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Your Beatitude:

Speaking most honestly, your Beatitude, I would never in my wildest dreams have thought of Tiger’s Woods’ unfortunate sexual dalliances as holding the remedy for the egregiously secularized politicization of the Church in the US, concomitant with its failure, judging from our national mores, to teach anything akin to chastity. Poor Tiger’s friends said he felt he was just enjoying the perks of his success, and he was certainly in good company: Eliot Spitzer, Mark Sanford, Jon Edwards, just for starters – and, look at what pimping for his own daughters did for Scott Brown’s political career, they’ve got him all but elected already as President!

I have been trying to get such repulsive and revolting images out of my mind as we move into Great Lent, but this is not an easy thing to do, as glaring discrepancies remain. Last Sunday, that of the Publican and the Pharisee began the Lenten Triodion:

Two men went up into the temple to pray; the one a Pharisee, and the other a publican.

The Pharisee stood and prayed thus within himself, God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers - or even as this publican. I fast twice in the week, I give tithes of all that I possess.

The publican, standing afar off, would not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, God be merciful to me a sinner.

I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other: for every one that exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted. Luke 18:10-14

Almost half a century ago, Dr. Herbert Schwartz was wont to say: When the average person hears that, he prays thus within himself:

God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men, even as that Pharisee.

To this mindset Dr. Schwartz in his time as still the Orthodox hymnology in our own comes across as strange and unreal. Although we sing the following and other like hymns every single year at this time, I would say the typical American Orthodox mindset remains as unrehabilited as that of Tiger Woods:

Christ has set before us the abasement of the Publican as a path to exaltation and a pattern of salvation: Let us follow his example and reject disdainful pride, and gain God's mercy through our humility. Let us cast foolish pride from our souls, learning to think with truth and humility; let us not try to justify ourselves, but to hate pride's delusion, and so with the Publican, obtain God's mercy. As the Publican, let us offer the Creator prayers for mercy. Let us avoid the ungrateful prayers of the Pharisee and the boasting words with which he judged his neighbor, that we may gain God's mercy and enlightenment. Weighed down by the great number of my sins, I have surpassed the Publican in an excess of evil, I have also made the boasting delusion of the Pharisee my own: I utterly lack all good things: O Lord, spare me!

http://www.ocf.org/OrthodoxPage/prayers/triodion/pubnphar

How do such sentiments square with your prestigious rendez-vous, reported on orthodoxnews.com?

In order to share the Orthodox Church in America’s positions on a variety of human rights and related issues, the hierarchs will meet with Congressman Christopher “Chris” Smith [R-NJ] and other members of Congress on Thursday, January 21. Among the topics to be discussed are the situation of the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Turkey in light of Patriarch Bartholomew’s widely acclaimed recent interview on "60 Minutes"; the plight of Orthodox Christians in Kosovo; growing concerns for Egypt’s Coptic Christians; pro-life concerns; and related issues, including human trafficking, that affect traditionally Orthodox Christian and other lands. Congressman Smith, widely known for his pro-life and pro-human rights positions, chairs the House International Relations Africa, Global Human Rights and International Operations Subcommittee and serves as vice-chair of the Committee on International Relations and as co-chair of the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (also known as the US Helsinki Commission), which works to promote and foster democracy, human rights, and stability in Eastern and Central Europe.

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If Congressman Smith is on all those committees, etc., why not address the committees themselves, instead of setting up a cozy tete a tete with a congressional member of a party that as I write this is so far from embracing truth for its own sake, that its leadership is contemplating penalizing its members and withholding party funds from them if they deviate from the currently politically correct conservative thinking within a certain cabal in the Republican Party at this particular time. What say you, your Beatitude?

Contrast this with the approach of my friend Abp. Hilarion to PACE, which, in fact, succeeded in getting the vote in question delayed:

Moscow, January 27, Interfax - The head of the Moscow Patriarchate Department for External Church Relations Archbishop Hilarion of Volokolamsk has called on the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) to refrain from adopting a resolution in defense of gay rights.

"The Russian Church does not support persecutions of homosexuals. However, views on homosexuality that go against the believers' convictions should not be imposed on them through the media and the education system," Archbishop Hilarion said in an address to PACE members published on the Russian Orthodox Church website.

Archbishop Hilarion called on the participants in the ongoing PACE session in Strasbourg "to refrain from passing any resolution on discrimination against homosexuals and revert to this issue only following its open discussion with all parties concerned." PACE "should follow the path of building Europe without erecting new dividing lines," he said.

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How is your outsized ego faring as you do the Prayer of St. Ephrem, accompanied by all the prostrations, at all the Lenten weekday services - faithfully attending which, let me say, has working out at the gym easily beat hollow, it must have you huffing and puffing like a tornado:

O Lord and Master of my life Do not give me the spirit of sloth, faint-heartedness, lust for power and idle talk. But give rather the spirit of chastity [note that chastity comes first, the other virtues being seen as building on this one], humility, patience, and love to thy servant.

Yea, Lord and King, grant me to see my own transgressions and not judge my brother; for Thou art blessed unto the ages of ages.

