zenpundit.com

[ by Charles Cameron — I thought it might be timely to consider trinary thinking in light of Zen‘s recent post featuring Clausewitz‘ Trinity ]
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I know, it sounds inherently ridiculous, but what would happen if we thought in threes instead of twos? I mean, we tend to see things in terms of black and white, good and bad. Let’s set up a binary of our own — US President George W Bush vs the Aymara of the Andes and Altiploano:

Two into three won’t go, as they used to say in math class when I was a kid.

Hegel thought otherwise. Hegel thought two needed to move on into three, or we’d be stuck with binaries in stasis for ever. Hegel’s dialectic is about the possibility called three — which opens the otherwise static two up to various kinds of process…

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We tend to view conflicts in binary terms: “who goes there, friend or foe?” is the challenge I was supposed to offer Mad Mitch the Axe Man if I ran across him as a CCF trainee in the grounds of my old school, Wellington College.

What is conflict is viewed in trinary?

Here is Chris Crawford, from his justly famous 1982 Art of Computer Game Design:

The advantage of asymmetric games lies in the ability to build nontransitive or triangular relationships into the game. Transitivity is a well-defined mathematical property. In the context of games it is best illustrated with the rock-scissors-paper game. Two players play this game; each secretly selects one of the three pieces; they simultaneously announce and compare their choices. If both made the same choice the result is a draw and the game is repeated. If they make different choices, then rock breaks scissors, scissors cut paper, and paper enfolds rock. This relationship, in which each component can defeat one other and can be defeated by one other, is a nontransitive relationship; the fact that rock beats scissors and scissors beat paper does not mean that rock beats paper.

We’re back in play…

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Here, too, is a bit from m’friend Wm. Benzon, jazz-player, blogger, polymath:

Three against two is one of the most important rhythm ‘cells’ in all of music. What do I mean, three against two? You play three evenly spaced beats in one ‘stream’ in the same period of time you play two evenly spaced beats in another ‘stream.’ It sounds simple enough but, the problem is that three and two do not have a common divisor, making the ‘evenly spaced’ part of the formula a bit tricky. The two patterns coincide on the first beat, but the second and third beats of the three-beat stream happen at different times from the second beat of the two-beat stream. And if you think that’s a lot of verbiage for something that ought to be simple, when then you’re beginning to get the idea.

Noting that the brain has a hard time moving from two to three this way, Benzon quotes old-time piano virtuoso Joseph Hoffman:

In faster motion it is far better to practise at first each hand alone and with somewhat exaggerated accents of each group until the two relative speeds are well established in the mind. Then try to play the two hands together in a sort of semi-automatic way. Frequent correct repetition of the same figure will soon change your semi-automatic state into a a conscious one, and thus train your ear to listen to and control two different rhythms or groupings at the same time.

Those readers already familiar with my insistence on many-voiced (ie polyphonic) listening will quickly grasp that Hoffman is speaking of just that kind of broadening of our mental horizons — of our thinking capacities.

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I’d like to close part 1 of this two part post within my “Numbers by the numbers” series, with a quote from LtGen Paul Van Riper (USMC Ret.), The Foundation of Strategic Thinking at Infinity Journal:

The United States and its allies need senior civilian officials and military officers who grasp the fundamental nature of systems, are adept at building shared mental models, comprehend the significance of Clausewitz’s paradoxical trinity, understand operational art and can connect strategic thinking with tactical actions through operational design. These are the true competencies of modern defense professionals.

As in conflict, as in Clausewitz, so in conflict resolution: we need to be able to think in trinary — in trinities — and beyond.

More on that — which interested me enough that I once designed a trinary game of my own, played with great splash and delight by three kids in a swimming pool — in the second part of this post.

[ by Charles Cameron — two books their owners have underlined and scribbled in, a practice I generally detest, and the issue of what music is suitable for worship ]
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From the Omega Auctions catalogue of the Presley Collection:

Elvis Owned Holy Bible given to him in 1957 on his first Christmas at Graceland (estimate £20,000 – £25,000).

