A riddling ramble on Thomas Sunday

The Lord’s Day called Antipascha, also known as Thomas Sunday, and this year by the special lateness of Pascha itself, also Mother’s Day. Meanwhile, I just realized that I missed acknowledging Ascension Day—that was May fifth, but only for the ‘Western’ Church, which means everyone except the ‘Eastern Orthodox’ and so I shouldn’t be bothered, but I am. Why? Because there’s only One Church, and so there should only be One Pascha (Easter to most people), and One Ascension Day, One Pentecost, One Christmas, and so on. It’s hard not to feel there’s something wrong with you when you’ve just started Lent and almost everyone you know has just celebrated Easter.

Or, like today, we’ve just concluded Bright Week, the week-long ‘liturgical day’ of Pascha—only we Orthodox have this—and you find out that the feast of Christ’s Ascension, for most people, happened three days ago! I know I wouldn’t feel this way if I lived in an ‘Orthodox’ country like Greece or Russia.

Remember, this is just a ramble, nothing more. I’m just thinking out loud as I continue my eighth-day rest after morning liturgy. I learned several things today ‘at church.’

One of them was the nomenclature of the day—Antipascha. I’ve heard that one before, or read it somewhere. I’ve seen the name made fun of by ‘I can’t remember who,’ but they compared it to antipasto. The notion that ‘anti’ means ‘against’ was corrected for us on the back of the weekly bulletin. ‘Anti’ means ‘instead of.’ Yes, I already knew that, but it also means ‘opposite of’ but not as in ‘against’ but as in ‘facing’ something, almost like a mirror image.

So there’s Pascha and there’s Antipascha, day one of Easter its beginning and day eight of Easter its ending. If memory serves me right, I think the Jewish feast of Passover also lasts eight days, and that wouldn’t surprise me. Like it or not, Christians and Jews, Pascha and Pesach, Easter and Passover, are inseparably connected, and we should be pleased.

But Thomas Sunday, yes, we heard the gospel lesson, but there was no preaching. We heard read to us instead the Paschal encyclical of our American chief hierarch, Metropolitan Joseph, a lovely epistle. I listened, but meanwhile my heart was squirming in my chest and a little indignant that someone wasn’t opening the gospel message to us.

The mention of Mother’s Day was also a brief tack-on.

Now I just remembered why another name for this particular Lord’s day is Low Sunday. ‘Low’ as in attendance in most churches because people are still tuckered out from the long services of Holy Week, and yes, ‘low’ in terms of energy level. I admit, I almost fell back asleep this morning myself, but in my case, only because I am insufferably lazy. My guardian angel got rather blunt and pushy with me, ordering me to hop out of my pajamas and into the shower, then thankfully softened up a bit and let me go to services dressed in my comfortable church clothes—cargo trousers and turtleneck fleece.

Another thing I learned at church today was that apart from all the other Orthodox jurisdictions—we have to say ‘jurisdictions’ and not ‘churches’ if we are to affirm the reality of the Orthodox Church’s unity—the Antiochian Holy Synod decreed back in 1997 that the forty days between Pascha and Ascension are totally fast-free, just as Bright Week is. If I had known this, I’d have joined the Antiochian Church long ago—just kidding!

I actually like to fast, and I am happy that I am a Greek Orthodox in an Antiochian parish, and I will probably keep the Wednesday and Friday fasts as I am used to, but it’s nice to know that if I accidentally forget—bacon and eggs for breakfast is my most frequent blunder—I can claim automatic amnesty from my conscience. Not from God, of course! because He didn’t institute the fasts, the Church did with the authority He gives her. (And I wish the Church would use that authority to let up on some restrictions and tighten up on some others. Oh, well.)

Mother’s Day saw people abandoning the sacred premises after the Divine Liturgy instead of gathering for fellowship in the parish hall. I hoped they were all going off to honor the mothers in their families, some to restaurants, some to banquets at home.

I know that the Mother’s Day and Father’s Day holidays are sort of made-up, but you can’t have too many days dedicated to honoring one’s parents and thanking God for them. Moi, I used to thank my Mom on my birthday for the double whammy of having to birth me and then having to raise me (my Dad helped with the second, of course), and then I used to do the same on Mother’s Day. She’s gone now, and so is my Dad, and now I’m in the hot seat. I’m next, but the odd thing is, I don’t feel any older than when I was a child, and even though they’re both gone, I still see them with a child’s eyes, love them with a child’s heart, and feel dependent on them and thankful for what they’ve done for me (and even to me).

Thank you, Mom, for raising me, and now for watching over me, and thank you too, Dad, because without you, Mom couldn’t have become my Mother.

Life goes on, for me, and for the world. I just read that the Russian Duma (parliament) gave its okay to a measure that would give the Russian government the authority to ask the Turkish government for the return of the Great Church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople (Istanbul, also once known as Islambol) to the Orthodox Christians.

I’ve opined on this topic before and unfavorably. My question then and now was and is, ‘What are we going to do with it, if we get it back?’ It’s as if someone we love were kidnapped and held hostage by an implacable enemy, and we asked for the loved one’s head. Sure, they might give us the head by chopping it off and rolling it to us, but the body is still theirs, and it’s dead. A head by itself is not alive, nor is a body without a head. Probably more than half of the Turkish population is descended from Christian Greeks and other Christian peoples. Only when Christ enters the Turkish heart, will Hagia Sophia be returned to us, as it must be.

Of course, first, it would be nice if Christ entered the Christian heart…

But I did also read an amazing story of a dauntless Cretan priest who during the aftermath of the first World War, as a chaplain to the Greek army, entered Hagia Sophia in February, 1919 and celebrated a Divine Liturgy in that part of the Great Church where the altar would have stood. In the presence of a gradually growing crowd of Turkish Muslims (and a few Greeks of the City who wandered in) he sang the liturgy with a few army officers as chanters and servers. Only after the liturgy was ended did the crowd of Turks get riled up and began threatening the priest and the handful of officers as they gathered their things and departed.

The story tells that one husky Turk actually hit the priest with a wooden beam intending to kill him, but the priest ducked and was only injured in the shoulder. A Turkish official showed up and ordered the crowd to leave the Greeks alone and let them go back to their ship. He didn’t want to create another international incident. Things were bad enough.

Things were bad enough! For us, today, this is an understatement. With world politics escalating everywhere you look, it astonishes me that Russia would make such a proposal to the Turkish government. It’s almost as if the world knows that it only has less than a year to redraw national borders and commit atrocities before the next American president takes hold of the reins of power, first in these United States, and then, everywhere else. That is, if the hated one wins the election.

If the harmless one is elected, by some kind of miracle, well, then the last eight years will have been nothing more than a practice run for the makers of Star Wars the Next Generation. Then, we’ll look back at the ‘liberation of Crimea’ as if it were nothing more than Russia taking back what was always theirs, as we see a large part of humanity swept into new political black holes, the results of collapsed red giants (puns intended). Then, my question will be, ‘How much did you have to pay for that church?’

In a mirror dimly

Thinking about faith and doubt, if they are religious, people tend to praise the first and blame the second. I mean, they think faith is good and doubt bad. They assume that they have faith, maybe not wonder-working faith like some of the saints had, but at least enough faith to get by, to qualify them as believers, and they outwardly pity and inwardly scorn those whom they imagine imprisoned in doubt, such as agnostics, atheists, and other unbelievers. Sometimes they combat with them, not so much to ‘save’ them as to conquer them, to prove that they’re wrong.

But this is not the way it is. Faith and doubt co-exist in every soul, and neither understands the other very much, but they are not enemies as much as they are spiritual midwives appointed by God to help deliver us, yes, to deliver us who have been born of the flesh once, but must also experience a second birth, of the spirit. One cannot believe without first doubting. Faith emerges from doubt. It is a seed planted in the dark soil that sprouts in the blind warmth of the sun, and breaks out to send up a shoot that greens and branches, leafs, flowers and bears fruit.

