What Role for Orthodoxy?

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 insightful anecdote is taken from the final chapter of Fr. John McGuckin's latest book The Eastern Orthodox Church - A New History (p. 300). You may recall, that back in early September I wrote about this book in a very positive manner, promoting this new history of the Church to the parish. I was informed then that a few parishioners made the investment. I did not write a full book review, but simply offered some key excerpts from the book so that everyone could have a "taste" of Fr. John's exceptional presentation of the Church's ongoing history through the centuries. If anyone would like to go back to that earlier piece: https://orthodoxmeditations.blogspot.com/2020/09/a-new-book-waiting-to-be-read.html

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)

 

A New Book Waiting To Be Read

 

To All Serious Readers of Orthodox Literature,

"Believers confess that their interpretation of the life of Jesus (making the Cross and Resurrection literally the crux of world history) is the correct interpretation (the Greek word for which is Orthodoxy, meaning "right opinion") and thus the essential truth of that moment in history."  -  Fr. John McGuckin

There is a new book now available that in my humble opinion stands out for its over-all quality - which I will get to momentarily - and which I therefore highly recommend for your personal library and more than worthy of the time and effort that goes into reading a high-quality publication. The book is making an impression of sorts as it has already been reviewed in the New York Review of Books. The book in mind is: The Eastern Orthodox Church - A New History written by Fr. John Anthony McGuckin. The title is bland enough, but that may obscure the riches of the book; for this is no ordinary rehearsal of the Church's history, but a fascinating and illuminating survey of the Church's historical pilgrimage, endlessly packed with great insights. Fr. John is trained as an historian, though he is an outstanding theologian who is a very prolific writer with many wonderful titles already to his credit. Of this new book of his, Fr. John Behr, also one of today's leading Orthodox theologians, has this to say:

"An engaging, sophisticated yet accessible, account of the Orthodox Church - its self-understanding, theology, sacramental life, and history - from the time of the New Testament through its long pilgrimage in the East and more recently into the West. One of the best introductions available." 

And from another very prominent scholar from Durham University, Clara L. E. Ramelli:

"This is a rich, fascinating history, from the beginning of Christianity to Patristics and contemporary Orthodoxy, by an outstanding scholar. It includes inspiring intellectual and mystical figures, importantly not only men, but also women, like Elizabeth Behr-Sigel."

One of the main strengths of the book, among many, is this basic thesis brilliantly conceived and presented: There is an unbroken continuity of all officially accepted Orthodox thought throughout the centuries with the apostolic deposit of faith "from the beginning" and "once and for all delivered to the saints." This is what offers validity to the claim that the Orthodox Church is the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. Fr. John draws that thread throughout the book as he takes us on a journey through the centuries. The Fathers and the Ecumenical Councils may elaborate and develop the apostolic deposit of Faith, creatively employing new terminology along the way, but it remains the same Faith regardless of the historical vicissitudes challenging the Church. Following that thread of continuity along with Fr. John is fascinating, and it is both coherent and convincing. The book is not an "entry level" Church history, but it is not burdened with jargon or academic theories that can weary the mind. It is all quite exciting, and in typical Orthodox fashion, it organically interweaves theology, history, liturgy and spiritual life. I would like to present just a few examples of Fr. John's presentation:

Fr. John begins with an insightful discussion of the content and purpose of the Gospels and other canonical books of the New Testament. In that discussion, he has this to say:

"The overall sense among the earliest canonical writers about the death and exaltation of Jesus is that there is an antithesis of response from God the Father to the sacrificial witness of Jesus's life. Just as Jesus poured himself out in self-sacrificing obedience to the Father's will in a bitter kenosis (a word that means "emptying out"), so too God gave him in return the fulness (pleroma) of glory after his sufferings, raised him up to the right-hand side of the heavenly throne, and acclaimed him with the inexpressible (divine) name of "Lord." ... The Resurrected and Glorified Jesus is now shown to the whole cosmos as Lord, who was once recognized as a slave." (p. 13)

Since this is primarily a book about the history of the Church, how does Fr. John describe the reality of the Church? What is the Church:

