AS THIS IS
a fairly new venture (launched just 21 days ago on the Feast of the Annunciation, March 25), I'm still developing habits and rhythms to add this into an already overwhelming load of daily EDI work. Part of that development includes making one minor change. Each day the Daily Synaxis will be delivered at 6 pm (or as close to 6 pm as possible) and it will be dated liturgically.
What does dating it liturgically mean? Since liturgical days begin at sunset, this means, for example, that today’s issue is dated Holy Thursday (for the East), A.D. 2020, April 16. The explanation for this tradition can be found in the creation account of Genesis 1:5 in which “there was evening” first, and then “there was morning.” It’s also why Vespers (evening prayer) liturgically initiates each day. So here’s the Daily Synaxis for the Feast of Sts. Agape, Chionia, and Irene the Holy Martyrs, and for the Orthodox, Holy Thursday. Dig in.
1. Essays & Reflections: “Vodka & Hand Sanitizer: A History of Alcohol as Medicine” by Mark Mosley
Have you ever thought of alcohol as fundamentally medicinal? Instead, we tend to think of it as a “recreational social lubricant” or as the “demon rum.” But as Dr. Mosley notes,
The inability to shake the vilification of alcohol [in America] is a very recent 19th and 20th century “post-temperance” view that is not expressed in the ancient cultures that preceded our Judeo-Christian heritage, nor in our Christian Churches’ legacy, and not even in our own puritanical American roots.
Mosley goes on to provide a brief but sweeping history of attitudes toward alcohol as medicine, ranging from ancient Egypt to early Church Fathers to the Puritans to Prohibition and beyond. The Puritans caught my attention:
The Puritans drank freely and regularly. When traveling on the Mayflower, the most important person on the ship was the ale-maker, the brewer. Without beer on the ship, the passengers would perish. They didn’t stop at Plymouth due to divine vision, or unfortunate storm, but because they had run low on beer. From the Mayflower logbook of 1620, we read: “Our victuals being much spent, especially our beere.”
I must have missed the day in class when the teacher told us that the Mayflower stopped on Plymouth Rock to pick up some more beer! But it’s a historical fact that the first thing they did upon landing was to commission the ale-maker to go about and make more beer.
After noting that there “was apparently never a time when alcohol (mead, beer, wine) was not viewed as medicine,” Mosley concludes:
What if we put the meaning of wine back into its old wineskin? If it were a medicine given by God used to prevent contamination, to clean a wound, to calm a mind, to provide analgesia for a “cut” (surgery was performed with alcohol as the primary anesthetic)—as well as being the central substance of health, the communion of the religious community? What if we more naturally thought of vodka as a hand sanitizer long before we ever considered it to be something that could get you drunk?
2. Essays & Reflections: “The Pandemic and the Will of God” by Ross Douthat
This piece by Catholic journalist Ross Douthat is one of the best I’ve read on the pandemic thus far. Douthat suggests that
the turn to Easter is an appropriate time to ponder questions of meaning amid the welter of death and suffering worldwide. A pandemic sharpens the permanent questions of theodicy, the debates over whether it’s reasonable to believe in a good and loving God in a world so rife with misery. But because any justification of God’s ways can seem smug and abstract when set against the awful particularities of sorrow, believers often eschew frontal debate in these moments, emphasizing solidarity and mystery rather than burdening the suffering with our moral speculations.
But as he makes clear later in the article, solidarity and mystery are not always sufficient:
To people experiencing the sharpest grief, contemplating the dying body and the open grave, a response of simple solidarity and lamentation is appropriate. But many people suffer more slowly and less sharply; even in this pandemic, much suffering will be doled out in slow doses as its social and economic consequences spread. Meanwhile, even people suffering the sharpest pain will eventually leave the graveside and begin life after tragedy. And in both cases — suffering that endures and suffering that belongs to the past — there is a need for something more than solidarity as time goes by; there is a need for narrative, for integration, for some story about what the pain and anguish meant.
The pandemic raises all sorts of questions – moral, theological, anthropological, economical, etc. And as Douthat concludes, they all deserve to be heard and wrestled with for the life of our world:
Asking these questions does not imply crude or simple answers, or answers that any human being can hold with certainty. But we should still seek after them, because if there is any message Christians can carry from Good Friday and Easter to a world darkened by a plague, it’s that meaningless suffering is the goal of the devil, and bringing meaning out of suffering is the saving work of God.
