Cease Praying in Somerset

Caroline Petrie is a community nurse who offered to pray for patient during a home visit.

The patient said she wasn’t offended, but she reported the “incident” to the nurse that changed the dressing on her leg the next day because she thought someone else might be offended if Mrs Petrie offered to pray for them. I suppose if someone is laid up with a bad leg, they have time to ponder the potential for political correctness in everyone else.

As a result, Mrs Petrie has been suspended without pay pending the outcome of an investigation. No doubt it will take a terrbily long time to determine if she offered to pray for the patient (which she acknowledges) or if the patient was offended (though she claims she wasn’t). I suppose they will want to find out if Mrs Petrie has actually offered to pray for anyone else. This would not be germaine to the actual incident for which she was suspended, but bureaucrats aren’t best known for due process.

What I’m not clear on is whether North Somerset Primary Care Trust has an actual official policy against prayer or whether it is rather a general policy against Christians.

Given the Third World quality health care in this country that can’t afford to pay for treatment that is standard in the rest of the civilised world, you would think they could use any available help, even in the form of divine intervention.

Prayer Warriors

Older Child: I’m doing “Our Father”.

Younger Child: It was your turn last night. I’m doing “Our Father”.

Me to Older Child: Younger Child is doing “Our Father”. It’s your turn to do “Most Holy Trinity. . .”

Older Child: Younger Child can do “Most Holy Trinity. . .”

Younger Child: I’m not doing “Most Holy Trinty. . .”!

Older Child: But I want to do “Our Father”.

Eventually everyone took their proper turn.

It’s not always easy being Orthodox.

In the Path of the Storm

Hurricane Ike is gaining strength and it is headed for my hometown. The projected path from the National Hurricane Center might as well have a bull’s-eye on the house where I grew up and spent nearly three weeks this summer. My parents are heading for the hills.

Fortunately my father is not feeling any side effects from chemotherapy, because he has to drive five hours to escape coming storm.

I always feel bad about praying that the storm will go somewhere else. That just means it will make a direct hit on someone else. Barring the dissipation of the storm itself, it is going to slam into the Texas coast somewhere. I just pray that if it hits my hometown, most things are preserved. Whatever survives the storm is my children’s inheritance.

Evangelical Leakage

I was surfing around the blogosphere and I have been observing some of the evangelical leakage to the Democrats in this Presidential election. It seems to come from three main sources, the emerging church movement, the black churches, and the apathetic. As I was reading in blogs, especially in the comboxes, I was struck by several things.

First, there is the appeal Obama has because he talks about compassion and helping the little people, especially with the big people’s money. It is spiritualizing the politics of jealousy. After all, Jesus said we should take care of the poor. Jesus didn’t seem to like rich people very much and said they would have trouble getting into the Kingdom of Heaven. The thing the emerging Christian socialist church seems to have missed is that Jesus never said we should rob the rich to take care of the poor.

What I have seen of the emerging “missional” churches seems to be Marxist Mennonite, squishy Anabaptist pietism, drunk deeply from the well of Ronald Sider. Obama is seen as the pacifist, caring candidate, who has adopted the views of the great philosopher Rodney “can’t we all just get along” King.

These churches also seem to be suffering from foetus fatigue. The abortion issue, for a long time the very first litmus test, is getting boring to some. The emerging church is quite wrapped up finding ways to live the word of Jesus in the New Testament and since Jesus didn’t talk about abortion, this has become a side issue. The only problem is that Christians that believe the Bible, whether Protestant, Catholic or Orthodox (in other word, other than a small liberal fringe) recognise that abortion is murder. So it seems that mass murder is not the issue it used to be.

Then there are the black evangelical churches. These had been moving more and more toward the Republican Party because in a election between two white men, it was clear that while neither was perfect, the Republicans have stood for traditional family values and those issues which have been important to all evangelicals. They could see how uncomfortable white Democrats were when they were campaigning in black churches (something with which the IRS would have had a field day if it had been Republican candidates campaigning in white churches, but that’s for another time).

During recent elections, black and predominately white churches were joining together in various prayer gatherings and vigils. They were all praying for the election of candidates that reflected the same set of values.

Now there is a black candidate. As I have said before, he is someone who has nothing in common with them culturally. He is not a descendant of slaves or a victim of racial discrimination. But he is black, mostly because his supporters are suddenly happy to adopted the One Drop Rule, ignoring the Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia. Like I have said before, unlike almost all of them, he is actually an African-American. Suddenly the possibility of having a man with similar skin tone in the White House is all that matters.