What some people call doubt, being misguided by ‘popular’ religion, is actually not doubt but ‘unknowing.’ One can have faith and still not know that God exists in a specific form. One may conceive of God as a force instead of a person, for example, and still have faith, even miraculous faith, because God’s mercy is not limited by either our knowledge or our understanding. Even the greatest saints, those who know Jesus Christ as Son of God and Savior of the world, those of the greatest faith, still have doubt—unknowing—because the human mind has limits.

Some people say, ‘I know God,’ or ‘I know the Lord,’ without qualification, or with it. They think this is a very great thing, and they contrast themselves with others ‘who don’t know the Lord’ and hence are not saved. This is a way of talking that easily passes for faith, but is only a cosmetic applied to prevent ourselves and others from seeing how ignorant we really are. The important thing is not that we know God, but that He knows us. On our side we can know Him very little, but what we can do is acknowledge Him before men and to ourselves, by obeying His commandments.

Christ knows what He is dealing with when it comes to us. He knows we are a barren wasteland full of noxious weeds, arid, wind-swept, and forbidding. There we are, a desert of doubt, yet that does not dissuade Him from coming to us, planting His divine seed in hope that it will take root and choke the weeds in us. He comes and waters us, nurturing us not only with what is natural but with what is supernatural, His own blood. The winds that blew us cold and dry, those ‘lords of the air’ He silences with a word, and He raises us from dark doubt into the light of faith.

Brethren, if you doubt, do not be afraid, but accept all from God’s hand. That acceptance, even of doubt, is reliance on the unseen, unknown and unknowable God, which He will, when it pleases Him, without our help, reward with all that He wills for us, even faith, that contract between Creator and creature that we were created for. The Bride is for the Bridegroom, and in each one of us, He is willing to come, though it be in the darkest night, ‘for now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now we know in part; then we shall know fully, even as we have been fully known’ (cf. 1 Corinthians 13:12).

Fully His

Since I am a fool, I want everyone to know. Stay away from me…

Most people, thank God, are way too smart, too educated and sophisticated to be wasting their time reading my humble blog.
To those who do, I apologise profusely. Why?

Because I say that, on a day to day basis, even using a translation, an ordinary believer can read the scriptures with confidence that he or she can understand most of it, in its plain meaning. For those who are sourcing doctrines (quite a different application), I say that we need to study the original texts of the scriptures to be sure we have the correct understanding of them. Someone counters, that there are many different versions of the original text, though the differences are trivial, so what do you do with passages that appear in some but not all versions? And what about people acting on texts they don't really understand? How exasperating!

Yes, which original text? And yes, the differences are trivial. And yes, there's that text about handling snakes, and yes, idiots try to force their way into God's hands by imitating such things and justifying themselves and their carnal and base beliefs, using it. And yes, something about that snake handling passage seems somehow inconsistent with the rest of God's Book, just as the other New Testament pseudepigrapha also seem somehow alien to the Spirit of the Bible. And yes, even if you leave it in, it’s still forcing yourself into God's hands to try to imitate that and seek your deliverance in it.

We are not idiots, however; we have minds and spirits trained by the Word of God, if we only let Him train us.

The Bible says, ‘You have not lost the anointing He gave you, and you do not need anyone to teach you. The anointing He gave you teaches you everything.’

Who writes this? The human author was John, the author of the gospel and the epistles, and the one to whom the Revelation was granted. And yes, I don't care what bible scholars tell me, I believe it is the same person, but, yes, it doesn't really matter, as long as we really believe what it says.

Because not man, not woman, not bible scholars, not pontiffs, not saints, not bishops and presiding elders, not the king, not the emperor, not my mother or father, not you, and not me have anything to add, elaborate, amplify, enlighten, make comprehensible or comprehensive, or more useful, or more relevant, than what God the Author, the Revealer, the Sanctifier, the Enlightener, the Teacher, the Father, the Savior tells us into our obedient and welcoming ears, directly and fully and without doubt, and salvifically.

No, we are not idiots. I do not pick up snakes to prove I am a Christian. I do not speak in strange tongues to prove that the Holy Spirit is in me, upon me, and with me. I don't need to prove my faithfulness to God's Word by going out and blasting sinners, holding them up to ridicule, hating them or judging them and excluding them from the promises of God.

But though everything be taken away from me, I will not, cannot deny the Word of God, and with the saints I will stand my ground, I will defend them even when I don't agree with them one hundred per cent, and I will stand on the Word of God, because there is no other foundation, there is nothing solid in the whole created universe to stand on, except that precious, holy, divine Word, who is the Son of God, one of the Holy Triad, glorified in the heavens and on earth, and fed to us spiritual infants, verse by verse, spoonful by spoonful, day after day, until we are fully grown and mature, fully reflecting His glory, fully alive in Him with that life that has existed from before the beginning of all things, fully His.

Christ is looking for us

Christ is looking for us. Are we going to hide from him, or let ourselves be found by Him before death hides us from Him, from the world and from life?

— Nikolaj Velimirović, Bishop of Ohrid and Žiča

A simple statement, just five words, and we are handed the key to life, ‘Christ is looking for us.’ Does anyone ever remember hearing these words before, spoken to them by parents, or teachers, or priests? It’s probably one of a great number of such simple, short, but pithy and powerful truths that have assailed our unhearing ears over the course of our lives. We weren’t listening because we were tired, or bored, or rebellious against what we thought was a power trip to control us. Or, if none of the three authority groups just mentioned, but maybe someone we liked and trusted, a close friend perhaps, said those five words to us, maybe we were just not interested.

Well, a little-known, deceased Serbian bishop wrote these words. Maybe we don’t want to hear him, because he was a Serb. Everyone knows that the Serbs are the world’s scapegoat—oops! I meant to say, you can’t trust them. Remember Milošević. As for me, though, I know the truth when I hear it, and I want to believe it, if I let myself.

Yes, Christ is looking for us. Doesn’t that thought make you wonder what churches have been doing all these years? They say they’re all about Him, about Jesus, getting to know Him, but sometimes it seems the preamble to the actual ‘getting to know Him’ takes years and years, and after we’ve been indoctrinated and sacramentally doused, oiled, and spoon-fed, we’re no closer to understanding this great truth than we were before. In fact, sometimes the superfluous foliage of ‘church life’ hides it, hides Him, from us so well, that we wonder what it was that brought us there—to church—in the first place.

Then, suddenly, out of nowhere, a voice speaks, ‘Christ is looking for us.’ And if we believe what we have just heard, we realize that everything depends on one thing—that He find us—and that all we can do, and do it with all our might, is remove anything and everything that keeps Him from His goal. Now, it seems, we look at ‘church’ in a new way.

Does what it does with us, for us, and to us, help Jesus find us? Whatever does, we must decide here and now, to keep it. Does anything that it does keep Him from finding us? If there is anything that does keep Him from finding us, in no matter how small a way, it must go, we must go—sometimes—if what is keeping Jesus from finding us is what we call ‘church.’

Because sometimes—and we are afraid to consider this possibility—the very authorities that we expect to trust are the ones that keep Jesus from finding us. Yes, the major obstacle to Him finding us is—you guessed it—ourselves! The bishop asks, ‘Are we going to hide from him?’ and so, if we are honest, we have to admit that we have been hiding from Jesus for as long as we knew He was there.
Of course, at first we hid ourselves, like Adam and Eve, because we just ‘knew’ we were naked. We knew that human nature, at least our own, cannot stand before the Divine Presence and not be annihilated. Annihilated? Yes, revert back to the ‘nothing’ out of which He made us, because we can’t thank Him enough for making us, blaming Him instead. ‘You made me this way! I hate You!’ is what we are saying by our hiding, no matter what our lips say or our minds think. What a mess we’re in!

All the religions of the world, including the Christian ones, make out God to be the bogey, the scary one, the haunter, the one who will find out everything about us and use it to condemn us. That’s why we have to sacrifice. We have to bribe and cajole the Divine Nature, just so He doesn’t torment us in this life, and torture us forever in the next. With a God like that, who wouldn’t want death to be the end? Just black, unseeing, unfeeling, unthinking nothingness. Pure idiocy without knowing it. Yes, a better definition of She’ol can’t be found. Just clear gone.

