Make disciples

‘Make disciples,’ says Jesus. It is the second of the three commands the Lord gives us before His ascension, ‘Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things I have commanded you’ (Matthew 28:19-20).

The Lord is very direct. He is easy to understand, when we want to understand Him. ‘Go’ needs no explanation. ‘Therefore’ implies that we know who it is we have put our trust in, and why. That needs no explanation either. It just is His way of letting us know that He knows everything about us, and that He has told us everything about Himself that we need to know.

‘And make disciples of all nations,’ packs a lot of meaning in its few words. Christ knows that we will want to excuse ourselves if we find the plain meaning of His words too much of a challenge. Before we have a chance to do that, He follows up with an explanation, but only after He utters the third command, ‘baptizing them,’ a very concrete action that should be obvious to anyone who has been with Him. Though Jesus never baptized anyone, His disciples did, because He had commanded it.

But ‘make disciples,’ what do we make of that? What should we make of it? The baptizing is something we do while we’re making disciples, but what does it take, to actually ‘make disciples’? Again, Jesus is easy to understand, when we want to understand Him, but when we don’t, well, He just calls someone else who does, and He tells them that making disciples means ‘teaching them to observe all things’ that He commands us. He always expects us to ‘just do it’ when He commands. He doesn’t wait. In the gospels we don’t see Him going back and giving anyone ‘a second chance,’ but I don’t think it’s out of character for Him to do so. Remember, He’s the same Lord who tells us to forgive not just seven, but seventy times seven times, and He’s no hypocrite.

‘Teaching them to observe all things I have commanded you’ seems intimidating at first, if you want to be intimidated. But stop and take stock. What did He command, really? What did He tell us to do? What did He call ‘the first and greatest commandment’ and what ‘the second which is like it’? And did His sayings fall on deaf ears, was He planting good seed in bad, stony soil, when He told us who are the ‘blessèd’? Don’t we want to be the good soil, the humus that nurtures the seed—that is, His words—so that they produce a hundred-fold in us? ‘How blessed are the merciful! for they shall have mercy shown them! How blessed are the peacemakers! God shall call them His sons!’

‘Make disciples,’ says Jesus, and, yes, this is a command. He always gives us things to do that push us beyond our limits, proving to us that they are only imaginary lines. If we want to obey His commands, He makes it possible. If we do not want to obey, we make it impossible. The Lord is very direct. He is easy to understand, when we want to understand Him. He even tells us, ‘Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls, for My yoke is easy and My burden is light’ (Matthew 11:29-30). ‘Rest for your souls’ may seem a contradiction to what He describes as taking His yoke upon us. We think, ‘It’s bad enough we have to deny ourselves, and take up our cross, to follow Him. But now we’ve got to be yoked to a burden as well? And He calls the yoke easy and the burden light? He can’t be serious! He must mean something else…’

Since I have been rubbing it in, let me apply one more salve to soothe our seething flesh. He says, ‘Make disciples’ and tells us who they are, ‘all nations.’ Yes, that includes everyone. Like I have been saying till I was hoarse, ‘the Church is a pan-human reality.’ Nobody, absolutely no one, is to be excluded, considered untouchable, unredeemable, garbage. ‘All nations’ means people whom we don’t like, even people we hate, not just the ones we love, because ‘even sinners and tax collectors love those who love them.’ A horrid saying that we keep at arm’s length, even though Jesus says it, as we busy ourselves with anything that might make Him happy, but which doesn’t.

He knows we have heard Him clearly. He knows He has called each of us ‘to come out from among them’ by name. Out from among whom? No, not from the pigs. We are the pigs He is calling to come out from the mire. He doesn’t flinch from washing us, thoroughly, and He expects us to follow His example. No one starts out clean, but when He’s done with us, and with them, we are as clean as He is, we shine as a thousand suns, whiter, brighter even than a fuller could make a soiled garment.

‘Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things I have commanded you.’ 
Matthew 28:19-20

We have called these words ‘the Great Commission’ yet we neglect committing it. But they are far greater than we think. They are, as Jesus says, ‘the words of Him who is holy and true, who holds the key of David. What He opens no one can shut, and what He shuts no one can open’ (Revelation 3:7), and ‘the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life’ (John 6:63).

This is the preparation of the good news, of the gospel, and it can only begin when we go and ‘make disciples.’

What price, salvation?

There is a strange disconnect between what people say they want and what they really want, and yet they claim to be honest in their convictions. They declare their intentions and then go about laying down plans that cannot possibly bring them to their destination. What is wrong with us? Why do we try so hard to live up to our built-in law of failure?

We all know what the Church is, at least we ought to know, if we read our bibles, if we pray, and if we try to follow Christ in everyday life.

When we are honest with ourselves, how much of what we experience in the church ‘we go to’ is like what we know the Church is?

True, that may be an unfair question, but only in minor respects. We are used to massive failure in human society at large, and in human relationships up close. We have learned to adapt, ‘to roll with the punches,’ to be forgiving and indulgent, to accept the fact that ‘nobody’s perfect.’

We’ve taught ourselves not to expect the best, even when our faith in Christ keeps telling us to expect, not just the best, but ‘the resurrection of the dead,’ as we used to say in the Symbol of Nicaea before they ‘retranslated’ it to conform with modern churchly ‘norms’—it is now, ‘I look for,’ instead of, ‘I expect.’

Hey! I don’t look for the resurrection of the dead, I expect it! And it’s not my human pride, my ego or my flesh telling me to expect this: it’s the Spirit of the living God, living in me, who teaches me to expect it, and not merely look for it.

What do we find in church, then? They say that the Church is a hospital, that it is a place where the sick go to be healed. A nice metaphor, coming from the Orthodox East where sin is considered not so much a crime to be punished as it is a sickness to be cured. This is not an unhealthy attitude. It gives hope and relieves us somewhat of our natural instinct to blame and guilt-trip ourselves.

So we’re sick, that’s all it is! Well, that means we can slow down, take it easy, follow instructions, take our medicines, and presently we will be well again. Not only that, we have this beautiful hospital, with beautiful procedures, we are simply surrounded by beauty, and we’ve been told, ‘Beauty will save the world,’ so we can be comfortable and content, as we wait to be made whole. This is the view from the patient’s bed.

We are told to be patient and follow instructions, and everything will right itself, almost magically, and we will be well again. But how long have we been lying there? Do we even know what being healthy feels like? And most importantly, do we really want to be made well?

A church says that they follow Christ, that He alone is Holy, that He alone is Lord. They say that they have seen the Light, that they have found the true faith, and that the Trinity has saved them. That’s great! But what of the others, those who can’t say these things? Those who don’t even know these things are possible? Who is supposed to tell them? Who to show them? We already know the answer to that—‘Here I am, send me!’ (Isaiah 6:8)

We go to church, and we hear the priest or deacon say—if they are good preachers—that we are the Church, not just the priests, and that ‘the great commission’ to ‘make disciples of all nations’ is our responsibility, not just theirs.

Fine rhetoric, this exhortation, very evangelical, but nothing more than fine rhetoric if it is not backed up by actions.

What happens if some of us take this responsibility to heart, and go forth two by two into the world to fulfill it? Are we supported by these same preachers? What preparations are they willing to take on behalf of our ‘mission’ and our ‘ministry’? Do they even know what preparations to take? Can it be, that all we have to offer the outside world looking in on us, is a once or twice yearly lecture series on such things as the history of the Church or its teachings ‘in our tradition, we…’, an invitation to come and ‘help us to get ready for the next festival,’ and of course, ‘just come and worship with us’?

I used to think the last one—just come and worship with us—was the best, and that it was enough, but honestly, it isn’t. We are not medieval Eastern Europe, where illiterate, barbaric people can come and be ‘awed by the beauty’ of our liturgical services. For them, perhaps, this wall of beauty was a real window into the Eternal, because they had little other possibility of access. For us today, it really can become just a wall.