Amen This exquisitely chaste and simple little prayer – so eminently to the point - has been abandoned by our Sister Church, the Catholics, and I wonder if this is related to their – uh, problems in connection with the virtues of chastity, as the well spring of that spiritual ascent which, from abasement through humility and tried by patience, nevertheless charts the path recognized for almost millennia (St. Ephrem lived ca. 306 – 373) to the selfless love of God and others in God commanded by the First Mosaic Commandment.

I readily acknowledge that if I have an advantage here, it is in no way due to my own efforts, but through circumstances of birth which, needless to say, I had nothing whatsoever to do with. On my mother’s side, I am a direct descendant of Margaret Askew Fell Fox, wife of George Fox, they being the Founders of Quakerism. My paternal grandfather was a doctor known for his dedication to the southern rural community he served as its Patriarch, renowned for his profound humility, the image of him most burned into my memory is as he would recall God’s infinitely great mercy to even so great a sinner as himself, the tears of repentance streaming down his cheeks, tanned and leathery from the life he lived mostly outdoors, making the rounds of his patients with a horse or mule for transportation.

Within Orthodoxy, the sexual abuse that hits the headlines is usually on the part of celibate (supposedly!) archimandrites serving as parish priests. Our authentic tradition is that parish priests must be married, indeed they cannot be ordained until after they are married, because their wives must agree to assume the duties that befall them, in line with their husbands’ priestly vocation. In Russia, for example, the fervent dedication of the widow of the recently slain Moscow Priest Daniil Sysoyev to her husband’s very dangerous mission is typical.

Orthodoxy here in the US, by contrast, is marked by the deplorably high level of divorced priests. I confess I was frightfully shaken when I first read that this was the case, and even more so when I encountered some living (ostensibly, at least!) specimens – having grown up at a time and in a locale in which the pastor’s wife shared her husband’s calling within so intimate a bond, it was scarcely possible even to think of them in separation, one from the other.

Against this backdrop, I was hugely gratified when I happened across the news item on Tiger Woods’ sex rehab in Time.com, you can read it in its entirety at

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1956517,00.html

What I saw as hugely promising on a larger – viz. national – scale was the following:

The calls for Tiger Woods to get help did not go unheeded. On Jan. 16, after weeks of sordid allegations regarding the star golfer's extramarital affairs, RadarOnline.com reported that Woods had enrolled in the Gentle Path program at Pine Grove Behavioral Health and Addiction Services, in Hattiesburg, Miss., to be treated for sex addiction….

A patient's partner can also play an integral role in his or her treatment. Woods' wife Elin Nordegren has already visited him at Pine Grove. "Recovery is a three-legged stool for a couple — his recovery, her recovery and healing, and then the marriage recovery," says Dr. Douglas Weiss… Addicts are encouraged to disclose the full range of their behavior to their partner when confronting their distortions of reality in the second stage of treatment.…

Although Woods may be in a six-week program, his therapy is likely to be ongoing. Simply working through the addiction could take two to five years of therapy, enhanced by 12-step programs for both partners; working through related trauma could take a lifetime. "Sex addiction is not about remaining abstinent for the rest of your life," says Denizet-Lewis. "It is about learning to have sex in a way that makes you happy again."

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It was the reference to 12-step programs that got my attention. Several years into my family’s 16 year experience in the community under the spiritual direction of Dr. Herbert Schwartz, I became interested in how this therapy followed to the letter the therapy Herbert used with us:

THE TWELVE STEPS OF ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS
Copyright _ A.A. World Services, Inc. 1.

We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable. [Herbert would often quote from Rm 3, in which Paul in turn quotes from the Old Testament, so it would be folly to look for any easy out: “As it is written: ‘There is no one just, not one, there is no one who understands, there is no one who seeks God. All have gone astray; all alike are worthless; there is not one who does good, (there is not) even one.’” The message is precisely that of AA.]

2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings. [Note how this accords with the wording of St. Ephrem: Aware of our inability to dig our own selves out of our dilemma, we beg: O Lord and Master of my life Do not give me the spirit of sloth, etc. But give rather the spirit of chastity, etc. Yea, Lord and King, grant me to see my own transgressions, etc.]

8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.

[You should be so lucky as to have actually lived – as against briefly visiting - in a community in which relations are established in this wise. It accords with the Russia practice of - before going to confession or receiving Communion – turning with a deep bow to those standing near, saying “Forgive me,” to which they bow in turn and reply, “God forgives, and I forgive.”]

11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.

12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

The entire AA program is in our Jewish Old Testament, our Christian New Testament – as well as in the sacred writings of every other religion known to man – so it is not at all surprising that it should be re-discovered in our own times as people seek a therapy capable of curing them of addictions which render them dysfunctional.

Moreover, in this manner our tragically fallen condition becomes itself the source of the very bond of love and devotion within God’s family, even the Body of Christ, the Church, which in fact is built up in this wise. As St. Paul says further, “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.” Rm 3:23f This justification and redemption is possible when, as expressed in the 2nd step of the AA program: We have come to believe that a Power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity, “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified freely through Christ Jesus.”