Jesus of Nazareth, a historical figure we have heard about, comes and teaches, performs a few miracles, gets in trouble with the authorities, and is condemned to a shameful and painful death even without a hung jury. His followers later claim he rose from the dead, hung about for a few weeks, then disappeared up there somewhere. Afterwards, the followers get a weird tingling sensation and start spreading incredible stories about the man. Finally, one of the cult’s worst enemies and persecutors has a religious experience and takes over the cult, giving a better interpretation of its leader than he gave himself. Ding-dong! Twenty centuries later, it’s still time for church. And you were made to go, come hell or high water, until you were able to slug abed on Sunday morning and have the guts to tell your dad or mom, ‘I’m not going!’

Yes, Christ is looking for us. He really is. At its best, the Church tries to help Him. At its worst, it would even turn Him away at the Communion Cup, if He showed up, with the announcement that the Holy Mysteries ‘are only for the Orthodox, those who have been baptized and chrismated, and prepared themselves by confession and fasting.’ Then, what do we make of His, ‘whatever you do to the least of My brothers, that you do unto me’? No, of course not, we’d never do that. Anyway, what He said doesn’t apply to such things as who can come to Communion. Only those who have crossed all their T’s and dotted all their I’s can be admitted to the Holy Mysteries. Never mind the good thief. He was an exception.

Someone says, ‘I believe! Help my unbelief!’ and that seems to be the lot of all of us. So much has been told to us, and demanded of us, in Christ’s blessed name, that we had just better go along with it. But wait! A bishop once said, ‘Christ is looking for us.’ What could be easier than me trying to help Him? I don’t want to hide anymore. I don’t want anyone to hide me from Him until, like the bishop says, ‘death hides us from Him, from the world and from life.’ Church is the place where the finding is supposed to happen. It has to be! It’s the great ‘lost and found’ room where much more than a lost hat or scarf is waiting to be found and taken home.

And what, then, when He finds us, when He finds me? Does everything continue as it always has? Well, at least I have no cause to say, ‘I am looking for God’ or ‘I am seeking the Truth’ because the truth is, I never was looking, never seeking. It was He, all the time, through all my disguises, hideouts, and subterfuges, He the persistent and only lover whose love alone makes lovely His beloved. Religions pale in His presence, disciplines for their own sake die at His feet. He comes, impervious to all that would harm us, and takes each one of us by the hand. He leads, we follow, until the wall of separation dissipates, and it is ‘no longer I who live, but Christ,’ who is all in all.

Amazing grace… I once was lost, but now I am found.

Yes, Christ is looking for us.

The Anastasis

Standing in the darkened temple, a rare experience. Not standing there alone, but standing, surrounded by a great multitude, barely visible by the meager light filtering through long, purple-tinted windows, light from the night outside, a physical oxymoron. Oh-KSEE-moh-ron, with the accent on the ‘ksee’, a mystical hybrid combining the words for ‘sharp’ and ‘fool’.

Light from the night outside, that’s how dark the interior of the temple was, that we needed the light of the night to see by, the night of Pascha. ‘How is this night different from all other nights?’ the Hebrew child asks, taking his part in the ritual of Pesach. There we stood for what seemed hours, each armed with a taper, soon to be joined to light from the unwaning Light.

In that prolonged moment, looking over the heads of people with their backs to me, a faceless crowd that I nonetheless knew, knew as people I once lived with in my earthly life, all of us now sunken to the lands below, never again to return to the sunlit lands above, the chill of ageless death breathed over us, we stood, we waited for redemption, in the pre-dawn darkness.

Never before had I experienced this in the midnight service of Pascha, the Easter of the Greek Orthodox Church. Never before did the darkness seem to last this long, long enough for us to glimpse what the darkness means, that we are all dead, all already dead and waiting in the darkness of Hades, waiting for our liberation. ‘I expect the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the age to come.’

‘I look for’ the creed says now, but ‘προσδοκω’ pros-dho-KOH ‘I expect’ is what we used to say, as I still do, when reciting the Symbol of the Faith of Nikaia. In the darkness, in the gloom of that cavernous darkness, we stood pressed together in rows, all facing forward, eyes fastened on the hand of our invisible Master like slaves’ eyes fixed on their master’s hand.

To save us, who though still alive in the flesh and gathered for the festival of our redemption, in that darkened temple instantly forgetting who we were, knew and awaited only One, our hearing sharpened by our night-blindness, listening intently for the sound the flash of fire makes when it descends from on high to light the Paschal candle, and then for the Voice crying out.

‘Δεύτε λάβετε φως’ DHEF-teh LAH-veh-teh FOHSS ‘Come, receive the Light’, and what a different light! as we peer through the waning darkness to see emerging from the Royal Gate in the metaphorical wall of Jerusalem emblazoned with glowing ikons, the Christ-bearing priests ‘εκ του ανεσπέρου φωτός’ ek too un-ess-PEH-roo foh-TOSS ‘from the unwaning Light’.

All our waiting, what seemed like forever, now at an end, like the souls in Hades whose lot we have just mystically shared, all in darkness and silence, has ripened into reception of the Light, which now goes before us, chanting, ‘και δοξάσατε Χριστόν’ keh dhoh-KSAH-sah-teh Chriss-TOHN ‘and glorify Christ’ as we meekly and with generous joy follow out into the starry night.

Into the cool wind that threatens to snuff out our candles, where we again see and recognize each other, families finding their members, mothers, fathers, daughters and sons, singing and re-igniting their tapers with ‘τον αναστάντα εκ νεκρών’ tohn ah-nahss-THAN-da ek neh-KROHN ‘the One who is risen from the dead’, now a crowd released to receive the real, the true Light, the Christ.

We experienced by anticipation in the morning service the harrowing of Hades, witnessing the scattering of laurel leaves and rose petals as tokens of the victory of Christ over death and Hades, but in the darkness of the pre-dawn service of the Resurrection, at the midnight hour, we personally experienced the waiting, the descent, and the hidden victory, our redemption.

The world goes on with its business, unaware that everything, even the course of history, even the laws of nature, have changed. Nothing remains the same, and the world of the past has gone. Before us, before the whole world, the door to a new universe has been opened, and we gingerly poke around on the path paved for our pilgrimage, ‘Is it really opened? Is it really for us?’

And to the angel of the church in Philadelphia write, ‘These things says He who is holy, He who is true, He who has the key of David, He who opens and no one shuts, and shuts and no one opens. I know your works. Behold, I have set before you an open door, and no one can shut it… (Revelation 3:7-8). Let us, therefore, brethren, walk in the Light, the unwaning Light, we have received.

A brief Bible study

When I woke this morning, I looked at my smart phone and it was signaling that there was a message. I checked the message, and then dismissed it. The screen then displayed this post from September 14, 2011—I don't know why, but perhaps I was looking at something from that date the night before, and did not swipe it out. It became my first meditation of the day, and I want to remember it.