Why? Because we have advantages, yet we don't make use of them. We can read. Bibles can be picked up in any language or dialect. Among us are experienced and knowledgeable ‘lay’ people, as well as clergy. If we rely on just the services to somehow magically inform and transform people, we are not giving them their true value, and we are lying to ourselves.

Christ came to make an end of magic, as holy father Ignatios of Antioch wrote to the church at Ephesos, “…every kind of magic was destroyed, and every bond of wickedness disappeared; ignorance was removed, and the old kingdom abolished, God Himself being manifested in human form for the renewal of eternal life. And now that took a beginning which had been prepared by God. Henceforth all things were in a state of tumult, because He meditated the abolition of death” (Ignatios to the Ephesians, ch 19).

If this was true and well-understood in the time of the early fathers, before the onslaught of the ‘dark ages’ submerged the Hellenic and Christian spirit, and continuing from the gospels and the apostles, how much more true today, when we have finally overcome those ‘dark ages’?

Where does this leave the churches?
Back to the statement made at the outset, there is a strange disconnect between what people say they want and what they really want, and yet they claim to be honest in their convictions.

What does the Church exist for?
Whom does it exist for?
They say it is a hospital for the sick, and that Christ is the Physician. Well and good.
Have they removed all obstacles to that purpose?
Have they laid out plans that facilitate it?
Have they got the priorities right?
Are the sick able to meet the Physician?
Are the instructions and medicines they are being administered working?
Are people being made well?

Or are secondary needs taking priority?
Are people being allowed to develop addictions to the medicines, dependence on the clinical staff, and diverted from getting to know their Physician personally?
Are the patients being administered cosmetic solutions to their real ailments, making them ‘look good’ to themselves and each other, while their critical illnesses remain untreated, because there’s no time for that, and no need?
Is a kind of spiritual homeopathy being applied, smaller and smaller doses of the same poison that created the symptoms, until these very ‘medicines’ have become nothing more than placebos, and health and recovery are redefined as ‘what the doctor tells you’ is healthy—not the Physician, but those who say they represent Him?

We are told that salvation comes through Christ. It doesn’t matter what church or denomination is speaking, the Message is the same, because we all use the same Book. “Here is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the worst” (1 Timothy 1:15), and “God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16).

Isn’t this what the whole mission of the Church is about, salvation through Jesus Christ? And isn’t this mission accomplished by following the simple command, “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit”? (Matthew 28:19).

Go, make disciples, baptize.
Can it be acceptable that churches do anything above and beyond these three things? Can it even be possible? Can we really think that we can add to the mission that Christ has already given us? Can we set priorities of our own that supersede what the Word Himself commands?
Go, make disciples, baptize.

A church says that we want the salvation of all, that we are offering the fallen world around us the gift of eternal life, vouchsafed to everyone who comes to Jesus and believes in Him.

Well, why aren’t they coming? Is that really how the Message entrusted to us works? Does the church go, do we make disciples, do we baptize, in that order? What have we put ahead of what we say we want? How can we have failed to realise that if we really want something, we remove all obstacles, and pursue it relentlessly?

We understand priorities in lesser things. How have we failed to apply the same principle to what we say is most important to us?
If we have to, what are we willing to give up to accomplish our mission? Have we really considered the question?
For there is really only one:

What price, salvation?

The house built on rock

The ‘Great and Holy Council of 2016’ is being prepared. Purposely I have not looked into it and know nothing about it, only the name, which I even had to research to make sure it was correct, and that it was really happening. I am not a seminary-trained theologian or a member of the ordained clergy, and what I am about to say is therefore at best my humble opinion, at worst maybe potential heresy. Until a great council is convened, many free thoughts remain free and their thinkers within the fold of Holy Church; afterwards, maybe not. Councils are convened as much to root out the unwanted as they are to plant anew what ‘the mind of the Church’ desires. That mind is also supposed to be at one with the mind of Christ, as it was at the first, ‘for it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay upon you no greater burden than these essentials’ (Acts 15:28). Unfortunately, history shows us that this is not always the case. The unity of the Church must remain either only a metaphor, or else, the church that holds itself to be ‘the only true’ must protect itself and God instead of following Christ.

Why the Council? My guess is, the Orthodox are thinking that they have been gradually growing apart from each other, as well as in relation to ‘the world,’ which cannot see us as a faith to be reckoned with, because visibly we seem fragmented and ineffectual. Myself, I feel that this apparent disunity is a symptom of our lack of heroic and decisive leadership, which produces a general confusion from the top down. In the 20th century we had such heroic, yes, even Christlike, leaders. The last of them are quickly dying off, and they seem to have few, if any, successors of like stature. Whatever they think the ‘Great and Holy Council of 2016’ will achieve, I hope (and yes, pray) that it will be commandeered not by political and religious interests, but by the Holy Spirit. How will we know the difference?

I have yet many things to tell you, but you cannot bear them now. But when the Spirit of truth comes, He will guide you into all truth. For He will not speak on His own authority. But He will speak whatever He hears, and He will tell you things that are to come. He will glorify Me, for He will receive from Me and will declare it to you. All that the Father has is Mine. Therefore I said that He will take what is Mine and will declare it to you.
John 16:12-15

To call a Council at the threshold of the third millennium has to be the work, not of men, but of the Holy Spirit. The Roman Catholic pope, John XXIII, prophetically inaugurated this work at the end of the second millennium. For those who were not yet alive, the last pope John was very much like the current pope Francis. They both have a way of living, speaking, and acting as if they were ordinary humans, not wearers of infallible authority. This behavior generates both hope and fear in members of their Church, and in the world generally. I have a hunch that, had pope John lived to see the Vatican Council to its conclusion (instead of presiding only at the first session), he would have been the last Roman pope, and the herald of the end of the Great Schism. The non-Roman observers he had invited would have been accepted for who they were—hierarchs and leaders of the universal Church—and the course of the Church, and of all of human history, would have been radically altered.

What do I hope for in a ‘Great and Holy Council’? Notice, I did not call it ‘the’ nor did I append a year. Why not? Because I do not know that this Council will be anything but a further estrangement between Christians, and the perpetuation of a ‘religious’ Christianity. I can only hope that it will be the final Council, the one that establishes for all time, not only the truth as Christ, but the way and the life as well. What I mean is, seeing as how we have verified beyond all shadow of a doubt who Jesus Christ is, we can begin to follow Him for real, not for religion. The Church must finally decide what she is, now that she knows who He is.

There is only one controversy to be decided. It is not about jurisdictions, nor about primacy. It is not about devotional practices, worship and the like, nor about morality, rules and regulations. It is about the life or death of the Church. We already have Christ’s promise that ‘the gates of Hades will not prevail against it,’ and so we know the Church will survive, and not only survive but triumph, and continue till the Day of Christ’s return. The controversy is, is the Church a religious society dedicated to its own perpetuation, or is it the transfiguration of all of humankind by the promotion of life in Christ? We’ve been doing the first—by our own efforts ‘preserving and protecting’ the Church—for two thousand years. Isn’t it about time to ‘let God be God,’ to stand on His promise to preserve the Church till the end of time, while we follow Jesus, doing what He does, learning from Him, obeying Him?

Whoever hears these sayings of Mine and does them, I will liken him to a wise man who built his house on a rock. And the rain descended, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house. And it did not fall, for it was founded on rock. And everyone who hears these sayings of Mine and does not do them will be likened to a foolish man who built his house on sand. And the rain descended, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house. And it fell. And its fall was great.
Matthew 7:24-27

Let me put it another way. The Church has spent a great deal of effort, all through history, of creating structures real and theoretical, to tabernacle God, letting ‘Lord, have mercy’ replace being merciful, building a religious edifice that Christ Himself does not want. He did not come to start another religion, but to be the end of religion. Christ is not a religious reformer. He is the re-creation of the perfect Man. We call Him the ‘new’ or the ‘second Adam.’ His resurrection from the dead is an absolute novelty in the history, not only of the earth, but possibly of the universe. He didn’t rise from the dead and then die again, like Lazarus. Religion pales into absurdity and insignificance when we consider these facts, yet we make Christ’s teachings a metaphor instead of following them. Is this the Church that the ‘Great and Holy Council’ is going to secure for us and for humanity in the third ‘Christian’ millennium?

