Some clarification

When I use terms like “sundered ones” from my previous post (and probably in the next post to come) I am not repeating ideas from anyone’s mind but my own. These days I don’t attend seminars and lectures (not that there’s anything wrong with those). I’m learning on a different sort of track than I used to, but that’s just where I happen to be.

I’m reading. Books are helpful. Here are a few I’ve finished or am in the midst of: The Orthodox Study Bible; Surprised by Joy by C.S. Lewis; The Lost Gospel of Mary by Frederica Mathewes-Green; His Life Is Mine by Archimandrite Sophrony; and On the Incarnation by St. Athanasius (there is a new Greek and English version of this volume, that wouldn’t do me much good, but I linked to it).

Mostly what I’m doing is going to church and absorbing. Before I was of any mind to do this, as some of you who know me may remember, I surmised things about Eastern Orthodoxy, like when I had the thought that it and a certain church were to my daughter and me, regarding faith, as our different genre preferences were, regarding stories. Or authors. Or something. It’s interesting now to go back in my blog-past and read myself wrestling with what might be real and true. (Only an iceberg tip, compared to what went on in my journals and notebooks, without me really noticing.)

So. Now you know. I’m not, today, regurgitating anybody else’s reflections of what might be true. At least I don’t think so.

It is difficult to know myself. Well nigh impossible to understand others, because the experiences we different ones come from are just that — so different. The amazing thing is we communicate. Sometimes very well. Sometimes after only finding some time for clarification.

Organic as spring rain and soil

Now I think I see the benefit in the influence of the Church.

None of us Protestants have been under it. There were lingering Church influences on the way churches did things — as I’m learning, I see them more and more — and it is rather amazing how much truth held on over the centuries. Probably the remnants of worship of the true Messiah that had been handed down from his first disciples were kept by individuals and gatherings that, compared to their rulers, were powerless to stop the sunderings from the living Tradition, and yet they understood enough to maintain all that they were able. They had received grace, and in their flawed ways they passed it on. But cultural changes always seep into our souls and affect our practices. We Protestants had lost much of the means toward spiritual healing, beginning back when we became Roman Catholics, and of course long before that people were rebellious, unrepentant. They were that way during the days of Peter and Paul.

The Holy Spirit’s work may indeed look as organic as spring rain and soil, the paradigm into which seeds try to grow. Like Jesus’s parable and any peek at the garden will show, there are various scenarios possible; there are no guarantees of fruitfulness in any one instance. There is, however, always good soil, because the sower made things that way. There is always belief in right doctrine, belief in the Creator. There is always “all truth” that the Spirit was sent to lead us into.

The Church’s tradition covers everything, addresses everything, that we Protestants have brought up over the millennia as we sundered ones tried to rewrite things from scratch. We simply need to see the actual history and to repent of our screw-ups. We need to submit to the Spirit and, receiving grace, begin to receive the healing.

Choice toward personhood

Every other human being, according to the ancient church, shares the same nature I do. But we are each persons — or, at least, we are each on our way to becoming persons. We are now individuals, subject to human nature. The distinction for and of Saints is they are those who have crossed a particular barrier/threshold, they are those who have become persons. These have moved somewhere beyond human nature, or at least beyond fallen human nature. Not that they share God’s unique nature, but they share his energies, and so then, as the Apostle Peter said, they share in the divine nature. Which, according to the Church, involves personhood as sovereign, as supreme. Which moves (in an organic motion) into life in all its fullness. Ultimate life.

Death (destruction) of the individual that is me — the nascent person if you will — is a formidable enemy. In the second epistle of Peter, the apostle is perhaps saying something along these lines. (And he says that Paul wrote about the “same things”, and that Paul’s writings are hard to understand and can be twisted by those “untaught” as well as by those “unstable”. Not that I am stable; don’t take my word for things; take Peter’s, take Paul’s.)

The idea I may be working with, then, is that I am not my worst enemy. I am a creature whose destiny can be personhood, which is life. By making rebellious, awful choices I am an enemy to myself, because I turn away from life, my best destiny. Nonpersonhood, it seems obvious, would be death, destruction. My ultimate foe. Maybe God's powerful, ultimate wrath is/will actually be seen toward ultimate death, the thing individuals can ultimately choose, being free, being creatures, not the Creator, who "has life in himself" and who "can't deny himself."