My favorite ikon of Jesus Christ. Whoever wrote this ikon knew the Lord. When I see His visage, I am reminded of the Psalm, 'Of all men You are the most handsome, Your lips are moist with grace for God has blessed you forever.' Psalm 45 Jerusalem Bible

“Most assuredly, I say to you, he who believes in Me, the works that I do he will do also; and greater works than these he will do, because I go to My Father. And whatever you ask in My name, that I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask anything in My name, I will do it.”
John 14:12-14

James and John, the two sons of Zebedee, came up to Jesus, saying, “Teacher, we want You to do for us whatever we ask of You.” And He said to them, “What do you want Me to do for you?” They said to Him, “Grant that we may sit, one on Your right and one on Your left, in Your glory.” But Jesus said to them, “You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or to be baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized?” They said to Him, “We are able.” And Jesus said to them, “The cup that I drink you shall drink; and you shall be baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized. But to sit on My right or on My left, this is not Mine to give; but it is for those for whom it has been prepared.”
Mark 10:35-40

There were also two others, criminals, led with Him to be put to death. And when they had come to the place called Calvary, there they crucified Him, and the criminals, one on the right hand and the other on the left.
Luke 23:32-33

“Therefore whoever confesses Me before men, him I will also confess before My Father who is in heaven. But whoever denies Me before men, him I will also deny before My Father who is in heaven.”
Matthew 10:32-33

One of the criminals who hung there hurled insults at him: “Aren't you the Christ? Save yourself and us!” But the other criminal rebuked him. “Don't you fear God,” he said, “since you are under the same sentence? We are punished justly, for we are getting what our deeds deserve. But this man has done nothing wrong.” Then he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” Jesus answered him, “I tell you the truth, today you will be with me in paradise.”
Luke 23:39-43

Who shall ascend into the hill of the LORD? or who shall stand in his holy place? He that hath clean hands, and a pure heart; who hath not lifted up his soul unto vanity, nor sworn deceitfully. He shall receive the blessing from the LORD, and righteousness from the God of his salvation. This is the generation of them that seek him, that seek thy face, O God of Jacob. Selah. Lift up your heads, O ye gates; and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors; and the King of glory shall come in. Who is this King of glory? The LORD strong and mighty, the LORD mighty in battle. Lift up your heads, O ye gates; even lift them up, ye everlasting doors; and the King of glory shall come in. Who is this King of glory? The LORD of hosts, he is the King of glory. Selah.
Psalm 24:3-10

Who is this King of glory?
The LORD strong and mighty, the LORD mighty in battle.

Maintaining standards

Much of the dissatisfaction and insecurity of the average man today is caused by what we perceive as the failure to keep to our standards. I know it is for me. My personal gripe is not about ecological recklessness, economic or social injustice, or ‘sliding scale morality’ taking hold of us, but about the complete breakdown of public education in America, which I believe is the root of the other problems. I am not going to entertain my personal gripe, but examine the one currently at the top of the country’s list—sliding scale morality.

What I mean by this, is the collapse of what used to be called ‘normal’ (we are constantly told, there is no ‘normal’), but worse yet, the complete abandonment of moral absolutes. Signal events characterizing this trend are, for example, the battles over images of ‘The Ten Commandments’ being set up in public buildings, and the ‘marriage equality’ conflict recently (and perhaps temporarily) decided by the United States Supreme Court. Earlier signposts were similar rulings that seemed to overturn former moral absolutes, Roe versus Wade, opening the door to legal abortion.

Ask anyone, and though the lists may differ in details, almost everyone feels that standards are not being maintained. Even those who wholeheartedly deny the existence of moral absolutes, believing in relativity of customs and morals, if they are honest, will admit that they feel some standards are being let slip or let go. They may be atheists or just believe in a God who couldn’t be bothered with so insignificant a matter as human welfare. They may believe ‘right and wrong’ are merely functions of our ‘herd mentality’ or instinct. Still, most believe in maintaining standards.

As a Christian, I believe in the law of God. By this, I mean that I accept it as fact that the Divine Nature has a definite personality, will, and plan. The plan is evident in the very structure of the physical universe. The will is perhaps less evident, but still reveals itself in the flow of human history. As for the personality, well, that I am a person and am sitting here thinking and writing is enough proof for me. The God I believe in makes things just like Himself, just on a different scale. As a consequence, I believe that the law of God is a function of His personality, will, and plan, and not of anything else.

Yes, there are human laws. Of course, there have to be. Made in the image of God, man imitates Him even when we don’t intend to. God is a lawgiver and so are we. That’s why there are six hundred twenty three mitzvot (commandments) in the Torah (the law of Moses). The famous Ten Commandments are at the core of these, but I don’t think that all of our man-made laws, even when attributed to the God of the Bible, are necessitated by These. To me, the Ten Commandments represent the irretractable moral law. They are universal and inalienable, not because they were written by God’s finger on the stone tablets, but because they are inscribed on every human heart, what we call our ‘conscience.’

Even the conscience, however, is overlaid, sometimes displaced by, the man-made laws and customs, many of which are counter to the Ten Commandments, but it is still there, waiting to be discovered, or to be freed. Human society, when it holds the Ten Commandments as a moral absolute, can still subvert them out of accidental or intentional legislation, and when it does, will find itself in exactly the dilemma we now are in. Hence, our dissatisfactions and insecurities, even when we do not want to admit it.

The Ten Commandments. I say they’re valid because they’re ‘written on the heart.’ Others will say because ‘they’re in the Bible.’ Either way, their substance simply cannot be ignored without consequences. Some of them cannot be enforced by human legal systems because they are too deep, though societies have tried, without success.

The first, ‘I am the Lord thy God. Thou shalt have no other gods before me,’ seems to impose the strict, dogmatic monotheism of the Semitic peoples on everyone else. I think that it is deeper. It is the call that all humans hear echoing inside their inner silence, in the ‘monotheism’ of their own personality, what motivated the poet Walt Whitman to write his ‘Song of Myself’. No state or church can enforce this, and it needs no enforcement. It is vital. It is the ground of human personality and the key to understanding it.

The second, ‘Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image,’ seems to be a corollary of the first, and I believe it is. You cannot follow the first without following the second. Yes, historically, it has been used to prohibit man-made representations of ‘God’ in the round and even in the flat, and just as historically been beaten back by human nature itself which, like the living God, still wants ‘face to look upon Face.’ This leads me to believe that misrepresentation, even substitution, of the Being by anything not intrinsic to Him, is the moral imperative of the second commandment, again, unenforceable.

The third, ‘Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain,’ though seeming to have nothing really to do with anything at all in the modern world view, is still, in my opinion, an ineradicable moral value. Yes, I cringe when I hear anyone joining the Name of Jesus in a curse as much as a Jew is scandalized by one articulating the syllables of the Tetragrammaton YHVH. But this commandment is as much a prohibition of taking your neighbor’s name in vain, that is, disrespecting his or her personhood, hence a universal transcending religious borders.

The fourth, ‘Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy,’ like the first, seems to have nothing to do with anyone except the Jews to whom it was first given, but the speed with which a ‘day of rest’ has conquered the world seems to testify that this, too, is a moral imperative that cannot be denied. Yet, as with the other Commandments, we try to bend this one to our uses, even though ‘deep down’ we know we shouldn’t. Shopping on Sunday, or working for pay, still feels strange for many people who live in countries where once all activities except ‘church’ were banned on that day. Though we have legislated the ‘weekend’ and do whatever we please, the pattern of human life is regulated by a seventh day ‘rest,’ which we find ourselves taking, out of expediency, any day of the week, proof again of its inviolability.

With the fifth, ‘Honour thy father and thy mother,’ we transition out of commandments many think merely formal and ceremonial, into those which most consider moral and enforceable. This is also the only one of the Ten Commandments which has a blessing, or reward, attached to it, ‘that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.’ Bridging the ceremonial and the moral, this becomes the proof text for many human laws relating to our obligations to authority, again a universal nonetheless. When we dishonor, or even kill off, our roots, what can we expect but that we should wither and die?

If the fifth commandment can still be regarded as a ceremonial, and unenforceable, standard, the following five cannot. We know instinctively that they are true and with the necessary energy try either to enforce them or to find our way around them, depending on our purposes. It is on these five that all man-made legal systems are built, even when the foundations are so overlaid and ‘remodeled’ that they are unrecognizable. Even moralities and legal systems completely unrelated to the Ten Commandments have these five at their core. How is this possible? Again, not on stone, but on the human heart, are they indelibly inscribed.

‘Thou shalt not kill… Thou shalt not commit adultery… Thou shalt not steal… Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor… Thou shalt not covet.’ That homicide, infidelity, theft, dishonesty, and greed are prohibited should surprise no one. In no country or culture anywhere on earth, knowing the Ten Commandments and the God of Abraham or not, are any one or all of these five held up as an ideal to be achieved—except in the modern world. There may have been human societies in the past in which some of these were considered virtuous and deserving of praise, but they have been known aberrations. In the modern world, however, legal systems seem to be designed to actually protect the breakers of these five commandments from any punishment, again proof of their validity.

