The Orthodox Church in America has a special page on its website with materials to aid in prayerful remembrance of the events of September 11. The following petitions from the site are for use in Memorial services for the departed victims.

Again we pray for all who have fallen into the hands of our enemies: for the
children, the aged, and the sick; for prisoners of war and for all those whom our
enemies have killed and injured through terrorist attacks; that the Lord our God
may look upon them with compassion; that He may comfort, strengthen, and
preserve them; and that He may deliver them speedily from bondage and
oppression and have mercy on them.

Again we pray for the repose of the souls of the valiant people of God who have
departed this life: especially for the souls of all those who lost their lives during
the terrorist attacks.

Again we pray for our relatives and friends who continue to mourn and to grieve
the loss of their loved ones; that the Lord our God will grant them His peace and
consolation.

Again we pray for those who serve in the Armed Forces of our nation on land and
sea and in the air; that the Lord our God may bring them safely out of every peril
and danger and ever sustain them with the comfort of His mercy.

Again we pray that we may be preserved from wrath, pestilence, earthquake,
flood, fire, the sword; from invasion by foreign enemies, from terrorist attacks,
from civil war, and from sudden death; and that our God, Who is good and the
Lover of Mankind, may be gracious, merciful, and easy to be reconciled to us, so
that He may turn away from us the storm of wrath and affliction stirred up against us;
that He may deliver us from the righteous judgment impending against us; and
that He may have mercy on us.

The following is something I wrote in the aftermath of 9/11 last year. I have some hesitation about posting it here, both because of its inadequacy in face of the subject matter and because it assumes knowledge of two poems by Yeats that are not quoted in full. I cannot do much about the first problem without becoming a better writer than I am. As to the second, the first Yeats poem can be read in full here and the second here. (Thanks to Steven Riddle and his Flos Carmeli blog for the link to the poetry resources at www.blackmask.com.) Susan and I had the honor of helping in a small way at the Pentagon crash site in the days following 9/11. We were there in response to a call for folks with a ham radio license to provide communications support for the Salvation Army. For the one night and one day we were there, I witnessed the quiet heroism of the military, law enforcement and public safety personnel. The job was massive, harsh and mostly thankless, but it was done without hesitation. I am used to crime scenes as part of my daily work, but this was on a scale beyond my imagination. This piece was an attempt to process at least part of my own reaction.

Like everyone else gathered around a screen on Tuesday, I had the feeling that the world had changed, radically, while we watched. It was as clear as a curtain closing between acts or an orchestra turning the page from a movement marked "staccato" to one captioned "largo." What it means for all of us we will find out in the weeks to come. For me, the first, and greatest, surprise was to discover I was an American again. This, I admit, sounds absurd. After all, I have lived here all my life and I'm sure that in any other nation I would only have to open my mouth to remove any doubt of my nationality. What I mean, is that for the last few years I have felt an erosion of loyalty to any grouping larger than family, friends, neighbors and congregation. Just a few weeks ago, I was revisiting a poem by Yeats, "An Irish Airman foresees his Death." The lines that have struck me since I first read them are:

Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love;
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan's poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.

Yeats' airman lives in that peculiar modern dislocation, where the glories of the brave new world draw you to strange places disconnected from the old places and values. The "lonely impulse of delight" in flying, of facing life and death in the clouds replaces the old reasons for fighting. He is not a mercenary, but neither does he fly as a patriot, for Britain, for Ireland, for anywhere. His is a life, and a death, disconnected from any place that any man born before this last century would recognize as home.

For many years I was convinced that home, in any deep sense, was something we had lost with advent of modern America. To have mobility, the ability to reinvent oneself at will, is a great thing at times, but it is the opposite of being rooted from generation to generation, in either a place or a tradition. We all, in these times, are subject to that "lonely impulse of delight" that can take us far away. The thing delighted in could be as simple as city lights and loud music, as complex as the marvels of science, art or literature. In any case, it leads us to a place where patriotism is not so much false, as irrelevant. Our true country is, at best, our callings, career and colleagues. At worst, our highest loyalty is to the products we consume.

