Month: May 2011

ROC: Bin Laden Killing Reason to Step up Fight Against Terrorism, No Cause for Joy

Bartholomew I: “Peace is a Matter of Choice”

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This is sure to warm the heart of religious liberals who are always on prowl looking for new ways to establish their righteousness. Global warming is disintegrating like the Death Star penetrated by Luke Skywalker’s missile and another cause has to be found quick. Maybe they can dust off the ‘peacemaker’ jargon. It has a relatively short shelf-life (except when conservatives are in power) but the recycling potential is tremendous.

I mean no disrespect to the WCC, but hearing the same old cant from the same old boomers is like listening to a car alarm that won’t shut off. Why is the Ecumenical Patriarch buying into it? It carries no moral weight or real cultural import. No one is for war. But it is foolish to think that the WCC will have any bearing on war or peace whatsoever. No one apart from their fellow-travelers takes them seriously. And why should they? Nothing about them ever changes.

In an encyclical letter intended to be read in congregations of the Church of Constantinople around the world on Sunday 22 May, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople Bartholomew I welcomes “with great joy” the initiative of the World Council of Churches (WCC) in convening the International Ecumenical Peace Convocation (IEPC) in Kingston, Jamaica from 17 through 25 May 2011.

Source: Overcoming Violence: Churches Seeking Reconciliation and Peace (WCC)

To the Plenitude of the Church:

Grace, Mercy and Peace From our Savior the Lord of Peace

Sunday, May 22, 2011

Beloved brothers and children in Christ,

At the celebration of each Divine Liturgy, after glorifying the divine name and blessing the heavenly kingdom, we offer three petitions “to the Lord” “for peace,” “for the peace from above,” and “for the peace of the whole world.” It is our passionate yearning that our world may reflect the kingdom of God, that the God’s love may reign “on earth as it is in heaven.”

Nevertheless, while such peace is foremost in our prayer, it is not always central in our practice. As faithful disciples of the Lord of peace, we must constantly pursue and persistently proclaim alternative ways that reject violence and war. Human conflict may well be inevitable in our world; but war and violence are certainly not. If this century will be remembered at all, it may be for “the pursuit of what makes for peace.” (Rom. 14.19)

The pursuit of peace has always proved challenging. Yet, our present situation is in at least two ways quite unprecedented. First, never before has it been possible for one group of human beings to eradicate as many people simultaneously; second, never before has humanity been in a position to destroy so much of the planet environmentally. We are faced with radically new circumstances, which demand of us an equally radical commitment to peace.

This is why we welcome with great joy the WCC/International Ecumenical Peace Convocation to be held on May 17-25, 2011, in Kingston, Jamaica, as a fitting conclusion and continuation of the World Council of Churches decade to overcome violence, a global inter-church.initiative to strengthen existing efforts and networks for preventing violence and to inspire the creation of new ones.

Now, the pursuit of peace calls for a radical reversal of what has become the normative way of survival in our world. Peace requires a sense of conversion or metanoia; it requires commitment and courage. Moreover, peacemaking is a matter of individual and institutional choice. We have it in our power either to increase the hurt inflicted on our world or to contribute toward its healing. Once again, it is a matter of choice.

Justice and peace are central themes in Scripture. However, as Orthodox Christians, we also recall the profound tradition of the Philokalia, which emphasizes that peace always – and ultimately – starts in the heart. In the words of St. Isaac the Syrian in the 7th century, “if you make peace with yourself, then heaven and earth will make peace with you.”

Nonetheless, this inner peace must be manifest in every aspect of our life and world. This is what the Jamaica Convocation underlines with its four sub-themes: peace in the community, with the earth, in the marketplace, and among peoples.

In an increasingly complex and violent world, Christian churches have come to recognize that working for peace constitutes a primary expression of their responsibility for the life of the world. They are challenged to move beyond mere rhetorical denunciations of violence, oppression and injustice, and incarnate their ethical judgments into actions that contribute to a culture of peace. This responsibility is grounded on the essential goodness of all human beings by virtue of being in God’s image and the goodness of all that God has created.

