Handwritings on the Wall

Did you know that tsunami is a Japanese word? It’s written this way: 津波 and it means “harbor wave”. We used to call it “tidal wave”. That’s strange, if you think about it. Sailors know that harbors are places of refuge from the undulations of the open ocean. Harbors are protected from the wind waves that roll freely at sea. So what is a tsunami? Unlike the wind waves that affect the ocean by means of the friction of the wind passing over its surface, a tsunami is a totally different event. It is created by a seismic shift in the ocean floor. The earth shifts and the whole ocean from floor to surface buckles and ripples. Oddly the tsunami is not felt by ships in deep water. But, the undulation rushes with tremendous force once it hits the coast, crashing onto beaches, driving inland and surging into harbors. Boats and ships are ripped from their moorings mercilessly. The historical tsunami that flooded the northern Pacific coast of Japan on March 11, 2o11 was one such tsunami. Mere hours after it hit home, it also reached across our great pond to Hawai’i and the West Coast of North America. Ke’ehi Boat Harbor next to Honolulu Int’l Airport was completely wiped out. Many vessels, especially the untended derelicts, were lost in the maelstrom.

Geological tsunami cannot be timed; they can only be prepared for. But there is another type of tsunami coming in exactly ninety days. It is a political tsunami that will wash away many of the derelicts in our national congress and state houses. Many of the ineffective – yea corrupt – officeholders throughout the country will be sent packing. Good riddance to them.

Why are they derelicts? The short answer is that they have forgotten God. The obvious proof is that they support a corrupt regime…a junta, you might say…in the White House under the most disastrous presidency of our lifetimes. The senile, old politician who mumbles while he reads a teleprompter is not to be pitied. He is to be reviled. He has turned the power of the administrative state against his immediate predecessor. This has never happened before. His attorney general and his chief law enforcement agency have crossed over a boundary that has never been crossed. They have raided the residence of immediate past president Donald Trump. The Democrats and the deep state who serve them have not stopped hounding Donald Trump since his first campaign. They’ve spied on him, slandered him, and accused him of wrongdoing when they had no proof. The House of Representatives impeached him twice. Twice, without success. Now they have insulted him by turning his house upside down while he was away.

Why? Because they think that he is a threat to their chokehold on power. By this invasion of the privacy of the former president and first lady, they may have gone a step too far. This unprecedented raid may well backfire on them in November. Most of the candidates that Mr. Trump has endorsed have already won their primary elections. They’re headed to the general in November buoyed up by the anger that is felt by a majority of Americans at the utter incompetence of an incumbent president who, although he can’t ride a bicycle, is able to destroy an economy and bungle foreign policy. There is a deep undercurrent, a tsunami of outrage that is about to be released on him and all who responsible for the damage that he has done to our nation.

Biden’s presidency may well be all but over next January when the new Congress is seated. He will no longer be able to pass any significant legislation due to opposition by the new Republican majority in the House of Representatives, and perhaps the Senate. He won’t be able to take out a second mortgage on our proverbial house and pass the burden of the monthly payments onto our grandchildren. No more big spender. He’ll be eighty years old, half a century in politics, and a never-ending embarrassment to the party and their voters who foisted him on the American republic. Look at what they’ve done to us.

The man whom they revile and whom they would like nothing better than to destroy may rise like a Phoenix in 2024. Many a voter like me who did not vote for him in 2016 will gladly give him support if for no other reason that he is “comeback kid” who suffered the slings and arrows of an irrational opposition who have forgotten God and now worship the false god of Science. Right, the so-called science that ginned up the pandemic and its phony vaccines. The science that will bankrupt a country’s people in a bogus battle against “climate change”. Now that Mr. Trump’s privacy has been invaded, and his home has been stripped they will have empathy for him. Dozens of millions will. And, what is more, he will be the remaining hope that the demonic powers that control the deep state that controls our nation will at last be vanquished. The party that has done all in its power to hasten the decline and demise of our nation will be back in the powerless opposition where they belong for good.

Pres. Trump has made an inspiring video. It’s less than four minutes long. Give it a watch.

A comment on the weblog Monomachos got me to respond:

Why would anyone stay Greek Orthodox with this now (speaking about regular people, that is, not those whose incomes are tied to this stuff)? How can regular people fight this? Withholding contributions from their parish? Every priest reports to his higher-up that reports to his higher up, eventually Elpi… are we condoning this by contributing funds to our churches?

That is the $64,000 question. Depending upon the makeup of one’s personality and the degree to which one has suffered in the past under episcopal misrule, the response will be different. I am a serious-minded former clergyman who has been fighting and regrouping from the onslaught of heresy for my entire adult life. Over the years, that tide flushed me toward Orthodoxy, and for that I am eternally grateful. I have finally discovered the Church of the Apostles, and though its customs are sort of weird, I can be confident that there is no farther to look.