Elvis Presley’s personally owned and used Holy Bible 1957-1977 with Elvis’ handwriting, annotations and underlining throughout. This was Elvis Presley’s most precious book throughout his life from Christmas 1957 to that final day on 16th August 1977 and he read and wrote in this Holy Bible over many years. This sixteen hundred page bible with Elvis Presley and Holy Bible, embossed in gold on a leather cover was given to Elvis by his uncle Vester and Aunt Clettes Presley as a Christmas gift on December 25th, 1957 at Graceland. The bible contains Elvis’ personal annotations throughout its fragile pages. This bible was published by. The John A. Hertel Co., Chicago, IL ©1941.

I’d say that would be a steal at the price!

The auction starts at 3pm GMT on Saturday 8th September 2012 at Meadow Mill, Water St, Stockport, SK1 2BX, UK, but there are viewings on Friday 7th September from 11.00am – 6.00pm and on Saturday 8th September from 8.30am – 10.30am.

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Tell you what I’d prefer myself, though — and I would’t even want to own it — just to know it’s there in the Concordia Seminary Library:

The 3-volume Bible commentary compiled by 17th-century Lutheran theologian, Abraham Calov, and once in the library of Johann Sebastian Bach has been in the Seminary Library collection since it was given to the Seminary by the Reichle family of Frankenmuth, MI, in the 1930s. The volumes are the only known, i.e., identified, books from the library of J. S. Bach. Calov is both editor and author of the commentary, using as he does both Martin Luther’s translation of the Bible and primarily Luther’s comments on the text, adding his own commentary when no material was available in Luther’s works. The work was printed in 1681-82. Some 25 marginal annotations of Bach, along with underlining and other marginal markings, are evidence of the composer’s use of the volumes. Careful analysis of the handwriting, as well as technical analysis of the ink done in the 1980s, established the authenticity of Bach’s ownership.

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Is that your final choice?

That is my final choice.

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Really what I’m getting at, though, is something that those two books can stand for: the debate now proceeding in the Catholic Church — and in Evangelical and Pentecostal Churches too — as to what kind of music is to be performed in the course of worship. The “battle lines” tend to be drawn between music that is intended to draw in the young, and music that is felt to be well-suited to the sacred.

Pope Benedict XVI is a strong proponent of the Western musical tradition:

An authentic updating of sacred music can take place only in the lineage of the great tradition of the past, of Gregorian Chant and Sacred Polyphony.

More personally, Benedict is an admirer of Mozart, whose music he plays daily on the piano — and of JS Bach, about whom he once said:

The encounter with the beautiful can become the wound of the arrow that strikes the heart and in this way opens our eyes, so that later, from this experience, we take the criteria for judgment and can correctly evaluate the arguments.

For me an unforgettable experience was the Bach concert that Leonard Bernstein conducted in Munich after the sudden death of Karl Richter. I was sitting next to the Lutheran Bishop Hanselmann. When the last note of one of the great Thomas-Kantor-Cantatas triumphantly faded away, we looked at each other spontaneously and right then we said: “Anyone who has heard this, knows that the faith is true.”

The music had such an extraordinary force of reality that we realized, no longer by deduction, but by the impact on our hearts, that it could not have originated from nothingness, but could only have come to be through the power of the Truth that became real in the composer’s inspiration.

Blogs like the Chant Cafe and colloquia like those of the Church Music Association of America are introducing a new generation of worshipers to this tradition.

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Interestingly, though, something of the same sort is also discernible in the writings of the Australian Pentecostal preacher and author named (perhaps coincidentally, maybe by grace) Barry Chant.

Here in the early 21st century, Chant wrote in “Retuning the Church”:

an unhealthy number of new songs focus more on rhythm and harmony than melody … Whereas a half century ago, Christians sang songs in which there were disciplined rhythms and rhymes, and both melody and lyrics followed an obvious orderly pattern, today’s rhythms are more likely to be disruptive and disjointed… ‘feeling’ is what matters. So the pulsating rhythms throb through our beings, the compelling beat makes our bodies respond and the intellectual or biblical content only needs to be sufficient to justify calling what we are singing ‘Christian’

But hey, this discussion goes back a while… Back in the mid fourth century CE, St Basil the Great wrote:

The passions born of illiberality and baseness of spirit are naturally occasioned by this sort of music. But we must pursue that other kind, which is better and leads to the better, and which, as they say, was used by David that author of sacred songs, to soothe the king in his madness. And it is said that Pythagoras, upon encountering some drunken revelers, commanded the aulete who was leading their song to change the mode and to play the Dorian for them. They were so sobered by this music that tearing off their garlands they returned home ashamed. Others dance to the aulos in the manner of the Corybantes and Baccantes. Such is the difference in filling one’s ears with wholesome or wicked tunes! And since the latter type now prevails, you must have less to do with it than any utterly depraved thing.

