Sorta

by J.Pilgrim

I finally sorta-finished my greenhouse. It took eight trips to the homestead, spread over ten months, and cost roughly $4,000 out of the budgeted $3,000, without calculating fuel, food, and beer.

I say “sorta”, because I still need to reinforce the roof by turning beams into trusses, then level out the floor and put down plastic and gravel. While I’d made a note of the need for trusses on what passes for building plans, I had forgotten to have an offline version of those plans for the trip. I also need to double the number of roof purlins under the Lexan panels, according to those notes.

A heavy weight of snow makes beams want to stretch as they flex, and if you’re using second-hand lumber like I am, at half of the recommended size, they may snap. Trusses work by transferring the load from one beam into another, which also changes how those loads work by dividing that tension across multiple points. Thus, the 75 pounds-per-square-foot (roughly 5 feet of buildup) snow load I have to design for gets first distributed across the roof evenly, then transferred to the walls. If everything works together, the building stands. If it doesn’t, if I forgot to include some necessary board, or miscalculated how the loads work together, then it will all come down.

Long before I became Orthodox, I was (and I suppose, still am) a fan of the writings of Soren Kierkegaard. His concept of Authenticity, which my monkey brain can only understand as “all the parts of a person being in agreement with all the other parts”, has always stuck with me. It’s not even un-Orthodox, as far as I understand it. Orthodoxy, like structural engineering, or music for that matter, requires every part of a person’s life to work together. In music, we’d call it “Harmony”.

Authenticity, or more specifically the quest for it, is also a massive, unending, pain in my ass. It is hard, rough, and unfriendly. The more I strive for it, the more it is a daily reminder that I’m not authentic, not a saint, and not even close to attaining those things. I keep running into opinions and positions that I hold that just don’t line up with things that the Bible and the Fathers teach. All of these positions at least seem logical, and are thus tempting to hold, and therein lies the challenge:

It’s not enough to have a set of “based” takes, and reference the Bible or Fathers for a few of them, while ignoring them on others. Everything I do has to be in line with everything else. If it’s not, then the building falls apart.

I had help from a Nazi with sorta-finishing the greenhouse. That’s not a slur or slander, that’s his actual political affiliation. I’m not a Nazi, which is not a defensive statement or slander against Nazis, I just disagree with the politics of the NSDAP. We’re friends, and we respect each other, we just don’t agree on politics, or (largely) religion. We agree, largely, with each other’s critiques of modern society, but we don’t agree on the solutions. It makes for some great conversations, but his solutions are not mine.

At one point, he admitted that yes, there’s a point at which “social and political pressure” aimed at getting minorities out of my region will inevitably turn violent. His reasoning is that it’s self-defense because “they” are the source of the problems. I once read a post by a different man that said “Never forget that our enemies are ontologically evil, and that everything we do to them is automatically righteous.”

Lord have mercy, it can be tempting to think that way. “People of Group X are the problem. If they won’t leave on their own, we’ll make them leave or kill them. They’re the bad guys, and that makes us the good guys.” But Evil doesn’t work that way outside of the movies. As Solzhenitsyn wrote:

“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

One wonders how my friend or the author of that post squares what they say with St. Paul, who said that “For we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.” (Ephesians 6:12). Or how people who say “I won’t be friends with or help anyone that’s not in my Group” justify that compared to Christ saying “If you did it not to the least of these, you did it not to Me.”

The least of these are the ones that need us to be the most like Christ. We want to tell ourselves that shitposting on the internet is equivalent to Christ calling out the Pharisees, and therefore a godly endeavor, but the overwhelming majority of Christ’s miracles were healing the sick or raising the dead. (Roughly 2/3, by my estimation.) That tells me that “speaking Truth to Power” is probably a lot less important than being charitable, but what goes along with all the miracles of Christ was some form of a call to live a Godly life.

I drive past the least of these on my way to work, and I don’t think Christ cares whether that day it’s a pale White meth-head or a ghetto trash Black gangsta. I’m supposed to stop and help those people, not spend the next 20 minutes justifying why I don’t. “Oh, I was running late.” (I wasn’t.) “I didn’t have time to pull over because of the traffic.” (I saw them a half-mile away.) “I’m not going to give them cash.” (Legitimately, I don’t often have cash on me, but that doesn’t stop me from offering to buy them a meal…) The least of these are still unique people, loved by their Creator and made in His image. the honor or dishonor we give to them, according to Christ, is the same as we give to Him. It’s not about “solidarity” or “racial unity” or “empowerment” or any of the other buzzwords I see thrown around but honoring our Creator, and we can’t forget that.

