I’m sitting in a coffee shop in Chicago’s Old Town waiting for the Vigil for Theophany to start at the Orthodox Church in America (OCA) cathedral. They’re offering three services out here at Holy Trinity, and I managed to miss the most important one already, according to my spiritual father. This morning at 8 am, they had the Vesperal Divine Liturgy of St Basil the Great, which is when all the Theophany readings are done. Tonight, they are having Vigil,... Read more
Last year just before midnight on New Year’s Eve, I wanted to post something clever on social media. I had just become a catechumen at my local Eastern Catholic temple, and I thought I’d put something different up. ‘Mary, the Mother of God,’ I discovered, was a ‘solemnity’ (whatever that is) only for the Latins, and I thought it’d be appropriate to make a circumcision joke (e.g. on New Year’s, they do them half off). That’s when I discovered that in... Read more
A Byzantine priest told me recently that Nativity is not as great of a feast as Theophany, which for us on the Newer Calendar comes on January 6. Theophany, he said, was Christ’s public revelation to the world, whereas Nativity wasn’t that big of a deal when it happened. I mean, who really knew about Nativity at the time? he was saying. Wasn’t it just a couple of shepherds and three guys from China? I think I like that. For all that has been... Read more
They say that 2016 was a pretty terrible year, and they (whoever ‘they’ are) seem to be amplifying the talking about this terrible year as Nativity draws near. I think this is, of course, because for most people, ‘Christmas’ and ‘New Year’ go together, as the Feasts of Our Father Among the Saints Holy Basil the Great and the Circumcision of Our Lord on January 1 and Theophany on January 6 don’t seem to be part of a popular modern consciousness.... Read more
Shortly after the clergy prayer meeting that I wrote about in my last post, the Eastern Jesuit who sort of became our de facto spiritual leader for Chinese Christian solidarity with Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement messaged me and said that he had an idea. He felt that it was important for people reflecting on the Umbrella Movement to have a space where they could think and pray about their ‘political and social hopes’ in relation to their ‘faith life’ (this is verbatim... Read more
In my last post on first encountering a Chinese Canadian Eastern Catholic Jesuit priest at a prayer rally in solidarity with the Umbrella Movement, I ended on a bit of a cliffhanger on what happened after a bunch of Protestants penned an open letter on Chinese Christian social justice in Vancouver signed by our Patheos Catholic channel editor by quoting said Jesuit. In order to get to the Eastern Catholic theology that we began learning from discussion with him, I... Read more
A few weeks ago, a friend and I were having a conversation during which I said that I was frustrated that most people don’t seem to understand that I first encountered Eastern Catholicism as a social justice tradition and just assumed that I got into it because of the beauty or the liturgy or whatever. It’s not that I don’t like beauty or liturgy or whatever – it is now my life – but those were things that I discovered after... Read more
Around late August last year, I was scrolling through my news feed when I saw a few of my theologian friends had shared a very interesting article on Ms Lauryn Hill – or as I knew her from hearsay when I was in high school, Lauryn Hill. Titled ‘Nearly 20 Years Ago, Lauryn Hill Made an Album So Perfect It Nearly Ruined Her Life,’ the piece details how The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill is so flawlessly done as an honest set of... Read more
When I was blogging as Chinglican at Table at a group blog called A Christian Thing, one of our group members known as Churl wrote a piece screaming at evangelicals, and by extension, all Protestants. As Churl and I were both Christians in the Anglican tradition at the time, I felt that I needed to write something to say why I’d stay Anglican and would never become Catholic. The series that resulted was titled What’s So Good About Anglicanism? I managed to... Read more
Tonight I got to go to Immanuel Moleben. It was awesome. For those who are unfamiliar, a moleben is a ‘supplication’ service, what the Greeks call a paraklesis, that is roughly adapted from Matins (the morning prayer service). Immanuel Moleben is something that we have for what we call St Philip’s Fast, the fasting period in the Byzantine Church between the Feast of St Philip (November 15, for us on the Newer Calendar) until Nativity. The moleben that we celebrate weekly is... Read more
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