And yet hey, hey — L’homme armé was a pop song in France around the time of the Renaissance — yet composers from Josquin to Benedict’s beloved Palestrina based settings to the Mass on its tune…

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The single piece of recorded music that I play most often for myself is Sara Mingardo‘s rendering of the recitative O selger Tag in rehearsal with John Eliot Gardiner, which is mercifully available on DVD.

On that same DVD, just after Mingardo has concluded her luminous performance, Gardiner quotes Bach as saying “Nota Bene: Bey einer andächtigen Musique ist allezeit Gott mit seiner Gnadengegenwart” — and then comments:

Now I find that very, very significant. That he’s saying wherever there is devotional music, God with his grace is present. Which, from a strict theological point of view is probably heresy, heretical, because it’s saying that music has an equivalent potency to the word of God. And I think that in essence is why Bach is so attractive to us today because he is saying that the very act of music-making and of coming together is, in a sense, an act which invokes the latency, the potency, the potentiality of God’s grace, however you like to define God’s grace; but of a benediction that comes even in a dreadful, overheated studio like Abbey Road where far too many microphones and much too much stuff here in the studio itself, but if one, as a musician, puts oneself in the right frame of mind, then God’s grace can actually come and direct and influence the way we perform his music.

Aaaaaaah….

[ by Charles Cameron — a quick look at the dramatis personae ]
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And let me repeat for the record: I am neither pro nor anti Pussy Riot. I have sympathies on both sides. It comes down to this: I love both liberty and liturgy.

The Washington Post was among the news sources hosting an AP bulletin from August 16, updated August 17 under the header, Art performer, poet, software programmer — three faces behind mask of Russia’s Pussy Riot band.

After pointing out that the group to which they belong strove for anonymity, the writer commented that they “have unwillingly emerged as vivid — and very different — characters.” Here’s the short form version of their differences:

One is a daring performance artist with Angelina Jolie lips and a notorious part in a filmed orgy just days before she gave birth. Another is a poet and environmentalist whose pre-Raphaelite looks project sweetness and sensitivity. Rounding out the trio is a quietly cerebral computer expert, who has applied her skills both to nuclear submarines and experimental art.

In more detail (and I’m still cutting quite a bit here to bring you the gist of the articled, and recommend you read the whole thing):

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Nadezhda Tolokonnikova:

Tolokonnikova left her home in the frigid oil town of Norilsk at 17 to enroll in Moscow State University’s philosophy department. … “Feminism, art and politics take up all her time,” said David Abramov, who has helped Pussy Riot organize performances. “She devotes all her time to it.”

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Maria Alyokhina:

Alekhina, an accomplished poet with long curly blonde hair, is quite a different face of Pussy Riot. Alekhina, mother of a five-year-old boy, has a long background in charity work and environmental activism. She organized protest pickets to defend Utrish, a natural reserve in Russia’s south, from developers and worked with Danilovtsy, a Russian Orthodox charity.

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Yekaterina Samutsevich:

Samutsevich, 30, studied computers at Moscow Energy University and soon got a good job at a top research center. She was promptly hired to a job in a top secret department where she was designing software programs for Russia’s top nuclear submarine Nerpa, her father Stanislav said.

Samutsevich later quit and enrolled at the renowned Rodchenko Photography and Multimedia School to study media art. Her final project at the school was designing a web-browser which intentionally distorted and manipulated search results — an invention that was supposed to highlight society’s dependence on media and helplessness in the uncharted waters of web media.

Alexei Shulgin, a professor at the Rodchenko school … praised her as a talented artist and said that like many young people in Russia she “turned to art for answers about modern times.”

