Exile (with leather armchairs)
My favorite humorist, Jack Handey, writes: "I bet the sparrow looks at the parrot and thinks, yes, you can talk, but LISTEN TO YOURSELF!" Listen to yourself. Good advice; probably should come right after Socrates's "Know yourself" in importance, advice which some people never take to heart.
People who write for a living (or as a hobby for that matter) should at least "listen to themselves". But they don't always. More often they parrot things that sound good to them.
I received an email from a reader with this link and this excerpt from an exceedingly long and rambling post:
Anyway, Orthodoxy is not just what you do on Sunday. It cannot be, and still be Orthodoxy. That is the point.
After eight years of living this life, I find the resilience it builds into you to be astonishing. And because Orthodox spirituality compels you always to search your conscience and to repent, I find that it has forced me to do some pretty painful, at times, growing in the spirit. It is possible, of course, to be self-satisfied as an Orthodox Christian, but to do so requires you to fight hard against the spiritual currents within the Church — which, I underscore, is less an institution and more of a Way.
Orthodoxy is weird. Incredibly weird by American standards. This is a strength, I find. If you’re Orthodox, you’re never going to really fit in to American Christian practice. You will always know who you are.
On the other hand, Orthodoxy is institutionally weak in this country. There are very few of us, and our churches are, for now, few and far between. Not all Orthodox churches are, well, orthodox. It is, sadly, too easy to find Orthodox parishes that are grim, closed-off ethnic clubs. It is too easy to find Orthodox parishes that are basically Mainline Protestantism with food festivals. No church is perfect, and never will be. My hope, though, is that in the time of exile, many American Christians will be drawn to the steady, faithful witness of Orthodox Christianity, and unite themselves to it, and strengthen the Orthodox Church.
That’s my positive case for why Orthodoxy is the best home for small-o orthodox Christians in American exile. What’s yours for your church? Remember the rules bounding this discussion.
The post mentions Roman Catholicism a lot, of course. How could it not? Even when Mr. Dreher is not bashing the church over hoaxes like Tuam, etc. he is dining out on being a "Catholic" writer, copping ideas from Catholic saints like "little way", planning a festival for an actual Catholic writer, Walker Percy and most recently, writing a book about Dante's Divine Comedy (nota—Dante was Catholic). I don't think I ever have seen evidence that he devotes as much time to Orthodox subjects in any detail, other than to say it's weird and otherworldly and really conservative as he does in this post, or when he gets embroiled in Church politics and cults of personality like he did awhile back.
I'm not interested in the whole "best home for small-o orthodox Christians in American exile" discussion any more than a "best home for small-o orthodox Christians in French exile" would. Let alone the "rules bounding this discussion". Isn't this entire life supposed to be an exile for the Christian by Christ's own words? "The foxes have holes..." remember that? Or read St. Paul's second letter to the Corinthians if you thought Christ was just being pessimistic.
I think that the best home for me in exile is the Roman Catholic church. This is because I believe the Catholic church is the one true church founded by Christ. It's my faith. But there are wheat and tares and they are in the Church together at this point. The Apocalypse of St. John starts off with condemnation of churches started by first generation Christians. So I would be horribly misguided to imagine that I would find the church in any age without major issues going one of one kind or another, or to one degree or another. And being called "vomit" or a "synagogue of Satan" qualifies as a high degree, I'd guess.
Aside from the implicit Catholic-bashing, what I glanced at in this post strikes me as a bit embarrassing in the same way as Miley Cyrus's antics (which, I might point out I also merely glanced at.) It's generally said that she is embarrassing because she obviously thinks she was the first human being to discover sex. In the same way, Dreher sounds like he thinks that he is the first to discover Christianity and how being a serious Christian is counter-cultural. But I'm pretty sure that there were a bunch of people who preceded us who discovered that in a much deeper way. This was due to the fact that the flames started at their feet. Agonizing seconds probably past by like hours before they died of smoke inhalation or severe shock to their nervous system. You can imagine that the burning martyr was truly longing for the homeland as one living in exile. You can be pretty sure he or she was not feeling like this. Exile? You decide.
My final observation is a question. What is the difference between this:
Not all Orthodox churches are, well, orthodox. It is, sadly, too easy to find Orthodox parishes that are grim, closed-off ethnic clubs. It is too easy to find Orthodox parishes that are basically Mainline Protestantism with food festivals.
and this?
Catholicism has the Magisterium and the Catechism, which are doctrinal rocks, but in my experience, so many American Catholics don’t submit their consciences to them.
Answer: nothing. So what is the point really?
Eh. Fish gotta swim, converts gotta enthuse, paid bloggers gotta drive page hits.
ReplyDeleteLet him enthuse, then, without dragging the Catholic Church into it, with the obligatory snide put-down. That's all I ask.