"We are meant to deduce that the Apostolic preaching that flows from the Pentecostal Spirit, and that first initiates the church's mission of reconciliation on earth, is itself  presented in the New Testament as a fundamental part of Jesus's resurrectional glory. ... The New Testament teaches, then, two significant things in relation to the  church. The first is that it is a mysterious and transcendent part of Jesus's Lordly glory:  an eschatological reality, not entirely reducible to a historical or sociological phenomenon (the number of people at any given time who claim to be Christians). The second is that it is per se the fundamental sign, or witness, of the dawning advent of the Kingdom of God on earth: the Kingdom of God's perfected will that would one day accomplish history and terminate it, when God's intent for his creation would be all in all.... It is often called, especially as based on the formative writings of the apostle Paul, the "Mystical Body of Christ;" and just as Christ was himself a sign, or sacrament, of the Kingdom in the world throughout his ministry, the church too has the destiny to be a sacrament of reconciliation and hope in its own historical journey through the ages." (p.14-15)

Fr. John has a wonderful chapter on the Ecumenical Councils of the Church, those events that have shaped our theology once and for all in a decisive manner.There is an excellent description of the Christological debates of the 5th century, when the Church had to make a pronouncement on the union of the divine and human natures in Christ. Offering a brilliant summary of St. Cyril of Alexandria's writings on the Person of Christ, Fr. John summarizes like this:

"Without leaving behind his divine glory he had willingly accepted the humility of the Incarnation. Just as he lifted up the Manhood into his own divine life, so too he lifted up along with it all the sufferings and limitations appropriate to that Manhood. Cyril went further. This, he argued, was exactly why the Incarnation happened in the first place. TheWord did not choose to come to earth, and live as a true human being, because he felt the need for a change of scenery. He came so as to embrace humanity into his own life as divine creator and refashioner, and, having embrace it so profoundly, thus to heal it. As he healed his own mortal nature, making what was evidently mortal and passible (as proved by the Passion and death) into what was immortal and impassible, rendering the lowliness of death into the glorified body, so too did he elevate all human nature in that once and for all act." (p. 113-114)

And in summarizing the everlasting contribution of the great Church Fathers of the era of the first Six Ecumenical Councils (325 - 681 A.D.), Fr. John reminds us of why we venerate and preserve their teaching:

"Each one of these fathers of the church is steeped in knowledge and love of the scriptures and the church sacraments, which is why each demonstrates that profound linkage in Orthodoxy between scripture, synodal government, Ecumenical Council, liturgy, and patristic theology: a synthesis of streams of spirituality that constitutes the Christian apostolic tradition and keeps the Orthodox Church ever ancient, yet alive to respond to the spiritual needs and hopes of  contemporary men and women." (p. 120-121)

Treating the Seventh Ecumenical Council (787) somewhat separately, in his discussion, Fr. John reveals the place of material reality within the life of the Church. In another summary, he offers a wonderful description of the over-arching purpose of Orthodox worship:

"To this day Orthodox worship is an earthy experience that rises to a transcendental spiritual experience. The two things are never separated. In Orthodox services this is seen quite clearly and immediately. All the senses are engaged: chanting, incense, lights, icons, relics of saints, full-bodied sacramental rituals - all being conducted with gusto. Whenever one enters an Orthodox church at service time, it  always seems in full swing, and if the clergy are ever still for a moment, inevitably the people are on the move, bowing down, crossing themselves, kissing icons, lighting candles. There is a profound sense that God himself is in the midst but that he is the Incarnate Lord of grace who has sanctified all material things when they are lifted up in prayer. In modern times several Orthodox thinkers have extended this ancient theory of worship from the seventh council and applied it to support a wider ecological theology. As the icon symbolizes the manner in which material things can serve as powerful doorways to the divine presence, so too all creation is graced with the marks of the Creator's energy. Thus, in Orthodoxy's spiritual sense there can never be a purely "secular thing:" all created things, especially human beings, are created as iconic mysteries of grace with a hidden power and potential to shine in the transfiguration of Christ's holiness and light." (p. 154-155).

Further chapters bring the history of the Church up to the present day, including such chapters as "Orthodox Life Under and after Islamic Dominion;" "Orthodoxy Under the Communists;" and "The Twentieth-Century Orthodox Diaspora." A closing chapter on "Day to Day Life in an Orthodox Parish" is quite fascinating.  Since this modest overview of Fr. John's new book is already getting lengthy, I can perhaps offer a Part II that share some of the insights of these further chapters. For the moment, I would again highly recommend The Eastern Orthodox Church - A New History by John Anthony McGuckin. I would suggest: 1) purchase a copy; 2) read it carefully; and 3) include it in your personal library of Orthodox literature for endless referencing!

 

Resolutions or Repentance?