These past eight years I have tried to run in the opposite direction. I live on land occupied by my wife's family for over a hundred years. (Longer, if the family story about a Shawnee grandmother many generations back is true.) In a time where mendacity and materialism have been the norms on both ends of the political spectrum, the acres I call home have seemed country enough. When Clinton was elected to a second term, my wife switched from flying the American flag to hoisting up the old secessionist banner of a white star on a field of blue, the "Bonnie Blue Flag" of the War between the States. I had a pretty good idea of what we were seceding from. Where we were seceding to was a little less definite. The combination of local land, relatives, neighbors and friends I felt loyalty to did not have a name of its own. In my own mind I have half-jokingly thought of it as the Republic of Gooney Run. Until Tuesday it was enough.

Now I fly the flag without hesitation. Chesterton, a great patriot, cautioning against an unreflective patriotism, once said "'My country, right or wrong,' is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, 'my mother, drunk or sober.'" This land, right or wrong, drunk or sober, is my land and I owe it whatever I can give. Not in spite of its sins and failings, but because of them, for they are my own. When Susan and I were down at the Pentagon helping with the Salvation Army relief effort, we rode by a parking garage filled with refrigerator trucks borrowed from the local supermarkets. When I realized what those trucks were holding it chilled and angered me. Those were my people in those ad hoc mortuaries. And I thought of some other lines by Yeats:

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned

I cannot quote the next two lines. The worst, indeed, are full of passionate intensity. But after seeing the rescue crews face to face at the Pentagon, men exhausted from back-breaking, soul-tearing labor, men struggling, not with the hope of finding anyone alive, but simply to fill a coffin for a grieving family, it is impossible to say that the best lack all conviction. Men like these were ignored and disparaged in this nation the last eight years, but they were still here when needed. One of the first acts of the rescue crews, both here and in New York, was to put up an American flag. They were not ashamed, and now, neither am I.

I'm trying another photo upload. If this works, you are seeing a sheep pedicure:

I spend an inordinate amount of time in bookstores. While I like a Borders or Barnes and Noble just fine, the real treasures are in the small shops; independent sellers, specialty shops and used book stores. Front Royal is blessed with the presence of Royal Oak Bookshop, my own favorite reef on the ocean of bibliomania. You can take a virtual tour on their website. I would recommend a visit in the flesh if you are in the area.

Royal Oak is a small store with a constantly changing stock of new and used volumes. Literally anything may come through, like shells washed up with the tide. One day there may be nothing of interest. Come back later, and there is that odd little book you have searched for all your life. Some years back, I found on their shelves a copy of In The Service Of The King, the memoirs of my great-grandfather, the Reverend Joseph Dunn, concerning his life as an Episcopal priest in Virginia in the early part of the last century. Up until that moment I had good reason to believe the only copies in existence were in the hands of family or moldering in the State Library in Richmond. The chain stores may offer discounts, but they can't give you miracles.

Blogger appears to be having technical difficulties loading images. If one picture is worth a thousand words, I have a lot of writing to do. Will try and do some of it later this evening.

Telford Work has returned to blogging after a move to the west coast. Until I can add him back to the link list on the left, you can find his theological meditations here.

Between family, farm, job and the kids' return to school, there hasn't been much time for blogging. I do have a few things in the works which will get posted later this week. To those who have written me or left comments, my apologies. I will get back to you in the next couple of days. In the meantime, here is another picture, looking out to the south. It was taken last summer during a dry spell and doesn't do justice to the look of the place now after the rain last week. The days still feel like summer, but nights and mornings have a certain slant of light that hints of autumn. There is a moment near sunset when a rush of cool air pours down from the mountain and the heat of the day vanishes as everything is lit up by the last burst of sunlight over Buck Mountain. Who could want more?

I'm experimenting with the new blog*spot plus/blogger pro upload feature. Here is a picture taken from the front yard earlier this summer. In the foreground are some of the flock who did a four footed limbo under the fence. Their taller, less flexible, brethren are behind them, still in their proper place. Below, to the left, are the barn and barnyard.

