Monday, June 22, 2009

Mississippi

I haven't posted in a while, and I have a good excuse; I've been busy packing, moving, and falling in love with someone, but not necessarily in that order.

I'm in Mississippi right now, Oxford to be exact, and still living out of boxes. I'll start proper posts back up soon.

Saturday, May 09, 2009

Star Trek: The Doppelganger Generation

(Beware: here be spoilers)

I went to see "Star Trek" yesterday.

It isn't Star Trek. It's something else. It has all of the characters and imagery of Trek, but it's not Trek. It's an "alternate reality" in which Kirk is a problem child/raging alcoholic ne'er do well and Uhura is in love with...Spock? But rather than call this an "alternate reality," I'm more tempted to call it a "doppelganger."

In the original series there was an incident involving the transporter which created a doppelganger Kirk who was a conglomeration of all of the negative aspects of Kirk's psyche. He rampaged through the ship, drinking Saurian brandy and assaulting female crew members. This division produced two "Kirks" - the aforementioned "evil" side and another "good" side that was unable to make decisions. But in order to survive, the two halves needed each other; the longer they were separated from each other the weaker they became. If the two Kirks could not be re-united into a whole person they would both die.

This new "Trek" is like that evil Kirk. It is not something "whole," but a conglomeration of ridiculous plot devices, bluster, eye candy, and cocaine-induced cinematography. It's just like evil Kirk on a Saurian brandy binge.

I hated the Kirk of this "Trek." I identified with the Kirk of the original series for a number of reasons, one of which being the fact that he was a bit of a pencil neck geek during his academy days. Anyone familiar with the episode "Shore Leave" knows that Kirk was "positively grim" during his days at academy and that he was mercilessly picked on and tormented by upperclassmen. The Kirk of this universe is a party animal who spends most of his time getting it on with Orion slave girls and voyeuristically watching Uhura disrobe - not that different from the evil Kirk of "The Enemy Within," who sneaks inside Yeoman Rand's quarters and attempts to rape her.

The Kirk of the original series taught courses at Starfleet Academy as a young Lieutenant - he was also known among his fellow cadets as a bookworm. In the alternate universe he is all swagger - there's no substance there, nothing to like. When he reprograms the Kobayashi Maru test he struts around like a braggart - the quiet confidence of Kirk isn't there. He just comes across as a jerk.

I'll take the bizarro war criminal Kirk of the Terran Empire or the evil Kirk of "The Enemy Within" over the wild child, Beastie Boys blasting (yes, Beastie Boys in a Star Trek movie) Kirk of this nightmare realm.

So much nonsense in this movie. So many silly plot devices. Are we to believe that Spock would allow "red matter" - a substance which allows for the creation of wormholes - to fall into the hands of Romulans? Wouldn't Spock have sacrificed himself to prevent it from falling into their hands? We know that Spock is willing to sacrifice his life so that others may live ("Wrath of Khan"). In this instance, Spock must necessarily have arrived at the logical conclusion that the "red matter" would enable to Romulans to hold the Federation hostage.

And the Vulcans get a really bad rap in this movie. From the beginning they are consistently presented as intolerant. Accordingly, you feel little or no sympathy for the Vulcans when their planet is destroyed (how could I when Spock, inexplicably, lets the most destructive potential weapon in the galaxy fall into the hands of a band of vengeful, psychotic Romulans - you made your bed Spock, now lie in it). Earthlings on the other hand come across as tolerant and accepting of all cultures, even offering mercy to the defeated Romulans (which Spock is not prepared to offer).

All of the nonsense in this alternate reality is down to time travel. In the past Trek has done time travel well, but at this point it's a trite plot device, particularly when it's just thrown out there with minimal back story. And when time travel is involved it allows you to create all sorts of silly "alternate" versions of things with little or no explanation. So any inconsistency can be explained away with the "but it's an alternate reality" defense.

I disliked the look of this movie also. The camera work is that sort of cocaine-induced cinematography that people call "gritty" and "cinema verite." I call it unwatchable. Hold the camera still for 30 seconds; stay on one shot for more than five seconds; let me see what is happening in the fight scenes. It's just like Battlestar Galactica in this respect, which is unfortunate, because BSG is also unwatchable for the very same reason - it tries so hard to be "gritty" and "edgy" that it loses me completely.

