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| Source: orthodoxartsjournal.org |
by Robert LockridgeBalancing on spent legs, I grabbed hold of the windsurfer’s uphaul rope and strained to hoist the submerged sail. The moment that it cleared the water, I grabbed the boom and threw my weight backwards catching the wind. The board leapt forward and in an instant I was skipping across the waves. But, like each of my previous efforts over the last hour, I couldn’t “beat to windward”; I couldn’t control the windsurfer and sail upwind. Attempt after attempt, the board and I kept slipping downwind, down the choppy Currituck Sound of North Carolina.
Tumbling into the water and swimming back to the windsurfer, I “cried uncle”. I rolled up the sail on the mast, laid it down the length of the board and began paddling on my belly back to shore against the wind and tide. Despite my repeated efforts, I had blown a full mile downwind. Fortunately, my family had been watching my struggle from shore, and my sister and uncle, realizing I was in trouble, had come out to tow me in by kayak. I was both thankful to see them and humbled. Then my uncle’s words made sense of my frustration. “You forgot the daggerboard.” Looking under my belly, I saw the daggerboard slot, empty.
Without a dagger board – the removable keel for a wind surfboard – I had no point of contact with the deeper, stiller water, no leverage over the wind and current. Without a daggerboard it was simply impossible for me to windsurf upwind and against the running tide. -—
By analogy, we modern Orthodox Christians may struggle to “beat to windward,” against the secularizing forces we all encounter when we leave the Liturgy and try to navigate our day-to-day lives. I believe that despite our rich, theological, liturgical, sacramental, and ascetical inheritance, we have unknowingly forfeited the daggerboard or keel of our journey of theosis– the integration of our eucharistic tradition into the whole of our lives. Our relationship with the creation is intended to be the ballasting, steadying, means of our communion with God throughout every aspect of life. Over many generations, however, the gap between us and the creation upon which we depend has widened into a gulf, so much so that now, like when I forgot the daggerboard that blustery day on the Currituck Sound, we are entirely unaware of having left anything behind in the first place. As a result, our lives are unhooked and disconnected from the creation in a way that would be unrecognizable to generations of Orthodox faithful who have gone before us. In this way, we are trying to “beat to windward” without our natural bodily intersection with the sacramental creation as leverage for our spiritual journey.
In For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy, Fr. Schmemann makes the compelling case that man is created as homo adorans –as a worshipping being who “stands in the center of the world and unifies it in his act of blessing God, of both receiving the world from God and offering it to God –and by filling the world with the eucharist, he transforms his life, the one that he receives from the world, into life in God, into communion with Him. The world was created as the “matter,” the material of one all-embracing eucharist, and man was created as the priest of this cosmic sacrament” (15).
However, through the fall, Fr. Schmemann argues that man….
“ceased to be hungry for Him [God] and for Him alone, ceased to see his whole life depending on the whole world as a sacrament of communion with God. The sin was not that man neglected his religious duties. The sin was that he thought of God in terms of religion, i.e., opposing Him to life. The only real fall of man is his noneucharistic life in a noneucharistic world. The fall is not that he preferred world to God, distorted the balance between the spiritual and material, but that he made the world material, whereas he was to have transformed it into “life in God,” filled with meaning and spirit” (18).
The Church has to contend with secularizing forces that are a “negation of man as a worshiping being, as homo adorans” (118). Fr. Schmemann posits that because of the incarnation of Christ, man is intended to be as a priest, receiving the sacramentality of the world as the gift of communion with God and offering it back to God in thanksgiving. The world received by the Church in worship finds its fulfillment, and is intended to be an epiphany of “man’s relations to God, to the world, and to himself” (118). However, secularism unhooks materiality from spirituality and Schmemann believed that the Church has been profoundly influenced by this desacramentalizing force. While theologically speaking Orthodoxy remains deeply sacramental, in its “liturgical piety” there is a dangerous drift toward the replacement of “sacramentality” and “epiphany” by “sacrality” and the “magical incrustation into time and matter (the “natural”), by the supernatural” (see 131-33 on Schmemann’s discourse on the meaning of “holy water”). In other words, while the Church is intended to restore mankind to his priesthood wherein we come to know the whole of life as illumined with Him who is the Life of the world, secularism and secularizing tendencies within piety do the exact opposite–making the world opaque and putting distance between man and his very means of communion with God. It is within this context of understanding that Fr. Schmemann sought to open the doors, so to speak, between what the secularized world wrongly understands as the divide between that which is sacred and spiritual, and that which is material and “profane”.
It is through this framework that we are to understand Fr. Schmemann’s efforts to help restore liturgical practices to their sacramental and epiphanous roles. I am deeply grateful to have received this liturgical inheritance within our parish; to hear the prayers, to see through the royal doors, to participate in the Divine Liturgy in all the ways that our congregation is accustomed. In my estimation, the liturgical distance separating man from his vocation as homo adorans has gotten much smaller within the OCA since Fr. Schmemann first published this book sixty-three years ago. Yet simultaneously, the distance or space between us and receiving the creation as “epiphany” has gotten unimaginably larger.
