Praying to Mary… and to my kids?

A Seventh-day Adventist gentleman who uses the handle @ScuzzaMan posted the pictured post on SocialGalactic in response to an image that I shared. As a former Seventh-day Adventist myself, I can understand exactly where he is coming from. Many times when we Orthodox are asked by Protestants about praying to Mary, the Theotokos, we might say that we do not pray to her, but we ask for her intercessions. What we mean is that our prayers to the Theotokos are of a qualitatively different sort than our prayers to Christ, and that we do not worship the Theotokos. However, Protestants are unlikely to understand what we mean when we say this. If I say I do not pray to the Theotokos, and then a Protestant sees on my bookshelf the prayer book Mother of the Light, which exclusively features prayers and hymns to the Theotokos, he is far more likely to conclude that I am a liar than to understand what I actually meant. I think there are better ways to speak about this.

Of course, the first thing though is to determine if you should talk about it. If the interlocuter is not actively seeking to understand the Faith or at least to understand your faith, its probably better not to engage. Arguments and debates over spiritual topics are often not edifying or profitable.

The image I posted, which ScuzzaMan was referring to.

However, if you decide to discuss the issue, this seems to me a better way to communicate with those coming from a worldview like ScuzzaMan. In ScuzzaMan’s first two lines, he implicitly links prayer with idolatry. This is an incorrect linking that should not be allowed to pass without comment. According to Merriam-Webster, idolatry is “the worship of a physical object as a god.” While these physical objects can occasionally be natural, they are almost always man-made. Although it is probably unnecessary, I will point out that the Theotokos is not a physical object. Neither are Thor, Odin, the Atman, or Brahman. Someone who worships a false god, such as Odin, is not by definition practicing idolatry. This does not mean that it is proper to worship a false god, or even to worship the Theotokos. As Orthodox Christians, we worship only the All-Holy Trinity.

Another false assumption implicit in ScuzzaMan’s linking of prayer to idolatry is the assumption that prayer is worship. This assumption is also false, which should be obvious but is missed by some due to the liturgical use of archaic language. When we say to God “hearken unto me, I pray Thee, and have mercy,” we really aren’t saying anything that a peasant might not have said to a judge a few centuries ago when that was the vernacular. Yet we can all recognize that the peasant in that situation would not be worshiping the judge. According to Merriam-Webster, “pray” means to entreat or implore, not to worship.

Mother of the Light, an excellent prayer book.

And this brings us to how the misunderstandings ScuzzaMan articulates in his final three lines really underlie the misunderstandings in his first two lines. If he understood that the Theotokos is alive, he would be able to understand why we ask (pray) for her help. Likewise, if he understood that Saint Phanourios is alive, he would not think it any odder to ask Saint Phanourios for help finding his car keys than he would think it to ask his brother. As a Seventh-day Adventist, ScuzzaMan holds a view of death and the afterlife that is foreign not only to early Christianity, but also to the Jewish and Mohhamadean religions that Seventh-day Adventism borrows so heavily from. In fact, he holds this Thnetopsychism so dearly that he states “Only Christ’s tomb is empty,” explicitly denying the testimony of Matthew 27:52-53, Hebrews 12:1, and Jude 1:9. While Seventh-day Adventists teach this openly, even most Baptists, who ostensibly believe in an immortal soul, seem to believe it implicitly.

This is why I think it better, when we are asked about praying to the Theotokos or the saints, not to try to explain how such praying differs from our prayers to the All-Holy Trinity, but rather to talk about how such prayer is similar to our prayers to our living relatives, friends, and associates. When a Protestant accuses you of idolatry for praying to the Theotokos, stating you also pray to your children is more likely to get his mind working than saying that the way you pray to the Theotokos is different than the way you pray to the Trinity. If he thinks it ridiculous to ask Saint Phanourios for help finding your keys, but thinks it reasonable to ask your son for the same, you can be assured that he is operating from an assumption of Thnetopsychism, even if he ostensibly believes in conscious souls.

How to Rule the World

Back in the 2010’s there was a distinct group of internet bloggers that were self-proclaimed “Neo-Reactionaries.” The abbreviation for this group was nRx. The nRx movement was faced with a pivotal moment in the election of Donald Trump, and essentially disappeared circa January of 2017. Why? There were a number of factors. Some of their folks were drawn into the Trumpening, which required turning away from nRx principles. Others stuck to nRx principles, and just didn’t have as much time to write due to what they were building offline. The few who did keep writing for a little while saw their audiences dwindle as folks were drawn to the Trumpening and the wildly expanding Alt-Right that was far less alternative and far less Right-wing than the groups known as Alt-Right in say, 2013.

So nRx (as an internet ideology) is dead, as far as I can tell. Which is fine with me, because what is needed is a movement that is neither “neo” nor “reactionary.” That being said, many self styled nRx thinkers were quite perceptive about a number of things, and I generally found them to be sincere, intelligent people with a decent grasp of both the extent of societal problems and the general path forward.

It is probably no coincidence that the major nRx thinkers (unlike its founder, Moldbug aka Yarvin) were almost without exception papists. There were always Orthodox Christians interacting with these thinkers, but like me (a protestant at the time) they generally were not fully aligned with the nRx “platform,” whether or not they adopted the label. In fact nRx, even in its name, mirrors “traditional” papism. Neo-Reaction is to Traditionalism as “traditional” papism is to Orthodoxy.

All this to say, the Neo-Reactionaries were right, or very close to right, on a lot of things. They were much closer to traditionalism than say the “conservatives.” One thing they got right was the three-step formula for ruling the world. Here it is:

Step 1. Become Worthy

Step 2. Accept Power

Step 3. Rule

This three-step formula for ruling the world (or a portion thereof), when put in practice, is known as “Passivism.” No, not pacifism. Passivism arose to denote the opposite of activism, just as “based” arose to denote the opposite of debased.