What does the pro-life movement base itself on, after all? Their message is that through abortion we are denying personhood. Or at least we are denying existence under the sun to those who are made such that they can become persons.

I suppose that in the pro-abortion movement might lurk the correct understanding that a little human who gets to be born is still not a full person. In the sense of the Church, maybe, then, the abortionist, who is denying that little human life here and now, is also still not a full person, because none of us is. And we are given the real option to deny ourselves the journey toward full personhood (maybe by aborting babies; maybe by gossiping, maybe by clinging to ideas that are outside of the truth and bring death).

The tragedy in abortion is not deepest for the baby, although an injustice occurs for that individual. The tragedy is deepest for the individuals who bring about that abortion of the process of living under the sun. The act of abortion is sin. As does every transgression, it moves toward the ultimate death, the second death. Thank heaven God is merciful toward me and every other sinner.

The choice toward ultimate life or toward ultimate death continues throughout our existences under the sun. This is a thought that pauses me. But while it is a fearful thought, it is not a despairing one. I remain one who has not made myself and has not created reality. The Creator, who is good, has done this and has provided the one good choice that can only be rejected; it will not be taken away. And I can be comforted by those who have gone before and have remained, abided, in the choice for ultimate life. Their choice is a Person in whom from the beginning was Life, and the Life was the light of men. They have become, at least more fully, persons. Saints.

with mustard

When my kids were young and we were out and about, I often found myself optimistically urging, "Let's catch up." The objective may have been big sister surging ahead in search of frogs beside a stream, or Daddy making long strides across the park. What made it fun for us lag-behinds in our potentially disadvantaged situation was adding a bit to what I first said. "Let's catch-up. With mustard."

Visions of hot dogs and french fries helped me, at least, and sometimes my children, summon a burst of new energy.

Those mommyhood days captured and deserved every drop of limited energy I possess. They were wonderful, except probably most of all for wondering too much: what people thought; whether I was failing worse than anyone; how I might ever rest; well, you who are reading are possibly someone who knows the list by heart. Or knows how it feels to imagine these things, watching someone else live their mommying phase.

Back then I swam the jelly river of stress pretty regularly. I guess flailed in that river is how to describe it. I tend to blame my chest-wall pains and panics on the demands of Christianity, as I was practicing it then at home and in church. There really was a lot of confusion and despair within my American Bible-based conservative nondenominational scene. But overall I think, looking back now, I was simply in the situation I had chosen and had found myself in. With a lot of other folks. Most of whom tried to make progress, as well, against a sticky current.

(I guess I obviously prefer salty, fast-food entries to sweet spreads on toast.) Anyway, stressed and despairing as I was, I was learning. Preparing. What would come next would be better.

Thankfully, the parenthood phase which I traveled with middle-to-late teens took place in a Christian situation I chose with gladness and rested in profoundly. I still stressed myself out, but I was all the while gulping wonderful insights. Full-course meals, perhaps. I loved hunkering down with my Bible and my books. And my journals and my writing. Going inward, inward. Staying calm. It was intriguing. It was enough. I was, yeah, well a little, a hermit. I was more certain of everything than probably I will have been at any time in my life, when all's said and done.

Still and once again, I was preparing.

Today I have grownup children around me. None of us consume many condiments, and we each go our own way, yet we process together somewhat often about Christianity. This phase, I expect, will burst the seeds from their pod, a few seconds into my future, and there will be fresh mommy- and daddyhoods happening, and stress, and preparation.

I think now in some sense I am the toddler, the one lagging and surging off toward the pretty butterfly, the one who must pause and consider something wonderful about movement in my own tiny self that others have long been accustomed to. I may never grow accustomed. I don't imagine I'll get bored, either. I may joyfully choose the long way though I never catch up.

Release and the Tree

Some days I spend hours in church. In gathering, in the building where we gather. I suppose the rest of my days may involve a process of “churching” begun recently — or did it begin long, long ago?

