Today, we celebrate the fulfillment of the promises of God. Today, we celebrate the revelation of the Trinity, the coming of the Holy Spirit, the day tradition views as the beginning of the Church. Today is Pentecost, a day when the promise of the book of Joel is fulfilled.

“I am going to paint the house,” said a big can of paint, waiting, already mixed, in the workroom.

“No, I am going to paint it!” the paintbrush asserted, bristling with indignation.

In the last issue, I dealt with Frank Schaeffer’s assertion:

[b]y ordaining women, “liberal” Protestants are in effect saying, “Christ did not come in the flesh, his maleness does not matter, he is a mere symbol of something larger.”

Frank Schaeffer, a former evangelical Protestant who recently became Orthodox, in the December 1993 issue of the Orthodox Observer accused those who do not believe Christ's gender to have relevance of being "iconoclastic," that is, of refusing to recognize the reality of His male sexuality. He said that

[b]y ordaining women, "liberal" Protestants are in effect saying, "Christ did not come in the flesh, his maleness does not matter, he is a mere symbol of something larger."

But to the Orthodox Christian, Christ's maleness does matter, just as Mary's femaleness matters.¹

The Wilderness

The Lenten journey begins in the wilderness—a place of tangled vines, disorder, rank growth, and spiritual twilight. The wilderness represents the interior self, our spiritual dimension, which, when due to the scant attention we give to it most of the year, becomes thick with overgrown weeds that choke our life and openness to God and to each other.