he was owed by his fellow servant. I would think he’d be walking on air after his interview with the master, whose mercy gave him a new lease on life. But he’s not—somehow, his heart is full of bitterness.
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Posted in Faith | Comments Off on Forgive Us Our Debts
Posted by Eric (March 20, 2006 at 7:03 pm)
“He humbled you and let you hunger . . . that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone.” (Deuteronomy 8:3)
We are nearly at Mid-Fast, and I’d like to return to Alexander Schmemann’s comment, quoted in my last entry, that “fasting is the only means by which man recovers his true spiritual nature.â€
At first this statement might appear contradictory. Doesn’t fasting make ever more present to us the fact that we do, indeed, rely on bread most utterly? Doesn’t fasting show us that we are but flesh and bones—hungry flesh and aching bones?
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