This past summer Timothy and I went to several early liturgies, as newly-ordained Fr. Daniel “served” his first forty times at St. John’s. People from the church community came to support Daniel when they could. During those lagging mornings, tiredness dragged at me, the exhaustion borne of battle within my mind.

I was torn in two.

On one side, voices raged, forces pushed, arguments spoke tirelessly. Their refrains, from deep inside me,  were familiar, ceaseless, and yet at the same moment they were curious things. They suggested in the strongest terms that I was not supposed to be doing what I was doing. Liturgy was wrong; the Church was wrong. The Church, after all, did not exist (hadn't I believed this many long seasons?), and I should have no part in practices that would influence me toward what must be rejecting the Messiah’s teachings.

All the while this din was raised, however, a gentle, joyful, tender yet solidly resilient theme capered in the air, in curly-cues of incense smoke rising through sunbeams. I didn’t know exactly all it was saying/singing/waltzing, but I did see in every instance of the battle trying to be joined with it by the raging voices in my mind that it carefully refused to take any bait. Wise, it neither rushed to trot out irrational retaliations nor subjected me to academic rationality (rationalizations?).

It simply was. The theme existed without a problem: the theme presented my heart’s desire. The only thing necessary. Mary has chosen that which shall never be taken from her.

For years in the past, I got close to that essentiality and joyed greatly in doing so. I believed the gospel which Jesus came to present was the thing. I would carry and share it forever.

But back then I was plucking a ripe plum from the branch and missing the reality of the tree. The Tree. The Man. Branches lifted for me to climb toward my desireful destination. The Man who is God. Back then I ate the plum while believing the encouragement to disbelieve in the Tree. Mary sat at his feet, listening to him speak. Mary loved him with all her being; Martha got something of this love but was distracted from it. I was somewhere in between, caught in folds of reality by philosophy’s shiny grasp.

I am allowed now, the theme that capers and kisses reminds me, to climb. To grow. Interactive to the ten-thousandth degree, the Tree will grow into me, as I into it; its energies will come and make their abode with me, as it has with the frail yet faithful. From the beginning. From generation to generation.

Choosing the unique Son

An end-of-week perspective on Christianity, by one still processing.

Those who choose the Son have chosen the Father. They have received/will receive the Holy Spirit. This choice, then, of the only begotten, unique, Son of God is the only choice, really, toward eternity, the only choice worth looking into. Looking into this most important choice entails what?

What did the Son, Jesus, say about doing this work of choosing, which must be the ultimate good work, or the foundational good work?

Some of the things he said:

    Follow him,

    come to him,

    believe in him.

    Repent and sin no more.

    Do good to others.

    Keep his word, his message.

    Watch for his return.

    Tell others about him.

Did Jesus provide a context other than our homes, workplaces, and families for choosing him? What is the context Jesus gave to us for choosing him?

Jesus asked his disciples who they said he was. After Peter confessed Jesus as the Christ, Messiah, the Son of the Living God, Jesus said that on this rock he would build his church. Upon the solid base of the confession Peter gave, Jesus would build his gathering, or his assembly (as "ecclesia" or “church” can also be translated) of those who followed, came, believed, repented, did good to others, kept his word, watched for his return, and spread the news about him.

Against this context for choosing, this Church, the gates of Hades would not stand. Since Hades (Gehenna) was the word in that time for the place of the dead, this perhaps meant something along these lines: the place of the dead would be dismantled by the Church that Jesus would build.

A story of people from Campus Crusade for Christ, who undertook a journey toward discovery of what the Church might be (if it existed at all), is found in a book called Becoming Orthodox. It’s not a tract telling you how you really should become Orthodox. It’s a book about one group’s journey (and now, in the latest version, about where they are today).

pardon my texting

On a recent evening the Art Walk downtown cast its perspectives, in cafes and on corners, on subjects of nature, nurture, music, magic, lust, and love. People roamed and snacked and appreciated.

Someone commented on their smart phone's capabilities. I responded, "I have a dumb phone." Which is true. Or maybe it's my phone that has the dumb one. But, perspective, it's all a matter of.

