• Church and State – Part 1
• Church and State – Part 2
• Church and State – Part 3
• Church and State – Part 4
• Church and State – Part 5
• Church and State – Part 6
• Church and State – Part 7
• Church and State – Part 8

Recommended listening.  Fr. Thomas Hopko is a renowned Orthodox scholar.

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It is time to begin to develop thef principles within which the people of God must engage our hierarchs to correct these injustices.  I believe that it is up to the laity now to stand and be counted so that we can both bring light to the world, and so that we can protect those who care for our souls who may suffer from the unjust consequences of Metropolitan Philip’s anger.

I am putting these out as the principles with which I am going to operate.  They may not work for everyone.   I may be wrong on some of them.  I do solicit feedback and suggestions on how to improve this, and where I may be going astray.  But I’ve been an Orthodox Christian for 25 years, and the recent passing of the great man who led me into the Orthodox Faith has reminded me that it’s not enough to just sit in the pews.  We are called to be wise and cunning and fearless and sacrificial in our obedience and service to the Gospel.  And make no mistake, our first and primary obedience is to the Gospel, and then to the Church.

1. At all times and in every way, we must be respectful to the hierarchy.  This does not imply obedience to error, nor does it encompass obeisance.  But if they are wrong, we should correct them as we would correct our own errant parents.  Respectfully, forcefully, repeatedly and lovingly.
2. We are the laity, the people of God.  We are not under nor are we called to monastic rules of obedience.  If our leaders are in error, we do no service to our souls to follow them in that error.  Our obedience will not save us.
3. We should do all things without wrath or rancor.  We must be very careful to discern the difference between righteous anger and wrath.  In all things, it is better to err on the side of love.
4. What we do may well become a witness to the Faith.  So what we do must be done with prayer, and it may entail some risk, spiritual and possibly physical.
5. We are children of the Light.  As such, as much as possible we should forego anonymity, unless we are protecting others.  What we do, should be done in the light, because we are taught that light overcomes darkness.
6. This is a struggle for the heart and soul of the Antiochian Archdiocese.  It is not a struggle over race, ethnicity, or language.  Any claims to such are divisive, and belong to the Divider.
7. As much as possible, we should not inform our pastors what we are doing.  This simply puts them at risk.  Much better when they get the call from Metropolitan Philip that they can honestly say “I don’t know anything about that.”  They take so much on their souls for us, let us take the temporal risks on ourselves.
8. Finally, in all things, we should be using this to forward the saving Gospel of Jesus Christ.

I do not pretend to know how this is going to come out.  I don’t know if we will win this fight.  I don’t know if the Archdiocese will rise or fall.  But I do know this:  We are part of Christ’s Church.  However broken it seems, the gates of Hell itself will never prevail and we have already won the war.

Leave feedback here or email me using the links on this page.

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I remember one night at some parish banquet or event, I think it was a new years eve party.  A waltz started playing.  He went and got Khouriya Anne and they danced.  They were both excellent dancers, I remember being surprised.  What didn’t surprise me was the look of deep and abiding love that passed between them.

I remember Father James’ gift for story telling.  He always had a story about something.  He could make the phone book interesting.  It never really mattered that the stories were often embellished, because we all knew it.  What mattered was the good humor and love and joy behind them.

I remember sitting down with Father James and a bottle of good Scotch (NEVER the cheap stuff) and convincing him to teach me to swear (but not blaspheme) in gaelic.  I also remember the hangover I had and he didn’t.  Unfortunately I didn’t remember the gaelic.

I remember him spending a lot of time with me after I first became Orthodox.  Weekly he had me over for lunch, always by his own hand cooking me a meal.  It was always on a Tuesday or a Thursday so we could have meat outside of Lent.  We usually had a steak, vegetables and a bottle of wine.  During those times, in many ways, he became the father I wished I had.

I remember one year when Easter fell on the same weekend as Pascha.  Some non-orthodox couple had decided that they’d do “Easter” at St. Elias because we had the latest service, not realizing our Resurrection Service was the night before and this was the Agape Vespers.  So they showed up in all their finery, and here was the choir and most of the parishioners in shorts and jeans.  And at the altar was Father James, in his cassock with black shoes and socks on, and his pasty white scottish legs sticking out, since he had black shorts and his collar shirt on underneath.  I remember Father James rushing out to explain to them, while the rest of us tried not to laugh.

I remember the mentor who tried to teach me wisdom, both by word and example.  I remember the careful and cunning thinker that he was, who brought home to me in his own person why God so loved Jacob because of his guile, not in spite of it.

I was his secretary for a couple of years.  Even after I stopped being paid by St. Elias, I was still running errands and doing things for Father James.  You just couldn’t quit the man.  I am pretty sure that’s one of the reasons he convinced Archbishop Michael of blessed memory to make me a subdeacon, was so he’d always have me available to run errands.  I never really minded.

As his secretary, I saw and heard things he expected me to keep in confidence and I always did.  But that gave me some unique insights into Father James and his sacrices.  He sacrificed so much of himself for his parish, much of which they never knew.  Those stories I’ll not share here.  Partly because they might open old wounds, but mostly because he wouldn’t have wanted me to.   He bore those sacrifices and those wounds, not always gladly, but obediently and prayerfully.  No better model of obedience and perseverence could ever be put before any young man.

