Heaven gatekeeper – Christ is Thy lens!
As I crawl into line
I dream this of salvation: misting upwards through time
lost dimensions and managed phobias
Drifting towards the High Gate
See me as Thou would see Thy Christ
As best as I could walk in him
* * *
I stole a glance downward as I drifted away
The burning man cinemas of greed & hate
My new body, an alloy of flesh & spirit
Was light as silk, caught in His warm underglow
While beneath me the Worldlings argued
“I this” and “I that,” deploring their bests
For fear they would lose it
It was not worth watching any more,
so I thumbed over the next but even the commercials locked in
And the fighting intensified
They began to club each other, with knotted branches of oak
The dull drubbing of politicos, rapists, murder-mongers and worse
Fornicators all, they drew near to themselves and lusted
They wrestled harder, splashing soon into molten mud
The demons around their ring danced in adulation
Talking heads flinging floss spatter
one at another
Messing their high-def greasepaint
Squawking while
the devils squirted gasoline through their teeth
Along with their ammo books, their catchy covers
and titles galore
Burning doomsday beyond recognition
And the Lord reached the far shore and whisked away
the maniacs, pigs splashing into the brew
Come, he said, just come. Leave this messiness behind.
Let them rant while the right tree finds us and we rest
Recently, I took the family on a 2 1/2 day vacation to Boston and other parts of Massachusetts.
For me, this excursion was a dip into the past. Massachusetts was once my home — both west-central and the Boston area. I lived there nearly four years when I was college age, and, let us just say, lived rather lavishly. Painful memories abounded. A prodigal existence indeed…
The city and its state has changed and hasn’t changed. It has all the trappings of a society that has fallen in love with itself. For good reason: Boston and Mass in general are lovely places in a modern, Western sense. There are many coffee houses and bars, Pride marches, and freedom of expression is everywhere. But the side that disturbed me was that the region had lost its religion. Most churches have become museum pieces. A state that was founded on Puritan ideals has become a purely humanistic ideal. Almost.
By Sunday morning, worn down from being a tourist, I happened into an Orthodox church in Cambridge and found myself in a small islet of peace inside a rabidly “agnositicized” city. I joined the worship in a cloud of witnesses and joyful incense and for a couple of hours, escaped from the nauseating worldly pride emanating everywhere else. Thank the Good Lord for His homecoming He gives to all of us weary strangers who seek His Holy Place.
Thou, O Lord Incarnate and Mighty, which impales
on bait hooks all the evil worms below the decks
in fire-rotted hell
awful, knee-harrowing
hades, where their worm dieth not,
where darkness crushes deceivers’ souls
and they are packaged into cakes of dung
then sold to the lowest bidder
their branches cast
into the ripping flames
like the 6 o’clock lies
sent to the shredder
an amnesiac enjoying the moon
for the sun
The righteous bend of the mountain,
merging the clouds of heaven with whiffs of myrrh.
The merging of divine oxygen and brassy fanfare
the touch of His glorious pointers
inculcating life
illumining the path through gold-frosted pines
and ancient stones
Thy goads of right scripture;
setting forth parable and adage
each step of the new life beckons,
ascending through the sorrows of dark hearts.
One way I praise God every day is by chanting the Psalter. I normally use the kathismata — the 20 sections, or “seatings,” that compose the entire Psalter read each week (doubled during Great Lent). But, given a busy work and family schedule, when does one find the time in addition to a full prayer and daily bible study schedule? Sometimes, I need to chant psalms at work to stay on schedule.
One great help is this the Dynamic Horologion, published by the Holy Transfiguration Monastery near Boston. When I knew that I was called to Holy Orthodoxy and I had no Orthodox resources at my disposal, this was a great help to get me started. At least in this Protestant’s conversion to the Holy Faith, the copious and reputable resources on the Internet proved invaluable. The daily chanting of God’s hymnal created in me a hunger for personal revival encountered nowhere else in my Christian walk.
The D.H. is an online, interactive guide yielding up-to-the-minute Orthodox prayers and readings schedule. While it does not come anywere close to encompassing all of the Orthodox liturgical books, many key Orthodox staples are there, including the Psalter and the daily fixed worship services. Their virtual Psalter enables one to read the current kathisma (grouping of several psalms and prayers to be read at certain times of the day), when we can’t get it to in the daily bustle at home. Just click on “current kathisma” from the home page and see for yourself.