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What if they had been a classical ensemble playing Stravinsky — might we detect a faint echoes of the Paris première of the Rite of Spring just shy of a century ago? — or, given their interest in the visual arts, Scriabin‘s 102 year old Prometheus: The Poem of Fire with its part for keyboard-for-lights, perhaps?

My own taste runs more to Bach.

[ by Charles Cameron — culture clash, Madonna, Pussy Riot, Union of Orthodox Banner Carriers ]
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The gentleman on the left is Leonid Simonovich-Nikshich of the Union of Orthodox Banner Bearers, whose t-shirt bears the rubric “Orthodoxy or Death”. In the first video, he can be seen burning the photo of Madonna reproduced to his right above.

I apologize for the fact that you will need to click through to see this video on the AFP site, but am grateful to them for making it available via YouTube.

The second video shows the portion of Madonna’s stage performance in Moscow in which she spoke about freedom, the United States, and Russia’s treatment of Pussy Riot — she speaks directly about Pussy Riot starting at 3′.15″:

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I was reading an article about the “political theologian” Reinhold Niebuhr in The American Conservative yesterday, and noted with interest the author’s discussion of the delicate balancing of opposed concerns:

To read Niebuhr is to relish these tensions, to grip the fundamental balance of the moral universe. “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible,” he wrote. “But man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.” The concepts gear together like great cosmic cogs. “Goodness, armed with power, is corrupted,” he wrote. But “pure love without power is destroyed.” Much of Niebuhr’s worldview depends on these balances.

Reading Obama yields a similar effect. In 2009, literary critic Andrew Delbanco pointed out in the New Republic that Obama’s books are populated by counterweighted sentences, for instance: “There’s the middle-aged feminist who still mourns her abortion, and the Christian woman who paid for her teenager’s abortion.” Obama expresses his worldview, Delbanco wrote, in sentences “organized around pairs of sentiments or arguments that exert equal force against each other–a reflection of ongoing thinking rather than a statement of settled thoughts.”

That’s the sort of thing I was getting at yesterday — much less elegantly, in terms that come across far too “black and white” when the continuum in question could equally be “hot and cold” — when I wrote:

How can I put this? The white swirl in the tai-chi’h symbol is shocked and appalled at the black spot in its own heart — and the black swirl has no idea how to handle the purity of the white dot that has somehow crept into and illuminated its darkness.
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And yet, as Eliot says, this is all “That the pattern may subsist, that the wheel may turn and still / Be forever still.”

and:

So pious-Charles the lover of Gregorian (or Znamenny) Chant would almost certainly have been appalled. But Charles-the-anthropologist would have to admit, afterwards, once the shock had subsided — that these actions strike deep into the heart of “sacred” paradox.

As a lover of liturgy, I understand one side of the balance, as a love of liberty I understand the other.

The paradox is perhaps most succinctly stated in the phrase “whose service is perfect freedom” — but while that’s an admittedly, profoundly and joyously liturgical phrase — one of Cranmer‘s, from the Book of Common Prayer I think — I don’t believe it is in any way dictatorial.

[ by Charles Cameron — mystery beyond the senses, holy of holies behind the veil, altar beyond the iconostasis, and other considerations bearing on Orthodoxy, Pussy Riot, holy folly and monastic punk ]
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Life is full of surprises.

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Okay, I started fishing around the web the way I do because when I first ran across the Pussy Riot story, I kept seeing press reports that said the grrls had been protesting on the altar of Christ the Savior Cathedral [Russian Orthodox] in Moscow.

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What surprised me about this was that the altar in an Orthodox church would be behind the closed doors of the Iconostasis, because what takes place on the altar is too mysterious for us to grasp through the unaided senses.

Aside: there’s a lot of religious “clash of civs” going on in the Pussy Riot affait, so let me untangle some of the interesting threads, and then see where that leads us.

You may recall that when Christ died on the cross outside the City walls, there was a parallel incident inside Jerusalem: “the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent” [Matt 27.51]. This could, it seems to me, be an involuntary gesture of mourning on the part of the earth and temple — but it also opens the holy of holies..

