a sigh for some other way of living

The Entrance of the Mother of God into the Temple (November 21)

It seems thousands of years removed from us, but it was not so very long ago that life was marked out by religious feasts. Although everyone went to church, not everyone, of course, knew the exact contents of each celebration. For many, perhaps even the majority, the feast was above all an opportunity to get a good sleep, eat well, drink and relax. And nevertheless, I think that each person felt, if not fully consciously, that something transcendent and radiant broke into life with each feast, bringing an encounter with a world of different realities, a reminder of something forgotten, of something drowned out by the routine, emptiness and weariness of daily life.

Consider the very names of the feasts: Entrance into the Temple, Nativity, Epiphany, Presentation, Transfiguration. These words alone, in their solemnity, their unrelatedness to daily life and their mysterious beauty awakened some forgotten memory, invited, pointed to something. The feast was a kind of longing sigh for a lost but beckoning beauty, a sigh for some other way of living.

Our modern world, however, has become monotonous and feastless. Even our secular holidays are unable to hide this settling ash of sadness and hopelessness, for the essence of celebration is this breaking in, this experience of being caught up into a different reality, into a world of spiritual beauty and light. If, however, this reality does not exist, if fundamentally there is nothing to celebrate, then no manner of artificial uplift will be capable of creating a feast.

Here we have the feast of the Entrance of the Mother of God into the Temple. Its subject is very simple: a little girl is brought by her parents to the temple in Jerusalem. There is nothing particularly remarkable about this, since at that time it was a generally accepted custom and many parents brought their children to the temple as a sign of bringing them into contact with God, of giving their lives ultimate purpose and meaning, of illumining them from within through the light of higher experience.

But on this occasion, as the service for the day recounts, they lead the child to the "Holy of Holies," to the place where no one except the priests are allowed to go, the mystical inner sanctum of the temple. The girl's name is Mary. She is the future mother of Jesus Christ, the one through whom, as Christians believe, God himself came into the world to join the human race, to share its life and reveal its divine content. Are these just fairy tales? Or is something given to us and disclosed here, something directly related to our life, which perhaps cannot be expressed in everyday human speech?

Here was this magnificent, massive, solemn temple, the glory of Jerusalem. And for centuries it was only there, behind those heavy walls, that a person could come into contact with God. Now, however, the priest takes Mary by the hand, leads her into the most sacred part of the Temple and we sing that "The most pure Temple of the Savior is led into the temple of the Lord." Later in the Gospels Christ said, "destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up," but as the Evangelist added, "He spoke of the temple of His Body" (Jn 2: 19, 21).

The meaning of all these events, words and recollections is simple: from now on man himself becomes the temple. No stone temple, no altar, but man -- his soul, body and life -- is the sacred and divine heart of the world, its "holy of holies." One temple, Mary -- living and human -- is led into a temple made of stone, and from within brings to completion its significance and meaning.

With this event religion, and life even more so, undergoes a complete shift in balance. What now enters the world is a teaching that puts nothing higher than man, for God Himself takes on human form to reveal man's vocation and meaning as divine. From this moment onward man is free. Nothing stands over him, for the very world is his as a gift from God to fulfill his divine destiny.

From the moment the Virgin Mary entered "the Holy of Holies," life itself became the Temple. And when we celebrate her Entrance into the Temple, we celebrate man's divine meaning and the brightness of his high calling. These cannot be washed away or uprooted from human memory.

Protopresbyter Alexander Schmemann
The Virgin Mary. The Celebration of Faith. Sermons, Vol. 3.

dissipation of noble things

.... World history is more of a rake's progress than a conservation of 'goods'. It is a criminal dissipation of noble things.... We must admit in our own age the possibility of serious and possibly uncorrectable deprivations, and the clearer we see where they reside the more we shall be alive to our achievements in other directions, or even if we don't like the look of things at all, at least we shall be less easily deceived by this false scent and that, which is something, when there is much to deceive us.

- David Jones, Art in Relation to War in The Dying Gaul and Other Writings (1978)

no manifest destiny

From the Pastoral Common Room group, written in 2008 and still applicable in many ways:

The coming week is the week of the 15th All-American Council of the Orthodox Church in America. In light of the fact that ours is actually a continental church, with an Archdiocese of Canada and an Exarchate of Mexico, some in the church are calling for these gatherings to have the title 'All North American Council'. While this may be a better turn of phrase in some ways, you might think, as I do, that there is a certain grandiose quality to whichever title is used. We might do well ask ourselves: in what way does our Council represent 'All America' or 'All North America'? The fact is that our OCA is a smallish church, with perhaps - just perhaps - 150,000 faithful. We might barely - just barely - represent about one fifth of the total number of Orthodox in America. Not only are we just a fraction of Orthodoxy in America, the truth is that many, many of the most interesting and exciting and dynamic things going on in North American Orthodoxy are going on outside the Orthodox Church in America. The wind seems to have gone from our sails. The recent administrative scandals of which we have been made aware have not only been a big blow, but the ramifications of the scandals have revealed a sort of deeper cultural problem in our church life and history. By culture I mean our lived spirituality, the typical ways in which we think and act, how we express our sense of self. It is a question of identity. One the one hand we have generated from within a narrative that places our church on the canonical high ground. We have talked about 'the vision of St Tikhon' as if it were our unique patrimony. We have claimed the mantle of autocephaly (but seem unable to wear it!) We have acted as if we were the unique, priviledged, enlightened bearers of Orthodoxy in America - and as if the Greeks and the Antiochians and the Russians and others were somehow not really a part of what it truly means to be Orthodox in America. We have inflated our numbers - as in the claim of a million or more members! - and we attempted to sustain ourselves as an autocephalous church in the image of the very ancient or very big autocephalous churches, with ruinous financial - and I am afraid ruinous spiritual - consequences. Why couldn't we have modeled our sense of what being autocephalous means on, for example, the modest Church of the Czech and Slovak Lands, rather that the extremely impressive Church of Russia? On the other hand, while all this was going on and pumped up by our leaders and church press, we just accepted it. We just accepted the many distortions and half-truths, the improbable claims and assertions, the presumption of some ecclesial 'high ground', the 'vision' and all that it assumed and called for. Why? Probably because these things flattered us. It feels good to be part of the cutting edge, to have the high ground, to think oneself more and better than one really is. We did not like to hear criticism, let alone rumblings and hints of rot. And thus it is a spiritual problem, a problem in seeing ourselves clearly and honestly for who and what we really are. It is my fervent prayer that a deep and genuine spiritual impulse will, at our Council in Pittsburgh this week, cut through all the boosterism and hoopala to a clearer grasp of what is real and true and worthy and possible. There is no 'manifest destiny' for the Orthodox Church in America, or even for Orthodoxy in North America. There is only our destiny 'in Christ'.

