Healing rain

I awoke in the dark night, the cool air drifting into my room through two wide opened windows, the soft sounds of a gently falling rain soothing to my mind and soul. Healing rain, the heavens liquefying to lay down on hard, unyielding pavements and dry, thirsty soil a moist blanket of peace in the night, peace after a day satisfied with its work, peace and stillness.

Always welcome to me, rain by night or by day invites me to pause, to return to my inner home. I would curl up in a cushioned chair in a corner between two windows, maybe a light blanket over me, and read a good book, or the Good Book, or even just the book of my memories. Taking pause, the selah of the psalms, after words or work, to stop and consider, it is enough.

This night the rain remembered another day when it healed the earth and those that live upon it and are buried in it. That bright day many years ago when, after a week of my wife’s family reunion at Buffalo Lake, Alberta, some of us turned aside to a graveyard in Camrose to commit to the soil the ashes of one of its own, my father-in-law James Raymond Mabbott.

He had come home from Australia to die. After a stormy marriage that produced five children in short order, he had disappeared, leaving his wife and oldest daughter to manage a fatherless family. Canadian farm boy of good stock, he was descended from Christian people from England’s smallest county, Rutlandshire, that came to settle in Wisconsin before the Civil War.

That family fanning out over the great plains, always west and north, to the Dakotah Territory, then spilling over to fill the prairie provinces, to Saskatchewan, to Alberta, leaving sturdy sons and swarthy but fair daughters to build homesteads, first from sod houses, at last produced the generation that was cast into the fiery furnace of the second world war, turning farm boys into killers.

After that war, wishing to forget, one took to alcohol and riotous living, but obligations to kith and kin must still be met. A young man took a wife, daughter of Ukrainian settlers who wished to become ‘white’ as quickly as possible. To be like other Canadians, my wife’s grandmother Domka, daughter of Father Theodosius Taschuk of the Russian Orthodox mission, became Doris.

She sent her children to the Protestant school and church, never spoke the ancestral tongue, the better to make Canadians out of them. When my mother-in-law was six, the old country reappeared in Father Theodosius coming to the settlement, rounding up all the children who hadn’t been baptised, and giving them the triple dunk in a large washbasin. Nancy became Anastasia in a hidden moment.

Then, back to Nancy as she grew up, a nice ‘white’ girl like all the other Smiths and Gordons and MacDearmids, when she became ripe for wedding, the young school mistress became the missus Mabbott, and started bearing children for her gallant young man. But the war had left large scars on his soul, and Christian though he was, what little faith he had was traded for drink.

Before long, the inevitable happened. Paper Christianity doesn’t have much holding power, and the young family was torn in two. As usual the children weighted down their mother’s boat, almost capsizing it. And the father, clinging to his piece of driftwood, was finally lost at sea. They never saw him again for a decade, hearing only rumors that he, like many others, had gone down under.

When he finally returned, it was to come home to die. The family was mostly grown. His oldest daughter had just become my wife. He went about trying to gather his sons and daughters together, and to make amends, tried to give them what he thought they needed, but money can’t atone for missing years. Before long he couldn’t hide his throat cancer any more. He had to pay the piper.

I knew him very little, but I could see what sort of man he must have been, and could have been. He was no stranger to virtue, but even loaded with virtues, a man can still be felled by one carefully aimed vice. Not wanting to ‘be buried in the cold earth’ he requested, and was granted, to have his remains cremated, so his bones would not feel the frozen clay, but his ashes had no resting place.

Not even an urn, just a cardboard box contained him, or what was left of him, as we opened the trunk of my car parked at the roadside. His oldest son was angry, was outraged that his father had nothing to show for him but a box of ashes. It was a bright day, its sharp outlines blunted by the steady drizzle that drenched the ground and muddied our boots as we walked into the cemetery.

There was a grave opened and ready to receive his ashes. I don’t remember how they were interred, but someone took charge of them. My part was to perform the memorial service. James, my father-in-law, was not a religious man, but he was a Christian, not a victorious one, but a crushed one. He was a man who had to go through a dark wood by night and was attacked, robbed and killed by a brigand.

No one else in the family knew what to do, and the church affiliations of those present at the interment were sketchy, so it fell to us, to my wife and me, to ‘do something’ for a memorial. What we did was the Greek Orthodox memorial service, singing parts of it in Greek for that little crowd of pious but undiscipled Christian relatives. ‘Meta pnevmaton dikaion teteleiomenon…’

I had printed out the memorial service and the few parts that were in Greek I translated, but no one holding a copy in their hands was looking at it. Something I learned early about the rain: you can cry in it and not be ashamed, because no one can tell the tears from the raindrops on your face, unless they look very closely. One of my wife’s sisters joined in as we sang ‘Aionia i mnimi…’

That simple melody, Aionia i mnimi, ‘Eternal be his memory,’ still hung in the air as we slowly parted from each other and returned to our cars. Some of the family had stayed in their cars because they were afraid of the rain. It made me wonder at the time, and even now, what people think is important, and why. Me, I am as much an Indian as I can be, bare-chested I love to go out in the rain.

As I sit here by my open window, that beautiful, constant sound of water plays music on the dark hardness outside, finding echoes within me, and I hope that when the sun rises in about an hour, the rain will continue. The world and I both need healing right now, and we cannot heal ourselves. Our memories cannot heal us, our doctrines and covenants cannot heal us, only the rain.

The rain, no, not the water falling that I love to run in or sit quietly under cover and listen to, not that rain, though it can be the harbinger. No, the real rain, that which God sends to water the earth, to water the heart, that is the rain I am talking about. We know the name of that red rain that washes away all stain of sin and the sting of pain. It is blood. It is grace. Healing rain.

We're no longer what we were

Today, at ten minutes past seven in the morning, my wife and the mother of our four sons, Anastasia, passed away. And now we are starting out on the road to what must be.

Of course, we can piously say, ‘God is in control, and He knows what He is doing.’ Of course He does, yet even God doesn't desire the death of anyone, as scripture says, ‘Death was not God's doing, He takes no pleasure in the extinction of the living’ (Wisdom 1:13). Myself, I have somehow escaped the feeling of grief when it comes to the death of my loved ones. I sometimes wonder, was it because I never loved them at all? That can't be it. It's quite possible that years of trusting in the promise of Christ that ‘If anyone believes in me, even though he dies he will live, and whoever lives and believes in me will never die’ (John 11:25-26) has worn down any possibility of me feeling grief. Probably not. I think my prayers to God to protect and prolong the lives of my loved ones have been answered. Yes, even today. To me, our God has been a truly gracious God, and though His blessings have sometimes contradicted my desires, He has never ‘left me lying in the dust of death’ (Psalm 22:15c).