One of the beautiful things about this formula is that anyone steeped in modernism will reject it immediately. Telling the Modern that the steps are chronological and concurrent doesn’t help them either. Because modernity is predicated on the idea of seizing power (a very different thing than accepting power) the Modern glosses over or discards Steps 1 and 2. Its only Step 3 that he thinks he understands. (Hint: The Modern probably doesn’t understand Step 3 either).

Lets assume, just for the sake of clarification, that you—the person reading this blog post on the internet—still have some of the poison of Modernity clouding your brain, despite your best efforts to purge it. If that were the case you would look at the three steps and think Step 1 is vague and unclear, and Step 2 makes no sense because no one is going to knock on your door and say “I’d like to offer you some power, are you willing to accept it?” Now, I would never assume so badly of any of my readers as to think the above would describe you, we were only assuming for the sake of clarification. But perhaps you just aren’t sure how to explain the steps to your thoroughly modern, thoroughly liberal friend—say someone so liberal he voted for Trump in 2016 or Goldwater back in the day. Now you are prepared for his objections.

Before you try to explain anything to your friend, you might want to give his brain a chance to recover from its full saturation with the poison of liberal modernity. Take him for a walk in the woods, or along a field or stream at least. In this environment, you may be able to help him see how naturally power flows to the worthy. You could try the old adage on him “hard workers are always rewarded with more work” or you could read him some stories from the Biblical book of Judges. Ask him if he became the best at his job, if that wouldn’t cause power to flow to him in his workplace. He’ll get it or he won’t. If he still talks of power as something to be seized, he’s not ready. He may need to mull the ideas in his head for a year or two before he’s ready to understand.

Once you see how power invariably flows to the worthy, the three-step formula becomes a simple truism. You immediately see how the steps are both chronological and simultaneous. You become worthy. Power flows to you. As soon as that power flows to you, you begin to rule. At first it may only be yourself you rule, or even only a part of yourself—say, your appetite. But you continue to become worthy, you continue to accept power, you continue to rule, and your dominion increases. Soon you may not only rule yourself, but also a wife and child. But you cannot stop performing any of the steps. If you stop ruling, by doing so you stop accepting power, and you become unworthy. This is the path that kings took which led to liberal democracy. Not overnight, but over time. As the kings were refusing to rule, refusing to accept power, and refusing to become more worthy, in some places courtiers and parliaments were doing the opposite. In those places, courtiers and parliaments soon ruled in the place of the kings. This is also the path of many husbands and fathers steeped in the lies of liberal modernity.

Nothing living is stagnant. Either you are becoming more worthy and ruling a widening dominion, or you are ruling a shrinking dominion and becoming less worthy. There is no way to say “I’m happy with the sphere I rule, I don’t want to accept any more power.” As soon as you stop accepting power, you begin to be less worthy. If you rule your appetite, but refuse to rule your children, you will eventually cease to rule your appetite. Nor does ruling yourself mean rebelling against someone set above you. The father still rules the child who rules himself, and the king still rules the earl that rules the manor. But the earl who rules his manor well will find himself accepting power not just from his subjects, but also from the king, and the child who rules himself will find himself accepting power from his father. Consider well the difference between the child who rules himself well and accepts power from his father, and the child who attempts to seize power from his father. Seizing power always indicates a lack of worthiness.

So what do you say to your friend when he turns to you and says, “but how do I even start? How do I begin to become worthy?”

The first step in becoming worthy is to recognize unworthiness.

This holds true no matter how worthy one becomes. This is why the greatest saints immersed themselves in the Jesus Prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” No matter how worthy you become, you will always be unworthy. This is why we will always be working on Step 1. If the steps were strictly chronological, none of us would ever get past Step 1. But they aren’t strictly chronological—they are at the same time chronological and simultaneous.

I am often asked how to “do” passivism. I could list hundreds of actions. Go to Church. Grow a garden. Throw away the TV. Dress well. Have children. All of these are distinct actions that can be part of passivism. But you can also do these things and still be an activist. The difference in the activist and the passivist is that the activist’s focus is always on attempting to seize power, while the passivist’s first focus is always on becoming worthy. Passivism isn’t another way to do activism. It isn’t a secret strategy for more effectively accomplishing the goals of activism. It is the opposite of activism, and an activist and a passivist trying to solve the same problem will approach it from opposite directions.

If the following statements make sense to you, congratulations! You have purged the poison of modernity from your brain, and are breathing the clean, pure air of traditionalism.

How can we effect a political change in our nations? By ruling our appetites.
How can we correct the wandering from the Tradition in our churches? By ruling our families.
How can we change a decadent and debased culture? By ruling our tongues.

Review: Honey Hog Farm’s Pit Sauce Deodorant

Most of my life, I’ve had issues with deodorants. When I was going to high school and working in the ungodly Arkansas heat, I’d quickly sweat out both my shirt and undershirt. I got in the habit of only buying antiperspirants with the maximum amount of aluminum in it (I think it was 21%). I knew the aluminum wasn’t good for me, but nothing else worked. I’d still sweat out my shirts, but at least I wouldn’t stink. I kept the habit up through college, and when I ended up in Miami I of course stuck with it. Brut brand is what I settled on. When I got off of active duty and moved back to Wisconsin, I decided to try to go to regular deodorant. The fact that I was now married probably made me less afraid of stinking, too. Regular Old Spice burned my armpits and left a bright red rash after one use, so I stuck with the Brut Antiperspirant.

One day, I was at Wal-Mart (I know. This was years ago though. I almost never go to Wal-Mart anymore) buying some deodorant. They had raised the price on the Brut by a dollar. So I decided to go with the Arm & Hammer antiperspirant, as I had used it before, it was effective, and it was now less than the Brut. When I went to grab a stick, I noticed a new product, Arm & Hammer Naturals deodorant. Aluminum free, and I could pronounce most of the ingredients. They also had a woman’s version, so I bought a stick for myself and one for the wife. From that day on, this is what we both used. It didn’t make my armpits break out, and it was tolerably effective.

