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At last!!! An Orthodox Pope!!!!!!!!

“Catholic” has become a denominational term for the Church headed by the Roman Pope – it is the same in different languages, only the spelling changes for the respective orthography: Roemisch Katholisch, Catholique, etc. My web site (address given above) indicates why, see especially the latest of my “current updates”. (And I urge everyone who is interested to check them out now, as I don’t like to keep argumentative posts on my site, and will soon archive them.) Ortho-dox, by contrast, consisting of the roots “correct” and “belief/practice” is expressed in the language of the faithful; the Slavic, for instance is “pravo-slavnie” and expresses the Slavic emphasis on belief as praise, worship, slava – as in “Slava Bogy” for this miracle! Hence when I celebrate Pope Benedict as Orthodox, I do not mean that he has left the Catholic denomination, but rather that he has joined the ranks of those who still adhere to the apostolic and evangelical Credo (incidentally, this means “I believe”, not “we believe”, as I have heard it in some Catholic churches – as a pointed example of what we are dealing with here) of the Christian Church, the Body of Christ.

I quote from a talk posted this week on Zenit, the Vatican news site:

Spiritual worship has a prerequisite, the Bishop of Rome explained, and it is union with Christ.

”Paul,” he said, “always supposes that we have come to be ‘one in Christ Jesus,’ that we have died [to our undeified selves] in baptism and we live now with Christ, through Christ and in Christ. In this union -- and only in this way -- we can be in him and with him a ‘living sacrifice’, to offer the 'true worship.'"

THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU, Pope Benedict!!! For the rest, I for once have nothing more to say!

I would just like to share with everyone a delightfully whimsical dream that came to me along with this blessing upon our land at this time when we desperately NEED the truly Orthodox Christian Church in our hemisphere. This is hardly anything new, but we at this time are ready as a nation to embrace and to abide within this Church, and to share the goods we derive from it with others of fervor and good will who may express themselves in words and in ways which differ from ours. It looks like we will even have a “Club of Presidents” to boost us into orbit!

The dream itself was rather messy and confused, but I remembered it with such clarity that I thought it must have significance.

It was about a cat. The cat was large, huge, in fact, and was black and white, but the enormous body was black. I am not being racist, by the way, in negatively perceiving black, which throughout Scripture signifies darkness, lack of light – yet which is even necessary that light be seen! Herbert Schwartz (German for black) loved to apply to himself the refrain from the Canticle of Canticles: nigra sum sed formosa - I am black but beautiful.

So in the beginning of my dream I was going to try to do away with the cat. But then the scene shifted, it was in bed, and ready to have kittens, and I changed my mind and was even very sorry about a white patch I had made on the cat – I guess trying to erase it, such is the logic of dreams! So I woke up disturbed and conscience stricken that I had had a bad intention against the cat.

It was Sunday, and so the first thing was Liturgy – and I think it was as I was driving there that I realized the cat in my dream was Pope Benedict. And I was sure that the meaning of the dream was that we would not need to replace Benedict as, in the Orthodox Church in America, Met. Herman got the former metropolitan to retire and had himself elected metropolitan – and proceeded to let the church self-destruct, but in such wise that it, in fact, destroyed him rather than itself! I wish you could all have lived through it with me. Herman was masterful! And he never lost his cool, however much he was vilified from all sides, even within our own St. Tikhon’s community. And when that was all over, they had “forced” him into retirement (although I’m sure not against his will – he is now in retirement more fruitful than ever), and they met at an “All American” event – Pittsburgh was wondering if it could find space for them all – and after a very fractious beginning, they elected Met. Isaiah, and it’s like some kind of soft velveteen mist has enveloped the OCA! I kid you not!

But as for my dream, I understood that as regards Benedict, he would stay and do the right thing and be fertile, having all the kittens!

So that was that.

Then I stopped by to visit my friends the Newports. A couple of years ago someone gave their teenaged daughter a big and almost ferociously unfriendly black and white cat, which did calm down a little over time, but the facial markings are so farcical, that cat is never going to look affable. Then when I arrived down here this year, there were two kittens, who look like pedigree Siamese, except that Siamese are said to have been royal guards in the palace, and they look the role – while these two kittens are very soft and gentle looking. I was told they belonged to the black and white cat, who I had just assumed was female. So I thought, will wonders never cease? And that was that.

But this week I again dropped in on the Newports – and there was yet another cat, rather small, about the same size as the kittens who are now late adolescents, it was one of those motley cats, overall dark, but speckled with lighter shades, and this cat has a very quiet, self-contained, almost royal demeanor! She stepped carefully around us to her food bowl, ate her fill, and gently wafted back into the shady bushes. She has Pope Benedict’s manner like she could have been him in another life! Of course, it turns out that the big black and white cat is a Tom Cat after all. But I never before saw a female cat move in with the father of her kittens! Whatever – I think it bodes well for the Church.

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