Dear Parish Faithful & Friends in Christ,

According to the civil calendar, we begin the year of our Lord (Anno Domini) 2019, on January 1. The year of 2019 is based upon the calculations of a medieval monk who, in attempting to ascertain the exact date of the birth of Christ, missed the year 0 by only a few years. According to contemporary scholars, Jesus was actually born between what we consider to be 6 – 4 B. C. These were the last years of Herod the Great, for according to the Gospel of St. Matthew, Jesus was born toward the very end of Herod’s long reign (37 – 4 B.C.). Christians therefore divide the linear stretch of historical time between the era before the Incarnation; and the era after the Incarnation and the advent of the Son of God into our space-time world. 

In other words, the years before the Incarnation are treated as something of a “countdown” to the time-altering event of the Incarnation; and the years since are counted forward as we move toward the end of history and the coming Kingdom of God. By entering the world, Christ has transformed the meaning and goal of historical time.

Recently, there has been a scholarly shift away from this openly Christian approach to history, as the more traditional designations of B.C. and A.D. have been replaced by the more neutral and “ecumenically sensitive” designations of B.C.E. (Before the Common Era), and C.E. (Common Era). Understanding and interpreting history from a decidedly Christian perspective, I would still argue in favor of the more traditional B.C. and A.D.

Although an issue of more than passing interest, that discussion may appear somewhat academic in comparison to the pressing issues of our daily lives as they continue to unfold now in 2019. We will  exchange our conventional greetings of “Happy New Year” probably more than once in the next few days. 

Under closer inspection, there remains something vague about that expression, and perhaps that is for the better. Do we wish for the other person – as well as for ourselves – that nothing will go (terribly) wrong in the unknown future of the new year? More positively, do we wish that all of our desires and wishes for our lives will be fulfilled in this new year? Or, are we wishing a successful year of the perpetual pursuit of “happiness” (whatever that means) for ourselves and for our friends? At that point we just may be reaching beyond the restrictive boundaries of reality. As Tevye the Dairyman once said: “The more man plans, the harder God laughs.” 

Perhaps the more realistic approach would be to give and receive our “Happy New Year” greetings as neighborly acknowledgement that we are “all in this together,” and that we need to mutually encourage and support one another.

We also approach the New Year as a time to commit ourselves to those annual “resolutions” that we realize will make our lives more wholesome, safe, sound, or even sane - if only we can sustain them. A resolution is to dig deep inside and find the resolve necessary to break through those (bad) habits or patterns of living that undermine either our effectiveness in daily life; jeopardize our relationships with our loved ones, our friends and our neighbors; or seriously threaten to make us less human than we can and should be. 

We know that we should eat less, swear less, lust less, get angry less, surf the computer less, play on our iPhones less, watch TV less and so on. We further know that we need more patience, more self-discipline, more graceful language, more attention to the needs of others, more “quality time” with our families and friends, more forgiving, more loving and so on. We know, therefore, that we need to change, and we intuitively realize how difficult this is. Bad habits are hard to break. Therefore, we need this annual opportunity of a new beginning and our New Year resolutions to give us a “fighting chance” to actually change. 

We may joke about how quickly we break our resolutions, but beneath the surface of that joking (which covers up our disappointments and rationalizations) we are acknowledging, once again, the struggle of moving beyond and replacing our vices with virtues. May God grant everyone the resolve to maintain these resolutions with care and consistency.

And yet I believe that we can profoundly deepen our experience of the above. For, as a “holiday” is a more-or-less secular and watered-down version of a “holy day;” so a resolution is a more-or-less secular and watered-down version of personal repentance. To repent (Gk. metanoia) is to have a “change of mind,” together with a corresponding change in the manner of our living and a re-direction of our lives toward God. The New Year’s resolution of our secularized culture may be a persistent reminder — or the remainder of — a lost Christian worldview that realized the importance of repentance. “There is something rotten in Denmark,” and an entire industry of self-help and self-reliance therapies — totally divorced from a theistic context — is an open acknowledgement of that reality regardless of how distant it may now be from its religious expression. As members of the Body of Christ living within the grace-filled atmosphere of the Church, we can, in turn, incorporate our resolutions within the ongoing process of repentance, which is nothing less than our vocation as human beings: “God requires us to go on repenting until our last breath” (St. Isaias of Sketis). Or, as St. Isaac of Syria teaches: “This life has been given you for repentance. Do not waste it on other things.”

