Two thousand four will be a transitional year for me. I will, Lord willing, have completed my course work for my doctoral program at Loyola, and will have gotten my dissertation proposal approved and have begun writing. I will be free to relocate, if I can find a suitable teaching job, and will begin submitting resumes. I'll need to beef up said cv with conference papers and journal articles--which I should already have paid much more attention to--but my immediate responsibilities and obligations will have drastically altered. Indeed, this coming semester, with two directed readings, will be something of a transition itself. I won't have formal class meetings to sit in each week. I'll be reading and writing and meeting one on one with my respective professors. Pretty much what I'll eventually be doing for my dissertation.
Anna will soon be transitioning to full-time motherhood (as though she weren't already doing that, but you get the point). Goodbye to the regular salaried workweek. Hello to not missing out on the smallest joys and "firsts" of Sofie's growth and development. Hello to more time to give to our local parish, connecting with the young mothers group.
I'm not sure what sort of transitions we're in for as a family with regard to the Orthodox Church. We've already begun small steps in a direction toward, if nothing else, an embrace of a local Orthodox parish. Will this turn into a joint pilgrimage toward Orthodoxy itself? I dare not guess. But I would never have thought we'd have come to this point, so I'm open to further surprises. Patience and prayer are the order of the day.
Those are the philosophical, professional, and familial faith transitions. But there remains my own personal faith transition.
A recent comment by a dear friend (who, actually, was defending me) struck home: "I will admit that his detail-oriented, philospohical style of argument, quite frankly, sometimes just gets on my last nerve." Jane, thank you, I know you meant the best, but . . . ouch.
Readers of my blog will know that for a year now, I have really struggled, when it comes to the Faith, between exercising my intellectual gifts in understanding and defending it, and shutting up and living it. I tend more toward speaking when I feel I should focus more on living. Previously I have made all sorts of promises to myself: total blogging and "dialoguing" silence, only arguing certain topics on certain days--only to fail to keep those promises. And I haven't developed the concomitant focus on Faith-full living.
While the other transitions taking place this year are somewhat out of my control, this is the one intentional transition I need to really fight to make: Live, live, live this Faith I hold. There are all sorts of things I could recommend to myself: less reading (except for school obligations), more praying, seeking more opportunities to serve at our local parish, etc. But I've made all these, and many more, resolutions before. And here I am.
This is a fight with the old nature. This is askesis. And if I could program change more effectively, I would. But mine is a selective discipline. Many of the more important areas of life are under control of the passions--like "impulse buying" I have "impulse areas" in which passion leads to act without much thought.
So, in facing this new year, I know areas where transition will occur. I know where it should occur. But I have no programs or formulas to "guarantee sucess." Three hundred Jesus prayers every hour may have helped the Russian pilgrim, but my starts almost never finish. I guess I just need to look forward to messy struggle, gaining and losing ground everyday.
But that itself, if done more consistently on my part, will have been a great step forward.
Today's Gospel of Inclusion comes from the Diocese of New Westminster (Canada)
Praise to you, Power-Bestower on Purse-String-Holders.
An Anglican church defying its bishop by refusing to support same-sex unions has been "terminated" only days before Christmas. . . .
Ronald Harrison, executive archdeacon of the Diocese of New Westminster, said Holy Cross brought the closure upon itself by seeking episcopal oversight from another bishop. He said that a result of the church declaring itself "independent" was that its funds had been stopped and eventually the bishop was forced to close it. . . .
Holy Cross, a mission church that relies on its funding from the diocese, is part of a group of breakaway churches in New Westminster that was seeking episcopal oversight by Bishop Terry Buckle of the Yukon [Ed.: The same Anglican Church of Canada in which Bishop Ingham is a bishop].
In October, the Diocesan Council of New Westminster voted to close Holy Cross but needed Bishop Ingham's approval. However, funding was withdrawn from the church.
In a letter dated Dec. 18, Bishop Ingham informed Mr. Wagner that he had decided to close the church. . . .
After the task force was set up, Bishop Ingham wrote to Holy Cross offering to restore their funding if they accepted his authority.
Mr. Harrison said the bishop had never had a satisfactory reply except from Mr. Wagner to say that he was consulting his lawyer.
"We support and fund all kinds of things, including mission initiatives, but if they have openly declared their hostility to the diocese and the diocesan bishop and will not rescind that even when the bishop has stepped back from the plate, the question is: 'Why would we fund that?'
"The decision was made months ago and the bishop withheld his decision while he waited for the parish to respond favourably. They didn't correspond with him. It has nothing to do with Christmas. We have been waiting for their response for some time."
This is the Gospel of Inclusion.
Glory to thee, He-She-It Who Giveth and Taketh Away.
[More examples of the Episcopal (and Anglican) Gospel of Inclusion can be found here.]
This is the season of Incarnation. And, aside from Anna's pregnancy and Sofie's birth, this bedrock dogma of the Christian faith has not been felt quite so keenly as during this holiday travel.
First of all, let it be said, Sofie is a major-general trooper. The last two or three days have been a bit rough as the accumulated travel and new surroundings have taken a bit of a toll. But the great blessing is that though her days have been messed up, she's maintained her normal nighttime sleep patterns. She is an amazing four-and-a-half-month-old daughter. God blessed us last year with news of her little advent. And he has blessed us again this year as we celebrate with kisses, hugs and laughter, what we could only anticipate last year.