In his commentary on the Song of Songs, the ancient church writer Origen has the Lover (Christ) saying to the Beloved (the Church; you and me): 'I adjure you: awaken the love which is in you, and after you have woken it make it rise up! When the Creator of all things created you, he planted in your hearts the seeds of love. But now in you love is asleep...'

Origen goes on to say that the Word of God is asleep in those who do not believe and in those of doubtful heart, while it is awake in the saints. It sleeps in those who are shaken by storms, but it awakes the moment they cry out - those who want to be saved and who are looking for this...

What I would like to say is this. Everyone wants to be loved. To give and receive love is the most wonderful exchange possible. Where love is given and received it is a source of joy and peace, even in the most difficult and troubling circumstances. It is possible to bear wars and poverty, tragedy, illness, old age, and approaching death - if only there is love. Where love is not given and not received there is only pain, a sort of hell, even in the midst of prosperity.

Love is like an oasis in the desert, an enclosed garden in a bustling city, a precious secret the joy of which is doubled by being shared.

Is it possible that this love is simply the product of biochemistry and biological imperative?

Everything we are given in the Church - the Mysteries, our worship, Scripture, prayer and the spiritual disciplines and opportunities - are given to us to awaken the love - the capacity to give love and receive love - that the Lord has planted deep in our inmost being. Our love needs to be wakened and re-awakend, for it is as if our distractions, and so often our fears and the hardness of heart that comes from fear, work as a narcotic, drugging our love of God and one another, putting our love into an unnatural and artificial, unrefreshing sleep.

The Coming of Christ - in the Incarnation and in our encounter with Him in our baptism, in repentance, in the eucharist, in the many spiritual renewals that make up our life in Christ - is the basic reality, the pattern and theme of this awakening of love. God loves us and has made us to be lovable and loving, in the image and likeness of His love. And when we fell away - and when we fall - and when our love was stilled - and is stilled - in an unnatural death-like slumber, He sent - and sends - His beloved Son to enter into our dreary unreality and the darkness of our dream-world, to awaken us, to renew love in us, to bring us into the light.

St Andrew, Fool for Christ

Who was this Andrew, this blessed chosen one, to who the Mother of God manifested herself? In the great city of imperial Byzantium, St Andrew seemed to be the most miserable, poor, and lowborn man. Beneath the appearance of voluntary holy foolishness he had hidden from men his radiant spirit and gracious wisdom.... Following the inner call, reinforced by a miraculous vision, he laid all his gifts at the foot of the cross and clothed himself with a strange and laughter-provoking madness. But the poor man's rags concealed rich robes; the sores and filfth concealed spiritual beauty. He accepted the ascesis of holy foolishness together with the disciplines of fasting, poverty, homelessness, and unceasing prayer. And it was this mad and strange holy fool to whom the Mother of God chose to reveal herself in the church at Blachernae. She did not choose the patriarch or anyone of the rank of bishop, priest, or monk; she did not choose the emperor or his court; she did not choose any of the wise and learned men who were so abundant in Byzantium; she did not choose any of the notables of the imperial city. Instead, the Mother of God chose this Andrew, who had abased himself beneath all other men, who had made himself more foolish than all other men.

- Adapted from Fr Sergius Bulgakov, The Radiant Protection over the World ( in Churchly Joy: Orthodox Devotions for the Church Year, translated by Boris Jakim; William B. Eerdmans, 2008)

in a predicament and on the move

What distinguishes Judeo-Christianity in general from other world religions is its emphasis on the value of the individual person, its view of man as a creature in trouble, seeking to get out of it, and accordingly on the move. Add to this anthropology the special marks of the Catholic Church: the sacraments, especially the Eucharist, which, whatever else they do, confer the highest significance upon the ordinary things of this world, bread, wine, water, touch, breath, words, talking, listening — and what do you have? You have a man in a predicament and on the move in a real world of real things, a world which is a sacrament and a mystery; a pilgrim whose life is a searching and a finding.

– Walker Percy, “The Holiness of the Ordinary,” in Signposts in a Strange Land

Warren: God is in the Details

God is in the details

My Gaelic, Calvinist ancestors (on my mama's side), were very clear about the meaning of Labour Day. As they said, that is the day when we work especially hard, to prove how much our efficiency has improved over the last year.

Now, I will tell you a secret about them (if you promise not to tell my mother). I learned this as a child, visiting their native Cape Breton. These people were droll, on the edge of mischievous. My maternal grandmother, somewhat over the edge. "Post-moderns" since time out of mind, they tended to communicate in layered irony. Often as not, the ironies doubled or quadrupled, which is to say, cancelled out, and the truth is they were very hardworking.

