Ephrem

Last night I dreamed that Christopher who is now not going by that name but it kills me to try to call someone a different name arrived here unexpectedly. In the dream I cried and cried and cried - and NOT because I was sad. I wonder if that dream might one day come true? But I'll try not to cry.

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Voice from the past

So you called tonight. How long? Six years? It doesn't seem possible. Spur of the moment drives to Leavenworth, arguments in the kitchen, dinners eaten on the floor in front of your computer. Six years ago? More? Unthinkable. Your voice still sounds the same and can still lull me into that same complacency that says let's just drop the important and do the urgent; fly far from here. No, it's awareness into which you lull me. I know how quickly nine months pass and six years of silence take their place. Maybe seven. I haven't yet counted. Long time. I do read. I do lie on the grass and think sometimes. Not often enough, you'd say.

Your voice brought back so many good memories. I wish you to return.

Tears aren't always bad, young upstart. This post is for you. I raise my glass to you. The contents are unworthy, but the gesture means the same. Here's to you. To you coming home one day. To friendships that do not yield to the pressures of time. To loving forever. To understanding. To your mood not being my responsibility, but my concern. Here's to you. To children being a direct deposit by God Himself into the eternal bank account of our soul. To the means by which they are acquired being a non-issue. To life. Where there's life, there's hope. I will pray that God smiles on you and grants you a speedy end to trouble. God bless you. God bless you. God fill you with hope. God fill you with life.

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Yes, ok. It's one of these cheezy quizilla things. But I thought the outcome was interesting. I happen to be just finishing up the book that I am.

Umberto Eco: The Name of the Rose. You are a mystery novel dealing with theology, especially with catholic vs liberal issues. You search wisdom and knowledge endlessly, feeling that learning is essential in life.

Which literature classic are you?

Update

I was commenting on this with a friend and had the following exchange.

J. says:

i hold the belief that what we are drawn to is ultimately what is most important to us... whether we realize it or not

J. says:

so that makes sense

Tuirgin says:

Yeah, of modern authors Borges and Eco seem to be the most important to me -- and I see a lot of corollaries between them.

Tuirgin says:

Interesting as neither are terribly spiritual writers. But they are writers of mystery, the absurd, and encyclopedic knowledge.

J. says:

somehow i think that fits

Tuirgin says:

Yeah. Maybe it's the mature me. The one that is beginning (just beginning) to feel comfortable in my own skin. The one that senses that the urgent life and death spiritual questions need to take a backseat, not out of lack of importance, but because they are comprehended best in an oblique fashion.

J. says:

yeah, i like that interpretation

Update

I should clarify what I mean by "backseat". Unfortunately, the best clarification I can think of is a passage of Doctor Zhivago in which Z contrasts Pushkin and Chekhov with Gogol and Dostoevksy, the unfortunate bit being that I don't currently have the text at my fingertips. Essentially Z concludes that G & D were focused on the "big questions" while P & C, though not ignorant or avoiding the questions, focused instead upon the business of their personal craft.

In English letters we have a somewhat similar contrast between Lewis and Tolkien. My choice is to take Tolkien as a model over Lewis. Got it? Ok.

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Kids, don't ever mix coke with the Book of Revelation.

The Fathers take almost literally the fact of putting on Christ and see in it a projection or, more exactly, a prolongation in man of the incarnation of the Word, perpetuated especially in the eucharist. That is why they teach us not to "imitate" but interiorize him. This inwardness is not a simple metaphor which would force the meaning; it has its roots deep in God himself. If the incarnation reflects a certain anthropomorphism of God (a mysterious primordial conformity), it reveals above all and assuredly the theomorphosis of man. From the biblical point of view, the incarnation brings to perfection our nature, which is made to the image of God, and it reveals the manifestly Christological structure of the spiritual life.

Man then traverses an immense distance to the interior of his being. St. Paul quotes a primitive hymn charged with almost explosive dynamism. "Awake, sleeper, and arise from among the dead, and Christ will enlighten you." A variant reinforces its meaning: "You will touch Christ." This passage from the state of death to the state of life, from hell to the kingdom, is precisely the itinerary of the spiritual life.