Rebecca Poe died today after a long battle with cancer. She was nobody famous, though if you have lived more than a few years in Warren County, you knew her, or at least had read her work in the local papers. Becky devoted her life to recording the comings and goings of our community. In later years she took up the mantle of local historian, and became the keeper of our memories. If you wanted to know where the creek that flowed past your farm got its name, Becky could tell you. She knew the old census records, newspaper files, and the few formal works of history our community produced. More importantly, she knew stories. She was related to most of the old-timers, had talked to all of them and remembered everything. She wrote down much, but the loss of what she held in her own heart and head is immeasurable.

Becky spent most of her working life as a journalist, reporting, writing, editing; doing at one time or another every job that can be done on a small town paper. She retired when her health got bad. After an unexpected remission from the first bout with cancer, she treated her reprieve as a gift and decided it was time to do whatever her heart truly desired. She discovered that what gave her the greatest pleasure was what she had done for all those years, running a small town newspaper. She wanted to do it on her own terms though, and started the Warren Times, a small paper produced weekly from her kitchen table. My wife Susan, who was a cousin to Becky on her father's side, helped out by selling and designing ads for the Times. I grew used to seeing oversize sheets spread across the table in Susan's study, ready for advertising copy and last minute stories, before being returned to Becky and the printers. The paper thrived for several years, breaking even and even making a little money on occasion, until Becky's health began to fail again. The paper has been dormant for a while now, and with Becky gone, will not likely see print again.

We will miss her. She had a quick mind and a great heart, a love of family and a love of community. In any place, large or small, there are a few souls who do more than their share to see that what is good survives, and that what is wrong gets fixed. Most of these folks are unknown outside their own town or neighborhood, sometimes not well known within it. Becky Poe was one such person. Her time among us left us richer, her passing will leave us that much poorer.

Tomorrow (September 1) is the beginning of the Church year on the Orthodox calendar. My own Church, the Orthodox Church in America, follows a revised Julian calendar which tracks the civil calendar for most dates, but calculates the timing of Pascha (Easter) according to the traditional reckoning. (For those Orthodox Churches that use the traditional Julian calendar, September 1 is still thirteen days away. Orthodoxy being conservative in all things, many Churches have declined to use the revised, or "New" Calendar and, in some circles, the change is viewed as the first step of a descent into secularism and relativism.)

The custom of starting the Church year at the beginning of September dates back to the times when Orthodoxy was the official faith of the Eastern Roman Empire. Even in these more secular times, it is still the custom of Orthodox hierarchs to send a word of greeting and encouragement to their flocks at the beginning of the new Church year. The message of Metropolitan Herman, new chief hierarch of the OCA can be found here. Archbishop Demetrios, head of the Greek Archdiocese, sends his greetings here.

While unloading groceries this afternoon, I saw a very large bird walking by the roses along the back fence. Since the (still unnamed) peacock was over by the small sheep shed, I assumed it was one of the vultures I had seen this morning, sitting out on fence posts at the far end of the feed lot for the ram lambs. Walking closer, I could see my mistake and the reason for my confusion. It was not a turkey vulture, but an actual wild turkey. For several years there has been a good sized flock living in the National Park above us on the mountain. Usually shy, wary birds, they sometimes come down to the pasture by the house to feed in the early morning. I am used to seeing them from some 100 yards distance, not 10 feet away, walking in my own backyard. This fellow (I say "fellow" because he had the Tom turkey's characteristic beard, a long tuft of feathers dangling down in front) panicked when he saw me, tried to find an opening in the wire fence, and then flew off into a tree on the property line. I lost sight of him in the foliage, and with frozen foods thawing in the truck bed, could not stay to watch.