No, the Council shall alone be ‘great and holy’ that enthrones Christ, the King of kings of kings, not as a religious idol, but as the God who lives among us, healing our infirmities, curing us of blindness, raising us from the tombs of our sinful nature, preparing us by His holy commandments, making us in spirit and in truth (that is, in reality) a holy nation of priests and kings, extending the borders of the Church to encompass all of humanity, welcoming all to the life of transformation, expecting not the end of the world, but the end of the world as we have known it, dissolving division, slaying slander, abolishing the darkness of earthly ignorance and overturning the poverty of the knowledge of God, preaching and pursuing peace, inaugurating the wedding feast of heaven and earth.

How can the Council that is being planned be that one which transforms the human race, and history, in the way I have so inadequately described? By letting go, perhaps, of all concern for self-preservation, by abandoning exclusiveness, by seeing the Church not as a subset of humanity that intellectually accepts a body of religious doctrines, but as all humankind waiting for illumination, and, most of all, by returning to the word of Jesus, for that is the house built on rock.

The power to become

‘God is not a used car salesman.’ This thought occurred to me as I drove along a street in my neighborhood and saw a house along the way which is abundantly labeled with big signs ‘Jesus Saves,’ and ‘In God We Trust’ and many smaller signs on a garage door and in a driveway littered with illiterate automobiles, all inside a protective cyclone fence. What better way could be found to deflect anyone from Jesus or God, even better than a mere ‘No Trespassing’ sign, or a ‘Beware of Dog’? Yes, their entire property was one great billboard saying to all and sundry, ‘Beware of God.’ I wonder if the local door-to-door evangelists (the ones who damaged my screen door by shoving a tract through the screen) were ever brave enough to leave one of their merry invitations at that house!

That house prompted the idea, ‘God is not a used car salesman,’ and the more I thought about what it meant, the deeper the saying got. After I said these words aloud to a friend who was with me in the car, the next thing that came out of my mouth was, ‘Jesus says, Behold! I make all things new!’ and then, ‘Don’t those people know that?’ After a few more words passed between us on the topic, it was forgotten, but not by me—the idea wouldn’t leave me.

No, God is not a used car salesman. The one man in whom we can say God ever became fully incarnate, Jesus Christ, is the instigator of a newness that is always latent in the universe He created, but which humanity in our weakness and sin (is there a difference?) covers up by a blasphemous conservatism which it justifies before God by calling it ‘religion.’ How is the conservatism of religion blasphemous? Isn’t it merely inconvenient to people who want to do things their own way without reference to God?

No, I’m afraid not. Religious people keep bad-mouthing any newness in life, religious or otherwise, by referencing the ‘unchanging message of the tradition,’ and faulting human weakness and sin for this irrepressible desire for newness. They call it ‘novelty,’ and try by any means to hush it up, completely forgetting, maybe purposely burying, the very words of the Savior of the human race, ‘Behold! I make all things new!’ One with the Pharisees who condemned Him to death, their work is never finished.

Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday, today, and forever. So why are His self-proclaimed followers out to kill every vestige of newness of life except in mouthing their formularies? Not Caesar, but Jesus Christ, truly ‘came, and saw, and conquered,’ and ‘not by power, nor by might, but by the Spirit,’ as prophet Zechariah utters, his words being fulfilled and echoing from one end of time to the other. Jesus Christ was, is, and will always be, not only the only lover, but the only liberator, of mankind. Why, then, this blasphemous conservatism? What’s blasphemous about it?

‘God created man in his own image. And man, being a gentleman, returned the favor,’ attributed to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, unabashedly hints at the answer. What makes people religious is the tendency to take one’s ideas or ideology about God and make that ‘God.’ Any authentic encounter with God as He is, call it a theophany personal or public, shatters the chains of religion, which others inexperienced hastily reforge.

But conservatism is not the problem. There is good, as well as bad, conservatism. Yes, God does command, He has a definite will. One of His first commands to the human race at our last major evolutionary jump, to Adam and Eve, was to tend the earth, to be its gods and protectors, and that is the primordial and divinely ordained conservatism. Is it because God commanded it, that we ignore it, run from it, and make up our own idea of conservatism which is anything but conservative? Only God does not need to be conserved, yet we treat Him as our property, and stingily hedge Him around with a cyclone fence like the inhabitants of that private ‘used car lot.’

Thankfully, God is not containable, as I recently observed, except in the womb of a virgin Mother. Well, that’s the truth but not the whole truth. That was only the beginning. The human race as we have been in recorded history is maybe six to nine thousand years old. Whatever our ancestors were before conscious life was breathed into Adam—those remains we have been finding of creatures that resemble us from almost apelike to almost humanoid form—we were remade by Christ in the Garden of Eden—yes, He has always been the ‘new creature Maker’—we were even renamed, Adam, homo sapiens our scientific nickname. But Christ came to us in another Garden, where He laid down His life as the ‘old man,’ as homo sapiens, when He hung on the Cross, the new Tree of life, and emerged as the ‘the new man,’ the new Adam, for which science has not yet found a name, because it doesn’t believe in it.

Jesus Christ was, is, and will be forever that new Adam whose Name, like God’s, cannot be formed by the lips of the ‘old man,’ but can only be pronounced as the lives of the new humanity that sits with Christ on the Throne of the heavenly and consubstantial Triad, at once heavenly and earthly, the fulfillment of the prophecy, ‘God became man, so that man might become God.’ That ‘might’ is not a possibility for the ‘old man,’ the old Adam, the homo sapiens whose conservatism destroys not only the earth we were created to protect, but the soul of everyone who sleeps.

No, God is not a used car salesman. He does not deal in used religions either. Nor does He ever do what we have been trying to do since the morning He was the first to awaken from death. He never fills old wine-skins with new wine. That’s what we’ve been doing for the past two thousand years. You may call God anything you like, but He cannot be called impatient. Coming to us two millennia ago not as a freak of nature or of history, a God-man merely to be religiously worshiped, but as the first Example, the primordial Adam, of a new humanity, He breathed into the first generation the Breath of the new Life, the Breath that is Spirit, and what we were before, homo sapiens, leapt up in dignity to be by adoption what He is by nature. Brothers, come, let us become the new creatures for whom the creation groans in anticipation, for…

…To all who received Him, He gave the power to become sons of God, to those who believed in His name, who were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us…

John 1:12-14

Beyond tomorrow

Even while she was still with us, I found myself talking to her, asking her, when alone and needing some comfort, especially when I awoke in the middle of the night, for prayer. It was hard to understand, and to accept, the story she told us, about the angel, but then, we had no trouble hearing and believing the other story, but that was all about her Son. This time it was about her but, unlike the first visit of Gabriel, which brought the word of good news, this visit seemed nothing but the harbinger of sadness.

How could we put up with it? How could I live suddenly alone? She was my mother, more than only mine, for twenty-four long years. She was a mother to all of us, and it was wonderful to be back in the Holy City again with the brothers, all of us returned to where it all began. Like the scripture says, ‘From north and south, east and west, I gather you.’ She was so calm, and her eyes looked so dreamy, almost as if she were going to weep, when she told me, ‘Just think! Only a fortnight, and I will see him again!’

See him again? ‘What do you mean, Mother? Is this why we have all come back to Jerusalem? Is this why you were so insistent that we all find ourselves here, together, as we once stood on the Olive Mount, watching him go? So that as the angels declared, we could watch him come back in exactly the same way we saw him go?’ Words such as these with half-hope and excitement I blurted out, forgetting all else, and spoiling the serene moment that surrounded the lucid jewel of her expectation.

