Friday, July 25, 2014

Only human beings can be saints, and more

  • Saints are the only fully human beings out there. The rest of us are striving for it, following this plan or that plan with faddish delight, or gym-bunny urgency, or lackadaisical lack of energy becoming a teenager wearing too much black to move this week. Gay people can't be saints. Neither can straight people. Black people can't be saints. Neither can white people. Women can't be saints. Neither can men. Only human beings can be saints. Galatians 3:28. Good but male and female is an essential difference; why only one is the matter for the sacrament of holy orders.
  • Shook my head yesterday about all the pundits ranting about arming the Ukraine... Have we learned NOTHING about dumping weapons in these areas? They almost always end up being used against us. I'll be darned if my tax dollars should go to give someone a gun I'm forbidden from owning by the same government that is stealing my money to give it to them... Tax money that is not used in furtherance of the enumerated powers of the federal government as defined by the US constitution is stolen money... Russia and the Ukraine aren't Communist anymore and unlike Europe we don't trade with them so they're not our problem.
  • Bill Tighe reminded me that the Greek and other non-Slavic Orthodox (well, some Slavs were under the Greeks then) broke with Rome, because of the Turkish takeover, in 1484. I know it's complicated (bearing witness to our belief that sacramentally we're the same church and they're just estranged, intercommunion continued on Venetian-owned Greek islands until the 1700s) but you can say "Orthodoxy" as we know it is only 530 years old. Next time you see an "online Orthodox" wish him a happy anniversary all next month, like the Lutherans celebrating "Reformation" Day on Halloween, and tell him Uncle Serge sent you. (That name was simply my first online handle 20 years ago, because my birthday is on St. Sergius' Gregorian-date feast day and I didn't want AOL to name me jbeeler1234-something.)

1 comment:

  1. It occurred to me (re: "Orthodoxy" as we know it is only 530 years old) that the Russian Orthodox Church can claim to be the oldest "Orthodox Church," since some sort of Russian synod rejected the Council of Florence in 1441, and, after imprisoning the Metropolitan of Kiev, Isidore -- the metropolitans had for well over a century previously lived mostly in Moscow -- upon his return to Moscow from Florence and proclaiming the Union, effectively "declared independence" from Constantinople.


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