I don’t want to be “sorta Christian” the way my greenhouse is “sorta finished.” It’s like having a song where one of the instruments is completely doing its own thing or a building with boards that don’t work together to hold the roof up. Everything in my life has to be Christian, or it’s as if nothing is. Even all of the littlest, easiest to ignore things. Perhaps the hardest little thing to remember in Christianity is that nothing is up to us. We’re only called to repent, to resist evil, and to let God handle everything, even including the outcome of our attempts at repentance. Why we’re so persistent in thinking the fate of nations is up to us Christians when we can’t even control our own lives is beyond me, but I’m just as guilty of thinking it as anyone else.

The Fathers of the Orthodox Church said that the spiritual hardships of the last days will be greater than the physical hardships of the Early Church. Think about it: What’s harder to do? Keep my mind on Christ while being thrown to a lion by a bunch of soldiers, or while walking past the magazines with half-naked women on them at the checkout counter at the grocery store? The music on the radio, the shows on TV, pretty much the entirety of the internet, the stress at work, the way people talk and dress on the street, literally everything is saying “You, Christian, forget about Christ for a moment and pay attention to me. It’s not sinful, it’s just a news feed, and you should want to know what’s going on. It’s just a complicated task at work, and you need to focus on it. It’s just a pretty girl, and she’s not even naked. It’s just a show, and it’s well-written. It’s just…not Christ.”

St. Paisius of Mt. Athos said of Christians living during the Tribulation, while the Antichrist will be laying waste to the Earth:

“You’re suffering without the mark,” they’ll say. “And if you had just accepted it you would have had no difficulties.” For this reason, by learning to live a simple, moderate life here and now you’ll be able to get through those years. By getting a little bit of land, raising a little wheat and some potatoes, planting some olive trees, and keeping animals of some sort, a goat or chickens, the Christian will be able to feed his family. Stockpiling is of little use: Food doesn’t keep for long before spoiling. But these oppressions will not last for long: three, three and a half years. For the sake of the chosen the days will be hastened. God won’t leave a person without help. Tomorrow thunder will strike, and the brief dictatorship of the Antichrist-satan will come. Then Christ will intervene, will give the whole anti-Christian system a good shaking up. He’ll trample upon evil and turn everything to good use in the end.”

Orthodox Christianity is at times frustratingly apolitical. It says, over and over again, that our sole focus in life must be to repent and turn to God, and to avoid evil. That, and nothing else, is what following Christ actually means. That, and nothing else, is how we find authenticity in life, and that, and nothing else, is how we can heal our society, if that will even happen at all. Our nation will never repent if our states do not repent. Our states will not repent unless our cities repent. And so on, from cities, to neighborhoods, to families, to individuals. If I am actually serious about creating a society that honors God, that starts with just me. Not “us”, not “you”, my readers, but just myself. I have much to repent of.

Christian Nationalism, if it’s going to work at all, doesn’t start with a political campaign, it starts with our neighborhoods. If it doesn’t work with your neighbors, it won’t work on any larger scale.

But that “simple, moderate” life on a little bit of land that St. Paisios spoke of, I think that’s a good start, and it’s as political as I want to get. It’s not just about making sure that refusing the Mark of the Beast doesn’t mean watching my family starve to death (I’m tough, but watching my child cry as they waste away?), but about leaving a world that is neither simple, nor moderate, nor conducive to remembering God. My “politics” will be taking care of my family whilst humbly repenting of my sins. I suppose that some people will criticize this, and say that I need to spend my time trying to make the world at large better, but it’s fairly clear in the teachings of the Fathers that the world will not get better, that the world will, in fact, get worse and worse until it culminates in celebrating the Antichrist. While I would never, ever claim to know anything about God’s timeline for the End, I do know that my own life can end right now. I could die whilst typing out this very post, and I have much to repent of. As for the timing of the Antichrist, I will only turn to what St. Seraphim Rose said:

“It is later than you think. Therefore, hasten to do the work of God.”

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