‘No, no, beloved Son, not that! Not even he could tell us that, nor could an angel of the Most-High! Only the Father knows that time, that hour.’ Still perplexed, I waited for her to continue. What she related was difficult to grasp, and to accept. To blunt its sharpness, she reminded me that the same message would one day be vouchsafed to me as well, but not yet. I too would see the day I would go forth to meet him, but that day was yet far off. No, this was her time. Angels always bring good news.

The word had gone out, I don’t know quite how, but all of us, all except Thomas, were now somewhere in the City, or close by. Over the course of a few days, I had chance to meet with them, with Cephas, with my brother Jacob, with all of the brothers, by ones and twos, and I handed over to them the news that our Mother, our beloved Mother, the Mother of our beloved Master, had given me. It was never easy, and there were tense moments, words of astonishment and incomprehension, even of disbelief.

‘Of this we are sure,’ I told them, ‘that on the fourteenth day after the angel’s visit, the Master will welcome his Mother into the Life eternal, carrying her as a babe in his own arms, escorted by the angelic host.’ No, we would not see what she would see, but we were privileged to encircle her bed at that precise moment, and through her eyes, the Light of Light, even the true God of true God—blessed, blessed, blessed be He!—was to shine on us, casting away forever all shadows from her life and ours.

Twenty-four years of living together, her silence as well as her testimonies teaching and strengthening me, crossing lands and seas, preserved by her witness, by her very being, the Mother of my Lord and Master, Jesus, of my Savior… over, forever over! I was disconsolate. But when had I not known it, understood that this time of blessing would also come to an end, that all that is human must, like a book, be finished and closed? Yet the One who writes us and fills the world with our testimony, He lives.

‘Evening came, and morning came, day one,’ I began counting, clinging desperately to the words of scripture, fervently hugging to myself every moment I was able to spend with her, while she continued living as she always had, caring for me, creating the inner world for me to retreat to after laboring so hard to build the outer—but I, while she waited so patiently and with unperturbed certainty for her Son to arrive, I could not keep myself on task, I could not work. It was a very strange kind of fasting.

Little did I think to feed my body, even though with foods from her hand I would never taste again. No, but I fed my eyes with her beauty, yes, her beauty, for though she was my Mother, to see us together, one would think at most she were my sister. But now, my hair grown white, my beard and side locks the same, though still young inside I was, outside those who did not know me took me for an elder of Israel, and she for my young bride. And indeed, a bride she was, whom we knew as ‘the Unwedded.’

Sojourning among the Gentiles in the northlands, in Ephesos of Diana of the hundred breasts, we walked together, meeting the people where they were, her womanly witness the hidden foundation of mine seen and heard, and when we coaxed her to speak, she speaking of her Son, Jesus, enlivened all hearts and minds, unleashing many from the bondage post, and watering their lives as a life-giving fountain. How many miracles followed us wherever we were sent. Yes, she was a water-bearing rock, for me.

And that day we were cast ashore, alive, from the raging sea. Who would imagine that a humble daughter of Israel would be found following her young son, taking ship and sailing to the copper island, to Cyprus, to visit the only man living who was dead and brought back to life after lying four days in the tomb? But the God and Father of us all, who sent His beloved Son to us as her Son, guarded our path wherever we went, toppling idols as He did when we were cast, boatless, on that rocky shore.

‘Zeus and Hera!’ they shouted, the villagers, as they ran to greet us and ask us to preserve them from the wrath of the earth quake. But we were only humans, the mother of Jesus, and his beloved friend. We sat down together on the shore, made fires to warm ourselves, and waited for the rescue that the Lord would decree, meanwhile calming their frightened faces with the story of the only Lover of mankind. How they took to it! how they believed! not from my lips only, but from the Mother of us all.

My mournful thoughts return to that final day. Long since I had stopped counting as the day drew near. The days count themselves when we are afraid of what lies ahead. It happened so peacefully, everything so in order, as if everyone were directed intimately in thought, word and deed. We gathered around where she lay, and waiting, our fast more natural and unconscious than our own heartbeats. Expecting a miracle, she just fell asleep, and we, afraid to awaken her, just looked on. Fragrance filled the room.

What happened next, I cannot remember clearly. It seems I was brushed aside as others more vigorous in intention and plan—it was obvious they knew what to do—took charge. I saw the holy body of my little Mother carried away somewhere and I, still grieving, sat with my back against a wall, wondering what I would do next, what life I would have beyond tomorrow. My brother Jacob came and raised me up and so much as said, ‘Come along,’ and my body sheepishly followed, my mind lodged in my heart.

The next thing I remember was the sealing of the tomb. My eyes saw, but my heart did not believe, and inwardly I wretched to the core of my being. ‘You will not abandon my soul to She’ol,’ I murmured to myself, remembering my Master, who trampled death by death and bestowed Life to everyone in the tombs. Like Thomas who said it aloud when, arriving a few days later and coming to see us, Mother and me, like Thomas I cried inside, ‘I don’t believe it! It’s impossible! She can’t be dead!’ as I looked on.

And Thomas did finally arrive. Why was he allowed to be late? Why was he the only one not there? Just like the last time, he missed the Lord when he came among us, resurrected. Only this time, none of us saw the Lord with our physical eyes, as we did behind that locked door, in that room. But we believed the word that the angel spoke to Mary, as she told us, ‘The God who loves me is coming.’ Sometimes we have nothing to rely on but our faith but, as Jesus said, ‘Your faith has healed you.’ So, faith is enough.

Again, he must see with his own eyes, or he will not believe! ‘Thomas, can’t you let anything alone? Why must we disturb the rest of her body in the tomb, just for you? We told you, she has been taken by her Son, our Lord. Isn’t that enough for you? Isn’t faith enough?’ He regained his calmness and after a moment, ‘No, faith is not enough, not for me. I want to see her one more time. It’s not that I don’t believe what you’ve told me. I just want to see what all of you saw. Can you grant me that?’

Suddenly, we were ashamed of ourselves. How thoughtless, how unfeeling of us. She was his Mother as well as ours. In fact, Mary had a very tender place in her heart for Thomas and always seemed to dote on him more than on the rest of us when he appeared at her door. They seemed to understand each other, the mother of faith and the brother of doubt. So we relented. With a slow, silent pace we walked to the garden where her tomb was. We broke the seal and with difficulty shifted the stone covering.

There was that fragrance again! The same fragrance we smelled in the room when she fell asleep! Like roses, only richer, deeper, like an essential oil. There were roses scattered about the floor just inside the tomb, at least that is what I saw. Cephas went right in, as he did the last time, but I stayed outside, somehow afraid of what I might see. Thomas followed him closely, and Cephas bumped into him as he abruptly turned about and pushed past him to shout, ‘She is not there! Her body has disappeared!’

Now, as I lie here and ponder the darkness of unknowing, how great is the wisdom of God! how profound His mystery! He does not ask our permission before He moves. He just decrees His will and performs it! ‘Your Kingdom come, Your will be done on earth, as it is in the heavens!’ we pray over and over, yet when He does what we have asked, we are dumbfounded. The Mother of our Master, of our Lord, yes, the Mother of our God—how can we say such things?—but yes, the Truth is dawning on us.

A rascal enters paradise

Never until I heard Fr Matthew refer to him as a rascal in his funeral service homily did I have a starting point from which to describe the life and antics of my friend Yanni. ‘Life and antics’ is really an understatement when referring to him. Yanni was not his name in the world, only within the Orthodox community of Portland, where he was known in many of the congregations because of his wanderings, his ‘going to and fro in the earth.’ Like everything else about him, his name had to be different. When it came to him, it came as a revelation, and he never let go of it. Named for John, but in Greek, not in English. Which John? The honorable forerunner and Baptist, of course. Only a saint who was a somebody— wild, reckless and enigmatic—could be his nameday saint.

