The law of tangles

Have you ever noticed, that if there is something that might get tangled up, it usually does? Or if it is something that can get caught on something, it does that too? Such things as the electric cords on vacuum cleaners, for example. Or if it is something that can get a kink in it and stop working, like a garden hose, it usually does? Even when you did what I did, buy one that says it doesn’t kink?

We seem to live in a universe—God! I hope it’s only our planet, but I don’t think so—that is full of what some might call booby traps, things that should work a certain way, or at least we’d like them to, but they reliably don’t. I’m sure much of what looks like a conspiracy against us is only our own shallow thinking or incomplete planning—we seem to all come with a built-in propensity to fail.

So I was house cleaning and had to shift my heavy carved Balinese throne off the carpet, so I could vacuum the rug. Sure enough, the electrical cord was going to find itself on the wrong side of the throne, but I outsmarted the little devil, I carefully swung the cord over the heavy chair so it’d be on the right side, where it wouldn’t get caught, or be too short to reach. Then, shifting the throne back into place afterwards, one of its legs bashed into my toes—Ouch! The little devil always gets even, doesn’t he?

What else? In my life, using a toaster often results in disaster. I set the level of darkness I want and trust the mechanism to do what it should. When I am home alone, it works. I do exactly the same thing when I am having company for breakfast, and the toast becomes, as we jokingly say, ‘burnt holocaust for Yahweh.’ Why is it that if something can go wrong, it usually does? I never trip except when I’m being watched.

All of this amounts to nothing more than perpetual annoyance, like the gigantic hotel on wheels that just parked on the street this morning in front of my cliff top home to block my view of the mountains. How long will they park there? I hope they’re not planning to stay. We try our best to keep everything we do in order and take our fair share of shortcuts, and more than half the time, it seems, we fail.

Yet I have met people—and this has even been true of me once or twice—for whom creation itself seems to open a wide path for them to accomplish what they want to do. We call some of them lucky, especially when their general behavior and personality otherwise irk us. When they are those rare people of whom we are in awe for their moral qualities, we call them saints, and wish we were them.

I wonder if this weird fact of nature has some scientific basis. They say that when you get down to those infinitesimal thingummies—string theory stuff—there are no laws as such and everything just chaotically hustles and bustles, producing on a larger scale what appears to us as natural laws. Maybe it’s a statistical thing that mathematicians can figure out. Personally, I don’t buy that one, yet it does sell.

And I don’t exactly buy the animist explanation, that there’s a ‘devil in the details’ of everyday life, you know, imps and demons and poltergeist kinds of things. It seems to me that we live in a universe with a Creator who designed everything to work as it should when we are working as we should, and the problem is, we aren’t, because we won’t. ‘If you don’t obey God, then creation won’t obey you.’

The Bible is full of more than mere hints of this saying being true. Though it may be couched in mythological language, Adam and Eve and the snake and all the rest, there really was a first human couple, there really was a real source of temptation, and there really was a fall—the proof is that we are repeating the pattern every moment of every day. The Book says God put us in charge as His deputy.

We were to be, as it were, God on earth for the rest of the universe. Since the Divine Nature is invisible, He made us to be a visible equivalent of His nature, for the universe to gaze upon, to know, to trust, and to obey. If you read some of the ancient books that never made it into the Bible, like the Book of Adam and Eve—sure they’re ancient myths—you’ll see the principle repeated. Ancient man knew it.

And not so ancient man knew it too, as you will read in the letter of the apostle Paul when he writes that all creation is waiting expectantly for the sons of God to be revealed. The Christian faith is built on this premise, that since the first Adam, that is, we in our current devolved condition, couldn’t step up to the place that God made him for, He had to restart the process by coming Himself as another Adam.

So, in spite of all our many great accomplishments, as we the civilization only seven thousand years old descended from that original Adam and Eve whose conscious life was breathed into our humanoid biological ancestors by the only God there is, yes, in spite of these accomplishments made possible in us by Christ who says, ‘you will do even greater things,’ we still haven’t taken our place, and so these tangles.

These tangles, these stumbles, these getting caught on something where everything should flow smoothly, these little annoyances—not to mention the big ones like wars and revolutions and ecological disasters—these are signs to us, reminders, even wake up calls, to the individual, to you and me, and to human society, that we still aren’t what God created us to be. We disobey God, so creation disobeys us.

What you’re expecting to hear next, maybe, is an altar call: Just accept Jesus, and be saved. But though this is without a doubt the beginning of the good news, the Gospel, it is not the end. We can, and mostly have, stopped short at Christianity as a religion. We haven’t followed Christ, our great High Priest, as He goes beyond the veil, to that real Throne that He shares with His Father and the Holy Spirit.

And which He promises to seat us upon, because that Throne was really made for us in the Beginning, and at the Ending we will be seated upon it, as He foretells to His beloved disciple John in the book we call Revelation, ‘He who overcomes, I will grant to him to sit down with Me on My throne, as I also overcame and sat down with My Father on His throne. He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches’ (3:21-22).

Ikons of the Divine Nature

The sacerdotal priesthood in the Body of Christ is an ikonic construct established by Christ and the holy apostles, within the human biological and cultural milieu, and within the divine order of His creation.

The relationship between male and female is the union of ‘a kneeling with a sceptred love,’ as C.S. Lewis puts it. Modern people, brought up within a world view largely contemptuous of divine order, even when they are Christians, tend to see every social relationship in terms completely alien to nature that are the product of mere thinking.

The so-called ‘age of enlightenment’ is really just another ideology. Christ is not ideology, and if we follow Him, we follow nature as well, for it is patterned after Him. Nature and life. Modern man has let his thoughts carry him away.

Why didn’t I say ‘modern man and woman’?

Because Man includes Woman: The two are one, and are meant to reflect the divine order in the most perfect way. Now, I just noticed that I seem to be expressing myself as the proponent of an ideology and gotten off course. What I wanted to say was something much simpler; it is just this:

Modern people thinking of ‘church’ think of it in modern terms, where only the leaders, the high profile visibles, matter. That is not, however, how Christ thinks of ‘church’.

Being a priest, or whatever the equivalent is in any Christian community, is not something that most people, not even most men, are called to be. Literally, we are all priests in the holy nation of God, male and female, and no one is more preeminent—despite the titles and ceremonial forms of address—than anyone else.

Priests are men because fathers have to be men. Where does that leave women in the Church? Everywhere, but only a woman can be a mother. There is no trans-gender in the Body of Christ (speaking now metaphorically, not addressing the issues of trans-sexuality).

I can only explore from my home base, Greek Orthodox Christianity. A community is pastored by a presbyter and presbytera, ideally. A family becomes a priestly family, each with his and her role to play.

If the male dies, the female remains a presbytera and continues her ministry within the community: She never marries again. The same is true if the female dies: The male remains a presbyter and continues his ministry without remarrying. In those situations, the community itself replaces the lost partner in various ways, to help the presbyter or presbytera to continue fulfilling the role that Christ has assigned them.