Summarizing and synthesizing the Church’s traditional teaching about repentance, Archbishop Kallistos Ware has formulated a wonderfully open-ended expression of repentance that is both helpful and hopeful:

Correctly understood, repentance is not negative but positive. It means not self-pity or remorse but conversion, the re-centering of our whole life upon the Trinity. It is to look not backward with regret but forward with hope – not downwards at our own shortcomings but upward at God’s love. It is to see, not what we have failed to be, but what by divine grace we can now become; and it is to act upon what we see. In this sense, repentance is not just a single act, an initial step, but a continuing state, an attitude of heart and will that needs to be ceaselessly renewed up to the end of life.  (The Orthodox Way, p. 113-114)

Hard not to be inspired by such an expressive passage! In the Service of Prayer for the (Civil) New Year, we incorporate into the litanies of the service some of the following special petitions . Thus, in the language of the Church, these petitions served as an ecclesial form of the resolutions we make to break through some of our dehumanizing behavior; as well as a plea to God to strengthen our better inclinations:

That He will drive away from us all soul-corrupting passions and corrupting habits, and that He will plant in our hearts His divine fear, unto the fulfillment of His statutes, let us pray to the Lord.

That He will renew a right spirit within us, and strengthen us in the Orthodox Faith, and cause us to make haste in the performance of good deeds and the Fulfillment of all His statutes, let us pray to the Lord.

That He will bless the beginning and continuance of this year with the grace of His of His love for mankind, and will grant unto us peaceful times, favorable weather and a sinless life in health and abundance, let us pray to the Lord.

If you resolve to seek and to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your mind … and your neighbor as yourself” (MATT. 22:37-38), then I believe that this new year may not be perpetually “happy,” but that it will truly blessed.

'The decisive moment in the history of the world...'

Dear Parish Faithful,

CHRIST IS RISEN! 

INDEED HE IS RISEN!

Pascha - The Thirty-Ninth Day

"The instant of the Resurrection was the decisive moment in the history of the world. It was the event of deepest importance for every human being who ever lived. It was the supreme kairos, the definitive 'day of the Lord'. The Law and the Prophets were fulfilled in that moment, and the existence of the human race took on a radically new meaning."

- From The Jesus We Missed by Patrick Henry Reardon

The Christian Revolution

Dear Parish Faithful,

During the homily yesterday, I referred to a remarkable passage out of a remarkable book by the Orthodox philosopher/theologian David Bentley Hart.  He was explaining the over-all purpose of his  book Atheist Delusions - The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies and in the process produced a powerful paragraph about the revolutionary nature of the Christian Gospel as it pervaded the Graeco-Roman world of the first century A.D. and then beyond.  This is what we now refer to as late antiquity.  

Living in our own contemporary world, we can be unaware of the radical reassessment of reality offered by the Gospel. All I could do was offer a brief and inadequate summary of Bentley Hart's thesis yesterday.  So, I thought to share this part of the book's Introduction with this packed paragraph which, in its own way "speaks volumes."

The Christian “Revolution”

From Atheist Delusions – The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies

By David Bentley Hart

This book chiefly – or at least centrally – concerns the history of the early church, of roughly the first four centuries, and the story of how Christendom was born out of the culture of late antiquity. My chief ambition in writing is to call attention to the peculiar and radical nature of the new faith in that setting: 

how enormous a transformation Christianity constituted in the age of pagan Rome; the liberation it offered from fatalism, cosmic despair, and the terror of occult agencies; the immense dignity it conferred upon the human person; its subversion of the cruelest aspects of pagan society; its (alas, only partial) demystification of political power; its ability to create moral communities where none had existed before; and its elevation  of active charity above all other virtues. 

Stated in its most elementary and most buoyantly positive form, my argument is, first of all, that among all the many great transitions that have marked the evolution of Western civilization, whether convulsive or gradual, political or philosophical, social or scientific, material or spiritual, there has been only one – the triumph of Christianity – that can be called in the fullest sense a “revolution:” a truly massive and epochal revision of humanity’s  prevailing vision of reality, so pervasive in its influence and so vast in its consequences as actually to have created a new conception of the world, of history, of human nature, of time, and of the moral good. 

To my mind, I should add, it was an event immeasurably more impressive in its cultural creativity and more ennobling in its moral power than any other movement of spirit, will, imagination, inspiration or accomplishment than any other movement in the history of the West.  And I am convinced that, given how radically at variance Christianity was with the culture it slowly and relentlessly displaced, its eventual victory was an event of such implausibility as to strain the very limits of our understanding of  historical causality.

Atheist Delusions, p. x-xi