********

Today being Mother's Day, I offer you my two favorite pop songs about mothers:



"Even as a crack fiend, mama, you always was a black queen, mama."

Saturday, May 02, 2009

Tangibility and ghostliness

Two fascinating passages I recently came across in my readings. They're fascinating because they present two different views of the created world and God's relationship to it. Twain has trouble with the notion that God would associate with the "dusky" people of the Holy Land, while O'Connor places the sacraments within the context of place, in this case the South.

Twain in The Innocents Abroad:

It seems curious enough to us to be standing on ground that was once actually pressed by the feet of the Savior. The situation is suggestive of a reality and a tangibility that seems at variance with the vagueness and mystery and ghostliness that one naturally attaches to the character of a god. I can not comprehend yet that I am sitting where a god has stood, and looking upon the brook and the mountains which that god looked upon, and am surrounded by dusky men and women whose ancestors saw him, and even talked with him, face to face, and carelessly, just as they would have done with any other stranger. I can not comprehend this; the gods of my understanding have been always hidden in clouds and very far away.

Flannery O'Connor:

I feel that the grotesque quality of my own work is intensified by the fact that I am both a Southern and a Catholic writer. It's standard for the Catholic writer to say that he is not a Catholic writer, but a writer who happens to be a Catholic....I've always been more tempted to say that I'm not a Southern writer, but a writer who happens to be a Southerner. However I feel that both of these are evasions, and that they stop discussions that they ought to begin. The Southern writer can't escape the image of the South that has built up a life of its own in his senses any more than the Catholic can escape the indelible marks that the sacraments put on his soul.

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Baptism/chrismation photos

The photos of my baptism have been posted. They can be found at the Holy Cross Orthodox Mission website, but I've re-posted the better ones here. In case there's any doubt, I'm the guy in the white shorts. Lydia, the little girl in the first photo, was baptized along with me. Her parents, Josh and Amelia, as well as her brother Judah, were chrismated. Also being chrismated with them were Benjamin and his fiancee Angie.

I took the name of Silouan at my baptism.








Saturday, April 25, 2009

Rev. George Leyburn and the "Anatolic Church"

About a month ago I found an article in an 1872 edition of the Southern Presbyterian Review by George W. Leyburn on the Orthodox Church. Leyburn was a Presbyterian minister and missionary from Rockbridge, Virginia. He was a graduate of Princeton and was well versed in the Greek language. In 1836 he traveled to Greece to work as a missionary, but was prevented by the Greek government, which insisted he use the Orthodox catechism, or cease his activities. He returned to Virginia soon thereafter and resumed his pastoral duties in the vicinity of Appomattox Courthouse. During the the war, Leyburn served as a chaplain to the southern troops, although it is unclear whether or not he had a commission in the Confederate army. In 1875 he returned to Greece, at the insistence of the small group of evangelicals there, to continue his mission activity. After only living there a matter of weeks, Dr. Leyburn took ill and died. The work entrusted to him fell to his son, George L. Leyburn, and a Dr. Kalopothakes, a Greek convert and member of the Virginia Synod of the Southern Presbyterian Church.

I had to send away for a copy of the article since they have been archived by the Presbyterian Church in America, and no digital copies exist. I received a copy in the mail a few weeks ago, and though it was late when I returned home and picked up my mail (after midnight), I immediately sat down to read it, my eyes heavy with sleep. What I read did not please me. I mean, it did please me that I had a southern minister writing about Orthodoxy, but the content of that writing did not please me.

Leyburn, here referring to the Orthodox Church as the "Anatolic Church," writes: "Any Church that holds to tradition, and in the most gross and pernicious statement of it, as the Anatolic Church does, is radically degenerate, and even apostate." Leyburn scandalizes his readers with a litany of supposed heresies, ranging from the old hat - scripture versus tradition - to the worship of images and saints as gods and demigods. He calls the term "Theotokos," "dangerous" and "blasphemous," and takes language to mean that Mary is believed to have begotten God from before the ages. He takes the Synod of Jerusalem, held in 1672, as the definitive statement of what Orthodox Christians believe, although this synod was the product of a western influence within the Church, what Georges Florovsky has termed the "pseudomorphosis of Orthodoxy."