In very broad strokes then, there are three spaces in Orthodoxy, separated by two doors, and they correspond to three ways of knowing.

• Outside the church, there’s the realm where the senses and rational mind can be pretty much relied on for the kinds of transactions that humans mostly engage in, food, drink, shelter, exchange of goods…
• Passing in through the church door we are in a space of devotion, the nave, in which attention is focused on the second doorway, that of the iconostasis, where the icons are presented. Here the mental activity is typically one of prayer, and the icons are available to lead the senses and mind towards that which the mind cannot comprehend.

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• And passing, as only the ordained may, through the doors of the iconostasis into the Sanctuary, we enter the space of the altar and the sacramental transformation of the Eucharist — which neither rational mind nor senses can apprehend, and which is accordingly the realm of Mystery properly defined.

The Pussy Riot grrls are clearly dancing (and singing and prostrating and crossing themselves in the video) in front of the doors of the iconostasis — not “on the altar” — a big difference, which I would suggest is comparable in kind to the difference between human prayer and divine revelation.

No, they were not “staging an anti-Kremlin protest on the altar of Moscow’s main cathedral” [Telegraph], nor “performing what they called a ‘punk prayer’ on the altar of Moscow’s Christ the Savior Cathedral” [ABC News].

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By way of giving you some context, Eurasia Review has the religious politics:

The actions of Pussy Riot inspired indignation on the part of Church leaders and regime officials. Patriarch Kirill called their action a “mockery of a sacred place.” Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, said it was “blasphemy.” The women were described as “satanic devils” and “prostitutes” and there were calls for them to be ripped to pieces on the ancient execution site in Red Square.

What was lost in all this was the identification of the Russian Orthodox Church with the Putin regime. Putin’s inauguration was marked by the ringing of church bells in the Kremlin. Kirill held a special prayer service for his “health” and “success in government,” in the Cathedral of the Assumption in the Kremlin. In the Novodevichy Monastery, the nuns sang psalms round the clock for Putin’s health.

And then there was that 2009 London Times article:

The Russian Orthodox Church will choose tomorrow between three alleged former KGB agents as its next spiritual leader.

More than 700 priests, monks and lay representatives will decide who should become the new Patriarch in the first Church election since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The contest at Christ the Saviour Cathedral in Moscow pits the favourite, Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk and Kaliningrad, against two rivals who also rose through the heirarchy at a time when the Church was under strict Communist control.

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Here are the lyrics to the “punk-prayer” Virgin Mary, Put Putin Away that they were singing:

(choir)

Virgin Mary, Mother of God, put Putin away
?ut Putin away, put Putin away

(end chorus)

…
Black robe, golden epaulettes
All parishioners crawl to bow
The phantom of liberty is in heaven
Gay-pride sent to Siberia in chains

The head of the KGB, their chief saint,
Leads protesters to prison under escort
In order not to offend His Holiness
Women must give birth and love

Shit, shit, the Lord’s shit!
Shit, shit, the Lord’s shit!

(Chorus)

Virgin Mary, Mother of God, become a feminist
Become a feminist, become a feminist

(end chorus)

The Church’s praise of rotten dictators
The cross-bearer procession of black limousines
A teacher-preacher will meet you at school
Go to class – bring him money!

Patriarch Gundyaev believes in Putin
Bitch, better believe in God instead
The belt of the Virgin can’t replace mass-meetings
Mary, Mother of God, is with us in protest!

(Chorus)

Virgin Mary, Mother of God, put Putin away
?ut Putin away, put Putin away

(end chorus)

Here’s a linguistic comment, which I can neither affirm nor refute, from The Economist:

“The Lord’s Shit!” is a literal translation, while the expression “Sran’ Gospodnya” found in the lyrics is an equivalent of English “holy shit”, which is a totally diferrent matter.

And then there’s this:

But prosecutors sought to downplay the political angle and highlight the blasphemy, overriding the defense’s objections with the help of Syrova’s many “question disallowed!”

“Do you believe it acceptable to say ‘Holy sh*t!’ in the church?” a prosecutor asked a father of one of the defendants in the courtroom.