Consider then how dismayed I was to see the infiltration of the atheistic utopian vanguard into Christ’s Church. The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese in particular has been severely compromised for the last century. The leadership’s recent forays into schism in the Ukraine, and into immorality regarding homosexuality and abortion, and the megabuck corruption in New York and Istanbul must not stand if the GOA wants to remain a canonical jurisdiction.

Throughout the so-called pandemic, I sat on the parish council of a Greek Orthodox church. That involvement gave me some insight into the inner workings of the broader Church. I saw some areas of strength in our metropolis’ governance, but other aspects were deeply troubling. One of those problems was the draconian measures that shut down the churches’ liturgical life in person and put it online. What a grave mistake that was! A misguided non sequitur! How can one then participate in the mysteries, which are essentially tangible means of receiving intangible grace? It is a logical impossibility, and yet our parish followed the metropolitan directives to a tee. Even our medical officers were duped as they considered protection from a bug that kills only those whose health was already compromised by age, disease or obesity. And our priest was weak, knowing that he might very well be removed from his pastoral cure and transferred – or worse, deposed and left by the roadside along with his family. Orthodox bishops carry a big stick.

And then we come to the issue of money. There was some temporary abatement of the parochial assessment, but our treasurer made it clear to us that the metropolis was very keen to have its pound of flesh. Our assessment for this year was a figure in excess of our income from stewardship pledges. Without the constant income from ownership of the land beneath the apartment building next door, parish finances would run into the red. With this in perspective, it was particularly irksome to watch with suspicion the financial malfeasance in New York, especially the astronomical sums of money that just poured into the construction of a national shrine that looks more like a nuclear power plant than a temple.

Some who are Greek Hellenists have a primordial bond with the GOA – a bond that can deny or withstand the corruption, both theological and financial, that has so soiled that jurisdiction. Knowing now what I had come to know, and being the wary warrior that I am, I got to the point where I could no longer stomach the corruption and left the parish and vowed not to return to the GOA until it had had a major overhaul. I.e., penitence and amendment of life across the board.

Hardly a saint myself, I needed to find a purer expression of Orthodoxy to find healing for my own soul and advancement in the virtues. Thanks be to God there was a Russian parish to which I could repair for that purpose!

Not everyone is willing to pack up and leave his parish. Many Greeks have their ethnic bond to the GOA which prevents them from leaving. Some converts from elsewhere remain ignorant of the heresy, schism and malfeasance. Or, they just feel comfortable in their habits. “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.” Let them all know that a goodly portion of their financial contributions to the parish go to the metropolis and the archdiocese, which are guilty of this corruption. Greek or not, if they feel that they must remain, it would behoove them to find a creative means of supporting their priest and his family that circumvents the need to pour money into a bottomless pit of corruption. Regardless of their personality type, loyalty to Christ and his greater Church demands that they pray for metanoia and that they protest the evil actions of Abp. Elpidophoros and Pat. Bartholomew.

There is a woeful lack of catechisis in the GOA, so ignorance of sacramental theology is a problem. Most laymen do not know that participation in the chalice at the parochial level is, among other things, an expression of support for the hierarch. Many months before I left my Greek parish, I decided that I could no longer remain loyal to hierarchs who were not loyal to Christ, so I stopped receiving the Eucharist and I stopped paying my pledge. Those were the practical means for me to both obey my conscience and express my displeasure. Months thereafter, weary of the cognitive dissonance, I left the parish altogether. Many others have chosen to do the same thing for similar reasons.

The watchword that directed me is, “Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing; and I will receive you.” II Cor. 6:17 It would behoove other Orthodox Christians to contemplate the implications of that verse of Scripture.

Prof. Peterson’s speech is forceful oratory. He’s a psychologist and statesman whose impassioned words are downright prophetic. One can sense his heartfelt compassion for the world. This man is very close to the kingdom of God. He finds Orthodoxy the most authentic expression of Christianity, so let us pray that he enter with all his genius into a full relationship with Christ and his Church. Lord knows he’s been through hell already. He doesn’t hide the sufferings of his personal life, so the rest of his story is just a click or two away. You will see that his podvig has already begun.

Peterson’s call in this videograph for a stop to the public insanity about the war in Ukraine is more persuasive than the lies regurgitated by a hundred compromised politicians like Justine Trudeau and Joey Biden. Watch his passionate plea that the West step back from the brink and come to its senses vis a vis Russia and Ukraine. Petty politicians who control their nations’ foreign policy ought to be careful when they play with nuclear fire lest they set the whole world ablaze! Listen to Peterson.

Prof. Jordan Peterson

A tip o’ the hat to Monomachos.

