Jesus Prayer and Mountain Top Removal

This story begins with myself sitting in an automobile, nearly every day, waiting for the coal train to pass by. I felt guilt and sorrow for those trains - because I am responsible for missing mountain tops in West Virginia. The coal runs our electricity power plants in Virginia. I use that electricity.

Then, as Wendell Berry puts it, I accepted that, "We are embedded in a structure that gave rise to us. We didn't give rise to it." Catholic social justice teachings describe it as a structure of sin - we participate it in unwillingly but are aware of it nonetheless.

I am neither agrarian nor Catholic; I am an urban Orthodox catechumen. What do we do when faced with sin? Pray the Jesus prayer!

So I sit in my car now, watching the coal train pass by, and say, "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner."

This is a very small beginning, but that is what our faith is about - making a beginning, even if a new one every day. I hope this little green shoot of martyrdom will continue to grow.