It's been great to be back in our native lands. Driving through the rolling plains of northcentral Oklahoma and southcentral Kansas is not, like some travel snobs like to put it, boring. I can't tell you how my soul breathes in these wide-open spaces. I'm not crowded and hemmed in by ugly cement and steel boxes that block out the sunrise and sunset. The twenty-four-by-seven city lights don't veil the night sky here, so the stars are ever available for awe and contemplation. I saw Orion for the first time since I can remember.
And I'm quickly assimilating my native "accent" (such as it is). I have one of those voices that unconsciously picks up on the intonations and inflections of my surroundings. My "i's" are now "ah's" and my "ohr's" are "errr's". I both love it and hate it. But it won't take me long to "lose" it again when I return to Chicago and start teaching.
All of this just simply reminds me that patrimony is not a bad thing. One's homeland is more than just a marker of birth and years of living. I am, in ways I'll probably never fully understand, as much this Kansas soil as I am anything. Though I grew up a "city kid" (Augusta, Kansas, population 7000), my late paternal grandfather (Clifton Fitzroy Healy) was a farmer all his life. My holidays and summers were marked by wandering his acreage, setting fenceposts, and watching dad brand cattle and, from the vantage point of the front seat of a pickup, drill winter wheat while the November wind blew and whistled underneath a grey sky.
Though I prefer monastery retreats, this journey through the heartland has been something of a retreat for me. The oil fields near Tulsa, then the sprawling ranchland further north, the small farming communites along K-15 in southcentral Kansas, this is an openness not just of geography but of character. There are bastards and rascals galore here, of course, but for the most part people are honest, hospitable, accepting.
If creation reveals the strong character traits of God, then my native state says that God loves you and welcomes you wherever you are. There's hard discipline here. God loves us but doesn't bless our every whim. I noticed on the drive here that many wheat fields have been replaced by, of all things, cotton. You plant and harvest what you can sell, not necessarily what you've planted and harvested all your life. There's a lot of work to do: when others are enjoying Thanksgiving dinner, you may be out drilling into the cold brown earth what will keep the lights on and the house warm. But God is as open as a Kansas sky, and as full of blessing as a winter wheat harvest.
I thank God I'm from here. And that I'm here today. Say what you will about Kansas--and I've heard all the jokes and slights--this is place full of the revelation of God. I'm glad he's given me the eyes, after thirty-odd years, to see it.
Christian Foundations for Faithful Thinking: Truth is Personal
If knowing is communion, then the other side of that is Truth is Personal. But this is not such a leap, after all, Jesus calls himself the Truth. St. Paul says of Christ, that "in Him are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge." Truth is absolute, because Truth is a Person: namely, Christ; or more broadly, the Holy Trinity.
But we are not used to this understanding. Ours is an inheritance from the Enlightenment, and for us, truth is exclusively propositional, intellectual. But this conception has led to the Cartesian problem of the split between mind and body. This semi-Gnosticism has made its way into modern Christianity as well. On the one hand there are the mainline liberal churches which boil Christianity down to a few main propositions--keeping them as vague and general as possible for the sake of ecumenism--which have no real connection to morals and ethics, aside from some nice slogans. For example, the Episcopal Church officially has no doctrine on sexuality. The concept of love for one another gets bandied about, but when it comes to what one does with one's body, it doesn't matter. On the other hand, in the more conservative evangelical world, there are, indeed, moral truths, but once again, these things are relegated to intellectual propositions and moral codes, for the most part.
But if Truth is Personal, then it is also Incarnational. If Jesus is the Truth in his Person, this has to mean that Truth is embodied. So in faithful Christian thinking there is no mind-body dualism. There are intellectual truths, to be sure, just as there are truths about one's person and body. But these are not split, but are joined together in perfect union. So when Paul exhorts us to offer our bodies as living sacrifices, he calls this our "reasonable worship."
Precisely because of this embodied nature of Truth, as Christians understand it, the Truth is freedom. And we shall know the Truth and the Truth shall set us free; for freedom Christ has set us free. This is not always the case when insistence is made the Truth is essentially propositional. The difficulties here is that reason's rules often bind in logical necessity that do not allow for embodiment. Indeed, this is the trap of the Law from which we have been sprung. One can reason oneself into extreme ethical dilemmas, which a fuller Christian perspective on Truth would resolve.
Take for example, the arguments for pacificism. They are extremely persuasive on rational grounds, because they subscribe to principle which necessitate certain conclusions. But they also fail to embody themselves in concrete situations. From a few simple premises, for example (one should not kill or resist violence; God is completely sovereign; one cannot know the future), it is possible to argue that one should not kill or attack a murdering rapist who has a knife to the throat of your infant daughter and is about to rape your wife. The answer that one's bonds of love to family demands protecting their physical, emotional and spiritual welfare is often dismissed as viewing the situation emotionally and not from rational principles. But the fact of the matter is, viewing it with reason and emotion, with the concomitant considerations for potential bodily harm, is a more embodied way of understanding the situation, and is closer to the Truth that came down and was born of a Virgin.
This principle of embodied Truth, is, of course, founded on the primary demonstration of God's love for us in the Incarnation. God did not communicate to his human creations by mere propositions, as he is pictured having done in Islam. Rather, God communicated in a Person, revealing his Truth not just with intellectual knowledge, but with the knowledge of touch, taste, smell, hearing and sight, with the knowledge of personal communion.