What's Coming Through the Speakers:

Tonight's soundtrack is a RealAudio stream of June Tabor's album, Rosa Mundi, courtesy of Green Linnet Records. A veteran of the British folk scene, she has a dark, haunting voice, capable of crystalline beauty in the midst of heartbreaking pathos. Richard Thompson and Elvis Costello both write for her. In a better world, June Tabor would be selling out stadiums, while Madonna, Brittany, Christina et al would be reduced to strutting their stuff in front of a few drunken Shriners in the lounge of a Holiday Inn outside of Trenton, New Jersey.

Green Linnet provides complete streams of four of her albums for the curious. While this is generous of them, RealAudio, even over broadband, doesn't do justice to the quality of her singing. Grab a CD if you can find one. You can read more about her here and here.

The Suburban Ascetic

Back in June I started this feature, intending it to be a regular series on living a basic Orthodox spiritual life in a consumer culture. The first two installments, on the Jesus prayer, can be found here and here in the archives. As you can see, I now have to refer to it as a series of irregularly appearing essays on Orthodox topics. This installment has some thoughts on iconography, though I still intend to get back to the promised piece on fasting and present a basic bibliography on prayer.

Someone coming from a secular or Protestant background cannot help but be struck by the role icons play in Orthodox life and worship. If you enter an Orthodox Church, the first thing you see is the iconostasis or icon screen, at the front of the Church, between the congregation and the altar. Some may be modest and open, others reach from floor to ceiling in the traditional manner, forming a wall covered with images of Jesus, Saints, Angels and the Virgin Mary. In some Churches, the images spill out over the entire sanctuary, leaving no surface unpainted. In a devout Orthodox home, somewhere there will be a corner with small icons, and perhaps a prayer book and oil lamp. These are more than just decorations. To the horror of some protestants, icons are venerated; they are kissed, parishioners cross themselves before them, the priest censes them, they are carried in processions. It is hard to think of an act of Orthodox worship which does not involve icons in some way, shape or form. This strikes secular and protestant souls alike as superfluous and superstitious. I have heard protestants exclaim, even after a lengthy theological and Christological explanation of the basis for icons, that it still feels like idolatry. Why, if the heart of the faith is a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, would anyone need these peculiar artworks as part of their life?

To give a full answer to the question is beyond the scope of my abilities, and certainly beyond the limits of what can be jammed into a weblog. The classic apologia for images was written by St. John of Damascus. The best translation of his work is published by St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, but an earlier translation can be found online here. St. John's argument is wide ranging, covering Old Testament precedents, discussing the worship of the Church, analyzing the role of tradition and, most importantly, exploring the centrality of the incarnation in our redemption. With the coming of Jesus Christ into the world, everything has changed. Even matter itself is charged with the possibility of bearing the Kingdom of God. Redemption does not happen simply in the mind, nor is some disembodied soul the subject of redemption. Just as Christ was raised in a body, so shall we be. The earth is not merely doomed to destruction, but will become a new earth, with a new heaven. Icons are a foretaste of this. They teach us that men and women can become transfigured in Christ. We live in the midst of glory, even in this fallen world. The Saints are part of this: Since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God. (Heb. 12:1-2) The images of Jesus, the Saints and the Virgin remind us of this "cloud of witnesses" and show us the goal of our race.

Orthodoxy asserts against the materialist that there is a spiritual world. It asserts against the Gnostic and Manichean that the spiritual is linked to the material and that the material, though at times dangerous, is fundamentally good. Seeing the spiritual in and through the material is one of the goals of Orthodox spiritual life. For those of us who are a long way from sainthood, icons provide a way of seeing we could not achieve on our own. Technology has shown us that much of reality exists beyond the visible spectrum. Pick up any issue of National Geographic and you will see photographs of earth or the stars enhanced in what is sometimes called "false color" to show realities hidden from the narrow band of energy our eyes can see. Infrared pictures show the heat plumes from towns and factories, x-rays show stars invisible to the naked eye. Even radio waves tell stories of pulsars and quasars inaccessible in visible light. The iconostasis, or icon screen, does not hide the altar from the people, it reveals it. The liturgy tells us that we celebrate together with Saints and Angels, that Christ is present and that His Mother is there, interceding. The iconostasis shows this to us, revealing a hidden spiritual reality, just as the "false color" of an infrared or computer enhanced photograph reveals a hidden earthly one.