DeleteExactly, Diane. What is it about Orthodox spirituality over Catholic that makes him so "resilient"? He never really says. It has nothing to do with rigor, we've already dismissed that.
Delete"That's all I ask."
DeleteSure, but that's not going to happen. "It's incredibly weird, institutionally weak, and filled with phonies" is his positive case for his own Church. The same passage could serve as his positive case for non-Orthodox Americans to go right on ignoring Orthodoxy. (I'll leave it to the Orthodox to judge the merits of his case toward either conclusion.)
Catholic bashing, on the other hand, has a ready audience and a paying market, and it feeds Rod's habit of real-time memoir.
To go back to Jack Handley's proposition, it's not noteworthy when a parrot says the same thing today that it said yesterday. That's what parrots do.
Tom writes: "It's incredibly weird, institutionally weak, and filled with phonies" is his positive case for his own Church.
DeleteYeah! LOL. Well put, Tom. That's what I'm trying to point out here. The way he talks about religion in general -- his present and former religions included -- is what is weird to me, and the only thing surprising to me is that there is anyone out there who finds any merit in any of this sort of blather.
And Tom is right that the parroting isn't really noteworthy. But I have to lament from time to time the fact that some people act as if the parrot is worth listening to.
Maybe so. But, as you yourself once observed, as a professional anti-Catholic Rod is in a position to do a lot of damage. I believe he already *has,* in fact.
DeleteSo, he's a pretty toxic parrot. :(
But I have to lament from time to time the fact that some people act as if the parrot is worth listening to.
DeletePrecisely my point.
If someone just had the sense to make Rod Pope he could finally put all this right. He studies this stuff, you know. As things stand now, he's not only been forced into double exile, he's found himself exiled into a new house in suburbia, far from his Crunchy Con roots.
ReplyDeleteI...I can't say anymore. There's only so much suffering I can look upon head on.
Yeah, my heart is bleeding, too. Those Chaldean Catholics whose heads are impaled all over Mosul -- what do they know of Christi9an exile, suffering, and costly discipleship? I mean, seriously.
DeleteThat Dreher piece takes so many words to ask a pointless question. He asks "Which form of contemporary Christianity is best suited to living out the time of exile that is fast approaching American Christians?", but of course, the answer can't include "because it's True".
ReplyDeleteAs though anything other than Truth would get a church through any serious exile.
So what do we get for answers? We get the drivel that Dreher himself posts (as Tom summarizes), and such things as Orthodoxy has the best music, so it wins.
But just as the question doesn't matter, neither do the answers. The only thing that matters is blog hits, and better yet lots of comments (as Dreher himself says in UPDATE 2: "This is one of the best threads ever."). He plays the "exceedingly long and rambling post" perfectly -- the well-meaning blog reader presumes that there has to be a pony somewhere in that huge pile of shit, so he projects one onto it, and away we go.
LOL re the music thing. My older son did a study-abroad thingie in Greece last summer, and he attended a number of Greek Orthodox liturgies. He describes Byzantine chant as "like a goat getting castrated." Chacun a son gout, I guess.
DeleteBut I understand that Russian liturgical music is a lot more accessible -- partly, at least, because it was influenced by Western Stuff, such as melody.
Anyway, everyone knows the Anglicans have the best music. They stole a lot of it from us, but hey, at least they kept it alive. 1940 Episcopal Hymnal: Best. Ever.
Re Orthodoxy not being what you do on Sundays: Isn't that true of any Christianity? Wouldn't Baptists, Presbyterians, Pentecostals, and Two-Seed-in-the-Spirit Primitive Snake Handlers say the same? I mean talk about trite, banal, and obvious.
ReplyDeleteIn the passage Pauli quotes, Rod says two things that I don't find trite, banal, and obvious. He says Orthodoxy builds resilience in you in an astonishing way, and he says Orthodox spirituality compels you always to search your conscience and to repent.
DeleteI have no idea at all what the claim about resilience means. Resilience to what? How is it built up? What makes it astonishing?
As for Orthodox spirituality, how does it compel repentance? (Not very well, as he points out a couple of paragraphs later, but you can't judge the effectiveness of a medicine based on people who are prescribed it but don't take it.) And in particular, if Orthodoxy is weird, how is the way its spirituality compels repentance different from the ways less-weird-to-Americans spiritualities compel repentance?
Answers to these sorts of questions could make for an interesting blog post -- even a positive case for Orthodoxy.
These manic/depressive episodes (If Orthodoxy is what he claims it is for him, how could it possibly have left him foundering, unresilient in a "dark wood", just when he needed it most?) - Crunchy! No...Orthodoxy! No...only-eggs-with-yolks-of-amber-gold! No...Dante! No...only Orthodox kale omelets made exclusively with eggs-with-yolks-of-amber-gold! No...only Orthodox kale omelets made exclusively with eggs-with-yolks-of-amber-gold eaten imagining one is Dante eating them! - really sort of wave the flag that, born in an earlier generation, we would be hearing Rod gushing about the Maharishi instead.
