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Rootedness and Uprootedness: A Lament
In the past few weeks, I've learned of impending relocations of more relatives west of the Mississippi River, including one family that has been in the same state for decades and one elderly relative who has even been in the same house since the mid-1960s. One by one or in clumps, over the past several years it seems that both sides of my family (or at least the parts I stayed in touch with) are gradually relocating at least two time zones to the west, with all indications that they mean the move to be permanent.
I couldn't quite place how I felt about all that when I learned it. It seemed a combination of anger, disappointment, betrayal, regret, helplessness and loss all bound up together into one unnameable emotion.
I don't blame the individual members for their reasons, to be sure. For some, it is for work. For some, it is health. For others, it is simply a desire for a major change of scenery they've never had before. For still others, it is to be close to those who were already headed that way. And even though we haven't lived less than hundreds of miles from most of them for many years, this series of relocations seems to me far more tragic than when we at least lived in the same time zone, within a day's drive.
It all seems just wrong, like a violation of some sort. And of course, I suppose I have little room to talk. I ran off and went to seminary, offering up my locus and domus on a platter to the hierarchy like a good soldier. I just happened to get assigned to my native time zone at something relatively near my accustomed latitude. So my loyalty to—what, exactly?—only remains vaguely intact for reasons mainly beyond my control. But I still nevertheless feel that it is right I should be here (even though it is no credit to me) and that my family ought to be somewhere accessible to me and to my children. Shouldn't they be allowed to know them?
Again, I am not blaming any of them individually or even as a group. Their reasons are all pretty decent reasons. But for many of them—for many of us, I should say—there is nothing to violate. There is no home. There is no hometown. There is no ancestral land, no place where we all once were from, no place to go back home to. There's just nothing.
For generations now, my family on both sides has been mobile. They usually didn't head this far out, to be sure, but they were mobile. There hasn't been a home for… well, I don't exactly know how long. Maybe a century. Home seems to me some kind of artifact hanging on the wall of a museum, fashioned by hands long cold and dead. I can see it and see how beautiful it is, but I can't quite touch it. It is out of reach, behind the glass, above my head, somewhere else. But not here.
One of the curiosities of what it means to experience the peoples of Orthodox Christianity in America is that we are always encountering immigration. In one form or another, immigration touches everything we do. Everyone here either is or knows someone who is far from home, who has left family behind somewhere, stranded on a map somewhere. We continually are confronted by uprootedness, an unsettled restlessness where the heart is always somewhere else. But even the immigrant has a home, a place to locate his heart, even if it is not here. I'm not really sure what my family has. It's not that.
My wife and I made a commitment to try to give our children this thing we've never had—a home. It's kind of laughable, though, isn't it? I've moved twenty-two times, and she's moved twenty-three. We're not experts on home, not by a long shot. But we want roots. I want them really badly.
Roots are a curious thing, though, something that can take generations really to put down, even for trees. And some trees will never come to their full glory within the lifetime of those who plant them. I feel that way sometimes about my now 15-year-old move into Orthodoxy. I know so many families whose whole lives are bound up in this faith, bound together with cords that are centuries old, and I am deeply covetous. I don't know of anything that binds my family together like that. Even though most of them are all Evangelicals of one sort or another, they're distributed nearly randomly among a post-denominational handful of churches that happen to be close to them and are mainly the kind of thing they're used to.
But I dream of "the Orthodox Damicks," and I don't know if I will ever see such a thing. Right now, we are the only ones. Will my children remain in the Church? Will they marry Orthodox Christians and raise Orthodox Christians? Will they know Emmaus as their home and remain in the Lehigh Valley so that we all will celebrate Pascha and Christmas and Theophany together, so that I will get to baptize and marry them, so that many cousins will go to church together, so that love will not only be something we do over the telephone?
Forgive me all this. I know it's self-indulgent. But I do have a point in all this. Even though it's true that we have no continuing city, that we seek the one to come, we best reflect and preach that city that is to come by making the homes we have into Paradise as much as we are able.
I think it will be long after I am dead before the Orthodox Damicks will have their earthly Paradise, at least the incomplete, contingent one that will help them along to salvation toward the true Paradise. But like a monk I know once told me, you still plant the tree, even though you know it may be a century before it's truly grown.
Gardening is hard. We do it anyway.
Priest vs. Machine: Dollar Rent A Car as an Emblem of Bureaucratic Nihilism
I offer up the following experience as a data point along the continuum into deeper inhumanity because of the too-big-to-care nature of much of corporate and government life in these latter days:
I recently had the misfortune of renting a car from Dollar Rent A Car at the Atlanta airport. The original estimate for the rental was $93.50 for three days' use. But in the end, I paid $233.28. I thought it might be a little more than the estimate, since I forgot my GPS device at home and asked to use one of theirs, but I was unprepared for a rate that was roughly 250% what had been estimated, though I had been prepared to get something ignominious like the screamingly red Kia they assigned me.
Somehow, I also signed for insurance and "roadsafe options," and the sales representative never once explained to me that those things were not actually required. Mind you, even though I asked questions and tried to understand all this (I am not a regular car renter), the sales representative's thick non-American accent made it hard to understand the monotone script that he no doubt had well memorized. (I do not blame him, of course, for the unavoidably degrading nature of his employ. Nor, of course, do I blame him for being from another country. I love people from other places, and I love other languages, but someone whose job it is to talk to people needs to be comprehensible to his customers.)
On top of all that, even though I knew that I was reserving a car for three days, when I returned it, I was actually only a little over 17 minutes past 48 hours' use. I sent a letter to Dollar explaining all this in a most irenic tone and not once demanding a refund (I was sure they had my signature on file for everything), but hoping that perhaps they might at least not count 17 minutes as 24 hours and give me a partial refund. I also told them that, based on my experience, I did not see myself renting from them again and would warn people off from doing business with them. This is what I got in return:
Dear Rev. Damick,
Thank you for notifying us of your recent experience with Dollar Rent A Car in Atlanta. We appreciate the opportunity to assist.
We have attached a copy of the final billing contract that we received from the location for your review. We are showing that LDW, the navigation unit and the roadsafe options we [sic; no doubt they meant "were"] accepted and signed for at the beginning of the rental. Due to this information all charges are done correctly and we are not showing a refund. Please let us know if you have any further questions.
Thank you once again, Rev. Damick, for taking the time to notify us of this situation. We look forward to serving you again soon at Dollar Rent A Car.
[Name redacted - Fr. A]
Member Services Representative
Case ID: 2013018
I probably should have searched to discover that this is what I would likely get. It seems that "Refuse to adjust, relying on terms of agreement" is their S.O.P. Here's my response to that (slightly edited to fix some typos and grammatical mishaps):
I will essentially take this to mean "You signed for all this stuff, so even if we didn't really explain it to you, we have the legal upper hand, so no refund."
I'm not sure whether what I was attempting to communicate really got across, though. I was not actually demanding a refund, though it might have been a gesture of goodwill on your part to offer at least a partial one. I was sure after I realized what happened that I had indeed signed for all those things. I'm not accusing you of cheating me.
The problem, though, is that the process itself leaves almost no room for actually understanding what is being signed for, and your representative certainly did not explain these things to me, something that would perhaps be expected in the normal circumstance of a traveler renting a car after having gone through all the annoyance of air travel. That is the essence of my difficulty here.
Now, I have no doubt that you do enough business that people getting charged for things they signed for but didn't really understand does not particularly bother you. And especially since they signed, it probably doesn't have to bother you in any legal sense. But I do hope I might appeal not to your sense of legality here but rather of simple, basic courtesy and humanity (even if not morality). One would imagine you would want your customers to know exactly what they're buying and what they don't have to buy if they don't want to. I certainly didn't want to buy insurance or "roadsafe options" (I still don't even know what those are), but somehow I did anyway.
In any event, my purpose is not to come off as a pompous know-nothing who breezed through something without any care for the consequences. I asked your representative why all those charges were there, and whatever it was he said was incomprehensible to me, perhaps because the script he no doubt is required to read from is written that way and possibly that combined with his thick accent. In any event, the point is that one of your customers has walked away disappointed.
I am sure that you do not have to care, but I hope you might. We're human beings out here. Perhaps there are some in there, too. I hope so.
A shout into the darkness, I am sure, but one may as well say something and try to be civilized about it and even wax slightly philosophical. Caveat emptor, caveat lector.
Update: It looks like a problem quite similar to one of mine is actually the subject of a lawsuit against Dollar.
The Election's Over: Let's All Work Together?
I was never going to be happy with the results of yesterday's election.
The leadership of both major American political parties is deeply compromised by corporatist interests who are served by an inflationary monetary policy managed by people who largely used to work for those interests and/or will do so again. Both major candidates are representatives of this entrenched political class. So there was no way I was going to be happy with who won. There are many problems with this political class and what it pursues (many of which are enabled by the aforesaid monetary policy), no matter which party banner it happens to wave, and I have a lot of criticisms for it, so no one who is a champion of this class is likely to garner support from me.
As such, I was prepared this morning to see elation by the people whose candidate won the election and not really to feel good about it, even if one candidate was slightly closer to me in terms of his rhetoric. But I didn't really think too much about what else I might see, which turned out to be some folks' attempt to be gracious and conciliatory following a bitterly fought campaign. (And I do hope that at least some folks out there will note the irony of a corporatist-backed candidate fighting bitterly against a corporatist-backed candidate. Will Pepsi win? Coke? O! the excitement!)