So we cannot blame Leyburn for the poor quality of his sources. He comes to the conclusion that the Orthodox are essentially pope-less Roman Catholics who lack the spiritual vitality of the same. He writes:

But as to vital, spiritual religion among the people of this great communion, there is a sad and terrible eclipse. The words are on the lips; the technology of piety is volubly used; - certainly so among the Greeks, and said to be so everywhere else in the communion; - you would think at first that you were talking with some of the most pious people in the world; and this has misled even missionaries at first. But alas! you soon find that, under this outward show, there is an utter want of true spiritual perception and understanding, - the shell without the kernel; - that every body is a Christian from baptism, and that repentance and faith, in their vocabulary, or rather, in their minds and hearts, have a meaning that falls far short, practically, of the true and saving one.

Emphasis mine. I found Leyburn's wording interesting; they lack the "true spiritual perception and understanding."

Leyburn rails against the tangible, visceral aspects of Orthodoxy; he praises the iconoclasts:

Leo and other "eikonoklast" emperors had made, through fifty years, one of the last struggles against this invasion of idolatry. But the Empress Irene, well styled by historians "the infamous," triumphed, in the calling of this council, which decreed every thing that she wanted. And, though the murderess of her husband, she is adored in the Greek Church as a saint, and her name constantly crowned with praises.

It is a mistake often made in the west of supposing Irene to be a saint, since Theodore the Studite praised her as a saint for restoring the icons. But she was never recognized as a saint by the Church, nor does she appear anywhere in the Menaion.

This section of the article was the most interesting to me because I'm fascinated with how southerners viewed Islam. The iconoclastic controversy was an outgrowth of the Byzantine Empire's contact with Islam, which was (and is) strongly iconoclastic. One common thread that appears in almost all of the writings I've read from southern intellectuals on Islam is their praise of Mohammed for bringing about the decline of an idolatrous nominal Eastern Christianity. Islam was often praised for being a more "pure" faith than Eastern Christianity, and for having a salutary effect on the benighted "barbarian" peoples of Africa and Asia. Leyburn, ignorant of the Orthodox evangelization of the native peoples of North America, finds no effort among the Orthodox to raise the "barbarians" from their, well, barbarism:

...if the body now spoken of be a true Church, even one of the parts of the true body of Christ, we might expect to find something of a gospel influence emanating from it upon the non-Christian races - at least those in immediate contact with it. But where has the "Greek" Church done the least particle of such work for ages upon ages past? What good and saving influence has she thrown out upon Mohammedanism?

I think it would have surprised Leyburn - and probably worried him - to know that for nearly 80 years, Orthodox missionaries had been converting the "non-Christian races" of Alaska.

Leyburn continues on the subject of saints and icons:

In the Catechesis of Darbares, already cited from, and the most mild, guarded and apologetic of all the published statements of Anatolic faith ever published, unless we except that of Bishop Plato, we find, in the exposition of the first commandment, even where he is defining the violation of it, such language as this: "That person sins inexcusably and greatly against this commandment who offers to the ministers of God almost the same honor that he offers to God himself; who prays more and oftener to them than to God; who celebrates their memory or their [festival] days with more reverence than that of our Lord; who honors their pictures more than that of our savior," etc. The indirect intimations of this language are sadly significant.

I can sympathize with Leyburn. There was a time when I would have been shocked by such language. Yet, here we have a catechism warning against idolatry. However, note that even when the Orthodox catechism warns believers against making saints equal to God, he still labels it as "creature worship:"

And, bad, in these things, as are her symbols of doctrine, the prescribed worship of the Anatolic Church is even worse. It is a dreadful fact that the larger part of the forms of worship found in the numerous collections of her church services, are addresssed to the Virgin and the canonized saints. And a large part of this vast accumulation may, without exaggeration, be called a compound of puerility with what a properly enlightened mind feels to be not only creature-worship, but even blasphemy and sacrilege of the most revolting kind....