Fr. Schmemann argues that there has been a profound desacramentalization of the world. Quietly, and without our even knowing it, this process has unhooked us Orthodox Christians from our intended sacramental relationship with the world, leaving us with little leverage to “beat to windward”. Without this leverage it is increasingly difficult for us to worship God through the whole of our lives as we were created to do. Instead, our lives can end up feeling very bifurcated–with our Orthodox lives and the rest of our lives separate rather than integrated. I am convinced that the theological and pastoral implications of this reality are profoundly important.
In order for the Church to be healthy, for men and women to live into their vocations as homo adorans, there needs to be not only a liturgical restoration but also a restoration of our eucharistic relationship with the creation so that we can fulfill our priestly roles and know communion with God through the whole of our lives, even while living in a secular culture.
Unlike the generations who have gone before us, we modern Orthodox Christians live largely unhooked from the bodily knowledge of our dependence upon creation. As a result, the integration of our sacramental and ascetical practices suffers. For example, throughout the history of the Church, people living in the northern hemisphere have known late winter and early spring to be the “thin time” – the time when the previous season’s harvest is running low; the time before the next harvest season begins; the time before the lambs are born; the time before the calves are born and the cows come into milk. In this way, humanity’s innate dependence upon the natural, sacramentalworld, through the “thin time” was intended to be transformed into a means of communion with God. The Lenten Fast was an offering of an already embodied and integrated reality. The “thin time” was offered back to God and used as a means of our catechesis. Undoubtedly, it stretched people to share with those who had less during a time when some struggled to trust that there would be enough.
I think it is safe to say that our experience of fasting during Great Lent is significantly different from that of the faithful who have gone before us. For that matter, so are all of our eating habits. Rather than being an extension of innate sacramentality born out of humbling, seasonal limitations that are congruous with our shared, embodied, creation-placed lives, our modern Lenten fast can feel like a compilation of arbitrary consumer choices that are hemmed in by the prescription of the Tradition, but which, by themselves remain opaque, playing no epiphanous role on our journey of theosis. For example, many of us, my family included, enjoy our fair share of Oreos during the Lenten fast. While from the label we know that Oreos are technically within the restraints of the fast, and therefore a permissible, “creamy,” chocolaty dessert during a time when most options are “off the table,” so to speak, the snack itself lacks sacramental depth and has little ability to point us to the story of God’s faithfulness. Without this depth, the Oreo, along with many of our dietary choices can become a means to an end, merely a way to achieve the fast. But in Christ, the means and the ends are intended to be communion with Him.
When we hear the pre-Lenten gospel reading on the “Publican and the Pharisee,” we all want to know the true humility of the tax collector, who encountered God’s grace as he knelt in the shadows, beating his breast. Yet we do not always know how to go about doing this. Inadvertently our creationally-unhooked fasting can become a means of our self-exaltation and a proof of our rigor, rather than a pathway towards true humility. Though the Pharisee fasted twice a week and gave tithes of all he possessed, his posture remained upright and proud. For him, the fruit of “doing the right things” was not humility but self-righteousness.
The type of asceticism that is integrated into the whole of an embodied life rather than a seemingly unrelated religious accretion upon it, inculcates a sense of humility and dependence upon God that is woven into the very fabric of one’s existence. There is less space for false piety to rise up when we are being bodily humbled by our beholdency to the creation. And perhaps there is cause for greater joy as well when Pascha comes– when we celebrate the Resurrection of the Lamb of God and simultaneously feast upon the lamb born in spring.
That said, I understand that we’re not going to be literally feasting on lambs that we raise in our urban/suburban contexts!
Nevertheless, I am convinced that unless we recover a comprehensive, embodied, sacramental understanding of the creation through the whole of our lives, the hope we profess will prove insufficient against the strong secularizing tide of our time. Unless there is a restoration of our sacramental relationship with the creation, we will be as effective sailing against the current as I was, trying to beat to windward without a daggerboard. I am convinced that the health of the church, the coherence of our lives, the wellbeing of our children, and our children' s children, and the authenticity of our witness depends upon this.
Perhaps we can take encouragement from the icon of “The Mystical Church” or “The Ark of Salvation” in which the Church, including the Theotokos and the saints, are seen at sea in a sailing boat with Christ at the helm tending the rudder. In this icon, the rudder of the boat is understood as the Holy Canons of the Church that Christ uses to steer the faithful in the direction of truth, toward the waters of humility through which deeper communion with God is possible. Unlike windsurfing, where in an individual strains by him or herself atop a floating board that has no girth or weight or ability to sit down into the water, this icon reminds us that as the Church, we are journeying together with one another, and with the apostles, and saints and all the faithful before us. The stabilizing weight of the Church acts like ballast to the boat, preventing it from slipping downwind as easily as we would as isolated individuals. We are not alone in our beating to windward, in our journey of theosis. Therefore, as we consider how to reconnect with our eucharistically integrated inheritance, we should be doing so as a body.
Over the course of the next year I am going to write a series of essays born out of my family’s life together here in Norwood over the last fifteen years, during which time we have sought to live a eucharistic life in community with fellow Orthodox and other Christians, rooted in a sacramental relationship to this particular, neighborhood of West Norwood. My hope is that through these reflections, on the theme “why matter matters to Orthodox Christians,” we may be encouraged as a body to journey deeper into our sacramental understanding of the Church’s relationship with the creation, the foundation of which is Christ himself.
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