By tolerably effective, I mean that I would put 25-30 strokes under each arm in the morning, and as long as I didn’t work out or do any heavy labor, I’d smell OK at the end of the day. Heavy labor or a workout would result in me needing to shower and reapply deodorant. I had no plans to switch deodorants, until I discovered Honey Hog Farm’s Pit Sauce Deodorant. Not only did it have half the ingredients of the Arm & Hammer, but they were also ingredients I was already familiar with from Courtney’s soap and lotion making. Courtney had talked about developing a deodorant recipe to accompany her homemade soaps and lotion bars, but lately she’s been pretty busy sewing custom dresses. So I ordered a stick of Pit Sauce for each of us to try.

I have overall been quite happy with Pit Sauce. It costs more than the Arm & Hammer, and there is less deodorant in a stick, but I also think I use less daily. With Arm & Hammer, I’d do 25-30 strokes under each arm. With Pit Sauce, you don’t really do strokes. You simply cover the entire pit (once) and you’re done. It is important to cover the entire pit—the one time I had a stink come through was because I had followed the directions and just done 3-4 strokes under each arm. One one side, this had resulted in full coverage. On the other, it left an uncoated strip that I discovered by smell. Once I switched to visually covering the entire armpit, I never again had this problem. In general, I think Pit Sauce is more effective and better smelling than the Arm & Hammer

The other thing I noticed is that because I wear merino wool undershirts, which remain odor-free for days, I am often putting on the same shirt over freshly applied Pit Sauce for several days in a row. After a few days, a fairly thick layer of Pit Sauce does build up on the shirt. If your wear cotton undershirts and thus a new one every day, this wouldn’t be a problem, but it does get annoying with the merino undershirts. However, the Pit Sauce does seem to wash off fine.
Courtney has one synthetic dress that is her fancy dress, and she found that the Pit Sauce did not wash out easily from it. However, she found that it washed out just fine from her natural fiber dresses. Courtney also felt that the Pit Sauce lasted longer than the Arm & Hammer deodorant, and that if she didn’t take a shower one day, she also didn’t have to reapply deodorant, while with the Arm & Hammer she was applying at least once a day and often twice a day. In conclusion, I fully endorse Honey Hog Farm’s Pit Sauce Deodorant, and it will continue to be my daily go-to. Give it a try!

A Short and Very Belated Non-Answer for Eric, Who is Patient

Eric raised some good questions in the comments on my last post. I have been meaning to respond to those questions for some time (though not necessarily to answer them). Hopefully this response can make more clear a vision for the less-mechanized future that is inevitable.

In the last post I wrote that “natural-scale agriculture requires smaller farms than machine agriculture, which in turn means more farm families. The switch from human/animal agriculture to machine agriculture drove many farm families from their land and into the cities, and this process continues as the machinery gets bigger.” Let’s look at some of the numbers behind this. In 1900, over 50% of the US population lived on farms, meaning more than 38,047,000 people lived on farms. By 1990, this number had declined to 1.6% of the population, or 3,991,020 people.

If we assume that human scale farming would require roughly the same number of people living on farms as 1900, the would require about 34 million people moving to farms. I believe that a return to human-scale agriculture would actually require far more people than this to move to farms, but let’s use this number for now. That’s 34 million people whose food no longer has to be transported. A fair amount of those 34 million no longer have to drive to work either. This results in fresher food for those folks, plus significant saving in fuel and transportation costs.

However, a return to a human-scale agriculture cannot happen in a vacuum. It must be accompanied by a return to human-scale cities. These cities, by virtue of being human-scale, will be more numerous than current cities. Rather than shipping tomatoes across the continent in three days in a refrigerated Semi trailer, they will be transported to the local market in a horse-drawn wagon. Transportation will be drastically reduced, because the people will have been relocated to much closer to where the food comes from. This solves many of the “difficulties” of human-scale agriculture. Most of the others are solved by the personal attention that is absent in large-scale machine agriculture, but present in human scale agriculture.

Yes, Human & Animal Powered Agriculture can Feed the World

“You can’t sustain current population with only human and animal powered agriculture. We need machines to feed the world.”

This is an attitude that I’ve run across more than once, and yet it seems that those who express this attitude are always unwilling to provide any reason that it should be believed. I would have liked to take the argument of someone who believes this as my starting point, but being unable to find such an argument, I have been forced to create my own. After considerable thought, the below is the most intelligent argument I can make against the idea that the world could be fed by human and animal powered agriculture (hereafter, natural-scale agriculture).

1. Natural-scale agriculture requires smaller farms than machine agriculture, which in turn means more farm families. The switch from human/animal agriculture to machine agriculture drove many farm families from their land and into the cities, and this process continues as the machinery gets bigger. A current 1,000 acre mega-farm was likely at one time 25 or more natural-scale farms. More farm families mean more farm houses and barns, which means less land in production. If a 1,000 acre mega-farm was divided into 25 natural-scale farms, that would mean 24 more houses, which might take a total of 12 acres (on the high side) out of production from the total of 1,000. Extrapolated across the board, this could mean a 1.2% reduction in farmland in production under natural-scale agriculture.

2. Natural-scale agriculture requires different farming methods. For example, natural-scale agriculture does not lend itself well to the spraying of glyophospate or herbicides on crops. While natural-scale agriculture does not preclude the use of hybrid seed per se, natural-scale farmers are far more likely to choose heirloom varieties and save their own seed. Because overhead irrigation is not available, rows must often be planted further apart to ensure each plant receives adequate water to thrive. All of this results in a lower yield per acre. According to Purdue University data, from 1866 to about 1937, US average corn yield held relatively steady at about 25 bushels per acre. In 2019, thanks to technology and machinery, average corn yield was about 170 bushels per acre.