Thus if a Christian is going to think faithfully about matters of Gospel and matters of knowledge and insight, he is going to do so not from mere rational propositions, but from the whole of his being. Because it is only from the whole of his being that he can love. And it is only through love that we can know anything at all.
[Next:Christian Foundations for Faithful Thinking: Knowledge is Love]
I had just started into the litany of intercessions for morning prayers (along about "Be mindful, O Lord, of all civil authorities . . ."), when I heard Sofie cry out and Anna sleepily mumbled for me to come and get her. So, I headed back to the bedroom, continuing the prayers (". . . that in their tranquility we may lead calm and peaceful lives in all godliness and sanctity"), and grabbed Sofie up out of the co-sleeper, and said, "Let's go finish our morning prayers."
Holding my daughter in my arms, I continued the Church's prayers, praying for family members and friends, travellers, the captives and the needy poor, for myself, and for the dead. Between the litany of intercessions and the concluding prayers, I interject several intercessory prayers both formal and extemporaneous, and troparia and kontakia for several saints, including my patrons.
In my prayers, I call upon the Mother of God to intercede for my wife and daughter. As I invoked the intercessions of the Theotokos this morning, I held in my arms the very daughter for whom I prayed.
And that got me to thinking again about something that's been on my mind for some time. You see, this isn't a reflection on fatherhood, per se, nor a resume of my prayer practices.
Rather, I want to reflect on the vocation of motherhood.
The vocation of motherhood is tranformative. Just a few years ago, my wife had several career goals she wanted to meet: children's librarian, member of the Newbery Award committe, published author, etc. And in three short years she has met these goals. She also wanted to be a mother, and in the past three years, we have had moments of greater and lesser longing for children. But motherhood was something more distant, after we both finished school.
God had other plans. From one perspective, Sofie was unplanned. On the other hand, I'd been praying certain prayers for which Sofie was the answer. So Sofie's presence with us now had been ordained.
And that mix of half-felt longing and "accident" unleashed a new vocation. Anna is now a mother. And seeing the transformation it has made is something to behold.
I have been a front row witness to the holiness of the vocation of motherhood. Motherhood is not a sacrament, per se, nor a Eucharistic ministry. But it is not the less sacred for all that. Indeed, at this time of year, I am reminded that the most holy of women undertook this most holy of vocations; the Mother of God gave birth to our Savior and raised Him in the faith of God's people.
One of the great failures of the modern feminist movement is this severing of women from their holiest and most transformative of callings. Seeing my wife and daughter, I have to seriously ask, why would any woman so disparage this greatest of holy gifts to run around trying to be like us men? And for those who do not disparage the gift yet who still sever the woman from her vocation, my question is, how can what we men do and accomplish in this fallen world ever compare to this miracle of life-bearing?
Yes, I am well aware, at least so much as a man can be, that there is no wealth of human glory given to motherhood. And though we are newly-minted parents, I can better understand each day the toil and potential heartache of motherhood. That it is its own reward on some days must surely not seem enough.
But it seems to me that this is to fail to see the vocation of motherhood through the eyes and in the full-treasured heart of the Blessed Virgin. That Mary's motherhood is unique and not-to-be-repeated does not make it any less a touchstone for our more ordinary birthing and living and dying. Indeed, because of its uniqueness, it is all the more relevant to our daily struggles.
I am in awe of my wife and her vocation, this holiest of human ministries. I pray I may be worthy to provide her the protection and support necessary for her to accomplish her salvation through life-bearing.
What an interesting juxtaposition of events today.
First, I've been reading from the book, Letters from Father Seraphim, edited by Hieromonk Ambrose (formerly Fr. Alexey Young). He makes these remarks regarding St. Seraphim's understanding of suffering and the faith:
[H]e believed that when suffering comes as a result of our own immaturity and mistakes, it has value only if we learn from that suffering. To embrace the sorrows and difficulties that result from our own fallen human nature, or those which are sent to us from "outside" by persecution and misunuderstanding, must not entail self-pity, but should soften our hearts hardened by sin and refine our spiritual nature, making us depend more and more on God alone. One must accept these sufferings without complaining or they have no spiritual value. Often Fr. Seraphim spoke of the need to "suffer through" some particular problem or difficulty. By this he meant that one should endure, again without complaining--which is one of the best tools for spiritual growth. (p. 163)
And about a person who had come to the monastery for guidance, Fr. Seraphim writes to Hieromonk Ambrose:
He accepted everything I said, including the necessity to put off his habit of self-justification . . . .
My general impression is this: his habit of self-pampering and self-justification is so deep that humanly his case is almost hopeless. But there is God. We should continue to help and support him--and firmly insist that he change, persistently working on himself. . . .
I think this whole thing is given you by God to give you insight into how deep is sin in man, and how stubborn is human self-will and resistance to amendment of life, even in sincere converts. (p. 194)
Then, because I have no permission to share details I will have to be vague, in a series of email exchanges on a particular group to which I subscribe, I found myself in the position of responding to allegations as to my honesty and integrity. Admittedly, I now see how diametrically opposed are some of my theological beliefs with those of most of the ones in the group. But I little suspected that I would be made to look like some cyber troll or agent provocateur. I'm used to defending my beliefs. I'm not so used to having my motives impugned and maligned. How does one respond to allegations that one has bad motives? I did it the only way I could, by highlighting how my actions demonstrated my integrity.
I doubt it swayed those who were suspicious to begin with.
