Orthodoxy in America

A number of pieces on the future of American Orthodoxy have appeared lately from Fr. Jonathan, Fr. Stephen, and from Fr. Gregory. All of these are helpful. But for me, Fr. Stephen sums it up rather nicely:

Orthodoxy faces many deep challenges in the modern world. Some of them are brought on us by both the abuses of the past century as well as the new challenges of the present century. Our ecclesiology, which is never more than love (a canon cannot produce the Church), is and will be tested to the maximum. But the world is not hungry for the Canons or for pride of place, but for the self-sacrificing love of Christ and the fullness of His emptiness on the Cross.

The way forward for Orthodoxy in America will only be through the Cross, God help us. But there is no other way forward for anyone, ever, anywhere.

Great to get there just using the ol’ GPS or the “pure brainpower” equivalent of brute force. But it is our saints rather than the “selves” with which we enter the Church that will in turn build the sort of Orthodoxy here in America that we pass along to those who follow after.. or at least that’s my two bits.

Elder Paisios and a Little Divine Justice

“For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” (Mt 5:20)

Once my ears were often filled with sermons on “Social Justice”. And though I suffer selective recall, I’m not sure I heard nearly as much about Divine Justice. So while I would agree that we should do the Orthodox thing and do both, I wanted to put in a little time on our less spoken virtues.

Divine Justice seems to offer a quiet and humble approach to “picking up our cross and following”. It’s not the work we choose, but the work in front of us. So often we see it as beneath our dignity much less our efforts. Whatever it is, it’s whatever we leave undone. Understandably, it’s boring everyday stuff, and at the same time “complicated” and obscurely difficult – otherwise we’d do it, huh? Maybe leaving for later frees us to tackle the heroic stuff, the stuff really “worthy of Christ”; the stuff amounting to our own Everest or BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal) and overwhelm us into understanding our smallness and need for Christ. Yeah.

Now don’t get the wrong idea: These things are important, worthy and all the rest. I applaud them as good and worthy in themselves and worthy of the best and most heroic of our saints. We should have nothing but admiration for these efforts and the folks that do them, and should thank God that they are done, and done by these folks.. and we should join them when and as we are able. Honest. Maybe next year. Right after “American Idol”, or “the third beer”.

Rather my point lies elsewhere: there are also smaller jobs readily at hand that all of us can tackle – even the least among us – and maybe even accomplish. And that’s where the crucible seems to lie: we really have to sweat the small stuff, too. Fact is, I’m certain the small stuff is precisely the sort of stuff we have to do in order to really manage the greater and worthier challenges, to really be ready for the BHAGs of life. And yes, this is often precisely backward from what our gurus tell us, and why it matters.

When we fail the big stuff, it’s often as John Wooten used to say, because “failure to prepare is preparing to fail”; we’ve tried to take on too much too fast, and skipped the small stuff. Of course, we lack training, and falling flat on our duff should be expected rather than a surprise.

What’s the training we need? Again – the small, everyday stuff. This is the stuff of the average mom or dad or kid as much as anyone else: getting up and going to work or school; showing up on time; listening and contributing to those around us; doing our work or homework; giving it our best; giving 100% of ourselves and not holding back; making the small sacrifices and doing these things satisfied that others may freely enjoy the fruits of our labors. It’s giving back to the field in which we’ve worked; it’s going beyond what’s asked to do what’s needed or wanted unasked or because “it’s right”. And it’s not complaining, not explaining, but being accountable and letting our work speak for itself.

This is really detailed stuff: a personal life lived in the details. And it’s paying enough attention to these details to know we’ve never done enough; to know that there really is more we could do; to admit that we can never appreciate the people around us on whom we rely as much as we should. And it’s not in resolving to change… but changing; to begin to take the time; to thank every last one every chance we get; to let them know how much we depend on them; to let them know how critically important they are; and to live like whole people and part of others instead of how and where we find ourselves. And it is so much more than this… for it’s less. As Father Paisios explains:

I always wondered how someone could become a saint, and what was the distinctive trait which made the saints receptive to God’s grace.

One day, I went to Father Paisios and asked him:

“Elder, what do saints have that makes them different from the rest of us, and thus they receive the grace of God?”

“Our saints had divine justice instead of human justice,” he replied.

“What is divine justice?” I asked him once again.