Peace is inextricably related to the notion of justice and freedom that God has granted to all human beings through Christ and the work of the Holy Spirit as a gift and vocation. It constitutes a pattern of life that reflects human participation in God’s love for the world. The dynamic nature of peace as gift and vocation does not deny the existence of tensions, which form an intrinsic element of human relationships, but can alleviate their destructive force by bringing justice and reconciliation.

The Church understands peace and peacemaking as an indispensable aspect of its life and mission to the world. It grounds this faith conviction upon the wholeness of the Biblical tradition as it is properly interpreted through the Church’s liturgical experience and practice. The Eucharist provides the space in which one discerns and experiences the fullness of the Christian faith in the history of God’s revelation. It reflects the image of God’s Trinitarian life in human beings and relates in love with the totality of the created world.

This eschatological experience of being in communion with God and participating in God’s love for the created world provides the hermeneutical key by which the community existentially interprets the fullness of Christian tradition, including Scripture, and structures the Church’s life and mission to the world. Love is the core of God’s revelation as it is revealed in Jesus Christ. Thus, in the Patristic tradition the violent texts of Scripture were understood to refer to the spiritual struggle of the believer against the devil, evil and sin. This interpretation implies that in their view the God of Jesus Christ and the Christian faith cannot be identified with violence.

Paradoxically, however, we can only become aware of the impact of our attitudes and actions on other people and on the natural environment, when we are prepared sacrifice some of the things we have learned to hold most dear. Many of our efforts for peace are futile because we are unwilling to forgo established ways of wasting and wanting. We refuse to relinquish wasteful consumerism and prideful nationalism. In peacemaking, then, it is critical that we perceive the impact of our practices on other people (especially the poor) as well as on the environment. This is precisely why there cannot be peace without justice.

“Blessed, then, are the peacemakers; for they shall be called children of God” (Matt. 5.9). To become and be called children of God is to move away from what we want to what God wants, and from what serves our own interests to what respects the rights of others. We must recognize that all human beings, and not only the few, deserve to share the resources of this world.

This is the peace that our Risen Lord offered to His disciples and the hope of our Lord for all of His children. It is also this same peace, which “surpasses all understanding” (Phil. 4.7) that, from the martyred Throne and Mother Church of Constantinople, we invoke upon all of you.

Your fervent supplicant before God,

+BARTHOLOMEW

Archbishop of Constantinople-

New Rome and Ecumenical Patriarch

C.S. Lewis on Dictators and Totalitarians

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Source: The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment by C.S. Lewis

Highlights:

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

For if crime and disease are to be regarded as the same thing, it follows that any state of mind which our masters choose to call ‘disease’ can be treated as a crime; and compulsorily cured.

Excerpt:

It is, indeed, important to notice that my argument so far supposes no evil intentions on the part of the Humanitarian and considers only what is involved in the logic of his position. My contention is that good men (not bad men) consistently acting upon that position would act as cruelly and unjustly as the greatest tyrants. They might in some respects act even worse. Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. Their very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be ‘cured’ against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level with those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals. But to be punished, however severely, because we have deserved it, because we ‘ought to have known better’, is to be treated as a human person made in God’s image.

In reality, however, we must face the possibility of bad rulers armed with a Humanitarian theory of punishment. A great many popular blue prints for a Christian society are merely what the Elizabethans called ‘eggs in moonshine’ because they assume that the whole society is Christian or that the Christians are in control. This is not so in most contemporary States. Even if it were, our rulers would still be fallen men, and, therefore neither ver wise nor very good. As it is, they will usually be unbelievers. And since wisdom and virtue are not the only or the commonest qualifications for a place in the government, they will not often be even the best unbelievers.

