Render unto Caeser...

No, I don't particularly like the King James Bible either but it's the only translation that has the desired effect in a blog post title, so there it is.

My attention has recently been drawn to this article by a Konstantin Matsan.
 
My initial reaction was that de Nile is not just a river in Egypt, it seems. However, after further consideration, I think that Mr Matsan is right in that too often all manner of assertions are made about the supposedly deepening relationship between church and state in Russia without any effort being made to show the premise to be true, (I believe that "begging the question" is the expression that he is struggling to find), but he falls into the trap of another logical fallacy in that this itself does not render the premise untrue.

Are the Russian state and the Church in Russia getting closer? Finding an answer to this would require a detailed historical comparison, which I am not qualified to make, and indeed we are presented in the article with evidence that seems to suggest that there is no real deepening relationship here. Perhaps a more manageable question, then, would be whether they are already too close. This only requires an examination of present circumstances.

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The All-Night Vigil

Be very diligent in coming here early in the morning to bring prayers and praises to the God of all, and to give thanks for the benefits already received... and so pass the time of day as one obliged to return here in the evening to give the master an account of the entire day and to ask pardon for failures... Then we must pass the time of the night in sobriety and thus be ready to present ourselves again at the morning praise.

- St John Chrysostom

Until recently, I used to dread the All-Night Vigil.  This may seem a strange thing for a Christian to say.  In fact, it was last year during Lent that I was serving for my bishop in the cathedral one Saturday, and had been in church all day.  There had been the Divine Liturgy in the morning, a brief repast, then the service of the Great Anointing.  Having started at 9 a.m. and it now being 5 p.m. and mindful of being back the following morning, I made my apologies and made good my escape.  My bishop asked me, 'Are you a Christian?'  I understand his question - indeed how better for a Christian to spend his Saturday night than in prayerful greeting of the Resurrection of the Lord? Yet, I think that people who are very well accustomed to things sometimes just don't realise what it can be like for people who do not know them and find them a trial when presented in a completely inaccessible form.

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Pedantry: "Fast", please; not "Lent"

What is this strangeness to be found in use among English-speaking Orthodox people, and now seemingly found in calendars, of referring to all fasting periods as "lent"?

The word lent is from an Old English word meaning springtime.  Among Christians, it probably came to be used as a sort of shorthand for the lenten fast - literally, the great fast prior to Easter which, in the northern hemisphere where the terminology was coined, always takes place during the spring.

There are other fasting seasons throughout the year, of course, but some Orthodox Christians also call these by the name "lent", as though the word is some sort of synonym for fast, which, of course, it isn't.  It is not unusual to hear such expressions as Dormition lent, Apostles' lent, and so forth.  This makes no sense.  They are fasts, not lents.

I would be interested to learn what terminology is used in Russian or Greek, for example, to refer to the fasting seasons.  I assume that it is some word for "fast" and not a time of year.

Just saying.

Orthodox Android - part 4

Just a quick update: It seems that within the past fortnight, an Android version of the Ancient Faith Radio app has been released.  It has taken them far too long to get their act together but I'm grateful that they have finally come up with the goods.

Orthodox Android - part 3

Well, here it is:

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Orthodox Android - part 2

Having got my shiny new Android phone, I had to learn how to find my way around a new operating system but found this very easy due to the intuitive design of Android, which is fairly typical of Google's products.  It is more easily customisable both in terms of its layout/appearance and of its functionality, which means the phone works the way I want it to work, according to what is easiest for me.  Unlike the iPhone, there are no permanent apps that cannot be removed from the screen.  If I don't want something there, I get rid of it.

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Orthodox Android - part 1

Last year I posted this collection of reviews of my favourite apps for my iPhone.  Now that I have an Android phone, I have promised people a similar review for Orthodox Android apps.  This will come but, having previously endorsed the iPhone I feel that I bear some moral responsibility to point out what its flaws are to prevent others from falling into the trap that I did, of getting caught up in the Apple hype.