He answered by telling me some charming stories:

“Suppose, two men are sitting at the table to eat. In front of them, there is a plate with ten peaches. If one of them greedily eats seven peaches leaving three for his friend, he is being unfair to him. This is injustice.”

“Instead, if he says: ‘Well, we are two and the peaches are ten. So, each one of us is entitled to eat five peaches.’ If he eats the five peaches and leaves five for his friend, then he applies human justice; that is why, many times, we go to court to find human justice.”

“However, if he understands that his friend likes peaches very much, he can pretend that he is not very fond of them and eat only one, and then says to him: ‘Please eat the rest of the peaches, as I don’t really like them; besides, my stomach aches and I should not eat any more.’ This person has divine justice; he prefers to be unfair to himself by human standards and be rewarded for his sacrifice by God’s grace, which he will abundantly receive.”

Noted in Passing

Today’s Sunday New York Times notes that “The Very Rev. Henry Chadwick, an Anglican priest, professor, editor, translator and author whose historical voyages into early Christianity won praise for depth, insight and evenhandedness and helped shed light on modern religious problems, died Tuesday in Oxford, England. He was 87.”

I have not read his writings, nor am I familiar with his themes or anything about him… other than that as an ex-anglican I felt some sympathy with what is referred to as his most quoted line and given at the end of the obituary:

“Nothing is sadder than someone who has lost his memory, and the church which has lots its memory is in the same state of senility.”

Orthodoxy is blessed by its memory. What we seem to struggle with lies in not holding so fast to the details of the memory that we fail to allow them to breathe… and thereby warm our hearts.

Elder Paisios’s “Machine”

Inside a Church that never seems to lack for something going on, something to do, some prayer to pray or some book to read, sometimes it seems so easy to get so busy with religiosity that we get off kilter and kind of neglect the basics of what we’re supposed to get out of all this effort. Priestmonk Christodoulos’s “Elder Paisos of the Holy Mountain” gives a quick and simple reminder.

Looking at this subject from a different point of view, Elder Paisos stressed and greatly emphasized the specific charateristic of love, that is, that “love is not irritable or resentful” (1 Cor 13:4 ). He used to say that “we should never, even under the worst circumstances, allow a negative thought to penetrate our soul. The person, who, under all circumstances, is inclined to positive thoughts, will always be a winner; his life will be a constant festivity, since it is constantly based on his positive thinking. Our acts depend on and are determined by the “machine” we have inside us, and not by the “material” we digest, or the environment we live in. I will give you an example, so you can better understand what I am trying to say:

If one has a machine that produces bullets and feeds it with the highest quality material, – let’s say gold – the machine will still turn gold into bullets, golden but destructive bullets; if he feeds it with silver, then it will produce silver bullets; if he feeds it with iron, it will produce iron bullets, or if he feeds it with clay, it will produce clay bullets. In other words, no matter what material he feeds his machine, it still produces bullets. If someone converts the machine into one that produces holy chalices instead of bullets, then whatever material he feeds it, it will always produces holy chalices. If he puts in the machine clay or iron, it will manufacture clay or iron chalices respectively.

I will now tell you a story regarding a very old father from Kapsala. The old father’s “machine” was the kind that produced only positive thoughts. He only saw the good things in life and he was blind to every evil. Once, a group of people visited him and brought him a small radio as a present. The old father took it in his hands and examined it with lots of admiration. He asked where it was manufactured and the visitors told him in Japan. As he was looking at it, suddenly he was filled with joy and started kissing the radio saying:

“Glory to God!” The visitors asked him why he was glorifying God and he explained to them:

“You see, I am very pleased that the Japanese Christians put the sign of the Holy Cross on the products they manufacture.”

The old father had notice the positive and negative pole (+, -) of the batteries and thought it was the sign of the Cross. His mind produced a simplistic and positive thought for the radio the visitors bought him. Considering he was an ascetic, he could have developed negative thoughts and get angry at them for bringing him such an unsuitable present.

One might also observe that perhaps the Elder was not as simplistic as he was professed to be, but was instead willing to be seen this way that he might find pleasure in the gift, show kindness to his visitors, and maintain his inner peace and silence. Not bad.