The Orthodox Christian family is the basic unit of the Church, and within it the same divine order prevails.

When married, husband and wife are crowned king and queen, priest and priestess (though we don’t use those words, I don’t think, in English) of what will be a new cell in the Body of Christ.

Everything, absolutely everything, is laid out according to divine order. What we see in reality, though, is a Church that is struggling against a constant invasion by the world at the family level. That is where our struggle lies, and not every family fulfills the call. Feminism and secular attitudes invade and capture us, and we come to question and analyze the Word of God with an attitude of superiority to it.

I have visited a website of Catholic feminists where nuns want to become priests, and some actually have, I think, though it is without canonicity. This is all too stupid for words! As if canonicity mattered!

If the canons of the Church were changed to admit women priests, bishops, etc., that would not change the divine order, nor could it cover up the mismatch and disobedience we would be trying to hide under our new regulations.

All this has been better and more fully said elsewhere, but I try to explain it without a polemic motivation: Every essential ministry is open to every man or woman in the Church, excepting those ceremonials which are ikons of the Divine Nature in humanity.

We all can be spiritual fathers and spiritual mothers: In fact, that is what God expects us to be, what Christ calls us to. What else can it mean to be ‘called to be saints’, if not this?

Evening meander

Psychosávvaton, ‘the Saturday of the Souls’ of the feast of Pentecost is coming up this week, and so I am thinking of my ancestors…

miłość, miły, miłosierdzie, miłosierny, miłościwy
love (n.), pleasant (adj.), mercy (n.), merciful (adj.), gracious (adj.)

My family is one hundred per cent Polish by nationality. My father’s father, Kazimierz Górny, immigrated to America from his birth place on a royal estate in the Grand Duchy of Poznań, a province of the Kingdom of Prussia, sojourning a while in Hanover, and then departing from the Free City of Hamburg, via ocean liner to New York City, in 1902. My father’s mother, Zofia Pokrzywa, immigrated in the same era from a country estate of a landed gentry family in the Kingdom of Galicia, a crown land of the Austrian Empire. We don’t know (yet, but I’m working on it) the exact year of her immigration, or her point of departure, only an apocryphal legend that she and her sister were spirited away by their uncle, after their parents were killed and their estate plundered by angry peasants.

Two things stand out to me about these parents of my father. They were merciful and gracious. Yes, they were other things too. They were both educated, speaking English fluently before they ever arrived in the New World. Casimir (the easier-to-pronounce German version of his name) was an entrepreneur and a man of many talents. Trained in ‘Kolonialwaren’ (import of consumables, retail and wholesale), he had a keen business sense, transferable to other fields. One of his first jobs in America was real estate development in the Florida panhandle. His unwillingness to pay his black employees less than his white caused him to be blacklisted by other bosses, who forced him out. He went north to Chicago and started a building and loan association. Zofia, my grandmother, did volunteer work helping other newly arrived immigrants who couldn’t speak English make the adjustment to living in America. Merciful and gracious, my paternal grandparents were quiet about their philanthropy, but they were the model for their children and grandchildren.

Though I spoke Polish as a young child, I only read it now. Growing up in America where one is free to choose absolutely everything about oneself, even religious and ethnic affiliations, I found myself on an eastward course, migrating to Orthodox Christianity and Hellenism as a young adult, and raising my own family within that environment. Now, with everyone ‘grown up,’ even me, I find that returning to my roots gives a finished touch to my life. I appreciate my ancestors, and their virtues and example, much more. I had to make ‘the journey out and in’ to arrive on my own at the same place that they perhaps arrived on their own. Due to an unusually wide generational gap between us (my grandfather Casimir was seventy-two when I was born) I didn’t have the benefit of watching and learning from him and my grandmother. Nevertheless, there was something that was passed down through my parents’ generation to mine, and I hope it continues to pass down, however it happens, whether it’s part of a temperament rooted in genetics, upbringing, or faith.

The Polish words I wrote at the beginning of this essay are a meditation of mine, something that came to me as I did my chores today, thinking of my ancestors. My mother’s family name was Milewski. It is spelled with a different ‘L’ than the words above, but I like to think it is still somehow related to these words in meaning, and that’s how my meditation started. I was thinking of my other grandfather, Paweł Milewski. He had perhaps more humble beginnings than Casimir and, coming from the Russian dominated heart of Poland, had a more gentle, resigned spirit, quiet, sensitive, yet artistic and innovative. He was a craftsman in wood as Casimir was, and they often visited together in his home workshop in the basement. Down there he also had a little sleeping cot, where he would retreat when the hustle and bustle of daily life got too much for him. Both physically and spiritually, I resemble him most, even though I never had a chance to know him either. When I think of him, all those Polish words come to mind, the ‘M’ words, all meaning love in manifestation.

One more memory. My other grandmother, Maria Kozińska, who made her house part museum, part menagerie, a collector of the latest inventions, the rarest tropical birds and exotic dogs, proud of her (possibly imagined) upper class Warsaw background, yet humble enough to labor obsessively in her garden and raise her own chickens and geese so she could prepare the family meals according to her own illustrious tastes.

One night, my older sister and I stayed overnight at her house. Grandfather was asleep in his tiny bedroom (or perhaps in his workshop below). Busia (our affection name for our grandmother) tucked us both in a small bed hidden behind the wall of the kitchen, in the back porch actually, though it was enclosed and had a glazed window. Everyone had been in bed asleep for some hours. In the pitch black darkness, I felt myself suddenly nudged and awakened by my sister. Busia was there, leading us by the hand back through the kitchen and into her tiny bedroom. The room was so small, there was nothing in it but her bed. She tucked us in carefully, kissed us good night, and disappeared. The night was so cold, she was afraid for us, and traded places. We didn’t see her sleeping in the back porch, because she was up long before us preparing breakfast, but we knew that’s where she had slept. Matter-of-factly and firmly, but still mercifully, she too delivered the message of love to us.

Love, mercy, gentleness, affirmation demonstrated by a kiss lightly laid on a sleepy head, by a quiet prayer reverently recited, unafraid to love unconditionally, providentially, even passionately, but pleasantly, how little energy this takes, how easily it flows out of our hearts and souls when we let it, how naturally it saves us and welcomes us into the Kingdom of Heaven, yes, how effortless is the way of Him who says, ‘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’ (Matthew 11:29).

The crown of scripture

                    Turn it this way, turn it that way,
                    everything is in it,
                    keep your eye upon it
                       and from it do not stir.
                   
                    Turn it this way, turn it that way,
                    grow old and aged over it,
                    for you have no better portion,
                       better portion than the Word.