3. Horses, mules, donkeys, oxen, and even farm hands require food. Unlike a tractor or combine, which only uses fuel when performing work, humans and animals require food at all times. If it rains for a week, and no field work can be done, humans and animals still require food, while a tractor will sit in the barn consuming nothing. The part of the farm devoted to pasture or grain for draft animals is land that is not producing food to “feed the world.”

4. Growing crops with 1/7th the yield on 1.2% less total land, and then devoting part of that land to feeding animals instead of humans would result in far less food being produced for humans. Such a reduction in the amount of food available for humans would cause widespread starvation and a failure to “feed the world.”

Hopefully this argument is not too much of a straw man. Unfortunately, it must be somewhat of a straw man, as I have been forced to create it myself. However, perhaps this article will spur discussion and provide me with other arguments to interact with.

First, natural-scale agriculture fits in smaller places than machine agriculture. In preparing for this article, I asked a current farmer who farms a very large acreage with machines what size field is the minimum size for such agriculture. He told me that 10 acres is the cutoff, and any field smaller than that is not likely worth planting in machine agriculture. However, in natural-scale agriculture, 10 acres can be an entire farm! The acre itself is a remnant of the medieval measure of the amount of land that could be plowed in one day by one man behind one ox. So for a one-ox plowman, fields as small as a a half-acre are worth plowing—its a half day’s worth of work. And human-powered agriculture, using wheel hoes, rotary cultivators, or simply hand hoes, can productively farm a much smaller field, which we tend to refer to as a garden. There are many small fields and other marginal areas that are not conducive to machine agriculture but are perfectly farmable using natural-scale methods. So natural-scale farming would increase, not decrease, the total amount of farmable land.

Secondly, the much lower yield of natural-scale agriculture would be a concern if the entire yield of machine agriculture was going to feed humans. However, this is not the case. According to the USDA, in 2019 13,620 million bushels of corn were produced. Of these, 6,257 million bushels went for “Food, Alcohol, and Industrial Use;” 30 million bushels went for Seed Use; 5,897 million bushels went for Animal Feed; and 1,778 million bushels were exported. This adds up to roughly 300 million bushels more than was produced, which was made up by using previous stores and imports.

Now lets look at the 6,257 million bushels that went for “Food, Alcohol, and Industrial Use.” Of these 6,257 million bushels, 4,857 million bushels went to “Alcohol for fuel.” In other words, 36% of the corn grown went for Ethanol fuel, which is clearly not human food and does not “feed the world.” If we convert that to acres, it means that there are 29 million acres currently farmed, but not used to grow food, and which could easily be converted to food production. However, that’s not all: 232 million bushels went for industrial starch, 419 million bushels went for high-fructose corn syrup, and 356 million bushels went for glucose/dextrose. Since none of these are foods, that’s another 6 million acres available for food production, for a total of 35 million acres.

We’ll assume that natural-scale farming would require as much seed as mechanical farming, and leave seed use alone. That brings us to the 5,897 million bushels that went for animal feed. The vast majority of this is feed for cows in commercial dairies and feedlots. In one sense, we could consider this as going towards human food and “feeding the world,” as humans eat beef and dairy products, which are more nutritious than corn. However, if we consider trophic losses, and the fact that cows can eat grass on pastures that are too steep, rocky, or otherwise featured to plant crops on, or on land that is going through a necessary fallow cycle, it becomes clear that it is unnecessary to devote prime cropland to feeding cows. This frees up another 35 million acres of cropland, bringing the total to 70 million acres.

70 million acres, when only 81 million acres of corn were harvested! 86% of the corn harvested does not go to feed people. Since only 1,859 million bushels of corn for human food were grown on 81 million acres of corn, the human food yield per acre for 2019 is 22 bushels per acre, below the average yield of 25 bushels per acre from 1866 to about 1937. Furthermore, average corn yields for natural-scale farmers today is likely much higher than 25 bushels per acre. I do not know what the figure was for 2019, but Wendell Berry cites 70 bushels per acre as the lower end of corn yields for natural-scale farmers in the late 1970’s. If you wish, you can look up the USDA data on soybeans, the 2nd largest crop in the US, and see how much of current crops go to non-food use, but I think the corn numbers alone are enough of an illustration to make the point in this article.

Finally, while draft animals do indeed eat even when not working, they are capable of subsisting entirely on pasture or hay when not working. As mentioned above, pasture and hayfields can exist on ground too steep, rocky, or otherwise featured for plowing. Once the pasture is fenced, there is no cost to letting the draft animal graze, and because cover crops and fallow cycles are necessary to responsible land use, there is very little additional cost to harvesting hay. Furthermore, oxen, donkeys, and mules are all capable of performing work on nothing but pasture/hay. Horses will require a little grain when being worked, but like the other animals, will subsist comfortably on pasture/hay when not being worked.

I realize that this article has tore down no arguments other than ones I invented myself, and which therefore are at least partly straw man arguments. However, I hope that reviewing the information has made you more sure that natural-scale agriculture is perfectly capable of feeding the world, not only at current population levels, but even at much larger ones. In conclusion, I would ask you to consider all the farmers and farm families driven off their land and into the cities by the mechanization of agriculture, depopulating rural areas. This seems to me to be the very thing the prophet condemned, and to me his words demand a reversal.

Woe to them that join house to house, and add field to field, that they may take away something of their neighbors’: Will ye dwell alone upon the land?