Herd Science: “On your mark, Get set… Ummm”

Thinking and hearing and getting precisely backwards the Gospel for Pentecost got me thinking the other day about the gifts of speaking and hearing – but especially of hearing:

“My sheep hear My voice, and I know them and they follow Me.” (John 10:27)

Hearing is hard. Knowing and following even more difficult. Also in John, we read that folks following Christ for three years – almost his entire ministry! – hear “a hard teaching” and wander off. “No can do, Buckaroo.” But more than hard, it seems that in so many places it’s more like trial and error… and mostly error. But at least we have the sacrament of confession to review our experience, and form the journal of our experiment in Christian living.

One thread runs straight up the gut and lies in those confessional moments where we admit those portions of our lives as Christians that fail to conform. Gandhi’s observation that “If Christians just did what their Lord commanded, we’d all be Christians” means that we don’t; and we’re not.

Instead, we argue, or puff ourselves up with pride in our “take” on things, or our superior understanding of this or that or our church or whatever. In short, we make of our faith either a study of philosophy or literature, a field of debate, or the basis of our pride. I am guilty of all of these. And as immensely rewarding, thrilling and enlightening as this sounds (Not!), it seems something of a perversion of the Pentecost. Either we can’t hear our teachers in a mutually understood language; or we’re just so used to our busy-ness, our distractions and talking past each other that we can’t see ourselves as clearly as our kids who see our dissembling ways and wonder why anyone would bother professing to be a Christian.

Here in Orthodoxy, much is made of our culture’s side-track into faith-as-literature, faith-as-philosophy and faith-as-pride routes – all for want of recovering the lost sense of Holy Tradition. Yet pointing out how the Orthodox Church has kept these “lost” traditions doesn’t really cut much ice so long as popular notions seem to equate tradition with a suffocating imposition of “someone else’s ideas” – especially God’s. My guess is that as wildly off-base as notions of this sort are; they are neither new nor were they as narrowly held in the past as our sense of nostalgia would prefer to suppose. History teaches that “all ages are corrupt” (G.K. Chesterton).

Some scholars now suggest that as our understanding of oral cultures continues to increase, Biblical scholarship may morph less stridently and more congruent with Tradition. Fairly, the advent of the internet together with its study has revived the study of oral traditions as an analog so that there may be some merit in the suggestion. Yet I have my doubts that an avenue of this sort will prove more than a new dead-end, and a new way of continuing to avoid the obvious.

Consider that in our study of John (Gospels, Epistles, and Revelation) at St. Nicholas Cathedral (OCA) in Washington these past few weeks we’ve been blessed to hear wonderful priests and scholars illuminate the texts without fear of Holy Tradition or straying into the province of the novel and weird. “Just the facts, m’am.” For my part, many of my manifold fogged over misunderstandings and all-too-common “I was sure it said (but it doesn’t)” notions have thankfully been dispelled. But as good as this is, it isn’t really “it”, is it?

Unlocking the scriptures may begin with “borrowed” understandings of this sort, but surely this is not the primary intent. It’s a start and a good one, but only a start and at that, not even “rent to own” unless we take the next step to convert it. And it is this next step that is the only Bible translation that matters: The translation we make from the Word of God into our way of life.

Do we have the courage to do this? Without it, we’re stuck in neutral. We may even prove more flatulent than the other guy, as we rattle on about “getting it” while “…dose bums in Brooklyn”….just don’t. Borrowed understandings of scripture reach their limit quickly. Like reading how to ride a bike, or like the engineer who rails that “mathematically” the Bumble Bee can’t fly – our knowledge stands in the way of reality, and has no virtue in filling our storehouse. Stored up there unused, our accumulated intent ages, our knowledge fades into forgetfulness, and “on the night when our soul is required of us”… these stored riches offer nothing.

Thus I naturally prefer Archimandrite Zacharias’s expression (and many others before and since as well) that Orthodoxy has to be a positive science of the heart rather than “just a religion”. Our understanding has to come by better means: by daily living and ascesis. Indeed, all other means to understanding are simply… well… to borrow provocatively from one oft-demeaned scholastic’s assessment his own writings… “no better than straw”.

If we cannot be kind to our families, friends and co-workers; if we cannot be good; if we cannot love one another; if we cannot honestly admit our faults and limitations and live with them in peace; if we cannot pray for our enemies – just what is the point? Indeed.