On this stock of Scotchmen, and similar cultural materials (Norman French; Methodist English; escaped Irish; relocated American) Canada constructed her work ethic. By any broadly accepted statistical standard, we are among the world's most productive people, and this despite the fact that, at any given moment, most of us don't know what we're doing. (Imagine if we did!)

But what is work, the more philosophical may ask. We know what it is in physics (a scalar quantity, measured in joules), but what is it for a human being?

It can be slavery. When a contemporary urban office worker describes himself as a "wage slave," he is intending an irony. But back up, and look at the building in which he works, or even the arrangement of furniture within his department, and we may detect aspects of a double irony. (Two negatives make a positive.) He really is a slave to the wage. How long, after winning the lottery, would he continue to work there?

The shocking answer is, many do not quit their jobs immediately. I have gleaned this by reading actual accounts of lottery winners. Some angel has told them it would be imprudent. They wait until the reality of unearned wealth sinks in, to let the life of irresponsible leisure begin to undermine them.

Am I doing this only for the money? And for myself, alone? Or out of laziness, since it would be much harder to earn a living in a more satisfying way? Do I love my job, or am I self-indentured?

My late father checked out of industrial design promptly on his 65th birthday. Or rather, he checked out of being paid for it (or for teaching it). He continued to take on design work - tasks which seemed worth doing - but refused to charge for his services. This way he could do only what he enjoyed, and tell clients who annoyed him to progress, hell-ward.

That, at least, was the theory. In practice, services obtained for free are valued at nothing, and dear papa found clients who just wasted his time. That is why, incidentally, true voluntary work is almost thankless, in this world. And why it is so noble. And such thanks as may be obtained - in the hospitals, prisons, nursing homes, refugee shelters - are the very gleam of Heaven.

Most of us will not win the lottery. And few are born to great wealth. Yet as a dear Czech friend put it, once, when asked if a certain unusual person was independently wealthy: "No. He is independently poor."

My own view is that we should pursue what is noble, and that work is ennobling. Or rather, potentially ennobling. When I look at the urban world around me (and I am unambiguously a city boy), I find examples of it everywhere. But that may be because I don't own a car, and get from A to B mostly by walking.

On a more analytical view, it seems to me, the great majority of jobs involve very little skill or craft or moral stamina. They involve the production of goods and services which the average human being would be better off without. I see even relatively poor people, struggling back from the malls with consumer goods that are tawdry, and joyless - yet which advertisers have persuaded them they cannot live without. They worked (or collected welfare) for this?

Statistically, our economy is a great success; morally, it is a catastrophic failure. For an economy that was broadly successful would not only feed, clothe, and shelter every one, but make available to each real joy in labour (both paid and unpaid), and in consumption, too. Not "rewards," as a union boss would understand the term, but intrinsic rewards.

"God is in the details." A true craftsman works even on the details that are invisible to his customers. He works, as it were, not only for them, but in the sight of God, who sees everything. Conscience and self-discipline inform each movement of hand and eye. He takes his pleasure in doing a job well; in exceeding every regulatory standard. Each object is made, each task performed, as if it were his last. He has a calling.

And the strange thing is, behind all the garbage heap of statistics, and the pace and stress of "getting by," people long for this. We were made to be craftsmen.

David Warren

begins as a representation, soon becomes a substitute

In a wide-ranging study (L’image interdite, 1994) the French
philosopher Alain Besançon has argued that the fear and suspicion of
images has influenced the development of religion and philosophy
throughout recorded history, and has not disappeared merely because we
are now surrounded and distracted by images on every side and at every
moment of the day. Indeed, much of what disturbs people in our
image-saturated culture is what disturbed the theologians of Islam:
namely, that the “graven image,” which begins as a representation,
soon becomes a substitute. And substitutes corrupt the feelings that
they invite, in the way that idols corrupt worship, and pornography
corrupts desire. For substitutes invite easy and mechanical responses.
They short-circuit the costly process whereby we form real
relationships, and put mechanical and addictive reflexes in their
place. The idol does not represent God: it defaces Him, in something
like the way pornography defaces love.

Roger Scruton, From Christ to Coke, Prospect 187 (24 August, 2011)

Screwing Up (review)

[an interesting reflection on a fundamental truth of theological anthropology and epistemology, apophaticism, modesty.... -

Raymond Tallis
Screwing Up
a review of

Kathryn Schulz
BEING WRONG Adventures in the margin of error
405pp. Portobello. Paperback, £15. 978 1 84627 073 4
US: Ecco. $14.99. 978 0 06 117605 0

Screwing up

From 1987 until 2006 when I retired, I was Professor of Geriatric Medicine at the University of Manchester. Since about 1948 or thereabouts (when I was a tot in a cot) I have occupied another post: I have been Professor of Data-Lean Generalizations at the University of Me. There seems little chance that I shall retire from this post, which brings me great satisfaction, though I have several billion colleagues, most of whom are equally well qualified for the title. The key qualification is to be able to punch above one’s cognitive weight, making assertions that are either ill-founded or entirely unfounded, usually in the belief that they are, or are probably, true “just because I think so”. The beliefs promulgated by a Professor of Data-Lean Generalizations encompass huge swathes of that boundless nexus of rumours called “The World Out There”; but, unfazed by the mismatch between the size of the universe and that of the human mind, I am prepared to defend some of them with considerable vigour.

If anything is likely to persuade me to retire, or at least partially retire, from this self-appointed post it is Kathryn Schulz’s luminously intelligent investigation of our propensity to error. In Being Wrong she ranges widely and digs deep. Her inquiry is “built around stories of people screwing up” and involves “illusions, magicians, comedians, drug trips, love affairs, misadventures on the high seas, bizarre neurological phenomena, medical catastrophes, legal fiascos, some possible consequences of marrying a prostitute, the lamentable failure of the world to end, and Alan Greenspan”. Her central thesis is that the propensity to error goes through our psyche like “Brighton Rock” through a stick of Brighton Rock. It is not “a hallmark of the lawless mind” but “our native condition”, because the mind is not an unfoxed looking glass in which the intrinsic reality of things is replicated. We peer into the world through a succession of distorting lenses.
The first and most important is our body.