This graciousness has essentially boiled down to one major sentiment: Let's put all this behind us now and work together.
I've seen a lot of rather nicely warm posts online about America "coming together" to stand "shoulder to shoulder," etc., to "work on our problems." The sentiment behind such comments is of course laudable. We should indeed be united. We should indeed work together. But such sentiments imply that there are common goals.
Some goals at least seem to be common, to be sure—jobs, peace, etc., but they are so nebulous in their terms and the means to achieve them required by different political philosophies so divergent that one has to wonder whether such goals really can be worked on together. If, for instance, you believe that it is wrong to increase employment by making more people into employees of the state or your neighbor thinks it's wrong to increase employment by giving rich employers their tax money back, neither of you are "against job-creation." You're both for job-creation, but your principles require different means to achieve that goal. One or both of you may of course be wrong about whether those means actually work.
But there are goals that some of our politicians have that I absolutely refuse to work with anyone toward putting into effect.
I will not work with anyone to pay for, encourage, or permit abortion on demand. Likewise, I abhor faceless drone warfare and extra-judicial assassinations, undeclared wars, interventionist foreign policy, the surveillance state, the notion that all property belongs to the state and may be confiscated at any time for any reason, the increasing centralization of political and economic power, the sanctioning and subsidy of every base human impulse (and I don't just mean sexual ones), the drive to shove religious liberty and even discussion out of every facet of public life, and several other things besides. Most of these convictions are based directly on moral principle determined by my core beliefs, while others are derived from those principles.
To "work with" anyone to accomplish these goals is a violation of my beliefs. I am also saddened by the reality that most of these things, either by explicit commitment, by omission or by the weakness of political will, are indeed the goals of both of the major American political parties.
Thus, when I read these calls for us to "set aside our differences" and "work together," while I fully understand and appreciate the sentiment behind them, it's hard to read them as saying anything much different than "Stop believing in your principles and work with me on mine instead."
No, I don't think so.
I'm not a "culture warrior," at least not in the sense that I think that the force of law should be used to make people behave as I would prefer them to. If they become a public menace, yes, of course the law should restrain them. But I cannot make them moral by passing laws against immorality. That said, I do think that there is a war going on, and it's a war that requires that people stick to their principles, even (and especially) in the face of calls to "work together."
There is a very deep problem with our modern political culture, and it's one that I think that not only Christians—who believe in the inherent and infinite worth of the human person as created according to God's image—but also non-Christians who also believe in that same worth on other bases need to take note of. For every problem, there seems to be a system that needs to be invented, a new machine that will solve everything. Why can't everyone just shut up and submit to the machine? Don't they realize that this machine will finally be the machine we have all hoped for? Don't they realize that we should all work together to make the new machine a reality?
The temptation is not only to utopianism, which is the eschatology of secularism, but it is something even more insidious—a direct attack on the integrity and sanctity of the human person. That is what stands behind the drive by our whole political class always to begin some new programme, some new initiative, some new regulation, some new standard, some new thing to which we must all submit so that we will have happiness, peace and prosperity, whether we like it or not.
This affliction, you see, is much deeper than DECISION 2012™, etc. It goes down to the root of our desire to dominate all life, all matter—whether animal, mineral, vegetable or especially human. Once we decided that all the world must finally be malleable to our will, then we decided something very dangerous.
This has become something of a rambling rant, I know, and you can probably tell that thinking overmuch about our political state is not something that brings out much hope in me. But I will try to leave you, gentle reader, with some hope, nevertheless. You have, after all, deigned to read this far.
I know a number of Orthodox Christian clergy who are quite vocal about their politics, even in terms of parties and candidates, though I don't know any who use their position as clergy to make any official endorsements. I can't be one of those, at least not in that way, if only because I see little that is redeemable in our current political culture.
But I am indeed interested in politics, and I have strong political opinions. I propose a politics, however, that is far more subversive than any SuperPAC ever can be, one that will not please any party and probably very few candidates. And what is that more subversive politics? It requires taking some of our central political ideas and reinterpreting them.
It is part of the American political mythos that any single person can change the world. There is a sense in which I believe that, though I don't believe it in terms of the "any kid can grow up to be president" piece of it. (Statistically, almost no one will grow up to be president.) Rather, I believe that the infection which afflicts our political culture requires not merely some policy nor even a philosophy. Neither is what is needed merely a new marketing strategy to reach the electorate. What is needed is a new electorate. As long as the electorate continues to prefer the Machine, they will continue to get the inhuman and dehumanizing effects of the Machine.
The only way to a new electorate is the change of the human person, a genuine spiritual reorientation and movement toward a different set of goals than comfort, predictability and domination over the whole earth.
How do I intend to change the world? Primarily, I must change myself. But I also hope to influence you to change, too. What can we work together toward? We can pursue humility. That is a goal I think we all really can embrace together.
But this call to set things aside and work together comes with a price and therefore a warning: If we really seek humility, learn it and practice it, then we will find that our desires for comfort, predictability and domination will be stripped away. But we should also take joy in that, because in casting those things aside, we will find freedom and become people who don't just "care about" particular classes or categories of people, but actually self-sacrificially love the person next to us. Such people need few (if any) programmes or policies.
Never give in on principle, not even to "work together." But here is something we should all be able to agree on—humility, the most neglected virtue of the modern age. Let's all try it and see what happens, shall we? Hardly anyone can grow up to be president. But everyone—without exception—can grow up to be a saint.
But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you. (Matthew 6:33)
A Firm Foothold
I feel that as long as the Shire lies behind, safe and comfortable, I shall find wandering more bearable: I shall know that somewhere there is a firm foothold, even if my feet cannot stand there again. —Frodo Baggins
I happened upon this quotation again yesterday evening, while I was reading my daughter The Lord of the Rings. It seems a dauntingly long tome to read to a five-year-old, but of course we have years, if need be. She's also already listened to the whole of The Hobbit and liked what she heard and wanted to hear more about hobbits. So of course I could not resist. Naturally she will not remember everything or understand all the details this time around, but that doesn't particularly matter. So it goes with all of the good tales for any of us, including, I think, the Book itself.
As someone who is in some sense homeless (though not houseless), having lived now in twenty-two separate dwellings across fifteen towns, six states and one unincorporated territory, these words from Frodo in anticipation of his great Quest always make me a bit sad. Much of Tolkien's work is about a sense of loss, of remembering things that never will return, and when Frodo speaks these words to Gandalf, he has no idea yet how much he will lose, that he will indeed lose the Shire for himself, even while he saves it for others.
The sadness that I feel is not quite Frodo's sadness, though, because there is no geographic place that I have left behind and can return to or at least hope for while I am in my wanderings. And while I do intend to spend the rest of my days here in Emmaus, I think that it is too late for me to have a home. Though I am not old, I am too old for that. I've done it backwards from Frodo—I have tried to find a home after my wandering rather than embarked upon my wandering from a home already found and already loved.
My point here is not really about me, though. My life is what God has permitted it to be, even if I've muddled it up here and there, and I am grateful for what I have received. No, the point is about that "firm foothold" that Frodo mentions. For him, it is the Shire, and he carries memories of the Shire throughout the Quest to destroy evil. I do not have a Shire of my own, not in the sense that there is some specific place I can place my mind's feet to gain that firm foothold.
But even though some of us are homeless in this life, I think that we nonetheless have the possibility for such a firm foothold, for a memory of beauty and homeliness (to use homely in its British sense, roughly homey in American English, though not so rustic). I hope I can say this without sounding like a romantic, but for me that firm foothold has become the worship of the Church, most especially in its Byzantine iteration, with which I was first imprinted in Orthodoxy. It is not quite the same as having a home in the earthier sense—a sense I encourage all to develop as best they can, even in such a homeless state as I find myself—but there is certainly a firm foothold to be had there, a power and glory and sense of belonging that can be carried along in any place of wandering, any struggle, any peril, as we pursue our own great Quest.
There are many instances throughout the history of the Church in which the saints, those people who were most infused with God's presence here on earth, did something peculiar as they faced imprisonment, torture and even death—they sang hymns. I cannot help but think that their experiences in worshiping the one True God in His Body the Church became for them the firm foothold that made their wandering bearable. And when faced with the gravest of circumstances, they called to mind that power and energy, and they brought it forth again in an act of anamnesis (a term usually referred to the invocational memory that brings Christ's passion and death into the here and now as the Eucharist). While Frodo could only engage in mneia (recall), we Christians have the possibility for anamnesis, bringing the Savior Whose salvation we remember into the very present by means of collective invocational memory.
As we do that, the orcs and Uruk-hai and evil wizards and the Ringwraiths and even the Enemy himself can be borne rightly, with patience and even with love and with joy. And in so doing, like Frodo, we can also destroy evil and loosen its hold on our hearts.
