Towards an Orthodox Christmas in the West

Aaron at Logismoi has written some interesting and helpful suggestions on how to resist Western Consumerism and reclaim a meaningful and rich Christmas.

I do not think that I will impliment (m)any of these suggestions this year, but I am happy to have begun to think about them, and also to have some good resources to consider.

With my first child on the way (a son!), I am especially concerned with how to create a home that protects him from the insanity of our culture. In this task it seems essential to provide him with actual experiences of love and goodness so that he can recognize the imitations for what they are and resist them.

Pillars of Unbelief

I recently found this series of articles by Peter Kreeft, a philosophy professor at Boston College, on Benedict Seraphim's blog "This is Life!: Revolutions around the Cruciform Axis." I read the article on Kant, but have not yet read any of the others.

If the Apostle Paul tells us to always be ready to give an account for the hope that we have, then it is equally important to be able to give an account for the lack of hope that we find in our culture. This series of articles is one step towards that.

The Heart of God...

The whole reason I logged into my blog today was to share something that Fr. James said at our catechism class this past Monday.

He said that there is a truth about God's heart that he has found to be very important pastorially and that he shares with people who are nervous about the sacrament of confession: "God loves us more than we love ourselves, and God desires to forgive us more than we desire to be forgiven."

This is the Orthodox understanding of God. If salvation is a process, it is because it takes a long time for each of us to learn to love ourselves and others as much as God does and to grow and develop the desire to truly be forgiven.

Each of us can only say, "I do believe, help my unbelief," because our "belief" is unbelief, our "love" is not love, and our "desire to be forgiven" is a desire to justify ourselves. I pray that from these small seeds of belief, love, and desire for forgiveness, God will raise each of us up to the heights of the divine life. May we grow into the strong trees that provide shelter and safety for all of God's creatures.

A farewell?

I have been silent for quite some time. I am currently thinking about how much I want to be online, and whether this medium is more beneficial than detrimental. Perhaps for others the internet can be exactly what it claims to be - a value neutral technology that is useful for connecting with others and exchanging information. I am afraid that for me this is not the case.

Given the slimming that must occur for any online interactions, it is much too easy to present only the best of who I am (or what is worse, the best of who I want to be, but in no way actually am yet), while neglecting all of the embarassments and irregularities of my fully embodied and actual self. I am able to cultivate an avatar, a virtual image of myself that in no way reflects reality. While this need not always be the case, it is the perpetual temptation of images and a disembodied existence.

What the internet offers is the allure of infinite possibilities - possibilities that are not kept in check by reality, by bodies, or by the time and energy that it takes to transform myself and my relationships with others. By striking a few keys, I can be whoever I want and I can surround myself with whoever I want. I can give full play to my intentions, because commitment and the difficulties of external actions are not required to embody my intentions. It takes far less work for my intentions to shape a virtual world of images - which may partly explain the allure of video games: the chance to create a self completely unhindered by the concrete world of flesh and blood.

Perhaps this is the temptation offered to the human spirit by all new technologies. Infinite possibilities are offered at the push of the buttons of a remote or at the clicking of a mouse. Everything is easy and convenient, which, as I said in a prior post, is what we Americans prize above all else.

This temptation is powerful precisely because it is a half-truth. Each of us does have potentialities that we are called to cultivate and develop. And the chance of realizing infinite possibilities certainly seems in keeping with the dignity of the potentialities within us and our vocation to develop them.

But this half-truth, like every half-truth, is actually a lie. Because where is the struggle? Where is the commitment? Where is the hard work that tradition tells us must accompany growth and development? It is entirely absent.

Whatever can only be gained through hard work and struggle can only be gained through drastically limiting one's possibilities. By creating ourselves in our embodied life we necessarily exchange everything that could be for what actually is - we give up who we could be and live more faithfully into who we actually are. In essence, we exchange every possibility for actuality.

This is also the difficulty of marriage - giving up the possibility of getting together with anyone (which more closely approaches infinity every year that the world's population grows), for the actuality of being with one person and one person alone. To make this commitment is also to become one person. Before this commitment is made, one can be anyone. For women who change their names upon getting married this is perhaps more obvious, but I think that the identity shift that happens for men is every bit as profound. In getting married my life takes a certain shape - a more definite person starts to emerge from the clay.

Each of us is called to become one person. We are called to become ourselves. In one of the Tales of the Hasidim, the Rabbi Zusya says that in the life to come God will not ask him why he was not more like Moses, but why he was not more like Zusya.

Does the internet help each of us to become one person? To answer this question we need only consider the commitment and sacrifice that anything on the internet exacts. How hard is it to maintain a Facebook friendship? How difficult is it to maintain an Emergent weblog unity? Reality is made of sterner stuff. It requires much more from each of us to maintain actual flesh and blood friendships and actual flesh and blood communities.

A concluding question: are the internet and every other technological world of images and possibilities simply a distraction or do they actively undermine our ability to live in the difficult but actual and real world of flesh and blood people?

Scenes of Orthodox Monasticism

When I was writing the last post about entreating God that He would establish His kingdom in in my heart first and foremost, I was also thinking about a post on Father Stephen's blog that I looked at over a year ago.

