Thoughts on Redemption

In the view I grew up with, our goal or God’s goal for us was to bring us back to the garden of Eden. This meant, symbolized, etc., coming back into the perfect, mature fellowship Man had with God before the Fall.

The original or Eastern understanding appears to have been similar yet different. Transgression by Adam and Eve was a real thing, before which they had dwelt innocently, in direct communication with God. The difference may have to do with a question: were the first people, or was Man in Paradise, perfect (as in complete, wise, fulfilled, and so on)? Or were they immature, nascent, just beginning their journey toward relating to God as they were designed to in the future?

I’ve read somewhere in Orthodox literature that God determined to send His Son before the foundation of what we know as reality was laid. And the Son was always intended to bring Man into union with God. It didn’t matter what Man might choose to do; God’s determination stood, stands, outside of time and reality as we know it. If Man hadn’t transgressed, therefore, the Son would still have come, in the fulness of time. Christ wasn’t sent as an afterthought, defense against Satan, or Plan B.

Man was completely free to choose. God, I would imagine, knew Man would choose transgression at some point. This was revealed in a test, a commandment: Do not eat the fruit of this one tree.

Man ate the fruit. Okay, there’s your transgression. Now what would he do? In innocence, immaturity, and rebellion, Man made excuses. Blamed others. Stood before God, unrepentant. God cursed Man as punishment.

In the understandings I grew up with, God got angry with Man, because Man did a bad thing. All these centuries, God has been waiting for Man to return to the Garden, to Paradise, to what was going on before — no clothes, animals all newish, and so on.

Here’s another question: what if the Curse has been something instructive, and when its effects are ended, the good, righteous (dikaios) process for Man continues on? What if the Son’s coming into reality as we know it, as was always foreordained, included instruction about the Curse Man had chosen, and began (or completed) the dissolution of that Curse, while including, as was predetermined, Messiah’s active union with Man, so that Man can continue his journey, his growth, once again rather than still doing so as Man might have remained if he had immediately repented?

What if Redemption means going forward rather than going back? This would eliminate nostalgia; Man’s longing for Paradise would be, rather than a wish for the good old days, a sober, joyful continuation toward maturity in the household of his Father.

Time

Evidence and passages and workings-out and many, varied reactions have fed into my process since the first night I went to an Eastern Orthodox Vigil service with a view to serious consideration.

Questions, always. How can they say...? Aren't we never supposed to think...? Doesn't the Bible mean this over here, rather than that over there they are emphasizing...hm, oh...wait...? What if...what if...?

All my life I’ve been used to one person (99% of the time a male person) standing in front of a group at church and teaching. The services I've known centered around this time of speaking, or sermonizing, which can include very wonderful teaching, but might not. Orthodox services often contain a homily (though not always), but this is not the main focus. And yet I have been richly taught in every service I've attended. Taught by persons from over the course of recorded time. Both men and women have contributed to the tapestry which is remembered expression of what’s been given.

One thing that has dawned on me (many things dawn as time continues) is that this “remembered expression” is what could naturally have happened, if people preserved, both in written forms and by committing to memory, what was done from the beginning. The stories of the actions taken by God the Father, by the Holy Spirit, by Jesus Christ are the stories I want to sink my teeth into. Since the day I made the decision to be a Christian, this is what I have wanted.

The worries which are natural for Christians in the West are the worries I struggled with. Heartily, meatily, I struggled for months. Glad I am that my past Christian training was done by faithful people who weren’t out to brainwash me, make money for themselves, or other such hogwash as is repudiated in Scripture. Because of my Protestant teachers’ high standards, I have for years been able to discern some things (I’m neither a scholar nor anywhere near flawless, but I can think for myself).

And so I have delved (and am still delving) into questions, such as: 1) Why allow only Church members to receive communion?; 2) Why call Mary the Mother of God? Is this worshiping her?; 3) Why have pictures (icons) of people in the churches? Why are they dubbed Saints?; 4) Why repeat phrases? Is this a behavior meant to be done enough times to win God’s approval?; and 5) For that matter, why make ritualistic motions, such as the sign of the cross over oneself? Isn’t this another attempt to “look good” to God and others, which would be in a biblical sense “fearing” man instead of fearing God?