“We can perform our own experiments. In physics for instance, we see that an able scientist first forms an hypothesis, then he or another scientist carries out experiments to verify this hypothesis, and if it is verified then it is formulated and recognized as a law that governs the relationship of physical phenomena. That is how we have obtained all the laws of physics. (The Enlargement of the Heart by Archimandrite Zacharias, p. 154)

He continues:

In our faith, all the revelation of God is given to us in a hypothetical form. Do you know why? Because God is kind, and does not want to constrict our freedom, to impose anything on us, and He says, “If you accept my teaching, you will know whence it comes” (cf John 7:16-17), that is to say, whether it is from a human being or from God; and if it is from God, it will engender newness of life. And you will notice that the commandments of the Lord, and all His words, are given as hypotheses. For example, “Be still, and know that I am God” (Ps. 46:10). If you try stillness, if you make your own experiment, then you will know. “Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted” (Matt. 5:4). If we mourn, then we shall receive the comfort of the Comforter. Although I have not prepared verses specifically on this subject, I have already mentioned one: “If you receive my teaching, you will know whence this teaching comes,” (cf John 7:17). All the revelation of God – the word of God – is given to us as a hypothesis, which we can analyze in its hypothetical form, not because it is true, but because God is kind and wants us to carry out the experiment, and prove it to ourselves, and establish it as a law of our life. That is how the commandment of God becomes a law of our life. We make our experiment, we see that it works, and therefore His word becomes absolute for us. That is why it is wrong to classify theology as a theoretical science; it is a positive science. It follows the method of positive sciences exactly, and even more so than the science of medicine. (The Enlargement of the Heart by Archimandrite Zacharias, pp. 154-155).

As the man said, “What began at Pentecost was meant to continue.”

Gotta Roll With It…

Received in yesterday’s email, this photo presents so many opportunities…. an opening to so many potential captions…

And maybe it was the heat or the lack of air; or the fact that I’m still not through any of the five million books I’m NOT concurrently reading and therefore lacking in material; or possibly the fact that my Guardian Angel got kind of miffed at my last post and a little “light” reminder that maybe his job is easier than it looks might help get me out from under the cloud; or maybe it’s just that at four bucks a gallon plus, being outta-gas doesn’t seem so unusual anymore…

So I’m posting this baby. S’posed to send me to the website of one of my “favorite” suppliers. And as they used to say in a memorable Christmas perfume commercial: “Share the fantasy…”. Right. Now, FWIW… I realize it might be disappointing to consider that this is NOT actually yours truly… but on the other hand, I am very impressed with the dog.

Updated Links

Three new links have been added to the blogroll (like you’ve been waiting, huh?):

1. Andrea Elizabeth
2. Lost in Elegant Cogitation
3. Koinonia

“Axios! They are worthy!” We lose bloggers sometimes, too! Enjoy these folks while you can. Sometimes the stream dries up, real life takes over, the thesis consumes, or a transfer of some sort intervenes. This “writing for the fun of it” ! … well… sometimes the fun… hmmm….

Note also that one of my linked blogs signed off and has been removed.  Seems to happen often enough. Sadly I already can’t find it in my bookmarks!… and I’m already so geezing I can’t remember the title either!

“Departed worthy blogs… Memory Eternal ! Whoever you were! We liked you.  We got a lot out of you… we just can’t remember your name or find you anymore.” Not your fault. Just my bad. Sic Transit Gloria Mundi !

Brings up a whole new concern or two. Yep. You got it. Those icons. Sure hope these folks were perfected… ’cause otherwise… I’m thinking… I mean I know what the real world’s like:

“Thanks for your prayer. I’m not here to hear you right now… but your prayer is very important to me. I’ll be sure to get busy with the  interceding business for you later if you’ll leave a message at the beep.”

And for those forgetful saints who got a lot on their plate:

“For quality assurance and verification, your prayer is being recorded.”

FWIW… I’m not saying this is happening to me… I’m on a different network. But if you don’t get on the right prayer plan… think what could happen!

While we’re at it with the icon thing….want to draw attention to Icon New Media Network’s podcasts on Prayer with Fr. Jonah, abbott of the monastery of St. John of Shanghai in San Francisco. There are five (count ‘em) podcasts here… so it’s a chunk of time… but what else are we loading on the iPod these days? Okay…so I’m an Orthogeek (!) but yes I download the Ancient Faith stuff, Orthodox choral CD’s and the like… but sheesh! there is some R&B there as well… I mean you gotta grunt to something else at the gym sometime! But these podcasts are quite good and helpful. Folks won the “Best Group Blog Award”… so they’re doing something right! Give it a try if you go for this kind of thing.