The "cloud of witnesses" commemorated in icons is particularly important in Orthodox life. In Orthodoxy, no one is saved alone. Orthodoxy is not opposed to knowing Jesus as one's "personal" Savior as long as that does not mean merely personal, as if our Lord could be someone's private possession. To be redeemed is to enter into a communion that extends to both the living and the dead, to angels and archangels and all the company of heaven, as well as to earthbound men and women. A "personal" relationship with Jesus that does not involve this is unthinkable. It is as if a man or woman were to turn to their beloved and say, "I want a personal relationship with you. Your parents, your family, your friends, the people in your past, I don't want to hear about any of them, I just want you. The beloved (unless their friends and family are horrible indeed) might reply, "If that is so, you don't want me at all. All those people are part of who I am, and you cannot truly know me without them." Orthodoxy asserts that the figures pictured in icons are the friends and family of our Lord. They are part of His story and His story in turn encompasses all that is and ever will be. If we bow before an icon, or say our prayers before it, we are not worshipping an idol, but merely taking our place within that story, as part of that great company.

There is a welcome break today in our summer-long drought. Steady, soft rain has been falling all afternoon. I was trying to get one of the fool house cats to come inside out of the weather, when my youngest explained the problem: "You have to open the door real wide. Cats like to think that they're royal . . ."

I was unloading thirty bales of hay from the farm truck Monday when one of the ewes came over to scratch her back on the frame of the truck. Sheep being into groupthink at a genetic level, this resulted in a half-dozen other ewes under the truck, stretching and scratching. They had the thing (a battered battleship gray Dodge Ram with an oversize hay rack on the back) popping up and down like a low rider on an L.A. street corner. I'm glad it was the smaller commercial ewes. The Hampshires might have flipped it. I can see the pictures now; rioting sheep turning over vehicles and smashing windows!

Fred First at Fragments From Floyd blogs on the topic of vultures today. We get more than our share around here. They fly the thermals coming off the ridge line of Skyline Drive back behind the house, circling for road kill on Browntown Road, or letting us know that one of our older sheep has gone on to her last reward. The native turkey vultures are with us all year. We are on a migration route for black vultures. It is not unusual to have a tree full next to the driveway, roosting until the air warms up on spring mornings.

Last summer we had a young black vulture with an injured wing on the farm. He would never let you get close enough to catch him, but he had the run of the place for the month or so he was here. An odd sight, a giant ugly black bird running through Susan's rose garden. I used to see him standing on a large rock in the pasture, looking for something dead. I always wondered, if he did find food, would he walk around it in big circles first? I never did find out what happened to him; did he heal and fly off, get caught by something larger and meaner than he was, or just simply hike over the next hill, hissing and snapping on his way?

I read James Lilek's Bleat with the morning coffee. He is always worth a minute of my time, but today's piece is exceptional. He takes on the case of the radio "shock jocks" who encouraged a (embarrassingly enough) couple from Virginia to have sex during mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York. Or more to the point, he takes on those who think the swift response of the radio station was a bad thing. He goes on to confront the entire modern genre of "transgressive" art:

It’s the work of people so jaded they think that intellectual bravery is defined not by the traditions you honor, but the ones you debase.

My father-in-law keeps a floating population of peafowl on the farm. I haven't done a head count recently, so I can't give an accurate figure. At one time there were over a dozen peacocks and peahens strutting around the place, shrieking and stealing cat food off of the in-law's kitchen porch. Their numbers are somewhat reduced, but they are still a visible and audible presence. Our house is about forty acres north of theirs and we have been spared the peafowl infestation, until now. First, the five geese that are the remainder of my father-in-law's more traditional poultry flock moved down to our barnyard. (They sneak in and eat the spilled grain from the sheep troughs when they are not honking and squawking like old church ladies mad at the minister.) Now one of the peacocks, apparently unhappy with his standing in this year's mating competition, has joined them on our side of the farm. We first realized he was over here when we began finding shed tail-feathers around the place. He has tried to move into the yard, much to Charlie, the house dog's disgust. Sheep he is used to. Llamas, he has adapted to. Peacocks are just too much. At the moment they are in a kind of stalemate, the peacock coming in under the fence rails when Charlie is inside, retreating down the hill to the barn when he is out.

