On the Murder of George Floyd

George Floyd. Photo from The New York Times.

Over the past few weeks, I have had to deal with my own situation in a way that has left me with very little energy to engage with the news, or much of anything else. I don’t need to go into that here. Suffice it to say that while I have come through the ordeal intact—and indeed much happier—I am still deeply tired. And it will take some time to fully recover.

Nevertheless, the murder of George Floyd—the murder of yet another unarmed black man, at the hands of a police officer sworn to protect and to serve—has not escaped my notice. Nor has the gamut of reactions I have seen from my own personal circle of acquaintances, which is a decent miniature representation of this country as a whole.

Rebuke Me Not in Thy Anger?: Notes in a Time of Pandemic

We are living in strange times.

Certainly, I never expected to have occasion to sing the above molieben, “Sung in Time of Devastating Epidemic and Deathbearing Pestilence.” Or even had an inkling that such a service existed. (Not that I was very surprised—the Russians seem to have a molieben for every occasion…)

And yet, I sung it today after Liturgy, in a choir deliberately reduced to a handful of people, each of us prudently spaced at our own stand.

On the Particularity of the Saints—and Us

Note: For various reasons, I haven’t felt up to writing for a few months. I was surprised to see from the blog stats that people have evidently kept checking the site during that time! I’m not sure that I’ll get back to posting regularly, but in the past couple days I’ve felt one taking shape in my mind, so here we go…

Halloween was a few days ago, which naturally got me thinking about two things: death and saints. However much the modern American holiday may have strayed from its religious roots, the celebration of All Saints is still reflected in its very name. And on the Western liturgical calendar, All Souls’ Day (November 2) immediately follows All Saints’ Day.

When Friends Suffer

William Blake, Job Rebuked by His Friends

Recently, some dear friends of mine have been suffering. This is hardly the first time I’ve had to watch people I care about suffer, nor will it be the last. However, the present case is hitting me especially hard, because of the people and the nature of the suffering involved. How are we to respond to the suffering of our friends and other loved ones?

On St Maria of Paris

Today, July 20th, the Church celebrates the feast of my beloved patron, St Maria of Paris, as well as her associates who were canonized with her: her son, St Yuri, still a young man; the gentle, courageous priest St Dimitri (Klepinin); and St Ilya (Fondaminsky), a Jew by birth who refused an opportunity to escape while his kin were being murdered, wishing in his last days to “live with the Christians and die with Jews.”

So You Want to Be a Monastic

Note: The title of this post is playfully riffing on the title of the first book in a favorite young adult fantasy series by Diane Duane, So You Want to Be a Wizard. One could observe many points of similarity between monastics and wizards.

For the past year or so, I have been fairly open about my desire to go to the monastery, but it’s something that I’ve been seriously thinking about for quite a bit longer than that—very early into my time at seminary, in fact. The experience of seminary, of living in community according to the the rhythm of the liturgical cycles, was nothing short of a revelation for me. It was a homecoming, and the fact that I took to it so immediately and naturally sparked the idea of monastic life.

Of Doubt and Closed Doors

Today, on Thomas Sunday, we celebrate the “most wonderful doubt” of Thomas. As I discussed in my previous post, Thomas’s doubt is most wonderful because it is through this doubt that he comes to certain faith. For Thomas, it is the physical act of touching the body of the risen Christ that turns his doubt to faith and elicits the joyful confession: My Lord and my God!

This is all very well and good, but where does it leave us? What about our doubts? We certainly don’t have the advantage of following Thomas in seeing, speaking with, and touching the risen Christ.

Most Wonderful Doubt of Thomas

The Apostle Thomas often gets a bad rep. “Doubting Thomas,” he’s called: the disciple who stubbornly refuses to believe in Jesus’ resurrection until he himself touches the wounds. But this isn’t how the Church remembers Thomas. On the contrary, on this first Sunday after Pascha, we celebrate his doubt as most wonderful:

On the First Week of Lent

By the grace of God, we have reached the end of the first week of Great Lent. Much more of it lies ahead; this is no sprint. But if you’re anything like me, you already have some cause to feel that you haven’t been keeping it quite as you’d hoped.

In a way, the Orthodox frequently tend to approach Lent like the general American population does January 1st—with a heightened sense of resolve, and every sincere intention to do better. But then a week rolls along (or two, or three….), and we find ourselves in much the same state we were at the beginning. Maybe we’re even keeping the fast from the specific foods we’re supposed to abstain from, but we’re still judging our neighbor, gossiping, getting short-tempered, or whatever our own passions may be. Even though we know that the food is the easy part to deal with, and that none of this is actually about food at all:

On Religious Experience

Yesterday in the bookstore I got a call from a lady about We Shall See Him As He Is: The Spiritual Autobiography of Elder Sophrony. Notwithstanding the facts that 1) she already owned the book and so was not looking to buy it, and 2) we don’t even publish that particular Sophrony book (it’s a St Herman of Alaska Brotherhood publication), she was in some distress and asked me to bear with her, and so I did. Basically, she had started reading the book and was worried about the trustworthiness of these seemingly extravagant claims of spiritual experience by a contemporary, uncanonized person. Her parish had been without a priest for months and she didn’t know who to talk to…and so she called us.

It was a slow day, so I gave her my two cents, with the explicit caveats that this was my personal opinion, I’ve never read the particular book, and I’m (obviously) not a priest. We ended up talking for about 20 minutes (far from the longest call I’d had even that week), and, thank God, it seems that my off-the-cuff answer was helpful. This conversation has left me thinking about the nature of religious experience in general, and what place it has (or ought to have) in the Christian life.