Reader John

Orthodox Christians complete their Lenten Fast this weekend and enter the days of Holy Week. Very specific events are recalled: the raising of Lazarus; the entrance into Jerusalem; the tears of the harlot; the betrayal by Judas; the arrest and trial; the mocking, scourging and crucifixion of Christ; the harrowing of Hell; the resurrection from the dead. All of these are marked in the present tense. This time is that time.

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St. Gregory the Theologian’s First Paschal Oration is filled with this understanding:

Yesterday the Lamb was slain and the door-posts were anointed, and Egypt bewailed her Firstborn, and the Destroyer passed us over, and the Seal was dreadful and reverend, and we were walled in with the Precious Blood. Today we have clean escaped from Egypt and from Pharaoh; and there is none to hinder us from keeping a Feast to the Lord our God — the Feast of our Departure; or from celebrating that Feast, not in the old leaven of malice and wickedness, but in the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth, carrying with us nothing of ungodly and Egyptian leaven.

Yesterday I was crucified with Him; today I am glorified with Him; yesterday I died with Him; today I am quickened with Him; yesterday I was buried with Him; today I rise with Him. But let us offer to Him Who suffered and rose again for us — you will think perhaps that I am going to say gold, or silver, or woven work or transparent and costly stones, the mere passing material of earth, that remains here below, and is for the most part always possessed by bad men, slaves of the world and of the Prince of the world. Let us offer ourselves, the possession most precious to God, and most fitting; let us give back to the Image what is made after the Image. Let us recognize our Dignity; let us honor our Archetype; let us know the power of the Mystery, and for what Christ died.

This is the Day of days.

Father Stephen Freeman (emphasis added)

I came to Apple for design and quality, and I’m staying because at Apple, I am not the “product” they’re selling (unlike the “free” sites on the internet”).

But it’s a jungle out there, and not everything Apple introduces floats my boat. This summarizes my feelings about Apple News:

In some ways, Apple News+, the company’s new all-you-can-read news and magazine subscription service, feels like the same idea that powered the Kindle and even the original iPod. Take a bunch of physical things—books or CDs—and make them available en masse on a single device.

“To have your whole music library with you at all times is a quantum leap in listening to music,” Steve Jobs said of the iPod back in 2001. So now you’ll have a whole newsstand of magazines. Yay?

In addition to the magazines, News+ also includes content from other publications, including this one. But as with the other titles here, your News+ subscription only gets you so much.

David Pierce, *Apple News+ Is Great for Magazine Lovers, But It’s Not the Future of News *

I could elaborate, but it would boil down to “I’m trying to lose my FOMO (fear of missing out), and I don’t need further opportunities to spend my days reading ephemera just because it’s a ‘bargain’.”

Our modern self-understanding sees people primarily as individual centers of choice and decision. A person is seen as the product of their choices and decisions – our lives are self-authenticated. As such, we are managers.

Of course there are many problems with this world-view from the perspective of Classical Christianity. Though we are free to make choices and decisions, our freedom is not unlimited. The largest part of our lives is not self-determined. Much of the rhetoric of modernity is aimed towards those with wealth and power. It privileges their stories and mocks the weakness of those without power with promises that are rarely, if ever, fulfilled.

Our lives are a gift from God and not of our own making. The Classical Christian spiritual life is not marked by choice and self-determination: it is characterized by self-emptying and the way of the Cross.

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[T]he myth of the modern world is that we, in fact, do create ourselves and our lives – our identities are imagined to be of our own making. We are only who we choose to be. It is a myth that is extremely well-suited for undergirding a culture built on consumption. Identity can be had at a price. The wealthy have a far greater range of identities available to them – the poor are largely stuck with being who they really are.

But the only truly authentic human life is the one we receive as a gift from God. The spirituality of choice and consumption under the guise of freedom is an emptiness. The identity we create is an ephemera, a product of imagination and the market. The habits of the marketplace serve to enslave us – Lent is a call to freedom.

Thus, a beginning for a modern Lent is to repent from the modern world itself. By this, I mean renouncing the notion that you are a self-generated, self-authenticating individual.

Fr. Stephen Freeman

The United Methodist travails, when I get my anger at the progressives under control, evokes what I think is a serious question:

In an age that thinks some sin isn’t a sin, or even thinks it’s a virtue, dare the Church for pastoral reasons de-emphasize the truth for a season to keep from driving away unrepentant sinners (who see themselves as righteous)?

The obvious context is the idea that the Church should keep its nose out of the bedroom, but many Christian traditions have long been lax on gluttony, avarice, pride and other sins.

I recall an argument at First Baptist, Prescott with a man who insisted that pride was good. Maybe “pride” is equivocal enough that our arguments weren’t meaningfully engaging, but winks at gluttony are ubiquitous, in some places more than others.

(I launched this out into the void of blot.im, but here I suspect that some smart people may have some helpful things to say. I picked the title to catch their attention.)

I am not an angry man. I have sometimes, when driving, spoken sharply to other drivers about their incredible stupidity, but mostly I’m a pleasant and mannerly passive-aggressive Midwesterner. I am tender and loving to my wife, Penny. I am 76 — did I already say that? — and I believe the cure for anger is euphoria. I don’t drink anymore and I never got high from reefer or cocaine and due to physical cowardice I never skied or dove from planes and so for euphoria I turn to the arts, mainly music.

I was in New York last week and got to hear Renée Fleming sing Richard Strauss at Carnegie Hall and see “Rigoletto” at the Met and attend a Rodgers & Hart revival, “I Married An Angel,” and all three had moments that threw me out of the plane and opened my parachute.

I was transported by Miss Fleming’s golden soprano, a passage in which she decrescendos to a whisper and the audience stops breathing and the hall is filled with a whisper, and the next night by the father-daughter duet of Rigoletto and Gilda and then, Friday night, live on stage, a fabulous tap dance number, twenty hoofers, ten dudes and their sweet patooties, tapping their hearts out, step step step shuffle scuffle slap and slide jump click clunk paradiddle paddle turn pullback and roll.

The audience went to pieces, it was so astonishing. Twenty dancers, in a line of work with 92 percent unemployment, had worked two weeks to create five minutes of anonymous synchronized perfection such as I, at 76, had never seen done onstage before and how can a man not be changed by that? I was.

Three transcendent moments in one week. To me, an old man, this is more meaningful than having a common crook in power ….

Garrison Keillor