I remember how unflappable he was.  During our wedding ceremony, a huge storm was raging outside.  During the reading of the wedding Gospel, the lights went out.  Father James did not miss a single beat, he simple dropped the Gospel Book down a few inches so he could read it by the light of our candles and went on.  And during the sermon, he used a particularly convenient thunderbolt to claim divine approval of the style of Orthodox marriage liturgies.

I remember how stoic and compassionate he was when we had to do a funeral for an infant killed in a car accident, because the mother had been holding it on her lap.

Most of all, I remember how much he affected me, how I wouldn’t be who I am today without him, how much I love him, how sad I am to know that he is gone from us, for a time.  Father James Kenna was like a force of nature, a bit of a divine tsunami blowing through all our lives, leaving change, growth, and in the end, Joy in his wake.

Very Reverend Archpriest James Duncan Kenna, 1934-2009.  Memory Eternal!

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Metropolitan +Philip needs to learn the first rule of holes.  STOP DIGGING!

Let’s list some of his major screw-ups:

1. Joseph Allen.  A man who shouldn’t be a priest.  He broke every rule in the book, and +Philip broke a lot of good men who pointed that out.
2. Demetri Khouri.  +Philip got his friend mad a bishop.  Demetri then proceeded to get drunk in a casino and sexually assaulted a woman.  Demetri was convicted and is a registered sex offender.   He was allowed to retire by his brother bishops as an act of mercy.  +Philip has apparently kept him on the payroll and assigned him work in Mexico.
3. Trying to demote his brother bishops in the US so he can act like a papal legate.
4. When that didn’t work so well, he arranged or allowed incorrect documents purporting to be from the Holy Synod of Antioch to be spread.
5. He sent a delegation including known criminals to represent him at the meeting of the Holy Synod.
6. He has appointed known criminals including a money-launderer to sit on the Archdiocese Board of Trustees.
7. He refuses to allow the books of the Archdiocese to be open, and refuses for them to be audited.
8. And so many lesser things I cannot keep track of.

One way or another, he won’t be in charge soon.  It’s time for him to retire, preferably to a country without an extradition treaty and give the Archdiocese a rest.

ANAXIOS!  ANAXIOS!  ANAXIOS!

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The rest will be posted on my business website, which I am in the process of rebuilding.  My goal is to have a post every day on something related to the technology and business of systems administration.  I’ve set a goal of July 15th to have the site acceptable and the first post up, and to have at least 5 posts a week (1 per working day).  We’ll see how well that works.

I’ll post here much less regularly, but more regularly than I have been.  I expect at least one post here a week.  Please feel free to hold me to that.

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The first step was deciding once again what task management tool I wanted to use.  I’m  a geek, I love tools.  Bright shiny tools. I had been using Thinking Rock which I liked for its cross platform capabilities.  I was still deciding whether to make my primary workstation my Macbook, or my Thinkpad from work and Thinking Rock let me move back and forth.  The problem was I had to then keep track of updates and put them in later.  With me, not so good an idea since I tend to forget to do it until too late.

However, my beautiful wife needed the Macbook for her nursing studies.  So I went back to something I had tried and liked, but hadn’t really committed to.  Remember The Milk is not strictly a GTD tool, it is a list management tool.  But with just a little work it works just fine.  More importantly it syncs with my Blackberry Curve.  Since I installed the 4.5 OS update on my Blackberry it has been much more user friendly, and the task management interface on it is simple but gets the job done.  So now I can enter tasks right away, without losing them.  Then I go back and can manage them from RTM’s web interface, and they are automatically synced back to my Blackberry.

Now the real fun begins.  Getting my task list life organized again….

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Make no mistake, we know who’s fault this is (well, at least some of us do).  And the Senate version of the bailout does not address the problem, it confirms and extends it.  The same essential bill is being offered, but with more pork.  I am disappointed in John McCain for supporting this bill.  It won’t help his election campaign, and it violates his stated principles about pork and waste.

Earmarks, pay for play, and lobbying got us into this mess, made it worse, and are not going to solve it for us.

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Downtime in that environment could cost millions (the rough planning figure I used was in the vicinity of a quarter of a million dollars an hour in lost productivity with the first 15 minutes of the outage losing between 4-24 hours of work.  Lots of money was on the line, and I had plenty of senior management at IBM regularly telling me how criticial it was.  I even got a phone call once from the VP in charge of the Server group to let me know how critical uptime was for a particular chip build.

Needless to say, in that environment it would be easy to panic.  Most times I didn’t because I had a strong team backing me.  The few times I did panic were very instructive.  Here are some of the lessons I learned:

1. Panic will not make the solution better.  It usually prevents the solution.
2. Panic will not get anything done any sooner.
3. Choices made while panicking will almost universally prove to be the wrong ones.
4. Panic immobilizes.
5. Panic equals FAIL.

Panic is what I see going on with the bailout.  We don’t know what to do, so we gotta do *something*.   And we do need to do something.  But does it need to be so panic driven?  What will change between today and tomorrow that will make such a huge difference?

Bold and decisive action does need to be taken, but it should also be deliberate action, not the panic driven need to do anything to show we are doing something.

Rudyard Kipling (under read in our politically correct society said this:

If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you; If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too; . . . If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two impostors just the same . . . yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it.

We forget this to our peril.

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Please vote against the bailout bill.  I have already contacted my Representatives office (Mike Conaway) and thanked him for voting against it.  I hope to be able to thank you as well on Wednesday.

The bailout has been necessitated by poor policy that was the enabled by the Community Reinvestment act and poor oversight by Congress.  The activities of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the stewardship of Henry Paulson, John Snow, and their predecessors.

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