But all this got me to thinking. Dare I take on the Lenten discipline of not justifying myself in anyway for anything for 40 days during Great Lent? (Gulp.)
[Eugene, the future Father Seraphim, briefly commented later in life on his attending his first Orthodox worship service: ] ". . . [W]hen I entered an Orthodox church for the first time (a Russian church in San Francisco) something happened to me that I had not experienced in any Buddhist or other Eastern temple; something in my heart said that this was 'home,' that all my search was over. I didn't really know what this meant, because the service was quite strange to me, and in a foreign language. I began to attend Orthodox services more frequently, gradually learning its language and customs." . . .
After his first experience of an Orthodox service, Eugene attended services in a number of Orthodox churches. Above all he was attracted to the Russian tradition. In San Francisco, three overlapping "jurisdictions" of the Russian Orthodox Church were represented: the Russian Church Abroad, the American Metropolia [N. B.: Later to become the Orthodox Church of America (OCA)], and the Moscow Patriarchate. Eugene went to services in the church of all three.
In 1957 Eugene was profoundly moved while attend the Holy Week and Pascha (Easter) services in the various Russian churches in San Francisco, espeically in the Holy Trinity Cathedral of the American Metropolia. At that time the Metropolia's ruling hierarch in San Francisco was Bishop John Shahovsky. A highly regarded and influential church figure, Bishop John had grown up as a prince in pre-Revolutionary Russia. He was tonsured a monk on Mount Athos, Greece, in 1926, and served as the dean of St. Vladimir's Seminary in New York before being appointed Bishop of San Francisco and Western American in 1950. . . .
Eugene's experience in the Russian Cathedrals--both of Archbishop Tikhon and Bishop John--did not bring about an immediate change in him. A seed had been planted, one that would grow inside of him and later transform him into a new being. Almost three years would pass between his first entrance into an Orthodox Cathedral and the time when he would come to know Him Who was depicted in the Cathedral's icon.
--Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works, pp. 83-84, 86
Today's Gospel of Inclusion comes from Bishop Clark Grew of the Diocese of Ohio.
Praise to you, guarantor of our judgment.
I think the tension I feel is, and I don't want to devalue the authenticity of scripture claim that people make that this is a matter of scriptural authority, but I think, deep within that posture is a deep-seeded homophobia and an inability for people to see gay and lesbian people as children of God. But I think it's an issue that comes down to how we feel about our own sexuality and how we feel about our relationship with other people and there's a level of acceptance and comfort that people just can't get to yet.
You who are considering leaving the Episcopal Church, you need to know what the repercussions are. You may be putting yourself in jeopardy, and for people who say, I don't want to be a part of the Episcopal Church anymore, if you're a clergy person, you know you have to renounce your orders and you're deposed as a member of the clergy. It's not punitive, you just can't have it both ways. You're either in the church or out of the church. If you leave the church then you've left the church and then there are canonical consequences to that.
People who want to leave the diocese can leave the diocese but they don't leave with their building and they don't leave with their assets so…the endowments and the church building itself stays within the diocese.
This is the Gospel of Inclusion.
Glory to thee, who makes us not like that Pharisee over there.
[More examples of the Episcopal Gospel of Inclusion can be found here.]
At Jon's recommendation, Eugene [N.B.: the future Father Seraphim] went first to the Cathedral of the Russion Orthodox Church Abroad in the heart of San Francisco, dedicated to the icon of the Mother of God "Joy of All Who Sorrow." Having formerly been an Episcopal church, the Cathedral had tall stained glass windows in front and along the walls. Its vaulted ceiling had been made from boards taken from old sailing vessels; and indeed, standing beneath its arches one felt as if one were inside some great ark.
Eugene arrived at the Cathedral in time for the Vespers service. Red oil lamps flickered before a gold iconostasis, illumining holy images of Christ and His Mother. From the left side of the Cathedral and from the choir loft came beautiful antiphonal singing in a language foreign to Eugene's ear. On a small platform in the middle of the nave stood a crippled, bent-over old man with a white beard and purple vestments. This was Archbishop Tikohn Troitsky. Totally immersed in the service, he kept his eyes closed in a state of utmost attention. Whenever he would open them, they would be stern and command complete alertness from those who served with him.
The small figure of Archbishop Tikhon made a tremendous impression on Eugene. Perhaps Eugene saw even then that he was not just performing according to a carefully choreographed ritual, but was in a state of deep prayer. What Eugene did not know then was that Archbishop Tikhon had been a man of prayer all his life, having received his spiritual training from the God-illumined Elder Gabriel of Kazan and Pskov in Russia. In his small quarters attached to the Cathedral, Archbishop Tikhon spent more time in prayer than anything else, and would keep vigil whole nights through.
In the Cathedral, the intensity of all that was happening around him touched the soul of Eugene--this seemingly incidental visitor. He witnessed the beauty of the traditional art and music, but, even more, he sensed the fulfillment of his longing to leave this world--since what he beheld was otherwordly.--Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works, pp. 81, 82
I happened across a wonderful audio link at OC.net. It's from the Minnesota Public Radio website "Speaking of Faith." The audio is of an interview Jaroslav Pelikan gave to MPR on the creeds. In the interview Pelikan does touch briefly (if vaguely) on his conversion at the end of the interview, and how Tradition and creeds related to that conversion. His summation of his conversion: "I sort of discovered that I'd been speaking 'Orthodox' all my life. And so I didn't convert. To convert is to change. And I didn't change. I simply discovered the continuity that had been there all along." All in all, he gives the most wonderful defense of the creeds.