The man denied it, pointing out Russia’s ancient tradition of skomorokhi – traveling actors afforded the degree of freedom of speech that apparently exceeded that allowed to Pussy Riot. Of course, the skomorokhi sometimes faced burning at the stake, but this was not mentioned at the hearing.

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Which brings us to the entire issue of holy fools in Orthodoxy…

The holy fools are understood to “feign madness in order to provide the public with spiritual guidance” — but I wonder if that’s a rationalization of behaviors that were simply sane, direct and challenging at the time. Consider this description from the National Catholic Register:

In Russian history the greatest of the “holy fools” was Basil the Blessed, a man so revered that the famous Cathedral in Moscow’s Red Square next to the Kremlin was named in his honor. Basil walked through Moscow wearing nothing more than a long beard. He threw rocks at wealthy people’s houses and stole from dishonest traders in Red Square.

Few doubted Basil’s holiness. Tsar Ivan the Terrible feared no one but Basil. Basil was also given to eating meat on Good Friday. Once he went to Ivan’s palace in the Kremlin and forced the tsar to eat raw meat during the fast saying, “Why abstain from eating meat when you murder men?” Countless Russians died for much less but Ivan was afraid to let any harm come to the saintly Basil.

And the grrls explicitly claimed the Holy Fools inspired their mode of protest:

Nadia said. “We were searching for real sincerity and simplicity, and we found these qualities in the yurodstvo [the holy foolishness] of punk.”

Well, there are similarities, and there are differences. The canonical Holy Fools were presumably orthodox in their beliefs, which the Riot may not be — but on the other hand, they are clearly “speaking truth to power” to use the admirable Quaker phrase.

Folly is a tad under-appreciated these days.

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On the other hand, maybe it’s demonic possession. From the examination of “altar warden Vasily Tsyganyuk, classified as a victim because he claimed to have suffered psychological trauma as a result of the performance” during the trial:

VICTIM: “Those who are possessed can exhibit different behaviors. They can scream, beat their heads against the floor, jump up and down…”

DEFENSE ATTORNEY NIKOLAI POLOZOV: “Do they dance?”

VICTIM: “Well, no.”

JUDGE: “Stop questioning him about those who are possessed. Tsyganyuk is not a medical professional and is not qualified to render a diagnosis.”

Nah, not possessed — possession would be a medical diagnosis.

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Hey — the name Pussy Riot is a riot — and riots are not always comfortable.

Who would have imagined the name “Pussy Riot” would appear on the digital tongue of Archbishop Cranmer — who only the other day was chastised for saying that British Olympic athletes had “given the nation a veritable golden shower of success after success” when the kind of golden shower he was thinking of was presumably the kind Zeus showered on Danae.

But the good Archbishop — or at least the conservative Christian blogger who has taken that name — has in fact been vociferous in support of the Pussy Tribe, their name notwithstanding:

This is foolish. If history teaches us anything about the murky fusion of religion and politics – the spiritual with the temporal – it is that you cannot persecute the prophets of truth without multiplying the message and spreading the cult. These women had no bombs or bullets: they are not terrorists, but anarchic artists. The more inflated and preposterous the charges laid against them, the more they are elevated to martyrdom. The longer they rot in prison at the behest of a puffed-up Patriarch, the more that martyrdom becomes a cause.

Pussy Riot have nailed their 95 Theses firmly to the door of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. You can’t kill a movement by crucifying the radicals.

That’s theology!

But look, ecclesial nomenclature can be ambiguous in its own right. The original Archbishop Cranmer was a Puritan divine, and Richard Hooker the latitudinarian divine who wrote the classic Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie.

I think we can be safely if secretly amused that one of Cranmer’s respondents in the Pussy matter has chosen the online moniker “The Judicious Hooker”. In fact he’s the one who posted:

I realise that YG was rather plain in the chancel department (praise God for the Laudian revival!) but the ‘prisoners of conscience’ were not dancing on the altar. The Orthodox Holy Table lies behind the iconostasis screen and access is confined to sacred ministers.

The Orthodox – of all Christians – still maintain the sense of the sacred. The Cathedral’s iconostasis – where icons of our Lord and his Saints are displayed for veneration – looks rather impregnable and its doors firmly shut against profanation.

