Month: October 2012

Fear of Flying

“Do you know what that means?” he asks. “That feeling at takeoff?”

“Transformation,” I say. “It’s a leap of faith, perhaps a leap into faith. It’s your mind telling your body to relax. the physics and the math work pretty well.”

“Some people never get over that fear, though,” he says. “Some people can never make that leap. Just like some people sometimes in the religious life never get over certain fears, they build up regulations and walls and rules. They do things that keep them from flying.. And it seems to me that the spiritual life is about letting go, is about being free and trusting. There is a sense of mystery about it. There is always a sense of mystery ….”

Thin Places & Thick Time, Saint Katherine Review, Volume 2, Number 3.

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Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

The Fontainebleau Manifesto

The Fontainebleau Manifesto

WE RENOUNCE THE FUTURE.
WE DON’T CARE FOR VICTORIES.
WE DON’T WANT TO RULE OTHER MEN.
WE DON’T WANT TO CONQUER NATURE.
WE KNOW THAT DEATH DEFEATS US.
WE WANT TO RECONQUER THE PAST,
LIVE FOR THE PRESENT, AND RULE ONLY OURSELVES.

OUR PRIDE IS THAT WE REMAIN SANE AND WILLING TO LOVE
DESPITE THE HORRORS OF THE WORLD, BUT IT IS DIFFICULT.
WE CAN’T LIVE ON BREAD SOURED BY SQUALOR.
WE CAN’T BREATHE AIR POISONED BY DEATH FACTORIES.

WE DON’T NEED MISSILES, CARS, COMPUTERS, ELECTRIC TOOTHBRUSHES.
WE CAN DO WITHOUT ALL THE JUNK GREAT KINGS COULD DO WITHOUT,
BUT WE CANNOT LIVE WITHOUT AIR, THE FORESTS, THE FIELDS AND THE RIVERS,
GREAT SQUARES AND GARDENS AND YES, OUR PALACES.
IT IS A LIE THAT THE WORLD CANNOT AFFORD SPLENDOR FOR EVERYONE-
WE RENOUNCE REAL-ESTATE VALUES.

WE CANNOT LIVE WITHOUT BEAUTY;
MANY OF US SEEK IT IN DRUGS
AND ALCOHOL AND HATE.
WE TRY NOT TO SUCCUMB TO SUBSTITUTES
BUT IT IS DIFFICULT.
THE WORLD NEEDS A ROYAL REVOLUTION
SO THAT ALL MEN MAY LIVE LIKE KINGS.

Stephen Vizinczey via Michael J. Sauter. I assume there’s some reason it came to me in all capital letters, so I left that undisturbed.

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Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Rearranging the mosaic

Just in case you’ve never encountered St. Irenaeus’ timeless simile, here’s Fr. George Florovsky’s telling:

Denouncing the Gnostic mishandling of Scriptures, St. Irenaeus introduced a picturesque simile. A skillful artist has made a beautiful image of a king, composed of many precious jewels. Now, another man takes this mosaic image apart, re-arranges the stones in another pattern so as to produce the image of a dog or of a fox. Then he starts claiming that this was the original picture, by the first master, under the pretext that the gems (the ψηφιδες) were authentic. In fact, however, the original design had been destroyed — λυσας την υποκειμενην του ανθρωπου ιδεαν. This is precisely what the heretics do with the Scripture. They disregard and disrupt “the order and connection” of the Holy Writ and “dismember the truth” — λυοντες τα μελη της αληθειας. Words, expressions, and images —ρηματα, λεξεις παραβολαι —are genuine, indeed, but the design, the υποθεσις (ipothesis), is arbitrary and false (adv. haeres., 1. 8. 1).

Another reason why I cherish every accusation that Orthodoxy is stagnant and hasn’t kept up with the times.

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Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Self vs. Identity

Sometimes, Fr. Stephen Freeman just takes my breath away. I’ve never heard anyone who can so evocatively speak (maybe even deepen) spiritual truths I thought were ineffable. He’s a keen observer, wide reader, and deep thinker.

I highly recommend The True Self and The Story of Me. It’s a podcast of less than 13 minutes if you can resist “rewinding.” From the website:

The true self is “hid with Christ in God,” St. Paul tells us. What then is the “self” that we live with every day? Fr. Stephen looks at how we create our own identity and how we should seek our true self in Christ.

From early in the Podcast (paraphrase):

The story we tell ourselves about who we are actually begins to become our identity. But this carefully constructed and defended story is not our true self. Distinguishing between the two is one of the most essential tasks of the spiritual life.

One distinction that struck me (though Fr. Stephen didn’t juxtapose them explicitly) is that the heart, the true self, is quiet, intuitive, lives in the present and is accepting of circumstance, whereas without an enemy, the mind is unsure even of its own identity.

Another observation: part of our terror of dementia is that we lose the stories from which we construct our egos, and cannot imagine an existence without them.

But I’m beginning to be able to imagine existence without a narrative construct because for 15 years, I’ve been showing up on Sunday morning, trying to “lay aside all earthly cares” – to step out of chronos into kairos. There are no histories in kairos – if only I can stay there rather than thinking “Wow, how far I’ve come! Remember how shallow Sunday services were back pre-Orthodoxy? When will my young grandson start behaving more attentively in Liturgy? What will I have for lunch? What time is it?“ 

Listening would be, I think, a very good use of your chronos.

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If you’re having time wrapping your mind around the possibility of a self without a narrative, try entering into the narrative of Lonnie Sue Johnson, as told by Amy Ellis Nutt – because Lonnie Sue, who has global amnesia as a result of encephalitis, has no narrative of her own.

It’s tragic – but I don’t think you could ever convince me that Lonnie Sue has no self.

“Our identity is made up a lot of what we remember about our past and when that’s taken away, what’s left?” said Michael McCloskey, a cognitive neuropsychologist at Johns Hopkins University, who is part of a team testing the parameters of Lonni Sue’s memory. “But clearly something is. She’s not an empty shell that can talk. She has likes and dislikes and has a personality . . . There’s something of a child-like quality about her. Perhaps without a memory of horrible things, she doesn’t know how people can be so cruel.”

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Talk about anticlimax:  Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.