The 53-minute audio link is here. (Requires free RealPlayer, which can be downloaded here.)
I love the Pelikan quip: "The only alternative to Tradition is bad tradition." (!!!)
And this one: "I'm aware of it [the modern discomfort with creeds]. I don't share it."
And this one, too: "The interesting thing though is the world is much more pluralistic than it is relativistic. And those are often equated in the secular west."
Oh, and this one: "If we're going to have wait for one billion Muslims to become relativistic, if that's the way we're going to get religious understanding, we're going to have to fasten our safety belts."
Wait a minute, there's this one: "It is not enough to Christianize Africa, we have to Africanize Christianity."
And how could I not love this one: "There was a Norwegian who loved his wife so much he almost told her."
Really, you've got to check this out. You'll love the Massai Creed.
Christian Foundations for Faithful Thinking: Hypostatic Koinonia
If the Trinity is the fundamental reality of all of life, then one particularly significant aspect of that reality is what I am calling hypostatic koinonia. Or, in other words, personal communion.
The relationship between the three members of the Godhead is sometimes referred to as perichoresis, or coinherence (sometimes, "interpenetration"). Perichoresis refers to (in theological distinctions) the Trinity in its essence, in terms of mutual dependence, interrelation, and partnership. Each Person of the Godhead is distinct, yet each is ineffably united to the other, which union is characterized by love.
I have coined the (so far as I know) neologism, hypostatic koinonia as a referrence to perichoresis, but also wanting to avoid an unwarranted direct extrapolation from the holy Godhead to fallen humanity. In Church thought, fallen humanity retains the image of God, though it is only through the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit through the Son in the Body of Christ that we are recreated and restored to his likeness. Thus to refer to the human experience of the perichoretic reality of the Trinity as also perichoresis would be a confusion.
Another reason to insist on the phrase hypostatic koinonia instead of just the rightly well-worn koinonia is because koinonia has been misused to refer to a fellowship around activist ideas, or ideological creeds. This is absolutely not what the New Testament means. Thus I have added the term hypostatic, which is from the Greek and indicative of the person. But here, in Christian terms, hypostasis carries connotations that relate not only to the Godhead, but to Christology and ecclesiology as well.
In Trinitarian discourse, the hypostases of the Godhead are the specific Persons of the Trinity: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. In Christological terms, hypostasis refers to the union, in one Person, of the divine and human natures of Christ. It is precisely this union that makes salvation possible for humankind. If Christ were not wholly divine and human we would still be lost in sin. Christ is, quite literally, the bridge between sinful humanity redeemed in Christ and the holy and righteous Father. But more to the point, this bridging that takes place in Christ, does so only in the Church which bears his humanity with him.
So, the perichoretic reality of the Trinity fuels the hypostatic koinonia which grounds all of human existence. To be human means to be in personal communion, in ways analagous to and made possible by the gracious energies of God.
If Metropolitan JOHN Zizioulas speaks of being as communion, then, in terms of faithful Christian thinking, knowing is communion. There can be no separation between the intellectual and the personal. Indeed, the phraseology of knowing in biblical terms is precisely just this sort of intimate personal knowing. The knower cannot be separated from the thing in which he is in a relationship of knowing. To be sure, there is a distinction between knower and known. Hypostatic koinonia absolutely requires personal distinction. This is not philosophical monism. But the relationship established in the act of knowing makes all knowing personal at the same time it makes it revelatory.
Hypostatic koinonia collapses the Enlightenment bogey of objective/subjective dichotomy. There is not some distanced, detached knower looking on the object of knowing, uninfluenced by and not influencing the thing known. Nor is Truth lost in the monistic maze of subjective experience. Rather, Truth is both objective and subjective. Kierkegaard was more right than Descartes and Kant, but he was still mistaken. Or, to speak yet more correctly, Truth is personal, with the distinctions of subjective and objective meaningless in light of the ultimate reality that is both subjective and objective without confusion or intermingling, separation or division.
Truth is personal communion, because humans are utterly contingent upon the mercies and gifts of God. We have no autonomy to claim, no point at which we can stand in pure objectivity. We are dependent on God, which makes all our reality personal, all our knowing a form of communion.
We do not just know facts, we relate to them and they to us. Facts do not merely convey information, they convey meaning. The fact that it is 8:00pm on Sunday does not merely convey the fact of the time marker at a given point. It means that I will be helping my wife put our daughter to sleep. The fact has a different meaning for someone else. There are no independent, objective facts. There are only innumerable meanings.
But that these facts have innumerable meanings does not mean that Truth or knowing is merely arbitrary or utterly relative. Remember, the fundamental reality which grounds human knowing is the Trinity. In the Trinity all these contingent facts and events are known fully and completely. Human knowing is indeed fragmentary because humans are fallen. But insofar as we are ever more deified, which is to say, ever more like the God with whom we have to do, the more we grasp the meaning of the facts and events which make up our individual realities.
This is why the Godbearing Fathers and Elders of the Church are so rightly revered for their wisdom. Their clairvoyant knowledge (in those Fathers and Elders who manifest this gift) of those who come to them for counsel, is a result of their increasing deification. In taking on more and more of the nature of God through his energies, they come to see the facts and events of their world through the eyes of God. It is in this way that Peter could see the hearts of Ananias and Saphira, and know the lie they had promulgated. It is in this way that the God-man Jesus could both see and know Nathaniel from a distance, and could read the thoughts of the Jewish leaders opposing him. The more deeply we commune with the Trinity, the more wise we become.
