Saturday Morning with the flock

As I noted below, my personal theme for this Lent is "Stagger onward rejoicing." To expand on this theme, I include below the following excerpt from The Journals of Father Alexander Schmemann, which has now joined First Fruits as part of my Lenten reading.

The source of false religion is the inability to rejoice, or, rather, the refusal of joy, whereas joy is absolutely essential because it is without any doubt the fruit of God's presence. One cannot know that God exists and not rejoice. Only in relation to joy are the fear of God and humility correct, genuine, fruitful. Outside of joy, they become demonic, the deepest distortion of any religious experience. A religion of fear. Religion of pseudo-humility. Religion of guilt: They are all temptations, traps--very strong indeed, not only in the world, but inside the Church . . .

The first, the main source of everything is "my soul rejoices in the Lord ..." The fear of sin does not save from sin. Joy in the Lord saves. A feeling of guilt or moralism does not liberate from the world and its temptations. Joy is the foundation of freedom, where we are called to stand. Where, how, when has this tonality of Christianity become distorted, dull---or rather, where, how, why have Christians become deaf to joy? . . .

People continuously come and ask for advice . . ..And some weakness or false shame keeps me from telling each of them, "I don't have any advice to give you. I have only weak, shaky, but, for me, unremitting joy. Do you want it?"

From the Thursday segment of the Great Canon:

Do not require of me fruits worthy of repentance, for my strength is spent in me. Grant me ever a contrite heart and spiritual poverty, that I may offer these gifts to Thee as an acceptable sacrifice, O only savior.

Any time you begin serious work on your spiritual life, two dangers arise. The first is a perception that you are failing; your fasting rule falls apart, prayer is dry or non-existent, the whole enterprise is best abandoned before you embarrass yourself further. The second is the perception that you are succeeding and are only steps away from taking your place alongside the holy and enlightened. At the very least you have pulled away from the common crowd who do not have your discipline and insight. Despair or arrogance, the feeling of failure or the feeling of success; falling into either is a sign that the message of Lent has been missed. What does God require of us? That we come before him honestly in our weakness. There is no room for arrogance, because our poverty means more to God than our strength. There is no room for despair either, because it is in our poverty and weakness that Christ comes to us. Just as our strength will not bring him, neither will our failure drive him away. Our imperfect reality is gift enough for God, if it is given without pretense.

My copy of First Fruits of Prayer arrived yesterday and I have begun using it as part of my daily Lenten reading. A friend pointed out that, in addition to the written interview I linked below, one can listen to an interview with the author on "Come Receive the Light" an Orthodox radio ministry accessible through their web site or downloadable as a podcast via iTunes.

Tuesday morning at the barnyard

Now that we have begun Lent in both East and West, the question arises, why do we do it? Why do we have a season for repentance when we are called to repent regardless of the season? I guess it has to do with how you think of sin. Let us go back to the image of the spiritual life as a journey. We are, all of us, traveling into eternity. When NASA sends a probe out to Jupiter or beyond, the journey of that small piece of machinery is only a fraction of the journey that each of us takes. It is the belief of the Church that this life opens up into something so immeasurably larger that "eye has not seen nor ear heard" what it holds in store. As C. S. Lewis put it in his essay, "The Weight of Glory," we must

remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations.

There are, as NASA would tell you, no minor navigation errors at the beginning of a journey of that length. Sin, over the long haul, is a failure of navigation. The term used for sin in the Greek New Testament, hamartia, means literally to miss the mark, like an archer missing a target. If the spiritual life is a journey, then repentance is not so much a matter of feeling guilty as it is making a course correction. Lent is the time set aside for us to check our navigation, take some sightings and see just how far off course we have drifted throughout the year. During Lent we check our position with God and the created world through the disciplines of prayer, fasting and almsgiving. The purpose of the disciplines is not to punish or to justify ourselves, but to set right the course for our journey. As Lewis goes on to say in the passage we began quoting above

It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations--these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is with immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit--immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.

