The Arrow's Path

My cell phone starts ringing early this morning. I had set the alarm clock on it because I had to get up at 5 to make a pastoral care call. I looked at it and realized it wasn't the alarm clock function...someone was calling me. Bad news always invariably comes in the middle of the night. It was the police station: the church security alarm had gone off. 2 potheads from the fraternity had jimmied the door downstairs. Their mission? Smokin' doobies in the Lady Julian chapel. Not realizing they had tripped the motion sensors, they proceeded to fire up some purple incense haze. The police busted them as they were coming back out. Sergeant Friday The policeman on the scene was quoted as saying, "the only evidence of the pot was that one of the officers thought they smelled it. I guess they smoked the evidence." They were ticketed for trespassing. Quoth the rector, "I chose not to speak to the young men, but I did see them from across the courtyard; they looked like...

I think we should make use of Biretta Headlamps during the Order of Light... -The Archer+

Occasionally, if I get the chance, I like to pop into an Orthodox liturgy. There is an Armenian (no not Arminian) church in Evanston. Westcott House shares its chapel with a Russian Orthodox church plant. I have been meaning to sit in on one of their Sunday services while being here in Narnia, and finally got around to it today. I could never be Orthodox because I am a flaming Augustinian, and Augustine never really happened in the East, but I enjoy the occasional Orthodox liturgy because it is just so foreign to what most folks (Catholic or Protestant) in the West get on a Sunday morning. The copious amounts of incense make Anglo-catholics look puritanical by comparison. One of the things that has struck me about the few times I get to pop into an Orthodox church is the quality of preaching, surprisingly enough. One thinks of Orthodox liturgy having so much mystery that actual exegetical preaching would seem to be on the back burner. That is completely not the case, at least from my l...