Not only, then, is knowing communion, but precisely because this is so, we know that Truth is Personal.
[Next:i>Christian Foundations for Faithful Thinking: Truth is Personal]
Conclusion: What Remains; or, Why I Haven't Yet Been Chrismated (Part IX of IX)
[Note: The entire series can be found here, with the first entry at the bottom, and this last entry at the top.]
I have tried to describe, as summarily as possible, those aspects of Orthodoxy which have drawn me to seek the Orthodox Church. Being the sort of person that I am, the original force of my inquiry was largely historical and doctrinal. (I have described this aspect of the journey elsewhere.) But once I'd been intellectually satisfied--and for me, an important quest must have intellectual validity--it soon became clear that the journey had only just begun. For it is now incumbent upon me to turn that intellectual gain to lived experience.
This aspect of my journey became more clear to me during the Nativity Fast last year (precipitated by news of Anna's pregnancy with Sofie), but really came to the fore during Great Lent of this year. Heeding the counsel of my priest, I attempted to keep the fast of the first week of Lent, and I read daily from Unseen Warfare. In the combination of success and failure of my struggle with the askesis of the start of Lenten fasting, and with that my contemplation of the texts of Unseen Warfare, I made the slow beginnings of the transition from mere thinking about the life of Faith, to more thoughtful living of the Faith.
Back in July 2000, when I first began to seriously inquire about Orthodoxy, I had been attracted to the idea of the Orthodox Church. But I was still too plugged into my own preferrences. By this same time last year I knew Orthodoxy to be what it claimed. And in the ensuring year I have in small ways experienced the most scintillant of glimpses into the reality of that Truth.
However, before I can be fully illumined, I have had to put my own house in order.
My spiritual pilgrimage from my heritage churches to the Episcopal Church was not handled very well in terms of my relationship with my wife. I was chasing the "big idea" I saw with regard to historical connectedness to the Church, and the power of the sacraments and liturgical worship. My wife wanted me to put on the brakes. I refused, albeit as politely as I could. And in that refusal I incurred a huge deficit in terms of my spiritual headship in the home. After a few years, Anna was more willing to allow me my continued journey in the Episcopal Church, so much so that she acquiesced to my attending seminary. Throughout it all, however, she steadfastly refused to become a member of the Episcopal Church. Then, with our experience at an Episcopal seminary, her willingness to allow me my opportunity to journey the Anglican way was more severely tested than either of us could ever have imagined. That she did not abandon our marriage--though seminary put the most desparate of strains on our relationship--is a testimony to her love and faithfulness. Since it was during all this that I began to turn from Anglicanism as a dead end in my search to the Orthodox Church as something of a last gasp, it is little wonder that Anna was sceptical about it. I had forfeited her trust in my spiritual leadership when I failed to give serious considerations to her objections to the Episcopal Church. That legitimacy of that forfeiture, for her, was hammered home again and again as we confronted each and every problem the Episcopal Church presented.
So, in July 2002, after two years of inquiry into Orthodoxy, and some six months after having left the Episcopal Church, it was hardly any surprise that Anna's reaction to my seriousness about the Orthodox Chuch was warmly opposed. In the ensuing year and a half, it has been my task to rebuild the trust in my headship of the home, and, more specifically, in matters spiritual.
While on retreat at an Episcopal Benedictine monastery in October last fall, I began to pray quite specifically about the common journey of our household into the Orthodox Church (my prayers had been much more generic to that point), as well as to take on a new devotion to the Mother of God. It was during that autumn weekend that I first prayed the Akathist to the Theotokos, and sought her intercessions specifically for my wife. About a month and a half later we discovered that Anna was pregnant.
It was then that I was more fully aware than I'd ever been before, that the sort of changes I needed to make in myself involved much more than making sure my family and I prayed at mealtimes, read Scripture together and went to church. I'm still a long ways from being the husband I need to be, but Sofie's advent, by God's grace and the intercessions of the Mother of God, has helped me to be the sort of husband Anna needs.
And it is just here that I have come to see how pervasively the Orthodox Faith transforms all of our existence. It's not just about ideas. It's not merely about political activism. It's not about mere good deeds. It's a change of heart, soul, mind and body. Even during sleep, the Orthodox pray for protection from impure thoughts and from the wiles of the Enemy. It is an absolute life change.
I think once Anna began to see the ever so slight changes in me, she began to consider that the search I was on with regard to the Orthodox Church was much more legitimate than she might previously have thought. Then, too, she was encountering the frustration of her own expectations about the Church being continually disappointed by the churches here with which we've had contact. She acquiesced on Mother's Day to go with me to All Saints. As it happened, the sermon was on the Orthodox view of women. That could not but win over my wife, since Orthodoxy avoids the denigration of women in some fundamentalist sects, and the heresy of personhood in some of the liberal sects. She returned again on my birthday. And each time the love and attention of the parishioners broke through. Here, she saw, were those who really lived what they believed.
We are now at the point that All Saints is our common place of worship. This is a most major step. We have not had a common church home since our move to Chicago (since Anna refused to take part in what she saw going on in the Episcopal churches here). That was nearly four years ago.
Is Anna on her own journey to Orthodoxy? I cannot tell. Nor is it a matter of urgency at the moment. We have made significant steps in the last four months. These things have only happened through patience and persistent prayer.