Tomorrow is Clean Monday, the beginning of Orthodox Lent. It is traditional to sing the Great Canon of St. Andrew of Crete during Compline services over the next four days. The Great Canon can be found conveniently divided into four portions for Monday through Thursday on the Monachos web site for printing or viewing on-line. The prolific and always readable Frederica Mathewes-Green has written a guide to the Canon, First Fruits of Prayer: A Forty-Day Journey Through the Canon of St. Andrew . My copy should arrive shortly and I will pass on any thoughts about it when I can. In the meantime, an interview with the author can be found here.

Tomorrow is the Sunday of Forgiveness, the last day before the beginning of Orthodox Lent. It is a commonplace in the literature to describe the spiritual life as a journey and this metaphor is often used for our passage through Lent. In ages past the archetypical traveler was the pilgrim. Today it is the tourist. Both the pilgrim and the tourist travel towards an experience. The pilgrim is seeking something larger than himself and the journey is an act of self-denial. The tourist is seeking to indulge and enhance his self by an act of consumption. Is there still a place for pilgrims in a world where travel is an industry? Self-denial in an age of consumption is a kind of foolishness and any pilgrimage, particularly a pilgimage in place where the journey is within oneself and the destination is always beyond ones grasp, is little understood in our secular age. The following poem on the topic by W. H. Auden has one of my favorite lines which I take as my theme for the coming Lenten journey; "Stagger onward rejoicing." We will fail, it will be hard at times, but underneath it all, this is a joyful journey.

Atlantis

Being set on the idea
Of getting to Atlantis,
You have discovered of course
Only the Ship of Fools is
Making the voyage this year,
As gales of abnormal force
Are predicted, and that you
Must therefore be ready to
Behave absurdly enough
To pass for one of The Boys,
At least appearing to love
Hard liquor, horseplay and noise.

Should storms, as may well happen,
Drive you to anchor a week
In some old harbour-city
Of Ionia, then speak
With her witty sholars, men
Who have proved there cannot be
Such a place as Atlantis:
Learn their logic, but notice
How its subtlety betrays
Their enormous simple grief;
Thus they shall teach you the ways
To doubt that you may believe.

If, later, you run aground
Among the headlands of Thrace,
Where with torches all night long
A naked barbaric race
Leaps frenziedly to the sound
Of conch and dissonant gong:
On that stony savage shore
Strip off your clothes and dance, for
Unless you are capable
Of forgetting completely
About Atlantis, you will
Never finish your journey.

Again, should you come to gay
Carthage or Corinth, take part
In their endless gaiety;
And if in some bar a tart,
As she strokes your hair, should say
"This is Atlantis, dearie,"
Listen with attentiveness
To her life-story: unless
You become acquainted now
With each refuge that tries to
Counterfeit Atlantis, how
Will you recognise the true?

Assuming you beach at last
Near Atlantis, and begin
That terrible trek inland
Through squalid woods and frozen
Thundras where all are soon lost;
If, forsaken then, you stand,
Dismissal everywhere,
Stone and now, silence and air,
O remember the great dead
And honour the fate you are,
Travelling and tormented,
Dialectic and bizarre.

Stagger onward rejoicing;
And even then if, perhaps
Having actually got
To the last col, you collapse
With all Atlantis shining
Below you yet you cannot
Descend, you should still be proud
Even to have been allowed
Just to peep at Atlantis
In a poetic vision:
Give thanks and lie down in peace,
Having seen your salvation.

All the little household gods
Have started crying, but say
Good-bye now, and put to sea.
Farewell, my dear, farewell: may
Hermes, master of the roads,
And the four dwarf Kabiri,
Protect and serve you always;
And may the Ancient of Days
Provide for all you must do
His invisible guidance,
Lifting up, dear, upon you
The light of His countenance.

Friday morning sunrise.

Even those of us who start our days walking through barnyards in rubber boots sometimes daydream about living the high life. I've been thinking about this lately, partly because I have been taking stock with the approach of Lent, but mostly because I have been watching a DVD collection of the William Powell and Myrna Loy "Thin Man" films from the thirties and forties. Now that was style. Even the low-lives in those movies wore better suits than I do. And I am sure that William Powell never had to worry about what might be on his shoes after a walk across the yard. I watch with a little bit of envy, but have to admit that, while it would be fun for a while, black tie for dinner would get awfully confining as a regular event. And, as far as I have been able to observe, livestock are not terribly impressed by formal wear.