(Folk song based on Pirke Avot, 5:24)

To ‘study’ the bible as one studies a specimen under the microscope, except perhaps for bible scholars (if there really is such a thing), is the wrong way to study it. It's equally wrong to pretend to give people ‘the big picture’ by not making them study it at all, but instead by entertaining them. Both these approaches to the written Word of God are ways to escape the main function of scripture, which is to bring us face to face with our sin, and with our Saviour.

We say we study the bible, but actually the bible is studying us. We may think we are rightly dividing the Word of God, but actually the Word of God is rightly dividing us. That is, if we let Him. (Jesus is the Word of God. The bible is His icon.) Rightly dividing us from our sin, from the world and all its pomp, and from the power of the evil one.

People think we're so blessed to live in an age when there are so many amazing resources available, yet it's precisely this mistaken attitude about technological resources that has changed Christianity from a living faith and close walk with the Lord to a kind of dinner theatre about such a faith and walk.

We have become detached from the Word of God like a doomed fetus becomes detached from the uterus and then dies, which the mother may not discover for days, but which can kill her as well if it is not discovered in time. That mother is the Church, that fetus is the believers who do not live in the Word but only ‘watch a movie’ about it and think they've ‘got it.’

To live in the Word of God is to make the holy and God-breathed scriptures, the bible, our daily bread, our constant companion, our very home.

This means never being without it, physically, when possible, even if it's only a slim New Testament and Psalms tucked into a pocket.

This means rising in the morning with the Word on our lips, praying and thanking the Lord in the words of psalms and prophecies, not just five times a day as Muslims do, but all through the day (and night).

This means turning not to vain and sometimes vile entertainments (making excuses for the profanity in them), but turning to the bible for refreshment, for relaxation, for recreation.

No, you can play sports, go on hikes, collect stamps, read novels, write poetry, play the guitar, have an electric train set, or even a speedboat… but what’s on your mind, really?

I'm no different from the rest. I often have to yank my attention back to where it belongs, visit the mansion that Christ my Lord and Saviour has prepared for me in His Father’s house. What? You thought He was talking about the heavenly mansion? Well, yes, of course, that one too. But the study of and meditation on the inspired words of the divine and holy scriptures, that is like a foyer leading into the heavenly mansion, and a foyer is part of the house, isn't it?

Paradox upon paradox, that the churches that claim most strongly to be centered on the bible have the most trouble cleaving to it, but find ever more numerous by-paths and supposed short-cuts to keep them off the One True Highway to Heaven—the Word of God.

Visit any Christian book store. The bible section, besides being splintered by the proliferation of ‘specialty’ bibles, is often dwarfed by sections devoted to contemporary Christian authors, gimmicks, and games. Why all these Christian authors and their books?

Isn’t the Word of God in the form of the bible enough for us? Isn’t the Holy Spirit here with us to help us understand it? But how can we hope to be disciples of the Lord, if we do not stay constantly at His side? And how do we do this? By ‘never letting the sacred volume out of our hand,’ as Jerome says.

Instead of expanding your facilities and upgrading your film stash and other technological enhancements, get back to the bible, teaching it, studying it, learning it by heart, worshipping with it, praying it, prophesying with it, evangelizing with it, healing with it, feeding on it and living in it.

There is no other divine scripture on earth, no other literature whose sum is greater than the total of its parts, no other book so alive that it doesn’t need to be enhanced with movies and computer games.

And we think that we can do better than the living God who provided this crown for us?

Queen of Love

Poetry is one of my loves, whether it's just written to be read aloud, or as lyrics to be sung. It is the poetry of the Bible that I read most regularly, the Psalms, and the Prophets, but from time to time I pick up a book of poetry and just read for awhile. Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman, is my all time favorite. But apart from the scriptures, it is actually the poetry of my favorite songs that follows next after the Psalms in my daily devotions. By devotions I mean, the remembrance of God. I am retired now, but when I was still in the labor force, I used to listen to these songs as I drove to and from work, and while I was at work, I used to sing them. I was a machinist in my last five years, so I could get away with that, even when I sang hymns. In fact, if someone walked past my station and didn't hear me singing away in Greek or French or German or, yes, even in English, they'd ask me, ‘Something wrong today, Romanos?’

The song I am quoting below is from a Scottish folk ensemble from the late 1960's, my college days. It is titled ‘Queen of Love.’ It is one of the songs I hold most deeply in my spiritual core. It is full of biblical allusions, but it also makes reference to pre-Christian mythology (as Pan with the unsane eyes, or with the wild horns) and folk customs (or when I am crowned with the paper crown, an allusion to an April Fools Day tradition). It speaks of things using few words that I can only express in paragraphs, if at all.

One of my dearest friends told me years ago that he thought this particular song was the point at which its author, Robin Williamson, finally and openly rejected Christianity. I didn't contradict him, but I entirely disagree with him. To me, this song, taken together with others by the same author, displays a grass-roots familiarity with both the Bible and the Western Tradition, and uses this to express the meeting of earth and heaven in human experience, leaving it to us to find the key to unlock the meaning of this experience, but pointing us in the direction of Christ, the Word of God.

Yes, but who exactly is this ‘Queen of Love’?

Well, it's very hard to say, precisely. Personally, I think she is the third Person of the Holy Triad, the Spirit, who can be described in feminine terms, shown in ikons as ‘Holy Wisdom,’ and of whom it can be said, ‘You have unwove my eyes, and my heart will not sleep.’ The person of the Queen of Love in this song provides a container for the other words in the song, many of which point to Christ. This, too, is a characteristic of the Holy Spirit. He doesn't draw attention to Himself, but always points us to Jesus.

If anything in this song offends you, dear reader, please accept my humble apology. I am a mere human and therefore subject to error and sin, and that may be why I love this song. On the other hand, if these lyrics please you, dear reader, and you would like to actually hear the song, you can click HERE and listen to it.

This song is my gift to myself and to you, and may it draw us closer together, as we approach the fiftieth day of our salvation, Pentecost, when we shall prepare ourselves for the awesome and everlasting anointing of that Holy Spirit who is celebrated in its lyrics, as the Queen of Love.

A strong power calls from the left hand
across the waters deep
A strong power calls from the left hand
let all things sleep or weep

Oh, the Queen of Love,
you have unwove my eyes
and my heart will not sleep

The eye would sleep but the mind would rise
I must needs walk down God's eyebrows
and along the street of his eyes

Look for me,
and you will see me in my red cloak,
swimming determined as God's blood flies

Creatures of grief,
you beg from the thief
I will not carry home your sacks of sorrow

But I will pay the fiddler
good silver if he smiles,
pray God he see tomorrow

And the fine, fine girls that are into it
and my eyes with salt water swim,
and we disputing with a brittle gaiety
upon the world's rim

If I sought to love you with my body,
it would be with a bent back
unto the day of doom

Oh, the Queen of Love,
I am in her heart,
she is in my room,
and together alone we clasp hands
and in each other's eyes
walk the endless shore

And below I have my duty
to perform in the song
and that that I was
you will see it no more

The snow is on the hills of my heart
and to speak is to die
The men at arms do seek to mark me
and the monks raise hue and cry

Seek me in vain on Golgotha
or in fear's hollow
for the way I take today
only the true may follow

The ancestors in stone armour
calling for loyalty untrue
seek to make a zigzag of the arrow's flight

It is so swaddled in the bands of form
but I am girdled with the storm
and cloaked with the night

I am not to be seen or found
save only in what I cause,
standing outside on the inside outside,
perfectingness and flaws

How will I say where I end
or where you begin?
How will I say, what shall I play?
Shall it be you or the wild wind?