While we are all familiar with visual illusions, mirages and the hallucinations that hover round the borders of sleep, we are unaware of the extent to which we may be deceived at this very basic level. “There is no form of knowledge, however central or unassailable it may seem, that cannot, under certain circumstances, fail us.” Schulz recounts the case of Hannah, a woman who had had a stroke. Asked by her doctor to describe his face, she reported that he had short hair, was clean-shaven, had a bit of a tan and was not wearing glasses. Unfortunately, his face was concealed behind a screen.

Hannah was in fact blind but, being unaware of her blindness, she confabulated. She was suffering from Anton’s syndrome, one of a group of similar neurological problems known as anosognosia, or the denial of disease. And such conditions are emblematic of the human condition: “To be blind without realising our blindness is, figuratively, the situation of all of us when we are in error”.

We are most likely to be in error where we are most confident, as is dramatically illustrated by a study of those so-called “flashbulb” memories we have of surprising and traumatic events. We all know exactly where we were and what we were doing when President Kennedy was assassinated or when we learned of the death of Princess Diana. No we don’t. Careful studies by psychologists such as Ulric Neisser have shown that an individual’s successive accounts of such memories correlate very poorly with one another, though the memories remain just as “vivid”. We find it difficult to set aside the notion that our experiences of the events have been “burned” into our brains. And it is easy to get healthy people to confabulate, as was demonstrated in a study in which two psychologists set up shop in a department store in Michigan.

They asked people to compare what they claimed were four different varieties of pantyhose. In fact, the hose were all the same. Even so, shoppers not only declared a preference for one or the other but gave solid reasons for their preferences.

These are benign errors. Schulz’s “Wrongology”, however, visits some very dark places. Not long ago, Alan Greenspan was described as “the greatest banker in history”. But his opposition to regulating the market for derivatives – to the point where he persuaded Congress to pass legislation actually forbidding the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission from taking any action – was crucial in bringing about the crash that resulted in 40-45 per cent of global wealth evaporating in just over a year. Appalling miscarriages of justice, driven by the rock-like certainties of prosecuting authorities, may be impossible to overturn even in the face of new evidence, as reputations have been invested in being right – illustrating Nietzsche’s observation that “convictions are greater enemies of truth than lies”. Medical errors result in an annual death rate in the US equivalent to a full Boeing 747 crashing every three days, killing everyone on board. And Thabo Mbeki’s confidence that he knew the cause of AIDS killed 300,000 of his fellow countrymen. The assumption that one is right can be very costly for others.
Many mistakes we readily admit to and we take steps to avoid in future. But some mistaken beliefs we cleave to with a passion. As Schulz says, with characteristic wit, once you are contradicted (particularly by your mother), a belief “can move from noncommittal to evangelical in milliseconds”. And this can be as true of beliefs about the recipe for crumb cake as about the origin of the universe.

We take pride in being right; indeed the best way to be insufferable is always to be explicitly right about bloody everything. Being wrong is a source of embarrassment and shame, especially if our interlocutor treats it as a matter of life and death. Being insulted can turn us into sophists for whom victory is more important than truth. It will exacerbate our tendency to embrace “the Evil Assumption” – “that people who disagree with us are not ignorant of the truth and not unable to comprehend it, but have wilfully turned their backs on it”.

Our beliefs, as Schulz observes, “are inseparable from identities”. Our sense of our identity is itself bound up with the community to which, voluntarily or involuntarily, we belong. The pressure to have the same beliefs as those with whom we identify can be irresistible, if only because dissent seems like betrayal. This is evident not only within religious communities where apostasy is punished by vilification, excommunication or death but in the kind of “groupthink” that gripped the Kennedy administration during the Bay of Pigs disaster, the Johnson administration in Vietnam and the Bush-Blair axis seeing non-existent WMD in Iraq.

The existential investment is particularly profound in the case of beliefs about those with whom we are in love. The pain of discovering that there is more to the other person than was evident in the shared dream of the initial romance – even if it is just a matter of their having their own ideas about things – is a poignant reminder of something that all error tells us: that we are to some extent on our own; that we have world pictures that cannot be directly shared; that we are to a greater or lesser degree sealed up “each in his prison”. Our resentment that the beloved should have a different take on reality is “in no small part, a resistance to being left alone with too few certainties and too many emotions”. At any rate, there is nothing to compare with falling in love for drawing “swift and sweeping conclusions based on scanty evidence”.

“Wrongology” threatens to be a dismal science, telling us unwelcome truths, but Schulz’s sparkling introduction greatly mitigates the pain of the message with the pleasure-giving manner of its presentation. And, notwithstanding all that has gone before, Schulz ends on a rather cheerful note. There are, after all, many ways in which we can limit the damage caused by our inescapable tendency to err. And while there are individuals who continue to defend beliefs that have been refuted with increasingly wild rationalizations, there are others who, at huge personal cost, recant their earlier creeds. One unlikely hero in Being Wrong is C. P. Ellis, an ex-Klansman (he was the chief of the Durham, North Carolina, Klavern) who devoted the latter part of his life to furthering the cause of justice for black people.
And while error itself is not a good thing, it is linked to other things that are good, such as our intelligence and our imagination. Without the inductive capacity that takes us beyond what the evidence truly delivers, we would not be able to find our way round the world; we would not enjoy the surprises, the defeated expectations, that comedy exploits; we would not have that hunger for knowledge and understanding, based on our sense of our cognitive limitations, that drives us to the creation of art and the theorizing that underpins science. It is because we live in a domain of possibilities that we can imagine new realities and we are able to transform actuality as no other creature has. Mistakes, Schulz says, “enable not only our biological evolution but our social, emotional and intellectual evolution as well”. So, perhaps I shouldn’t require the Professor of Data-Lean Generalizations to retire yet. But, somewhat late in his career, he is on probation.

