When it comes to me and Eastern Christianity, I’m something like a newlywed: I’m in giddy with love and most sincerely committed, but still have a lot to learn about this mysterious Other. This is especially true when it comes to Eastern theology, particularly on the issue of marriage and the related questions of divorce and contraception.
Fortunately, there are smart guys like Karl Schudt out there to help me along. (more…)
Today, the Feast of St. Mark, I cantored solo for only the second time at St. George Church in Aurora. The first time was last week, when the regular cantor called me while I was driving to the Church to say he wouldn’t be there.
I tripped up fewer times today than last week. My biggest speedbump today was that I went astray in the middle of the Exaltation (”The angel declared unto her . . .”), having hit the wrong interval somewhere. I don’t think it sounded bad—I didn’t slip into another key or really depart from the character of the piece, but it took me a while to find my place again.
Here is pictured one of the towers of Holy Trinity Cathedral in Chicago, a sight I cannot behold without some feeling of sorrow.
I took this picture a couple of weeks ago when I happened to be passing through the Chicago neighborhood that is home to several Eastern Christian churches. Only a few blocks away from this church, which is the cathedral church of the Diocese of the Midwest of the Orthodox Church in America, is St. Nicholas Church, the Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral. Same liturgy, same spirituality, two Cathedrals
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.
“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.”
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?