Anyway. I don't text or applicate. What I have done, forever (hm, as I grow longer in years that's less an exaggeration), is appreciate and be nurtured by books, those texts which are somewhat longer lived. This has become my new thought for the current year, a very old and lovely thought, that still rings in my self like music (and magic): Which book shall I read today?

Here is a taste of my findings, relating to artful stuff, from C.S. Lewis's wonderful Surprised by Joy:

To compare and to prefer [is] an operation that does little good even when dealing with works of art and endless harm when dealing with nature. Total surrender is the first step toward the fruition of either. Shut your mouth; open your eyes and ears. Take in what is there and give no thought to what might have been there or what is somewhere else. That can come later, if it must come at all. (And notice here how the true training for anything whatever that is good always prefigures and, if submitted to, will always help us in, the true training for the Christian life. That is a school where they can always use your previous work whatever subject it was on.)

A little later in the same volume is a smidge that inspires me with desire to start a whole new blog. (In fact, I did):

What I like about experience is that it is such an honest thing. You may take any number of wrong turnings; but keep your eyes open and you will not be allowed to go very far before the warning signs appear. You may have deceived yourself, but experience is not trying to deceive you. The universe rings true wherever you fairly test it.

Regarding nature/essence

Those times when Jesus prayed all night to the Father, did he bring a list of things to be addressed? Or did he pray from the Scriptures? Was it a combination? Was he talking to himself, as some insist (with tongue in cheek)? Or was he speaking as God to God, as others insist? Or is there a way at all to explain what Jesus did when he prayed?

Was the experience one of rest? Ordinary? Or was he in particular turmoil? Well, we know of one time he was in agony. In Gethsemane, he requested release from the burden of his task while remaining committed to doing the Father’s will rather than his own of the moment.

How could someone who may perfectly represent a Person who is the only Person perfectly, at every moment, ask to be released and do his own will?

The answer, in the Christian group I’m from that I’m calling ultra-Protestant, is that Jesus was scripted to do so, to give us the perfect example of laying down one’s own desires before God, even the desire for saving one’s own life.

The answer, for Orthodox Christians, is… Similar, I think, in that Jesus gave us the perfect example of humility before God — he practiced a process of laying down the desire even for life before God. Organically, genuinely, Jesus expressed the reality of his situation to his Father. His free will and choices as a Person have ever been free. Was he demonstrating perfect freedom, yet perfect unity and concert with the Father with whom he is one? I and my Father are one.

In Orthodox theology, Jesus is a Person of the single essence of God, one of Three Who have been revealed to us. Personhood is sovereign to nature. We of the single nature or essence of humanity are individuals first, on the road to becoming persons in the light of God’s single essence and reality. This concept, to me, has become more than a narrative, more than a good book.

I love a good book, don’t get me wrong. But I rise from the sofa where I’ve been fully engaged with reading — observing the world of the mind who created the story — and I go and do and exist and move and have my being. The book travels with me, as elements of the story remain. There are many, many wonderful stories. But I can’t live a story. I must live all dimensions of reality that are given to me.

I am more than:

    A character in a book

    A Gentile dog

    A creature who is my own worst enemy

I do, perhaps, fit all of the above descriptions, but I am more than those things.

God does more than:

    Compose a narrative

    Create good and evil characters

    Choose for every moment of time what will happen

He does, perhaps, do all of the above, but he has revealed himself doing more than we can begin to imagine. His ways are completely beyond our ways. We may find helpful analogies for his activities, but we are charged to learn from him, from Himself.

I have been charged to learn from God’s essence. The Father is who I’m referring to when I say God; if I get this, the  Eastern Orthodox are understanding that throughout Old Testament times the title God referred to the Father. But “He” and “God” can also refer to the Trinity of Persons, the nature of the triune Creator/Deity, whose actions are always one and never separated. Therefore, the Trinity came to earth; in fact, the Trinity has always been interacting with the creation.

Still, as Jesus said, no one has seen the Father. The Father is the Source of everything, including the the Son and the Holy Spirit. Perhaps this implies the Father’s complete “otherness” and dominion over all else, as well as, or alternatively, describing us as unable to “see” what the Father is, because he is so other, so beyond. We would die, we are just not and can’t be in the realm of the Father. And this can lend possibility to the thought that the Father/Source could produce/has always produced other Persons to share his same essence (perhaps the “otherness”). And maybe this “production” was different from our “creation”, our creation having started at a point in the beginning (of time; of whatever began; this that began we experience in part and someday will fully know; we won’t ever know God’s own, non-beginning, Personal doings unless he desires to and can reveal them to us without our being exterminated).