Read the whole piece here. It’s well worth your time. (You may have to create a NYT account, but all it requires is an email and a password, i.e., no cost.)
3. Essays & Reflections: “COVID-19: Theology, Theodicy, & Meaning” by Jivko Panev and Jean-Claude Larchet
As good as Douthat’s piece is, if I had to select only one piece to recommend related to the coronavrirus, it would be an interview conducted by Jivko Panev with Orthodox theologian Jean-Claude Larchet. Here’s Larchet’s answer to why God, if He is good and all-powerful, does not abolish sickness and suffering in this world, and why they persist when Christ has overcome them for all humanity:
This is a strong objection among atheists, and often raises doubts among believers. The answer of the Fathers is that God created man free, and respects man’s free will even in its consequences. Because sin is perpetuated in the world, its consequences continue to affect human nature and the entire cosmos.
Christ removed the necessity of sin, put an end to the tyranny of the devil, and made death harmless, but he did not remove sin, the action of demons, physical death, or the consequences of sin in general, so as not to force and deny the free will that caused it. On the physical level, the fallen world remains subject to its own logic. For this reason, too, illness affects each person differently, and this is particularly striking in the case of an epidemic: according to individual physical constitutions, it affects some and spares others; it affects some slightly and affects others severely; it causes some to die and leaves others alive; it kills teenagers and spares great old men.
Only at the end of time will the restoration of all things take place and there will appear "a new heaven and a new earth," where the order and harmony of nature destroyed by sin will be restored in a nature raised to a higher mode of existence, where the goods acquired by Christ in his redemptive and deifying work of our nature will be fully communicated to all who have united themselves with him.
4. Books: Mental Disorders & Spiritual Healing
by Jean-Claude Larchet
In this fascinating book, Larchet notes that the early Church Fathers “recognized three main origins of mental illness – somatic (or organic), demonic, and spiritual (defined as one of the passions developed to the extreme) – and he introduces a fourth unlikely and surprising category to their discussion, the fool for Christ.”
Read the full Eighth Day Books review here
and be sure to order a copy from
Eighth Day Books.
5. Poetry: “Idiot Psalm 1” by Scott Cairns
– a psalm of Isaak, accompanied by Jew’s harp
O God Belovéd if obliquely so,
dimly apprehended in the midst
of this, the fraught obscuring fog
of my insufficiently capacious ken,
Ostensible Lover of our kind – while
apparently aloof – allow
that I might glimpse once more
Your shadow in the land, avail
for me, a second time, the sense
of dire Presence in the pulsing
hollow near the heart.
Once more, O Lord, from Your Enormity incline
your Face to shine upon Your servant, shy
of immolation, if You will.
6. Bible:
1 Cor. 11:23-32, Matt. 26:1-20, Jn. 13:3-17, Matt. 26:21-39, Lk. 22:43-44, Matt. 26:40-75 and 27:1-2.
Online here.
7: Liturgy: A Prayer by Patriarch Daniel of Romania
O Lord our God, who are rich in mercy and who with diligent wisdom guide our lives, hear our prayer, receive our repentance for our sins, put an end to this epidemic.
You who are the physician of our souls and bodies, grant health to those who are afflicted by sickness, making them rise promptly from their bed of sorrow, so that they may glorify You, the merciful Savior.
Preserve those who are healthy from all sickness.
Preserve us, Your unworthy servants, and our parents and relatives.
Bless, strengthen, and guard, O Lord, by Your grace, all those who, with love for humankind and a spirit of sacrifice, care for the sick in their homes or in hospitals.
Remove all sickness and suffering from Your people, and teach us to appreciate life and health as gifts that come from You.
Grant us, O Lord, Your peace and fill our hearts with an unshakeable faith in Your protection, hope in Your help, and love for You and for our neighbor.
For it is Yours, O our God, to have mercy on us and to save us, and we glorify you: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, now and ever and unto the ages of ages. Amen.
8. Word from the Fathers: "The One Physician" by St Ignatius of Antioch
Here’s a short creedal excerpt from a passage written by St. Ignatius of Antioch to the Ephesians:
There is only one Physician—
Very Flesh, yet Spirit too;
Uncreated, and yet born;
God-and-Man in One agreed,
Very-Life-in-Death indeed,
Fruit of God and Mary’s seed;
At once impassible and torn
By pain and suffering here below:
Jesus Christ, whom as our Lord we know.
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