Writing about the latest manipulations of liberal Catholic bishops and their pressure on Pope Francis, Orthodox intellectual Rod Dreher states this about Abp. Elpidophoros: “The woke head of the Greek Orthodox church in the US has caused a ginormous stir in world Orthodoxy by baptizing the children of a gay male couple, in what is being read (and proclaimed by one of the couple) as an indirect attempt to legitimize same-sex marriage within Orthodoxy. What was so shocking about that is not only that the Archbishop did it, but that he would do this kind of radical thing, heedless of the tradition, and how it would appear to other hierarchs. The rarity of this kind of thing in Orthodoxy, and the protest that it has predictably raised, testifies to the stability of the Orthodox tradition.”

Yours truly has an incurable case of PTSD from the generation of rape of the Anglican Communion, caused mostly by the leaders of the Episcopal Church of my birth, the problem child of worldwide Anglicanism. The Faith, having been betrayed by bishops who thought they knew better -even bishops in the Nippon Seikokai, where I was trained and served as a priest – I will never fully trust a bishop again.

No, please! Not ever!

The bishop who immediately comes to mind today is the unorthodox Elpidophoros, who pulled that gay stunt reported above. So, I am pleasantly surprised that the bishops of the Greek Orthodoxy Church – the real one in Greece – have rebuked the conceited Elpidophoros, and it is my hope that the conniving titular bishops of the Istanbul-lish Phanar will now see that it is in their best interests to excise their exarch in New York. Let us hope and pray for the sake of the GOA that they will be granted a truly orthodox Orthodox bishop to lead their archdiocese after this debacle.

Let us also work toward the unification of all Orthodox jurisdictions in the United State and the Americas under the transitional leadership of the faithful Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops. They have stood up to Elpidophoros on a separate issue regarding the impending consecration of a scoundrel. Good for them. Now, let them use this occasion to solidify our visible unity as one American Orthodox Church.

The Orthodox blogosphere is all abuzz with news and views about Abp. Elpidophoros’ latest outrages.

Right after the conclusion of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese’ centennial celebration, the consecration of St. Nicholas’ Shrine and the clergy/laity congress, the archbishop boarded a plan for Greece. All of these prior events were problematic in their own rights. Questions were raised by those concerned in New York: Why was St. Nicholas’ consecrated when it’s not even finished yet? (And, again, where did all that damned money go?!) Why were the archdiocese’ financials not handed out to the delegates of the clergy/laity congress? Why does the archdiocese still not have a charter? When is the IRS going to come knocking on the doors of Manhattan’s 79th Street?!

These are only a few of the queries. Notwithstanding, it is the action that the inimitable archbishop took after he landed in Athens that took the cake. What did he do this time? He baptized the two little children born via surrogacy and claimed by a so-called “married” homosexual couple. They are “famous fashion designer Peter Dundas (of Norwegian descent) and Evangelo Bousis, an actor, son of billionaire Jim Bousis and Eleni Bousis of Chicago.” So writes Nicholas Stamatakis, who has the inside story of all things Greek at his blog, Helleniscope.

Boy, did the (expletive deleted) ever hit the electric fan then! The pertinent Greek hierarchs are furious with the archbishop for deceiving them. Elpidophoros is one “walking, talking embarrassment to American Orthodoxy”, as someone close to me has said.

But wait! There’s more! On another topic, the venerable hierarchs of the Assembly of Orthodox Bishops in America have told Abp. Elpidophoros in no uncertain terms that they will not tolerate the consecration of a certain scoundrel. They are ready to part ways with GOARCH if the archbishop makes the mistake of elevating one Alexander Belya to the episcopacy. Belya has already made himself persona non-grata with ROCOR by being a cheat, to put it succinctly. He is not episcopal material. So says the Assembly. They have warned Abp. Elpidophoros not once, but twice; not privately, but publicly that they will leave the Assembly is he goes through with the consecration. The proverbial gauntlet has been cast down.

In regard to the last scandal, the prolific Abbot Tryphon has made the following comment. The abbot is well-known for the Morning Offering, where he writes something for spiritual edification every day of the week. He seldom comments on the newsy Orthodox weblogs. But he has now. Notice how the abbot implies that Patriarch Bartholomew is behind this plan to ordain Belya. In fact, Bartholomew is assuredly behind much if not most of the outrages perpetrated by his trusty exarch, Elpidophoros. It is Bartholomew with whom the abbot demonstrates a sarcastic exasperation:

Abbot Tryphon says

July 14, 2022 at 1:25 pm

The Greek Archdiocese is moving further away from the Orthodox Church, but are we surprised, given the “Ecumenical Patriarch’s” plans for union with the Roman Catholic Church by 2024? Time to admit we no longer need “Black Bart” as the “Pope of the Eastern Church”. Time to break ties, I would say.
Abbot Tryphon
abbottryphon.com

One gets the distinct impression that some key leaders of American Orthodoxy have about had it with Bartholomew and his devoted lieutenant, Elpidophoros. The status quo may soon become “status gone”.