Looking into WordPress

...for a possible new home for this blog, to get the word out to more readers. I won't be adding new posts here for the time being, just at WordPress, but I will still try to respond to Comments here as health permits (which has been a bit difficult since last Spring).

I wish you a profitable Great Fast when it arrives next month!

Rich Russians Pursue Better Wealth

This Washington Post feature story will become unavailable to those of us without the money to sign-up (ironically). But the quoted remark of a museum curator in Russia in favor of Russian tycoons buying-back the nation's Orthodox Christian religious heritage, including Holy Icons, from abroad, where it had been taken, stolen, or sold after the Bolshevik Revolution, is telling for those of us only used to hearing about oligarchs accumulating rubles there: "It's a wonderful thing that our businessmen are returning our wealth to the motherland." Evidence, also, that Russia's post-Communist return to Faith isn't restricted to the poor or the boondocks, as some would have us believe. At least one quoted claimed 'a religious awakening.'

Coincidentally(?), a few days later the Boston Globe did a feature on a Massachusetts tycoon - an American - and his museum of Russian icons. Maybe we Yanks can work something out with the Russians?

Of course, some believe it's sacrilegious to treat Orthodox holy icons as mere artworks, merely displayed in museums. Prince Charles of the UK (and Her Majesty's other Realms and Territories), like his father a camp-follower of Orthodoxy (his father, Prince Philip, was born Orthodox, a prince of Denmark and Greece), recently tried to get a museum there to set aside a permanent display of its icons, as an improvement on letting most of them just collect dust in storage. The museum's disrespectful response to him - which went beyond simply stating that they weren't an icon museum but a general art museum - briefly became tabloid fodder. Perhaps some wealthy Briton (Your Royal Highness??) - or Russian - could sponsor a wing or even a whole subsidiary museum for those icons?

Almsgiving is good for you

It's easy to forget that almsgiving is not only a good idea and helpful to the needy, but also good for the giver, a spiritual discipline, encouraging detachment from things, and a form of union with God's Energies and activities everywhere - which may be why the Lord said, "It is more blest to give than to receive." Self-restraint of greed, desire, envy ... all things I have some acquaintance with as a not-so-healthy working-class American!

So said the pope of Rome in his Lenten message this week. (Western Lent starts this Wednesday.) The trio of Prayer, Fasting, and Almsgiving is also traditionally part of Orthodoxy's Great Fast, which this year begins on Clean Monday, March 10. They're also part of Orthodoxy throughout the year, though not as emphasized as during Fasts, especially the Great Fast.

I also read somewhere that it's good to say a prayer for a recipient when writing the check, filling-out the online form, giving it in-person (not necessarily audibly, I suppose, unless you're a cleric or monastic maybe!), or whatever.