I am more hopeful than ever, however, that by God's grace and our personal repentance and transformation, we will eventually find ourselves chrismated in the Orthodox Church. We will have finally found the home we have sought each in our own way, and our daughter will be the first cradle Orthodox in either of our families.
But there is much to do between now and then. Much patience and love to exercise. Much prayer to undertake.
Still and all, our God is good and loves mankind. That we have come this far is a testimony to his particular care and attention. On this day the Lord has acted, let us rejoice and give thanks.
Today's Gospel of Inclusion comes from the diocese of Los Angeles.
Praise to thee, semi-inclusive one.
In a ringing defense of an openly gay bishop and same-sex unions, Los Angeles Episcopal Bishop J. Jon Bruno declared here Saturday that the Episcopal Church is "a roomy house" for all, and warned that those who leave would be leaving "the presence of God." . . .
"If we withdraw our participation in the community, then we withdraw from the presence of God," Bruno told a thousand clergy and lay delegates. "It is the community that joins us together in common worship."
This is the Gospel of Inclusion.
Glory to thee, purveyor of political power.
[More examples of the Episcopal Gospel of Inclusion can be found here.]
Okay, no kidding: this one creeped me out.
I had two dreams this morning, some time between Sofie's three o'clock feeding and her six o'clock feeding. I'm not sure how or if they were related. One involved one of the seminaries I went to. The other one was really weird: It was a dream about Lucifer.
In the first dream, I was in a large kitchen with several of my former seminary classmates, the dean, and one of the professors I had really admired. Some sort of conversation had ensued about Scripture and theology, when the dean opined, "It's all just metaphor." There were silent nods all around. I replied, "It can't be just metaphor. There is a reality behind it, otherwise it's not a metaphor."
Everyone must have thought this terribly rude of me, for no one would meet my gaze. Even the professor suddenly retrieved his hat and said he had to go.
Then, for some strange reason, we all adjourned to a lounge on the seminary campus where I was to defend my stance. I sat in a wingbacked chair while a couple dozen students gathered around. I began to weep, but tried to hold it back. I said a silent prayer, and someone asked a question.
I don't remember anything else about the first dream.
Then, in my second dream I was on my hands and knees trying to rearrange an icon stand I'd somehow knocked over. I didn't recognize the stand and the icons were new, and, over my shoulder, asked Anna about it. She said she'd gotten it not too many days before.
Then, I saw a pair of boots walking behind the stand, and I looked up. It was an ordinary man I didn't recognize. There was a conversation of sorts that I don't remember. What I next remember about the dream is that I sensed some sort of threat, to which I kept replying, "The Lord Jesus Christ reigns." The man sneered, but calmed down. Then he appeared to listen intently.
In my dream I sensed that this was Satan, so I began to tell him the Gospel. "If you accept the Gospel, you can became what you are not. If you refuse it, you will cease to be what you are. Through the Gospel you will gain all that which you only think you have."
There was an ensuing part that I do not remember, then at the end, I was asking Anna if she thought Satan had accepted the Gospel. She said she didn't know. We were standing in the lobby of a club, it looked like, and I happend to look up at an ordinary man dressed in black. With him he had a date I couldn't see very clearly. But when the man turned to look at me, he had a mask covering his eyes. So though I suspected it was Satan and that he had rejected the Gospel, I wasn't sure.
I don't often have dreams bubble up from my subconscious. And now I know why I prefer it that way.
Christian Foundations for Faithful Thinking: The Trinity
It seems to me that the fundamental starting point for all Christian thinking is the Trinity. There can be no compromise here. For if a Christian were ever to fail to affirm (or even deny) the fact of the Trinity, he could not proceed forward in any surety of the Truth. For the Christian, knowledge is not merely about the end, but is inescapably about the beginning. Or if it is about the end, this end determines the beginning. So if a Christian is to think faithfully, he cannot do so as a monotheist. This is not to say that the Christian understanding of the Trinity denies or invalidates the monotheism, for after all, Christians do claim to worship one God, and the Trinity is one God. But monotheism per se is not Trinitarian. And if anything a Christian is by definition one who believes in the Trinity. Jews and Muslims cannot affirm Christian Trinitarianism (which would entail confession of the divinity-humanity of Jesus). And since a Christian cannot deny the Trinity, he cannot affirm the monotheism of Judaism or Islam, precisely because these two faiths must deny the Trinity.*
So, if a Christian hopes to think faithfully, he must start with the Trinity.
By the Trinity, of course, I do not merely mean the doctrine of the Trinity. I certainly mean at least that. But more essentially I mean the Trinity, the Three-Personed God. If one is a Christian, one cannot but be so because of the reality of the Personal Trinity. This is the fundamental Christian conviction about reality. The God who revealed himself as Father has eternally begotten the Son, who makes the Father known to us, and eternally causes the Holy Spirit to proceed, who seals and unites us to the Father in the Son. The Trinity cannot be discovered by reason. The Trinity can only be known and loved as God has made himself known. The Trinity is not a matter of intellectual inquiry but of Personal enounter.
The ramifications of this are not insignificant. First and foremost, it means that the quest for Truth is no autonomous. It absolutely depends on the self-revelation of God, and depends on fellowship with that God. Apart from such revelation and participation, there is no means by which humans can in any way be assured of any knowledge concerning reality. "In him," Paul writes, "are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge." Truth depends not only on the existence of God, but also on God's revealing of himself to us in the Son. Truth cannot be divorced from God's self-revelation. The Enlightenment project is stillborn.