Isaiah 5:8

A Short History of my Relationship with Technology

I was recently asked if I had ever written an essay on my “primitivist philosophy.” I don’t consider myself a primitivist, and I don’t know if I even have a fully coherent philosophy when it comes to technology and its use, but my thinking on the topic has certainly evolved and deepened since I last wrote on the topic here. Reading and learning on many topics has effected my views, including philosophy, permaculture, responsible agriculture, history, economics, and religion. I can’t condense the contents of many books into one essay, so this post will just scratch the surface of what people more intelligent than I have written.

Let’s start with the 5 questions for evaluating technology I posed back in 2014:

  • What benefit will I gain from making use of this technology?
  • How much will it cost me to make use of this technology?
  • If I adopt this technology, am I in a worse place when/if it fails than I would be if I had never adopted it?
  • Should this technology fail, is it easier or harder to repair myself than my current system?
  • Will the regular use of this technology cause me to lose a skill that would be vital should the technology fail?

All the above questions are focused on evaluating a newly-available technology. But what about previously-adopted technologies? Things I’ve been using since birth? Should they also be evaluated?

Some rather ubiquitous technologies, adopted by many of my peers from birth, I grew up largely or completely without. I grew up largely without television, and completely without video games. Even today, in my thirties, I still do not own a television. I’ve noticed that this results in me having a completely different perspective on the technology than some of my peers. When a peer and I discuss the role of television, particularly national broadcasts, in the destruction of regional dialects and local cultures, we interpret this fact differently. He sees it as a sad but inevitable loss, because of course we couldn’t live without television. I see it as a needless and wanton destruction, because of course television is unnecessary and this negative consequence far outweighs any minor entertainment value when there are so many more enjoyable means of entertainment anyways.

Perhaps it was recognizing the negative effects of an ubiquitous technology that I don’t use, like television, that prepared me to see the negative effects of technology that I do use, like cars. I don’t think I’d ever even considered the cultural impact of cars until I read this short article in 2017. But suddenly, a lot of things clicked. The unwalkability of modern cities. The much stronger social fabric (and better aesthetics) of walkable cities. The insanity of transporting food across a continent . But mostly, I suddenly woke up to the cultural and societal shifts that the automoble brought about. Perhaps I was primed here too. In 2017, my wife and I shared a single vehicle, and had done so since getting married in 2015. When she went out of state to visit her parents, I rode my bicycle to work. Perhaps this helped me to see the possibility of living without a car (a possibility that I am not currently pursuing, more on that later), and perhaps I had to see living without a car as possible to honestly consider the damages caused by the mass adoption of the automobile.

Somewhere around 2017, I began looking for a grain mill. My wife makes homemade bread, and I wanted to mill our own flour, rather than buying flour. I was going to buy an electric grain mill, like both my mother and Courtney’s mother had when we were growing up. But then we happened to buy a hand-crank coffee grinder. I discovered that I enjoyed turning the crank by hand. And I’d always hated the terrible racket that electric grain mills make. I did some research, and found a number of hand-cranked grain mills, eventually buying one. I found several things that surprised me. First, I was surprised that the mill was far easier to turn than I expected. My 2 year old at the time was able to turn it. Second, I was surprised at how fast it was. It milled enough flour to bake a batch of bread almost as fast as the electric mill I was used to–and ground it finer to boot! Third, I was surprised at how much more enjoyable it was to grind grain using it than with the electric mill. Sure, it took a few seconds longer, but the whole process was enjoyable, while the sightly faster process with the electric mill was not.

Previous to the grain mill, in 2016 when we bought our first house, I couldn’t afford to buy a riding mower. So I bought a Fiskars reel mower and mowed our just under half acre lot with it until a friend later gave me a riding mower. I loved mowing with it. It took a little while, and it was hard to push if I let the grass grow too long but it did a great job, and it was so quiet, and it didn’t matter if the grass was wet. Sometimes I mowed at 6am without worrying about disturbing the neighbors. Later, when I was given the rider, I spent far less time mowing, but it also was less enjoyable, a chore to finish. And my lawn never looked as nice. Having had this experience with the lawn mower, coffee grinder, and now the grain mill, I began to consciously choose to use hand tools more on projects and power tools less. I found that this often made the projects more enjoyable. They did take longer, but I also tended to procrastinate starting less, so I didn’t find this really impacted the total amount of work I got done.

Even after I began choosing to use hand tools more than power tools, there was one particular power tool or machine that I wanted. I have wanted a small farm since at least my teens. This farm would be diversified and labor-intensive, making use of small fields that are too small to even work with modern 24-row cultivators. And I wanted a compact or sub-compact tractor with a front-end loader to work this small farm. A front-end loader is an incredibly useful piece of equipment, with essentially limitless uses. There is also not a human or animal powered alternative to a front-end loader. But then I started realizing the harm caused by tractors.

Tractors, by allowing one man to do much more work, greatly reduced the jobs available in agriculture, and were thus instrumental in forcing many men off of farms and into the cities and factories. As the tractors grew larger, so did this dysgenic effect. Furthermore, tractors were instrumental in degrading the land, and in exceeding natural limits, causing monopoly of the food supply as more small farmers are forced out of business each year as larger and larger corporations control more and more of the land. Reading The Unsettling of America by Wendell Berry convinced me that when I finally get my little farm, draft animals will be better for both me and the land than a small tractor.

The fields lose their humus and porosity, become less retentive of water, depend more on pesticides, herbicides, chemical fertilizers. Bigger tractors become necessary because the compacted soils are harder to work-and their greater weight further compacts the soil. More and bigger machines, more chemical and methodological shortcuts are needed because of the shortage of man-power on the farm—and the problems of overcrowding and unemployment increase in the cities. It is estimated that it now costs (by erosion) two bushels of Iowa topsoil to grow one bushel of corn. It is variously estimated that from five to twelve calories of fossil fuel energy are required to produce one calorie of hybrid corn energy.