DeleteOrthodoxy builds resilience in you in an astonishing way
DeleteThat could mean almost anything, couldn't it? "Astonishing" does have a specific meaning, but here it is just used as filler. Like when I write (at my day job) that a bra "gives you fabulous support." I use "fabulous" because I'm too lazy to search for a word that actually means something.
So, does Rod ever define this resilience or explain what's so "astonishing" about it? If he doesn't, then he's just blathering.
Keith, I think you're on to something. As a child of the Sixties who attended an "experimental" liberal arts college, I knew boo-koo folks who went in for Eastern religions of all varieties, from Zen to Meher Baba-ism (don't ask). These converts to "mystalicious" Orthodoxy remind me a *lot* of my old college pals, with their never-ending quest for exotic religions as far removed as possible from their childhood churches or synagogues. (BTW, "mystalicious" is a term coined by one of my non-koolaid-drinking Orthodox acquaintances. It cracks me up.)
DeleteTom: Answers to these sorts of questions could make for an interesting blog post -- even a positive case for Orthodoxy.
DeleteI agree. That's the "missing blog post" that I'm always alluding to.
Here's my theory on why we never near about it. It's basically just what Diane said. Isn't it true of any form of Christianity that, when properly applied, Christ gives the Christian the ability to live a life of grace in the world? And along with that comes resilience, i.e., fortitude, and the other virtues.
So if Dreher starts actually detailing Orthodoxy liturgy and devotional practice then other Christians--esp. Catholics--are going to be reminded of the devotional practices in their own churches. So much better to keep it all mysterious, or mystalicious, and "weird". It's just like the Colonel's secret fried chicken recipe.
Diane, I think you should smuggle some alt. adjectives into your bra-advertising work, see if they get past the editors. "Astonishing support" has got to be better than fabulous even... right? How about "weirdly resilient support"?
Delete"Weirdly resilient" -- actually, I can think of a few bra styles that would apply to. Especially the old bulletproof bras that give you nosecones. Straight out of the Mad Men era, but, believe it or not, they're still around. Older women (even older than I, I mean) love them.
DeleteDiane, we are totally on to something here. The Spiritual Brassiere. I think you should write about how prudence, temperance, justice and fortitude must be represented in any undergarment for the truly spiritual woman.
DeleteLOL!
DeleteDiane, remembering that pic of Rod in Paris with his beard grown out all scraggly and those Harry Potter glasses, the word I might use would be "Byzantinepunk". As far as I'm concerned, it's all "cosplay" to him.
DeleteWRT the title of the leather armchair link. I was just musing that the question "How do you write about a moment like this?" is improved greatly by removing the first word. This results in the more useful question of "Do you write about a moment like this?" to which the answer is patently obvious.
ReplyDeleteLet's see what good ol' Hemingway has to say about Dreher's happy-post:
DeleteA writer who appreciates the seriousness of writing so little that he is anxious to make people see he is formally educated, cultured or well-bred is merely a popinjay.
― Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon
And what is a popinjay?
Deletepop•in•jay \ˈpäpənˌjā\
noun: popinjay; plural noun: popinjays
1. (dated) a vain or conceited person, especially one who dresses or behaves extravagantly.
2. (archaic) a parrot.
So here we are, back to parrot.
"Catholicism has the Magisterium and the Catechism, which are doctrinal rocks..."
ReplyDeleteOh, please. No "magisterium" that equates Islam with Christianity nor arbitrarily tosses out centuries of teaching regarding the morality of capital punishment is worth the collective excrement of its members. Neither is the "cathechism" those members compile.
..."but in my experience, so many American Catholics don’t submit their consciences to them."
Good for them! Frankly, it's about time. They should go all the way, leave the Catholic Church and find out what real Christianity is! It's certainly not the apostate version promoted by a bunch of latter-day monarchists whose pretentious, condescending attitude toward others hides their collective arrogance and intellectual vacuity.
Joseph, I don't think Rod's asking you to die on that hill. I think he's just asking you to humbly acknowledge that he's holier than you for having beautifully claimed that he's done so himself.
DeleteDreher is the Dos Equis Most Interesting Man: "I'm not always Catholic, but when I am, I'm better at adhering to the teachings of the magisterium than cradle Catholics." "I'm not always Russian Orthodox, but when I am, I'm more orthodox than all those ethnic people who clutter up those nice churches."
DeleteBam! You got it.
DeleteOK, I understand, now. Thank you for clarifying
ReplyDeleteBTW, Pauli, your post about Dreher as the MIM is brilliant!
"I'm not always Catholic, but when I am, I'm better at adhering to the teachings of the magisterium than cradle Catholics."
ReplyDeleteEt tu, Marcus Sheavianus? ;)