Emphasis mine again. Honoring the saints and asking for their intercession is puerile. Only the "properly enlightened mind" can grasp that it is idolatry, blasphemy, and creature worship. I would love to see Leyburn's reaction to St. John Damascene's "Against Those Who Decry The Holy Images." And what's this business about the "larger part of the forms of worship" being addressed to the Virgin?

Had Leyburn not died so early into his mission efforts, I wonder to what extent he would have been successful. He did not have a clear understanding of Orthodoxy, of the development of Church dogma, or of its history. In part, he can't be blamed, since the sources that were available to him weren't the most accurate. The picture of Orthodoxy he was able to assemble was filtered through western sources - whether they were the "confessions" and catechisms of individual Patriarchs influenced by the West or English clergymen living in Russia who lent their "disinterested" and "objective" testimony to Leyburn's assertion that the Orthodox were idolatrous.

But there is also the anti-Catholic bias, which Leyburn could not help but betray (I should say he was happy to betray it), and that rubs off on Orthodoxy. Unfortunately, this is what many evangelicals today believe regarding the Orthodox.

It's what I used to believe.

Finally, Leyburn's dismissiveness and self assurance simply annoyed me: "We need not take much time for the evidence," he writes, with all of the assurance of a man who knows that he's right.

I shouldn't have been surprised at Leyburn's opinions regarding Orthodoxy. As I have found, almost without exception, southerners tended to take a low view of the Orthodox Church. The only real exception so far is the redoubtable George Fitzhugh, ever one of my southern heroes, despite his unfortunate racial notions (which, in his defense, he shared with pretty much everyone else at the time). How I wish I could transport myself back to that time and challenge Leyburn to a debate, but alas it can never happen.

Monday, April 20, 2009

Baptism

"Breathe and spit upon him."

I spat in church. On the devil.

I did a lot of things during Holy Week I'd never done in a church before. Spitting was just the beginning.

I didn't know until a few months ago that I'd never been baptized. I'd always assumed that it had happened when I was a baby, but no. So when I told my priest that I'd never been baptized he started scratching his chin - he'd never baptized an adult before. In fact, I was to be the first adult baptized in our little mission church.

A horse trough was purchased for this purpose. On Holy Saturday, I stood barefoot before the baptismal font in my hastily assembled white baptismal outfit (white Dickie shorts and a white Guayabera - I resembled a Central American drug lord more so than a candidate for baptism). The trough had been dressed up with a burgundy skirt borrowed from a nearby hotel - such is common in a little mission church. How fitting it was, I thought, that I was to be baptized in this horse trough, since Christ himself was laid in a feeding trough.

There is a mysterious connection between man's salvation and barns full of beasts.

I was trembling through the rite of exorcism, and was so nervous that I could barely produce the required saliva. And I was still trembling as I approached the trough and watched Father make the sign of the cross over the waters, which seemed forbiddingly dark to me from where I stood....

Then I climbed into the trough, kneeled down because it was too short and shallow for me to stand, and Father dunked me three times in the Name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. As I came up the first time I gasped for breath. People later remarked on this. A friend said that I had drowned in the water. It was the last gasp of a dying man. Or perhaps it was like the first in-drawn breath of a child as he is brought forth from his mother's womb.

Or the water was just cold.

But when I came up the third time something changed. I felt it almost immediately after being baptized and felt it quite acutely all that day. It was an almost tangible grace. A serenity descended upon me. An inquirer at our church who will soon be made a catechumen told me that I looked very peaceful and serene, and that he found it "very moving." It was a naked and unashamed state of being. "They looked to Him and were radiant, And their faces will never be ashamed."

How can anyone experience this illumination and say that baptism is a mere "ordinance," or a "testimony?"

As we were lead in procession around the tomb singing "As many as have been baptized into Christ, have put on Christ..." I had to fight back the tears of joy and gratitude.

How blessed I am to have been baptized Orthodox!

Saturday, April 18, 2009

Pascha

As many as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ.

On Saturday I was received by baptism into the Orthodox Church. I cannot even begin to describe all of it now, as I am still quite exhausted. But I will jot some things down in the coming week when I get some time.

Christ is Risen! Χριστός Ανέστη! Христос Воскресе!