The practical problem of Christian politics is not that of drawing up schemes for a Christian society, but that of living as innocently as we can with unbelieving fellow-subjects under unbelieving rulers who will never be perfectly wise and good and who will sometimes be very wicked and very foolish. And when they are wicked the Humanitarian theory of punishment will put in their hands a finer instrument of tyranny than wickedness ever had before. For if crime and disease are to be regarded as the same thing, it follows that any state of mind which our masters choose to call ‘disease’ can be treated as a crime; and compulsorily cured. It will be vain to plead that states of mind which displease government need not always involve moral turpitude and do not therefore always deserve forfeiture of liberty. For our masters will not be using the concepts of Desert and Punishment but those of disease and cure. We know that one school of psychology already regards religion as a neurosis. When this particular neurosis becomes inconvenient to government, what is to hinder government from proceeding to ‘cure’ it? Such ‘cure’ will, of course, be compulsory; but under the Humanitarian theory it will not be called by the shocking name of Persecution. No one will blame us for being Christians, no one will hate us, no one will revile us. The new Nero will approach us with the silky manners of a doctor, and though all will be in fact as compulsory as the tunica molesta or Smithfield or Tyburn, all will go on within the unemotional therapeutic sphere where words like ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ or ‘freedom’ and ‘slavery’ are never heard. And thus when the command is given, every prominent Christian in the land may vanish overnight into Institutions for the Treatment of the Ideologically Unsound, and it will rest with the expert gaolers to say when (if ever) they are to re-emerge. But it will not be persecution. Even if the treatment is painful, even if it is life-long, even if it is fatal, that will be only a regrettable accident; the intention was purely therapeutic. In ordinary medicine there were painful operations and fatal operations; so in this. But because they are ‘treatment’, not punishment, they can be criticized only by fellow-experts and on technical grounds, never by men as men and on grounds of justice

New Footage of the Destruction of Smyrna in 1922 Made Public [VIDEO]

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Source: The National Herald

A never-before-seen video containing historic scenes from the destruction of Smyrna in 1922, which was shot by George Magarian was made public by his grandson Robert Magarian, who discovered the film at his grandmother’s New York home, where it had laid forgotten for decades.

Source: The Economist | May 1st 2008

WHEN Smyrna—modern Izmir—fell to the Turkish army in 1922, and much of it was destroyed by fire, the city’s role as a bastion of Greek and Christian culture, going back nearly 2,000 years, came to an abrupt end. Before that, the port had been home to a diverse and cosmopolitan population; by the standards of the region, it was a beacon of tolerance and prosperity.

In addition to the Greeks, Armenians, Jews and Turks, there were also Americans and Britons and what Giles Milton calls the “Levantines”, rich families of European descent, who spoke half a dozen languages and occupied vast villas. Their dynasties dominated the trade and industry of the region. Some (like the Whittalls) retained British nationality over generations of Ottoman life, and it is their English-language diaries, letters and documents that provide Mr Milton with his best material. Although this slant is unrepresentatively British and privileged—lots of parties and picnics—it allows the author to be fair towards the Greeks and the Turks, who still blame one another entirely for the disaster.

The city’s destruction—still known in Greece as “the catastrophe”—had its roots in the first world war and the effort by the great powers to grab pieces of the disintegrating Ottoman empire.

Britain, America and France backed Greece’s charismatic leader, Eleftherios Venizelos, in his pursuit of the megali idea (“great idea”), the dream of creating a greater Greece by occupying Smyrna and swathes of Anatolia. Having licensed a war by proxy, the allies in varying degrees turned cool on it. They looked on passively as Mustafa Kemal (later Ataturk, republican Turkey’s founder) and his troops routed the Greeks from Anatolia and reoccupied Smyrna, bent on revenge for Greek atrocities in the city and further east.

The port was ransacked and looted for days. Women were raped and mutilated, children were beheaded and more than 100,000 people killed. Meanwhile, 21 allied warships sat in the harbour. Hundreds of thousands of refugees were trapped on the city’s quayside, yet officers on the ships still dressed for dinner and ordered louder music to drown out the screams. “Paradise Lost” is a timely reminder of the appalling cost of expansionist political ambitions; it tells a fascinating story with clarity and insight.

Osama is Dead. Now What Should I Feel?

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Source: OrthodoxyToday.org

Last night, like most of the world, I was captivated by the announcement that the President of the United States would be making a statement at 10:30 p.m. As I Tweeted this information, I added the line that this could not be good. Presidents do not often come on at 10:30 on a Sunday night to announce good news. So, like the rest of the world, I waited and watched the social media to try and find out what was going on. I will add a side note here that I almost went to bed!

News started to be leaked and then confirmed that the USA had killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan and that they were working on identification. This was a military operation and no U.S. military personnel were harmed in this operation. I will admit, I, like many others in the U.S. and around the world, rejoiced at this news. Rejoiced at the news that bin Laden was dead and the news that no Americans were hurt or killed in the operation.