As Pan with the unsane eyes
or with the wild horns
or when I am crowned with the paper crown
or with the crown of thorns

A strong power compels distortion
from the right hand
Fleece to the grey wolves,
fangs to the grey sheep

But the Queen of Love she strokes
my body alive, that I do not sleep

The doctor brews potions and pills
to open his own front door
and the locksmith makes strong bolts to bar his gates
to every new breeze that blows

Shall I now put lion's ears upon my ears,
hear every sound as a roar?
Shall I now put mouse's eyes upon my eyes,
gauge the moon for size against my paw?

While the Queen of Love,
she sings to me from above
and beyond the world

And I observe my mind,
it is playing ignorant boy
while at her feet I am curled

And I remember all female movements so well,
of such a form to bring much joy
and ease much care
to perfume and let fall the coloured gown
and to let down the curling hair

But now I play seed thrower,
and I will play three-legged man
I will play dream weaver and day bringer
and catch as catch can

While the Queen of Love,
she swims like a silver dove
in my mind's room
and my body sleepwalks down the road
in a warm dark swoon

Queen of Love, by Robin Williamson

The house built on rock

As the ‘Great and Holy Council’ is about to begin, I could not help myself. I have to post this again, just to encourage myself that, whatever happens, Christ is still the Head of the Church, and she is His beloved Bride. Originally posted August 17, 2015.

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.

God loves us so much

‘God loves us so much, that He’s done everything He can do to save us, and He doesn’t want it all to be wasted.’

I was trapped in a very strange dream sequence, which I call the ‘church dream.’ This is a recurring dream which I’ve had for more than twenty years, which has as its location—church. Usually, it’s the church I once attended and ministered out of, St. Mark’s, what I consider my original family church, a miniature masterpiece, architecturally a basilica with Italianate bell tower, interior based on the famous church in Venice, replete with frescoes and icons. The first few scenes in this dream sequence were based on St. Mark’s and had the same themes, me trying to explain to visitors why the great church was no longer what it once was. The last thing I remember out of those scenes was taking an embroidered icon cloth out of the church, rescuing it from oblivion because the ‘remodel’ had no place for it, and unrolling the cloth on my bed, so I could look at it more closely…

Other scenes followed, now not directly connected to a specific church building. The one that I remember as I awoke this morning was something like this.

This time I was in an Orthodox environment, but in no particular church. I was just bidding farewell to an Eastern European new immigrant, a young man, a musician, who had just received some kind of blessing from the church. It seemed like he had been in need of a new musical instrument so he could support himself, and maybe the church had just helped him out in some way. He was beaming.

Then, he told me of his old dad, who was a farmer with one cow, who was not making it in life, but who thought that if he had two cows, things might go better for him. This problem was keeping him away from church, locked in a mental battle, because of a rule that they had in their church, that a man had the church’s blessing only to have one cow. The priest in his church would not give him a blessing to have two cows. So he was staying away from church. I decided to go and visit him.

I found the old farmer, sitting cross-legged on the wooden floor of a small, unfurnished room, literally a cubbyhole the size of a walk-in closet, drinking a bowl of soup. He was the image of poverty itself, clad in faded old work clothes. He didn’t speak to me at all. I stood in the doorway silently for a moment, as tears started welling up inside me, I’m not sure why. I leaned my head on the doorpost and said to him, ‘God loves us so much, that He’s done everything He can do to save us, and He doesn’t want it all to be wasted.

‘Don’t let this matter of having two cows get in the way of your salvation. If you want another cow and can buy it, go and buy it. Then, go to your priest and ask him for his blessing. If he refuses to give it, thank him, say “That’s alright, father, that’s alright,” pay your respects, and leave. Then, come to the Greek priest. He will give you the blessing, because we don’t have a ‘one cow’ rule.’

At that point, I woke up.

Though dreams can often be quite meaningless and usually are, this one has some meaning. Though in my dreams I often hear or speak verses from the Bible, in this dream it wasn’t an exact Bible verse I cited, but something like a conflation of maybe John 3:16 and Romans 8:32. And that was that. No wordy sermon, just an assurance of God’s love for us, and a practical work-around to get through the ‘toll-gates’ of the Church.

Yes, though the Kingdom of God is but one country, ‘on earth as it is in heaven,’ it seems that somebody thought this wasn’t good enough. The ‘inheritance of the saints’ has been divided and sub-divided, the ‘first and greatest commandment, and the second like unto it’ multiplied into hundreds of rules and regulations, and the ‘one Mediator between God and man’ replaced by a multitude of gate-keepers.

Dreams, I think, come from a combination of factors—what happened to you the day before, your mental or emotional state, what you’ve been reading or watching on television or PC, even the state of your digestion. This dream is no exception. But God can even use our dreams, sometimes, to speak something in our ears.

If He were speaking in this dream, what might He be saying?

Deliverance

When you hear the word ‘deliverance’ in the context of Christianity, what comes to mind is, deliverance from a destructive lifestyle or obsessions or habits that threaten to permanently (in this life and in the hereafter) disable, even annihilate, people—in brief, to send them ‘to hell.’ The irony is that often the form of Christianity that espouses this kind of ‘ministry’ is actually substituting one form of addiction or affliction for another, not really delivering anyone, just changing the symptoms. The following essay is excerpted from the blog If God Is Love, from the author’s notes to ‘How Ignorance Obscures the Sense of Christ’, Discourse XV.2, by St Symeon the New Theologian. Italics in the essay are mine.

Allow me to consider what might be a subcategory of ignorance. There are churches — often groups which separate from mainstream churches for motives of correctness, or outspoken individuals within a mainstream church — which advocate for a narrow interpretation of Bible and Church. In other words, they claim to have the right answers and that everyone else is wrong and condemned. The result seems to be an idiosyncratic and even bizarre religiosity — having just enough truth elements to maintain the appearance of a church but with emphases which also distort Bible, Church, and history.

Ignorance and Correctness

How do people become like this? How can people read the Bible and yet remain ignorant? It seems to me that there are some people who are driven by a need for security and authority. Correctness and isolationism fulfill these deep psychological deficits. I can imagine these people as children — living in fear of abandonment and disapproval from parents and teachers. All children have these fears to some extent (because young children want to please adults and receive affirmation), but most children mature while others become permanently scarred. My speculation is that, in some cases, the experiences of emotional abandonment and behavioral disapproval transmute into an extreme need to be correct. Ironically, these people then disapprove of and disown all others who might pose the uncertainties of relationship, interaction, and human weaknesses.