Sadly, I don’t think that the addition of Sarah Palin to the GOP ticket will swing either of these segments of the evangelical vote. However, she has and will continue to energise the apathetic. These were the ones who got excited about Mike Huckabee. These are the ones the Left really loves to hate. In fact, the more the Left  vent their hatred on Palin, the more energised these people get. They had no reason to get excited about McCain, but now they have one of their own. Hopefully this will stop enough of the leakage.

The One and the Many

I would not have thought Steven Curtis Chapman would be so well known that the terrible news of his daughter’s death would be mentioned on BBC Radio 2. Thus it was a double surprise when I heard it on the way to work this morning.

I don’t want to take away from my sympathy for the Chapman family nor fail to pray for the soul of little Maria Sue.

At the same time, I couldn’t help but think that there are so many other families who face the tragedy of the loss of a child. Because they are not celebrities, Christian or otherwise, they don’t have countless blogs eulogising with strings of commenters offering condolences and sympathy. They don’t have the prayers of millions.

I wonder how many families lost a child today. I’m glad they are known to God, even if they are unknown to me. May His mercy and grace, His peace and comfort surround them. May the souls of all those departed children find a place of peace and rest in the bosom of the Father.

Prayer Wars

The older unnamed child may be getting jealous of his sister doing the prayers at bedtime. There has been friction as to how the Trisagion prayers would be divvied up each night.

The older child has gotten one up on the younger. Except for singing “O Heavenly King” as the introduction to the prayers, they have otherwise heretofore been spoken. Well, the younger child may be able to do subtraction and multiplication at the age of three, but she’s never tried plain chant. The older child started chanting “Most Holy Trinity. . .” and didn’t stop until “O come let us worship and bow down. . .” He turfed his sister out.  She was not well pleased.

Teetoddler

The Younger Unnamed Child is learning all of the Trisagion prayers, which form the basis of the bedtime prayers. Having not yet arrived at four years of age, she is learning them mostly by rote and doesn’t really understand fully when I have explained them to her and the Older Unnamed Child.

Not surprisingly, this leads to some misunderstanding of the words. After all, they are not in our three-year-old’s usual six-year-old vocabulary. We all laughed when she was learning “Most Holy Trinity . . .” and prayed, “Mister, pardon our inninnities,” instead of “Master, pardon our iniquities”.

It wasn’t until last night that I realised that she’s had an interesting take on the Lord’s Prayer. After all, she never missed a syllable of “Forgive us our tresspassess as we forgive those who tresspass against us.” Perhaps because, “And lead us not into temptation” was enunciated with perfection, I never realised she was praying, “And deliver us from the Evil Wine”.

Getting Greater and Greater Forefathers and Foremothers

I’ve been gone all day today doing genealogical research in Devon. It was very fruitful.

I went to see what I could dig up about the only ancestors on my father’s side with whom I have made a connection from the US back to the UK. I still don’t know when my great-great-great-grandmother immigrated, but I know that she was born in 1807 in Arlington, Devon and died in 1874 in Owensburg, Indiana. I don’t even know when she got married, but she was having children in Ohio by 1831. I knew the name of her father and mother, and her paternal grandparents and great-grandparents and a few dates.

Thanks to some wonderfully indexed and transcribed parish registers, I was quickly able to dig down much further. I found one set of her great-great-great-great-grandparents. That’s my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents John and Agnes (in the baptismal record of their son, “Agnis” in the burial record) Moor. Don’t let the last name make you think they were Spanish Muslims. Spelling being rather non-standardised in the 17th century, they are buried as Moor but baptised their son as Moore. Likewise their grandaughter was baptised as Moore, but married as Moor (becoming a Taylor).

In terms of dates, the earliest I could reach was the baptism of their son, my great (x8) grandfather Francis in 1635. Most people who can get back much further than this have an ancestor with a long-established genealogy, usually a peer of the realm or some such.

People really like having famous ancestors. I remember when I broke the news to a recently met distant cousin that we were not descended in a particular line from the Earls of Northumberland (before that title was raise to a dukedom) – that the dates made it a chronological impossibility – and she was neither happy nor buying it.

The ancestors I found today seem to be rather common folk as far as I can tell. I couldn’t find any wills because the Luftwaffe took care of those in their very thorough bombing of Exeter. All the wills were keep in the ecclesiatical courts there at the time. My great-great-great-grandfather James Taylor was not a famous folk singer, but rather a shoemaker. Likewise his daughter is Elizabeth was not married eight times, but rather had eight children, the fifth of which was my great-great-grandmother Sarah Elizabeth McWhirter. She in turn had 13 children. I belief the ninth one was my great-grandmother, who died the year of my birth and whose voice I have recorded from 1948.