Being Wrong may be one of the most important books published for many years. It may seem paradoxical to try to see aright our universal, inveterate tendency to be wrong, but Schulz succeeds brilliantly. This sobering and yet liberating inquiry could make a major dent on the stupidity of the world, including even mine. But, having read this book, I know I may well be mistaken. I hope I am not.

We Orthodox are fond of saying that Orthodoxy is most fundamentally
neither a system of doctrine nor an institution, important as both
those are, but first and last a way of life, as in Bishop Kallistos'
little book, The Orthodox Way. We do not very often live up to that
claim, but we can and do point to those whom we believe have done so,
to our saints, as the proof of things unseen and embodying the
substance of things hoped for.

- Fr Alexander Golitzin

what the Church is for

The sacramental life proposes and realises a human relationship which is neither destructive nor conformist but redemptive. That is what the church is for.

- Herbert McCabe, letter in New Blackfriars, 1966

from the Pastoral Common Room list

By temperament I do not like hearing confessions or giving spiritual
direction. I do not like telling people what to do (just as I dislike
being told what to do!), and I only do so under some sort of
obligation. I approach scheduled confessions or office hours for
'pastoral conversations' with a kind of dread. But I do it, however
unhappy it makes me, because it is part of my job and because I know
that to do the job well - which I want to do - one simply has to do
it. So I am happy to be able to say that the Lord is merciful to me
and what so often begins in unhappiness frequently ends with a certain
pastoral joy. This is what makes it all bearable, the joy that comes
with the grace given 'in the moment'.

I say all of this because I am convinced that it really is the duty of
those in pastoral leadership and authority to make sound judgements,
whether they want to or not, and to do so humbly as servants of the
Lord and His Church, following the teaching, canons, customs we have
received and promised to uphold in our ordination, and that we do this
- at least I do this and I am sure that most readers on this list do
this - not because we want to assert ourselves, dabble in other's
lives, pretend to be holy elders, exercise control, or further any
sort of political or social agenda - but simply because we have both
embraced the message of Christ and His Church and been given the task
as pastors of helping the faithful connect the dots between this
message on the one hand and how they live their lives on the other.

Making sound judgements is a complex thing, and requires skill, but it
isn't brain surgery or advanced calculus or something that involves a
massive amount of preparatory research. We need to know what the
Church teaches and affirms. I do not think that this 'content' is in
any way obscure or difficult to understand. We should not fall prey to
the temptation to overly nuance (or waffle about) the teaching of the
Church, just as we not fall prey to the temptation to pontificate or
moralise. The only nuance we need to embrace is not in fact a nuance,
it is the principle that the pastoral life of the Church and therefore
the fundamental impulse of the pastor is restorative, not punitive.
The complexity in making sound judgement comes with the application,
the connecting of the dots, rather than with the principles involved.
Those principles are pretty straightforward. I guess I am simply
asserting this rather than demonstrating this, but still...

In spite of recent (and I think highly unsuccessful attempts) to
deconstruct it - a sort of trahison des clercs? - one such principle
is that the intimate communion of a man and a woman is part of the
pre-lapsarian created order of things, is part of the post-lapsarian
'economy' of salvation, can be a unique, sanctified way of life, is an
image that 'adequately' expresses the mystery of God's love for us, of
Christ's love for the Church, and is bound up with our language about
Pascha and the Kingdom of God. In other words, the communion of
marriage understood as between a man and a woman is privileged in the
tradition of the Church. (It is not, of course, the only or highest
good privileged by the Church. Virginity (or celibacy) committed to
ministry is, in the Apostle's view, highly privileged. In any event,
neither marriage nor virginity are ultimately privileged apart from
Christ and service, and both ways of life are subject to falling short
of the privilege accorded them, in other words it is not by nature but
by grace that their potential and dignity are fulfilled.)

We exist as male and female, that is we are sexual beings, and part of
our sexual being involves a providential design for a complex
integration of biological, psychological, emotional, spiritual
intimacy in inter-personal relationship with another of complimentary
sexuality. At least this is how I understand the story (or theology)
of our sexual givenness. Please note that I haven't reduced sexuality
or complementarity to genitals, but genitals are surely part of the
story, of the design, of the integration.

We absolutely acknowledge that our sexuality, like all aspects of our
existence, exists in a way which is fractured, broken, hurting, and
often sinful. But not only is our sexuality a place of real and
potential fragmentation and sin as are all aspects of our existence,
but somehow we have the intuition in the tradition that our sexuality
is *in particular* fraught with the consequences of the fall. I
imagine that this is precisely because the fall - the fracture - of
something so deeply and fundamentally integrative has led and leads to
profoundly disruptive outcomes. So many things about us are bound up
with our sexuality that in being pulled apart and broken in our
fallenness we have been left a deep and troubling wound. This is true
of us as sexual beings and true of us as sexual beings in intimate
relationship and therefore it is also true of our intimate
relationships, even - and perhaps especially when these are
relationships that are striving to live according to the image
privileged by the Church.

The first commandment, which follows from the creation of male and
female, is to be fruitful and multiply. Although to be fruitful is not
a concept exhausted by procreation, procreation is the most basic sign
of the fruitfulness, creativity, enlargement, openness for which we
were created. Fruitfulness is bigger than procreation, but it doesn't
oppose or negate or dismiss or choose against procreative potential.