If I were anything like a theologian or philosopher or rationalist, I might go on from here to systematically answer these questions. I’m none of those things, and if I were, I wouldn’t know enough yet to do so, but I do know something. The same action can be done by two different people for two different reasons — by any number of people for any number of complex reasons. This fact doesn’t eliminate the possibility of real, historical, organic truth being present in the meaning behind the action. I have been testing out answers to the questions above by participating, by tasting and seeing. By living in the Church.

An aspect I love of the prophetic, teaching writings in the Bible is their theme of leaving artifice behind and turning again and again toward truth. What was stated by people in the Bible had to be tested by the passage of time, lots of time. Their biblical theme, Christians believe, has so far stood the test.

May we each keep turning toward truth, and may what I share here be in that direction. Please weigh in at those points where it sounds to you like I’m rebuilding an artifice and so living the life of a transgressor.

underground

When relaxed, at table, new friends acquaintancing, while storminess abated outside wide windows, sipping vodka, sharing past adventures, the value of the now, the free, the aboveground, the opulence, contrasted vividly in the mind with the story being shared.

New parents, in Russia, in what was, meeting the challenge of a system doomed. No opulence. No basics (as I consider basic, anyway). Cloth diapers. (Well, I did that, pride insists.) But no washer, no dryer, no Mr. Appliance, no laundromat. A husband's nightly chore, washing for the baby for the next day.

The gift of city life: the underground. Before the baby, at university, acquiring a contraband Bible. Curiosity turns to immersion turns to joy. Belief. In America, years later, there would be laundry appliances aplenty and the house of God. But beneath the strongholds of the U.S.S.R. the one thing necessary blesses the soul, contains in meekness the beauty of the universe.

Turn

What do you do when God tells you to do something? I know. This is crazy talk — God speaking and such stuff; doesn’t happen anymore, and those to whom it does happen are completely irrational. I don’t blame you for thinking, I can see why this woman stood in an Orthodox service “seeing” things; she’d already gone way round the twist.

All I can say for the moment is I believed I had been told to consider seriously the things of the Eastern church and to do so humbly. I knew it was God who “told” me this, even though I didn’t hear a voice, even though the message was rather complex (as well as simply pointed in one moment) and had been building up for a long while out of my assessment of reality as it was being presented to my mind and heart.

If you can read further after such a statement, I’ll set us back in the midst of the service known as Vigil. I hadn’t learned yet that the service’s name meant (among other things) there was a Vespers and a Matins included. I wondered at one point why the candles were blown out and a man moved near the front to read from the Psalms.

The Bible I know. The words of David are dearly familiar. I’m with him, when he writes so poetically of despair and of hope, of pain and of trust in the Lord his God. Gratefully I listened.

Then the candles were relit and the choir resumed chanting. And every time I thought we might have come to a natural stopping place, the service continued. My feet grew sore afraid this would be their last stand. All the while, though, I heard strains of stories, weavings in and out of pieces I knew from Scripture.

I didn’t stand up the whole time, just most of it. I noticed some men across the aisle sitting for a lot of the service. I think I felt self-conscious and wanted to show I could sort of participate, as I understood participating right then — also I knew Timothy and Nina were standing with the choir. I wasn’t yet aware of the reality in Orthodox services. As C.S. Lewis once described it, “the beauty of [attending an Orthodox Liturgy] was that nobody took the slightest notice of what anyone else was doing.”

The feel of hiking, I decided at last, was the same sort of feel of this experience. Not knowing what was around each new bend, pressing myself to keep going — not through fear or anxiety, because (who’d have believed it?) I was drawn into the “terrain”, the “view”. I was hearing about the prodigal son (as the choir continued their chanted stories) and then would come a strain about “children” who were cast into a furnace yet weren’t burned. I recognized both those tales. Like a mountain peak mirrored in still pools, the acquisition of beauties came upon me. I had been as a midwesterner who’d never embarked from a wilderness trailhead, following others, amazed at the details of an adventure impossible with camera to fully capture.

Unlike my dad, who after his first youthful day fishing up the McKenzie was forever hooked, I remained in standby position regarding the Orthodox “chorus” and its possible implications for my universe. I had a lot of thinking to do. I should say, I had more possibilities to consider inside my little self than a bee who bumbles upon an alpine meadow in full bloom.

Told

I went to my first real experience of the Eastern Orthodox church with a very tight-squeezed mind. I guess what I mean by that is I had a mind chock full of wondermental ideas. The best of what I enjoyed about belief was jammed in there, and so it ought to have been a very joyful space. To some degree it was.

