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Dear Parish Faithful,
"Today, in many parts of the very wealthy and comfortable West, there is such a profound loss of spiritual consciousness that the very semantics of the Spirit are unknown. When people came asking for spiritual advice Archimandrite Cleopa used to ask them back: What prayers do you know by heart? What hymns from the writings of scripture or the fathers are you able to sing by heart? What habitual words do you use when you invoke the presence or the guidance of God in your lives? Often his visitors were hoping he might give then some weird and exotic "mystical" inner knowledge. But this is where he started."
This final chapter of his book is entitled, "What Role for Orthodoxy in a Postmodern Environment?" A fitting question, indeed, and Fr. John offers a sober assessment that avoids all of the triumphalism that usually descends into either bombast or unreality. But the very fact that Fr. John wisely eschews Orthodox triumphalism, makes his response to his own question all the more hopeful and uplifting. For he gets to the very heart of what the Orthodox Church continues to offer to a spiritually-thirsty world. Fr. John writes of "the ancient heritage of Christian wisdom, the Spirit-filled teaching of the Eastern Christian past," claiming that both Protestants and Roman Catholics will recognize "truly as their own," either the Christian East's "immediacy and simplicity" or its "richly Christocentric warmth." He then goes on to describe how Orthodoxy must keep this patristic spirit alive if a true witness will be effective:
"It is in the renewal of a new and deeper consciousness of Christ and his resurrectional presence among the faithful that all other renewal will flow out in the church: a renewal that will come in the fire and quality of the common liturgies, a renewal that will be powerful and fueled in the social and charitable outreach of the churches. Only after this sense of living in Christ has been renewed internally will the mission of the church be rendered actively reenergized once more. It is of no attraction whatsoever for any believers to offer to someone else what does not seem to illuminate their own hearts and minds with the radiant quality of beauty and freedom. Too often, in lieu of this, the Christian public mission has been characterized by fearfulness, cultic sectarianism, intellectual immaturity, and social hyper-conservatism. Why should we be surprised if this clammy handshake does not work?" (p. 301)
This leads Fr. John to this realistic question: "What can Orthodox Christian thought offer to the modern man and woman outside Christian culture, who would most probably find, looking in passing at an Orthodox service, something foreign?" After referring to the fact that "the divine Power and Word and Fire became personally incarnated within time and space: and our God was shown to us as a humble, suffering servant of mercy," Fr. John writes how Orthodoxy can lead us toward discovering our own humanity:
"The real problem today is not that men and women who have become secularized (nonreligious, or whatever) have lost the sense of God. The problem is that they have lost the sense of what it is to be truly human. The fundamental character of the true human being is the self-awareness that presses on all people that they are a transcendent reality, and as such, profoundly strange even to themselves...
In Orthodoxy, one learns from generations of wise and saintly teachers the knowledge that humility and love have been lifted up to divine status in Christ. This saves us: for our transcendence is rooted in the stability that our poverty has been made rich by God's love. The individual who serves to be the place of the indwelling of Christ, through the Spirit, is a person who can stand on the revolving planet without feeling dizzy: knowing why his place is both here and yet not here; and why it is true that we must 'cultivate the garden'; but not just the garden of our present culture and life, also the garden of our soul."
I find this to be an eloquent reminder in a time of political polarization, that it is not politics or politicians that we need to look at for our ultimate well-being. That Christians need not depend upon the support of secular institutions to "protect" Christianity and Christians. If the spirit of freedom in Christ fills our hearts, we will recognize this and understand that it was "the divine Power and Word and Fire" that strengthened the early Church to withstand the persecution that they suffered from the powerful Roman Empire. And the same can be true for us today, no matter how secular or godless the world becomes.
Be that as it may, I want to share a well-known passage that Fr. John closes his study of Orthodox Church history with. These are the words of Fr. Lev Gillette, also known as "a monk of the Eastern Church." In defining the Orthodox Church, Fr. Lev stressed humility, love and prayer:
O strange Orthodox Church, so poor and weak, with neither the organization nor the culture of the West, staying afloat as if by a miracle in the face of so many trials, tribulations and struggles; a Church of contrasts, both traditional and so free, so archaic and so alive, so ritualist and so personally involved; a Church where the priceless pearl of the Gospel is assiduously preserved, sometimes under a layer of dust; a Church which in shadows and silence maintains above all the eternal values of purity, poverty, asceticism, humility and forgiveness; a Church which has often not known how to act, but which can sing of the joy of Pascha like no other. (p. 304)
