Blogoslavia

It occurs to me that the number of Orthodox people I interact with in person is about the same as, or less than, the number of Orthodox I interact with solely via the internet. Other Orthodox I have met in person, including my husband, I met first on the internet.

Is this something other people notice, too, or is it because I'm an introvert and new convert? Is it reflective of being such a minority in American society? I don't think I've ever just met someone by happenstance, at work or out and about, who's Orthodox.

If others notice the same thing, how does this change how we live as Orthodox and understand ourselves?

Byzantium

When I returned to the US from Turkey, my plans were to head to graduate school and pursue medieval studies. Discussing it with a former professor, I mentioned I might like to focus on Byzantium or Byzantine/European relations, thinking that would draw together at least a couple of my widely diverging interests (this was even before I was considering conversion to Orthodoxy!). She tried to dissuade me, saying I'd never get a job. Not enough interest in Byzantium, nobody doing the work on it.

As I tried to find some basic historical surveys, I found she was right. I still haven't found a good general introduction to the Byzantine "Middle Ages"- maybe some of my better-versed readers can suggest one. The books on the northern-European Middle Ages, if they mention it at all, tend to sniff that the Byzantine world of the time was decadent and contributed nothing of interest or importance. One example of this is Norman Cantor's Civilization of the Middle Ages, a book I otherwise really enjoyed and frequently recommend to others.

Such judgments ring suspicious to me from the get-go. Not interesting or important to whom? Just how do you judge "importance"? Up until the past few decades, many people said similar things about the western Middle Ages, influenced as they were by 18th and 19th century historiographical prejudices (as I've written about before, here and here). And this particular sentiment sounds so much like an Edward Gibbonism that I can't help but think it's time to update the assessment of Byzantium, too.

Others are saying the same- here's an interesting paper, for instance. It would make it all the more tempting for me, were I ever to do that medieval studies degree, to head this direction. I just imagine what lies unknown and unexplored, the amount of field work there is to do for someone who could trawl through the dusty halls of Turkish and Greek archives... Other people's neglect is the curious fellow's food.

It will probably not be me doing the trawling, since our longer-term plans involve babies, but I hope there are other curious folk out there who take up the challenge.

Rain!

It's been so long since we had a good, proper rain, I'd forgotten what it was like. It's wonderful! Especially on a Saturday where you don't have anywhere to go.

Fall is marvelous, even the California sort that sneaks up on you, very quiet and subtle.

Things to do in San Jose

Pavel and I were busy getting married, and now I've been gimped up with knee surgery for months on end, so ever since we were dating we haven't really gone to see many area attractions. Forget San Francisco, there are still a lot of things here in the South Bay that are on my list of things to see and do. So, as much to remind myself later as to point prospective visitors to attractions, here's a list.

* Heritage Rose Gardens, which I always think about visiting anytime except when it's high rose season.
* Mission Santa Clara and Mission San Jose- No, I haven't seen them yet!
* History Park: A gathering of some moved and reconstructed historic buildings, including O'Brien's Cafe, the first ice cream shop west of Detroit, and a historic barn from a fruit farm.
* Stroll downtown Willow Glen and its farmers' market: An old Italian neighborhood and one of the more walkable downtown areas in the valley.
* Tech Museum of Innovation: This being Silicon Valley, a temple of the technogeeks.
* Museum of Quilts and Textiles: I'm into the things that women (primarily) have traditionally done with their hands, especially quilts which tended to be community efforts.
* Drive up to Lick Observatory, one of the country's oldest astronomical observatories. It was started by another Pennsylvania native, who made it rich in Gold Rush San Francisco and left the observatory as a monument to himself. You can't go up at night (more's the pity), but it's supposed to have great views of the valley and SF Bay. It's because of this observatory that all of San Jose's street lamps are the orange-y low pressure sodium lamps.
* Hike Big Basin: Redwoods and waterfalls.
* Go birding in some of the preserves around the Bay (not necessarily South Bay). I've considered joining a birding group, as a way to meet some hiking types who aren't all about conquering the highest mountain. I'm more of a "walker" in the English sense of the word.
* Pavel and I both want to see the Bigfoot Museum in Santa Cruz.
* Hike Alum Park, which is more of a roughing-it sort of park and I figure, liable to have some interesting plant and animal life.
* Gamble Garden and Tea House and FiLoLi: Area show gardens- one more of a cottage garden, the other an opulent formal garden.

I'll probably think of others!

Lutheran kitsch

This one's for Pavel, the former Lutheran boy. :)

Check out the line of products at oldlutheran.com. Don't miss the "Wash Away Your Sins" moist towelettes, "Sin Boldly" beer steins, bobblehead Martin Luther dolls, the "Card Carrying Old Lutheran" ID card, "Here I Stand" golf socks, or the "Clergy Girl" dolls for the budding clergywoman (those must be ELCA dolls :>).



Props to B Movie Catechism, another site my hubby will love to browse.

Enacting a sacrament of forgetfulness

More from Eamon Duffy's book, without comment.