But I digress, I contain multitudes, I know.

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One of the more interesting blogs I’ve run across discussing the Putin Pussy event has been Khanya — here’s a taste:

Is there an Orthodox culture, and does it have anything to say about this?

Yes, I believe there is an Orthodox culture, and it is well expressed in one of the hymns we sing repeatedly in the Paschal season.

Let God arise, let his enemies be scattered
Let those who hate him flee from before his face.

Does that apply to Pussy Riot?

Yes, I believe it does.

But you have to come to the end of the hymn to see how it applies.

This is the day of resurrection.
Let us be illumined by the feast.
Let us embrace each other.
Let us call “Brothers” even those that hate us, and forgive all by the resurrection, and so let us cry:
Christ is risen from the dead
Trampling down death by death
And upon those in the tombs bestowing life.

So what do we call the members of Pussy Riot?

Sisters.

And what do we do with them?

Embrace them, forgive them by the resurrection and tell them that God loves them and we love them too.

That’s Orthodox culture.

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Another insightful blog has been Registan, where Sarah Kendzior came at things from a different angle:

Media outlets that regularly cover Russian politics have noted how male Russian dissidents have been ignored as Pussy Riot draws world sympathy.
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Removing Pussy Riot from the broader problem of political persecution in Russia is a mistake, but the case also raises specific questions about gender, media and politics.

In the same week that Pussy Riot was profiled in the New York Times style section, the Boston Review republished a 2010 interview with Hillary Clinton, in which she was asked who her favorite designer was. “Would you ever ask a man that question?” she snapped. “Probably not, probably not,” the reporter replied. The American media embraced Clinton’s riposte, reprinting it widely. But when it comes to foreign female dissidents, they promote the values Clinton rejects.

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Meanwhile — and I mean meanwhile, since this has nothing directly to do with Pussy Riot, and a great deal to do with them in indirect ways — in my own beloved California:

In the wilderness of Northern California, Monks John and Damascene searched in hopes of finding a way to reach out to the Punk scene, which John had escaped. Seeing that the scene was full of kids that were sick of themselves and crippled by nihilism and despair, the Monks set out to give them the same hope that they found in Ancient Christianity. To do this, they decided to submit an article about Father Seraphim Rose in the popular magazine, Maximum Rock and Roll.

When Father Damascene read over the magazine, he knew that they would never publish something like it. Struggling to show truth to the darkened subcultures, they tried again, but this time only placing an ad for Saint Hermans Brotherhood. They got a response from the editor, saying “What the @#*% is a Brotherhood?” and the Monks were told “We only run ads for music and ‘zines*.” A light bulb went on and thus, Death to the World was born.

The first issue was printed in the December of ’94 featuring a Monk holding a skull on cover. The hand-drawn bold letters across the top read “DEATH TO THE WORLD, The Last True Rebellion” and the back cover held the caption: “they hated me without a cause.” …
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The first issue, decorated with ancient icons and lives of martyrs inside, was advertised in Maximum Rock and Roll and brought letters from all around the world. People from Japan, Lithuania, and Ireland wanted to get their hands on this new radical magazine. The mailing list grew and grew and the ‘zine was distributed at punks shows and underground hangouts. It was photocopied and passed around by hundreds who wanted to read about the radical lives of the lovers of truth and the mystery of monasticism. It was estimated that at one time, there were 50,000 in circulation.

Father Paisius, who is a Monk at the monastery, said, “This subculture is raucous and deeply disturbed because of their own pain. They see life as worthless. We want to show them an ideal that is worth their life. These are marginalized youth who are wounded, and Death to the World is meant to touch with a healing hand that wound.”

Writing and putting together issues 1-12, the Monks lived in the forests of Northern California in the midst of deer, bears, mountain lions, and rattlesnakes, translating and publishing wisdom from the holy fathers and mothers of ages past. The Monks and friends of the monastery also went to rock concerts and festivals, distributing Death to the World ‘zines and t-shirts, together with icons and other books that the monastery published. The Monks did not put out any issues after issue 12, but they continued to share and hand out back orders of Death to the World.

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That may be where the guy up there in the choir with the shocking pink mohawk comes in.