Nonetheless, we have our daydreams. My mother-in-law, who trained as a classical pianist before becoming a teacher, has been redecorating her home on the other side of the farm now that she and my father-in-law are retired. For the first time in her married life she can have light colored carpets without fear of what he might track in from the barn. She is trying to bring a little elegance back into the household, but it is, I fear, an uphill battle. Not through any fault of her own but because the realities of rural life keep intruding. Lately, when I drive over after dark, I see along with the peacocks and farm cats, one or more opossums trundling across the driveway heading for the small gap under her kitchen porch. She has made great progress with the house, but I'm afraid that having porch possums may be a sign that we are still not quite ready for high society.

Don't let the clown suit fool you buddy, I'm one tough sheep.

Things seen around the farm this week:

Llamas racing the car neck and neck up the driveway.

Crows on the fenceposts, quarrelling in the morning light.

Gray fox in the upper field, sniffing for a rabbit already gone under the fence.

Blackbirds flocking and scattering through the sky like liquid.

New lamb hopping with legs that surely must be spring loaded.

Thirty or more sheep standing in the driveway, staring up at me on the deck. Yes, I'm sorry, the evening feeding is late today.

Mice in the barn at dark, sneaking out to steal grain from the feed troughs.

Orion rising over the ridgeline after twilight.

Tomorrow is Mardi Gras, or "Fat Tuesday" for us non-francophones. In the Christian West, it is the last day before Lent, and, in traditionally Catholic countries, a last chance for indulgence of the flesh before Ash Wednesday reminds us by imposition of ashes that our flesh is but dust and our life a thing of a moment in the face of eternity. In the Christian East we are also preparing for Lent, but in a far less colorful fashion. This past Sunday we commemorated the Last Judgment and began a fast from meat. The Sunday to come is Forgiveness Sunday and is the last day we eat dairy products before the Great Fast of Lent begins in full. (Which is why it is sometimes called "Cheesefare Sunday.") We ease gradually into the rigors of the Fast, with no convenient stopping point for one last hurrah. "Fat Tuesday" is an invitation to party. "Cheesefare Sunday" doesn't quite have the same ring and "Last Chance For Cheese!" would make a poor rallying cry for a good Bacchanal. While food choice is the most obvious part of the season, Great Lent is about far more than just going vegan for a few weeks. As we go through the fast I will try from time to time to put down a few thoughts about the inner meaning of the season. In the meantime, the webmaster at Monachos.net has put together a fine collection of resources for Great Lent which I would commend to the curious, either Eastern or Western.

These pictures were taken within ten days of each other in mid February. As you can see, we have been having dramatic shifts in our local climate. It has made for beautiful scenery, confused livestock and many trips to the closet to add or shed another layer.

This past Saturday the whole family was down at the barn working with the flock. The ewes and rams needed drenching while the lambs needed shots and tails docked. I always think of the reaction of our youngest when, just out of toddler-hood, he saw docking for the first time. He was horrified until Susan explained that if the lambs kept their tails, they would get caked with dirt and dung and the lambs would get sores, worms and infections. Youngest son, being a bright child and very concerned about the family animals, went back up to the house where he saw the family cat stretched out with his long, undocked tail. Susan intercepted him, scissors in hand and assured him that cats, unlike sheep, lived long and healthy lives with their tails firmly attached.

You can never tell who might drop in on a sunny afternoon. We allow landing rights to hang gliders and parasailors jumping off Skyline Drive to ride the thermals off the ridge line. This fellow finished his day in sky and touched down at a run in our upper field.

So that's where I left that coffee cup . . . 

A ewe wandered off by herself today. I found her near some tall grass with twins, our first lambs of the new year.

Happy New Year from Glenrose Farm!

Looking out on the last day of 2005