another church

I had a meeting at this church this morning. It was cold and crisp and therefore sunny. Our milder days are usually overcast at this time of the year. So cold comes with the sun. This is a typical white clapboard Maritime church.

And now here is k.d. lang singing Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah, which we talked about at supper this evening.

ad campaign

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It started with an advertisement campaign inon the buses in London, England. It got picked up in this country. Some cities allowed the ads on their buses and some didn't. Radio shows and newscasts used it as fodder. Then my denomination ran this ad. The original is the first line. The second is ours. My take is that I wonder what concept of God probably does not exist. The God which probably does exist is certainly not the same concept. So I tacked the newspaper page on my office wall and considered it.

blessing the waters

So my Protestant church didn't buy blessing Trout Creek - but my sister's church on the Old Calendar - being chronologically challenged, they are always two weeks late - blessed the waters yesterday. It looks very Russian - but it is Lake Ontario. The usual feasting followed. The Orthodox get it right.

एपिफन्य/Theophany

So we were having coffee in the church office this morning when I mentioned that it was Theophany and we should be putting on our robes and going down to Trout Creek, dip in the cross, bless the water and then ... they looked at me askance ... then I said we go have a feast. Protestants just don't know how to have fun.

This is Epiphany, the Twelth Day of Christmas, and the day the decorations come down. I took this picture just before I took down my wreath.

Synaxarion

One of my sisters gave me the "Synaxarion" for Christmas. She told me that she was going to test me. Four days into the year and I have been deligient in my reading. Two days ago I was reading it at 3:23 a.m.. I have been emailing her flipiant comments on the daily saints just so as she knows that I have been engaged in the daily readings. In reading hagiography with a logical, rather than a mythic mind, it is easy to see the deficiencies. But the stories of saints are not history, but stories to edify the faithful. So while I snickered when I read that Saint Basil the Great, January 1, returned from being away to study to find that his mother and sister had turned their, and his, home into a convent. I mean I could imagine returning from university to my home in Montreal to find that my mother and sister (which one, I wonder) had turned our house into a convent - well what about my dad and what about my bedroom?! That is looking at it through logical modern eyes, but with the eyes of faith to illustarted the sancity of the entire family - many of whom became recognized saints.
There is something that really does bother me. It seems that sainthood involves "fasting, prayer and the labours of the ascetic life." It seems to make a two tiered system, the holy people who are totally devoted to the labours of prayer, meditation etc. and the rest of us who work out our salvation or enlightenment, or not, in the turmoil of the world. This isn't just in Orthodoxy, but in the eastern religions as well. What about the rest of us who keep things running. Surely if "God' is just, then sanctity has to be available to us all. Otherwise I will just stamp my foot and protest the unfairness of it all.
Yet I do know that the door to holiness is open to us all, whatever our lot, because our sanctification must be worked out within our circumstances.

funeral flowers

The flowers are left over from a funeral for a sad man who drank heavily and died before his time. Choices are made, or made for us, and how much will do we actually have? He had a strong faith and a beautiful singing voice and loved to sing hymns, in church, in the choir and in the hospital. Did that faith sustain him? He had neither health nor happiness, nor serenity, so what is it that faith brings into one's life?