Orthodixie

Steve at Pithless Thoughts continues to draw his your my life.

(Make sure to scroll down his blog, click Older Posts, for more.)

With all the fanfare surrounding the return of Jay Leno to The Tonight Show – and earlier, the drama around hosts and ratings, I was remembering my own visit to The Tonight Show, as a member of the studio audience, back when Johnny Carson was host.

This would have been many moons ago, in the summer of 1982 …

I was a college kid selling Cable TV in Southern California – and a coworker’s mom just happened to be on the editorial staff of The Tonight Show. So, a friend and I got comp tickets, even a behind the scenes tour!

I, Ladies and Gentlemen, met The Tonight Show producer Freddie Decordova and Johnny’s sidekick, Ed McMahon!

Anyway …

On that night’s show, Johnny’s guests were tennis star Bjorn Borg and … wait for it … Paul Tavilla, the world’s greatest grape catcher!

[The above link will take you to a video of “the world’s greatest grape catcher” — from the very night I was on the show! Click the link below for this week’s podcast which features pretty much everyone — from Arnold Schwarzenegger and Conan O’Brien to Carnac the Magnorfodox, David of Wales, and Red Skelton!]

The Orthodixie Podcast on Ancient Faith Radio.

Was thinking about this list the other day … could only come up with five. Suggestions welcomed in the comments.

10) The devil looks a whole lot like that Burger King guy.

9) You start thinking, “I hate everyone – is that a sin?”

8) It’s really, really … windy.

7) You wonder if reading ingredient labels counts as spiritual reading.

6) Greek, Russian or Arabic? Nope – but, during the Fast, your CHINESE improves greatly!

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The following quote, the words of Mother Mary and Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, comes from Fr Josiah Trenham’s site, The Arena.

“The primary aim of fasting is to make us conscious of our dependence upon God. If practiced seriously, the Lenten abstinence from food- particularly in the opening days- involves a considerable measure of real hunger, and also a feeling of tiredness and physical exhaustion. The purpose of this is to lead us in turn to a sense of inward brokenness and contrition; to bring us, that is, to the point where we appreciate the full force of Christ’s statement, ‘Without Me you can do nothing’ (John 15:5). If we always take our fill of food and drink, we easily grow over-confident in our abilities, acquiring a false sense of autonomy and self-sufficiency. The observance of a physical fast undermines this sinful complacency.”

Fr Josiah notes: In coming issues of the ARENA you will excerpts like this above from the classic article written by Mother Mary and Metropolitan (then Archimandrite) Kallistos Ware introducing The Lenten Triodion published originally in 1978 by Faber and Faber Limited, reprinted by St. Tikhon’s Seminary Press in 1994.

The following two snippets, the words of Mother Mary and Metropolitan (then Archimandrite) Kallistos Ware, come from Fr Josiah Trenham’s site, The Arena.

The Meaning of the Great Fast: How the West Changed the Fast

“The second tendency [viewing the fasting rules as outdated] is doubtless the more prevalent in our own day, especially in the West. Until the fourteenth century, most Western Christians, in common with their brethren in the Orthodox East, abstained during Lent not only from meat but from animal products, such as eggs, milk, butter and cheese. In East and West alike, the Lenten fast involved a severe physical effort. But in Western Christendom over the past five hundred year, the physical requirements of fasting have been steadily reduced, until by now they are little more than symbolic. How many, one wonders, of those who eat pancakes on Shrove Tuesday are aware of the original reason for this custom- to use up any remaining eggs and butter before the Lenten fast begins? Exposed as it is to Western secularism, the Orthodox world in our own time is also beginning to follow the same path of laxity.”

The Meaning of the Great Fast: Firm Resolve and the Reasons for Contemporary Man’s Weak Fasting

“One reason for this decline in fasting is surely a heretical attitude towards human nature, a false ‘spiritualism’ which rejects or ignores the body, viewing man solely in terms of his reasoning brain. As a result, many contemporary Christians have lost a true vision of man as an integral unity of the visible and invisible; they neglect the positive role played by the body in the spiritual life…Another reason for the decline in fasting among Orthodox is the argument, commonly advanced in our times, that the traditional rules are no longer possible today…it needs to be said that fasting, as traditionally practiced in the Church, has always been difficult and always involved hardship. Many of our contemporaries are willing to fast for reasons of health or beauty, in order to lose weight; cannot we Christians do as much for the sake of the heavenly Kingdom? Why should the self-denial gladly accepted by previous generations of Orthodox prove such an intolerable burden to their successors today? Once St. Seraphim of Sarov was asked why the miracles of grace, so abundantly manifest in the past, were no longer apparent in his own day, and to this he replied: ‘Only one thing is lacking- a firm resolve.’”

Fr Josiah notes: In coming issues of the ARENA you will excerpts like this above from the classic article written by Mother Mary and Metropolitan (then Archimandrite) Kallistos Ware introducing The Lenten Triodion published originally in 1978 by Faber and Faber Limited, reprinted by St. Tikhon’s Seminary Press in 1994.

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