I am rambling here, but for all these reasons (and more) I am saddened
when I come across Orthodox priests, pastors attempting to deconstruct
the tradition we have received and our pastoral obligation to connect
the dots according to the tradition. Exceptions to rules or principles
or affirmations or practices do not negate those things, they only
point to a certain openness (in light of grace) and generosity (thank
God!) and a very human inconsistency and sometimes incoherence in
striving to make things right or at least better.

I suppose that it is only to be expected. Once upon a time there were
many sexual sins (aka dysfunctions, brokenness, fracturings, fallings
short of the mark) that we as a community of Orthodox believers
acknowledged as sins, were ashamed of, tried to repent of, tried to
help others struggle with, tried to encourage in their embrace of the
moral vision of the Church. Take for example fornication (although of
course I am speaking of same sex relations). It was once recognized,
taught, generally accepted that pre-marital intimacy was 'not
according to the image' - it happened, of course, and it was handled
appropriately or inappropriately, whatever, but no one said it was of
no consequence to the integrity of one's Christian identity - but
today many of the parents of our children simply accept that their
children - who are also our parishioners and assumed to be believers -
will be having sexual relationships, if not in high school then almost
certainly in college, and that it is normal, natural, probably even
healthy for them to do so. Quite a few accept that their adult
children are living together, see no problem, no inconsistency, in
spite of the crystal clear teaching of the Church about all of this.
And of course many of the young folks themselves have no urgent sense
that their life-style involves such contradiction.

The real problem is not the fornication and not the living together,
the real problem is the bland, bourgeois, self-satisfied, dull-witted,
unreflective idea that one can be actively fornicating and yet 'a decent
Christian', without any whiff of repentance and amendment of life. (But
to forestall the sophomoric rejoinder, let me say that one can replace
'fornicating'with, say, - as the Lord Himself says - murder, adultery,
theft, false witness, slander - or the Apostle - impurity, licentiousness,
idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, anger, selfishness,
dissension, party spirit, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and the like,
etc etc etc)

Perhaps as pastors we have failed to connect the dots, perhaps we are
reaping the legacy of our predecessors who did not or could not
connect the dots, perhaps we simply have little leverage in the face
of the powerful and insidious ambient social messages. Perhaps when
our own friends and parishioners and family members are struggling
with or even opt out of the moral vision of the Church we suffer, fall
silent, try to find some way to accommodate, nuance, accept, to be
nice.... God help us! I would hope such 'nuancings' have a clear
restorative goal rather than being a sign of defeat, accomodation, or
a loyalty to something other than the one who says 'if you love me,
keep my commandments'.

missed something important

.... he though about the Selinsky performance he had attended so may decades ago, and the odd, tearful, raw feeling that would not release him for some time after, as if he, an established young diplomat with brilliant prospects ahead of him, had gotten something wrong, had missed something important -

Even now, the recollection struck him as uncomfortable, and ever so slightly he prodded his thoughts along....

Olga Grushin, The Line

from this very minute

.... Once the Elder was invited aboard a frigate which came from St. Petersburg. The Captain of the frigate was a highly educated man, who had been sent to America by order of the Emperor to make an inspection of all the colonies. There were more than twenty-five officers with the Captain, and they also were educated men. In the company of this group sat a monk of a hermitage, small in stature and wearing very old clothes. All these educated conversationalists were placed in such a position by his wise talks that they did not know how to answer him. The Captain himself used to say, 'We are lost for an answer before him.'"

"Father Herman gave them all one general question, 'Gentlemen, what do you love above all, and what will each of you wish for your happiness?' Various answers were offered.... Some desired wealth, others glory, some a beautiful wife, still others a beautiful ship he would captain; and so forth in the same vein. 'Is it not true,' Father Herman said to them concerning this, 'that all your various wishes can bring us to one conclusion -- that each of you desires that which in his own understanding he considers the best, and which is most worthy of his love?' They all answered, 'Yes, that is so!'"

"He then continued, 'Would you not all say, is not that which is best, above all, and surpassing all, and that which by preference is most worthy of love, the Very Lord, our Jesus Christ, who created us, adorned us with such ideals, gave life to all, sustains everything, nurtures and loves all, who is Himself Love and most beautiful of all men? Should we not then love God above every thing, desire Him more than anything, and search Him out?'"

"All said, 'Why, yes! That's self-evident!' Then the Elder asked, 'But do you love God?' They all answered, "Certainly we love God. How can we not love God?' 'And I a sinner have been trying for more than forty years to love God, but I cannot say that I love Him completely,' Father Herman protested to them. He then began to demonstrate to them the way in which we should love God. 'If we love someone,' he said, 'we always remember them; we try to please them. Day and night our heart is concerned with the subject. Is that the way you gentlemen love God? Do you turn to Him often? Do you always remember Him? Do you always pray to Him and fulfil His holy commandments?' They had to admit that they had not! 'For our own good, and for our own fortune,' concluded the Elder, 'let us at least promise ourselves that, from this very minute, we will try to love God more than anything and to fulfil His holy will!' Without any doubt this conversation was imprinted in the hearts of the listeners for the rest of their lives...

- from The Life of St. Herman, American Missionary (Originally published in 1894 by the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church. Translated into English by Archpriest Vladimir S. Borichevsky
and republished by the Orthodox Church in America)

a peculiar moral urgency

While reading an article recently I came across a remark by Lionel Trilling, noting "the moral urgency, the sense of crisis and the concern with personal salvation that mark the existence of American intellectuals" and I thought: bingo! Only not so much intellectuals or simply intellectuals as much as American Christians informed by the ambient
religious culture.. It may be hard for some Americans to understand, but that moral urgency and sense of crisis and absolute priority for personal salvation are not the only ways in which Christians can and have lived out their faith. These particular American themes are the roots of the religious and spiritual intrusiveness, of evangelical boosterism, of denominationalism as team sport, of the perverse commodification of faith and its transmogrification through advertising and marketing and the application of sales techniques into the tchotchke of this religious market-place.