There was a time when I myself felt the emotional impact of hyper-correct individuals. I had acquaintances among such people. It caused me to feel frightened for my salvation and confused about Jesus Christ. These people can tap into our innermost psychological fears and spiritual doubts. You see, there are indeed correct ways to do things. There is a correct way to sew a dress, to cook a casserole, to play a game of baseball, and to drive down the road. Part of growing up is to be trained in these correct ways. Moreover, there are consequences for incorrectness — everything from a burnt dinner to a speeding ticket.

However, correctness does not extend neatly into religion because of the dynamics of love and mercy, and because of the sovereignty of God the Father. Please do not think that I am undermining the Ten Commandments, for example, or even liturgical rites and prayer books. I am stressing the cultural and nationalistic elements, the picking and choosing of Bible passages for a foundation, the elitist strictness of rites and rubrics which never existed in the earliest centuries of the Church, the obsessive devotional practices, the use of charismatic expressions as proof of holiness, the racist and ethnic preferences, the fear-mongering toward those who are not correct, and the use of doctrine to separate rather than to gather. This all adds up to ignorance or illiteracy of Bible and Church.

Ignorance and Deliverance

Are ignorant people malicious? Or are they just misguided? I do not have the answer, and I will try not to judge. It is possible that, in this subcategory, there are variations of conditions. Some are probably prideful and fraudulent, some are mistaken and unfortunate, and some are victims of overpowering personalities and harsh upbringing. The use of fear, especially panic, can be contagious. It can spread like a virus, afflicting many people. However, we do not really have to figure out other people’s intentions. Perhaps the key is this: if you feel frightened rather than repentant, if you feel dehumanized rather than forgiven, then you might consider evaluating your religion or church leaders. You might visit some other churches, try to read the Bible with a fresh mind, and pray for deliverance from anything nonsensical and unmerciful.

More powerful than fear of hell fire

Ask any religionist—that is, anyone who adheres to a religion—if they want others to be converted to their religion, and I think that most, some after a moment’s thought, would probably answer, Yes. Most people who belong to a religious faith believe that theirs is the best of any. If their religion is one of the Abrahamic faiths, they might consider that those who do not convert to their faith are doomed to an eternity of punishment. Almost any other non-Abrahamic faith might at best feel the smugness of ‘my God is better than your God,’ or at least think ‘the God I chose works best for me’ and not have an opinion about those who follow other faiths.

Of the Abrahamic faiths, I think that Judaism, being the original, is the most mature and introspective, and I have almost never met a Jew who, though believing their faith the best or even the only true, has tried to convert me to Judaism. Part of this reluctance to promote their faith comes from a pride of race; not just anyone can be a member of God’s people. Yes, the Jews believe that they are God’s hereditary people, a notch above everyone else, and they have all of history to prove it. What happens to people after they die, moreover, is hardly to be considered. As a matter of fact, the Jews just know that God is fair and just, so no one who does what is right has anything to fear.

If I were to ask a Jew the question often put to Jesus of Nazareth, a Jewish rabbi of twenty centuries ago, ‘What must I do to be saved?’ their answer would probably be, ‘Go home and be a—what did you say you were? a Catholic? Go home and be a good Catholic.’ If they were a particularly fussy (what they might call devout) kind of Jew, and learned at that, they might start by explaining to me that, since I am not a born Jew, I can find favor in God’s eyes by keeping the seven laws of Noah. If I pressed them further, they might allow me to stand in their synagogue at the back and pray and witness their service, but I might never come near the Torah scrolls or be counted in a minyan.

So much for the Jews. Ask a Christian—and there are so many kinds—the same question ‘What must I do to be saved?’ and though you’d expect them to willingly share their faith with you—evangelize you, for Christianity is a missionary faith—a good many would not know what to answer and might even be shocked that you should ask at all. To them, it’s obvious. You join a church and do what they tell you. I remember when I moved from mainstream Protestantism into the Greek Orthodox Church just short of thirty years ago, a Greek co-worker asked me, when I told her I was Orthodox, ‘How were you able to find us?’ as if Orthodoxy were, as often boasted, ‘America’s best kept secret.’

Brought up a Catholic and later lapsed, through study of books and life experiences self-evangelized at twenty-four years into the Episcopal Church, I was from that point on, eager to share my faith in Jesus Christ, and even to promote my church, because ‘I found it’ and was certain that, ‘if it works for me, it will work for you.’ Convert’s zeal was quickly dampened in me by what actually goes on in the Christian community, but I never lost my zeal to share, not the church, but Christ. Joining the Orthodox Church was for me not a conversion, just a refinement: Now, having entered the ‘original’ form of Christian community, I could evangelize for Christ, and He would evangelize for the Church.

Or so I thought, because as I put myself into situations where evangelism might be possible, I began to see that this is not really how God works. How would I know? Well, looking at Jesus Christ as He is portrayed in the Bible, what He does and what He says, and especially hearing Him say, ‘If you have seen Me, you have seen the Father,’ I had to rethink the motive for evangelism. For Christianity, you see, is a derivative religion. It is really a refined form of Judaism, but still essentially Jewish. The main difference is that it has, in theory at least, expanded the borders of ‘the Chosen People’ to encompass all of humanity—all, that is, who accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, as God.

Back to the topic of wanting to proselytize, make converts of others, to one’s religion, and why anyone would want to do it, and asking Christians again, starting with the Bible-believers, those who affirm that ‘the Bible is the inerrant Word of God,’ we find that honestly or doctrinally, they fear for the ‘salvation’ of unbelievers and sinners. God, according to them, is angry with mankind, with all of us, and nothing we do to try to appease Him can succeed. If we don’t accept His Son Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, we will spend eternity roasting in the fires of hell. This is not a new or uncommon belief. In some form it is held by religionists of other faiths, particularly Islam, and once by all Christians.

Once by all Christians, meaning the ‘roasting in hell’ part, but a good many Christians today, of all church affiliations, still believe something quite like it. We want to evangelize because those whose sins are not forgiven and expunged will be separated forever from God, and this forgiveness and expurgation is possible only while we are alive on earth. After death, whatever we have decided in life—for Christ, or without Him—determines our fate in eternity. Given that God is a mechanical Being, that He is a Divine accountant, a supreme Lawgiver, Lawyer, and Judge, and since He generously sacrificed part of Himself, His Son Jesus Christ, to acquit us of our iniquities, He can be this kind of God.

But is He really? Is the only possible interpretation of the life, teachings, and death of Jesus Christ the ‘angry God requires appeasement’ one? One thing is for sure, the last—and they would say the final—revelation of the Abrahamic God, Islam, continues to hold to the view of a God who is demanding, can be angry, and most certainly consigns ‘the wicked’ and ‘the unbelievers’ to hell fire. This basic pattern for the ‘God versus man’ relationship is implicit in all three Abrahamic religions and gives their adherents the motivation at least to be ‘good’ people and to ‘believe,’ as well as to warn others to do likewise, so that everyone can make God happy and be made happy in return, forever.

