How Long, O Lord?

 

It is very early in the morning of the shortest day of the year, and  I am awake with my second cup of coffee.  My nearest neighbors are a flock of assorted birds, and their assertive rooster woke me, and my moving activated my 'smart watch' which told me that it was nearly time for Legacy Icons to stream Morning Prayer, so I thought, why not?  Television church always seems a bit odd to me, but it's an odd time and it has been another odd year.

So, I boil water and light a candle and hear psalms and troparia and a story of yet another virgin who wa martyred rather than let herself be defiled and a sermon about Elias and his prayers for drought and rain.  I am still a little punch drunk from having watched what has become my favourite Christmas movie,  Alfonso Cuarcon's adaptation of P. D. James' Children of Men.  I had first watched the movie in 2007, when it was first released on DVD.  Remember DVD;s.  They were a miracle that arrived soon after the radio.  I recommended it this year to a friend to watch as  the perfect movie for the Feast of the Holy Innocents, but he thought he might have to work that night, so we watched it on the Fourth Sunday of Advent.  When first I saw it, in bucolic Eureka Springs, the Seige of Seattle seemed like a fiction, and the Plague that had occupied the Earth by 2027 did, too.  Now, not so much.

Morning Prayer hurries along, as is normal in Orthodox services, a practice I still find a bit odd.  Is there really a great reward in heaven for him who can read Psalm Fifty the Fastest?  And then I listen to a video of Olafur Arnalds' Morning Sessions II.  Somehow I am shocked that Arnalds has become grey-headed.  How is it possible?  How long, O Lord, have I been enjoying his music, which is certainly as effective prayer as Elias'  How is it possible that already fourteen years have passed since I first watched Childreen of Men?  How isit possible that it is already another solstice morning, another Feast of St. Thomas, which only yesterday I celebated in the snows of Santa Fe.  I t was the deep midwinter of 1991, and I was taken with all things Celtic, and so we said the ThomasMass outside, processing a deep trench in the snow around the altar of cold stone, claiming the record for the coldest mass ever celebrated  intentionally  in Santa Fe history, before breaking fast at Pasqual's.  We of course prayed for peace.  Now eveyone from that little congregation is grey-headed or lying under the snow in that church yard where we had processed..

Arnalds at the piano seems like a grown-up Schroeder and I think that every Christmas is a Charlie Brown Christmas and that the question is always How long O Lord?  How long before we childen of men lean to number our days and apply our hearts to wisdom?  How long befoe we children of men might know the things which belong unto our peace?  Still, it seems, they are hid from our eyes.  How long, O Lord?  How long?

On Being a Whited Sepulchre

 December has arrived again, and with the making of lists of biggest hits of the year.  Certainly the thing that hit me the hardest in 2021 was the corona virus.  In March I did not expect to live to December.  I didn't expect to live to April.  In April, I was still feeling pretty uncetain about my suvival, and it was the end of May before I was convinced that my survival might be a good thing.

One of the frequently asked questions on Facebook and such is, if this were the last day of yur life, what would you do?  I hardly ever consider that question seriusly, but just think that I would go on doing what I usually do.  I am, not unhappy.  I am seldom ever even grumpy--although there wass that one afternoon last week .  . . .

But over the months since March that I have come to consider bonus months of a sort, I have begun to consider that question more seriously.  And I realized that I had become a sort of whited sepulchre.  For those of you dear readers who aren't familiar with the image, it is from the Gospel according to St. Matthew, where Jesus says:

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulches,which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within fullof med men's bones, and of all uncleanness.'

Now, I ain't claiming that I appeared beautiful ooutward ot other people who saw me, but I was pretty happy with my life when I looked at it.  Indeed, I was practiving all of what in traditional morality were considered the seven deadly sins of pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth.  Not so noticeably that I considered myself a grievious sinner, mind you.  I wasn't as [choose a sin] as someone I knew.  Besides, these attributes which were once considered sinful--that is, damaging to our personnages, to our souls, have become in contemporary society virtues.

Part of my wake-up call,  so to speak, was the attitude my friends had towards my illnesses.  I sawy illnesses because the United States had just gone through an election, and I voted against the party most of my good liberal friends thought would be the salvation of the country.  And they spared few opportunities to tell me that they thought I must be crazy--is this gaslighting?--because I had erred from the true faith.  Well, the party of light won, and nothing they have done has made me wish that I had voted for them.  Rather, they have just reminded me of the implications of the name Lufifer.  My regret is that I voted at all.  I regret that I got distracted from working on my own thoughts and actions and lgave energy to what is basically a cock fight or a pit dog fight Then  during the months that I was so ill from the virus, those same friends who were so anxious to convince me that I was mentally ill with wrongthink almost never checked to see how I was doing in my fight with the virus.

In the long run, however, I consider having had a fight with the virus to have been a blessing, because it reminded me of what St. Paul had said about our real fight:

'we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.'

We all will die. If I had died in March, the world would still  sing the carols of the  Adventt and Christmas seasons, stay up and drink too much on New Year's Eve, complain about the cold and slush of February and hardly notice next March that I was no longer posting cat photos on Instagram or writing occasional contrary blog posts.  But . . . .(Am I making a New Year's resolution?  I don/t make those.  But this is a sort of Advent resolution, and much of the western Church considers Advent the start of a new year, so . . . .)  But I hope during the months remaining to me to pay mor atttention to how I live, to recover the order of my life that I once followed, an order or attention and prayer that was designed to keep me connected to the earth and to the seasons, to my fellow human beings and to the other creatures with whom we share this earth, and to the One who created all of us, all creatures great and small and all creatures, as Monte Pythom reminded us, 

'all , things dull and ugl, all things small ad  squat, All things rude and nasty  . . .'

We are all in this together, and I am convinced that the tradition of the Orthodox Church is correct, that what one of us does affects us all/  There my be victimless political crimes, but there are no victimless sins. And so, as is the practice at Vespers in the Orthodox Church, I ask you, my brothers ad sisters, to forgive me, for I have sinned.