The Unsettling of America by Wendell Berry

Philosophically, there are few things that I have learned that have changes how I view and interact with technology. The first is that technology is not neutral. Most of us recognize that every tool or machine has a purpose, but most of us do not see the actual purpose of most technology. For example, if you ask most people the purpose of a gas-powered hydraulic log splitter, they will say that its purpose is to split logs. However, this is not the case. The purpose of a splitting maul is to split logs. The purpose of a gas-powered hydraulic log splitter is to free the splitting of logs from the constraints of human labor. If human limits are a fundamental part of humanity, than machines designed to circumvent those limits are fundamentally inhuman, and we shouldn’t be surprised if they also circumvent other aspects of humanity, including community and sometimes joy.

Secondly, I’ve learned to see labor differently. This is two-fold. First, I’ve learned that labor isn’t a negative to be avoided at all costs, and second, I’ve learned to more fully account for hidden labor. Much of our technology is designed with an assumption that labor is bad. The gas-powered hydraulic log splitter is “better” than the splitting maul because it requires less labor. But, as I learned with my grain mill and lawn mower, not all labor is equal. Some labor is more enjoyable than other labor. I could split my logs with a hydraulic splitter, get done an hour earlier, and use that hour to go to the gym and lift weights. But am I actually ahead of where I am if I take the extra hour to split with a maul, knowing I am getting a good workout, and enjoying the satisfaction of doing the work myself?

A modern tractor and haycutter can do the work of many men with scythes when it comes to cutting hay. But does that mean the scythe requires more labor? On the surface, yes, but what if we look deeper? The tractor and haycutter were assembled in a factory, and the labor of the workers must be factored in. Before they were assembled, they were designed, so we must include the labor of the engineers, product designers, and product testers. We must account for the labor that built the components, that loaded the shipping containers of components onto rail cars, ships, and semi trucks, and that transported them to the factory. We must also account for the transport of the finished product to the dealer, the construction of both the factory and the dealership, and the labor of the repair technician at the dealership. We must must account for the labor involved in drilling for, refining, and transporting the petroleum that fuels the tractor. At this point, is the scythe still require more labor? I don’t know, but let’s assume it does. We now must factor in the enjoyment factor. Is the labor in the windowless factory mindlessly assembling parts equal to the labor of swinging a scythe in the open air with a breeze on your back and the birds singing overhead? What about the labor of the repair technician, or the truck driver, or the billing clerk for the farm cooperative’s fuel depot? How do the scythe and the tractor with haycutter compare when all the hidden labor and it’s quality is factored in? I don’t know, but I do know that the scythe comes out considerably better in a true accounting than in the superficial one often used.

So how do I currently navigate all of this? Well, I own two vehicles, a zero-tun lawnmower, a chainsaw, a gas weed-eater, a laptop, and a smart phone. Clearly, I am not a total Luddite. However, I do try to make conscious choices. When I put up the frame for my greenhouse, I used a hand saw to cut the joinery, and used nails and a hammer rather than screws and a screw gun. I try to limit my use of automobiles–any trip to a store (except the auto parts store) generally waits until I or the wife is already going to either work or church. We do not have internet service at our house, except for the ability to use a cell phone as a hotspot, which we turn off when not in use. I am considering buying a small (~125cc) motorcycle to ride to work and back to reduce our consumption of gasoline. I built a clothesline to reduce our use of the electric dryer. I installed a non-electric pellet stove to reduce our dependency on our natural gas furnace. We use kerosene lamps for our lighting needs in the winter. I try to take it one step at a time and become less reliant on technology each year.

Perhaps someday I will have a small farm, and breed mules. Maybe I’ll be able to do this somewhere close enough to church that we can do without a car. Maybe I’ll be able to limit electricity and internet to a small office in a shed on the property. But for now I just try to make one small step and a time, to use my labor instead of a machine where I can.

Why Helen?

It was my second time in an Orthodox Church.

A week before, Courtney and I had visited St. Ignatius (now our home parish) for Vespers with one of my brothers and a few of Courtney’s siblings. I knew right away that I wanted to go back. There were so many connections I made during the service to the Old Testament sanctuary and to various New Testament verses. I experienced a sense of spiritual peace that I had never experienced in church prior to that. There were about 40 people there for vespers that evening, and a third to half of the women were veiled. We were Sabbatarians at the time, and were visiting a number of Seventh-day Adventist and Seventh Day Baptist churches in the area, trying to find a church home. I remember on the car ride home saying that I wanted to keep coming to St. Ignatius—my idea at the time was that we would go to an SDA or SDB church Saturday morning, and then close out the day with vespers at St. Ignatius.

Now, a week later, my plan was falling apart.

I was in Sturgeon Bay for the weekend for drill, and Courtney was staying with my parents in Neenah for the weekend. So we met at St. Matthew in Green Bay Saturday evening for vespers. We did not know that St. Matthew was without a priest at the time. We were 2 out of the 4 people that were there for Reader’s Vespers that evening. That was not the cause of my trouble, though. My trouble came from one of the readings.

As the reader read the below, I found myself thinking it was a bunch of fairy-tale hocus pocus:

Although the holy empress Helen was already in her declining years, she set about completing the task with enthusiasm. The empress gave orders to destroy the pagan temple and the statues in Jerusalem. Searching for the Life-Creating Cross, she made inquiry of Christians and Jews, but for a long time her search remained unsuccessful.

Finally, they directed her to a certain elderly Hebrew by the name of Jude who stated that the Cross was buried where the temple of Venus stood. They demolished the pagan temple and, after praying, they began to excavate the ground. Soon the Tomb of the Lord was uncovered. Not far from it were three crosses, a board with the inscription ordered by Pilate, and four nails which had pierced the Lord’s Body.

In order to discern on which of the three crosses the Savior was crucified, Patriarch Macarius alternately touched the crosses to a corpse. When the Cross of the Lord touched the dead one, he came to life. Having beheld the raising of the dead man, everyone was convinced that the Life-Creating Cross was found.