Outside the pale of these three, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, a different idea of what God is like and, consequently, how we relate to Him, removes the motivation for their adherents to proselytize. When they do, it’s often to deliver people from the ‘angry God’ of the Abrahamic faiths—especially young Westerners. In classical times, the motivation was to spread civilization, the religious faiths being the carriers of material as well as spiritual technologies. Reflecting back on Christianity’s vast nineteenth and twentieth century missionary exploits, the same might be true.

It seems that way, at least in modern America, and in fact, it was this way for the past three centuries until very recently, in the western and northern parts of Europe as well. Christianity, by individual, personal evangelism along with social activism, raised the moral and material level of the peoples it evangelized. In modern America, the sects go after, and are usually only successful in evangelizing, the lower classes, those whose lifestyle has degenerated over the course of a few generations, into severe familial and personal dysfunction. Once raised, people often ‘outgrow’ Christianity.

So why don’t we ‘go fishing’ as Jesus calls it ‘for men’ if we really believe in a dangerous universe, where God is angry with us and will certainly punish us forever, even if we’re ‘good,’ because we don’t care a ripe fig about Jesus or what He has done for us? You know, why don’t people want to play the church game of ‘pretend to be a sinner, then pretend to be saved’ with us? Is it because they really have better things to do than contemplate the niceties of God, Christ, and religion, if that’s what it’s all about? To those who believe in the ‘inerrant Word of God’ I say, you haven’t done enough, not for yourselves or for God; you’ve been lavishing grace on yourselves, while letting the world go to hell in a hand-basket.

To those, like myself, who believe that Christ Jesus, not the Bible, is the incarnate, not just the inerrant, Word of God, I say, we haven’t done enough, not for ourselves or for humanity; we’ve been keeping our light hidden under a bushel, we haven’t followed even the most basic commandments of Jesus, ‘Therefore go, make disciples of all nations, teaching them everything, baptizing them’ in the life of the Holy Trinity, restoring their freedom, their human-divine dignity, healing their sickness, and raising them to life, here in time on earth, so that there, in eternity, they can continue to live with God. We should know that we have a motivation, one more powerful than fear of hell fire.

Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. This is how God showed His love among us: He sent His one and only Son into the world that we might live through Him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and His love is made complete in us.

This is how we know that we live in Him and He in us: He has given us of His Spirit. And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent His Son to be the Savior of the world. If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in them and they in God. And so we know and rely on the love God has for us.

God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them. This is how love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment: In this world we are like Jesus. There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.

We love because He first loved us. Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen. And He has given us this command: Anyone who loves God must also love their brother and sister.

1 John 4:7-21 NIV

Knowing Jesus

I am not going to read the rabbi's book, but there is a meaning to ‘You don't have to be wrong for me to be right.’ That meaning, though, comes from a location where right and wrong in the usual human sense simply don't exist. That location is the presence of God, before whom all our ideas, even all our beliefs, simply pale into insignificance. Did we love the ones God sent to us? or did we pester them to death with our probings?

I don't believe that all spiritual paths lead to God in an institutional sense. For example, Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, even Judaism do not lead you to the living God, the only God there is, but then, neither does Christianity. All these ‘paths’ are only containers for our souls to keep us from spilling ourselves to death, but also from which we can offer ourselves as drink to others.

If that's not what we use our religion for, as Christians anyway, then we've got nothing to look forward to except staleness, and maybe evaporation. I believe what C. S. Lewis writes (quoting from memory), ‘All who persistently seek joy will find it,’ and that is what Christians mean by salvation, if they tear away all the fantasies they have about it. I also believe what he writes about knowing Jesus, that ‘no one can be saved without Him, but does one have to know Him to be saved by Him?’ (again, quoting from memory).

How many Christians really know Jesus? True, they may confess Him with their lips, even before men (I do the same), but do they, do I, really know Him? He’s not impressed even by the miracles we do in His name or by our calling to Him, ‘Lord, Lord,’ but He rewards those with ‘the joy of the Lord’, with salvation, if we have noticed Him walking among us, and done for Him what He does for us. Knowing about Jesus is not knowing Jesus.

Study and even confession is not doing what He does. To answer His call requires hands and feet, even if they must be pierced. The path of joy, of salvation, can only be walked. Heaven cannot be reached any other way. Yes, we must walk with Him, but like the disciples on the road to Emmaus, we may not recognize who He is, yet we walk with Him just the same. The issue of who is right and wrong is meaningless in His presence.

The Lord is truly among us, alive, enlivening, walking with us, within us, among us, and we do not know Him, nor are we worthy to undo the straps of His sandals, but if He asks us, ‘Whom do you seek?’ let’s be bold enough to ask Him, ‘Rabbi, where do you live?’ and when He says, ‘Come and see,’ let’s not hesitate, but laying aside all earthly care, follow Him, so that He can teach us all things, how to do what He does, how to live the life of heaven on earth.

If we haven’t found the way here and now, we won’t find it anywhere or anywhen, because we will have let the Christ slip through our midst and disappear, because in truth we have sought to stone Him for His blasphemies. Sought to stone Him or throw Him off a cliff, the One who has come not to judge the world, but to offer the only life that is eternal to us, who can only receive it when we are willing to offer it to others, with whatever it takes.

It is love that heals

Over the course of my life this thought keeps coming to me,
“It is not medicine that heals, it is love.”

I’ve said it to people in conversation, even to my personal physician on my last visit. I’ve written it to my closest friends in messages and emails. I’ve thanked God for it, the healing that comes from love, not just from the feeling of love, but from the actions that love inspires. I’ve reminisced how I used to hold my sons when they were very young, and sick with fever, sitting on my lap facing me, bare chest to bare chest, rocking them gently to calm them and to absorb the fever from their hot bodies into my cool one, or how as a sick and frightened child, one of them would slip into papa’s bed, to sleep in safety. And I’ve thought about the strange sharing of others’ sicknesses and distress by holding them close to my heart, spiritually, by prayer, and how they have done the same for me. As holy apostle Paul writes, ‘If one part suffers, every part suffers with it’ (1 Corinthians 12:26), to which verse my experiences have given very personal meaning.

Elder Païsios, one of my teachers, describes this same idea, that it is love that heals. The elder writes,

“You must make the other person’s pain your own, and then pray from your heart. Love is a divine attribute, and informs the other person [that you are praying for him]. Even in hospitals, when doctors and nurses feel genuine compassion for their patients, this is the most effective of all the medications to give to them. The patients feel they are being cared for with love, and have a sense of certainty, security and consolation. You do not need to say much to someone who is suffering, or try to instruct him. He understands that you feel his pain and care about him, and he is helped by this. Feeling his pain is everything. If we feel compassion for others, we forget ourselves and our problems.”