Saving the World from Suicide: Localism, Christian Evangelism and the Culture War
The world is trying the experiment of attempting to form a civilized but non-Christian mentality. The experiment will fail; but we must be very patient in awaiting its collapse; meanwhile redeeming the time; so that the Faith may be preserved alive through the dark ages before us; to renew and rebuild civilization, and to save the world from suicide. —T. S. Eliot, "Thoughts After Lambeth"
When my wife and I married, one of our major logistical problems was figuring out where to put our combined libraries. We still have this problem, although we have discharged a number of volumes from our total. Among the books that were not part of the original merger but are an increasing portion of our cache are tomes with titles ranging from When Technology Fails to The Square Foot Garden. We are, in short, stocking up on books (and items) toward the goal of being more self-sustaining. We have various reasons for this, but one of them is the sense that a possibility exists that we need things like a manual flour mill, because it's possible that the industrial civilization around us may well collapse. It's also—and this is perhaps a bit less obvious—because the spiritual civilization around us has already collapsed.
Rod Dreher has written in a couple pieces recently (here and here, both well worth reading), specifically addressing the question of same-sex marriage (SSM) but also touching on larger issues, that the culture war has essentially been lost by conservative Christians. (I use "conservative Christian" here to refer to a theological outlook, not a political one, though of course there are political implications to all theology.)
He writes that the time has come for Christians in America to use libertarian strategies to secure religious liberty for themselves before they find their churches, businesses, education and even private behavior overwhelmed and even outright persecuted, because the competing moral vision that includes same-sex marriage as only one of its many tenets will demand more and more of the moral imagination of the people. The time is coming when Christians will not be allowed merely to tolerate moral dictates that are contrary to their own doctrines but will be expected to endorse and participate in them, or else face real penalties.
As I noted a few posts back, religious liberty is already being penalized by the courts because believers have the temerity to try to live out what their faiths teach them—and I'm not talking about trying to "impose" their beliefs on anyone else, but simply trying to live them for themselves. Christian doctrine is already thoughtcrime in countries not terribly unlike ours, and I have little reason to believe that we will somehow remain exempt.
I am not much of a social prognosticator, but I think Dreher's right. The culture of what a writer he quotes refers to as "atomism"—that the most basic moral commandment of society is that the individual should be allowed to do whatever he wants under nearly any circumstances, that there is no grand narrative larger than the individual—has become so pervasive that something like SSM is, in Dreher's words, "only a skirmish in a much broader war that we've lost. The essence of the problem? The collapse of Christianity as the foundational bulwark of our civilization — something that happened long before anybody had the slightest interest in promoting same-sex marriage, or the Sexual Revolution."
That is, the foundation of what was Christendom was ripped out long ago, and I would trace that to long before America's founding. It's taken a long time for it to come to such foundational errors regarding the nature of humanity as the Sexual Revolution makes, but those are only logical extensions of the atomistic culture of liberalism—and here, again, I am not speaking of political liberalism exactly, but of this moral idea that the individual and his desires is the only absolute on which the culture is built.
I think that conservative Christians' problem is that we're acting as though Christendom is under attack and that we have to defend it. But look around, folks. Christendom has already fallen. All we have left are the ruins, a handful of basic affirmations like the inherent worth of the person and the equality of all mankind—but even those things are subject to the charismatic domination of some ideology or leader, who may well turn those things on their heads, as the 20th century so amply demonstrated for us. As Dreher writes, "My sense is that we Christians and other traditionalists had better plan for resistance in the long run. My fear is that by focusing so many of our resources on fighting for ground we've already lost, we will have left ourselves unprepared to build the structures and strategies we are going to need to pass on what we know to be true to future generations in a culture, legal and otherwise, that is going to be ever more hostile to those beliefs."
We cannot act any longer as though we are imperial soldiers defending the borders of the empire from the barbarians. We are resistance fighters engaged in a guerrilla battle against an occupying force that conquered us generations ago. Or, if you like, we are now in much the same situation of the Apostles, who had no particular dreams of reforming the government but were instead concerned with getting the light of Gospel into a world covered in darkness.
So what, then, do we do? I think we have to continue to speak sanity clearly even in the halls of the insane, and we have to be willing to suffer for it. Even if we could use the force of law to try to enshrine certain moral precepts into the legal code, such things will not last long, as they would be counter to the prevailing cultural logic of the age. True morality is always about more than the individual, about an appeal to a narrative grander than myself alone and certainly far grander than the state with its guns. In any event, I do not believe that making the state our primary mode of speaking truth to the culture will actually serve the truth. We should of course remain involved in the political sphere, but we have to keep in mind that the law can only restrain. It cannot make men moral.
If there is going to be any hope for Christians in a post-Christendom culture, it can only be found in that primal Apostolic fire that once, long ago, turned the world upside down. We may well have to suffer some martyrdom. But we will also have to show an increasingly inhuman society what it means to be human. That is the real purpose behind a Christian localism—to demonstrate a humanity of love to those who can receive it, who are right next to us and mostly only know the Machine. This is also the purpose of our evangelism—not only to save individual souls (though that would be enough!) but also to build a new culture, refounded on the one foundation of Christ. The Church has always been counter-cultural, but in some points in history the contrast with the surrounding culture is greater than others. This is one of those moments in history.
All this is part of the great worth of homeschooling, pilgrimage, gardening, opting out of the 24/7 entertainment/infotainment culture, knitting church communities more tightly together, and learning all the skills that many of our pioneering forebears had to know for survival. We may well need these things for basic survival, especially if the moral corrosion of post-Christendom continues to express itself in economic corrosion. But even apart from these skills' value for survival, they also teach us to be human, to be humane, to love, to deny extraneous and unnecessary possessions. They have a spiritual value, both for our own salvation and for our evangelism.
We may well find ourselves in a situation not unlike that described in Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, in which most of a galaxy is plunged into war and barbarism, but there are two libraries ("foundations") at distant corners of the galaxy, waiting for their contents to be used to restore civilization far more quickly would have formed unaided. Christians may end up being embattled enclaves of sanity, whose very existence will stand witness to the world that it is possible to live with self-sacrificial love for one another and who will retain the knowledge of how to worship the one God and to receive the divine energies needed to be fully human.
Even if it really is the case that religious liberty is not about to be overwhelmed by the atomist culture of materialism and desire, we still have to approach this culture as the Apostles did their own. We live in an empire that is not Christendom, but rather the domain of spiritual powers working for the Enemy. If the Gospel is going to fall on ears that are anything but deaf to it, it will have to be accompanied by a clear, authentic demonstration of the humanity of love, a sane humanity that loves people, loves the earth, and treats all persons and places as holy and bearing the sacred imprint of the Creator. We will soon be the only alternative to the madness of the Machine.
And some of us may well have to die. I hope we'll be ready.
The Mass Cult of Big
The following is essentially a piecing together of selections from a Facebook thread in which I participated today. The following quotation led off the discussion:
We have become fascinated by the idea of bigness, and we are quite convinced that if we can only 'stage' something really big before the world, we will shake it, and produce a mighty religious awakening. – D. Martin Lloyd-Jones, 1958
This response was given by a poster:
"Doing something big, for bigness sake is silly and egocentric… however we shouldn't fear something becoming something big…"
This was followed by a back-and-forth discussion. Here are my responses, more or less, stitched together and revised a bit:
I don't fear big. But I am deeply suspicious of it.
Why? "Big" almost always means systems and ideology, but rarely attention to persons. It is typically about marketing, not about communion. It almost always means vanity (though usually is not advanced enough for real pride), but almost never any humility. It is usually about control and not about freedom. That's why.
I am not talking only about church size, but about more than that, i.e., philosophy, politics, economy, architecture, education, etc. But even if we were talking solely about church size, a church designed to be big is automatically subject to all those problems. It is so prevalent one could almost assume that it's written down in some sort of mega-church mega-manual. But such things are by no means prevalent on the much smaller scale. Why? Because human beings can only truly know so many people. After one's communal capabilities are saturated, the only way to maintain things is through ideological and technocratic systems. Even the mega-churches at least sense this, which is why they do "small groups" to try to offset their technocratic leviathan.
Yes, some little church communities do indeed exert a kind of control over members, but that is rather the sectarian/cultic impulse, which is not really about the question of big/small or systematic/local, but rather of fierce personal loyalties. The fact that a mega-church cannot command such loyalties is precisely because of its inherent weakness—it is not about incarnational communion, but about marketed, corporatized consumption. Loyalty is created to a product, to programmes (which are a kind of product), not to persons.
If a mega-church is less susceptible to cultic-style control, it is essentially because it is a corporate entity that does not and cannot care. But it exerts a far more subtle and pernicious kind of control over its clients. It is one vast system, and if the mice wandering around in the maze do not realize they are in a maze, so much the better! The control here is essentially the control of the consumerist market, keeping consumers trapped in their own passions and desires. The rules it enforces are the demands of ideology and system—why do you think mega-churches need so many signs, ushers, automated check-ins for kids, etc.?
At least a little cult-like religious community still maintains the clear sense for its members that it is a set-apart elect. Members can more easily leave such a group, because all the control is usually focused into one or two people, and members may more easily have full social networks that are not comprised by the sect. And at least there is the possibility for repentance of the leadership. In a mega-church, if one head of the hydra is cut off, no one particularly questions the whole system. They just find another head to run the monster.
Loyalty should be only to Christ, not to personalities or religious products or programmes.
Yet "big" tends to lead in such directions almost without fail. "Small" actually quite rarely does. Very few small churches are cults of personality. But big ones quite often are, and they are more often (and sometimes simultaneously) cults of religious product.