Fr Matthew spoke truly when he related that he knew very few personal details about Yanni, because whenever he was around him, all Yanni wanted to talk about was theology and church history and other religious topics, but never, or rarely, about himself. Not being a priest, I wasn’t quite so lucky. Yanni became as familiar to me and my family as if he were my long lost brother, and because we were both from Chicago, he put every effort into emphasizing that fact, always bringing up places and streets by name, trying to jog my memory and infuse me with the nostalgic fantasy he had about the place of his origin. But of course, for neither of us was it a place of pleasant memories, but for him, it was valuable because it seemed to him a possible inroad into my life and an escape from loneliness.

Yanni and I became acquainted when we were both Episcopalians, and I was the reader of Friday vespers at the parish of Saint Mark. He used to drop by for Sunday service and occasionally to my evensong. Somehow, he followed us when we migrated to Greek Orthodoxy. I seem to remember him sitting in the last pew in Aghía Triás when we joined the Church. Fr Elias Stephanopoulos (memory eternal) was fond of him, and as he did with all strangers and lost sheep, took Wesley (that was his name then) under his wing like a mother pelican, tearing up fragments of her own flesh to feed to her dead babies, bringing them to life, as in the ancient story. Wesley the still-born Christian was born again in the holy font of Orthodoxy to emerge as Yanni, and every bit as mischievous as ever.

A Navy veteran of the Vietnam War, Yanni had been discharged after twelve years because he was beginning to show symptoms of a dysfunctional disease. I can remember driving him to the VA hospital several times so he could have tests done. It ended up that he was afflicted with Parkinson’s disease, and though he didn’t die from it, it made his life for himself and for those who cared about and cared for him, a real challenge. In spite of his malady, he lived his life with more and more gusto, or attempted to, and what he really wanted to be—which was denied him because of his disease, among other defects—a priest, well, he tried with all his might to be and do what a priest should be and do, sometimes with hilarious, or pathetic, results.

The last eight or ten years we hadn’t seen much of one another, just meeting occasionally when attending a church service. He found the Greek church, which he always considered his home, uncongenial after Fr Elias reposed. The priests who came after him were not the kind of shepherds that Fr Elias was, going after the lost sheep, not waiting for them to come to him, and finding something for everyone to do for Christ, by calling them, not waiting for them to call. Yanni drifted in and out, but found a new home with the mission of Holy Apostles in the old Northwest neighborhood, not far from our Saint Mark’s. Fr Nicholas and Matushka Barbara always made him feel welcome.

What of his reputation as a rascal? Well, to be blunt, he was notorious for doing things his own way, and for general disobedience. He was the classic offender against all rules, who knows he can rely on forgiveness after a certain scolding, and that ‘sticks and stones may break my bones, but names can never hurt me.’ Yes, Yanni was a child, and a very disobedient, mischievous child, whose faith seemed to be a religious fantasy, yet who but he himself had walked in his shoes? Only a few of us knew what he had gone through, both in his upbringing, and in the intervening years. I knew he was harmless, meant well, and was only annoying and contrary because otherwise no one would have paid any attention to him.

The Orthodox funeral service, with its prayers for the pardon of sins voluntary and involuntary, seems to have been made especially with Yanni in mind, but what was evident in him is as much present in us, though well hidden. If Christ were to send someone to test and try our every vaunted virtue, He could have sent no one better than Yanni. Not a ‘fool for Christ,’ which in some ways would have been easier for us, but a ‘rascal for Christ,’ and worse, one that simply never let up. Only physical death could stop him. But I wonder if, even then, was the rascal in him with boyish mischief twinkling in his profusely watering and reddened eyes still chuckling at us as he felt his soul separate from his cruelly tortured limbs?

I didn’t know what I would do when I had to stand before his remains in the opened, felt-covered casket, and look at him one more time. What would I see? Would I be able to bend down and venerate—kiss—his lifeless body as I saw those ahead of me doing? It was difficult to kiss him while he was alive, because of his infirmity and how disfigured it made him appear. I was ashamed to have felt that way, but that is my worst weakness, being terrified of disfigurement. A woman of piety that went ahead of me, paused, prayed, kissed her hand and laid it on his head, heart, cross and hands. Ah, that’s what I could do, so I thought, as my turn was coming next.

‘Yanni!’ I cried inside as I looked on his face, his white headband with HOLY HOLY HOLY written on it crossing his forehead and keeping his whispy hair in place. That face was a face I had never seen before, a face not disfigured, but noble, quiet, serene, devoid of all mischief, beyond grief, clean and wise with closed eyes, a face sleeping, a soul resting in the bosom of Abraham. Not the face of earthly trial and pain, but the face that will meet the Lord, and also me, on the day of resurrection, the face that now looks on paradise, knowing its wearer is finally home, has finished the race, and is now what he always wanted to be, in the presence of Jesus, the King of kings of kings—blessed be He!

Without another thought, reverently pausing for prayer, I bent over and kissed the headband marked HOLY, and took one more look so I will remember to find again that face when we are raised ‘to meet the Lord in the air,’ on that Day. I bent and kissed the ikon lying on his chest, then the pectoral cross which he was never allowed to wear in the altar (since he was not an ordained priest) but which he will bring to the Lord for His blessing, and finally his hands, fingers entwined with the knots of his black prayer rope. ‘Forgive me, brother, for having denied you, forgive my weakness,’ I spoke inwardly as if he could hear. Then, remembering his mischievous eyes, ‘A rascal enters paradise.’

Not without cause

The place where I come from is a small town
They think so small, they use small words
But not me, I'm smarter than that,
I worked it out
I'll be stretching my mouth
to let those big words come right out
I've had enough, I'm getting out
to the city, the big big city
I'll be a big noise
with all the big boys,
so much stuff I will own

And I will pray to a big god,
as I kneel in the big church

My parties have all the big names
and I greet them with the widest smile
Tell them how my life is one big adventure
and always they're amazed
when I show them 'round my house to my bed
I had it made like a mountain range
with snow white pillows for my big fat head
And my heaven will be a big heaven,
and I will walk through the front door

— Peter Gabriel, Big Time

How sad it is, to know the truth about something and, with a gleam in your eye and a tight smile on your lips, to enunciate that truth to an audience that you think probably doesn’t have or know that truth. They may be visitors to your church, to whom you are giving a ‘tour.’ They may be students or auditors in your class or seminar to whom you are revealing the truth. In either case you feel quite justified. They came here. They asked for it. Now, you’re going to let them have it. Always, however, with that gleam in your eye, that tight smile, those controlled, well-rehearsed words. How often you’ve practiced them, over and over in your mind, so that when you had the opportunity, they could come pouring out.

Any questioning, however slight, you accept as a challenge to your—oops! I mean, the Church’s authority—and you grasp the handle bars of your wingèd intellectual vehicle even more tightly, as you careen into your opponent with astonishing precision and speed, knocking them off their high horse—splat! face-down on the pavement where they belong. Of course, the gleam in your eye and the tight smiling lips are consistent all the way. You do not betray the slightest lack of nerve. You know that you’re right. You know that they know that you know you are right. That’s all that matters, really. They invited themselves here. It’s your forum. They are your guests. Like the heaven that treats the myriad creatures as straw dogs, you have shown your mettle.

We all want to be right. We all want recognition somehow, for whatever it is we think we’re proud of, whether it’s something as mundane as our good looks (is that really mundane?) or something as sublime as the creed we hold, whether it is Godly or the opposite. Our own brains are a fertile field for the sowing of our thoughts and desires, and we make them come up the way we want them to, or so we think. We get our house in order and we receive our guests with contingent hospitality, to show off our treasures, humbly laying them at their feet, so they may worship us with a clear conscience, and we can be self-effacing as we pass them another refreshment, more chunks of our own flesh, or our blue blood to drink.