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My Mother

Today is a Soul Sabbath, when we pray for our dead.  Yesterday would have been my mother's birthday and the 13th of this month will be her anniversary.

Of your charity, please pray for the repose of Stella.  She was not an Orthodox woman but she loved the Lord.

"Comprise"

Are you familiar with the experience of a word, or person, or song, or some other thought that hasn't entered your consciousness for some time suddenly surrounding you, seemingly with no connection between the sources?

This happened to me yesterday with the name Gargamel.  I heard it on the television while I was at the computer and recognised it as a name from childhood, but couldn't remember from where.  As I looked up, I realised that it was an advert for the 2011 film The Smurfs.  Gargamel was the villain in The Smurfs cartoon, which was a staple of my childhood.  Later on that evening, reference was made to Gargamel in a programme aimed at people of my generation, who would be expected to remember The Smurfs.  It brought back fond memories of the various children's programmes that I used to watch, followed quickly by my usual lament that children today are subjected to nonsense that simply doesn't compare to the treasures that my generation had.

Another recent - but less felicitous - example is something that is usually just a minor annoyance to me but by no fewer than six examples of which I have been bombarded over the course of the past week.  While my writing is by no means from free of errors of spelling, punctuation, grammar, syntax, and vocabulary, I feel that I must address this one because it really grates on me more than most.  I do not know why: it just does.

When speaking of any collective body or other subject made of constituent parts, it is proper to refer to those parts as together composing the whole.  It is also proper to speak of this in the passive voice, by saying that the whole is composed of those constituent parts.

The problem comes when people replace the word compose with comprise, which has the effect of turning the sentence into nonsense due to the reverse meanings of these words.  To compose is for individual elements to come together to form a complete article, which can be said to be "composed of" those elements.  To comprise is for a body or other article to embrace or include within its make-up its various constituent elements.

Therefore, it is correct to say:

My science class is composed of students from around the world.

However, it makes no sense to say:

My science class is comprised of students from around the world.

The intended meaning is properly expressed by:

My science class comprises students from around the world.

That is to say, the science class includes in its make-up students from around the world.  It comprises them: it is not comprised of them.  In fact, it is difficult to imagine what the expression "comprise of" could possibly mean.

That's all.

Orthodox Enthusiasts

The title of this post was originally going to be "Orthodox Hobbyists".  However, there is something of a value judgement implicit in that wording that might suggest a strength of feeling that I don't have.

However, I would welcome help in understanding a phenomenon that I have heard of and in some cases witnessed, but never actually experienced myself, and it is what appears to this outsider to be a fascination of some non-Orthodox with many of the accoutrements of Orthodoxy, and incorporation of them into their lives, and an almost fanatical obsession with the goings-on in the Orthodox Church, all unaccompanied by any desire whatsoever to actually become Orthodox.

What is that?

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Mirfield

When I was an Anglican, I used to make an annual personal retreat of a few days to the House of the Resurrection.  As many will know, this is the mother house of the Anglican monastic Community of the Resurrection.  I would go each year for four or five days surrounding the feast of the Conception of the Mother of God.

For a suburb-dweller from South Manchester, accustomed to 20-hours-a-day public transportation, meals available at all hours of the day or night, and the hustle and bustle of city life, a Yorkshire village in December was an entirely different world.  It was a very easy journey.  I lived near to Manchester Airport at the time so only needed to walk to the airport to get the train to Huddersfield.  From there, it was a short walk to Huddersfield bus station, and this is where there was the first sign that I was about to enter something entirely alien to my experience:

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The Sinking Ship of the Milan Synod

Some of you will know that I have been following the events in the Autonomous Orthodox Metropolia of Milan and Western Europe ("Holy Synod of Milan") with varying degrees of interest for the past couple of years.  If you click on the "Milan Synod" tag on this post it will take you to some of my earlier postings on the subject.