I had spent minutes upon hours upon days, weeks, and years reviewing what I learned in my experience of being a Protestant Christian to the max. Waking at night, I would “meditate on” the things I read and studied in the Bible and on their implications for everything in my life (and in everyone else’s life). I loved doing this, don’t get me wrong. I read, wrote, and blogged about my view of God. I aspired to be a philosopher of the Bible.

This aspiration came from a good place. I don’t wish to sound ungrateful for the amazing teaching I received during my final Protestant years, or for the friends in the community I studied with. More than ever, I thank God for their contribution to my education, for all the hard work of the teachers there. Thanks to my time spent along life’s road with them, I was in quite an interesting position that Saturday evening when I attended my first Vigil, with a nascent interest and my tight-squeezed mind.

Until that night, my steps inside the doors of Orthodoxy had been reluctant at best. At worst they were nearly footfalls of rage. I didn’t understand why my daughter, Victoria, and my husband, Timothy, kept returning here, doing whatever it was they did on “Nativity”, “Theophany”, and “Pascha”. I had stood through a sampling of the weekly services. I had spent an afternoon talking with Victoria’s “spiritual father”. (He obviously didn’t get where I was coming from, but he had been direct and nonthreatening; I felt he was a kindly sort, though theologically muddled.) I had endured Victoria’s receiving of the Orthodox name “Nina” and her baptism — and I should say that although the latter felt endure-ful due to its length and the repetition of some phrases, it had looked like a joyful time for the people participating; I had visualized some glimmers in Nina’s baptismal liturgy of what could be called gospel truth.

But, oh my gosh, these Orthodox liked to go on forever. As the Vigil service got underway, I could see tonight would be no exception. The only, slightest difference wasn’t to be found in the chanting choir, the incense wafting, or the faces looking out from candle-lit icons.

The difference was inside me. I had been told to be here.

Tight

A friend of mine articulated well the problem she and I each fled from not long before we met. In differing circumstances, both of us left one corner of existence as Protestants in America, the corner known as Evangelical Christian culture. We didn't hate the people we farewelled; we didn't condemn them to eternal damnation or anything. We simply had had enough, inside ourselves within that culture, of taking on certain behaviors in order to win God's favor.

Speaking for myself, this had been a troublesome issue for more than a decade. After giving birth to my daughter, I recognized a need to raise her within a faith context. In a genuine way, I think, I had decided to follow Jesus, but for a couple years Timothy and I didn't make an attempt to "fellowship" anywhere. Then, in the late 80s, we found a very nice, family-friendly congregation where a dear, white-haired preacher taught simply from the Bible. Maybe if all things had remained equal we would still be attending there, our kids raised and our world cycling in an idyllic routine toward retirement.

But we moved away. The next years brought my first tastes of volunteerism, political action, women's ministries, homeschooling. I watched my husband baptize our kids. I wrote for Christian magazines. I was determined to reach "success" in a way that would give Christ glory, in a manner that would please God.

I was behaving.

Not that any of those things are necessarily wrong to do. It's just that my attitude, my heart, was aimed squarely at myself. God would surely reward me. I had filled in the blanks correctly on my application.

Interestingly, inside myself I lived with tremendous turmoil. It came out at home -- scrubbing sudsy dishes at the sink, troweling stubborn backyard weeds, reacting to requests from Timothy. Life isn't fair! my turmoil shouted. God shouldn't treat me this way. When will someone notice my goodness?

The gift I received back then, about a dozen years ago now, was permission to see my assumptions and my presumption before God. I began a journey toward the Scriptures in a deeper way, released from the burden of Evangelical trappings I'd got trapped in. I relaxed. I started to let God be sovereign, even if it meant I was truly a little critter (which I was/am) needing mercy that by definition could not be won, could only be received with gratefulness and a sort of fearful joy.

I began practicing.

Probably if all things had remained equal I would still be practicing the way of non-church, non-ritual. But the problem there, for me, became a continuing depression. I was reaching toward God and Life with my mind, on the basis of ideas regarding Jesus Christ, via a brilliant methodology for Bible study. I was seeking to grasp the scriptural authors' original intentions. It was invigorating, in our present time so far from New Testament days. But I'm beginning to understand only now that, after a certain point, I once again was behaving certain ways. Following the rules, and, yes, keeping them, but having run into a wall, into a theological corner.

My mind was squeezed very tight.