It is telling that, in the early years of the Church, when congregations started becoming large enough that not everyone in the same city could easily join together for worship, the bishops began delegating their authority to presbyters to lead spin-off congregations.
And then when the faith was finally legalized in the early 4th c., there wasn't a sudden move to building gigantic church buildings so that the full Christian population of cities could recombine.
The general rule was always small and local, even when necessity did not require it. It was because of a theology of the Incarnation and the communion that it creates, something that simply cannot scale up indefinitely, because of the God-made limitations of human personhood.
A desire to scale up indefinitely is indicative of a defective theology of the Incarnation, usually one that is devoid of any ecclesiology. Church is conceived of not as communion, but as rock concert.
It is true, of course, that some 3,000 people were baptized into Christ on Pentecost. That's actually a fascinating and telling example, though—the Apostles were clearly perfectly capable of attracting a mass "rally" of sorts, but there's only one example of such a thing ever happening. This exception proves the rule.
It is one of the great (at least linguistic) ironies of modern American Christianity that it has become a mass religion—a massive religion about masses of people, but without any hint of the mass.
Ite, missa est.
Ten years ago today—April 26, 2002—I first sat down and had coffee with the beautiful woman in the picture above. This picture was taken about sixteen months later, on our wedding day.
Our pairing was (and in some ways, remains) unlikely. When I met her ten years ago, she was actually an atheist with a Lutheran background she had left behind in her teens. Although when I met her I was quite interested in her, I never attempted to convert her to anything, though of course I invited her to church (at our first meeting, in fact). She came, and she stayed.
I proposed to her a little less than four months later, while she was doing dishes. I was fairly sure of her response before I began (by reading her a poem and giving her a ring with an amethyst), especially since she already had her wedding dress purchased. (It had been the tax-free weekend, you know.) We had also actually arranged a wedding date with the priest. I don't remember when that was, to be honest, so I don't really know when we had essentially agreed to be married, although without yet going through the ritual of proposal.
We were also something of an unlikely pairing because, although we never really explored it very much at the time, we were probably initially worlds apart politically. We've both changed a lot in that regard since then, and now we have nearly identical opinions about politics and even work together to figure out how we want to vote.
Probably the biggest unlikelihood of our courtship and marriage was cultural: I was raised Midwestern/Southern/Missionary/Evangelical, while she represents a hybrid of upper-Midwestern/Lutheran and immigrant/Palestinian/Lebanese/latent-Orthodox, favoring the latter in many respects, though of course she still says melk (rather than milk) like her Wisconsin relatives and was raised with their religion. The curious mix of communication styles that come with each of our backgrounds (not to mention, the basic fact that we are a man and a woman) have made for challenges over the past ten years, but I do think that we've largely acquired something of the best of each other's worlds, especially in our better moments.
I was an Orthodox Christian when I met her (though only about four years into it), and of course now we both are, as she was received into the Church just a few days before our wedding. Yet while we are both Orthodox Christians, we are different kinds of Orthodox Christians. From my pastoral experience, I can see that these differences are partly just the differences that come because we are a man and a woman, though they also come from the different paths we took to get into the Church. Hers was always communal, whether from her father's childhood background in Orthodoxy (and even her Middle East relatives' sense of membership that doesn't much include actually going to church) or her reintroduction to it through the guy she decided to date and marry, while my path was (and in many ways, remains) a kind of personal quest, the quest for beauty.
We still have many differences, and some of the things we used to have in common we don't have in common any more. But we also have new things in common. And what we truly share between us is life—in all of its rugged, ragged, rickety glory.
As I write this, she is now quite expectant with our third child, a second son. The due date is less than three weeks away, which puts us in the "any day now" stage. (Inexplicably feel like buying us something for this event? Go here.) She took to motherhood quite a bit more rapidly and with surer commitment than I took to fatherhood, something I think is probably true in many families, if only because of the essential and deep link that is shared in the initial period of life between a child and his mother. But as the children gain more and more interface with the world outside our home, I find that fatherhood is making more sense to me, that I am becoming more a father. So I am slower at this than she is, but God gives His grace in His ways and times and completes that which is lacking—and if there is anything fatherhood reveals to a father, it is that he is lacking.
I think that what we most have in common—though often with different iterations of it—is a deep and enduring longing for home. We are both children of itinerant families and have nearly two dozen residences under our belts, and we are weary of moving, of uprooting and restarting. We want to know this place and remain in this place until our deaths, and our prayer is that our children will desire the same thing. And we mean home for all that the word means, both earthly and heavenly.
I have titled this post Conversions, because that is what it is about, really. Over the past ten years, we each have had to convert on a number of occasions—not just trying to put on an idea of what we think we ought to be, but actually having to become different people in order to meet the new demands of communion.
One of the singular insights of Orthodoxy is that man is not simply a lone hero on a quest, searching for his absolute identity and trying to acquire it or to authenticate what he suspects is his true essence. Rather, man is a dynamic being, dependent for identity not only on God but even (as dangerous as this may feel) on other human persons. He is capable of repentance. He is capable of conversion. He is capable of communion. He is capable of union with the Other.
For all of this and in all of this, I am and will always remain grateful to the Creator for my beautiful, beautiful wife Nicole. Her spunk, longsuffering, flexibility, patience and ingenuity are all elements of her beauty. She is a woman brightly-adorned by her Maker. I do not know or wish to know what my life would have been like without her. But from that moment, ten years ago today, when our communion began, I knew that I had found beauty—and that I would, even in my imperfection and frequent failure, try to be with her always.
The Transfiguration of Place: An Orthodox Christian Vision of Localism
Both parts of my talk, The Transfiguration of Place: An Orthodox Christian Vision of Localism, are now available via Ancient Faith Radio. Get them here: Part 1, Part 2
I have to say that this is one of my favorites among the things I've written. A number of folks have actually asked me to expand this into a book, but I don't think I really yet have the experience or background to have enough material to warrant a book on this. Perhaps I will someday.


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Economic Activity and Labor
Household Wealth and Consumption
As if you haven't had to digest enough troublesome tales from the housing market, along comes the Federal Reserve System's Board of Governors with news that owners' equity as a percentage of the total value of residential real estate hit an all-time low of 53.1 percent in the fourth quarter of last year.
Simply looking at the picture demonstrates the problem with making too much out of that statistic: Most quarters bring a new low in owners' equity share. The same issue arises if we view the flip side of household balance sheets and look at household debt as a percentage of disposable income:
Although there is surely a limit on the level of debt that can be sustained relative to income, we have apparently not yet found that limit. What's more, total household net worth as a percent of disposable income continues to expand from its post-1991 recession low and is at historically high levels. Not everyone, however, will be impressed by that net worth statistic. As the experience of the late 1990s demonstrated, the net worth picture can change rapidly when the bottom falls out of an asset boom. And there is little doubt that the importance of housing investments in household balance sheets has increased over the past several years, on both the asset and liability side:
In the face of sharply declining rates of housing-price appreciation, these balance sheet developments are generating no shortage of concern about the financial health of U.S. households. One aspect of these concerns is that a deterioration in household wealth could cause a noticeable decline in consumption spending, requiring yet further, potentially disruptive, adjustments in the allocation of economic resources. It is true that growth in retail sales has been drifting south for over a year now…
…but we should remember that overall consumption expenditure only loosely tracks retail sales:
In fact, though the mix of expenditures on durable goods, nondurable goods, and services shifted in January, total consumption expenditures appear to be holding steady:
Though the most recent Blue Chip forecasts for 2007 show only a slight drop-off in the growth of consumption spending, it is possible that the pace of consumer spending will may look less appealing when the data for the first quarter arrives. Furthermore, those healthy spending levels of the past several years have been associated with a dramatic decline in household saving.
Relatively high levels of saving by businesses have been enough to keep net national saving in positive territory, and low personal saving rates do not automatically spell trouble. But it is fair to wonder just how long household saving can remain negative before consumption plans begin to feel the strain.
Economic Trends is published by the Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.
Views stated in Economic Trends are those of individuals in the Research Department and not necessarily those of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland or of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. Materials may be reprinted provided that the source is credited.
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ZARAGOZA, Spain (AP) -- Under-pressure Zaragoza president Agapito Iglesias has decided to sell his majority stock in the relegation-threatened Spanish club.
Iglesias has not been a welcome figure for Zaragoza fans this season with the team last in the standings and nine points from safety. Iglesias says in a statement the decision comes with "immediate effect" after failing to find new investors.
Zaragoza, which beat Arsenal in the 1995 Cup Winners' Cup final, is in bankruptcy protection with debts of over €110 million ($145 million). Recently, disgruntled fans have held regular demonstrations outside the club's Romareda stadium.
Zaragoza has 13 games remaining to try to stay in the first division. The team has won only four of its 25 matches so far this season.


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Bahraini two-year plan aims to boost labor market
A two-year plan which aims to ensure stability in the country's labour market, increase the number of jobs available and provide employers with a qualified workforce is being drawn up, said a senior government official.
Labour Minister and chairman of the Labour Market Regulatory Authority (LMRA) Jameel Humaidan yesterday ordered a committee in charge of preparing the plan for 2012-2014 to carry out a detailed study.