I have written that death doesn't have to be awful, that it can be beautiful, and that those who are truly alive have nothing to fear in death. That may sound alright on paper, and such an explanation may work for the dispassionate person, but I think, for most people it simply doesn't hold water. In fact, even for Jesus Himself, such an explanation doesn't work. How do we know? Because in the shortest verse in the bible, considering the death of his beloved friend Lazarus, scripture says of Jesus, ‘He wept’ (John 11:35). Yet this same God-man—though at the time He asked this question, no one knew for sure or exactly what or who He was—said to the sister of Lazarus, ‘whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?’ At the same time that He truly grieved and really wept for the death of His friend, He still knew that He could, and would, raise him.

Martha said, ‘I know he will rise at the last day.’ Well, to her that was no consolation, and by her words and tone she let Jesus know that that was not enough. She wanted her brother back alive, now, though she didn't say it aloud. Christ, knowing everything about her just as He knows everything about all of us, testified, ‘I am the resurrection,’ even though He knew that unless He demonstrated it, what He said was just words. People then and now had some kind of belief in the afterlife, though no one ever has a clear picture of it. Some say it's just an extension of life on earth, where we appear the same and know each other, and live forever, carrying on as we did on earth, only without end. Just as the resurrection on the last day was not enough for Martha, so this kind of imagination about the afterlife is not enough for me.

God is real. Jesus Christ the God-man is real. Paradise is real. Therefore, all that we can think about or imagine of the life hereafter is at best a kind of pill we swallow to keep our anxieties quiet. The fact is, we can't know, we can only believe, and so sometimes we let our beliefs carry us away into fantasy. Whatever else death is, it is without doubt the end of our lives on earth, all that we are and were is no more. We will be seen here no more. There is only one of each of us, and nothing about us or anything else in the universe really repeats itself or can continue forever as it was. I once wrote, ‘The perfection of anything solely human consists in the fact that it must end,’ and I meant what I wrote. We exist only to run our courses to the finish line. When we break through that line, our utter exhaustion from the final effort to finish sends us careening into ‘the great cloud of witnesses’ who catch us as we fall, completely out of breath and, if we were still alive, close to suffering a heart attack.

But we are dead—thank God!—and so a heart attack is simply out of the question. We made it to the finish, but we're no longer what we were, not at all. As we lie there dazed for a moment in the arms of the heavenly host, for a moment we remember what we were on earth as one almost remembers the figments of a waking dream, and then, as we come back to ourselves, we are as different from our earthly identity as uncreated is from created. Where once we were contained in our bodies, now our bodies are contained in us. It would not be an exaggeration to say we are no longer human, but only as we say that an oak tree is no longer an acorn. Lord have mercy! Here I go imagining the afterlife and what we will be just like the next guy! And after all I just said! What I really wanted to write was something I just feel, something I just ‘know in my knower,’ but there aren't any words for it. Holy apostle Paul writes something that gives me the same feeling, ‘We shall not all die, but we shall all be changed’ (1 Corinthians 15:51).

It's that word ‘changed’ that comes closest, without defining, to what it is that we are, after we have expired in the body of flesh. But, back to grief. We are right to be sad, to mourn, the death even of an aged parent or grandparent, just as we grieve for the death of a child or still-born. Why? Well, again, because He who created all, who knew us all before we appeared on earth, and who by knowing us after we have disappeared holds us forever suspended in a new and unknowable life, He too grieved, He wept, He was sorry that His beloved friend had to physically die. And did He weep knowing Lazarus was just dead, or even more so, because He must raise him temporarily again so that he must endure that same disembodiment and transformation again? Only God knows all, including the answer to this. ‘Memory eternal,’ that hymn with the haunting melody, tingeing the air of purply pre-dawn with expectation and transformation: ‘Awake, my soul, to the real life!’

God became man, that man might become God. We can say the words and even imagine, but there is nothing we can say truly, until happens to us what holy apostle Paul wrote, ‘No eye has seen, no ear has heard, and no mind has imagined what God has prepared for those who love him’ (1 Corinthians 2:9).

Apostles

Two men more unlike each other can hardly be found, and yet here they are, cheek to cheek, the father and father of the Church, proving that there is more than mere flesh and blood involved in spiritual parenthood."What is born of the flesh is flesh. What is born of the spirit is spirit" (John 3:6). Yet the flesh is not to be discounted, for that is what we are made of to begin with, where we start from, but that is not where we end up.
Today is the commemoration of holy apostles Peter and Paul. The ikons show their appearance as it has been handed over to us generation after generation. I love it that the family is so faithful in keeping the treasury of faith intact. Peter is always shown with a head of thick white or gray hair and a short beard and mustache, an industrious and fair small businessman. Paul always has his characteristically balding pate, his hair and mustache dark, his beard and sidelocks curly, just as you would expect of a man who was groomed to be a great rabbinical scholar in Israel.

Did they ever really hug each other like this? Well, probably not often, but even once would be enough to warrant it being recorded on spiritual film. Two men almost fated by their backgrounds to be enemies, or at least to feel superior to each other. The one a man of the people, roughly educated, speaking just enough Greek to trade and just enough Hebrew to pray, attending to the business of wife and family and providing others with a livelihood, a small town fisherman, careful of his affairs, clannish with his friends, loyal, trusty and true. The other, a cosmopolitan man of some means, a tent-maker probably by hereditary trade, though trained for better things, the study of Tanakh—the Torah (law), the Nevi'im (prophets) and the Ketuvim (writings)—unmarried because not yet a rabbi worthy of a wife, Greek and Hebrew second nature to him, Aramaic for dealing with all classes of men, prepared to meet every man on his own ground, a man for all seasons.

Our ikons and paintings show them together, but this is a spiritual unity not a historical and personal one, for little did they actually collaborate in their preaching of the Good News. Between them, though, the Lord who chose them, "you have not chosen Me, I have chosen you" (John 15:16), has all the bases covered until the end of time, with the help, of course, of the other ten. When we see Peter in the ikon, we should remember that it is not he alone, but all the original apostles, that are there represented. The holy eleven, or twelve if you count Matthias who was chosen by lot to replace Judas Iscariot, are with Peter. And among them all, there is not a single one that is not a friend for our inmost soul.