But back to my day. . . I drove out through the tiny winding country lanes of North Devon to the little church at Loxhore where the ancestors I found today were hatched, matched, and dispatched. The font cover in the church dates from the 16th century – very possibly the cover removed to baptise each of my ancestors. It is a very small church and the acoustics were fabulous. I know because I used the opportunity to sing the Trisagion Prayers before commending the souls of my long-departed ancestor to safe-keeping of the Heavenly Father. After all, they may have been dead for over 300 years, but once they enter eternity, there is no time. It is just as if it were yesterday. I kissed the font as I asked God to remember their baptisms.

I don’t know how long it has been since anyone has even thought of them – how long they have been lost to the passage of time. Probably many, many years. I have found them. Now may their memory be eternal.

Eliminating Public Prayer

It’s like something you would see in the States. A public body wants to include prayers and they are warned about being sued. After all, somebody might be offended by short introductory Christian prayers. This may seem strange in the country with an established Church.

What you have to remember is that Parliament is no longer the supreme authority in the land. The National Association of Local Councils (NALC) is worried about the implications of Article 9 of the and Fundamental Freedoms, which trumps any British legislation. The language of it seems innocuous enough: “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief, in worship, teaching, practice and observance.”

The NALC is worried that this could be used by anyone, councillor or member of the public, to argue that their right to practise their non-Christian religion or no religion could be infringe. That’s why they’ve urge the Bideford town council to stop praying. They want to eliminate any risk of a court challenge. Clearly, once one council has been challenged then any others might be challenged. Town and parish councils have such small budgets than any sort of damages awarded would be devastating.

But it is not just European law that is a problem. The NALC is worried that the Race Discrimination Act may also come into play. I have never understood this. What does religion have to do with race? After all, most Christians in the world are not of the same race as the members of Bideford Town Council.

For now Bideford Town Council have voted to keep the prayers, after one councillor offered a motion to get rid of them. Unfortunately they are waiting to see what the Government’s position is on all this before discussing it again. Knowing this Government’s track record against Christianiy, that does not bode well.

When You Pray

We have a bit of a competition in our house. I don’t mean the kind where there is an eventual winner. Rather, each night there is a dispute at bedtime prayers as to is going to pray the Lord’s Prayer. The younger unnamed child can almost say it without any prompts. The older child doesn’t like to be left to only Lord have mercy and Glory be. I need to work on him picking up “Most Holy Trinity, have mercy on us / Lord be gracious unto our sins . . .” or the “Oh come let’s us worship and bow down . . .” triad.

This doesn’t mean that we always avoid a recalcitrance to pray. We all have that sometimes – it’s just that it’s more noticeable when someone actually whines vocally about it. We all need to be reminded that prayer is not an option. Jesus never said, “If you pray. . .”, He only ever said “When you pray. . . ” He also never said, “When you pray, do it your own way.” He said, “When you pray, say:”.

Does that mean there is no place for spontaneous praise or petitions? Of course not. But it is also a reminder that we worship God as He wants to be worshipped, not as we want to worship Him. We are not the centre of attention. Suggesting that we don’t need to pray, or even that we don’t need to pray the Our Father, is directly disobeying God.

As always, and like most Orthodox, I hope to pray more during Great Lent. Pray for me, that I might succeed in a small way.

Sowing the Wind and Reaping the Whirlwind in Kosovo

I’ve debated within myself whether to step into the morass that is the matter of Kosovan independence. After my post on the Rest of the Bible blew away all my previous stats on this blog and overnight became the most read post in the history of this incarnation of my blog and my daily stats doubled my previous high, the return to normal numbers is a bit of a letdown. If I alienate all of my Ortho-blogger friends, the numbers are likely to dry up even further.

Let me say from the outset, that I don’t think the Unilateral Declaration of Independence was a good thing for a least three reasons. First of all, Kosovo is Serbia. It is just one of a number of regions. It happens that ethnic Albanians have migrated there. Second, UDIs create a mess in international law. Invariably some countries recognise it and others don’t. It’s made an even bigger mess when members of the UN Security Council are on opposite sides of the matter. They can (and are perfectly will to do so in this case) block the emerging country from joining the club. Third, as Steve notes, Kosovo UDI is a triumph for terrorism.

The Serb minority in Kosovo have been, and will continue to be, subject to persecution. I think this is a bad thing. Yes, it is a statement of the obvious. So why do I bother?

Because I think was goes around comes around. Or to use biblical language, what you sow, you reap. As Orthodox, ever-persecuted, or at least in the West having a sympathetic persecution complex, we want to see Serbia as the victim – the victim of the Croats, the victim of Bill Clinton, the victim of the Muslims (whether Bosnian or Albania or Turk). Neither am I denying that Serbia and the Serbs have suffered in the past, both distant and recent. But neither have they been keen to turn the other cheek. They have been just as willing to perpetrate genocide when it suited them.