Peacocks are remarkable creatures, hardy, but weirdly impractical. They grow those giant tails every year for mating displays, only to shed them at the end of the summer and start the whole process over. My boys have grown up gathering two and three foot long radiant rainbow-touched tail feathers off the ground every August. We have bundles of them stashed around, like summer sunlight stored in quills. It almost makes up for the trial of living with them. One would think, after seeing a male in full display, that these birds must have the most beautiful of all calls. Wrong. Imagine, if you will, the sound of someone crushing a cat under a giant rusty hinge, echoing off the hillside. Multiply that by the total number of nesting peafowl and you have our night time music when they are disturbed. Makes a great alarm system though.

Our friend is an India Blue Peacock, the kind usually raised domestically, but still found in the wilds of Southeast Asia. Susan commented today that, since he seems determined to stay, he should have a name. Being fresh out of ideas, I am taking suggestions. Drop me a line or leave your pick in the comments section!

We just returned from the Page County Fair where we finally succeeded in our quest to buy a steer. The auction in Page is in a covered building, the heat kept just on the near side of bearable by strategically placed fans. Good people though, and the kids did a great job with the livestock. The auctioneer was the same fellow who worked our Warren County sale. He has the classic high speed sing-song patter, broken by the staccato cries of the guys taking the bids ( A dollar ten, dollar twenty, dollar twenty?, Yep!, A dollar thirty? . . .) At Page he cautioned the crowd that all animals were sold by the pound, recalling the case of the suburbanite in Warren County this year who thought she had bought a sheep for three dollars, fifty cents. Multiply that by 110 pounds and you get the shock she had when time came to settle up. And they say us country folk are ignorant . . .

We ended up buying a nice Hereford steer raised by a little girl who came up to about my elbow. She had a little trouble in the ring persuading her 1235 pound charge to stand still, but you had to admire her pluck. She didn't name the animal, which is just as well. It disturbs some of our dinner guests when we can tell them who they are eating. The steer now goes to Gore's Custom Slaughter & Processing, where he joins the hog from the Warren County sale. (Yes, I know, a meatpacker named Gore is right up there with a Dentist named Gum, or an Osteopath named Bones. They do a great job nonetheless.)

If you have the time and inclination, go find yourself a rural County Fair and stop on in. Nothing fancy, just real folks doing things most Americans have forgotten. And if you are in the area, give us a call. We'll throw a steak on the grill.

On Friday night Susan and I went to the Clarke County Fair, where we know a few folks, in an attempt to buy a steer at the 4-H Auction. My father-in-law picked up a hog at the Warren County auction the previous week. He was a stout fellow (the hog, that is) and is now on his way to becoming pork loin and sausage. The 4-H kids got good prices for their animals, good enough that we were priced out of the steer market. The irony is is that we have a few cattle here on the place and sell feeder calves. We don't have the facilities or the temperament to raise them up to the 1,000 pound plus size for slaughter, so we buy our beef from the local 4-H sales. The quality of the meat is better than anything you will find in the grocery store and the money goes straight to the kid who raised the steer. I often say that the purpose of 4-H auctions is to give young people the illusion that there is money in farming, in the hopes that some will be foolish enough to give it a try. Clark County's prices were lower than Warren's, but still higher than our budget allowed. We had a good time nonetheless. A few Warren County Deputies moonlight as security there for the week. We ran into one, an investigator whom Susan had spoken to many times, but had never met. (The phone is on her side of the bed - the Sheriff's Department wakes her first, then she wakes me.) He took a good look at her (a former Miss Warren County), looked closely at me, noted the contrast, then asked her, "Did you used to drink a lot?"

This week we try again at the Page County Fair.