The collapse of moral absolutes under the weight of our man-made legislation should hardly be a surprise to anyone, but the way back seems to be undiscoverable, because everyone has his own idea now of what is moral and what immoral, and I am no different. I may believe that only the Ten Commandments are really from God and everything else just man-made expedients. Whether I am right or wrong about this, the world struggles on, either maintaining standards, or dismantling them. Meanwhile, daily life under the watchful eye of Divine Providence continues, and even in the briefest moments allowed us, we can make a difference by doing what deep down we know is right.

Unto the ages of ages

My beloved friends, let us continue to love each other since love comes from God. Everyone who loves is born of God and experiences a relationship with God. The person who refuses to love doesn’t know the first thing about God, because God is love—so you can’t know him if you don’t love. This is how God showed his love for us: God sent his only Son into the world so we might live through him. This is the kind of love we are talking about—not that we once upon a time loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to clear away our sins and the damage they’ve done to our relationship with God.

1 John 4:7-10 The Message

All week I have been thinking this one thought, ‘If God is love, what does that make us?’ We have heard the phrase ‘God is love’ and its inverse ‘Love is God’—both in some senses true—that we have gotten used to it, so it doesn’t have the same effect on us that it may have had when we first heard it. ‘Yes,’ we say to ourselves, ‘God is love, but I still have to deal with living in this world, where very little of that love is found. Today, I will just try to do my best.’

My mind wanders into the treasury of my heart, and there I find the jewel box of Fr Evely, where this gem is shining and sparkling its bright, powerful meekness at me, ‘Not seeing enough love anywhere they look, they just love with all their might.’ Never letting us wonder for long who ‘they’ might be, he tells us on the very lid of the jewel box, ‘That man is You,’ and I quietly back away from the glory (of who love is) as carefully as the High Priest of Israel backed away from the Sacred Ark.

‘If God is love, what does that make you?’ again I hear myself pondering. No, don’t press me too hard. Like an overripe fruit I might burst. Without a mirror we cannot see ourselves, but our reflections return to us from other people. I know a saintly woman who seems not to ever stop working, caring for others (even for me) with boundless might. Her husband and only son, both invalids seriously and painfully ill, she is their mainstay and manages everything, thinking herself untalented and unremarkable.

Little does she know that she is a true ikon of the God she serves. Yes, she’s a Christian, a Roman Catholic, but you won’t see her at mass very much. Her love is out working in the world where, as Fr Evely observes, ‘there’s not enough love anywhere,’ and without thinking twice, she just does whatever needs to be done. Her life, she thinks, untheological and barely Christian, because it doesn’t follow the ‘rubrics’ of her catechism. She admires and praises the gifts of others, while unknowing her own.

‘Let us make man in our own image,’ says the Divine Triad, both at the beginning, and in every moment since then until now, ‘and let them have dominion.’ Yes, the Divine Nature, ever One, has even blurred His Oneness without sacrificing His unity by being Three, and from eternity, so that He could be what He has always been—love. Not satisfied to remain ‘God on High’ His love for His creation drew Him down to its depths, where He recapitulated every step in His evolution of the universe in His mother’s womb.

Knowing that we are made ‘in the Image’ we still did not understand what that means—we still don’t, or won’t, but He keeps reminding us, reminding me—so He, the pre-eternal God, became one of us, appearing as a little child. We are familiar with that too from our Christmas hymns. The gospels, which we hear regularly all year long in church services, reiterate that He is love, proven by everything He did for us from the beginning till now. We let ourselves forget that ‘now’ means, ‘right here, right now.’

If God is love, what does that make us? No question can have greater impact than this, when we know the answer. And the answer is not hidden, never was hidden, it’s been before us, individually and corporately, since we came into being. Our being itself is the answer. ‘Let us make man in our own image.’ To know the answer is the revelation of who we are, in Christ. Following that revelation, all human knowledge, all eloquence, pales before ‘the revelation of the sons and daughters of God.’

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing. Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.

1 Corinthians 13:1-8

No, love never ends. How could it? for God is love. Now, made in His image, brethren, let’s be adamant to be what He made us ‘always, now and ever, and unto the ages of ages.’

If anyone has ears

“Already in the Western Council of 371 it is supported that councils without the consent of the Pope are invalid. In the East, St Basil the Great mentions the ‘arrogant papal brow’, while the records of the Ecumenical Councils inform us about the papal claims the papist representatives conveyed until the 8th Ecumenical Council (879/880) under Patriarch Photius. It is internationally confirmed by history that the Orthodox East never recognized the primacy of the bishop of Rome in administrative jurisdiction and authority, neither in theory nor in practice, but only in ‘position of honor.’ This means that he was first among equals… Finally, the Orthodox East’s refusal to submit to the claims of the West concerning a primacy of authority over the whole Church became the reason the papists broke away from the Church in 1054.”

— Dimitrios Tselengidis

Reading such ‘stuff’ as the above, is it any wonder that Christians cannot see eye to eye, let alone get together, be together, and stay together, following the teaching of Jesus? Why aren’t we ashamed to say such things, why don’t we blush to hear them? Instead, it warms our hearts when we hear our Christian adversaries traduced in this way, yes, but the fires of hell will do more than warm our hearts. Christian adversaries? Well, we wouldn’t call them Christians if we didn’t have to. We’re only being ‘nice’ to recognize them at all, as if we did at least give them the shallowest shadow of a doubt that they just might be trying to believe in Christ, something which we’ve got under our belts, perfect to a ‘T’. No one can hold a candle to us. We’re ‘the light of the world’ that Christ mentions in the gospel.

Anyway, if we’re cantankerous and uncooperative, it’s not our fault. The holy fathers have paved our path long before we ever arrived on the scene. If Jesus wanted us to be any different, He would’ve had the holy fathers express themselves differently. I mean, if St Basil the Great points out the obvious and St Photius guards us against their prideful errors, can we do any better or be any worse than our holy fathers? Certainly not. To the Turk we’ve always said, ‘I was born a Christian, and I will die a Christian,’ and they’ve been gladder than hell to oblige us. So, why shouldn’t we keep up our hue and cry against our mortal enemies on the other side of the aisle? After all, we know what they want—to lord it over us. The leopard can’t change its spots. They’re more dangerous than ever, because they seem so friendly.

Yes, it’s Bright Week, something I recently learned from a Catholic priest I know, they don’t have. It really surprised me. Somehow I just assumed everyone knew that Pascha, Easter, is a liturgical day that outlasts the twenty-four hours from sunset to sunset, that it stretches out, leaps across the chasm of one week’s time to become a septuplet of itself. ‘Aw,’ I thought to myself while trying to not look condescending at Father Bill, ‘they don’t have bright week… It’s so sad.’ Pushing back the walls of denominational bias can be difficult, even when we think we’re liberated from it. Just like the Hebes who couldn’t find a way through the Red Sea to escape Pharaoh if God didn’t open it, we have to depend on His help to do the impossible—love our fellow Christians—or perish like proud charioteers when the sea of grace closes.

Back to the passage quoted above, it reminds me of a sad truth that occurred to me recently. The Church has always acted as though it must protect the holiness of God and especially of the sacraments from us. We have to prove ourselves worthy by public confession of our faith and submission to all the teachings of Holy Church. Only then are we allowed to partake of the Lord’s Supper, only after we’ve been shriven and washed in the saving waters of holy baptism. The Church must guard us very stringently and keep outsiders—those who don’t believe as we do—away. The unclean must not be allowed within the sacred precincts. Never mind that Christ invites all to come to Him, to receive Him, without explicit stipulations, ‘Take, eat, this is My Body which is broken for you…’

Why this is so, it seemed to me one day as I watched and heard a priest announce sternly before allowing his deacon to come out with the Holy Gifts that ‘communion is only for the Orthodox’ and ‘only those Orthodox who have prepared themselves by…’ is that the Church operates as a government, as a state. It has laws that must be obeyed. It requires steadfast loyalty and obedience. It expects to be the most important thing in our lives. Although when Christ and the apostles founded the Church, they modeled it on the family, not on the state, the challenges it has had to face have hardened it, so that if it is still a family, it is a very tight one. Though a family can be a place of love and acceptance, when it is dysfunctional it can be the loneliest and harshest place on earth, and more clannish than the Ku Klux.