All Saints

We have come to the end of a very long liturgical cycle, stretching back to the beginning of the pre-Lenten period, even to the Sunday of Zacchaeus in early February. The Sunday of All Saints is the fulfilment and fruition of the story of our salvation. If we look back from the perspective of All Saints to Pentecost, the Ascension, the Paschal season, Pascha and Bright Week, Holy Week, Great Lent and the preparation for Great Lent - it is a good third of the year! - we can see that everything that leads up to today's celebration of sanctity and the saints generally has had as its goal the creation of circumstances and persons capable of holiness, of our renewal and the renewal of the world we live in. The incarnate life, ministry, passion, death, resurrection, ascension and glorification the Lord are the step by step reconnaissance mission whereby our fallen, humiliated and enslaved humanity is liberated and renewed. The outpouring of the Holy Spirit is the power of this new life in Christ in the lives of believers and through believers passes actively into the community and world around us. We can say that the Son of God became incarnate in order to die, and He died in order to rise again, and He rose again in order to ascend back to the Father, and He ascended to the Father in order that the Holy Spirit would be sent, and the Holy Spirit was sent so that we might be filled with this new, glorious and grace-filled life in Christ.

The short-hand for the story of our salvation, expanding the famous phrase of St Athanasius, is that the Son of God became man so that man could share by grace in the communion of the divine persons of the Holy Trinity. Or we could say that all that has taken place for us - what the theologians call the economy of salvation - has taken place so that saints might walk among us and so that we may be numbered among them. The point of everything is holiness.

never fully comprehensible...

.... I see trees, the wood, as the best analogue of prose fiction. All novels are also, in some way, exercises in attaining freedom - even when, at an extreme, they deny the possibility of its existence. Some such process of retreat from the normal world - however much the theme and surface is to be of the normal world - is inherent in any act of artistic creation, let alone that specific kind of writing that deals in imaginary situations and characters. And a part of that retreat must always be into a 'wild', or ordinarily repressed and socially hidden self: into a place always a complexity beyond daily (or artistic) reality, never fully comprehensible, mappable, explicable, eternally more potential than realized, yet where no one will ever penetrate as far as we have. It is our passage, our mystery alone, however miserable the account that is brought out for the world to see or hear or read second-hand.

- John Fowles, The Trees

the warmth of the heart

The meaning of life is frighteningly simple: to strive always and in every circumstance to preserve the warmth of the heart, knowing that it will be yet needed by someone, that we are always yet needed by someone.

- Sergei Fudel

Dream Song 47

John Berryman: Dream Song 47: April Fool's Day, or, St Mary of Egypt

— Thass a funny title, Mr Bones.
— When down she saw her feet, sweet fish, on the threshold,
she considered her fair shoulders
and all them hundreds who have them, all
the more who to her mime thickened & maled
from the supple stage,

and seeing her feet, in a visit, side by side
paused on the sill of The Tomb, she shrank: 'No.
They are not worthy,
fondled by many' and rushed from The Crucified
back through her followers out of the city ho
across the suburbs, plucky

to dare my desert in her late daylight
of animals and sands. She fall prone.
Only wind whistled.
And forty-seven years with our caps on,
whom God has not visited.

The Convert

The Convert

After one moment when I bowed my head
And the whole world turned over and came upright,
And I came out where the old road shone white,
I walked the ways and heard what all men said,
Forests of tongues, like autumn leaves unshed,
Being not unlovable but strange and light;
Old riddles and new creeds, not in despite
But softly, as men smile about the dead.

The sages have a hundred maps to give
That trace their crawling cosmos like a tree,
They rattle reason out through many a sieve
That stores the sand and lets the gold go free:
And all these things are less than dust to me
Because my name is Lazarus and I live.

G.K. Chesterton

SUNDAY OF ST JOHN OF THE LADDER

Do you remember the childhood game of Snakes & Ladders? It is a simple game. Moving along the curving path of squares from the beginning square at the lower left hand of the board towards 'home' at the upper right of the board a player can land on a square that scoots him ahead on a ladder to a higher point, or sends him sliding down on a snake towards the beginning . Ladders advance; snakes are a set-back. The ladders are like virtues and the snakes are like vices. Learning, practising, mastering, persevering in virtue shapes our character in holiness and advances us toward the Kingdom of God. Each virtue builds on other virtues. Vice debases our character, obscures the image of God, sends us on a trajectory away from realising the Kingdom. Ever vice is linked to other vices, a slippery slope.

Of course, our metaphor of Snakes & Ladders will only get us so far. It is not only some squares that are ladders and others that are snakes. Every moment of our life, every choice we make, can be either ladder or snake.

In the Ladder of Divine Ascent, St John teaches us that our effort, our climb, is what we must do as an expression - a necessary expression - of our faith, hope and love. We are to struggle against wickedness and selfishness, and cultivate virtue, because the Lord says: If you love me, keep my commandments. We strive to keep the commandments, to overcome vice and pursue virtue, because we love Him. This effort shapes us towards the Kingdom. But at the end of the day we discover that it is not so much our climbing, our effort, that brings us to where we need to be, but the Lord's grace that brings virtue to its fruition. Our work puts in a position to receive His grace. Indeed, according to St John and as clearly seen in the icon of today's feast, even the one who perseveres in all the virtues discovers that at the very top of the Ladder there is an unbridgeable gap between it and the Kingdom of God, a gap that can only be overcome by the hand of the Lord, Who reaches down to save us and bring us home.

