This is Life!: Revolutions Around the Cruciform Axis

Battleground Cliff

I've whined about this before. And I'm going to bellyache about it again today. But only because Great Lent is rubbing this wound raw. The most recent abrasive was my post (a few days ago) from Elder Paisios the New.

Let's lay out the combatants.

On the one hand is my mind. I'm INTJ (according to Myers-Briggs) and pretty much focused on the life of the mind. I've always been bookish, the proverbial kid who, on family holidays, would rather hole up in his room with a book than mingle among the aunts, uncles, and cousins. My dad would take me with him to Grandpa's farm on Saturday's, perhaps to get me out of the books, but it only exacerbated the problem. Staring out at the rolling expanse of the central Kansas plains only encouraged my philosophizing. My religious upbringing, and training for ministry, was largely oriented around ideas. My brand of conservative evanglical Protestantism was focused on purity of doctrine more so than the unity of the Church.

On the other hand is my, um, well, hands. That is to say, I have with the above predilection, had a concommitant "cash-value" orientation. I've never been a mere theorist. Ideas matter, because ideas do things. Ideas, in a title Mr. Weaver didn't much like, have consequences. And there are activities and behaviors about which I can be very disciplined (though I would not consider myself a disciplined person). My primary focus in my PhD program is ancient philosophy (Aristotle and Plato) and ethics. Not just about the mind, but about actions as well. My friends like to speculate about theology and dogma. I like to point out the practical results of such speculation.

My coming to Orthodoxy was, for some time, very much about the idea of the Orthodox Church being the Church Christ founded, and indeed, the Church. It was about all the practical ways Orthodox doctrine would be good for me and mine. But when it came to living the ideas I was encountering, that was another thing. It was more fun to read about the Trinity than to pray to Him. I could recite all the things one should keep in mind, in physical terms, when fasting. But I never fasted.

I began to come to the suspicion that this division between mind and hands was unhelpful and unnatural during last year's Lent. God has seen fit to really pound this home again this year.

It is painful to be hammered this way, I have to say. According to St. Theophan the Recluse, in The Spiritual Life and How to Be Attuned to It, the only resolution is to unify one's person in the heart. Without hands, the mind will die from starvation. Without mind, the hands will have no direction and motive force. But neither mind nor hands are the natural center of the human person. The center is the heart.

I have got to get centered in my heart. Pray for me a sinner.