I am a Christian. I belong to an ancient church. I confess and try to practice an ancient faith. I keep my door unlocked to the stranger, but there are some to whom I cannot unlock it, because I am just a man, and what they might require of me is that I give as God gives. Perish the thought. I am just a man, Lord, just a stupid man! Ask my wife, my friends, they’ll tell you. I am worthless. Yet I keep pretending to be someone I am not. I escape one trap of conceit to fall headlong into another, and while I am burning my neighbor’s house down to save him from his worldliness, I find that my bridges have been burned. Who was it working behind my back? Was it that ancient One, the only Lover of mankind? He is so unfair. Why can’t He leave me alone, so that I can make myself out to be the Solomon of the thousand lusty love chants, at once wise and voluptuous?

A spectacled older gentleman standing surrounded by his admiring students, almost three generations of them, never having learned the lesson that love conquers all, even our own vain hearts, our useless, suffocating knowledge, or our pretended wisdom, and instead, promotes himself under a thousand masks, hoping to brand his greatness on yet another generation’s unmarked hide, so they will remember him with awe, how he vanquished the infidels, the antagonists of the truth, and established once again the triumph of Orthodoxy. Now, we don’t need to pray as we sing the words, ‘Soson, Kyrie, ton laón Sou…’ Save, O Lord, Your people, because his invincible wisdom, his teaching, has secured the faith and those confessing it against all its enemies. We can sing now, just to follow the tradition, to live in the luxury of the world-conquering faith. Nothing more to do.

Man has closed the door on God, so he can be heard better as he talks about Him. Once they made Him out to be a great Craftsman working on a gigantic clockwork, and having assembled it, and wound it up, gave Him permission to go away and leave it to continue ticking forever. Now they were free to not talk about Him anymore, for what was the need? This time around, we bring Him back to animate our discussions, tying Him hand and foot by our ease, gagging Him with our mouthsome words, deafening ourselves from the voice of many waters heard by the eager ears of John the Revelator, so that we can hear ourselves better, and glorify Him by our works, so that men, seeing them, will glorify us in return. Not without cause does the tree-bound Lord cry out, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ and, though we no longer tremble at it, pant His parting prayer, ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’

We shall be safe

When I was ‘saved’—yes, it happened on a particular day in time, but only from my point of view: from God’s, it was before time began—when I was saved, I was twenty-four years of age. I was christened as an infant in the basement chapel of a local convent, St Mark’s in Chicago. The evangelist has been a patron saint of mine ever since. I even named one of my sons after him. I love his lion emblem, and the city of Alexandria in Egypt is very dear to me.

By Church teaching, I was saved at my christening, or baptism, but I still had to be instructed. Had I died as an infant, I would’ve been assured of heaven. Baptism is indelible, they say. What God says, though, is what matters in the end. With Paul I cry, ‘we must be content to hope that we shall be saved—our salvation is not in sight—we must hope to be saved since we are not saved yet. It is something we must wait for with patience’ (Romans 8:24-25 Jerusalem Bible).

But baptism is some kind of preservative. Isn’t that why salt is placed on an infant’s lips? I didn’t remain the infant I was at my christening—at least I hope not!—but I feel like I haven’t aged a day since my personal theophany at age twenty-four. Forty calendar years, χρόνος ‘chrónos’ time, in Greek, have been added to my physical body, but as far as καιρός ‘kairós’ time, I am still the age that I was when the Lord ‘found me.’

He appears to be a very faithful God, who says through His apostles, ‘remain as you were when God first called you’ (1 Corinthians 7:17), and through the psalmist, ‘like a tree that is planted by water streams, yielding its fruit in season, its leaves never fading’ (Psalm 1:3). I left out the last part of the psalm verse, ‘success attends all he does,’ because I do not want to boast—or to scandalize the brethren, who can see my life is anything but successful, at least from the world’s point of view.

But when I was saved, my life was very different from how I live today, and the same is true of my thoughts. Having just escaped ‘the world system’ I was a constant and constantly thankful reader and student of the Holy Bible. I ate it more than I ate physical food, knowing that ‘you are what you eat.’ I wanted to be the kind of man who would bleed not blood but the word of God when wounded. I wanted to make Christ’s word my home, to be His disciple.

Because of the promises, yes, that He would come to me and make His home with me. I was scrupulous to follow the commandments in every detail. I tithed my ‘tithe of dill and cumin’ and tried very hard not to ‘neglect the weightier matters of the Law’ like mercy and kindness. Yes, I tried, but the former were far easier than the latter. I often trampled a flower while planting an evergreen, a zealot in religious observance and studious righteousness, but a failure in showing mercy.

That’s how it can be with new converts, isn’t it? I failed to notice that the people I sometimes corrected and called to task were my elders, who probably knew more, and did more, than I but were loathe to show it. I mistook their silence, acquiescence, and humility as a kind of ignorance. I delighted in tormenting not only my body and soul with ‘spiritual’ exercises, but also looked on the lax losers around me with disdain. Secretly I thanked God that I wasn’t like them. Lord, have mercy!

Such are the sins of youth, my youth, anyway. Some waste their youth in licentious living like the prodigal son. I wasted it by trying to be more spiritual than God. Of course, the Church, I thought, was beaming its approval at me, when they were simply bored to disgust but too merciful to let me know. Filled with the ‘blows against the empire’ spirit, I wanted to be counted among the martyrs for my ‘sufferings’ and made enemies where I should have remained a friend.

The faith of the God of heaven, our Father, revealed in its totality by the God of earth, His Son our Lord, Jesus Christ, settles slowly on us, falls gently on us like a soothing cool evening rain after a scorching day. That is the work of the Holy Spirit. You cannot rush love. Not His, but ours. You cannot pretend, though it is precisely by starting out in pretence that, by the mercy of God, we arrive finally at the safe harbor of invincibility, incorruptibility, through ‘grace in return for grace.’

Yes, someday we finally become, I finally became, Christian, though the least of the disciples and, as we pray before receiving the Holy Mysteries, of sinners the chief. Saying the words over and over for years, the ears must be so dull that it takes a lifetime for them to sink in. Longing to count and venerate the skulls in a monastic bone room, we lose the opportunity to count and venerate the living souls that surround us, unadorned by lampadas, weeping not myrrh but real tears.

O gracious God, Savior, Lord, Master, only Lover of mankind, and my most loving Friend, how great You are! How magnificent Your mercy, how priceless Your poverty, how redeeming Your righteousness! You take us by the hand, one by one, and lead us to the Kingdom You have prepared for us, to the Life for which You created us before the world ever was made. Glory to You, O God, glory to You! For the sake of even one soul You gave Your life, and You lose no one who comes to You.

Yahweh Sabaoth, bring us back, let Your face smile on us
and we shall be safe.
Psalm 80:3 Jerusalem Bible

The only lovers of mankind

I recently heard a fellow Orthodox Christian confidently claim that the God that the Jews and the Muslims believe in is not the same God that we believe in. The reason supplied was that since the Jews and Muslims do not accept Jesus of Nazareth as Messiah but are waiting for another, that proves their God and ours is not the same Being. That came from a ‘cradle Orthodox’, and it was supplemented by the assertions of another, a new convert to the faith, who chimed in that neither is the God of the Mormons the same as our God, because though they use Trinitarian terms, they mean something entirely different.

I suppose there are grounds for saying such things. I suppose there is a frame of reference where such ideas are true, but these sayings are categorical. They mean precisely nothing outside such special frames of reference. Whatever Jews, Muslims, Mormons and anyone else believes about God, even whatever we Orthodox believe, it is all still only human constructs. Beliefs about God do not save, nor do they condemn, contrary to what the zealots of every creed attest. There is One God, One Divine Nature, self-existing, eternal, uncontainable by our temples or our thoughts, but not by the womb of a virgin Mother.

This is what it all boils down to, what Jesus Himself asks His disciples, ‘Who do men say that I am?’ He listens patiently to our answers about men ‘in general’ and then asks again, ‘But who do you say that I am?’ The ball is now in our court. It is we who are now probed by the Lord of all, who knows all, everything about us, our needs before we ask, our doubts before we confess, our sins and sicknesses that we hide from each other so well. After He receives our answer, which Peter speaks in our name for the first time, He confirms and blesses the Spirit in us who teaches us the truth. He doesn’t condemn the others.