They walked with the Lord. They were present for most of His miracles. They touched Him, ate with Him, lived with Him. He slept in their presence, and they in His. They were as close as a band of brothers could be. Their fellowship seemed impenetrable, but for the intrusion of the "one untimely born" Paul (cf. 1 Corinthians 15:8), who would not have been found walking with them and with Jesus during His three year mission. He had more important things to do then, to sit at the feet of the sages of Israel thirstily drinking in their words, so that he would become worthy of their company and fellowship. If Paul had been among the Pharisees who knew and met Jesus, like Nikodemos and Joseph, he wouldn't have been quiet about it. But no, he admits to having been born "too late."
We are now at the end of the Apostles' Fast, and tomorrow the rest of the holy apostles will be commemorated. With them we share the Good News of the Kingdom, of the Living One, Jesus the Christ, "the Word co-eternal with the Father and the Spirit, born of the virgin for our salvation" (Ton synanarchon Logon, Resurrectional Apolytikion, Tone 5). We are not imprisoned as holy apostle John was on Patmos, "for having preached God's Word and witnessed for Jesus" (Revelation 1:9). We are still free to do these things, there is still a little more time left for us to go out into the field of the world to the harvest of souls.

What is keeping us idle? What treasure have we counted more precious than the death of God's Son which has granted us eternal life and great mercy?

Now is the acceptable time of the Lord, now if ever, the fields are white for the harvest, and the sower and reaper rejoice together, to reap what in reality they have not worked for, to reap what others have planted, following Jesus the Lord of the harvest, who says,
"He who is not with me is against me, and he who does not gather with me, scatters" (Luke 11:23).
Though it be the eleventh hour, come, brethren, labor on.
The Lord of the harvest is always ready for us.
Let's not just honor the apostles.
Let's join them.

The peace of Christ

My wife Anastasia is in the hospital as of last Monday, suffering from terminal cancer. Of anything I've ever written that describes the feeling we are presently experiencing, this short testimony puts it best, describes the peace we are feeling. This is peace we are all afraid to accept, until we find no other way open before us. Yet it is a sweet kind of peace, because of the tears of repentance and purification that accompany it. There's nothing else to be said, except to thank Him who gave us this beautiful life.

Peace, perfect peace, in this dark world of sin?
The Blood of Jesus whispers peace within.
—Edward Henry Bickersteth

Hymn writer

Peace, that which comes from above and is granted by God alone through Christ is not easy to define, but it definitely does not mean something like ‘all's well’ or ‘peace and quiet’ in the usual sense. Peace from God does not necessarily mean that there is no trouble anywhere in our life, nor that we are not faced with problems to which we cannot find a solution.

It's easier to talk about this peace that comes from God through Christ and is bestowed on us in prayer than it is to actually have it. Why? Because we usually talk about it when we are not in any great distress, emergency or need, but after we have been delivered from it. We look back in retrospect and thank God for the deliverance and find words of testimony to give about God's faithfulness.

What is the best definition of and the most convincing testimony to the ‘peace from above’?

When we are presently in distress, in danger, at risk, beset with problems we see no end of, when we are suffering persecutions, slander, unjust accusations, when no one believes us, when no one cares about us, and we are not sad, not unhappy, not anxious, not disturbed, not reproachful, uncomplaining, unmoved to anger or revenge, still hopeful, still forgiving, still loving our enemies, still seeking God’s Kingdom first and His righteousness, never giving in to despair or abandonment. When we are in this place, and can define ‘the peace of God which passeth all understanding’ not only by the word of our confession, but also by our passionlessness, then we have understood and accepted what that peace is. It's the same peace that Jesus knew when He was crucified and when He uttered with His last breath, ‘It is finished. Into your hands I commend my spirit.’ It is the same peace which Jesus gave to His disciples when He said, ‘My peace I give you, a peace the world cannot give.’

This is the peace of Christ.

Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace

Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace

‘I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world’ (John 16:33), says Jesus Christ, and so, His disciples, those who are called by His holy apostle Paul the Body of Christ, are called by Him into His heavenly kingdom of great peace. In the Body of Christ, there are many parts, they are not all the same, yet they work together for the good of the whole.

‘Just as a body, though one, has many parts, but all its many parts form one body, so it is with Christ. For we were all baptized by one Spirit so as to form one body—whether Jews or Gentiles, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink’ is how the same holy apostle puts it (1 Corinthians 12:12-13), and he elaborates even further, saying, ‘From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work’ (Ephesians 4:16).

How beautiful is the Body of Christ!

How beautiful the hands that served the wine and the bread and the sons of the earth! How beautiful the feet that walked the long dusty roads and the hills to the cross! How beautiful the heart that bled that took all our sin and bore it instead! How beautiful the tender eyes that chose to forgive and never despise! And as He laid down His life, we offer this sacrifice: That we will live just as He died, willing to pay the price.

How beautiful the radiant Bride who waits for her Groom with His light in her eyes! How beautiful when humble hearts give the fruit of pure lives so that others may live! How beautiful the feet that bring the sound of good news and the love of the King! How beautiful the hands that serve the wine and the bread and the sons of the earth! How beautiful is the Body of Christ!
(Twila Paris)

What unites the saints is the freedom of the Spirit. They are free from their wills, from themselves. This is the proof and assurance of the genuineness of their truth. It is not the man speaking, but the Spirit of God. Thus a trinitarian balance reigns within them and flows round about them because in them is no ‘individual’ initiative, no arbitrary dealings, no partial view, but a universal manifestation. The Lord's judgment is just because He seeks not His own will, but the will of the Father who sent Him (cf. John 5:30).

The Comforter consoles the people of God and leads it ‘into all truth’ because He does not speak of Himself. What is important is not that we should achieve the project we have set ourselves to achieve, but that the Holy Spirit should do with us and within us what He wishes, when He wishes, regardless of whether this seems, or is, disastrous for our projects and our good resolutions.

This release from his own will and total captivity to the freedom of the Comforter means that man's theological testimony can be heard, like a message of resurrection, from the whole of his behavior and his being. It makes the course of his life into a script which can be clearly read, theologically mature and universally saving. Theology is a creation, a superabundance of life, a gift, an overflowing, an involuntary movement. It emanates from the whole body of the life of those who are spiritually liberated, like the sound that comes from all the vibrating metal of a bell.

