Category Archives: church

Pagans and Inverted Victorians

church, history, home, quotes, ,

This short piece from the Touchstone journal compares the perspectives and lifestyles of pagans, early Christians, and feminists regarding home and virtue — and disconnections that rob us of our full humanity.

Home Remodeling by Peter Leithart

In the ancient world, household and city were confined to opposite corners. The inner space of the household was for women and children, while the open space of the city was for men. Men gained honor and displayed their prowess in the forum and on the battlefield, places where only men could go. Alasdair MacIntyre has pointed out that virtue for Homer was military prowess, and the etymological connection between the Latin “vir” (man) and “virtus” (virtue) is no accident.

English theologian John Milbank has argued that the social revolution of Christianity broke down this distinction. The church is both household and city, Christians both brothers and fellow citizens. As the gospel penetrated late antique culture, the household itself, along with its work and its child-rearing, was increasingly valorized, producing what to ancient paganism would have been the oxymoron of the “virtuous woman.”

The deep paganism of modern feminism is evident in the effort to reverse that Christian achievement. Many feminists feel that they cannot flourish in the cramped space of the home. To be fully human, they must abandon the hearth and crib to take part in the agon [contest] of the male world outside.

In developing this neo-pagan social cartography, however, feminists are often reacting against a reversal that had taken place earlier within Christian culture. Nineteenth-century sentimental domesticity joined with fascination for the classics to re-divide household and city. From this angle, feminists look less like radicals than like inverted Victorians.

In any case, the Christian response to the whole mess seems clear: to reaffirm the original Christian revolution by insisting that, for both men and women, the household is a school of virtue.

Touchstone, Sept-Oct 2010

Myrrhbearers

church, icons, Pascha, ,

As St. Joanna was one of the women who bravely went to Christ’s tomb early in the morning to anoint his body, she is commemorated today as one of the Myrrhbearers — which makes today my name day!  I wrote a little more about this here; today I wanted to show an icon that was a gift from my husband, along with the eggs that daughter-in-law Joy knitted for me.

The angel came to the myrrhbearing women at the tomb and said, “Myrrh is meet for the dead; but Christ has shown Himself to be a stranger to corruption, so proclaim: The Lord is risen! Granting the world great mercy.”  — from the troparian of the day

myrrhbearers 14

Day of Rejoicing

church, death, nature, Pascha, , ,

The Day of Rejoicing is a tradition in some Orthodox churches, on which we visit and bless graves on the second Tuesday after Easter. Last year I posted about this happy day, when we visit the cemetery and sing “Christ is risen!”

Our priest blesses graves at four cemeteries this day, but I was present at only one. I got a ride with my godmother and another friend, and we had in the car roses, eggs and eggshells that we would later place on the gravestones. It was a hot day, so we also carried umbrellas, and as we made our way to the service the smell of roses was ever present from within and without.

In the upper part of the cemetery is the grave of a very beloved priest who founded one of the local monasteries, so the nuns always come from there to sing at his grave. It’s the one with the exuberant rockrose, which this year was in all its glory. Father accepted a sunhat from the nuns, which he only removed during the reading of the Gospel.

radonitsa 4-29-14 w poppies

We walked down to the newer and flatter area that has lawns instead of weeds, and completed the service there. Lots of bouquets, mostly of pretty artificial flowers, had been placed on various markers, but I liked best the California poppies that were decorating the older section.

One of the last prayers includes a phrase that I love, referring to our “quickly flowing, brief and temporal life,” after which our bodies will also sleep in the grave. We blessed the cemetery that it might be “a place of sweet sleep” for the bodies of these souls who wait for the time when they will receive them back, when all the dead will be resurrected, some to condemnation, and some to a Resurrection of Life.

Even now, with God’s help, we can live in that Life that Christ has given us, as we wait for the fullness of our own redemption, when we also will put on incorruption and immortality. We have much to be glad about on this day of rejoicing.

Christ is risen! Truly He is risen!

radonitsa blessing Zossima 14

Space is the womb of life.

books, church, nature, quotes, , , , ,

G.K. Chesterton said he believed that “…the most practical and important thing about a man is still his view of the universe.” (I can’t find the source for that quote; does anyone know it?)

[update: The quote is from Heretics, and in larger context it goes,

“There are some people, nevertheless — and I am one of them — who think that the most practical and important thing about a man is still his view of the universe. … We think that for a general about to fight an enemy, it is important to know the enemy’s numbers, but still more important to know the enemy’s philosophy. We think the question is not whether the theory of the cosmos affects matters, but whether in the long run, anything else affects them.”]

He would have liked this article I read in Touchstone magazine, “Lost in Space.” In it Michael Baruzzini compares the viewpoints of Carl Sagan and C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy character Elwin Ransom, and relates what modern astronomers have discovered about just how empty it is out there.

Ransom’s thoughts are quoted in the article, and they are appealing in their expression of what seems to me the nurturing and provision of the Creator:

 “…the very name ‘Space’ seemed a blasphemous libel for this empyrean ocean of radiance in which they swam. He could not call it ‘dead’; he felt life pouring into him from it every moment. How indeed should it be otherwise, since out of this ocean the worlds and all their life had come? He had thought it was barren: he saw now that it was the womb of worlds, whose blazing and innumerable offspring looked down nightly even upon the earth with so many eyes….”

Baruzzini: “Where Lewis had Ransom find a life-giving environment, Sagan found affirmation of man’s essential loneliness. While Sagan’s picture of space focused on the vast distances and vacuity of the heavens, Lewis’s character, eschewing the nihilism of modern sentiment, focused on the connections between the planets and space.

“Who was right? Is space really just a vast, empty void, as Sagan imagined? Or is the earth not rolling through emptiness, but floating in a cosmic sea of light and radiance, as Lewis envisioned?

“It turns out that Lewis was largely right.”

space240-small-magellanic-cloud_66026_600x450

“Without the astrophysical processes that power the stars, the very matter that makes up our bodies would not be here. Science writer Simon Singh points out that this means we are made of nuclear waste; Carl Sagan for once got it right, and poetically so, when he stated that this means we are made of star-dust. In either case, Lewis’s instinct is confirmed: Space is the womb of life; it creates the very matter from which life and its home on earth is made.”

Read the whole article here.

Linking up to Weekends With Chesterton.