Moralizing spirituality reduces salvation to the forgiveness of disobedience. Now biblical ontology, vigorous and exacting, leads from a moral catharsis (purification) to an ontological catharsis. This represents a very real change in the whole human being--body, soul and mind. It is the strongest affirmation of patristic exegesis, stressing the Gospel's call to metanoia or conversion. "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." It would be more exact to say: "Change yourself", become a new creature, for it is a question of a repentance in the full meaning of the word--a complete turning about of the mind and of the whole human being.

The encounter with God could not be effected in the state of fallen nature; it presupposes a previous restoration of this nature in the sacrament of baptism. For baptism, according to the Fathers, is a true re-creation of the redeemed man. Repentance, metanoia in its complete meaning, goes to the roots of all mental faculties, volitional and affective, and even to the heart of the entire being, body and soul.

Struggle With God, Part I, Chapter 6.

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Introduction </h2>

What follows is the text of a lecture which Fr Alexander gave on 25 January 1989 in Moscow. His first topic takes its starting point in the contrast between two monks depicted by Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov: Zosima, the famous spiritual guide, a lover of nature and experienced man of the world who believes the Christian path is to be lived in the world and therefore sends his young protégé Alyosha Karamazov away from the monastery and back into the world to deal with the troubles of his family; and the ascetic Ferapont, living a life turned in on himself, full of hatred and portrayed by Dostoevsky as semi-crazed. These two monks represent two different models of Christianity: the one open to the world, like the famous monastery of Optina Pustyn, and the other withdrawing from it. Fr Alexander draws a telling portrait of the present weaknesses and distorted ideology of many adherents of the Russian Orthodox Church today and shows how this tendency is rooted in Russian history.

The second theme of the lecture is to weigh up and assess the relative importance of the inner life and of outward works in the Christian life in general, arguing for a balance of each. The talk concludes by drawing out the point that has been running like a leitmotif through the lecture: a plea for pluralism and understanding in the religious life.

The text was published as ‘Dva ponimaniya khristianstva’ in A. Men’, Radostnaya vest’, Moscow: Vita-tsentr, 1992, pp. 309-318. The conversational style has been retained in the translation.

The online source for this text is to be found on Alan Carmack’s wonderful resource on Father Alexander Men http://home.earthlink.net/~amenpage/

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From Lev Shestov's In Job's Balances, Part 1, The Conquest of the Self-Evident (Dostoevsky's Philosophy), section 6.

Surgunt indocti et rapiunt caelum! To take heaven by storm, one must give up the learning, the first principles which we imbibed with our mother's milk. More than this: we must, as these quotations prove, renounce ideas altogether; that is, we must doubt their marvelous power to transform facts into theories. Scientific thought has given ideas this supreme prerogative: they are to judge and decide what is possible and what impossible, they are to fix the limit between reality and dreams, between good and evil, between what may, and what may not be done.

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I am totally opposed to the whole concept of trying to create
bowdlerized replacements for today's media. And it is, unfortunately,
far more "media" than "arts". But those of us who are artists and
Orthodox ought not wall ourselves into some artificial culture of
Orthodox Contemporary Artistry wherein all of our work is peppered
with particular spiritual catch phrases. If we are not expressly
creating liturgical or pseudo-liturgical works we ought to be in the
midst of things, pursuing our art. But of course, to those of us who
are both artists and Orthodox Christians there is no need for
self-conscious religiosity or sermonizing, because "where your
treasure is, there will be your heart also," and where our heart is,
there will be our art.

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1. this is just chat but Im not as familiar as I should be with Seamus Heany...does he have a religious as well as a general spiritual side?
2. do you find people in your parish you can share your heart and thought with? I have asked this of others but I am interested in the state of community in the churches...
3. does Fr Men's thought that there is not sacred art and secular art there is only good art and bad art and real art is sacred, seem about right or would you prefer something more isolating iconography as such from other art?
4. favorite music?
5. Yeats and Blake sent you invitations for lunch tomorrow which one will you accept?