Personality cult

Not by us, Yahweh, not by us,
by You alone is glory deserved,
by Your love and Your faithfulness.
Psalm 115 Jerusalem Bible

By the very nature of a thing, its meaning, its use or function, is implicit.

God Himself, who is beyond all being and is therefore no thing, still fits into this idea. This is the test of greatness: that the very large can enter the very small, the very high can have commerce with the very low, the beyond being can indwell the being, and the Creator can become a creature. And so, God’s meaning, use or function (though it’s unseemingly to speak thus) is to deserve glory. All that He is (God), all that He does (love), and all that He reveals (faithfulness), makes Him the only One who deserves glory. That is His nature. Our nature is the complementary one: to give glory.

If we grasp this, and then look at the world around us, and especially at ourselves, we are astonished to find that from our perspective, the opposite seems to be true. Somehow, our instincts have been changed. It is we who deserve glory (in our own estimation), even while we are mentally denying it. It is from others, and even from God, that we expect to receive glory. This is so essentially hidden from us that as soon as we do a good deed, or think a good thought, we feel happy and inwardly congratulate ourselves, as we wait for it to be noticed by others. Since God is metaphysical, we just assume that He is up there applauding us, giving us glory. Though we call Him our faithful Friend, our attitude reveals that we actually regard Him as our faithful fan. Even if no one else notices us, at least He does. I am no different. I am just as addicted as you are to this cult of personality.

Last night I was trying to have a Greek bible study with a friend in a coffeehouse. We were reading and learning from the second chapter of Luke’s gospel, the account of the presentation of Jesus in the Temple, as yesterday was the feast-day Ypapandí which commemorates it. The wonderful passage which I memorized years ago, “Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace, according to Thy word…” is one of my favorites. What a pleasure to read it in the original language, and to understand it!

At the next table, two men were standing and apparently trying to finish up some business and make their farewells. One man looked like he was earnestly trying to get away, the other as though he were trying to prolong the encounter. That man kept looking over at us reading Greek aloud and discussing it. Finally, the first man got away, the other graciously walking him to the door… or maybe not so graciously. After the first had left, the second man came back to the table and was fumbling with his stuff and fidgeting with a small high-tech digital camera, apparently looking at previews on the screen.

All at once, he looked over at us and called out, “What are you two doing? Is that Latin you’re reading?” I was facing him, so I responded, “No, it’s biblical Greek. We’re studying the New Testament.” Then a conversation ensued in which this gentleman dialogued with me, mostly, asking some questions about Greek, and then making a connexion with “Greek” by announcing that his art teacher was a young Greek girl, “no, actually she is half Lithuanian,” and that she was also a chanter in the Greek church.

“Oh, you know Martha?” I gasped, surprised. Then, gradually the conversation turned in a direction that I had hardly anticipated. This 55 year old, twice-married, left-handed, very talented graphic artist, who had totally designed his beautiful first home and then lost it in litigation with his ex-wife, and then even had the hard luck of his second wife being deported to Fiji (he didn’t explain why) without his being able to follow her there (because the Fiji government restricts the immigration of white people to keep the nation ethnically native), showed us a couple of photos of Martha on his digital camera, to prove to us that he knew her.

Before I noticed where he was going, our new ‘best friend’ had moved closer to us and was standing at the edge of our table, locating photos of all his best paintings and showing them to us. He also knew my son Andrew and had heard him play at an art exhibit (probably that Martha had managed). “Wait a minute!” he said, “I have a video of Andrew playing! Here, let me show it to you…” he said, as he passed the camera first to me and then my fellow bible student. “Very nice,” I said. “I used to listen to him practicing all night sometimes, as his bedroom was next to mine.”

Then another surprise, for me anyway. Mentioning the Greek church where my son and Martha are both cantors, I realized (too late) that I had just opened another chance for him to do a take-off on his knowledge and experience of the Greek church. “That young priest, he’s so handsome, and his pretty little wife, she’s a beauty really…” he began, as he now boasted of having met our new presbyter Fr Dimos and his presvytera. More than that my poor memory cannot recall but, trying to find some gracious closure to this ‘visit’ I asked him a rather pointed question, “Hey, why aren’t you Orthodox anyway, since you know all these people and all this stuff?”

“When I was eight or nine, I got this nifty little telescope. It was my most prized possession. I even still have it in mint condition in the original box. I was raised Catholic. You know, rosaries and statues and confession and communion and Hail Mary’s a hundred and fifty times. Well, when I used my telescope to see the wonders of the night sky, I realized that if there was a God, I could relate to him better by looking at planets and stars than by going to church. I let my parents know how I felt and they let me off the hook. They were very understanding…”

Now it made sense why all his paintings were close-ups in incredible detail of the lunar disk and surface, some of them augmented by images of fetuses in detached wombs dotted about the night sky like other planets, modern art for sure. I got quiet, realizing that if I said anything more, he would use it as an invitation to explore another facet of his personal universe and reveal it to us. That didn’t stop him. He started on a new, rather opinionated political topic, waiting for me to react.

I looked over at my fellow bible student and then waited for a pause. “What did you say your name was? …oh, that’s right. Well, I hope you won’t take offense, but we were really trying to study the bible tonight. Would you mind if we got back to it?” This was at least a half hour since he first came over to us. Without visibly being taken aback, he graciously withdrew, thanked us for the chat, gathered his things, and left.

“Now, where were we…? Ah yes, νυν απολυεις τον δουλον σου δεσποτα κατα το ρημα σου εν ειρηνη… Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace…”