Fortunate is the man who is broken in pieces and offered to others, who is poured out and given to others to drink. When his time of trial comes he will not be afraid. He will have nothing to fear. He will already have understood that, in the celebration of love, by grace man is broken but not divided, eaten and never consumed. By grace he has become Christ, and so his life gives food and drink to his brother. That is to say, he nourishes the other’s very existence and makes it grow.
(Archimandrite Vasileios)

The life we share in Christ puts all of us ‘into the arena’ no less than it put the early Christians. Why is this? Are we any different from them? No, we are the same. We are the early Christians. The world puts us into the arena, but actually they do not know what they are doing. They are only following the orders of the One they do not know, who loves us so much that He is willing to let us share with Him His passion, so that we can share His resurrection. There is no other way to life. He says, ‘Do not be afraid. It is I’ (John 6:20).

Like our Lord Jesus Christ who after His baptism by the honorable forerunner and prophet John the Baptist went into the desert where He was put to the test by satan, we are driven by the Spirit into the wilderness for exactly the same purpose: to provoke the evil one to reveal himself, so that he can be overcome. How overcome?
By ourselves? Not at all, but by the Word of God who lives in us and has already transfigured us into images of Himself, full of His own authority and power.

Yes, we are put into the arena. We are driven into the wilderness. That is what this world is, what life in this world is, a battle, yet we are called to live in the heavenly kingdom of great peace. What is this kingdom? Where is this kingdom? ‘The coming of the kingdom of God is not something that can be observed, nor will people say, ‘Here it is,’ or ‘There it is,’ because the kingdom of God is in your midst,’ says the Lord Jesus Christ (Luke 17:20-21), who is both king and kingdom, and who alone is our peace.

‘Christ is in our midst! He is and ever shall be!’ the liturgical greeting that must be lived and not just said, is the road and the destination at one and the same time. How can we not be at peace with one another when we are in Him who ‘makes His home in the praises of Israel’ (Psalm 22:3)? We recite and we preach, ‘One Lord, one faith, one baptism’ (Ephesians 4:5), yet we tear the Body of Christ apart with our own hands and words, putting to death in our bodies not sin as Christ put to death in His, but rather the peace that He came to give, the peace that He alone is. ‘For he himself is our peace, who has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility,’ as the holy apostle writes (Ephesians 2:14).

Have we forgotten what is written? ‘Be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms’ (Ephesians 6:10-12). Let’s remember these words, ‘Live a life worthy of the calling you have received. Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love. Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace’ (Ephesians 4:1-3).

‘I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world’ (John 16:33).

Yes, brothers, the heavenly kingdom of great peace!

Want to be one

What is more important in the Body of Christ than unity? The world does not believe because it sees that the Church is not the abode of peace, unity and love, but only another society much like itself, full of jealousies, usurpations, war and discord. It knows that we have a good Lord and God but that He must not be worth very much, that we do not really believe in Him very strongly and truly, because our belief hasn’t changed us very much. It looks in at our door and sees a house no better than its own. It looks at our family and sees the same dysfunction that afflicts its own family. Why would the world want to enter into the Kingdom of God, if that Kingdom is only the same as its own under another name?

The human world, the human race, is stopped in its tracks, cannot take the next step in its evolution, because the only part of it that has the possibility of taking the first steps has chosen not to. The only new man in the history of the world has appeared. Though we fought against Him with all our might and were able to bodily kill Him, He was not defeated but instead defeated everything in us that keeps us down. What is worse for us is that the Man did not go away but is always present in our midst, and still we, the Church that claims to be His Body, the Body of Christ on earth, His Presence, that people who can of all peoples take the step into the new humanity, the new world, do not take it.

Unity, yes, unity. It does not have to mean what we try to bend it to mean. It is not an ideal that we can say we strive for but are unfortunately unable to achieve. No. Unity in God does not mean administrative unity. We all do not have to be united under one pope or system of Church government. That has been our big mistake, but it stems from another deeper one, the desire to overcome, not ourselves, but others, in the name of God. How senseless, how brutal is our handling of the Message that it no longer has any power in it to transform the world. We are indeed on our last legs, we have indeed reached our next to last day. We have failed to bring new birth to the world.

The Book is there and open to all who can read. The Christians read it and do not follow what it says but only argue about it and talk it to death. The world reads it and picks and chooses what it wants to take in its vain attempt to do without the Spirit what only the Spirit can do. The world and the Church are two disobedient sons, one saying it will do what the Father wills but does not, the other saying it will not do what He says—because there is no Father—and yet does, though without effect. Belief cannot be followed by disobedience. Obedience has no power to transform without faith. Though Christ prefers the obedient faithless to the disobedient believing, neither brings mankind to its destiny.

This talk of mine is no more than idle talk. I am both in the world and in the Church and I share the fate and fault of both. All I know is, I too want to be transformed. I too want to see the uncreated Light of Tabor and seeing it become it. There is no blame or shame that I do not share with all of you, my brothers, all of you, both believers and unbelievers. Nothing about us that divides us matters at all. Nothing. It is only what unites us that matters, and there is only one thing, one Man, that can unite us, and that is Christ. He does not unite us by brute force, by threats, intimidation, or by decree. He unites us by His prayer to the Father, by His life for the world, by His death on the Cross, by His resurrection.

This is what humanity is waiting for, what mankind really desires, what every man and woman, rich and poor, free and slave, really wants. Having this, having the unity that is in Christ, having it not just talking about it, is what dissolves the struggle between man and woman, tears down the wall between rich and poor, and makes of the human race a single family of priests and kings, where none rule but who serve, and where all make progress with not a single one left behind into the new world that Christ has established. He is the new Man, the only One, and what then does that make us? There is no middle ground, though we have made of human history a midden of disappointed hope by our refusal to follow Him.

Can we start today? Is there anything I can do as a single man, you as a single man or woman? If you are a pope, a bishop, a priest, a minister of the gospel, a missionary, a witness, a worker for Christ, whatever you call yourself, if you say you are following Christ, is there anything you can do? Is there anything you can do to make a difference? There is no program to follow, no principle to espouse, no compact to subscribe to. Have you been baptized and believed? Now just go and say and do what you hear Jesus saying and see Him doing in the holy gospels. Step into the shoes of the fishermen, but don’t do what you want, do what He wants. He is alive. He will tell you. I cannot do that. I can only listen for myself.

