A few years ago there was a fellow from a nearby town who declared himself the grand wizard of his own branch of the Klu Klux Klan. He would announce plans for a march a local town and instantly the media would be racing their news vans there to get reactions from politicians, police chiefs and random people on the street. Headlines would ensue, bloggers would go to work, counter-protests would be announced, etc. But the grand wizard turned out to be mostly an Oz-like apparition of smoke. No established KKK organization recognized him. His rallies would attract at most two of his buddies. He was in his early forties and living with his mother. He was fired after three weeks working at Wawa, the local convenience store chain. Yes, he could have been a danger if he had gotten a hold of a cache of guns but he never did. He was a guy who was a loser at everything except getting media attention for outrageous proposal. Last I looked up he’s got religion, recanted his racist ideology, and apologized for the KKK talk.

Another story I could tell is more personal, of a not-so-distant relative who went on a middling-murder spree—five dead in the end (I’ll omit details for reasons of family diplomacy). I only met him once but I’ve come to know the setting that shaped him. Some of the issues that shaped him go back generations and are still active. To tell the story of his snap would take a novel on the order of Jeffrey Eugendies’s Middlesex. I have an autistic son and know that this condition runs in the family. I try to imagine throwing him into a mainstream school setting with no support and no diagnosis, and then bringing him up in the family tradition of alcohol-based self-medication; a stint on the armed forces would just add to the explosive mix. Forty years from now my precious little boy might well be the top story on Action News. And it would be a tragedy.

If I had a time machine, I think I’d do experiments to understand the nexus of ideology and individual personality. I’d give a 24-year-old Osama bin Laden a desk job in an obscure Saudi ministry, and an 18-year-old Adolf Hitler a prize to a prestigious foreign art school.

Violent ideologies are often the perverted manifestation of less-visible personal and family tragedies. I hope we can find a way to step back from the voyeurism of Colorado details to find ways to extend ourselves in love and care. Tonight, when you feel rage or indignation, call up a friend or relative in pain. Yes, gun control can help lesson the immediate tragedy. But let’s not forget the long-term solutions. Think about how we lobby to  widen access to medical care (e.g.: universal healthcare) and programs for the needy of our youth (hint: fund the schools, expand special-needs programs, bring back after-school programs and enrichment opportunties). There are three- and six-and eighteen-year-old’s out there teetering on crossroads of alternate futures. Let’s hold out our hands and invite them to paths of healing and love.

The Old Believers have a fascinating history. They were Russian Orthodox Christians who refused to comply with liturgical changes mandated by the Patriarch and Czar in the 1650s. As usual, there was a lot of politics involved, with the Czar wanting to cozy up with the Greek Orthodox to ally Russia against the Muslim Ottomans, etc., etc. The theological charge was that the Greek traditions were the standard and Russian differences latter-day innovations to be stamped out (more modern research has found the Russians actually were closer to the older forms, but no matter: what the Czar and Patriarch want, the Czar and Patriarch get). The old practices were banned, beginning hundreds of years of state-sponsored persecution for the “Old Believers.” The survivors scattered to the four corners of the Russian empire and beyond, keeping a low profile wherever they went.

The Old Believers have a fascinating fractured history. Because their priests were killed off in the seventeenth century, they lost their claims of apostolic succession–the idea that there’s an unbroken line of ordination from Jesus Christ himself. Some Old Believers found work-arounds or claimed a few priests were spared but the hardcore among them declared succession over, signaling the end times and the fall of the Church. They became priestless Old Believers–so defensive of the old liturgy that they were willing to lose most of the liturgy. They’ve scattered around the world, often wearing plain dress and living in isolated communities.

The Old Believers church in Millville has no signs, no website, no indication of what it is (a lifelong member of “our” St Nick’s called it mysterious and said he little about it of it). From a few internet references, they appear to be the priestless kind of Old Believers. But it has its own distinctions: apparently one of the greatest iconographers of the twentieth century lived and worshipped there, and when famed Russian political prisoner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn visited the U.S. he made a point of speaking at this signless church on a dead end road.

Links:
* Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Believers
* Account of US Lithuanian Bespopovtsy communities: http://www.synaxis.info/old-rite/0_oldbelief/history_eng/nicoll.html
* OSU Library on iconographer Sofronv (PDF): http://cmrs.osu.edu/rcmss/CMH21color.pdf
* Solzhenitsyn’s 1976 visit: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f‑news/2057793/posts

In album St Nicholas Old Believers, Millville NJ (9 photos)

And for new readers, I long ago explained why the Quaker Ranter’s kid was getting baptized. Sorry for the weird formatting, I haven’t cleaned up all the back articles.