It is not Christ, but we ourselves, who condemn those who do not believe as we do, to any number of indescribable punishments. He only asks, ‘Do you believe this?’ when He announces, not argues, the fact of His being ‘One with the Holy Trinity’ and His specific persona as ‘the Resurrection.’ He asks, and we answer, and then He does what only God can do, revivify a man dead and entombed for four days, or a nation dead and imprisoned in darkness for four thousand years. All who do not know Him as ‘the Christ’ in this life are not condemned unless they reject and resist Him when He comes to them in Hades. Yes, even us!

For holy apostle Paul writes, ‘The point of all our toiling and battling is that we have put our trust in the living God, and He is the Savior of the whole human race, but particularly of all believers’ (1 Timothy 4:10). This has always intrigued me ever since I first read it. Considered in combination with the verse, ‘For God so loved the world,’ it reminds me that when Christ descends into Hades, He empties it. Who wouldn’t go with the living God when He finds you where you are, even in hell, and bids you, ‘Come forth!’ as He bids Lazarus? This is the God of us Orthodox ‘believers’ and also ‘the Savior of the whole human race.’

What do we then make of the God of others who do not believe as we do? Can we really say that their God and our God are two different beings? God forbid! It is exactly this kind of ignorance, this kind of barbaric tribalism, that is preventing the world from accepting Jesus Christ, and preventing us from being what Christ Himself calls us, ‘the Light of the world.’ There is only One God, and only One Church, He the Bridegroom, we the Bride, He the Head, we the Body. The Church is a pan-human reality. Everyone was born into it, but all must be instructed, must be told, even us. Only those who resist Him, are lost.

Brethren. let us be lovers of mankind, just as He is, yes, the only lovers of mankind.

Because I am

There are two absolute uniques in my life, and many more that are not quite absolute, but almost.

Unique is the person of Jesus Christ, as the Son of God in the Holy Triad, as living Truth, Teacher, and Savior.

Unique is the Bible as the only (written) expression of the Word of God on earth.

These are my two absolute uniques, from which I cannot budge.

Of course, in a mystery, they are really One unique.

From the time of my adolescence, I was driven to find or make something that was unique, that was true, that could save me. Though I am Greek by faith and even by culture, my family is Polish on both sides, and at least nominally Roman Catholic. I am the only Orthodox member of it.

I grew up in a dysfunctional family with an obsessively religious mother (who nevertheless did not believe in the Catholic church and never attended until she did in her casket at death), and a philosophically leaning non-religious father. His mother tried to make a Catholic out of him, but his skepticism about churchly things was the result of being snagged by the ear and pulled out of a private pew at Saint Hedwig’s parish in Chicago by a priest. He made his mother join a different parish. He’d never set foot in that church again.

We had a bible in the house, a King James version in a dusty, beige cloth cover. The pages were yellow and brittle, the font in two columns too small to read, and the language too archaic to understand. I knew there was something special about this book, but I never saw anyone reading it, or even try to, until I picked it up and tried. Discouraged as a child, I picked it up later and started studying it when I entered high school. It was still mostly unintelligible, but by then I knew I had to have something unique and powerful that I could believe in. I worked my way through Genesis to Proverbs, then skipped over to the Gospels.

In the ninth grade, I began copying sayings from that bible that made sense to me into a notebook, numbered them, and began writing, or at least gathering, my first “scriptures.” At that point, I didn’t think of the bible as unique, but as one of many sources from which I could draw saving knowledge. This mistake came from the fact that my family stopped going to church when I was 8 years old, and from that point on, I was on my own, with whatever tidbits of Polish catholic piety I had absorbed. Truth seemed to be wherever I could find it. Church was a mysterious, dark, fragrant place in my memory.

Little by little the notebook grew, but after doing this for awhile, I gave it up. It was obvious to me that my “scripture” was just a notebook of ideals that I wasn’t able to live up to. I started delving into non-Christian religions and the occult, reading my way through the explosion of New Age literature that was emerging in the 1960’s. There wasn’t an area I didn’t explore. I even bought and read a paperback of the Satanic Bible by LaVey. “What trash!” I thought at the time. I never fell for it, but I was curious. Still, my older sister and my mother believed in the supernatural and E.S.P., and both claimed to have such gifts. I cautiously followed along, sometimes witnessing unexplainable things.

In college, I came into contact with Christian students and for the first time met people of my own age who believed in Jesus in a way I hadn’t encountered before. They seemed to think of Him as a unique person, one like no other. They also not only read the bible but had copies of it in modern English. I didn’t know such people or things existed. To me, Christ was a statue in my grandmother’s living room, His presence or protection over me was a plastic image of the Sacred Heart that had glow-in-the-dark rays coming out of it and hung on the wall above the light switch in my bedroom since I was a little boy. Of course, there was Blessed Mother, who was also a statue. The statues of Jesus and His Mother always had their hearts showing.

I still needed a guide, something that would save me, because now I knew that couldn’t be a person. In college and from reading New Age books, I had found out that Jesus was a good moral teacher, and that everybody was potentially, if not already, God. We were all just little gods trying to find our way back to being the big God. I couldn’t quite figure out what was to happen to us, though, when we got there. Would we really be merged into Him like a drop of water falls into the sea and disappears? Somehow, this thought seemed a bit too simple.

When you don’t recognize anything or anyone as unique,
my goodness, have you got a problem!


In college, and I won’t go into detail, I started writing again, and fadged up a book of “scriptures” far more original and sensational than my little notebook ever was. At the same time, though, I bought my first modern English bible, the New English Bible, and began reading it, starting with the Psalms. After a short time, I bought my first copy of the Jerusalem Bible, and that was the beginning of my conversion to Christ. Starting with the Old Testament, with Genesis, I met in literary form, a new Being, Yahweh, who began following me everywhere and making me see things in a new way. I was sure that He was a unique being, as well as a unique person. It wasn’t long before I was sure that the bible was also something unique.

I’ve given my testimony as to how I came to Christ in other places, so I won’t repeat it here, but my meditations this morning showed me all that I have just written in a flash, and how important, how crucial, it is to know that there are two uniques, Christ as the Only Begotten Son of God, and the Bible as the expression in human language of Who He is. Please don’t misunderstand me. I am not leaving out God the Father, or God the Holy Spirit. When we speak of Jesus Christ being unique, we are also speaking of the Father and the Holy Spirit as well, since in essence, in being, the three are One, the Holy Triad. As Christ said, “If you have seen Me you have seen the Father,” and “I will send you another Comforter, who will tell you of Me.”

There, the two uniques, but what of a third? Well, to tell you the truth, there’s more than a third. There’s billions. Those uniques are you and me, and all our fellow creatures who have been created to know, to love and to praise God, as scripture says, “Let all that have breath, praise the Lord.” Made in the image and likeness of the One God, who is unique, more One than even a mathematical unity can express, how can we also, each of us, not be like our Maker? We also are unique. It is understanding this, that you and I are as unique as God is, and that Jesus Christ died for each of us as though we were the only man or woman on earth, that provides the answer for the question of our personal existence. Why are we here?

“You are here,” He responds, “because I am.”

Living words

The word of Jesus is not something He spoke once so that it could be written down and then turned into stone tablets with which we could judge the world. No, the word of Jesus is such a word that it takes what is stone and turns it into something alive. When we go forth to meet men in the world with the word of Jesus, we don’t go forth in judgment, but we meet them, all of them, in the company of Jesus, who walks with us, and who walks among men to save them. It is not the day of judgment yet. It is still the day of mercy.

When Jesus sent them out two by two, He instructed them to go to every town and preach the word, and if they receive it, peace be with them, but if they reject it, then the disciples leave that town and wipe its dust from their soles, and depart. What men reject when they reject the word is not a doctrine but a person, as the Lord says, ‘whoever rejects you rejects Me, and whoever rejects Me rejects the One who sent Me.’ It is all about personal encounter, of Life with death, seeking to bring the dead to life, not about standards of right and wrong.

