Month: May 2025
Protestants at Heart
Even Orthodox Americans are Protestants at heart.
Two examples.
Our parish elders extended an invitation to a new priest. We’ve been without a priest since January 1st, and it’s hard. Finally, the elders found a priest who is eager to relocate and take on our parish. But a bunch of parishioners are unhappy because the process was undemocratic. We didn’t get to vote on the new priest. The idea that an Orthodox church should be a democratic institution is ludicrous to me. What’s next, we’ll vote on which parts of the service we want to eliminate because they are not inclusive enough? The whole point of being Orthodox is that you want a hierarchy, an unchanged millennial tradition, a break from the consumerist model of endlessly choosing and deciding everything. The idea that people who converted fifteen minutes ago should get a vote on par with the members of the parish council who were born and grew up and grew old in this parish is nuts.
“How are these elders better than me?” asks a young dude who got baptized last year. That the elders have been here forever and consequently understand the parish much better never occurs to him. Equality! One person, one vote! Roots and history are nothing! That the elders have been mowing the lawn, cleaning the grounds, and running the food pantry for decades while you showed up yesterday with opinions and a sense of self-importance doesn’t occur either.
Another objection to the new priest is that he does parts of the service in Old Slavonic. “We don’t understand what he’s saying!” the refuseniks exclaim. It’s unclear what it is they need to understand. The service hasn’t changed in a thousand years. We’ve all heard it in English many, many times. There are booklets in every seat where you can read the whole text in English. And that’s not what an Orthodox service is for anyway. You don’t come to engage with the text of the service on an intellectual level. That’s Protestantism. Orthodoxy doesn’t claim that every individual is his own priest. It claims the exact opposite. It invites you to be part of something that’s bigger than yourself. You are subsumed into the tradition. Your personal whims are unimportant. You accept, obey, and defer, and in the world of ceaseless choices and decisions it’s extremely restful and peace-inducing.
We had one dude a while ago who would actually interrupt the sermon with his corrections and observations. He ended up having to leave when he realized that an Orthodox sermon is not a debate club.
There are opportunities for an enormous amount of personal growth in learning to bow your head and accept. For three hours a week you can experience a bit of humility and put away your hubris. You can feel instead of think. You can find joy in the realization that many generations of people heard the exact same service and sang the exact same hymns in the exact same order, and it’s all already done. It’s completed. It’s decided and finished. It’s there for you and you needn’t work on improving the process. Your ego can take a rest. It’s not about feeding it and making it feel important. It’s about doing the exact opposite.
Civilization Is Doomed
I also suggest inviting your mother to go over the breakdown and give helpful suggestions.
15 Friends
Leaving aside the deeply boring part about Zuckerberg’s AI bots, what I don’t understand is the need for 15 friends. Does the average American have no family? No job? No household tasks?
How can one squeeze regular outings with 15 friends into a normal life?
Even if you take them in batches of five, it’s three outings a week to maintain weekly contact. Who is with the kids while you are out with these batches thrice weekly? Who makes the dinner and folds laundry? Who packs the lunches and changes the bedding?
Or is the idea that these friends would agree to meet once every two weeks? Good luck finding 15 such accommodating bastards.
And then there are the text messages. Each friend needs to be buoyed up with strings of 6-7 messages at least every three days. You need to see, read, and watch each friend’s links and memes and react to them at least minimally. There are doctor’s appointments, kids’ milestones, profligate cousins, husbands with back pain, drama at the knitting circle, etc. And then the diagnoses begin. And the surgeries. And the cancer scares. And the actual cancers. Nobody who is regularly undergoing this with three friends would agree to 15. I’d enthusiastically consent to immediate euthanasia if forced to do this for 15 people, batches or no batches.
Of course, Zuckerberg is an individual who says things like “having demand for 15 friends”, which makes it clear that only months of serious torture would induce anybody to be his friend. But this comment still struck a nerve. I constantly feel guilty for not being able to give enough to my friends, and the idea that I’d want to populate my life with fifteen and then perish with guilt altogether is not pleasant.
The Maryland Dad Saga
Daily, there are fresh updates about the rich criminal history of “Maryland Dad” who was “mistakenly deported.”
Footage has surfaced of “Maryland Dad” being caught in the act of human trafficking in 2022. Since it was 2022, ICE refused to pick him up and he continued his gang activities, his wife-beating, and his abuse of her children.
It’s fascinating that a gangster who is in the country illegally and engages in all sorts of criminal acts is utterly and completely un-deportable. He beat that poor idjit wife for years. He was apprehended for a variety of gang activities. Yet he was never deported. Is there anything a person like Abrego GarcĆa can do to get deported?
It’s also quite fascinating that US politicians would go to El Salvador and pose for pics over a wife-beating gang-banger. Apparently, “the era of #MeToo” was thrown away the moment it became convenient to move on.
Embrace Change
Confucius said that the only people who are incapable of changing are the smartest and the dumbest. I’m neither, so I decided to embrace change in the form of heightened curliness. It looked better yesterday but now nobody will believe me.
Scalped
My mother really slayed today. She’s undergoing her third round of chemo, and I called her at the hospital to entertain her with the story about Canadian concentration camps.
“Ah!” she said. “I know what we should do. I’ll take off my wig, and we’ll ask the nurse to snap a pic of me holding it. Then you can tell your colleague that Canadians scalped me.”
I’d do it if I didn’t fear that the colleague would take it seriously.
Detained in Canada
A colleague comes to my office.
“You know I was going to Canada for a conference,” she says. “You signed my travel request.”
“Yes,” I say. “It’s a good university. I’m sure you’ll enjoy.”
“Well, I decided not to go,” the colleague says. “I heard that US citizens are being detained in Canada and sent to concentration camps.”
“There are no concentration camps in Canada,” I reassure the colleague. “It’s a very peaceful country. You are not in danger.”
“No, I heard that it’s Trump.”
“Trump detains people in Canada?” I ask.
“No. Yes. I don’t know how it works. But I heard that if you go to Canada, you might not come back.”
“It’s OK, you’ll come back,” say I despondently, beginning to wish this weren’t true.
“I heard it had something to do with Trump,” the colleague perseveres. “That if you travel to Canada, you might disappear and then nobody hears from you again.”
“Well, I’m going to Canada two weeks before your conference,” I say thinking that I don’t get paid nearly enough. “If I don’t come back, you’ll know whom to blame.”
“Trump?” she asks hopefully.
“Sure,” I say. “Blame Trump’s Canadian concentration camps.”
After the conversation ended, I took the rest of the day off.
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