Once approved, it will be incorporated into all labour-related programmes and it is being drafted by the committee comprising representatives of the Labour Ministry, LMRA, the Education Ministry and Tamkeen, which met for the second time yesterday.
Meanwhile, the LMRA is preparing a proposal to reduce Bahrainisation ratio and allow more expatriate labour to join the workforce, LMRA chief executive Osama Al Absi was quoted as saying by our sister publication Akhbar Al Khaleej.
Top Headlines
- AUB students start the academic year with 'mixed emotions' as strike looms
- It's a good time to be job hunting in the UAE
- Getting the jobsworth: New challenges faced in the UAE employment market
- Teachers' strike divideds Jordan's educators as students seen as main victims
- Profits in the name of education: GCC reeking in $6 billion worth of international school fees
- Beware of Bahrain's new blacklist! Employers hiring illegal workers to face new penalties under new policy
- Youth unemployment to blight Middle East according to Bahraini minister
- Major Bahraini businessmen express anger over expat levy
- Can you guess which Gulf country's unemployment is less than four percent?
- Bahrain plans mystery mega project


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ACTS Faculty
- Gabriel Barrera
- William Bloodgood
- Kimberly Carbone
- Lue Morgan Douthit
- Christopher DuVal
- James Edmondson
- Ezra Severin
- Jim Giancarlo
- Jane Hickinbotham
- Jakey Hicks
- Michael J. Hume
- Theatre Teacher Training Faculty
- Lynn Jeffries
- Annette Julien
- David Kelly
- Konnie May
- Jeremy Lee
- Eric Levin
- Maggie McClellan
- Susan McMillan
- Maggie Dick
- Penny Metropulos
- Michael K Maag
- Sean O'Skea
- Jamie Peck
- Steven Ritz-Barr
- Deborah Rosenberg
- Chris Sackett
- Dennis Smith
- Jonathan Spencer
- G. Valmont Thomas
- U. Jonathan Toppo
- Don Weingust
- Paul Zaloom
Don Weingust
Past Theatre Teacher Training Faculty
The author of the Routledge text Acting from Shakespeare's First Folio: Theory, Text, and Performance. Don is very active professionally; writing, giving papers at conferences, organizing seminars (most notably for the Shakespeare Association of America), and conducting research. He is the founding chair of the Shakespearean Performance Research Group of the American Society for Theatre Research. A trained director, he is an Equity actor and has worked off-Broadway and with regional repertory theatres such as the Berkeley Repertory Theatre and the Arizona Theatre Company. He came to southern Oregon from Tufts University, where he was the resident Shakespearean in the Department of Drama. Don holds a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley.
In 2009 Don joined G. Valmont Thomas to teach the elective course Bring Shakespeare to Life: Text to Performance.


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Madeleine Wickham
St. Martin's Paperbacks
40 Love
Madeleine Wickham
Patrick Chance has the perfect setting for a tennis party—the White House. Bought out of his bonuses as an investment salesman, it is complete with stable, bar, jacuzzi, shell-shaped bedheads, and, of course, the tennis court. But what is the real reason for the party? His brash and beautiful wife, Caroline, hides her suspicions in a cloud of Pimm's-induced laughter. She's happy to welcome Stephen and Annie, their impoverished former neighbors, less happy to see newly wealthy Charles and his aristocratic wife, Cressida, and barely able to tolerate the deadly competitive Don and Valerie. As the first ball is served over the net, it signals the start of two days of tempers, shocks, revelations, the arrival of an uninvited guest—and the realization that the weekend is about anything but tennis.
It was the sort of warm, scented evening that Caroline Chance associated with holidays in Greece; with glasses of ouzo and flirtatious waiters and the feel of cool cotton against burnt shoulders. Except that the sweet smell wafting through the air was not olive groves, but freshly mown English grass. And the sound in the distance was not the sea, but Georgina's riding instructor, intoning—always with the same monotonous inflection—'Trot on. Trot on.'
Caroline grimaced and resumed painting her toenails. She didn't object to her daughter's
Madeleine Wickham talks about her new book 40 Love, a delightful women's fiction book about tennis and so much more.
Listen to this audiobook excerpt of 40 Love by Madeleine Wickham, a.k.a. Sophie Kinsella, the bestselling author of the Shopaholic series. Everyone wins this game of literary tennis, a comedy of manners about envy in which Wickham skewers the nouveau riche. At their country estate, Patrick Chance and his wife host a weekend tennis party. As four couples gather on the sunny terrace, it seems obvious who among them is succeeding, and who is falling behind. But by the end of the party, nothing will be quite as
Praise for the bestselling novels of Madeleine Wickham
A Desirable Residence
"A well-executed and unexpected ending caps the dizzying action and demonstrates why Wickham is so deservedly on her genre's A-list."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A remarkably assured tale of adultery, avarice, and angst." —The Daily Mail (UK)
sleeping arrangements
"A delightful story…surprises abound…Wickham does a bang-up job."—Publishers Weekly
"Wickham's [Sleeping Arrangements] has a different tone than do her Shopaholic tales, but it's an equally engaging yarn, sure to please her many fans and gain her new ones. —Booklist
"Memorable characters who are as unpredictable and multifaceted as they are stylish."
—Publishers Weekly
"Wickham [is] an observant and engaging storyteller."—Kirkus Reviews
"[A] witty and deeply biting novel of modern manners and morals."
—Library Journal
"Wickham knows her characters well and the story never drags... an enjoyable read."
"Wickham has a shrewdly malicious touch with her characters."—The Atlantic Monthly
"Deliciously funny... witty and wicked."—Kirkus Reviews
"Wickham serves up a healthy dose of good-natured witticisms mixed with biting retorts."—Publishers Weekly
"Wickham writes a witty tale that goes beyond mere gossip, fashion, and fun; she provides a wickedly insightful look at the choices women make between career, children, and relationships."—Booklist
"Kinsella fans will feel right at home... At this Wedding, prepare to laugh, and maybe get a little misty."—USA Today
A Novel
Madeleine Wickham


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Presented by BEACHSPORT.org, the Chambers of Commerce and Cities of Hermosa Beach, Manhattan Beach, Redondo Beach, Torrance, Los Angeles County Fire Department and Department of Beaches and Harbors.
The 2014 Surf Festival will be held July 30 - August 3
Wednesday, July 30 & Thursday, July 31
9:00 a.m. Charlie Saikley Volleyball Tournament - Manhattan Beach Pier 6-Man / 6-Woman.
Thursday, July 31
6:00 p.m. Los Angeles County Lifeguard Medal of Valor Dinner - Redondo Beach - Seaside Lagoon.
Friday, August 1
7:00 p.m. LA County Lifeguard Championships - Hermosa Beach Pier. U.S. Coast Guard Helicopter & L.A. County Lifeguard Rescue Demo, 6-Lifeguard Run Relay, Lifeguard Events, Bud Stevenson Intracrew Medley Relay.
Saturday, August 2
6:45 a.m. International Bodysurfing Championship - Manhattan Beach Pier, North side.
7:30 a.m. Surfing Championshps - Manhattan Beach Pier, South Side.
8:00 a.m. Dick Fitzgerald Two-Mile Beach Run - Hermosa Beach Pier.
9:00 a.m. California Beach Volleyball - Hermosa Beach Pier.
11:00 a.m. Mich-Ultra Surf SUP - Manhattan Beach Pier, South Side.
7:00 p.m. So Calif. Lifeguard Championships - Hermosa Beach Pier, U.S. Coast Guard Helicopter & Los Angeles County Lifeguard Demo, Lifeguard Events / Junior Lifeguard Taplin / Lifeguard Beach Flags, Judge Taplin Three-Mile Lifeguard Medley Relay.
Sunday, August 3
7:30 a.m. Velzy-Stevens Pier-to-Pier Paddleboard Championship - Manhattan Beach Pier, North Side.
7:30 a.m. Sand Castle Design Contest - Manhattan Beach Pier, South Side.
9:00 a.m. California Beach Volleyball - Hermosa Beach Pier.
9:00 a.m. Dwight Crum Pier-To-Pier Swim - Hermosa Pier to Manhattan Pier, no Race Day entries, Contestants must pre-qualify. Information: firstname.lastname@example.com. Pre-registration only.
9:30 a.m. Paul Matthies Dory Race - Hermosa Pier (8:30am check-in).
1:00 p.m. South Bay Youth Swims and Paddles - Hermosa Beach Pier, North side.
Print Version


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At Mrs G and Me, we all LOVE to cook and experiment in the kitchen! We make everything from scratch - soups, sauces, even our blackening spice, cajun seasoning, you name it! Stop in and enjoy a great atmosphere, great people (that includes you and yours!) and a meal you won't forget. Mrs G is always in the kitchen and Me (aka Mr G) is always in the dining room. We look forward to seeing you!
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Anonymous and More
Sometimes it's hard to hold your nerve in this business. A gorgeous day on Sunday and we were empty. A gorgeous day on Monday and we were packed. Another beautiful day on Tuesday and we did ok, not great but ok. Planning and ordering is still not easy as we are just easing our way into summer.
Our Dining Out for Life ambassador stopped by yesterday with promotional materials. He is a great guy and we are looking forward to April 29. Do come in, join us and help support this wonderful charity.