Sergei Fudel, on sorrow and joy at Pascha

Now I am celebrating Pascha another way, on my own like a great sinner..., and in this fashion I rediscover the Paschal service. Till now it was the Divine service of Paradise, but in it I now see the possibility of repentance and remorse. My childhood and youth and also the first years of my priesthood were spent with our dear departed Father, and it was through him that I first learned to understand Pascha. ... Even as a child I was impressed by the way he sang the Paschal Ikos. ... He sang this Ikos in such a way that its meaning was revealed, and the sense of one or other of the expressions underlined. Then, amidst the delight and rejoicing of this night, he would suddenly retreat into himself, so to speak, and as he came to the words, 'O Master, arise, that those who have fallen may rise again,' I could sense that he was inwardly weeping and sobbing. Who was he grieving for? For our Saviour? No, now I know, it was for himself, the fallen. /.../ The triumphal climax of the yearly calendar ... merges into the climax of repentance..., so that the light of repentance pours down from Zion over the whole of the remainder of the Church calendar. A cry of repentance breaks into the Paschal hymns, a cry which penetrates into the depths of the penitent heart so that paradise is revealed. ... Tears, tears of repentance overwhelm me, but in my soul I can feel that joy is growing, joy that He has risen, and not only He but I also, I the fallen. (Cry of the Spirit, pp. 69-73)

The influence of the present environment is so strong, its mere power of suggestion so powerful, that a man may find himself advocating, with a certain enthusiasm, opinions which are in reality the exact contrary of those to which his own character would naturally take him.

- T. E. Hulme, A Tory Philosophy

The Image of God

On the Sunday of Orthodoxy our thinking about the meaning of icons inevitably leads us to thinking about the phrase 'image of God'.

In the story of creation the human person is said to have been made in the image and likeness of God. The 'image' has usually been thought of as something given and the 'likeness' as a potential. The relation of image to likeness might be likened to that of child to adult. It is often put this way: made in the image of God we are called to grow into His likeness.

But what is that image? Where can we find that image in ourselves and in others? There are a number of answers. Some suggest that the image is found in our faculty for reasoning, logic, analysis, understanding, that is in our mind. Others have thought that it is found in our ability to make choices and act freely. Still others have found it in our capacity for self-transcendence. It has been pointed out that there is something fundamentally relational in the image, for God says 'let us make man in our image' - and so the image is thought to have something to do with inter-personal communion.

These things are not, perhaps, mutually exclusive. The image, essentially mysterious, may have many aspects. If we were to think of the image of God as love, for example, we would see that love involves understanding (mind), action (will), self-transcendence, communion. Perhaps our capacity for love is as good an understanding of the image of God as any. We are created with the capacity for love and we are called to nurture this gift and grow in it into the likeness of God Who is, after all, Love.

There is more, however. The Apostle Paul tells us that our Lord Jesus Christ is the unique and perfect image of God. Following the Apostle and addressing God the Father, our Liturgy of St Basil says of our Lord Jesus Christ that He is the image 'of Thy goodness, the seal of Thy very likeness, showing forth in Himself Thee, O Father'.

Christ is the image of God. He is love incarnate. The image of God can be thought of as Christ in us, something given in our making, renewed in baptism, nurtured in the sacraments, built up through prayer and moral education, expressed in good-works and Christian character, growing unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ. This is our life in Christ, and at the heart of this is love.

Asceticism: the Cost of Discipleship

(from past years) Asceticism: the Cost of Discipleship

It is sometimes asked, why do monastic and ascetic saints figure so prominently in our church life? For example, during lent we have made much of the life and witness of St Gregory Palamas, St John of the Ladder, and today St Mary of Egypt in our liturgical worship and our seasonal teaching
and reflections. Wouldn't it be good to celebrate the witness of some married saints and saints whose sanctity shone forth in family life? Wouldn't it be good to reflect rather more on the kind of asceticism that must be part and parcel of leading a godly life in the world?

This is a good question. A partial answer as to why we do what we do may lie in the fact that so much of the content of our liturgical tradition comes from monastic sources and is promulgated by church authorities who were themselves monastics. Monasticism is a very powerful resource in the ongoing life of the Church and the pre-eminence of monastics and ascetics in our liturgical calendar and thus in our hymnography and celebration is simply part of the givenness of the tradition we have received.

But if we have received this tradition, it is surely because Orthodox believers are, generally speaking, lovers of monks and nuns and monasticism. It seems to me that the traditional role of monastics and monasteries in the piety of believers is not something imposed from without but comes from a deep affection, attraction and resonance within. This piety need not preclude a sense that more emphasis on married saints and Christian family life would be helpful.

But the most important answer to this question lies in the internal, thematic meaning of lent as a time for the renewal of our discipleship by means of the opening of our hearts and minds to God's grace through ascetic effort. There is a cost to discipleship and that cost is the inner meaning
of asceticism. The whole point of asceticism is to make discipleship costly. Unless the lenten disciplines of fasting. prayer and good works have an impact on self-satisfaction and a self-centred ordering and way of life, unless they inconvenience us in some way, unless they have a sacrificial character, unless they subvert in some way our nicely-ordered and comfortable lives, they don't have much point. For the Kingdom of Heaven is taken by force and violent men bear it way and no one ever attained salvation through convenience and ease.

Although monastic life cannot lay absolute claim to ascetic practice, it is in the lives of some of these saints that we find a very powerful and inspiring image of the cost of discipleship. This is especially the case with St Mary of Egypt. Her profound repentance, her ascetic struggle, and
her dedication to prayerful communion with God make her an example and a powerful intercessor for us.

What is pleaded

What is pleaded in the Mass is precisely the argosy or voyage of the Redeemer, his entire sufferings, death, resurrection and ascension. It is this that is offered on behalf of us argonauts and the whole argosy of mankind and indeed in some sense of all earthly creation, which, as Paul says, suffers a common travail.

David Jones, An Introduction to the Ancient Mariner