I was a little sad as I walked out of the church. Only one week since my first visit, and I still felt a longing to go back. But, I told myself, I couldn’t take my wife and future children to a place where such ridiculousness was taught.

The question hit me as I put the car in gear. It wasn’t a voice, just a question: Do you believe that the dead man who touched Elisha’s bones was resurrected? The answer was immediate and obvious: Yes, I fully and completely believed this. If you believe that touching the bones of Elisha made a dead man come to life, why can’t you believe that touching my cross would? I wrestled with this as I drove north. My first answer was that the story about Elisha’s bones was in the Bible, and the story about St. Helen, St. Macarius, and the Life-Giving Cross was not. But I instantly recognized this was a cheap cop-out. Yet I couldn’t change the fact that I believed the one and disbelieved the other.

I don’t know exactly how long I struggled with this, but I know that before I got to Sturgeon Bay I had reached that inevitable conclusion that my reaction to the story was a result of a lack of faith on my part. A lack of faith I could not overcome. I had nothing to fall back on but the prayer of Mark 9:24: ““Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!” I repeated that prayer as I finished my drive, and I arrived at my hotel with more humility than I’d begun the day with.

I look back on that drive as the most pivotal moment on my path to Orthodoxy, although it would be another two years before I was accepted into the Church by Chrismation. And that is why, when my 3rd child was born, she was baptized with the name “Helen.”

So You Want to Buy a Freezer…

The first thing to consider is what you will be putting in the freezer. Do you plan to buy a whole (or half) beef once a year? Or do you plan to fill the freezer with venison in the fall? If either of these is the case you should consider buying two smaller freezers, rather than one large one. For example, I have a just over 9 cubic foot freezer, which I fill with venison every fall. We really need a bit more freezer space, because the kids are getting older and it takes more venison to last a year, but you can fit 4-5 good size deer in a 9 cubic foot freezer if you debone all your meat and have nothing else in the freezer. This equates to about half a beef. However, if I was to do it again, with a plan to either buy half a beef a year or shoot 4-5 deer a year, I would buy a 3 cubic foot freezer and a 7 cubic foot freezer instead of a 9 cubic foot freezer.

Having two smaller freezers would substantially reduce the energy cost of running the freezers. Freezers are most efficient when full, which is why many people recommend that you add jugs of water to the freezer as it empties. We would eat out of the smaller one until it was mostly empty, then move the remainder to the fridge freezer inside and shut off the smaller freezer. Then, we would eat out the larger freezer until it was about half empty, at which point we would shut off the larger freezer and move the remainder of the meat into the smaller freezer. This would be much more efficient than the current situation, in which our freezer is half or more empty for half the year.

Another thing to consider is how much variety there is in what you will be filling the freezer with. Are you buying a whole or half beef once a year, or filling your freezer entirely with venison? Or are you buying a quarter cow once a year, plus butchering 50 chickens and 15 turkeys, plus hunting for deer, duck, pheasant, and goose? If you are closer to the second situation than the first, you are likely to find that every time you go to the freezer to grab something, its underneath a bunch of other stuff. The solution in this case is to get an upright freezer and a chest freezer. Upright freezers are far less efficient than chest freezers, but they are very good at keeping multiple things separate and organized. You can have a beef shelf, a venison shelf, a chicken shelf, a duck shelf, etc. When a shelf gets empty, you can reload it from the chest freezer. This will greatly reduce the time you spend digging through the chest freezer, which often involves taking quite a bit of food out of the freezer and then putting it back in.

Often, you can pick chest freezers up for a good price on craigslist. However, if you decide to buy new, try to look at a few different brands. Figure out what you will use to keep things organized inside. I like milk crates. I can pull out the milk crate of ground venison quickly and easily to access the milk crate of roasts underneath. Also, when the freezer is getting empty, a milk crate holds 1 gallon milk jugs perfectly. You can refill these jugs with water and place them in the freezer to take up space and help the freezer run efficiently. However, some brands and sizes of chest freezer won’t fit milk crates. Find a brand that fits a convenient stackable storage container, because the last thing you want is everything loose in the freezer.

Notes on the Perpetual Virginity of the Theotokos

Some Protestants react very strongly to the idea that Mary, the Theotokos, remained a virgin for her entire life. While this claim is rather mundane in light of other claims the Church makes about her, such as the claim that she miraculously conceived a child without seed, and the claim that she carried God Himself in her womb, some people are highly invested in it not being true. If you are one of those people, probably nothing I write here will change your mind in the least. However, these notes may help you understand why millions of Orthodox Christians affirm her perpetual virginity.

First, we should note that there is no verse anywhere in the Protestant 66-book canon of Scripture that explicitly states that Mary did or did not have sexual intercourse after the birth of Christ. However, there are verses in the Protestant canon that do have implications on the question. Probably the most obvious of these is Matthew 1:25, which explicitly states that Mary remained a virgin up to the point of giving birth to Christ. “But he knew her not until she had given birth to a son. And he called his name Jesus” (ESV). While the verse does not make any explicit statement about what happened after the birth of Christ, most English-speakers would find it to be a reasonable inference—absent any other information—that Mary did not remain a virgin after the birth of Christ. I am not an expert on Greek, and I cannot say whether that inference would seem as natural to a Greek-speaking reader of the 1st or 2nd century as it does to an English-speaker today.

There are also several verses that refer to siblings of Jesus. Matthew 12:46-50, Mark 3:31-35, Mark 6:3, Luke 8: 19-21, John 2:12, John 7:3-10, Acts 1:14, 1 Corinthians 9:5, Galatians 1:19. All of these refer to brothers, sisters, or both of Christ. Again, most English-speakers would find the implication that Mary had other children after Christ reasonable. When this was the extent of my knowledge on the subject, I assumed that Mary had other children after Christ, and therefore did not remain a virgin after his birth. However, I was never highly invested in this belief. It was just an assumption, based on implications, and wasn’t really something I thought much about.

