Today is the Sunday of the Prodigal Son, part of the Church’s preparation for Lent.
Hesitating at the threshold
During my years as an Orthodox priest, I have had visitors to my parish who sheepishly told me that they had visited for a number of weeks but had never gotten out of their cars. They came to Church, but could not go in. When I’ve been told such a thing, I understood that I was speaking with someone who had, at last, found the courage to cross the threshold, to take a step beyond the bulwark of unbelief and to risk an encounter with God. They already understood that the consequences of such an encounter would change their lives. That this has been a not uncommon story across the years speaks volumes to me about the perception of Orthodox Christianity.
In Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Mr. Beaver says this about Aslan (the Christ figure) when asked, ‘Is he safe?’:
“Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good.”
The great contradiction in Christianity is the claim that Jesus Christ was crucified, dead and buried, and has risen from the dead. It is a supernatural claim that echoes through every sentence of the New Testament. It was the contradiction voiced by every martyr standing before the flames, the sword, the lions, and every wicked form of torture. The tomb was empty. Christ rose from the dead…
“and was seen by Cephas [Peter], then by the twelve. After that He was seen by over five hundred brethren at once, of whom the greater part remain to the present, but some have fallen asleep. After that He was seen by James [the Brother of the Lord], then by all the apostles. Then last of all He was seen by me [Paul] also, as by one born out of due time.” (1 Corinthians 15:5–8)
The instinct within us that hungers for the transcendent is not a fluke nor a mistake. It is a whisper (or a shout) that calls us to stand face-to-face before the contradiction of our age. It says, “You are known. You are loved. You have purpose. You have meaning. I’ve been waiting for you.”
Fr. Stephen Freeman (bold added)
Jake sorta gets it
If you want people to be bewildered by church, then church needs to be weird in some way. It does not need to be weird in the way Shaw’s Orthodox parish is. But if church seems to consist largely in confirming people in their priors—either by an explicit endorsing of their political vision, as if Jesus shared their exact politics or through a consumeristic liturgy that is nearly indistinguishable from a fusion of concert and TED talk—then I suspect that even when a sincere seeker stumbles into our church, as Shaw did in his book, that seeker will not find anything that helps them to actually encounter Christ and grow into Christian maturity. The life of the church impedes the life of indulgent self-expression. And as Wendell Berry said long ago, it is the impeded stream that sings.
Jake Meador, reviewing Martin Shaw’s Liturgies of the Wild
As the White House tutors us about the “real world, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” I’m very glad to be in a church where every Sunday we sing the Beatitudes, which tell us the way blessedness works.
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Tipsy Teetotaler ن 