Humanity is waiting to take the next step in its evolution because those who know that the step has already been taken by Christ have refused to follow, but only squirm in their seats as they watch the Jesus movie and read the lives of the saints. The world will not believe until it sees God among us. Is He really there? Is He really here, with us? Do we believe that? If we do, then what are we doing sitting here like this? No, it isn’t just what we can do. In fact it is nothing at all that we can do that will transform humanity. Only He can do that, but we must first want it, we must first give Him our permission. We must let Him transform us.
All we need to do is want it.
Want to be one.

…that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me.
John 17:21

Unity

How good, how delightful it is

for all to live together like brothers:
fine as oil on the head,

running down the beard,

running down Aaron's beard

to the collar of his robes;

copious as a Hermon dew

falling on the heights of Zion,

where Yahweh confers His blessing,

everlasting life.
Psalm 133 Jerusalem Bible

My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: I in them and you in me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.
John 21:20-23 NIV

How people strive for unity, how much they desire it, but they stop as soon as they think they have reached it, and it is still terribly far from the unity that Christ prayed for us to have.

The unity that comes from above is the gift of the Spirit of God, not in some magical fashion that does not ask anything of us, but as a gift that can be received only by those who give themselves to it.

Unity is a gift that draws us in, all that we are and have. Unity is a gift that we receive only when we become the gift.

When we possess this unity, it possesses us. We no longer seek ourselves, but always the other. We are all of one mind and of one will, while remaining distinct persons, and we begin to understand the Holy Triad, not by thinking, but by living.

We become the trinitarian flock.

This unity, once experienced, even between only two persons, proves every word of the Gospels and of the whole of sacred scripture to be entirely true.

Between the lines

Fully Alive, by Danny Setiawan

The problem many people have with Orthodoxy, even when they are in favor of it, is not the anomalies, inconsistencies or downright absurdities they find in it, but rather the way they are trying to approach it, understand it, and classify it. In other words, our cultural mind set did not arise from it—we are far more different from it than we suppose and do not have a starting point within it, but only within ourselves—and we are examining it, by study, observation, and even experimentation, and trying to fit it into the only world view we know. That world view may be mainstream in the culture we live in, or it might be incredibly personal, but either way, we are approaching it much as we approach anything else in the world. But Orthodoxy, as a presence in the world, really is outside of the world, at least, outside of this world.

Whether we think of Orthodox Christianity as a religion, a philosophy, a way of life, or all three, we have no choice but to analyze it from the outside. We are told, you can only know what our faith is by accepting it as it is, in toto, and let it be what it claims to be, the true faith, something that will necessarily take a lifetime to sink in. We are told, ‘We are all becoming Orthodox,’ and other such things. The strange thing is, once you are inside, though you may find people who still jabber about Orthodoxy as if it were the cat’s pajamas, if you are sincere in your faith and following of Christ—without whom there can be no such thing as the Church, let alone ‘Orthodoxy’—you find that you are still primarily a disciple of Jesus, but that you have acquired a very large family, and now know ‘for sure’ where the road leads.

You see, Orthodoxy is not ‘the Church’ that any of us who came to it from outside ever thought it was. At first, we take it for granted that the Church is an institution, that it has rules, that it requires intellectual agreement with certain ideas, and that we are expected to participate regularly in at least some of its activities. We think that joining it necessarily separates us, even isolates us, from the non-Orthodox. We have heard as much from ‘authorities’ who seem to know what they’re talking about. There are books to read, even handbooks of correct ceremonial protocol—women wear skirts in church, no one crosses their legs, gum chewing is not allowed, and other such things which we see disregarded with impunity—and then there all all those dietary rules, what to eat or not eat during the fasts, and who knows what else.

Our intellect may be pushed out of shape, scandalized or even offended by things we think or we know are ‘wrong,’ at least by our upbringing. We want the Church to be perfect in every way, doctrinally especially, but even socially. We want to escape to it from whatever we have found disagreeable in the world we inhabit, and our approach to it often remains, unknown to ourselves, that of a consumer intent on getting the best deal. The truth about Orthodoxy, though, as a Church, is that it is the menagerie of the Most-High God, who collects every kind of human being as Noah collected animals for the ark. This menagerie was there before we arrived, and will still be there, if we leave it. We cannot buy it, it is not for sale. It is the pan-human reality, the visible part of the great Tree that God has planted in paradise.

All of the incidentals, even such things as beliefs and practices, which we want to take much too seriously, are really only that—incidentals. The Orthodox Church is what salvation looks like, wearing these incidentals, while the human race undergoes the most radical step in evolution we can possibly imagine. Far more people are included in this radical step than even the Church itself is aware of. Hence, the ubiquitous saying, ‘We know where the Church is; we do not know where it is not.’ When we offer to join this spiritual monstrosity, we think we are doing someone a favor, and like a swimmer contemplating a dive into a strange body of water, we want some assurance that we won’t be injured, that there are no dangerous creatures in the lake, and that we can get out of the water if and when we want to.

Back to our mind set, most of us are—at least at the beginning—unable to think ‘outside the box.’ We think we are doing precisely that already, just by considering Orthodoxy at all, but we are still trapped by a whole series of dualities upon which we feel we must opine, judge, and agree or disagree with. At the very least, we think that we must confess an exact belief and that we must, in detail, agree with everything the Orthodox Church teaches. We feel that to do anything less would be both dishonest and dangerous. All this is why the safest and easiest way to become an Orthodox Christian is to be born into it, forty-day blessed, triple-dunk baptized and slickly holy oiled, regularly spoon-fed with bread and wine pablum, and prayed over often, at length, and repeatedly, until we are so used to being loved, that we like it.

Back to assurance, most of us want to be certain that once we plight our troth to a strange religion, that we shall not later become liable to believe things that were hidden from us before our mystical marriage. We do not like surprises, as if we could say to Jesus, ‘Enough now! Let’s not go there!’ but fortunately for us if we really want to follow Him, we are willing to go with Him, anywhere. Still, we feel it is unfair that we must transfer this kind of loyalty to the Lord to a mere institution. At least, that is how our minds make us look at it. But our hearts shall thrill to hear such things as this: ‘Everything begins to speak with strange dogmas, strange words and the strange teachings of the Holy Trinity’ (Verses at Orthros and Sunday Vespers of Pentecost). With the mind in the heart, we welcome this strangeness.

