Utter Obtuseness!

A wind is blowing. A current of dissent and calamity. A course of strife and enmity with God. Purveyors of truth are purveyors of falsehoods. They speak for God with the voice of demons. Sowing discord among the brethren. The right hand does not know what the left hand is doing. Sweet and bitter waters flow from the same stream. Brethren! This ought not so to be. Blog forums, "public letters" circulate, authored by people with no ecclesiastical authority to do so. They pose as someone whom they are not and speak for others under false identities. Torrents of discord travel via the internet and cause destruction and disharmony. They care nothing of the truth but are deceived in their own minds and have become agents of the evil one. They cannot discern right from wrong, flesh from spirit, truth from fiction. They are oblivious to the correction of God and turn a deaf ear to God's voice of warning. They have been given over to a reprobate mind.

"But he who imagines that he knows, even though he knows nothing, were he even to see an angel from heaven come down to him, yet he would send him away as though he were an evil demon. Even if it were an Apostle or a prophet of God, he would turn him away like another Simon Magus. What utter obtuseness that a blind man should consider the seeing man to be blind, and that he who talks nonsense should think that the words of the sensible man are nonsense!

The blind man disbelieves those who tell him at night that the sun is not shining, and in his disbelief thinks that it is night when it is high noon. He thinks both are deceiving him whether by day they tell him that there is light, or at night that it is dark, and in his doubt sends his informant packing. So those who sit in the darkness of passions and whose minds are blinded by ignorance, or, rather those who have not acquired 'the mind of Christ' think that he who has the mind of Christ is foolish, and that he who has it not is sensible. Of these the Prophet David rightly states, 'The ignorant and foolish perish together.'

Therefore such men twist the whole of Scripture according to their own desires and corrupt themselves in their own passions. But it is not divine Scripture that suffers from this, but those who disfigure it!" Saint Symeon the new Theologian

BISHOPS OF THE CHURCH; DO YOU KNOW WHO IS SPEAKING FOR YOU?

Bishops of the church should take care to make straight their lines of communication to the world. They should delegate less and be at the forefront of their own communication and discourse. They should prefer personal meetings, personal phone calls, and personally authored letters that are delivered by hand or certified mail. They should be aware of whom among their parishioners are speaking for them and under their banner. They should step on the neck of Jezebel who seeks to control the message of the Church and assure disunity and dysfunction. They should give edict that the blind may not speak for the seeing, the deaf cannot speak for the hearing. They should ask of the these:

WHEN DID YOU RECEIVE THE COMMISSION, THE ORDINATION, THE AUTHORITY, THE SACRAMENT WHEREBY YOU DO INSTRUCT EVEN THE CLERGY AND THE MAN OF GOD? FROM WHOM DID YOU RECEIVE SUCH A MANTLE? 

The Bishop should say: 

Be silent! Be humble! Be obscure! So that your soul may be rescued and the fire that you have set may be squelched. The squire does not order the King nor does the servant issue an edict. Let you be rightly aligned. Let everything be done decently and in order.