The world is well aware that it is living in sin, that is to say, that it is dying in its sins. It already knows the bad news, which is so well-known that it needs no one to announce it. People are imprisoned in their own wickedness and they know it. Sometimes, even when the Gatekeeper comes with the keys and opens the door for them to escape, they dare not depart from the safety of the cage, despite its stench and filth, because they are afraid of the unknown. Why do their eyes hurt? Because they have never used them before. Light hurts at first.

The people who dwell in darkness have seen a great light, on them who live in the land of shadows a light has shown. Though we have responded to the call and come out from among them, they are part of us and we are part of them, a living Body with dead limbs, that someday will be amputated if they cannot be reinvigorated with the life of the Body. But ours is not the scalple or the ax, but rather the ointment and the bandage gauze, ours is the medicine that quickens souls and brings life to the dying. The Physician is among us, not the Judge.

Come, brethren, and speak the living word to your neighbors, not what can be written with paper and ink, but the word in person, as the beloved apostles write, not words of condemnation, but words of encouragement, not to quench the smoking flax, but to blow on it till it becomes a fire, that same fire of which the Lord Jesus says, ‘I have come to bring fire to the earth. How I wish it were ablaze already!’ He is not dead, brethren, and neither are we, but alive. His ascension has revealed who He is and where He lives, not for thirty-three years and in one body, but for ever, and among us.

The word of Jesus is not living words turned to stone, but words that turn stone statues into real men. Just as He spoke it at the beginning to create all things, He speaks it in us, with us, and through us, to keep renewing the world, even unto its last day. As He told His holy apostles, ‘I am with you until the close of the age.’ Between His first and His second coming, there is nobody here but us, living words.

Smoking flax

A bruised reed shall he not break, and smoking flax shall he not quench, until he sends forth judgment unto victory.
Matthew 12:20

Amazing how an absolutely wonderful day can be set on edge and made tense by merely dropping an inopportune word in an insensitive way. The words (for they are many) may be spoken or even written to be read and, when heard or read, can wreak havoc in people’s souls, troubling their consciences unnecessarily, and ‘quenching the smoking flax.’

There are souls that the Father loves that He is drawing to His Son as only He can do. The angels and ministers of grace that He employs to harvest them for the everlasting Kingdom are not mainly those who are called priests and missionaries by the institutional Church, and who sometimes work as hirelings, not for money, but to win the approval of men.

No, it is those whom the Father chooses, and who are willing to be used by Him as ‘instruments of peace,’ that He employs in harvesting lost souls. They are, in actual fact, the only ones who know how to bring in the harvest. They have been taught not by men but by the Spirit of God, who is love. And they lay down their lives for their brothers out of love.

Speaking of the Christ who was to come, the prophet declares, ‘He shall not quench the smoking flax.’ Those who follow Christ do so by following His every move, from head to heart, with hands and feet, they imitate Him, they do for others and to others what they see Jesus doing in the holy gospels. Like Him, they also do not quench the smoking flax.

Instead, like Him, they fan the flame of faith they find in weary souls whom the Father has begun to draw to the Son, remembering Christ’s words, ‘I come to bring fire to earth… how I wish it were ablaze already!’ Like Him, they breathe hope, encouragement and strength into those whom the Father sends. Like Him they say to the Father, ‘I have lost none of them you gave me.’

In Holy Orthodoxy, the one place on earth and in human history that the incarnate Son and Word of God has from the beginning been welcomed, worshiped, and willfully followed, the only religion that regards sin as sickness, and mercy as medicine, the only faith that knows that love works miracles even more than prayer, still we find those who, like satan, accuse and divide.

The world, my brothers, already knows well how to quench the smoking flax, how to intimidate and threaten the souls for whom Christ died, how to extinguish their faith, how to suffocate their hope. The world, my brothers, does worse than not believe in the God in heaven. It does not believe in the God on earth. But what is wrong with us that we join the world in doing the same?

For Jesus says, ‘whatever you do to the least of these, you do unto me.’ And so the Church, that is, the communion of salvation on earth, cannot side with the world in condemnation of anyone, for Christ died to save all men, as He Himself says, ‘and I, when I am lifted up, shall draw all men unto myself.’ When anyone in the Church forgets this, out of weakness or fear, he hurts rather than heals.

I have asked this question before, ‘When will the Orthodox Church decide once and for all whether her mission is to follow Christ in bringing salvation and life to all who live on earth, or whether it is to set up a legalistic police state?’ We already know the answer to this question, but not all of us do, whether we are highly placed or low. Only one of these alternatives can be theocracy in Christ.

And so we return to the daily struggle. We live our lives in Christ locally, and it is here in the arena that we must suffer and, dying in mortal combat, win the prize of immortality. We must say to those whom the Lord has sent us and to whom we have been sent, ‘Courage, dear hearts! The words you heard today that vexed your minds and hurt your spirits were spoken against you in vain.

‘For He that is already in you is stronger than He that is in the world. For God so loved the world, that He sent His only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have everlasting life. Do not fear those who can kill the body, for they can do no more. The lover of your souls has appeared. The angel of the Covenant is among us. He does not quench the smoking flax.

‘You have been bought and paid for by the blood of a Lamb without spot. Though men speak with the tongues of men and angels, that is, however eloquently, if they have no love, they are nothing more than a clanging cymbal. Remember who your Shepherd is. Remember His voice and His words. Follow Him, not anyone else. For you, dear souls, are His, and He is saving you.’

Your Word is Truth

Books of science fiction, especially from the 1960’s and ’70’s, tend to wander into fantasy about alternative religions, as they are mirrors of the real world in which they arise, where any religion is superior to the simple truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Why is that? Because mankind is a religious animal, and we are by nature shocked and offended by a God who becomes one of us precisely to put religion to death.

And so, these novels tend to promote religions, many of which resemble those we already know on earth, especially Buddhism, which seems to be a favorite. But religion is always only man’s best shot at escaping the horrible mess we find ourselves in, because we can’t accept that to escape our predicament—sin—means death to us, death to the world as we know it. So we take our best shot at whatever it is we’re searching for.

Buddhism is man’s best shot at achieving some kind of personal inner peace, if not salvation, given that there is either no God, or He is far too big and busy to deal with us.

Hinduism is man’s best shot at achieving some kind of personal safety, now and possibly in future lives, by satisfying the need for worship of the myriad hypersomatic beings, devas, that invisibly infest the human world.

Islam is man’s best shot at achieving some level of moralistic order in society for the masses, and justification for the immoral excesses of a select few, at the cost of a total denial of human freedom, while promising an otherworldly reward for the surrendered, and threatening thisworldly punishment for the unsurrendered.

Judaism is man’s best shot at achieving some kind of personal salvation, and a sense of righteousness, given that the only God has chosen the people of a certain lineage, to which they belong, to bring everyone to a knowledge of Him, while remaining outside His promises.

Christianity is man’s best shot at achieving some kind of personal salvation, with the least possible commitment to righteous living or self-sacrifice, by formal adherence to or membership in religious associations, while trampling on the call of the one they call Lord.

In the wasteland that is this world, I have waited, and been fortunate to have met two or three followers of Jesus who stand firmly on the Word of God, keep their lamps lit, remain vigilant, wait on the voice of Jesus at every moment and desire to do what He commands, and are willing to suffer for the sake of His name.
I didn’t look for them.
I waited, and He sent them.

And I too can only hope to be one of them, by continuing to open my door when He knocks and to welcome Him into my house, which I want to be His.

Help me, Lord, to seek not my own, but Your will alone, and to be willing to accept everything that happens to me at Your hands, for You alone are the lover of mankind, and Your Word is truth.

I bless You, Lord, at the assemblies.
Psalm 26:12