We are looking forward to Hendersonville's second Small Plate Crawl. We're being different this year and have gone out on a bit of a limb. Instead of having small plates from our regular menu fare, we're trying a couple new things. One is a Mushroom Meatloaf with Cajun Remoulade. This meatloaf is packed with mushrooms (of course), walnuts, cheddar cheese and rice. When we have offered it as a vegetarian dish, it was very well received. We hope you will enjoy it.
We are also going to have a curry tasting during the Small Plate Crawl. We will be sampling a Thai curry, an Indian curry and a Japanese curry. They will all be made with chicken so the taste differences should be discernable.
Yes, we'll have a lot more than the meatloof and curries. We look forward to serving you.
And yes Anonymous, I'll try to start posting more often. Everyone have a great day!
2 comments:
- mwearl said...
I can't wait for the Small Plate Crawl. Both the mushroom meatloaf and curry sound wonderful. Glad I found this on Google maps.
- April 15, 2010 at 9:17 PM
Glad to hear some enthusiam. Looks like things are going preeeeety good for Mrs G & Me. The Small Plate Crawl looks very interesting. Good Menu, a friendly smile & consistancy is all you need. Not every day can be a Monday. Hendersonville offers Mrs G & Me ...a fine dining experiance.
- April 20, 2010 at 1:44 PM


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I am trying to reach a customer service representative and after going through 10 minutes of automated options the "robot" just keeps hanging up on me! Great customer service.
Home equity lines of credit are good. With this bank , if you decide to close the account ,you will need a loan because of all the surprise fees they nail you with. And if you refuse to pay, well, they can take your house. Similar to organized crime tactics
Service at this branch both indoors and at the drive-up can be very, very slow since there is not enough staff the majority of the time. There seems to be only one representative who handles routine banking issues. If this rep is not there, service is suspended which is what happened to me.
I began the process of adding my son's name to my checking account on August 28. Between going in to find out the status and the rep being away for a week, this was not completed until 9/10. The rep only began the process and really didn't follow-up at all, i.e., did not check on the status and contact me in the interim. It was up to me, the customer, to keep on top of it. When I finally received the signature paper for my son to sign, I was told it had to be back in a week. If not, the process would have to be started all over again. I had to mail this to my son and he paid $19.99 to send it back by priority mail. So, in short, putting my son's name on my account took over 3 weeks and cost $19.99 to do so. The rep did next to nothing. If this isn't poor service, I don't know what is.
Another bothersome experience involves the availability of transaction slips. When they were no longer visible, I was told Santander is going paperless. That meant (or so I thought) going inside and swiping my debit card to do transactions. However, people are still going through the drive-up so I asked the manager at my last visit how this was possible. She proceeded to give me about 5 transactions slips which were behind the counter. How on earth are customers supposed to know they exist if hidden away like this? That's inexcusable and, frankly, dumbfounding.
I have banked at this location for over 30 years and have never had such poor service. I might, also, add that the environment, itself, is sterile since you came in and decided that there should be nothing on counter tops or desks. It looks as if no one is doing anything. And I doubt they are doing much.
I dread every time I have to go to this bank! They take their time coming to the drive-up window and are not friendly. When they smile, it is not sincere. I needed to speak to a person behind a desk for a particular matter and was ignored for about five to ten minutes before I was even acknowledged. The person who took care of me was direct and unfriendly. Never asked, Is there anything else I can do for you today?" This person was in a rush to get rid of me!
My wife and i engaged several banks and found santander's rates and process suitable for our dream home project. We felt comfortable with the terms and began the application process. Shortly after, we submitted an aia doc to outline the costs of the build and a preliminary set of drawings for the appraisal process. We were told by the loan officer that the docs would be suitable for the appraisal, since we were still making selections. Several days later, i began getting calls from the appraiser asking for the same docs. Apparently, he never got the correct pages from our lo. This was the first of many issues we would have with jeff smith, our loan officer. The appraiser had also asked for more granular information on materials to be used. We did not have all of our selections made, so he was given instructions to contact the gc for further clarification. This, he would never do. In the end, it would also not matter because the appraiser stated that any further details would not sway his appraised value. The appraisal came back $150,000 less than the construction cost; the entire basis for the appraised value was "data" used to identify comps in the area. This becomes a peculiar and interesting word, one i would hear later from our less than capable loan officer. It is also important to note that in construction loans, the appraisers are not assigned through the lottery process. Herein lies the rub - santander and this appraiser are well acquainted with each other. In fact, the banks supply this "data" to appraisers, which often includes only the lower 20-30% of the comparable sales. This term is called frafing. It is a tool utilized by banks to purposefully devalue homes in order to generate mortgage buy backs. While we cannot definitively say this was santander's goal with our loan, we certainly we're not willing to stick around to find out. Our gut feeling was that something was very wrong and decided to take our business elsewhere.
Before santander , i was with sovereign bank for the past 8 years. Recently and for once i applied for a personnel loan. I filed the application july 3rd and till today i did not receive a final approval yet. Every 10 days they ask for another document and each review is 10 days. They say it will ruched but it don't matter it will be another 10 days. Most of the delay is their stupid underwritter or their printing equipment. No trust established between bank branches and loan department. I had to deal with 3 loan agent in the local branche. I meant the first before she got fired/ quit, the 2nd was a temporary filler and the 3rd who is new and have no idea where is my loan paper. Guess what? The filler took them with her when she moved to another branche. It is a joke................ I refinanced my house in 15 days total with a mortgage.... I don't need their loan any more. It lost it's purpose and the part they don't know is that i got a loan from another institution 25 days ago.... Funny... Well let say that today i closed my wife account with santander and in few day i'm closing my both accounts. Enough is enough
Santander doesn't withdraw money from my account in time to pay itself for my monthly HELOC. So it chages me a $115 late fee - EVERY MONTH.
I call every month. I visit the bank every other month. I am assured this will be fixed. It hasn't for 6 months and they refuse to refund any of the charges. I am running away screaming from these crooks. You should too.
Beware everyone, do not bank here. I have been a loyal customer for over 11 years. I upgraded my accounts once I started college to their student banking accounts. Students BEWARE- If you overdraft your checking by accident with your debit card, Santander CHARGES you $12 dollars to move money from you savings if you have more than enough money to cover the transactions. PNC and TD do this FOR FREE. What is Santander did not send me anyyyyy notifications (email, text, phone call, ANYTHING) letting me know that I overdrafted or moved money for me "as courtesy" to cover the transaction. They have stolen so much money from me in that way.
I would gave the Sphere credit card a chance to start building me credit. This card is such a rip off. It offers points for useless things, gives you only 1 point on the dollar, the points disappear without notice, and get this- ITS NOT FREE TO USE INTERNATIONALLY. For this card to be branded for all these different countries on it and not have any benefit to be used abroad should be enough for this bank to seem shadier than Bank of America. This card is a waste of my time and does nothing for me. No cash back bonus, no exciting point accumulation, nothing. If it wasn't my oldest credit card, I would trash and burn this card very fast.
Here is the meat of my problem- Santander will charge you for something you are not responsible for. I use the mobile banking app to pay my credit card, which I pay on time every month. I accidentally told the CC payment to pull from my Santander checking account, when I actually wanted to pull from my TD account (hint there, I don't use my Santander accounts anymore because I'm sick of their fees). After this wrongful transaction clears, I am closing my student accounts. I am still in school and cannot afford Santander's greedy practices anymore. Also, FYI, they do not let you link your credit card account to credit karma. Should I even say anymore?
My debit card was blocked while taking my daughter back to college in ky. The customer service rep. Told me to borrow money from a friend in ky to pay for the gas that i had pumped into the tank for the return trip. I was told that i should've called before i left my home state. I would've been fine with that advice if i hadn't been to ky 5 times previously. Upon my return approx. One week later, i attempted to order some u of ky apparrel online & my card was denied because the company was in florida. Then the customer service rep. Proceeded to inform me of all the bank transactions that took place within a 7 mile radius of my home and that these transactions constituted bank fraud. This rep. Implied that i would have to notifiy santander bank everytime i was planning on shopping in a town other than my own. When i asked why can't someone in fraud or customer service make a phone call to the customer if a "red flag" is raised about transactions instead of shutting down or blocking the card therefore preventing the customer from access their money and i'm told "that's not what we do," I can appreciate a banking facility's concern about bank fraud but not at the expense of the customer. Never had a problem with sovereign in the past. Great employees @ the pennsauken, nj & aramingo ave, Philadelphia, PA but thumbs down to customer service. Note: they will record you & your conversation for "quality purposes" but if you tell them you're recording also, they'll say they have to terminate the call "can't be recorded." So, they can record you but you can't record them. I asked, "what are you going to state to me that i can't have a copy of it? i got no reponse, except he had to terminate the call. Hmm, Bank shopping.
I have been with another Bank for many years now and just recently changed and now I am part of the Santander Bank. Reason? Scott! He is Great! He took the time to explained everything and he was so pantience and even after I left the bank, I had many other questions and the same service I received in person, I received over the phone. I can't say the same about other Santarder Branches. I am happy that I was treated with respect and the professionalism of the staff in that branch is great! I like how you are welcomed from the moment you enter the door, and that no matter if you are dress down or dress with a suit!!! you are treated right! Many of us in life have different jobs, different life styles and many necessities and different background...I appreciate that we all are treated the same way! I opened 6 account within a week! I hope it all continues the same way it started. As for anyone there, stop by and as for Scott Rosenthal, I recommend his service!
