Opus Postumum

The lack of blog posts is due to three unrelated factors: (1) the lengthy recovery required by my illness; (2) a loss of purpose: abandoning the dream of the Ordinariates or continuing Anglicanism has left this blog without premise; and (3) the evident demise of European civilization has become, for me at least, a complete obsession. (Hitler and Stalin must be laughing in Hell.)

I'm still investigating Eastern Christianity but probably more as a well-meaning tourist. Here's a interesting reflection:

... I was raised in Canada as an Anglican, and it was in this context that my love for Christ’s Church was fostered. Like many Anglicans of the ‘Anglo-Catholic’ tradition, though, I asked myself for years what I would do ‘when the time came’. In other words, when it was clear that I could no longer live as a traditionally-minded Anglican, would I become Orthodox or Catholic? And I am sure that I remained in the Anglican Church longer than I might have for this one reason: I was seeking to reconcile my love for Orthodoxy and Orthodox Tradition with my belief in the role of Rome as the See of St Peter and locus of Christian unity.

In saying this, I am well aware that there are Orthodox Christians that may dispute my emphasis on the importance of communion with Rome, and there are Catholics that would wonder how I could possibly love Orthodoxy without the Pope, but I am not really interested in polemics. At the same time as I recognise their legitimate concerns, I look to the Church of the first millennium and see a community that did not agree on all points and expressions of the Faith, but held certain fundamental tenets in common and so communed together, and I look for the same thing in my own ecclesiastical subscription. I suppose this would make me one of those ‘Orthodox in communion with Rome’ folk, not really appreciated by either side ....

I'm sure of only one thing now: whatever group one joins up with names the people you can expect to be murdered with.

It's still more likely that I will choose a different ghetto. Because there is little expectation for the laity to engage in set forms of daily prayer, conforming one's public worship to the Tridentine (albeit à la the execrable 1962), and refusing participation in popular piety, while maintaining a private prayer life organized around the Prayer Book (and meditations with good music of the sort no longer produced or performed) is probably inevitable. But, of course, we shall soon see.

Der Abschied