Beauty in the tragic

The picture of David is the picture of Adam, when it comes to sin. Each was a believing-in-God person, and each was living rightly before God every day. Until. Afterward, each deepened the sin by delaying repentance. Each made things worse for himself and those around him. Each hid from what he knew so well he must do, in relationship with his creator. Each needed to reveal himself in front of God, and each chose not to.

This is my story, too.

The hiding is the grasping (what feels like revelation to myself) of an idea that I am God. Or at least I should be, and I should make this happen in accord with my present needs. Reality must bend to my wishes. My desire for this becomes so strong that I don’t even feel it as a desire out of harmony with what’s real. This is why in each story we find present temptation (the serpent, lust) — which is the grasping, the ducking out of bounds and off the grid. I no longer desire harmony, accord, concert. I want to do it my way, but what that ultimately means is I want to die. I didn’t ask to be created in the first place; I’ll take this in hand and end it here, thanks anyway.

God lets us go that way, if we want it badly enough.

The beauty in the tragic stories of Adam and then David is the part when repentance does happen. Genesis doesn’t specifically show Adam’s moment, but the implication is there, in the lineage which passes to righteous Seth, that repentance took place. Tradition expresses Adam’s longing for Paradise lost, in the bowing to the East where lay the Garden of Eden’s barred entrance. David’s moment, by biblical contrast, is vivid, technicolored. He, as anointed King most powerful, knew it was against God only that he had sinned. His sackcloth, his ashes, were inexhaustible, and yet they were sprinkled with wisdom.

These men went down to dust before God, in figurative and literal ways. It didn’t matter, though, that death would claim them. Repenting and confessing, they had set their hearts back on the real path.

They, with all the power God bestows, had chosen.

They would live.

in context

The other day I accidentally visited the church I left in 1999. Lately I've been driving a relative to doctor appointments, and we were out and about after a nice lunch together. There was a half-hour wait for the next appointment, and we both needed a bathroom, but the doctor's office was closed for lunch. So, there, voila, across the street, was the church I used to go to. They had a bathroom.

I went to the church office and saw two women I used to know. They smiled and seemed genuinely happy to see me. I explained our situation and asked about using their restrooms, and the women said, sure, go ahead. Then they went back to their computers. Neither of them looked up again when my relative and I passed their window coming and going.

I had a familiar pang of emotion. Often, attending that church, I felt like the people treated me in such a manner -- they didn't look up at me in reassurance at times I considered it would have been nice for them to do so. Around that group, I felt rather ignored and small.

Later the other day, I reconsidered my reaction. Maybe there was a fuller context to try to examine.

I have learned, from the best teachers over my life's decades, that context is king. We long for fullness. No one gets a full picture of reality in this life, but each of us was implanted with the desire to know, to apprehend. Context is the (mostly invisible to others) stuff surrounding what we say, what we do. It's also the "stuff," or the reality, surrounding what God says and does. Reality is God's business. No one knows why God does what He does in reality without understanding, without a fuller picture of the context. Only God can give that fuller picture.

How does God give a person more fullness? I can, of course, only speak for myself. If I didn't believe God "revealed Himself to men," I would be a very different person living a very different life. My children wouldn't have been born. As I said to someone recently, "I would so be a worldly academic." By implication, from what I have seen of worldly academics, I would no longer believe God exists. I might go through the motions of believing; I might belong to a "faith community." But the context of my existence would probably not really include a Creator who is a Person and who might reveal Himself to men, to me.

The past year has given me what I consider glimmers of a fuller picture of God's context. From this small awakening, as I see it, a bit of creative understanding might be starting to emerge. Regarding the church office women, maybe they weren't ignoring my relative and me. Maybe, out of deferential kindness, they were leaving us be. Maybe they were meditatively working for the Lord, to their fullest.

Pondering this my brain says, don't forget that back when you went to their church, you saw other things that helped inform your suspicion that people like these women didn't care about you.

And then from a new context I conclude, so what? What if I'm supposed to, what if I'm now allowed to, give a person a creative context, a view toward the longing each of us has for God, for Christ, for bowing to His longings and His love? Maybe this is what love demands. Maybe I would rather have people, in various sorts of contexts, do so unto me.

alive

It is always shocking to meet life where we thought we were alone. "Look out!" we cry, "it's alive."....

There comes a moment when people who have been dabbling in religion ("Man's search for God!") suddenly draw back. Supposing we really found Him? We never meant it to come to that!

Worse still, supposing He had found us?

~C.S. Lewis, Miracles