I have been with this bank for over 30 years, through a few changes in bank name, and have always been happy with my treatment. We have used a variety of their services, including loans, CDs, checking and saving. I used to live in town and knew most of the tellers and managers. When we moved away 9 years ago my husband and I kept our accounts with the bank since they had a branch at our new location in another state. It was a seamless transition, and I could always call Hopatcong to get great response to my questions. A few years ago I made a big mistake in our checking account that could have resulted in costly charges. A quick call to Hopatcong and a talk with one of the managers straightened out the problem immediately. I was grateful for that kind of service, and decided to never leave this great bank. They might have changed their name and logo, but it's still the same friendly faces/voices at this location.
Although I stay with this bank for their wonderful customer service, I also LOVE, LOVE, LOVE their Bill Pay and Extra 20 services.
I called the local branch to kindly inquire if I had left my ATM card in the ATM. I was told that since it has been past 3 business days my card had been destroyed. When I politely asked why no one from the branch called to notify me that they had my ATM card before taking the liberty of destroying the card, I was treated very rudely and my question was dismissed without an explanation or acknowledgement of my disappointment. The gentleman took great defense to my suggestion. I was simply suggesting that it would have been a courtesy to first be notified instead destroying my card without any notice.
Now I have to take time out of my busy work schedule to go to a branch to request a new card in person. I have been a customer with Sovereign for over 15 years and this is the first time I left my ATM card in a machine. I am appalled by how I was treated as an inquiring customer. I will certainly not step foot in that local branch to request a new ATM card as I do not have faith in how I will be treated in person if this is the kind of treatment I received over the phone.
I had closed an account with santander bank back in june of 2013. Apparently $34. 99 was taken out of the account in august of 2013.... Again, the account was "supposedly" closed.... This put my account in a negative status with them. Mind you, i still have a checking account with them... (same name, address, phone #, ect.. )
now after a year... There telling me that i owe them $104. 00 to satisfy the account,.... But!!!!!! That's not even the best part.... They have never contacted me (mail or phone) and have put a black mark on my account for 5 years. Now i can not get a new account with any other bank because of this "black mark" with chexsystems. They are holding me hostage to keep me as a customer with santander bank.... Not to mention there outrageous fees for money that is in the account and they say it's not......
Having mislaid my Bonds I requested the Financial Adviser to reinvest the £14,000. This Financial Adviser only invested £6,000, when I challenged her at a later date, she stated that one of the bonds had not matured and that she would now reinvest it for me.
Two years later on maturity of the ISA I requested my money and was informed that I had only invested £6,000. I once again spoke to her she stated that she had no recollection and had no idea where the money had gone. She pretended to diligently go through the process of finding what had happened. Presented the mature ISA to me and stated that she would put that one in a high interest savings whilst searching for the other ISA.
I made another appointment to see her but she conveniently had a training day on that day. I was asked whether I wanted to speak to someone else but declined. Another appointment was made which she then told me that I had only seen her for 5 minutes on that day and no transaction had taken place. I asked for the £6,000 which she had stated she had invested earlier. Upon leaving she stated that my money she had returned were compliments and in fact if I had spoken to another Financial Adviser on the day she had not attended the appointment with me, I would have been informed that there was no money and that the account had been closed.
Basically the Financial Adviser had stolen my money and changed the computer data to display information to her advantage.
I would like this solved as it is white collar theft by a Fortune 500 company whose reputation depends on the loyalty of its customers.
I have a direct deposit account with Santander. I've had the same account for nearly 20 years. I started the account when it was Fleet Bank. I kept the account when it became Sovereign Bank. I still have the account now that the bank is owned by a foreign company, Spanish Santander.
This is the worst bank I have ever dealt with. ATMs, especially those in less affluent neighborhoods, the Dorchester Section of Boston, Webster Square area in Worcester, and several others, never work. Lighting at ATMs in those areas is always broken, number pads worn away, broken slots for deposits and so forth. Their Branches are large, cavernous halls with space for up to 12 tellers. There is typically only one available. Service is awful. Employees standing around chatting with each other while customers wait.
Since Santander took over, the whole company has gone down hill at a rapid pace and I need to find a new bank, quick. Not only have I been charged an unreasonable $35.00 insufficient funds fees on a number of occasions, when the money was already there, I have been charged $35.00 unavailable funds fees. This has happened when direct deposit payments have arrived, but they've slipped in a few withdrawals just ahead of posting the deposit.
Direct deposit accounts are supposed to come with benefits. I get none. With Sovereign, if I used a non-Sovereign ATM, I might get stuck with the native bank's fees, but was never charged by my bank. With Santander, they charge an additional $3.00 for using the non-Santander machine -- outrageous!
This bank comes in from another country and uses Americans as if there is nothing we can do. There is. I urge everyone who uses Santander to pull out all accounts. Let them play their usury ploys on their own countrymen. They probably do, anyway.
SEC, pay close attention to this bank. They are bad, bad business.
Santander (formally Sovereign) has outrageous and excessive overdraft fees. Supposedly, you have to sign an agreement (called "Opt-in) for the overdraft protection allowing them to cover ATM and Checking withdrawal and charges when you have insufficient funds. So, say you have $25 left in your checking and $0 in savings. Then a check deposits for $26, they will cover that check leaving you a balance of -$26. But! They will also charge you a $35 overdraft fee so now your balance is -$61. Then, if withdrawal $20 from your ATM, they will cover that, then charge you another $35 in that same day, so now your checking balance is -$96.
Important fact: Santander's policy is that they can charge this $35 overdraft fee up to 6 times in one day!
I searched all over their online banking site for information on "opting-in and Opting-out" to no avail. I searched for opt-in under their help link (in the search box) and it come up with "no results" I then search for overdraft and a couple of links come up asking "How to enroll in Santander's Account Protector?" It provides a link that says click on and "Read Carefully." Of course the link does not work. I called and complained about a couple links not working and when I checked yesterday, it was still a broken link.
I called and called to get all of my $840 overdraft fees refunded but the said "no." I wrote the president yesterday so I'll wait for that response.
Also, I requested on the phone, speaking with a supervisor, to send me my "opt in" contract or any proof that I agreed to this protection and he said they don't have any records from Sovereign, where I first enrolled in the bank.
I found out over the phone, after I was unable to find anything online about "opting in or out," that you have to actually call the bank to do so.
So, I called them on Tuesday to "opt-out." The supervisor told me it was done. So, guess what? Today is Thursday and I was charged another $35 overdraf
I had a Home Equity Line of Credit (HELOC) with Sovereign Bank which became Santander. Everything was great with Sovereign, but once Santander took over, everything went downhill -- fast! Twice they processed a regular monthly payment as a principal only payment which made my regular payments late! They refused to reverse these payments so not only was the payment late, but late fees were incurred. Finally, I had enough and requested a pay-off amount.
Went to the branch with a bank check, and the teller at first didn't know how to process the pay-off payment and then couldn't find the loan in the system. Turns out she wrote the wrong account number down. The day after paying off the loan, I get a call from them indicating that I still owe late charges! Well, those weren't included in the pay-off amount they provided? I just paid the small amount to avoid the additional harassment from these boobs. Very incompetent service. Not sure if it is training or the corporate culture. My personal prediction, they will go out of business or be taken over by another bank in the very near future. Don't use them. Run in the opposite direction!
I consider myself to be pretty tolerant of mistakes by others. I make plenty myself. But I have never had a good interaction with Sovereign/Santander Bank in the three years I've banked with them.
When I first opened my account, there was a step where you receive some forms to sign in the mail. These forms contain private information (SSN, date of birth, etc.). Santander sent me someone else's forms. This means that there's a good chance someone else received mine too. When I called about the mistake, I never received an apology or any attempt to rectify the situation beyond just sending the forms back. Good thing I'm not an identity thief.
By some weird error, I received a check "from" myself written out "to" myself in the mail a few months ago. Rather than question it (I wish I had), I deposited the check in my non-Sovereign bank account. This caused an overdraft in my Sovereign account with an accompanying $35 fee. I didn't notice this for a few weeks and went on using my Sovereign debit card like normal, racking up more fees ($35 each transaction). When I finally realized what was happening, they agreed to reimburse me for the original fee from the random check since it was entirely their fault, but refused to give me back any of the subsequent fees "because it's my responsibility to monitor my account."
I don't understand why their customer service line is only available until 8pm. If any malicious activity takes place at night, you must wait until the morning to speak to a human about it.
Phone calls get dropped. Wait times are long. And I can't figure out who I would call if I have any issues while abroad for the next few months. Because of this, I am closing my account.
I withdrew 300.00 out of my savings. When I got home, I counted out the money to give to my husband. It was $40.00 short. I tried all the next day to call them, no answer. I tried the next day. Shawn, answered. This was at 8:30 isn in the morning, said he would call me back at 9:15. When he called me back he said that teller was over $20.00 that day. REALLLY???? So, now I only get 20.00 back. He said he would be happy to give me the $20.00. Honestly, I was there to get money already, now your going to so happily let me come there again, waste more gas and your not even gonna give me my full $40.00 back? BANK SOMEWHERE ELSLE. My husbands employer writes their payroll checks on this bank and they charge him $5.00 every time to cash his check. THATs why we opened the savings accountâ?¦..to save the 5.00 each week, their suggestion and rules. So, they don't even honor the checks written out on them. Then, once we did open the account we were bombarded every night for about 6 months with phone calls about opening a checking account with them. Last but not least, when I called 911 for the Whitman office, the phone number they have for them is a bogus number, it just rings and rings.