Sometimes a beautiful family, one that serves God and each other in loving friendship, can devolve, little by little, into something that one must flee from. The kids can’t wait to leave home. Daughters do what they can to escape, even becoming pregnant out of wedlock. Sons escape into gangs or plain debauchery. Somewhere in the devolution the parents get a divorce. In the end, a once beautiful family is everything it cannot be, yet by stretching the imagination and with reluctant patience, forces itself to occasionally get together, but it is an unjoyful reunion, every time a funeral, even when no one has died. It doesn’t have to be this way. Though a family is divided by divorce, the kids can still be friends, still love each other, and together wait for their divorced parents to make peace. Sometimes this actually happens.

Nothing broken by us can be fixed by us, not ourselves though we try, not others because we only break them more in trying. Only Christ can fix what is broken. Only He can unite what we have divided. Only Jesus can call us back who have run away through disobedience, because it is only to Him that we must run. Through all the centuries He has remained who and what He is, and by twos and threes, threes and fours, He has been healing and saving us, all without our help, except that we let Him. Meanwhile the Church has minded its own business, tended the sheep, kept the wolves away, made sure its kingdom was secure and running smoothly, allowing no disturbance, no inspiration or enthusiasm which it could not control. Hearing, but not listening. Praying, but not obeying. Giving, but not let living. Hence, here we are.

As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in his love. I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command. I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you. You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit—fruit that will last—and so that whatever you ask in my name the Father will give you. This is my command: Love each other.

John 15:9-17

Yes, ‘if anyone has ears to hear, let them hear’ (Mark 4:23).

Make us want You

The real world is not a map that we can enjoy looking at, remembering the places we’ve been or where we would like to be. No, but it is useful to have a map if we want to find our way to a destination in the real world. In fact, we may never find our way without one.

In the same way, the Christian life is not a book we can enjoy reading, remembering the events it tells of taking place in the remote and harmless past or looking forward to things that are yet to come. No, but it is useful, in fact, it is indispensable, to have a book if we want to live the life that the book describes, but only if we put into practice what we find written in it.

We all know what book it is that tells us the way, but because we are tired of reading it, we never quite get where we say we want to be. We live not by the book but by our feelings about it and ‘love to tell the story of unseen things above, of Jesus and his glory, of Jesus and his love,’ when it suits us, thinking that our word of confession, or holding the right beliefs, saves us.

But no, it isn’t like that, it never was, it isn’t now, and it never will be. We shall not arrive at the promised land by looking at the map, or just reading about others who tried and died trying in the book, or dreaming of arriving at a destination that we’ve made up for ourselves by casual and sporadic study.

The map isn’t real, but the ground we stand on. The roads and places it shows are not the traveling and arriving, just a picture. No matter how long we gaze at it, we will never arrive. The book isn’t real, unless it is more than mere stories. The Jesus it tells of is just a myth unless we give up mere reading and start heeding, and salvation not a tool but a pretty toy to tantalize ourselves and others unless we use it.

Use salvation? Jesus just a myth? The bible just a story? No better than a map for our fantasies? Yes, it is all for nothing, the highest price ever paid for a ticket to the only destination ever worth going to, that we simply trash, despise and discard, or play with when it suits us. And we are offended if anyone implies that we are not being faithful.

Lord, have mercy on us. We have despised Your call and preferred to listen to everyone else but You, and changed Your words into anything but what You say. We look at Your picture and worship it, saying it is You we worship, and then we turn to our mirrors and glory in what we see, not knowing it is our shame. You have made us for You, but we have stolen ourselves. Lord, have mercy on us. Call us. Bring us back. Make us want You.

Being fulfilled

We are standing halfway through the second decade of the century that will see Orthodoxy the lone survivor of Christianity in the world, and what is slowing us down, what is keeping us from our Christ appointed commission, ‘Go, then, to all peoples everywhere and make them my disciples: baptize them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and teach them to obey everything I have commanded you’ (Matthew 28:19-20a)?

‘Go, then, to all peoples everywhere,’ not only in far off heathen lands, but to the heathens in our town, in our apartment block, in our neighborhood, the heathens next door, in our own household, even (if that’s where we find them) in our own hearts. No need to fly far, but only to turn in divine friendliness and friendship to the one standing next to us, without qualification, without prerequisite or expectation, to offer in person the tender mercy of Christ.

‘Make them my disciples,’ not our disciples, not the disciples of this or that program we have whipped up, not even the disciples of the Church fathers (who themselves were, in the first instance, the disciples of Christ, not of each other), nor of any teacher (for we have but One teacher, the Christ), nor of any holy hierarchs (for none is holy but God), nor of any pope or patriarch (for Christ alone is the head), but disciples of Christ (who is) in our midst.

‘Baptize them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,’ immerse them, not bodies only in the holy mystery that Christ ordained, but in the life of the blessed, consubstantial Trinity, the unearthly Triad who in Christ has entered the waters making them all-holy, trod the earth sanctifying it forever, not only wearing the form of man but being a man, remaining with us, in us, even as us, who live with each other in the perfect unity of the Spirit.

‘And teach them to obey everything I have commanded you,’ not human rules and regulations, neither the canons of the Church nor the protocols of political correctness, only everything that Christ commands. And what is this ‘everything’ that He commands? ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment, and the second is like it, Love your neighbor as yourself’ (Matthew 22:37-39).

‘That was easy,’ you say to yourself, ‘That’s nothing new. We’ve all heard it before, and we’re tired of trying. It doesn’t work. We still have enemies, the unbelievers. You can bring a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.’ But that doesn’t let us off following the commandment, ‘Go, then…’ nor excuse us for working against the very prayer of Christ, ‘I pray that they will all be one, just as you and I are one’ (John 17:21). We may help, but cannot hinder, the work of Christ.

Nor can we stop His prayer to the Father being fulfilled.

Bright Monday News

This post is very, very long, but forgive me, I couldn't help myself. It is just too good to tantalise you with fragments. The following is a talk given by Archimandrite Elias Morcos in 1964, which I discovered posted here in English translation of the original Arabic.

The Revival as a Return to God

The Church in her human reality is always something less than her perfect true reality. We must always surpass our human weakness within her in order to arrive at her perfect true reality. This is the revival: this constant effort, this continuous movement from the way we are to the way we should be.

The Church is the salt of the earth and completes the work of Christ in the world. The Church works, she is present, for the sake of the salvation of the world. We can say that she is the center of being, in her its destiny is achieved. The world corrupts and ages, but the Church is continuously renewed for the sake of the salvation of the world. But if the salt is corrupted, then how can it be salty?

The Church is the group of those who believe in the Lord Jesus and who have united around him to live the life of the Gospel, the life of God. They have no concern except to follow the Lord’s teaching and to follow in his footsteps. The group is in the world and for the world, but at the same time it is not of the world. From the beginning, from the ascension of the Lord to heaven, it is oriented toward the age to come, awaiting the return of the heavenly bridegroom and hastening him on. From now on, it lives in the last days, in the fullness of time, “it uses this world as though it doesn’t use it, and buys as though it doesn’t own.”

However, the coarseness and weakness of human nature weigh upon the Church, since she is made up of humans. Sins and failings and imperfections remain, and doubles will continue to remain as long as human beings are human. But the Lord has born all things and taken them all upon himself, and as a result there is no barrier.

The Lord Jesus has passed over our life and has cleansed us and taken us from weakness to strength and from corruption to life. In order for the Church to continue to be the Church, she must follow the Lord and cleave to a continuous Pascha, surpassing the self and constantly passing from the weight of the world and its many varied temptations to the victory of the Lord and the purity of the divine life.