"Whether done under official pressure or not, the removal of the images of the saints, of the altars and perhaps most of all the brasses and obit inscriptions calling for the prayers for the dead, which were ripped up from gravestones and sold by the hundredweight from 1548 onwards, were ritual acts of deep significance. Like the silencing of the bede-rolls, the removal of the images and petitions of the dead was an act of oblivion, a casting out of the dead from the community of the living into a collective anonymity. They, like the Mass and the saints, were now as they had never been before, part of a superseded past. The imaginative power of the cult of the dead in late medieval England had lain in part precisely in its continuity, as generation after generation inscribed its names and imposed its features upon the palimpsest of the parish memory. Through the recitation of the bede-roll and the continued use of the objects which the generosity of 'good doers and well willers' had provided, the community was prevented from shrinking to become coterminous with its living members. Once broken, that sense of continuity proved difficult to recapture. The surprising failure of the Marian laity in many regions to re-establish the cult of the dead on anything like its former footing is probably less to do with any scepticism about doctrine than with the loss of this vital dimension of continuity.

For the reformers this act of distancing was in a sense deliberate, a necessary rite of exorcism. In his Displaying of the popishe Masse Thomas Becon has a passage in which he attacks the whole notion of commemorating the dead. In the course of it, he parodies the bede-roll:

And here in your mind and thought... ye pray for Philip and Cheny, more than a good meany, for the souls of your great grand Sir and your old Beldam Hurre, for the souls of Father Princhard and of Mother Puddingwright, for the souls of good man Rinsepitcher and good wife Pintpot, for the souls of Sir John Huslegoose and Sir Simon Sweetlips, and for the souls of all your benefactors... friends and well-willers.

This is undeniably effective, a rollicking but ultimately chilling reduction of the dead to the status of figures of fun, figures of contempt. From such puppets it was easy, and better, to be free. It is worlds away from More's evocation of the dead, a generation before, as 'your late acquaintance, kinred, spouses, companions, play felowes, and frendes.' The ripping out of the memorials of the dead, like the three hundredweight 'in Brasses' sold to Thomas Sparpoynt at Long Melford for fifty-three shillings in 1548, was the practical enactment of that silencing and distancing. The dead became as shadowy as the blanks in the stripped matrices of their gravestones, where once their images and inscriptions had named them, and asserted trust in, and claims on, the living."

The Stripping of the Altars

One of the things that preceded my deconversion from evangelicalism was a weakening of the hold on me of Protestant historiography, the historical mythology that you more or less unconsciously absorb being a Protestant. Protestantism basically relies on the assumption of a corrupt medieval church largely bereft of the true light and life of Christ (except for perhaps a few flickers here and there that the Pope never managed to stamp out). Discovering in my medieval history classes, by accident as it were, that this was not even remotely true was eye-opening. If this aspect of the Protestant story were not true, what of its claims on early church history...?

Naturally there are plenty of actual abuses in medieval Catholicism that can serve as emblems for the assumption, and others that came as a result of the Reformation can be played up to color the picture of the whole. You can even, as I have seen done, turn the abuses of the Reformation around and blame them on the Catholics. The Reformers, so it goes, learned tyranny from the best!

I think it would really surprise a lot of people to read in detail the "implementation" of the Reformation on the ground, such as Eamon Duffy provides in his book The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580. The Protestant self-awareness has the Reformers as liberating the common folk from the hold of corrupt, thieving Latinate clergy who were enforcing popery with threats of Inquisition and damnation. Duffy on the other hand begins his book by laying out in detail the rich religious life of the medieval layperson- not enforced, embraced. The fact that so much of this life seems quaint and arcane to us is testament to the effectiveness of the "religious cleansing" that is described in the second half of the book.

What is striking about this is not only the attacks on traditionalist clergy, the smashing of holy images and rood screens, the banning of pilgrimages and "extraneous" feasts and fasts, the disbanding of monasteries- let us pass over in silence the near-genocidal attempt by Oliver Cromwell to eradicate Irish Catholicism- but the pervasive and concerted attempt to interfere with the religious life of the English layperson. This is because despite all these "reforms," many of the laypeople were hanging on tenaciously to the old ways. Henry VIII may have been the impetus for the turn from Catholicism, but it was only after his death and the restraining influence he asserted that the real "reform" got underway. Duffy describes the "royal visitations" undertaken by Thomas Cranmer, inspectors sent out into the parishes all over the country to root out lingering dissent:

"The commissioners also had an exhaustive set of articles of enquiry, and had power to make their own articles where they deemed that necessary. The visitation was thorough, in many places aggressive, and it was consistently used to push through a radical reading of the Injunctions. Everywhere they went the commissioners enforced the destruction of images, the extinguishing of lights, the abolition of 'abused' ceremonies..."

Rather than- as you would think- limiting the power of the clergy, the activities of the visitations also served to remove the primary means by which the laypeople participated in local worship, that being the craft and religious guilds and the lay ministers that served at minor feasts and at country chapels. Under guise of liberating the laypeople's alms from clerical corruption (it being assumed that the money laypeople gave as expressions of piety was wasted coin extracted from them not by their own faith but by coercion), the money was instead appropriated for the Crown.