The video consists of scenes of Orthodox monastic life. The audio has haunted me ever since I first heard it. Every once in a while I return to Father Stephen's blog and search out the video so that I can hear it again. Because it took me so long to locate it today, I have decided to link to it here, and also to point you all to it (whoever you are).

I have also been influenced by the quote at the beginning of the video by St. Isaac the Syrian: "Make peace with yourself, and heaven and earth will make peace with you."

My problems are not "out there," but rather they spring out of my own heart and my heart is the arena where I can, with the grace and help of God, begin to change them.

Thy Kingdom Come: Equivocation, Self-Deception, and Prayer

I have been meaning to write this for some time now, but I think I must have needed to work through it a little more, not in order to clarify my thinking, but in order to be able to write these words without engaging in precisely the kind of self-deception and self-aggrandizement that I will lament here.

Equivocation is the act of using a word or phrase that has more than one meaning in an ambiguous way. Typically, when one is guilty of equivocation in an argument one has intentionally used an ambiguous term in order to mislead others. While this is indeed something to be avoided, I am currently discovering the deep capacity that I have to equivocate with myself. It seems that I am happy to use words and phrases that carry more than one meaning in order to deceive myself and others.

The example of this that I have found to be the most powerful (which also means the most pernicious in terms of my own spiritual development) in the past few months is in regards to the words of the Lord's Prayer: "Our Father, Who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy Name. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." What do these words mean? And more specifically, what am I asking for when I ask for the coming of the kingdom of God on earth?

I used to think that I was asking God to break into this world and arrange it in such a way that everyone is blessed and benefitted. As I prayed these words, I would look at Rublev's icon of the Trinity and I would long for the world to reflect the reality of Trinitarian love and self-giving. Thus what I was primarily praying for was for God to make Himself apparent "out there" in the world, in the relational and political affairs of those who I looked upon with a certain degree of self-righteousness.

While this language may seem strong (after all, what is so self-righteous about praying primarily for changes in the relational and political reality "out there"?), I believe that it is justified. This is especially true since I have fallen, and continually fall into the deception of believing that my life would really be a whole lot better if everyone else "out there" would simply get their act together and stop causing me so many problems. In short, even while praying the words of the Lord's Prayer, I harbor pride, self-righteousness, self-justification, condemnation of others, and thus ultimately a high degree of self-deception. To judge even while praying and assuming the posture of charity and selflessness is a great ungodliness.

When I was reading The Way of a Pilgrim a number of months ago, I discovered that the Fathers of the Church think about the words "Thy kingdom come," in a completely different way. According to the Fathers, when we pray, "Thy kingdom come one earth as it is in heaven," what we are primarily praying for is that God will establish himself in the inner kingdom of our hearts.

It is right here, within my own heart that the kingdom of God can be established and find a beachhead for the invasion of the world. When I pray, I must pray first for God to transform me, a prayer which is only sincere when accompanied by other struggles and efforts on my part as well, such as fasting and charity. I am not to pray for God to change everyone "out there" so that my life will be easier and I can finally work on myself without hindrance from everyone else, but rather I am called to change myself so that I can then be an agent of God who brings about the transformation of the world. But the transformation begins within my own heart, and nothing can spare me this difficult internal work which is the work of the whole Orthodox spiritual life.

There are those who are seeking to make the Gospel primarily about the relational and political transformation of the world, which means to make it amount to little more than social justice or the Kantian religion within the limits of reason or ethics alone. This is to be resisted. The best way to resist it is by appropriating the whole Orthodox ascetic and spiritual tradition which emphasizes that the change always begins at home, within the walls of our own cells, which means within the walls of our own hearts.

How to Read (the Scriptures) Rightly

Father Stephen has written an excellent post on the Orthodox approach to the Holy Scriptures.

Indeed, Orthodoxy did not have to wait for Postmodern philosophy to understand that everyone reads the text through a particular lens. This became apparent in the confrontations with the Gnostics and with Arius. Everyone involved in these controversies used the Scriptures, but the central question was, how are they using them?

What is most important for the Orthodox Church is that we read the Holy Scriptures through the lens of the Apostles, which means according to the Rule of Faith that they handed down through the Bishops, and which was expanded and set down in the (Nicene) Creed, or Symbol of Faith. When we interpret the Scriptures using these tools and from within this Tradition, all of the different Scriptures present a mosaic of the King, that is, they present Christ.

However, when we strike out on our own, separating ourselves from the Tradition of Apostolic interpretation, we put together various passages of Scripture to form an image of a fox, a dog, or perhaps even ourselves, which is an image that we especially cherish. Here it is appropriate to remember the phrase that epitomizes the difficulty with the modern search for the historical Jesus - Those who look for the historical Jesus peer down into a deep well and see only their own reflection - that is, a Jesus who is tailor made for themselves.

It is impossible to read the Scriptures without bringing some sort of interpretive matrix to bear on them, as Father Stephen says. And thus, as many in Protestantism are beginning to realize, Sola Scriptura is misleading rhetoric at best and outright false at worst. The question that he rightly asks is, are we reading the Scriptures with the Apostles or not?