— Elder Paisios of the Holy Mountain (Athos)

“Remember who your teachers were…”
2 Timothy 3:14

The imprisoned lightning

America in the twenty-first century is turning out to be a very dangerous place to live. I grew up in the nineteen-fifties and -sixties, my childhood straddling the divide between innocent and cunning America on either side of President Kennedy’s assassination, just as my lifetime straddles the divide between millenniums. Born in 1951, I may live to see 2051. Well, maybe that’s a bit too optimistic.

In spite of the sense of impending doom which crops up when horrific acts are reported in the media, myself, I remain optimistic. Can it be because none of these acts have happened near me, or to me? Every day I thank the Lord for sparing me, and giving me one more day of life, literally. My optimism rests on two things: my trust in God, and my belief that most people really want what is good.

Notice, I didn’t say, my belief is that most people are good, just that they want what is good. That’s a big difference. I don’t believe in ‘original sin’ or that people are born sinful, that is, disposed to evil. I do believe, based on my experience, that people are born needy, and that in the pursuit of what they need they sometimes, at worst often, do things they know are wrong, and the effects are cumulative.

Yes, I believe in a real right and wrong. So when people are born as innocents into the world, they find themselves in a place with a heritage of bad choices resulting in an environment of bad conditions, and they are automatically infected. They still want what is good, but their conditioning distorts what is good, so that goodness comes to be attributed to things that are, in fact, not good. But enough philosophy.

America is turning out to be a very dangerous place. When I was a child, my world was still protected by three or more centuries of evolved social conscience, which prevented individuals and society at large from doing or permitting certain things. Gambling was illegal, for example, and so were what is today called ‘drugs.’ These were things that society in general believed were addictive, and led to disaster. They do.

I was born too late to have experienced Prohibition, which was an issue that loomed so large, that it had to be written into the United States Constitution as an amendment. A century of struggle against the use of alcohol had finally won, and the whole country went dry for thirteen years, but in the end it was too much. Prohibition was rescinded. The very next year the Gold Surrender order got even with us.

Since we were again going to be allowed to drink beer, wine, and hard liquor, at least we would have to surrender to the Treasury all gold coins and gold banknotes in our possession. One form of control over people was exchanged for another. Society’s conscience was hacked in the process, and that was the beginning of the devolution, the unraveling of the three centuries or more of advancing civilization.

That civilization was driven by the momentum of Christianity. Although the fire of the gospel had been maintained only as embers after the breakup of the Christian state in Europe, after the wars of religion, the ethics of the gospel began gradually to revive side by side with varieties of piety and religious revival. America was the first and possibly greatest experiment in Christian statehood without religious control.

That was the original meaning of ‘separation of Church and State.’ We are still living in that experiment, but there were interests that wanted the experiment to fail, and they have gotten us very close to failing. They have done that by severing the connexion between citizens and civilization, by interjecting themselves between the man on the street, and the source of ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’

That’s how they did it, they interjected themselves, eclipsing the source, convincing people that they were the source, and therefore could legislate anything they desired, they could engineer the kind of society that would be least likely to revolt against their control. Removing a little at a time our real ‘safety net’ and substituting their own, they have created the dangerous environment we now inhabit.

Removing the real, and replacing it with toys, they have corrupted all sense of value. We notice this not only when shopping for food which no longer nourishes but fattens and decays us, but when we go to buy a house and find it consumes half our income, and even if and when we have paid off our loans and credit cards, we find we have spent ourselves in the pursuit, not of happiness, but of nothing.

These things are the real dangers of living in America in the twenty-first century, but we are diverted from attending to them by the more horrific dangers, the massacres of innocent people by shoot-em-ups of every description, home-made criminals the by-products of the decay of our national knowledge of right and wrong. This week it was a gunner with an Islamic name, last week a deranged white boy.

The atheist probing the causes behind this decay often blames religion, and hurls insults at the God he doesn’t believe in, ‘If there is a god, and he’s so merciful, why doesn’t he step in and prevent hate crimes and other disasters?’ Himself another by-product of the crash landing of the social conscience, he couldn’t ask such a question, if he had the slightest notion of how the universe, and God, really work.

What we once had that made America a safe place to live in, that made it possible to know our neighbors and to trust strangers, what enabled us to have freedom of speech, and the right to bear arms, and all the other rights that we were once taught are inalienable, was a single, corporate, national conscience. That conscience was as close to what scripture calls ‘the mind of Christ’ as we could come.

It wasn’t perfect, because it wasn’t finished. That conscience was evolving. It was more than three hundred years old, beginning in the British Isles, in the Netherlands, in France. It was still living and growing here, even when at times, it was being stamped out in other places, even in the lands of its birth. It wasn’t perfect, it wasn’t finished, and it isn’t finished. It’s still alive, though weakened, dulled.

The imprisoned lightning, that is what this social conscience in all humankind is called in the inscription engraved on a bronze plaque and mounted inside the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty: ‘Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand a mighty woman with a torch, whose flame is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles.’ There is something greater than mere idealism here, Someone greater.

‘Evil can be undone, but it cannot ‘develop’ into good. Time does not heal it. The spell must be unwound, bit by bit, ‘with backward mutters of dissevering power’—or else not,’ wrote C.S. Lewis in his short allegory, The Great Divorce. It is not too late for us, but what took centuries to build and decades to pull down is not, even in this age of immediate gratification, going to be rebuilt in the blink of an eye.

America in the twenty-first century can return to being a very safe place to live. Night doesn’t have to be inhabited by terrors. Strangers needn’t be approached as potential enemies. Neighbors can talk to each other, can collaborate on making the neighborhoods communities again instead of prison colonies. This can be a country where the imprisoned lightning in each person can be let free, but we must pick up the torch.

Only what is

It’s strange how often reality presents itself to us not in an either-or dualism, but in some kind of unforeseen manner that defies all our attempts to categorize and define—unless we are willing to, consciously or subconsciously, settle for mental compromises that allow us to work within an environment we have created, no matter how imaginary, or worse, foist them on others, excusing ourselves because we are ‘experts.’

We see this readily in the realm of natural science if we view it in historical perspective. Though the logical guesses of the ancients—the atomism of Democritus, for example—were initially proven nearly correct, with modern researches into subatomic nature a new structure of the universe is being uncovered. No serious atomic scientist would dream of clinging to earlier models, even though for ‘household’ applications they still work.

In politics, because we’re now moving into a social sphere, it’s more difficult to give up old models of political organization that simply don’t work and maybe never did, and it’s also easier to pretend to expertise—now called ‘legitimate authority’—to perpetuate social and political pathologies, often at immense cost, especially in human lives. The either-or predisposition of the human mind draws imaginary lines that cannot, or must not, be crossed.