Everything that exists is in a state of motion and progress. Vegetable, biological, and social life, the sciences… everything grows and is perfected. And how much more so the spiritual life. It is progress and growth, an infinite reaching toward God’s life. For that reason it is said that, “one who looks back is not suitable for the Kingdom of Heaven.”

The temptations of this world are many and varied. They take an evil appearance just as they take a good appearance. All of them are clear in their result, in that they are a stopping in the world, a stopping along the way, a stopping in the exodus, the passing over, Pascha. They are an obstruction to God’s eternal Pascha. The journey to God is a journey without end. Every stopping along it leads us to the corruption of the world.

We acquire upright faith. We build churches. We hold services and prayers. We celebrate the feasts. We have all the richness of Orthodoxy, its liturgical and spiritual and ascetic treasures… But naturally, if all this remains external it is not enough. There is no doubt that the journey towards God is at its base an inner striving of the heart, in God’s being a God to us, living, personal, inner. It is said, “If you want to kill God, then kill man’s inner life.”

No, the Church is not in the externals, it is in the heart. As the Bible says, “One who does not meditate in his heart has no knowledge and no understanding” (Isaiah 44:19). We know this, but in our habitual action we very often forget it. We know that the Church is not in the stone and not in the chants and not in the institutions and what is visible, but all its beauty is from within. If we are satisfied with the externals and we do not understand them and do not enter into their deep, living meaning, then the externals become something dead and superficial that comes between us and God rather than leading us to Him. It turns into an absolute value or an obsession or a reason to be distracted from God. Then we confuse the externals and the true, unseen glory, forgetting the words of the Bible, “On that day the glory of Jacob will grow lean” (Isaiah 17:4).

But if we transcend appearances and desire to live and enter into the essence, there is a Gospel that we must follow. There are teachings and divine commandments that we have abandoned for the sake of the commandments of men. Unfortunately, not only have we abandoned them, but often we have mocked them and we have mocked those who keep them. The logic of the world here is the logic of wealth and lust and it glorifies a lifestyle that dominates our entire life.

No, the Church is not in hearing the Gospel but in applying it. If we do not maintain our chastity, our poverty, our humility, our mercy, then where is the Church? If we do not desire righteousness and purify our hearts and we do not do good works, but rather tear each other apart, then where is the Church? Is it something difficult and ineffective? But have we tried? Have we experienced the Lord’s commandments to the very end in order to taste their sweetness and effectiveness? Or have we preferred the bitterness and emptiness of the pleasures of the world to the very end?

The Lord put a great deal of emphasis on keeping his commandments and he strongly urged this in his final sermon since he knew that “the prince of this world” will prevail over hearts. But if we are of the Lord and not of the prince of this world, should our faith not start from this? Does our Lord not deserve that we trust in his word and try to act according to his commandments so that we will be blessed? “If one loves me, he will keep my word. If you keep my commandments, then you shall be established in my love.”

But the Church herself is not commandments and ordinances so much as Love of the Lord and striving for his face. For this reason we do not understand the commandments if we see them as dry ideas, devoid of their marrow and their taste. Virtue is not in actions but in the movement of the heart within the actions. It is through actions oriented toward the Lord, cleaving to him and longing for him.

How can the Church be commandments when the Lord said through the mouth of the Prophet Isaiah “Precept upon precept, precept upon precept. Line upon line, line upon line. Here a little, there a little. For with stammering lips and another tongue He will speak to this people, to whom He said, ‘This is the rest with which you may cause the weary to rest,’ and, ‘This is the refreshing’; yet they would not hear. But the word of the Lord was to them, ‘Precept upon precept, precept upon precept, line upon line, line upon line, here a little, there a little,’ that they might go and fall backward, and be broken and snared and caught” (Isaiah 28:10-13).

And to the youth who had kept the commandments from his infancy, the Lord said, “You lack one thing.” That one thing remaining is love: to long for the Lord in our heart and to desire him alone.

This is not for some people and not for others. It is a call, it is an invitation, to all. All of us are called to love the Lord with the love of life. All the life of the Church is the life of invitation: “‘I have redeemed you and I have called you by your name. You are mine,’ says the Lord to his people” (Isaiah 43:1). Likewise the Apostle Paul says, “We also pray always for you that our God would count you worthy of this calling, and fulfill all the good pleasure of His goodness and the work of faith with power” (2 Thessalonians 1:11).

The people without a calling and love is “a people ravaged and plundered,” the Bible says. The Church does not exist without the visible Church, the Christian people. Our religion is a religion of incarnation. If we do not embody it, if we do not follow the Lord, then where is the Church?

“Our gospel did not come to you in word only, but also in power” (1 Thessalonians 1:5), says the Apostle, but out of habit and the passing of time, we often take the words without their true meanings, the shadow instead of the person and thus we mock the Lord. We might hear the call and do something. We might go for a part of the way. We might be given the grace of prayer if we ask for it, the fathers say. But if we do not do all the Lord’s will, there will come a day when we discover that we have no faith and no forgiveness.

“Woe to the person whose reputation surpasses his reality,” says Fr. Silouan. But the Lord says, “I know your works, that you have a name that you are alive, but you are dead. Be watchful, and strengthen the things which remain, that are ready to die, for I have not found your works perfect before God” (Revelation 3:1-3).

In order for us to truly follow the Lord, we must have force and self-emptying. Jesus came to be crucified, not to talk. If talking was enough, then Jesus would not have been crucified. He said, “He who wants to follow me, let him take up his cross and follow me.” This total commitment, the commitment of the cross is doubtless painful and scandalous. But it is the only way in the Church.

Pain here is a birth pang, and a birth pang is the beginning of any existence. We have no existence in the Church and the Church has no existence in us without the cross of commitment and its pains. But those who abide will be wiped out: “They slept a heavy sleep,” says the Psalmist, “and they found their hands empty” (Psalm 72:18). The issue is the issue of true commitment that we plunge ourselves into. We do not love our life to the point of death, a commitment in which we break the barriers of our freedom like breaking the sound barrier: in our freedom, we empty ourselves of our freedom in order to follow the Lord, and only then does he open before us the way into space.

This ultimate commitment is what makes the Church the Church. Everyone can contribute in this commitment to the Church of Antioch, each one in his field and surroundings and profession, fathers and sons according to the gift of the Lord. It is within the ability of fathers to offer the best and most precious gift, if the Lord wills.

I would like to repeat to you what a Coptic monk, a friend of mine, wrote, “O people of Antioch, the voice of the Lord to you, as from the voice of the great prophet Samuel: offer, offer the good vessels that you have, which through all these years have become empty. Offer them so that they can be filled with God’s oil. Do not be stingy with your sons and daughters, so that they can become your vessels of salvation on your day of hardship and so that they can become oil of joy and gladness in the time of war. The Lord will be pleased with you and your times of relief will come from him. Do not say enough, enough. The world looks upon you. Yes, enlighten once more, O Lord, Antioch so that the world will be enlightened by its light as in the first days.”

As for those who have truly committed to the Lord and have gone into the great depths—and among you are many of them—they do not stop along the way. If we have done something, we are not satisfied with it, as every stopping is a fall. No one is better than another.

“All the Church is a Church of penitents. All the Church is a Church of mortals,” says Ephrem the Syrian. We have not yet begun to repent. We have not struggled against sin to the point of blood. If we stop and we haven’t bled, then we have not brought it to the end and commitment, the revival, and the Church become mere expressions and empty clichés that we repeat in order to quiet our conscience. Our giving must increase in order to remain. May the spirit’s be to vigorously move forward and not stop short like Lot who remained alive while his wife looked back and died. We must renew our will like the stroke of a hammer in the soul so that it arrives at the profundities of existence.

“So the craftsman encouraged the goldsmith; He who smooths with the hammer inspired him who strikes the anvil, saying, “It is ready for the soldering”; then he fastened it with pegs, that it might not totter” (Isaiah 41:7). The danger of lethargy confronts us at every moment, “Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall, but those who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles” (Isaiah 40:30-31).