In John’s gospel Jesus says, “I and my Father are one,” and, “If you have seen me, you have seen the Father.” Regarding this relationship, there is a choice between two compelling teachings I have received, between two realities:

1. hearing this as Jesus saying “I, a created being, represent the Father perfectly, while being a man like any man (except for God’s choice and determination) and replaceable by any other man” (this is one ultra-Protestant understanding as I have received it); and

2. hearing this as Jesus saying “I represent the Father perfectly — you can begin to recognize this, in part because I’m telling you no one knows who the Father is except the Son and those to whom the Son reveals the Father. As the Son I am, as well, completely unique from any other — you can begin to recognize this, in part because I’m telling you that no one knows who the Son is except the Father” (see Matt. 11:27 and Luke 10:22).

The choice between these two options remains critical, a very live one for me.

Considering His action

The way I’m thinking these days, I have for now dubbed Protestantism (including Roman Catholicism) the religious “behavioral spectrum”. At one end of the spectrum is this idea: As long as you behave like us, we don’t care what you think. At the other end is this: As long as you think like us, we don’t care how you behave. In both instances, there is a separation I’m seeing between individuals that is artificial when compared with reality as Christ modeled reality. At both ends of the spectrum pride can receive free reign.

This is a concern, because throughout the Bible we find this exhortation: turn away from pride and embrace humility. It was a project necessary from the beginning of our humanity, I expect. At least it became the necessary thing for Adam and Eve to do, once they had chosen pride before God in the aftermath of their transgression.

I need to work every moment on this project; it is the reason, I think, that I find myself in the Church. I’m grateful and happy to do this, to work out this project’s details for the rest of my days.

The reason there is joy in the prospect of working on the project is that in every way Christ modeled for us the path of humility. He who did not rebel once, he who, as the Church teaches, became an infant while remaining “very God” did not harm his human mother in any way while being born.

All other human babies make a violent entrance into the stream of humanity. This can’t be helped. I didn’t know, growing in my mom’s uterus, that I was making the situation impossible for her to keep me there, to avoid suffering. All I must have understood during the birth process was my own confusion, suffocation, amazement at bursting out into space and white lights in my eyes, with blood and tissue the river around my naked self.

The Church teaches that Jesus, coming as a baby and being truly human, at the same time was able to keep Mary his mother from losing her virginity. I hadn’t considered just how it might feel to give birth as a virgin. The thing was hard enough for me who'd had years of womanly experience. I can only imagine the suffering of one who “never having known a man” must now be stretched, in a sense mutilated, in order to provide passage to her baby. This historical moment of Jesus’s birth was certainly before Caesarian sections were widely practiced. Maybe if Mary had been in Rome, and royal, someone could have experimented on her; even then the results might well have been disaster.

But we are presented, Protestant as well as Orthodox Christians, with a miracle. The promised Messiah enters the womb of the Virgin by means of the Holy Spirit. No male involved; no sexual union. And in the Church’s tradition the understanding remains that after Messiah’s birth those closest to the event found evidence that Mary remained a virgin, unharmed.

For me, this realization dawning brings the greatest glimpse of humility I have received. God breaking into human reality without doing any violence. Taking whatever pains needed to accomplish this. The Father, having always planned to send the Son, never made the requirements for our reception harmful or painful in the manner of our way of bloodshed. This must have almost made it hurt worse (spiritually speaking): to have him arrive so very humbly.

Compare his birth, then, with the manner of death he took on for our sakes. It happened in the same fashion: when the time came, God’s only begotten (unique) Son died, so that whoever believes in him might live. The violence of his death wasn’t directed by God toward men; it went the other way around. Jesus took it on. He suffered all the pain in his completion of a startling change to our reality, sparing us as he had done when he entered into our reality.

This act by Christ wasn’t a behavior; it was so much more than a performance. It was an action most organic, most real.