In religion, or that which is, as Paul Tillich calls it, the ‘ultimate concern,’ we move to an even deeper, more personal level of reality-evaluation, in which our critical faculties, if we try to use them to bend reality to fit our rational or irrational prejudices, can cause the greatest historical, cultural, and social dysfunctions. This is also where the greatest compromises with truth—that which is—are easiest to make, and hardest to abandon.

History, though, is as merciless as Darwinian evolution is, in weeding out the unsurvivables of our world views in every category of experience. It works, however, just as slowly, and so mistakes stubbornly believed in, implemented, or imposed, can take generations to finally fail and be discarded. In the political sphere, not imperialism, not fascism, not communism, are really dead yet, but neither has true monarchy been eradicated forever.

In the religious sphere—and we must confine ourselves for brevity of example, to Christianity—eighteen centuries of spent experiments with theology and ecclesiology, and five or six with scriptural exegesis, have resulted at present in a faith community strategically crippled by attachment to and promotion of ideologies that are as far removed from reality as we can make them, and history’s winnowing fork is already at work as we, helpless, look on.

A case in point is the famous assertion of ‘sola scriptura’ that arose at the time of the Protestant reformation. The reality is that this cannot be an either-or proposition, no matter how much we argue for or against it. It simply doesn’t yield to our manipulations or our attempts to turn theology into a one-dimensional process. Real theology, as multi-dimensional as the ‘real world’ is, is open only to those who experience first and humbly articulate later.

Without institutions or ‘experts’ to certify it, truth, reality, only what is, is notoriously vital and, though susceptible to dichotomy and dissimulation, lives on, survives and propagates itself in freedom as wild and undetected as nature’s. As Archimandrite Vasileios writes, ‘Heresy, by contrast, has in it that which is self-destructive. Its self-assurance—its attachment to human reasoning and sanctity which are its idols—leads it to a state of internal crisis’ (Hymn of Entry, p. 100).

Heresy—yes, it need not mean ‘religious’ heresy, but any compromise we make with reality—as all other elements of the physical universe and all living creatures appearing at intervals and being perfected by evolution—God’s instantaneous creation being experienced as ‘time’ and all events that fill it by creatures such as us—yes, heresy, wanting to believe that which can never be, leads always, by the mercy of God, to crisis—κρίσις, judgment.

For Christian and non-Christian alike, to be faithful and not infidel, is to ‘seek first the Kingdom of God, and His righteousness’ (Matthew 6:33), and Reality, now not just what or even whom we rationalise, but the Uncreated in whom ‘we live and move and have our being’ (Acts 17:28), is available to everyone without exception, the ‘true Light that enlightens everyone who comes into the world’ (John 1:9), who has trampled death by death, and bestows life to those in the tombs.

Χριστός Ανέστη! Αληθώς Ανέστη!

Τετέλεσται

Tomorrow is the Sunday between Ascension Day and the Sunday of Pentecost. Several years ago Fr John, who was pastoring our congregation temporarily while we were ‘between priests’ preached a homily that was very significant on this Sunday, and I want to bring it again to mind.

οτε ουν ελαβε το οξος ο Ιησους ειπε• Τετέλεσται, και κλινας την κεφαλην παρέδωκε το πνευμα.

When he had received the drink, Jesus said, ‘It is finished.’ With that, he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.
John 19:30 NIV

‘It is finished,’ or as Fr John, our beloved pastor paraphrased it in his sermon, ‘Mission accomplished.’

The word ‘mission’ reminded me of an incident early in my working career.

My first reliable job in Portland’s woodworking industry (I was trained as a furniture-maker, my family trade) was in a European-style frameless cabinet shop. I did double duty as the night shift lead man supervising a crew of mostly teenage boys assembling carcasses, and was also the panel saw operator, with an off-bearer assisting me. Larry was 19 and I was 29 years old. He was a tousle-haired artist, and two of his younger brothers worked the assembly crew as well.

One night, when we were filling out tracking tickets (this was before the days of computer generated labels), Larry started thinking out loud to me. ‘I wonder what Spencer meant when he told me to watch out for you.’

‘Huh?’ I said. ‘Yeah, he said, Watch out for Norman. He’s on a mission,’ responded Larry. (Norman is my English name, the only one I had at the time.) So, I guess my reputation as an evangelical criminal started early and had already attracted the attention of my new boss. I never thought of my life as a mission, but since giving my life to Christ at the age of twenty-four years, it hadn’t occurred to me to leave Him out of my daily conversation and activities. He was and is always there, with me. What could I say?


Back to Fr John’s sermon.

It was the Sunday between Análypsis (Ascension Day) and Pendikostí (Pentecost). Of all the priests I’ve ever known, Fr John is closest to the evangelical simplicity of the apostles and early Christian fathers. He always starts out by addressing us, ‘Fellow Christians and friends,’ and continues speaking, never above our heads nor below what the Word has spoken, never watering down or gussying up. This Sunday was no different. His theme and message was simply, Jesus Christ came of His own free will to earth, to live among us, to tell us and show us what the Father is like, to teach us how to live according to what is right in God’s eyes, and finally, to do what no one else had the power to do, to die for us as one of us, and to descend into Hades and empty it of its captives, taking them as tribute to His Father. Only He could do these things, because He is the Only-Begotten Son and Word of God, ὁ μονογενὴς υἱός (John 1:18) και λόγος του θεού (John 1:1).

Jesus Christ had a goal, a mission, that which He voluntarily undertook for the salvation of mankind. Ordinary human beings, but particularly Christians, used to have goals, used to have a mission in life, but now, this is largely a thing of the past. Instead, the world harnesses us into worldly schemes denominated by what it calls ‘mission statements,’ but which are usually just jargon covering up nothing or worse, camouflaging dangerous and dehumanizing goals. After all, the enemies of man are still there: the world, the flesh, and the devil, in no particular order. The world has robbed us, he said, of our goals, our mission in life, leaving us our freedom to do little more than run around in circles.

What the Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit, does with us is much different. He reveals to us, brings to our minds, all that Jesus said, all that the scriptures hold out for us, so that we can have goals, so that we too can have a mission. How else can we expect to hear the words, ‘Well done, thou good and faithful servant,’ if we had no mission in life, but wandered and meandered, circling like an airplane trying to land where there is no airfield... or simply nothing?


And what of my mission? What do I have to present to the Lord when I come to face Him? Will He forgive my failed life, even though I tried to make up for it in my later years? Will I be one of those who say, ‘Lord, Lord,’ but don’t do and didn’t do what He commands? I know that I am unworthy of salvation and have been an unprofitable servant, but I still trust Him, saying, ‘Jesus, I am Yours. Save me,’ (cf. Psalm 119:94 Jerusalem Bible) and, ‘I have faith, even when I say, I am completely crushed’ (Psalm 116:10 JB).

Is my mission accomplished, or is there still more that I have to do before I too can say, ‘Tetélestai’?