Brothers, if we understand the revival on this basis, and we walk in it with faith, steadfastness, and alertness, by His grace, He, for the sake of His glory, for the sake of His love and the Love of His holy Church which is above all and for all, He will allow the revival to be. At that point the revival will be at its true extent, proceeding after the Lord risen from the dead. Then each one of us will rise from his death. In an eternal exodus we shall follow him in his Pascha, he whose life has no end, amen.

Day without night

I saw that there was no temple in the City since the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb were themselves the Temple, and the City did not need the sun or the moon for light, since it was lit by the radiant glory of God and the Lamb was a lighted torch for it. The pagan nations will live by its light and the kings of the earth will bring it their treasures. The gates of it will never be shut by day, and there will be no night there…
Revelation 21:22-25 Jerusalem Bible

The whole of the message of Christ is contained and taught in two yearly feasts: Christmas, the nativity of Christ, at the time of the winter solstice, and Easter, Pascha, the resurrection of Christ, at the time of the spring equinox. This isn’t the Church taking over two pagan religious festivals and converting them into Christian ones. This is Nature itself pointing to the truths of faith and existence given a place within the New Creation, demonstrating that there is only Christ, who is in all, and in whom all ‘live and move and have their being’ (cf. Acts 17:28).

The world wants to localize these holidays, wants to contain them within calendar dates, wants to milk us for money as ants stroke and milk their aphids for nectar, giving us short respites between ‘holidays’, between milkings, so we can sufficiently recover. It doesn’t matter to the world whether the holidays are real or not. We tend to blame commercialism for spoiling the holidays, especially Christmas but to a lesser extent Easter, but it’s not their fault. ‘It’s not against human enemies that we struggle, but against fallen spiritual powers’ (cf. Ephesians 6:12).

So, they make Christmas end with a splash of presents and crumpled, glittering wrapping paper on the afternoon of December 25th, and they’d just as soon like to see Easter disappear under mountains of discarded candy boxes and deflowered Easter lilies: all very valuable and costly in the days leading up to the holiday, and suddenly transformed by studied consumption into garbage before sundown of the Lord’s Passover. Just as there is no mention of the birth of the God-Man during official Christmas, there is no mention of His resurrection during official Easter.

For the disciples of Jesus Christ whom He has ‘set free like birds from the fowler’s net’ (cf. Psalm 124), the great and holy Pascha does not disappear after the day of Resurrection, nor does the God-Man’s taking birth from the Theotokos retreat into mere myth and folklore after the day of Incarnation: These holidays are not days that inhabit one number on the world calendar. They are not days at all, as we experience them, but entrances into the Divine Nature, into the life eternal, the life of the Holy Triad, which begins in time but proves to contain even time itself.

In Christ’s birth, God becomes Man, not once, but forever, taking human nature up into the Divine Nature, divinizing the whole Tree that Man is, Himself one of us, by hanging on that Tree as its first fruit.

In Christ’s resurrection, Man becomes God, not once, but forever, reopening to us the gates of Paradise, a Serpent raised on a stake, inviting us to partake of the Fruit of the tree of life, renewing all creation.

In Christ’s birth, the two greatest commandments, ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself’ (Luke 10:27) become One commandment: to love your neighbor is to love God, thus brotherly love is theological.

In Christ’s resurrection, His entire life as Man becomes the pattern of our life, and only by following Him, by doing what we see Him doing, ‘Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill’ (Matthew 5:17), can we fulfill the One commandment, becoming by grace what He is by nature.

Tradition mandates twelve days to celebrate the birth of Christ, and after the day of His resurrection an entire week is gathered up into a single liturgical day, and a total of forty calendar days will hear the greeting ‘Christ is risen! He is truly risen!’ But after celebration, life must go on. We still must live our day to day lives. Tomorrow, I must return to the office and deal with what I find there, pretending to be ‘only human’ when I know by the testimony of His rising from the dead, that Christ is with me, even as He stands in the Presence of His Father, for He says ‘where I am, there will My servant be also’
(John 12:26).

In your minds you must be the same as Christ Jesus: His state was divine, yet He did not cling to His equality with God but emptied Himself to assume the conditions of a slave, and became as all men are; and being as all men are, He was humbler yet, even to accepting death, death on a cross. But God raised Him high and gave Him the name which is above all other names so that all beings in the heavens, on earth and in the underworld, should bend the knee at the name of Jesus and that every tongue should acclaim Jesus Christ as Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
Philippians 2:5-11 Jerusalem Bible

This, beloved brethren, is the Day of Resurrection,

the Day without night,

the Life without death,

and the Love without end.

The risen Christ

People have this idea that Easter time, the season of resurrection, should be all flowery and cheerful, with nature coming back to life and all. It seems to make the idea of Christ’s coming back to life more meaningful, in fact, it seems to push out almost any other meaning His resurrection can have, for some people. Hence, the fascination for floral arrangements, colored eggs, baby chicks and bunnies. But it’s really just a coincidence of nature, an instance of God’s ikonomía, His plan of salvation, interacting with the created world. In the southern hemisphere, the world is descending into autumn at Pascha, not ascending to spring.

That’s really alright. Christ is not a ‘dying and rising god’ whose myth tries to infuse meaning into the annual cycle of vegetation. That’s the function of the baalim and elilim, the divine ‘nothings,’ Osiris, Tammuz, and Adonis. No, Christ is nothing like them. For one, He lived as a real man in a country and time we know with reliable certainty. Not only that, but the stories about Him are not folk tales and myths full of imaginary exploits. He really did do the things the bible says He did. Moreover, His dying and rising again to life, though it seems at shallow glance to be just another example of the dying and rising gods of folklore, also really did happen, and it’s attested to by a multitude of witnesses who agree in all but minor details. That’s the history lesson part of it…

The resurrection of Jesus Christ is not even mere history, though it’s rooted there. It’s not even a ‘one point in time’ event, but rather an opening out of time into another realm of being, one that unlike the myths is not just a story to be retold or reenacted, but a reality in which a man can live even to this very day. Why is that? Because Jesus Christ is risen from the dead, death has no hold on Him, and He dies no more, and neither does anyone who believes and lives in Him. ‘I am the resurrection and the life…’

Back to the weather. Yes, it’s glorious. The winds are warm and the sun seems supernaturally bright, yet with a kind of brightness that opens our eyes even wider and permits us to see what we couldn’t see as well before. It’s no mere word play that the week following Pascha should be called ‘Bright Week.’ Nature may be cooperating this year and providing a natural metaphor to accompany the real brightness—that of the Son of God, the Light of the world, who was dead and is Alive—but it is that other radiance that is the effect of Pascha. It opens our spiritual eyes to see ourselves and the world around us as we really are.

Knowing thus the Lord in His resurrection, and walking in this unwaning brightness, how is it that we can still sin?

We learn that we do not sin less because we don’t want to sin more, but because we can’t sin more. We would sin more if we could, but Christ has removed our sins as far from us as the East is from the West. When we are weak, He strengthens us and so arranges circumstances that we can find an escape from occasions of sin—if we want to. In fact, He makes it hard for us to sin, so when we do, we can see by the brightness of His resurrection the truth about ourselves, and turn to Him asking for mercy.

Christ is the faithful, the true. We can know this not by mere hearsay, but because He has treated us with such kindness by remaining with us to this very hour, just as He promised.

‘And lo, I am with you, even unto the end of the world…’

This is the risen Christ,

who was, who is, and who is to come,

the Pantokrator.

The two ways

HEBREW

PSALM 1

The two ways

Happy the man
who never follows the advice of the wicked,
or loiters on the way that sinners take,
or sits about with scoffers,
but finds his pleasure in the Law of Yahweh,
and murmurs His Law day and night.

He is like a tree that is planted by water streams,
yielding its fruit in season,
its leaves never fading;
success attends all he does.
It is nothing like this with the wicked, nothing like this!

No, these are like chaff
blown away by the wind.
The wicked will not stand firm when Judgment comes,
nor sinners when the virtuous assemble.
For Yahweh takes care of the way the virtuous go,
but the way of the wicked is doomed.