Nor did the visitations limit themselves to interfering with only public displays of lay piety. Cranmer, in his own parish visitation,

"included detailed inquiries about the destruction of all images (not merely their removal), and in addition to making sure that they had all been removed from the churches, Cranmer wanted to know if any of the laity 'keep in their houses undefaced any abused or feigned images, any tables, pictures, paintings, or other monuments of feigned miracles, pilgrimages, idolatry or superstition.' [Don't you almost hear the drip of Enlightenment rationalism!] He wanted to know if abrogated feasts or fasts were being observed, whether there were any lights in the churches other than two on the high altar, and whether the Pope's name and the services of St. Thomas had been removed from the books..."

You can almost imagine the Most Reverend Cranmer searching the skirts of the townswomen to see if any were hiding images of the Virgin there. And indeed, as Duffy also relates, some of them might have been doing just that- the attempts of traditionalist clergy and laypeople to hide images and relics from destruction bear pathetic resemblance to Russian Orthodox hiding them from Soviets. It is this systematic, petty bureacratic persecution that surprises and chills me more than, say, the slow burning of a friar bound to a wooden image (for which there are certainly reciprocal atrocities of the Counter-Reformation). And doesn't Protestant fundamentalism still have this petty, nosey, busybody quality to it?

I don't mean to be uncharitable to my Protestant friends in writing about this, but as it is a story not often heard, it seems to me one that must be told. When I read about the royal visitations smashing the stone crosses that marked the path of pilgrimages, I think of Emergent websites that use images of old Celtic crosses, and wonder if they realize that it was the "anti-institutional" Christians of that day that made such emblems so rarified. I also cannot help but think that the state of the Anglican church today reflects its chaotic, bloody and unsavory roots as much as the crises of late modernity. Though it was once my introduction into liturgical prayer, I would not now for all the world use the Book of Common Prayer, knowing its history (read "common" as: use this or else).

That brings up the Reformation battle cry of the vernacular Bible. I have argued here and elsewhere before that the notion that medieval clergy hid the Bible from laypeople is as ridiculous a modernist obfuscation as they come. You hear such things all the time. "If not for the Reformation we'd all be reading the Bible in Latin...People weren't allowed to read the Bible back then you know..." Duffy's is a rich portrait of how steeped the medieval layperson was in the story of Scripture, even if they experienced it more in picture, drama, and sound than in text (as the economics of the day, not only its religious priorities, dictated). The Catholic Church's preferential treatment of Latin was not especially canonical, but was also far from tyrannical. There were English translations of the Bible before Tyndale and Wycliffe. Not very good ones, but here again, other factors were at work apart from papal control, and it was in part the inability to produce a good English translation that made the clergy prefer the Latin. The Bible was kept in Latin, as Jaroslav Pelikan says, the way books used to be chained in ancient libraries- in order to keep them available, not to keep them inaccessible.

It is true that in the Counter-Reformation, the traditionalists moved against the distribution and reading of the Bible in English. But reading Duffy's account, you understand more how this came about. The Reformers' Bible translations and their prayer books and primers were not merely faithful representations of the faith which let the common person read and decide for themselves on doctrinal matters, as we commonly view it today. Rather, they were concerted propaganda pieces. This really should not surprise us, if we think of how liberal Christians try to effect "reformation of the church" today by the same means. There is no better way to change how devout, well-meaning people think about the faith than to change how they pray. Then as now, political and social pressure is brought to bear in the process as well.

I cannot help but feel deeply and personally affected by reading these things. In becoming Orthodox, I feel that I in some ways rediscovered the roots of the faith of my Irish and Anglo-Saxon forbears, who learned the faith first from the East. In reading about the targets of the Reformers' ire- their disdain for incense, the veneration of the saints, rosaries, the designation of holy places, the efficacy of holy water- I understand how even now my thinking is shaped by their hang-ups. In considering the spiritual history of my ancestors, I find myself wishing the Latins had left us alone, but I really wish the Reformers had left us alone. It is too late to try to reconstruct some lost Celtic spirituality that may never have existed as we can piece it together anyway. Thankfully that really need not be our goal- the faith itself is eternal, not bound in historicism. Yet our understanding of it is culturally mediated and the work of peeling off these layers of cultural accretion is perhaps a necessary catharsis for a clear view, not of the Cross, but of ourselves at its feet.

Bigfeet

Pavel and I watched a TV show on Bigfoot and he then found a database with sightings by county for the entire US and Canada. It was interesting to read both the many reports from here in Northern California, and those from my home area of Pennsylvania.

I remain skeptical, but the sheer number and uniformity of sightings is impressive. At any rate it argues against large-scale hoaxism, although I'm more inclined to attribute them to the power of suggestion. Woods and lonely spaces have a way of working on the mind, for good (to calm) or ill (to rattle). Most of the sound recordings didn't impress me much, as they sound to me like coyotes or wolves, although the ones that sound more like ape chatter are more compelling.

In any case I enjoy reading the tales and feeling the shiver up the spine. Every place and culture should have its mythical or semi-mythical creatures, and celebrate them for the sense of awe and mystery they give us. The world would be a dull place if we could explain everything.