Their website has this to say about this ministry:
“This site was created for busy Orthodox Christians who for various reasons are forced to be online for long periods of time, but who still want to be able to incorporate the Psalms and hourly prayer services into their daily prayer life. As such, the dynamic Horologion will automatically display the current prayer service as read when a priest is not available (i.e. a reader’s service) and/or the current kathisma for whatever time it is, while still allowing you to manually view the services if you want to view the services for the day at any time. So if you just wanted to read say, Matins, you can get the Matins service for the day at anytime during the day.”
This is something that I have used countless times and keeps me up to speed on the Davidic portion of my daily prayer and devotional life. If your daily devotions are struggling and you would like to get your hands on material that monks have been chanting for millenia, try this out and see for yourself. It’ll have chanting addictively in no time.
O Lord Jesus, our Christ-God
the onslaught against Thee continues
still; they hate not Thy person,
but who could not love Thee?
Instead they despise the reflecting
that Thy divine light looses
on their dark conscience, full of sadness and regret; O
kind and gentle Master; fearful Pantokrator
Thy righteousness preceedeth Thee.
It roars down into the well of our sorrows,
our joyful suffering, as we grope
through a lightless room. And then
the candle stirs; the breathing tides sway;
Thy good report hymns Thy silent praises
into an extraordinary dimension.
This region has no place, nor form,
nor tangible proof of identity, save
Thy love reflected across the parallel oceans
bearing Thy thoughts unto a small school
of Believers, cutting arcs through
the fog of thick space where galaxies compress
and angels mingle.
To be shepherded by the Apostles
their wisdom carried aloft by the
Church of the God of Glory; His
will and the rock of His guiding intention
that we should possess the holy and eternal
knowledge, eons after it was plundered
by lies, snapped off the branch of the second tree,
hanging in the shadows of the Tree of Life.
How can we not follow the soft voice
of the shepherds, calling through
the ages to distracted ears, the only
ears that do hear that sound, the
sound of wafting prayer incense,
and the icons of the words, painting
upwards towards the highest throne
of Zion, created by His whims of love & mercy.
Enjoy this last installment of “The Ancient Church.” The take-home point of this series is this simple fact: People do not go to church to hear a lecture, but their real, inner and spiritual longing in going to church is to be sanctified. I am not sure who said this, nor in which installment it was in, but it resonates with me. Only upon attending a vigil and a liturgy did I behold the work of sanctification that the Church’s services contain, because they are the true vessels of Christ, and none other. Christ is risen! Christos Voskrese! Christos Anesti!
I used to believe I was in the original, true church that had somehow been killed and resurrected over and over, disappearing and reappearing over the ages, and become the American Bible-based, fundamentalist-edged, hard-preaching, devil-decrying, etc, church. Now I understand, that all the Protestant and Western churches that I had belonged to were but steps along the way. But, as this episode tells us, the Reformation, in its its rejection of Roman Catholic tradition, threw the baby out with the bathwater.
the midnight quake
had been most unnoticeable
since men began recording them
But this quake shook
the mightiest miracle
out from the bowels of the earth
rocking the shafts to Sheol,
that took Jesus below
the earth trembled and shook
but no one but the Lord could know it,
not even the guardsmen on the bluff
This quake signaled our Lord
back to the crust
ejected from Hades, where he
stymied Satan and his cynical stooges
trying their best babykilling slurs
Our Christ led even the most hopeless scoundrels up and out, but first –
The tomb
The tomb, thehall of fragrant darkness
nothing more than an aperture
a bridge leading from death to deeper death,
then back to life
O Christ God, the jolt that sprung Thee from hell
rolled the great rock back too,
a rock that restricted the brightest light
till its appointed time
A jolt that set agape the mouth of Thy cave,
awaiting the sliding of the myrrh-bearing ladies’ feet
shortly before the dawn
Christ is risen! I am now a member of the original Christian Church. Praise God for this. Praise Him for His holiness. Praise Him in the highest. Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to Holy Spirit, Both now and ever and unto the ages of ages. Amen.
Please enjoy this first installment of the Antiochian Orthodox Church’s series, “The Ancient Church.”
