Lysistrata's Daughter

Link to text published on oca.org January 18, 2009 To the Venerable Hierarchs, Clergy, Monastics and Faithful of the Orthodox Church in America Dearly Beloved in Christ: The Lord Jesus Christ emerged from the waters of Baptism, and heard the Word of the Father: "You are my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased." The Lord's word to each and every human being, to each and every being which bears the image and can actualize the likeness of God, is the same: You are my beloved. It is the very Word of God who, by His incarnation and assumption of our whole life and our whole condition, affirms and blesses the ultimate value of every human person--and indeed of creation as a whole. He filled it with His own being, uniting us to Himself, making us His own Body, transfiguring and deifying our lives, and raising us up to God our Father. He affirms and fulfills us, not simply as individuals seeking happiness, but rather as persons with an infinite capacity to love and be loved,...

My husband loves Christmas. By which he means that he loves the hymns and services of Christmas, both East and West. He loves to have an Advent wreath and sing the O Antiphons of the Roman rite. You know? Christ-mass. The lovely churchy parts of Christmas. The hymns we love because we only get to sing them once a year. I love all that, too. What I hate about Christmas is something quite different, and it was on full display today. It started this morning, with NPR hinting darkly that people who do not spend every penny they can afford on Christmas presents, and a few more after that, were nothing more than economic jihadists, determined to sell the country into financial ruin. As if the brainiacs of Wall Street hadn't done that for us already. And I'm so sorry that I'm not willing to spoil my child rotten and fill up my little house with kitchen gadgets we'll never use in order to save an economy already being killed much more effectively than I ever could with...

BBC NEWS | UK | Scotland | Edinburgh, East and Fife | Rom-coms 'spoil your love life' : "They found fans of films such as Runaway Bride and Notting Hill often fail to communicate with their partner." Ha! I always thought romantic comedies were pernicious crap.

Usually, when I think of A, I have a jumbled impression of his wildly convoluted stories about building houses and killing bad guys, tantrums over going to bed, elaborate coffee table altars and painstaking Lego constructions. Occasionally, though, I am struck by A as, simply, himself. The first instance I remember is when I realized he no longer had the baby smell, that soft aroma of milk and soap, but instead, smelled sweaty and dirty, because he was no longer a baby but a little boy. He must have been around two at the time. A year ago, when he was three, I was holding his hand after he had fallen asleep, and I felt the calluses that had grown as a result of his hard playing. It was a shock to discover that he no longer had the soft, fleshy hands of a baby, but the vaguely hard, dry hands of a man. Tonight I checked on A after he was asleep. He was rolled up in his comforter, and as cute and vulnerable as he looked, I also felt that I saw a glimmer of the man he would become...

Today is A's name day, and he got a new pirate hide-out thingy. The old pirates and the new pirates are getting acquainted and will probably be planning some expeditions to find treasure in the near future.

BBC NEWS | South Asia | The age of 'celebrity terrorism' : "Perhaps we have come to the point where casually self-radicalised, sociopathic individuals can form a loose organisation, acquire sufficient weapons and equipment for a few thousand dollars, make a basic plan of action and indulge in a violent expression of their generalised disaffection and anomie." I promise this won't turn into a round-up of political stuff I find interesting, but this really was a totally novel and convincing, to me, at least, analysis of modern terrorism.

I've stopped looking at Facebook recently, and I hardly ever watch YouTube videos anymore. The reason? I can't stand to watch the total disintegration of American political discourse. On Facebook, friends of all political stripes post snarky status messages taking potshots at one side or the other. They also post propaganda-style YouTube videos and fear-mongering articles, which cite few checkable sources. I can't take it any longer. I can't stand to watch the most outrageous propaganda masquerading as serious political comment. I can't stand to watch the artificial division of the country into 'us' and 'them'. I can't stand to watch as people I love, throughout the political spectrum, are painted as ill-intentioned, hateful people. Politics is not a parody of fundamentalist religion, in which we must choose between good and evil or face an eternity of Bill O'Reilly and Michael Moore wet t-shirt contests. Politics are contingent, ambiguous an...