The verse that made me reconsider some of these assumptions was Ezekiel 44:2: “And the Lord said to me, ‘This gate shall remain shut; it shall not be opened, and no one shall enter by it, for the Lord the God of Israel, has entered by it. Therefore is shall remain shut’” (ESV). This verse is in the context of Ezekiel’s vision. My first response to the verse was that was not talking about Mary. However, I was aware of that Christ continually referenced Ezekiel by referring to himself as the “Son of Man,” a title taken directly from Ezekiel. I had also accepted by this point that the entire Old Testament existed to point to Christ, and that prophecies and visions in the Old Testament especially so. So the question was, what did this saying in Ezekiel’s vision reveal about Christ? What else could this be a type of? I tried just taking the verse in Ezekiel as literally as possible—it only meant that an actual gate on the actual City of Jerusalem was to remain closed, because God had entered through it. But then the obvious question was, if God felt so strongly about a gate through which He entered a City, how would He feel about a gate through which He entered humanity?

Returning the earlier verses, I realized that when I read Jesus’ statement “I am with with you always, to the end of the age,” in Matthew 28:20, I did not feel that it necessarily implied that Jesus would not be with us always after the end of the age. In light of Ezekiel 44:2, I no longer felt that Matthew 1:25 implied that Mary did not remain a virgin. However, this left the question of the brothers/sisters of Christ.

The primary written source for the claim that Mary was perpetually a virgin is the Protoevangelion of James, which scholars say was written in the Second Century (for comparison, they also say the Gospel of Luke was written in the Second Century). Orthodox Tradition is that it was written by James, the Brother of the Lord, just as Orthodox Tradition is that Luke was actually written by Luke. Regardless of one’s beliefs about the authorship of the Protoevangelion of James, the claim made in the Protoevangelion about the brothers of Jesus is that they were older children born to Joseph from a previous marriage. This immediately made sense to me, as when we talk about Joseph, the prime minister of Egypt, we say that he had 11 brothers, when he only had 1 full brother, Benjamin. While Joseph of Nazareth was not biologically the father of Jesus, he is referred to as Jesus’ father in Scripture (Luke 2:48), so it makes sense that Joseph’s sons would also be called Jesus’ brothers.

Because I was not strongly invested in maintaining a narrative that Mary had sexual intercourse at some point in her life, this evidence was enough to convince me that Orthodox claim of perpetual virginity was reasonable. Later, when I accepted that the Orthodox Church was what it said it was, I became Orthodox, and thus accepted the teaching of the Church on the matter.

I should also note that even if the scholars are right, and the Protoevangelion of James was written in the mid-to-late Second Century, there would still have been many people alive who had been trained in the faith by the apostles, and who even met the Theotokos. These are the people who made the choice to preserve this book rather than anathematize it.

One final thought. Some Protestants have described as “poorly written fan fiction” the story in the Protoevangelion of James of a midwife attempting to check the Theotokos for a hymen after the birth of Christ and having her hand burst into flame. Considering the Biblical statement that there are many true stories about Christ that are not recorded in Scripture (John 21:25), I am not sure on what basis they write this story off as fiction. Do they also write off the story of Moses’ hand turning leprous (Exodus 4:6)? Of the earth swallowing Korah, Dathan, and Abiram (Numbers 16)? Of the fire from heaven consuming the drenched sacrifice of Elijah (1 Kings 18)? I will write more later about my own experience surrounding miracles not documented in Scripture.

Hopefully these notes help create a greater understanding of the Orthodox teaching on the perpetual virginity of the Theotokos. Thank you for taking the time to read.

Frugal Friday: Mead

There are many people who go all out on fancy equipment and supplies for brewing mead, but humans have been brewing mead with primitive equipment for thousands of years. I found this basic, foolproof mead recipe online years ago, although I cannot now find the site I found it on. It makes a very enjoyable mead with no equipment and very little cost. I will also mention a few variations that you can do, although I recommend starting with the basic recipe.

Shopping List:

  • One gallon jug of spring water
  • 2-3 lbs local, raw honey
  • 1 snack box of organic raisins (you may have to buy a pack of several snack boxes)
  • 1 pouch bread yeast (or 1 Tb of bread yeast if you already have some)
  • 1 balloon (you may have to buy a bag of several)

Instructions:

Open the spring water. Pour out 12oz of water (1.5 cups) for each lb of honey. Pour the honey, yeast, and raisins directly into the jug of water (a funnel helps). Cap the jug and shake vigorously. Poke a pinhole in the top of the balloon. Uncap the jug, and stretch the opening of the balloon over the mouth of the jug. Set somewhere to ferment.

After a day or two, your balloon should stand up. after 10-14 days, the balloon should flop back over. When this happens, take the balloon off, recap the jug, and shake vigorously. Replace the balloon. The balloon may stand up again. If so, wait another day or two after it flops over again, and then pour your mead into glass bottles or jars. You can use a coffee filter or cheesecloth to strain out the raisins and yeast, although most of the yeast will have settled to the bottom and can be avoiding by pouring gently and not fully emptying the jug. Seal the bottles. You may taste the mead at this point, although it will taste significantly better after conditioning in the bottle for 6 months to a year. The website I got this recipe from said that it gets even better if you condition longer, but I have never been able to let it go past a year.

Variations:

  1. Use the dregs from your homemade cider in the place of the bread yeast
  2. Use the apple peel method that I recommend for cider in place of bread yeast
  3. Add a cinnamon stick or two, a clove, and a star anise–Or whatever else you want to try
  4. Use only 1-1.5 lbs honey, pour out an additional 2 quarts of water, and add 2 quarts of apple or other fruit juice.

Let me know how you like your results!