There is a lot of evidence—why do we not accept it?—personal evidence, testimony that we are familiar with through our reading or by encountering real persons who have before us taken the flying leap into the ‘cloud of unknowing’ and embraced Holy Orthodoxy. Yes, now I am calling Orthodoxy ‘Holy’ even though every Lord’s Day I sing with the choir at the Divine Liturgy, ‘One is Holy, One is Lord, Jesus Christ…’ We sometimes have known people whose Christian life and witness have impressed us as being genuine and at least as real as our own, who like us were not born to the faith, and yet despite mental or even moral dilemmas, seem to have effortlessly entered. If they could do it, what about us? Is it really more like boarding a ship bound for safety, than reading a legal contract and making sure you agree with everything?

So there is this faith that seems to be walking on marbles. They call Jesus, ‘Christ God’ and ‘Saviour’ and then turn around and say ‘Most Holy Theotokos, save us!’ (Theotokos, the ‘God-bearer,’ is Mary the mother of Jesus.) They claim that they have seen the true Light, received the heavenly Spirit, and found the true Faith. Why then are they not consigning everyone else to damnation? If their ikons are supposed to be historical, why is there a dragon in some of them? And they believe some of the most wild things about people they call ‘the Saints’ with a capital ‘S’ (though some of them seem to be more evangelical than the most fervent bible thumpers, and call everyone ‘saints’). How can anyone feel safe on solid ground when all this is going on all around them, all the time? Bottom line is, just who do they trust?

Safe, yes, as one who has dived into that unknown lake, not even knowing how to swim, I was not injured. I did not break my neck on a hidden rock at the bottom, but I did find the Rock hidden from the world in that lucid pool. I can stand on that Rock, my head above the waters, because He who loves me is always with me. He does not ask me what I believe or doubt, does not require anything from me, except that I do what I see Him doing, say what I hear Him saying, and go where He goes. He gives me permission to go in and out through a Door that, when I open it none can close, and when I close it none can open. Agree and disagree belong to the world of those who measure, count, weigh, buy and sell. There is no loss with Jesus, even though everything we think we own is taken away. That is what Orthodoxy is.

It is not a religion, unless you want it to be. The ikon wall does not separate us from the Divine Nature tabernacled behind it, but hides what must not be seen for the sake of Him who is, was, and shall be seen. The ceremony celebrates the Divine Presence with us, who has pitched His tent among us, so that we can learn how we shall be dwellers with Him in the presence of His Father and the angels. The ancient tales, neither true nor false as men judge, are not to divide us, but to join us to the ‘great cloud of witnesses’ whose acts have filled the earth unnoticed by the arrogant and worldly wise, but we have noticed. We do not ask ‘Who said that?’ but we pay attention to everything that is said. Now, we see this treasure hidden by others who came before us. Orthodoxy we name it, the faith of saints we claim it, but till we own it, it is nothing.

The Kingdom of Heaven is like a treasure hidden in a field. A man found it, hid it again, then in great joy went and sold everything he owned, and bought that field.
Matthew 13:44

Birth pangs

The Christian Message—I don’t want to call it ‘Christianity’ just now—is an incarnational faith. It is this heresy against pure monotheism that aggravates the Jews and makes some Muslims very warlike and antagonistic. We believe—for here I have to confess I am one of them—that the self-existing, eternal, living God who creates, sustains and destroys all things, is One in being but, as far as His personality is concerned, He is a triad, a threesome, officially ‘the Holy Trinity.’ Besides confusing those who want to reduce God’s being to a mathematical formula, it makes some people think a Christian is a tri-theist. All that aside, no, we are monotheists, not as man would have it, but as God defines His own nature. Regardless of how many ‘persons’ share the Divine Nature, God is One.

Back again to our incarnational faith, we say that God became man. Well, that seems to be nothing new. The Hindus and other religious peoples have long known that the gods incarnate as humans or even other life forms. Vishnu has had nine incarnations so far, some of them animals, and the tenth one, yet to come, is amazingly similar to what many fundamentalist ‘end timers’ of all stripes—Christians, Jews, and Muslims—believe about ‘the second coming of Christ,’ or ‘the Messiah,’ or ‘the Mahdi.’ Their ‘end times Lord’ is Kalki. He rides a white steed and is heavily armed. He comes to destroy the miscreants and bring the Kali Yuga, the ‘iron age,’ to a fitting conclusion. Incarnations of the gods always seem to ‘come to the rescue,’ usually violently. Not so for the Christians.

The kind of incarnation that we Christians believe of God, well, yes, He does become a man in order to rescue us, even to save us, but He doesn’t stop there. Another thing is, He doesn’t come armed and dangerous and ready to kill, though the psalmist sings ‘Smashing their skulls, He heaps the wide world with corpses. Drinking from the stream as He goes…’ (Psalm 110). No, that’s not what the Christian God-man does. He comes to re-enact in time, and before our eyes, the Sacrifice of Himself which He made on our behalf before the universe ever was. Scripture calls Him ‘the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world’ (Revelation 13:8). And the strange thing about this incarnation of God and His Sacrifice is, that we aren’t meant to just watch the Divine life. We are to participate in it.

What does this mean for us, then, and for the human world, this incarnational faith? It means that God has come among us in a real and demonstrable way, and that He provides for us not only an escape from sin and death, but also the means to transform the world. He makes us co-workers in His creative plan. Did you think that God was all finished creating the universe? Far from it! In those six days, yes, He unfolded the space-time envelope, and then as scripture says, ‘He rested.’ And that’s where we come in. Being made masters of the earth is our entry level position. The human race was made for this, and though we’ve been in the habit of avoiding our responsibilities, that time is almost over. Can’t you feel it? Scripture itself says that the universe is waiting for us to take our proper place in the created order (see Romans 8:19).

Sometimes it seems hard to keep track of all this—that is, if we are instructed Christians—while we see our world falling apart. When they hear of people claiming to be the Second Coming of Christ, or of wars and revolutions, or of weather anomalies and earthquakes, or outbreaks of dangerous diseases, or of the increase of general lawlessness, the ignorant skip over Christ’s words, ‘but the end is not yet,’ and they get ready for ‘the rapture’ or the end of the world. Some of them even abandon themselves to irresponsible behavior since ‘it doesn’t matter, and Christ is coming back soon,’ and they lay waste the earth. But those who have listened to the Lord and put His words into practice, seeing this chaos, remember that ‘these are only the birth pangs’ (see Matthew 24:8).