The bank manager is one of the rudest people I have ever met! Not helpful at all! Always making excuses for her and the banks mistakes. Rather then be helpful she can not be bother by any extra work she may need to do.
Where to begin? I had a retirement account at Sovereign which allowed me to have a Premier Account. After Sovereign switched to Santander, I was getting charged $30 monthly maintenance fees because I was told, Santander did not recognize Sovereign's investment accounts. So, to the Beacon Street branch I went (in February) to sign all new paperwork to correct this issue. And yet, not only am I still getting charged the $30 monthly maintenance fee, but also the new investment account reflects all zero balances while my former Sovereign investment account, which Santander does not recognize, is still open.
Two months ago I called [Redacted] to ask him to please take care of this, but he did not. Over a month ago I called him again, he said he would look into it and call me back. Here I am, over a month later, and I am still waiting for that call. I am still getting $30 monthly maintenance fees. I think it is time to switch banks. Oh, and as an aside, I had a dormant account that should have been closed but I never got around to it, and Santander withdrew three month's worth of monthly maintenance fees ($90) to cover the cost of future monthly maintenance fees from that account.
When I asked [Redacted], the branch manager about it, he said he would look into it. He never did. I called about two months later to inquire about his alleged "search," and he actually said to me that it was I who had made the transfers! If you are thinking about opening an account with Santander, don't. They make promises they don't keep, they say they will correct a problem but then they don't bother, they say they will figure out why something keeps happening, but they really don't.
The story is long so I'll talk of the last 2 problems.
Besides having problems with getting a debt card due to their own inability to update my address on several ocassions, there's a problem with the so called triple interest savings account.
2 years ago it was suggested I open this triple savings account so I did as it was explained there are no fees etc. However, shortly after I found it had a $5K max monthly withdraw limit. Since this would not work for me I transferred all funds out ASAP.
2 years later I'm told this $5K limit did not apply. I then was very direct and asked about fees etc and was told the only thing I needed to be aware of was to maintain a min. of $100 a month auto deposit.
With the new info in hand I transferred some funds in it. 3 days later I get wacked with a maintenance fee. A phone call drew the response of "I'll talk to the manager". A week passed and nothing was done so I sent them a letter. My letter drew a phone call but no actions!
In my 45 years of banking with several banks, the problems incurred in those 45 years with all other banks combined do NOT come close to what has been my issues with Santander the past few years.
Ironic but the few dollars that IMO was skimmed from my account is peanuts compared to what Santander could have had as I was considering transferring some investments to Santander. Thank God I didn't make that mistake.
They have always been great to me and my family. I have checking, savings, line of credit and a mortgage. Never a problem. On all my accounts, I pay no fees whatsoever. I wouldn't have it any other way. I love my branch and the tellers and management in my branch (225 Atwood Ave, Cranston, RI) always treat me great and have a nice smile for me! They also have a great bill-pay service on line. I pay about 15 bills on line, they generate the checks the day I want them paid and the payments go out promptly and it is very easy to use. The entire on-line banking experience is excellent as well. Complete breakdown of my mortgage payments, telling me when taxes are paid, etc. I love Santander!
I was with Sovereign, certainly going down hill at the end, when Santander took over. I do not think Santander sweats the details. So many little issues have been problematic. For instance, I tried online to order checks; they never came. I then had to order the checks twice--at the window with the help of a teller--before the checks finally came. I had a similar problem with turning down "overdraft" protection. How many times can I say, "No," "No. Thank you," and similar statements to someone on the phone?
The Sphere credit card, prompted initially at Santander, is laughable. I needed three calls and an online request before I could get an extra credit card for another user. Although I was promised the card in ten days, I had to wait for over three months. Only after my third call, did someome notice that there was a computer issue. Once Alex was involved, she called me back, told me the issue had been resolved, and I had the card in about a week.
A barrage of new tellers who do not know me, an array of new rules about how to fill out banking slips, and out of order ATMs on the weekend helped to fuel my annoyance. Maybe I just am becoming less tolerant of poor service.
Billpay seem to work well online and I like the Mobile App for my iPad. I also have always had polite folks on the other end of the phone, and just this week began noticing phone calls, greetings when I enter the bank, and even smiles when my banking transactions are finished. Perhaps training has finally kicked in.
I am suspicious of all of the "new" accounts that seem to change every six months, and I cannot get the Sphere Card automatic payments ever to be withdrawn properly from the Santander site. Santander should have hit the ground running when they officially took over. I think they are beginning to offer a little more service or maybe I am becoming immune to the issues. But a few individuals seem to be trying a little bit lately to make the transition better for customers. Finally.
I was offered "free" overdraft protection by the Washington St, Brooklyn branch manager when I opened my account. Six months after closing my account (because of multiple minor clerical mistakes on their part), I received a statement claiming that I owed interest on my Credit line which was apparently tied to my allegedly "free" overdraft protection. Multiple calls to customer service got me nowhere. After receiving notification from a collection agency, I paid. Good riddance to a grossly disreputable Bank.
I been a member for quite a while now and ever since its changed to Santander, I've been harassed to sign up for a bunch of stupid programs which charge you every month. I wrote a check recently and it didn't cash until I didn't have enough in my account and they charged me $35 bucks. I didn't know I was under and got myself some lunch, and they charged me another $35. I now owe them about $100 bucks and I would never of known unless I looked it up myself because they didn't even call or notify me about being under. My card, however, still works when I have no cash in it. Sweet right? Avoid this bank.
My father has early stage dementia and cannot remember a lot of things. Last week when checking on the shared account that my sister holds with my 85 year old father, my sister found that all but 500 dollars of my fathers account had been withdrawn. Upon further investigation, she found that during one of his weekly withdrawals a teller at the Ashley Blvd. branch in New Bedford, Massachusetts talked him into putting all his money into a CD for 15 months.
When my sister spoke to the manager, with my father present, my father denied ever making the transaction,. He further declares that wasn't his signature on the withdrawal slip because he didn't remember signing it. In the face of this obvious error, the manager said that inorder to get his money back into his checking account, my father will have to pay the early withdralwal fee.
Santander Bank employs deceptive, predatory, financial practices against the old and infirmed and then charges them to correct the wrong that they did. Despicable.
I have been a customer at this bank for over a decade. In my opinion, this branch in Marlborough, Massachusetts is deplorable. On several occasions, I have gone in there to find no employees behind the teller counter for up to 10 minutes. One will be out front of the bank smoking. The other will be fixing the ATM or in the back. When you ask the manager if anybody is working, you get a sarcastic response.
Went in yesterday and found that yet again the employees were unable to process a simple transaction which is part of their own acknowledged policies and procedures. When I mentioned the poor training being exhibited to the supposed Branch Manager, [Redacted] she was being so unprofessional, telling me I had no basis for complaint even though I am the customer. Telling me the requested transaction is almost never done, yet Santander stocks preprinted forms at every branch for just this transaction. Yelling at me. Calling me by somebody else's name, telling me it was my responsibility to come in and introduce myself to her when she exhibited the behavior of a shrew. This woman is supposedly a Business banking specialist which in my opinion is a joke.
In my opinion, this branch has high employee turnover. Perhaps [Redacted] is a major reason for that. I'm a CPA in two states and deal with many, many businesses big and small. I wouldn't let this woman manage a piggy bank of pennies and will surely let all my business contact know that they should go elsewhere. I'll gladly take my business and cash to a bank where they actual do their jobs and respect the customer.
I have an account in UK and wished to transfer money from it but was told I live in a foreign country so I must travel to Grimsby branch to withdraw money that is four days travel for me. Santander must be the worst bank in the world by a long way and I will be closing my account as soon as I have contacted the banking ombudsman with a written strongly worded letter and a bill for 36 pounds for talking to them on a premium phone line or rather listening to music on a premium line. If I treat my customers the same as the morons at Santander, I would finish up out of work and a boot imprint on me.
Apathetic, unfriendly, terrible customer service.
Dropped by the bank this afternoon to cash a small expense check as my company doesn't process direct deposit for expenses, this is the only reason I've physically visited the bank over the past few years. I was the only person in line with three tellers behind the counter. One of them made eye contact but the three of them continued to chat about bank gossip for the next 1 to 2 minutes. I realize that doesn't sound like a long time but when there is literally a single person waiting for service and three tellers, it's completely unacceptable and disrespectful.
I was finally called up by a miserable woman named Sandra or something similar who didn't acknowledge me with a smile, a hello, nothing. I handed over my check and ID and she began to process the transaction. The only interaction she was "forced" to have with me was "do you have an account here?" and she completed her work. She then handed me my cash and turned back to continue to gossip -- no goodbye, no thank you, no nothing.
Seriously, get out of the customer service business completely if that's how you approach your job. Unreal. I'll be working diligently to transition to a new bank as quickly as possible. Good luck to anyone that keeps this bank in business.