Fortsätt till huvudinnehåll

Orthodox Whit Sunday



It was not my original intention today, but my plans were put out by a variety of circumstances so I ended up going to the Orthodox church this morning.

I have been experiencing a "pull" towards the Orthodox church for much of the past year, though it dates back for several years. A conjunction of events in 2013 was the initial trigger but the thing bubbled up again last autumn, after the Pope's visit to Sweden; I wrote a piece on the subject on this blog but it disturbed me in a way that has niggled ever since.

It is a considerable blessing to have a congregation locally which celebrates the Divine Liturgy in Church Slavonic. The parish is Serbian, but the services are also attended by Russians and a few Swedes who are spouses and converts.

At some point, Deo volente, a choice will have to be made, probably in about twelve months time. Or possibly not. I am not going to rush things. It is necessary to learn more, which will mean a lot of reading to be done.

As a non-Serbian, to be received into the Serbian church would seem strange, not to say perverse. It would take a lot of explaining. To join the Russian Orthodox would make slightly more sense, especially given the international reach of that church these days and the status of its Patriarch as a world Christian leader. Both, however, have political associations, which is the underlying problem with Orthodoxy as a grouping of national churches, not to mention the Church of Euphorbia.

There is a Swedish Orthodox church in embryo, attached to the Antioch patriarchy, now based in Damascus and under the protection of the Bishop in Paris. However, the Swedes have their liturgy on a Saturday and their church is out in the country. So from a practical point of view it would work less well. In any case it makes little difference to go to liturgy not understanding all the words in Church Slavonic or not understanding all the words in Swedish; the Serbians and Russians probably do not understand it all, since Church Slavonic is roughly as close to Russian as Latin is to Spanish or Italian. Either way, one needs to study the readings in English beforehand, and now that the priest has kindly given me a calender, I can have a look during the week.

Kommentarer

Populära inlägg i den här bloggen

The dreadfulness of British governance

I wrote to my MP on two entirely separate issues recently. The first was to do with the replacement for the Inter City 125 train, which at £2.6 million per vehicle, is twice as expensive as it ought to be. The second concerned the benefits of a switch from business rate and Council Tax to a tax based on site values. In both cases, the replies were full of spurious, unsubstantiated assertions and completely flawed arguments. This is typical. You will not get an iota of sense from the government on any area of public policy at all - finance, economics, trade and employment, agriculture, housing, health, transport, energy. All junk. If you write to your MP you will invariably receive answers that are an insult to your intelligence, no matter what subject you are writing about. Of course they cannot understand statistics. They are innumerate. Whitehall is staffed with idiots with a high IQ. Look at their IT projects. And mind your purse, they will have that too.

How much more will the British tolerate?

The British are phlegmatic, tolerant and slow to rouse. Thus there was no great reaction after the terrorist attack in July 2005. The murder of Lee Rigby created a sense of outrage, but nothing more, since it appeared to be an isolated incident. Two serious incidents within a fortnight are another matter. Since the first major terrorist incident in 2001, authority has tried to persuade the public that Islam is a religion of peace, that these were isolated events, or the actions of deranged "lone wolves", having nothing to do with Islam, or to reassure that the chances of being killed in a terrorist attack were infinitesimally small. These assurances are are beginning to wear thin. They no longer convince. If government does not act effectively, people will take the law into their own hands. What, however, would effective action look like? What sort of effective action would not amount to rough justice for a lot of innocent people? Given the difficulties of keeping large n...

Importing people to sustain demand

I got involved in a discussion with a Youtuber called “Philosophy all along”. This was in connection with criticism of Trump’s policy of deporting illegal migrants, which he argued would be bad for the economy as it would reduce demand. This implies that there is a need to import people to sustain demand. There is no obvious reason why a population should not be able to consume everything that the same population produces. If it can not, then something else is going on. It is a basic principle that wages are the least that workers will accept to do a job. Wages are a share of the value added by workers through their wages. The remainder is distributed as economic rent, after government has taken its cut in taxes. Monopoly profit is a temporary surplus that after a delay gets absorbed into economic rent. Land values in Silicon Valley are an example of this; it's like a gold rush. The miners get little out of it. Rent and tax syphon purchasing power away from those who produce the g...