The birth pangs of what? Aren’t these just the signs that a new world is coming? Yes, of course, but not the way some people think. A new world, that is, a new human world, is coming. In fact, it’s what the universe has been waiting for so patiently. The human race is closing in on the Day of the Lord, when we take that step as a world into that new humanity of which Jesus Christ, the Second Adam, is the first example. And more than an example, because He has the power not only to conquer sin and trample death by death, but also to make us, all of us, sons and daughters of God just as He is. This is not the ‘same old, same old’ message of religious Christianity, but the Message that Christ Himself preached, ‘Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand’ (Mark 1:1).

Scripture says, ‘The world of the past is gone’ (Revelation 21:4), and though this is not true yet, we’re almost there, ‘for the time is close’ (Revelation 1:3). The human race has evolved, by God’s creative plan, and in Christ the new humanity appears, and evolution itself is abandoned as the agent of change—but not without one final surge, one last assault by the forces of the First Adam, the old humanity, habituated to darkness, to the medieval madness of violence and slavery. They fight hardest and most brutally because they know they are defeated. They are about to disappear from human history, never to be remembered or brought to mind. They know, that to be forgotten is to die the second death.

Birth pangs, without which a birth cannot occur. Our future as a race is as certain, no, even more certain, than our past. Death for the race was taken on by Jesus Christ. He disappeared into the abyss, and reappeared, the Victor over death. Brethren, this is the evening of the Last Passover. We are about to leave Goshen forever. Night is almost upon us, just one more night, and then the Day without night. Let us prepare ourselves. A door is about to be opened.

This is not about religion. This is about the Truth, the Truth that will finally make us free.

Glory to God.

Only one

‘I have spent all my life with dance and being a dancer. It's permitting life to use you in a very intense way. Sometimes it is not pleasant. Sometimes it is fearful. But nevertheless it is inevitable.’
— Martha Graham (1894-1991)

I was led on, to find out a bit about the author of the passage below, which was quoted in the book Write Is a Verb (2007, Bill O’Hanlon), and I found the words quoted above. Both spoke to me of the immediacy and inevitability of life in Christ.

‘There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action—and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours, clearly and directly.’

Now, I’ve never been a dancer. Even in a private moment with no one watching, even with music that makes other people dance all around me, I’ve never ‘given in’ to the rhythm and just ‘let go’ and danced. Why? That’s just not me. In youth a geek, thinking that ‘dancing’ was expected of me, I gave it a try, failed, and found a hundred excuses why I don’t dance. There was really only one—that’s not who I am. At last, half a century later, with nothing to prove, I can just be myself, ‘sometimes not pleasant, sometimes fearful, but nevertheless inevitable.’

Being brought up in an environment of vigilant self-denial, surrounded by attitudes of rigorous if pharisaical piety, early on I came to despise the body and praise the spirit. It didn’t help that I was clumsy, unathletic, and too near-sighted to be any good at sports. Does upbringing shape the coffins that we seem to be happy to live in, unaware that our lives are dreams of people dead to the world who can do nothing but dream? Abandoning all thought of interaction with a world I was assured was of no account, I turned inward, to music and literature.

Or is it that our times and places, though seeming to shape us, actually prepare us to discover who we are inside, and at some point accept that inner nature, and maybe even express it openly, as ourselves? I think of Mother Gavrilía, almost an exact contemporary of Martha Graham, who expressed herself in her life in almost exactly the same way as the dancer, though she was a physical therapist and ascetic. Her upbringing squeezed her out of any social or inherited illusions, liberating her to be herself, to express who she was, and that, uniquely and inevitably…

‘When God created us, He gave us life and breathed His Spirit into us. That Spirit is Love. When we lack love, we become corpses and are altogether dead. The Christian must respect the mystery of the existence of everyone and everything. To reach nonexistence, love, love, and love—and so identify completely with the Other, with every other. Then at the end of the day you ask yourself, “Do I want anything? No. Do I need anything? No. Do I lack anything? No.” That’s it!’

It must be an amazing thing for someone to realize that ‘who they are’ is ‘to love’ as Avrilía Papayánnis, the girl who grew up to be known as ‘Sister Lila’ (when she lived and worked with the poor and destitute in India), and later (when she became an Orthodox nun at the age of sixty!) as Mother Gavrilía. Her ‘dance’ was every bit as original, unique, inspirational and, yes, even influential, as that of Martha Graham. In both of these women, the inevitable happened—they became what they were created to be—despite their upbringing (or because of it?), regardless of what others thought of them.

There’s a kind of rebellion that is an affront to God, and another kind that is as pleasing to Him as a commandment fulfilled. The first kind, which grieves Him, is to take what He gives and trash it; or maybe to not take what He gives at all, and to go on ‘a wild goose chase’ only to find despair. The second kind, which pleases Him, is to take what He gives—yourself, as He made you, as you discover little by little what you are—and hand it over to Him with interest, like the faithful servants in the Parable of the Talents. ‘Sometimes it is not pleasant. Sometimes it is fearful. But nevertheless it is inevitable.’

Well, almost inevitable. There’s only one charge of ‘living in denial’ that you cannot ignore. Not the ones coming from others, but the one coming from yourself. Everyone knows when they’re ‘faking it.’ To waste what we are given, what we have been created for, is a sin almost as serious as suicide. The words of a dancer—yes, that’s what she was created to be; she only appeared to be ‘merely human’—can be as important and life-saving as those of a canonized saint. If you knew her, and saw her dance, perhaps the message she spoke would have come across just as clearly. ‘There’ll never be another you.’ [*]

If you are young, as I once was (when there was no one to teach me), and you understand these things, then pursue them, pursue Him in yourself, be the man or woman He made you, is making you, and will make you in the world to come. If you are of whatever calendar age, whether you are old or only think you are, look to yourself. Make sure you are not still bound to fallacies, chained to appearances, trained to make-believe about who you are. What gives you ‘a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening’ if you would only let it, to be ‘translated through you into action,’ into joy? Have you accepted it?

‘There is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours.’

Only one face

Just as our bodies, skins containing systematic bundles of living matter, give us a physical definition in space, so our minds, elusive compositions of innumerable strands of thought and memory, weave us into ephemeral persons in time. ‘Who knows if the spirit of man mounts upward or if the spirit of the beast goes down to the earth?’ (Ecclesiastes 3:21).

We are born and, without taking thought, are molded into people we think we are, a boy or girl at first, then a man or woman, husband or wife, and gradually our likes and dislikes, our knowledge and our ignorance, our passions and our fears, collect our multiple, often contradictory selves, into a boxful of identity to which we can give a name.