It should be noted, however, that this self-revelation is not readily available to any and all through creation, and therefore, the Trinity is Truth that is unavailable to the unaided human mind. God's creation is revelatory of its Creator. But creation does not, in its fallen bondage, sufficiently reveal the Trinity. Rather, the full revelation of God is only in Jesus Christ. Thus those who deny the full Truth of Christ, cannot but begin wrong and conceivably can only end wrong and fail to know the Truth. Like the prisoners in Plato's Cave, they know only the dancing shadows, and cannot experience the light of Truth.
But more to the point, the fact of the Trinity implies one all-encompassing reality: hypostatic koinonia. Or, more loosely, personal communion or communal personhood.
*Which is why I cannot but affirm that monotheists (Jews, Christians and Muslims) do not all worship the same God. The only other alternative is to assume that one or more of these positions is false, albeit innocently so. But this necessarily implies that Jews and Muslims worship a Trinitarian God, though ignorant of his Triune nature. However, this patronizes Jews and Muslims by failing to take their emphatic affirmations of the radical monotheism of God seriously. We either assume that people do not mean what they say when they affirm a belief about God--but we really know better for them--or we affirm that they really do mean what they say, and these beliefs are radically incommensurable.
[Next: Christian Foundations for Faithful Thinking: Hypostatic Koinonia]
7. Unity of Home and Family in the Faith (Part VIII of IX)
When I first began this series of reflections on why I was attracted to Orthodoxy, I did not intentionally leave this topic for last. It was an accident that I ordered the topics in the way that I did. Yet this topic is, in many ways, the one closest to my heart. And as it so happens, there have been in the last few weeks events that have made this among the most exciting of any of these topics. (I'll reflect on some of those in the next--and last--reflection.)
In his Ephesians homilies, St John Chrysostom calls the home "a little church." This had had an immense impact on my life and thought.
Apart from the Orthodox Church, it was my heritage churches that provided me with the concept of the Christian home. We were taught that theology and practice of such texts as Ephesians 5.21ff, Proverbs 31, and 1 Peter 3.1ff. Prayer was to be central to the Christian home. A Christian home was one in which all the members participated in the worship and teaching of the church, in mission and evangelistic work, and sought to live a life of Christian character.
But what was lacking was, in a real sense, familial union. Indeed, rejecting infant baptism, there was the odd setting in which one or more of the children might not have been in real union with the family by way of the Gospel. In fact, lacking any real sacramental theology, the struggle of faith in my churches' understanding, was moral exertion as radically individual. My family might acept the same doctrines theoretically, and go to the same fellowship, but the sort of Christian union which bound us was more intellectual than it was ontological.
I came into the Episcopal Church as an adult. In the Episcopal Church I could discern no overt teaching on the Christian home. Although the Episcopal Church lays claim to sacramental theology, any moral exertion was either almost exclusively through political activist causes or through the lense of individual piety. So while a family might conceivably find an important and real union at the altar rail, there was no other teaching or example in my experience of what the Christian home was to be except that of individuals promoting causes or engaging in pious practices alone. (Indeed, in my own limited experience, most of the teaching in the Episcopal Church on the Christian home were efforts at explaining why it is the case that husbands are not the head of the Christian household in the traditional sense.)
In Orthodoxy, my expeirence has been strikingly different to my past. Even more so than was the case in my heritage churches, the Orthodox affirm the Christian husband as the head of the household, whose ministry is sacrificial love and faithful leadership. Although a husband who is a layman may not, for example, pronounce absolution of his family's sins, in a very real way, his leadership is a priesthood. One of the roles of the Christian husband and father is to bless. And so every night I pray over Sofie and anoint her with holy water. The Christian husband and father leads the family in the faith. And so by example primarily, though also by teaching, I have affirmed the doctrines of the Church (as well as the truth of the claims of the Orthodox Church), not the least of which is the role of public worship. The family, in the Orthodox Church, is united by Baptism and Chrismation and by their common communion in the Body and Blood of Christ.
The Orthodox Church is like my heritage churches in that it affirms the husband as head of the home and his role in teaching the faith, prayer and example of life, and leading in worship. But Orthodoxy differs in that it provides a real ontological union in Christ in a way that surpasses that of my more intellectualized and individualized heritage churches.
The Orthodox Church is like the Episcopal Church in that there is the assertion of union of the home in the sacraments. But it differs in that it undermines this unity it its silence on, if not outright denial of, the New Testament teaching on the roles of the husband and father in the Christian home.
Or to say it another way, the positive aspects of the teaching on the home found in my heritage churches and in the Episcopal Church are similarly affirmed and surpassed in Orthodoxy. And those deficiencies that exist in these churches are filled up with the fullness of the historic Faith.
In Orthdoxy, the Church does not cease to be at the threshold of the Christian home. Rather it takes up the home and fulfills its true essence in the ordering of the ome under the headship of Christ and the union of each and all family members in his Body and Blood.
[Please note: Speaking as I must about my previous and present church experiences in light of my attraction to Orthodoxy, I must necessarily and frequently take up a critical stance to many aspects of these experiences. But I have also tried to offer honest and heartfelt positive appraisals where I can.]
Next: Conclusion: What Remains; or, Why I Haven't Yet Been Chrismated