Church Life
- Church Life, Daily Life, Holy Days, I Never Thought I'd Be In This Situation, Photographs, Reflections
Ash Woden’s Day
And so Lent begins today. This is the first year since my awkward and stumbling embrace of Catholicism began that I will not be observing the day or the season. It is a fitting coincidence that today also marks the anniversary of my receiving my honorable discharge from the United States Marine Corps and became a civilian again. Leaving the Corps was an interesting experience, bringing with it a feeling of being unmoored and yet settled on a somewhat shrouded path. That’s a good description of how I feel today. I look outside and see the tiniest patches of green in the woods and little emerald dots along the length…
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Law-Word
Back in my Argumentative Protestant Days, I became fascinated with a sect of the Presbyterian/Reformed world who were known as theonomists (from the Latin for “God’s law”) or Christian Reconstructionists. Briefly, these fellows advanced the idea that society could be reconstructed using the principles found in biblical law. The most prominent of these men was a very interesting character named Rousas Rushdoony, who liked to use a very handy phrase, “law-word.” He was quite influential in the 1990s, but after his death, the organization which was his life’s work seemed to fall apart, as movements headed by an irreplaceable leader tend to do. I attended a conference where Rushdoony was…
- Church Life, Daily Life, I Never Thought I'd Be In This Situation, Paintings, Quotations, Reflections
The Fleeting Light
Where are the voices crying out, not for agreement with a doctrine or assent to a particular teaching, but for taking virile and perhaps physically fatal responsibility for one’s own reaction to the evil we see around us? The voices that do cry out do so in an attempt to persuade people to agree with them, or to at least debate with them about their position. Who speaks words of comfort for those who cannot and will not trust any of those clamoring for followers? What are the once-faithful and now-bereft to think, to do, to believe? The road to self-knowledge does not pass through faith. But only through the…
- Church Life, Daily Life, Holy Days, I Never Thought I'd Be In This Situation, Photographs, Prayers, Quotations, Reflections
Mourning Becomes Advent
As the Christmas season approaches, I find that I am filled with a low-grade dread. While Christmastime was once a wonderous time for me, the degradation of the world in my lifetime has brought me to a place where I pretty much despise this time of year. I have no new observations to offer; many people already roundly denounce the commercialization of the season in which we celebrate the birth of Christ. It has become a filthy, tawdry, grasping, shoving time, a time in which people stand outside shopping centers and ring a bell for a now-flaccid organization whose focus is hateful and ridiculous to many of the bell-ringers themselves.…
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No Rest
The heartbreak of seeing your grandsons incarcerated God offers to every man the choice between truth and repose. Take which you will, you can never have both. — Ralph Waldo Emerson One of the quotidian pleasures Mrs. Orr and I enjoy is working crossword puzzles. We haven’t subscribed to a newspaper in many years, but a friend does, and Mrs. Orr will often bring home copies of the puzzle from the paper. It’s a pleasurable way to unwind in the evening or in the mornings while trying to clear the cobwebs from the head. Mrs. Orr enjoys working the crossword while she’s cooking. Lately, our pleasure in the puzzles has…
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To Roam Through The New Earth
Heeding the news or pundits or bloggers about what’s going on in the world is like listening to preachers expound on the book of Revelation. None of them really knows what he’s talking about. It’s naïve speculation at best, and cynical self-centered grandstanding at worst. I grew up listening to sermons and skimming booklets that “proved” that Richard Nixon was the Beast, or that Henry Kissinger was the antichrist. And where are those authors now? Look at the current crop of blathering boys & girls, ignorant of both history and human nature, standing atop their picnic tables and waving their arms about. They, too, will be completely forgotten someday. Any…
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Woden’s Day
This morning, I had just settled in at my desk to begin work when the power went out. Mrs. Orr received a text notification from the power company that they were working to fix the problem and provided an estimated time for service restoration. I sat and listened to the silence of the house — one forgets how much noise even passive appliances make, like the hum of the refrigerator, etc. — and then went outside on the back porch to sit with the dogs. The hummingbirds are busier than ever, loading up the precious nectar to strengthen their taut little bodies in preparation for the upcoming journey down to…
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Until This Instant
I was not angry since I came to France Until this instant. Take a trumpet, herald; Ride thou unto the horsemen on yon hill: If they will fight with us, bid them come down, Or void the field; they do offend our sight: If they’ll do neither, we will come to them, And make them skirr away, as swift as stones Enforced from the old Assyrian slings: Besides, we’ll cut the throats of those we have, And not a man of them that we shall take Shall taste our mercy. Go and tell them so. Henry V, Act IV, scene vii by William Shakespeare A friend sent me a text…
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The Value of Moments
This morning, this gray and dripping morning, I walked in a neighbor’s corn field, thick-grown with silage for his cows. Except for the soft sighing in the tops of the trees in my woods behind me, the silence was deep and cyclical, like a tide, like a black spot in space between two stars. I stood in the chest-high corn plants and listened, and heard nothing but breeze, and I listened again, and inexplicably, a song came into my head, a song I have neither heard nor thought of in years. I walked on through the corn and then at the perimeter found some bear scat. A calf watched me…
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My Thoughts, They Are Provoked
WJT posted one of his singular pieces that troubled me, delighted me, and had me staring at the floor, lost in thought, long after I read it, just as his classic Supergod Delusion essay kept me chewing on his words for weeks after I read the post. Reading this sort of material doesn’t finally answer any questions for me, but like a good Zen koan, the act of reading and the subsequent attempts to digest such things helps me see myself with greater clarity. For the majority of my Christian life, I saw myself as a pretty smart fellow. It was a liberating but excruciatingly painful day when I began…