But it is all so fleeting. As the Indian calls it, no more than maya, illusion. Yet what we are is real, is solid, at least to the touch, ours from the inside, and theirs from the outside. The questions, who are we, who do we belong to, are we just ‘dust in the wind’ or are we permanent, and who or what is permanent, if anything or anyone, do not trouble us.

We may be leaves caught up in the wind, but nevertheless we exist, if only for a brief moment in time. Soon, it will all be over. Soon, we will be no more. How do we know this? Just look around. We are a visible between two invisibles, a waking between two sleeps, a day between two nights, a light between two darknesses, meaning caught in the jaws of unmeaning.

The scientist indifferent to God may theorize our physical definition and our ephemeral personality as the result of blind, purposeless evolution, vestiges of events previous equally meaningless, illusory. God, Himself the meaning of the universe He creates, does not stop to examine His own thoughts which we are, or ask Himself what or whom to conceive, His ‘let there be.’

Life unconscious of itself flows from His hands, world upon world. He releases it, and then receives it again unto Himself, with a characteristic that, at its lowest level, we call ‘love,’ and try to emulate. We know somehow that this alone exceeds both time and space, allows movement in the five directions forward and back, and delivers the invisible into our grasp.

Unbox oneself. Disperse the multiple, contradictory selves. Let passions and fears run to waste, knowledge and ignorance lay down their arms, likes and dislikes shrivel into non-entity. Be received back into the arms of love. Invisibly sleep in the night of unmeaning darkness. He hovers over, breathing Himself over that peaceful sea, making home its waves.

The gap unbridgeable has been closed, is no more. The Cross laid down, foundation for all space and time, dissolves the treachery of bent wills and unblindfolds forever the eyes of the universe. With eyes wide open, finally, we can see what we see. Thought no longer works against us, and memory, cleansed forever of its crimes, shines, a bright mirror of only one face, His.

Interwoven in amity

The painting reproduced above depicts the Russian priest and martyr Pavel Florensky (left) walking with the philosopher Sergei Bulgakov. In 1914 he wrote his dissertation About Spiritual Truth. During his life he published works on philosophy, theology, art theory, mathematics, and electrodynamics. Thus, he was both a scientist and a Christian.

An Orthodox brother sent me a link to a televised debate between ‘Science Guy’ Bill Nye and an Australian creationist, Ken Ham. This is not the sort of thing I am interested in, debates, especially debates on artificial antagonisms such as ‘creation versus evolution,’ but I looked at it, enough to know that, yes, just another waste of precious time. I certainly don’t blame my friend for forwarding it to me. I’m not sure where he stands on this issue, as I do know that there are many Orthodox Christians who hold to very literal and fundamentalist beliefs. Many of these are former Evangelicals, ‘born again’ Christians, disillusioned by the drift of their original fellowships into spiritual anemia.

Myself, not exactly a ‘cradle Orthodox’ but almost, I did start out holding staunchly to what would now be called creationist views. It would be difficult indeed, living in America, the seedbed of ‘fundamentalism,’ not to be affected at least a little, whether pro or con, by the vigorous promotion of such views, in the street, in the media, sometimes even in church regardless of denomination. But after growing up within the Orthodox koinonía, observing both beliefs and behaviors of those inside and outside the Holy Church, I came to the conclusion that what is called ‘fundamentalism’ is really a misnomer. A true fundamentalist deals in foundational faith, not in divisive opinions.

What I noticed very early in my life among Orthodox Christians was their unique way of presenting the Bible and its stories, especially those in the Old Testament, simply and without questioning or challenging them from a rationalist angle. When Adam and Eve were discussed, we never talked about who Adam and Eve were historically, or even if they existed at all as depicted in the Bible, but what their story meant for us and for the whole human race. Even, no, especially, in our holy ikons, the creation not only of Adam, and Eve, but of the whole of creation, is shown in beautiful and compelling color, and we are told, that ikons can represent only real events and real people. They are a graphic Bible.

So we were taught, and we accepted without resistance, that the right way to read the Bible and to view the holy ikons, is simply to accept them ‘as they are’ without raising the voice of dispute or dissension. This isn’t to say that we were forbidden to come to our own personal beliefs about either. On the contrary, it seemed we were quietly encouraged to ‘dig deeper’ and to ask the Lord, who is ‘the Only Teacher of mankind,’ to enlighten us. In fact, I would say, we had a sense that it was ‘very meet, right, and our bounden duty’ to study and seek, to further our enlightenment, not to teach others, but so that our lives would shine with the knowledge and love of God, not to argue, but to affirm.

What is at issue in controversies such as these is not really the rightness of one set of views over another, but the warfare of one barely concealed, nearly naked antagonism against another, both equally bent on personal triumph. Yes, let me reiterate, equally bent. In the debate I witnessed this evening, I was amazed at the ignorance of both the scientist and the creationist, displayed in their inability to cut through their own material spiritualism and spiritual materialism. In closing the debate, each was asked what was the driving force of his beliefs. The creationist answered first, predictably praising the Bible’s absolute, literal truth, tacking on Christ’s work of salvation as a final coup de grâce.

The scientist, or perhaps the evolutionist, for evolution is what he seemed to believe science itself is, offered as the reason for what he believed, science as an ongoing, adventurous, liberating, fulfilling, and victorious invasion and investigation by the human mind, his or anyone’s, of the material world, of all there is, and that is all there is. The universe, the whole show, and we as particularly favored to be, for no special reason other than we evolved, we fit in, the witnesses of this grand spectacle of which we are a part. He praised his teacher Carl Sagan by name, so we knew that even an atheist can look up to someone. If I seem to favor one debater over the other, forgive me, brethren. I found much to admire, and much to pity, in both.

You see, I myself am a scientist. I have no degree, but my primary and secondary education was in mathematics and the natural sciences. It was only when as a young adult at college I discovered that ‘the proper study of mankind is man’ that I switched over to history, political science, and philosophy. It suited me better, and there I have remained ever since. It was no accident, then, that when my heart awoke to love, I should seek Him, the Bridegroom of the soul, in His ancient habitation, Holy Orthodoxy. Also no accident, that in the faith of Christ and His holy apostles I should find no rend in the garment of either knowledge or wisdom. ‘Science’ and ‘religion’ are both at home here, interwoven in amity.

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).