So you say, yeah, sure, but that’s those evil politicians and generals like Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić. The Serbian Church has been pure as the driven snow over the mass graves in Bosnia.

Unfortunately, that’s not true either. The Serbian Church has behaved like the Russian Church when communism was overthrown there. It has immediately grabbed ahold of the leverage of the State to persecute other Christians. Like the Russian Church, it is nationalistic and ethnocentric. You can’t encourage violence and oppression against Protestant Hungarians in Vojvodina and then cry foul when Muslim Albanians start wrecking your churches and burning your icons in Kosovo.

Several bloggers have suggested that Russia will come to Serbia’s aid in this latest turn of the Kosovo crisis. Will that be in the form of fascist Putin Youth, fresh from the government-sponsored stadium rallies encouraging them to fornicate to make babies for Mother Russia? Are Orthodox in the West willing to decry American imperialism while supporting the resurgence of Russian imperialism, because it is the imperialism of an ostensibly Orthodox country?

Frankly, I think that rather than looking to them for spiritual guidance, Orthodox in the West need to start asking some hard questions about the “Orthodox homelands”. Let’s set aside the blatant Phyletism, if we can for a moment ignore the elephant in the room. Why is the abortion rate in Russia only exceeded in Europe by (you guessed it, another Orthodox country) Romania, that only legalised after the fall of Communism what the Church has always recognised as the intentional killing of an innocent human life, when the Church was once again free to proclaim and propagate the Tradition? Bulgaria, Belarus, Ukraine and Greece are not far behind.

I do not for a minute want a single person, Orthodox or otherwise, in Kosovo to suffer persecution in any form. I do not want to see the historic churches there to suffer even worse than the churches of this country did under Oliver Cromwell. But neither will I blindly support the Serbs just because they are Serbs or Orthodox, nor will I ignore the whole political and spiritual picture.

Jews Mad At the Pope, Because They Don’t Want To Be Saved (Unless It is on Their Own Terms)

The Pope has changed the Good Friday prayer for the conversion of the Jews. Last year, when he re-authorised the Tridentine Mass, he included the 1962 prayer. Jewish organisations like the Anti-Defamation League got all upset. The ADL said it was “a theological setback in the religious life of Catholics and a body blow to Catholic-Jewish relations, after 40 years of progress between the Church and the Jewish people.”

A theological setback? The Jewish ADL is pronouncing upon Catholic theology? Isn’t that just a little presumptuous? Not only is it a “theological setback”, but it apparently has some sort of affect on the religious life of Catholics. Do the ADL think that Catholic religious life takes one bit of notice of one liturgical prayer on one day of the year? It seems to me they are grasping for a reason to get offended.

The Pope has changed the prayer, but it isn’t good enough. The ADL says the changes are only “cosmetic revisions”.

The problem is that both prayers are essentially for God to have mercy upon the Jews and save them. Rabbi David Rosen, chairman of the International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultations sums it up:

It is a disappointment. While I appreciate that the text avoids any derogatory language towards the Jews, it is regrettable that the prayer explicitly aspires for Jews to accept the Christian faith, as opposed to the text in the current universal liturgy that prays for the salvation of the Jews in general terms.

All I can hope for is that, through further dialogue, the full implications of the Second Vatican Council’s affirmation of the eternity of the Divine Covenant with the Jewish people might lead to a deeper understanding of the value of Torah as the vehicle of salvation for the Jewish people.

The only problem is that if the Catholic Church recognises the value of the Torah “as a vehicle of salvation” it denies the Faith. Plain and simple. I’m sorry if that’s a body blow to Catholic-Jewish relations. There is no salvation outside of Christ. “He came to His own and His own did not received Him.” I’d say a prayer for mercy is about the kindess thing the Catholic Church could do.

I’ve put both versions of the prayer below the fold.

It would seem the Jewish lobbying organisations aren’t worried about Orthodox Christian-Jewish relations. Or maybe they can’t be bothered to go through the pages of our Good Friday liturgy. If the ADL and Rabbi Rosen want some theology, perhaps they should look there. I’ve also put some of that below the fold.

Grown Up

I have known Jared all of his life. He was born the month after I moved away to college in my junior year (I commuted up until then) in the church where I went to college. When he was three I was teaching him about the guitar on the platform at church after the services. His family became good friends of mine and I spent a lot of time with them.

Jared graduated from Texas A&M last December, following his father and grandfather from the Corps of Cadets into active military service. Today as a 2nd Lieutenant in the US Army Rangers, Jared deploys to Iraq.

I will be praying daily for Jared’s safe return to his wife of less than seven months, his parents and sisters. If you get a chance, pray for Jared too.