I watched as Twitter and Facebook lit up with news and reactions. (The interesting thing is everything went quiet as POTUS began speaking.) People were thanking God and military that justice had been served. But what are we Christians to make of all of this? How are we supposed to react and feel about all of this? Some of the folks I follow on Twitter started sending out Tweets that made it sound like them came from Fortune Cookies. (I have never liked using one passage of Scripture to try and prove a point.) But it did get me thinking, and thinking. I went to bed and listened to the news coverage on the BBC World Service and eventually drifted off to sleep.

So in the light of day I had to ask myself this question: How do we, as Christians, balance our relief that the mastermind behind so much killing is dead and the fact that a human life, created in the image and likeness of God, has perished? My Orthodox Christianity teaches that God does not rejoice when one of His children is lost. One of the folks on Twitter said that we Christians should feel sorrow that we did not do enough to convert him to Christianity. Well, I will not go that far but I do understand the sentiment. I also had to remind myself that it is not our job to judge — that is and should be left to God. Again, my Orthodox faith teaches that we are all sinners and we will all be judged for our actions.

I have said this before: Each and every human has been created in the image and likeness of God. Because of our creation in that image and likeness, we are not born evil. Evil is something we learn and is a byproduct of the fallen nature of humanity. Our actions are sinful and evil but humanity is not evil. As an Orthodox Christian I also believe in the power of confession and reconciliation. One of the hardest concepts for some people to come to terms with is the fact that if we are truly sorry and repentant; God will forgive all of our sins no matter how horrible. What an amazing and loving God we have!

The difficulty is in rejoicing over the situation at hand. Are we rejoicing because a man is dead or are we rejoicing because justice has been accomplished? I will say that if we are rejoicing because a man is dead then our rejoicing is misplaced. As Christians we should never rejoice at someone’s death, especially a death of one who is lost. Justice being served, however, is a different story.

We can rejoice that justice has been served for the thousands of people who were murdered because of the actions of this one man. I remember the anger I felt watching the events of Sept. 11 and how I wanted revenge, how I wanted those responsible to pay. It was a very dark day spiritually for many, many people, including myself. I will also confess that I am not sure how I felt last night when I heard the news, but it felt wrong that I was happy. A man was dead and I was happy. This was not right! If we give in to this kind of retribution then we are no better than those who committed the act. If we rejoice because this man is dead, then spiritually a small part of us has died as well.

During the Divine Liturgy we pray for those who love us and those who hate us. Praying for people who love us is easy, praying for those who hate us is difficult, if not downright impossible, but we have to do it. We are called to pray for every person not just the ones we like.

This past week we remembered the events leading up to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. One of the most remarkable events took place whilst Jesus was on the Cross. He asked His Father to forgive those who had done this to Him! Think about it: Hanging on the Cross, Jesus asked God to forgive those who killed him. What an example He leaves for us. “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”

I am reminded of a Scripture passage from the Gospel of St. Matthew, “You have heard that it was said, ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, do not resist one who is evil … love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:38-39, 44). Hard words to hear but it is good for us to be reminded of them from time to time.

So what is a Christian to do? How are we to respond to this? Well, first, as with anything, we need to pray. We need to pray for all those who have lost their lives the last few days and we need to pray for those who put their lives on the line. The killing of this man will not be welcome news to many people and our troops are in harm’s way. We need to keep all of this in the proper perspective, be happy that justice has been done but we cannot and should not rejoice in the death of anyone. If we truly respect human life, then all life is sacred, not just the ones we like. We also need to pray that we can make some sense of all of this.

So is it possible to be happy and sad at the same time? I believe it is. The very human emotion I was feeling last night was joy that he was dead. The very Christian emotion I am feeling today in the light of day is one of sadness that a life is lost and a feeling of relief that the one who brought terror to so many has been brought to justice. The rest of what I am feeling will just have to work itself out.

Fr. Peter-Michael Prebble is an Orthodox priest in the Romanian Orthodox Diocese of America.

Read the entire article on the Huffington Post website (new window will open). Reprinted with permission.

V. Rev. Fr. Peter-Michael Preble is the Pastor of St. Michael’s Orthodox Christian Church in Southbridge, Massachusetts and the host of the Shepherd of Souls syndicated radio program. Visit Fr. Peter’s blog.

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