Over the past two years, we have heard rumours of the Milan Synod seeking to restore communion with Moscow and of the Milan Synod already having done so (in some versions with its bishops being received in their episcopal rank - something highly unusual in situations such as these).  Later, we saw goings-on that might seem to lend credibility to some of these rumours.  Then came the official and semi-official statements of communion and intention, along with the on-again-off-again relationships that the Milan Synod was conducting alternately with Moscow and its sister Old Calendar synods.

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The Paschal Zadostoinik

I just came across this.  Christ is risen!

New Converts, Beware!

I begin to compose this post with a few disparate ideas floating around in my mind. Perhaps by the end they will have bounced off each other and arranged themselves into some sort of coherent structure.

As I have said in the past, before I first made contact with an Orthodox priest and began worshipping at an Orthodox parish, I learnt much about Orthodoxy through books and the internet. For all of the good such learning brings, the method can have its disadvantages, one of which, in my case at least, was that when I arose from the font a new creature I did so with all sorts of ideas of what the Church ought to be, how She ought to look and conduct Herself, how She could do things better.

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Paraliturgies

I love the litugical cycle of the Church's days, weeks, months, and years.  I think that having a fixed liturgical calendar in some way reconciles our life and existence in fallen time to the saving work of Christ, and bring us into the eternal Eighth Day of the New Creation.  Largely for that reason, many of my posts reflect my love for this cycle of prayer and worship.

However, that does not mean that I do not find great value in those prayers and devotions that do not fit into this established pattern of the hallowing of time. There are many of them - some of them beautiful, some not so beautiful - but they all flow from people's hearts and stem from a desire to be drawn closer into communion with God and each other.

Two of my favourite paraliturgical services are Molebens and Cross-Processions.  My absolute favourite is the Processional Moleben, which combines the two, and is highly festive in character.  A Moleben is simply a service of prayer and supplication, and may be offered for any of a number of intentions but my favourite form is the General Moleben, contructed from excerpts from Matins, with propers inserted according to a particular celebration, whether it be the parish's patronal feast, a pilgrimage to a holy site, a visitation of holy relics or an icon, or whatever else.

I think that the primary reason that I love this so is that it that it is fairly simple ceremonially.  That may seem like a strange thing for me to write but I do mean it. It means that I can immerse myself in the prayer without having to think about what comes next, how to communicate that to others who need to know, and so forth.  It also means that, on festive occasions when there are visitors from elsewhere, there is no confusion because some are accustomed to Greek-style, some Russian-style, and others none at all.  It just sort of happens and we get on with the business of praying.  The second reason is that it comes with a very pertinent dose of Scripture, usually highlighting things about whatever is being celebrated.  There is usually at least one psalm, often an Epistle, and almost always a Gospel (which is boldly proclaimed outdoors if there is a procession, in which case there may even be as many as four Gospels).  The third is that, it being a prayer service rather than something strictly liturgical, the clergy stand among the laity rather than ministering in the altar, and the practical participation is much more on the vocal offering, which brings everybody together in a different way from more liturgical offerings, where we each have our distinctive roles that come together into one act of service to God.  In addition to the litany responses, there is the "God is the Lord" responsory, which the people belt out, before going immediately into the troparion of the celebration, which can itself be repeated over and over again if there is a procession.

This is important.  I do not think that there is a western equivalent to the troparion, which is a short, thematic hymn unique to each saint or feast, and which becomes something of a battle hymn of the people during services on that day.  Everybody will know the troparion of his parish's patron saint because it will be sung at nearly every Divine Liturgy in the parish, and the troparia of certain feasts easily roll off the tongue after having been Orthodox for a couple of years.  Stand in the middle of a gathering of Orthodox people and sing the line "O Lord, save thy people" or "When Thou wast baptised in the Jordan, O Lord" to tone 1 and you'll see what I mean.

When the procession is included, and there is a station made at each of the four sides of the church, where the people are blessed with the Cross, the festal icon, and holy water, while imploring God's mercy with joyful hope. 

I love it.