First, become human
“Not too many years ago,” I read, “a young monastic aspirant went to Mount Athos. In talking with the venerable Abbot of the Monastery where he wished to stay, he told him, ‘Holy father! My heart burns for the spiritual life, for asceticism, for unceasing communion with God, for obedience to an elder. Instruct me, please, holy father that I may attain spiritual advancement.’ Going to the bookshelf, the Abbott pulled down a copy of David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. “Read this, son,“ he said. “But father!“ objected the disturbed aspirant. ‘This is heterodox Victorian sentimentality, a product of the western captivity! This isn’t spiritual; it’s not even Orthodox! I need writings that will teach me spirituality!’ The Abbot smiled, saying, ‘Unless you first develop normal, human, Christian feelings and learn to view life as a little Davey did – with simplicity, kindness, warmth, and forgiveness – then all the Orthodox spirituality and patristic writings will not only be of no help to you – they will turn you into a spiritual monster and destroy your soul.’”
Kyriacos Markides, The Mountain of Silence
When I entered Orthodoxy, several years before Markides wrote this book and before I can recall hearing this (or similar) stories, I was intrigued by the teaching that theosis, deification, was the goal of the Christian life — even the very meaning of salvation. But somehow I discerned, and said, that my goal for the foreseeable future was the more modest one of becoming human. This story gives me hope that I was right.
What should we do?
I am not remotely shocked that Fr. Stephen Freeman, in the beforetimes, lived in a Christian commune:
Our questions were framed in the only language we knew: what does the Bible say? The questions and answers of that dialog were informative. With those questions in mind, we became aware of a steady stream of admonitions in the New Testament urging believers towards a life of asceticism. Fasting, vigils (praying through the whole of a night), sacrificial giving, radical forgiveness are all considered commonplace and normative. We had no tradition to draw on, and thus we practiced such things without guidance. We learned many things the hard way. There is now a long string of decades that separate me from those fervent years.
No one told us to do the things we did, and no one told us to read the Scriptures in the manner we undertook. What we did was to read the Scriptures with the question in mind, “What should we do?” That stands in stark contrast to the typical question, “What should we believe?” Had our study been primarily directed to matters of doctrine, I think we would have lost our way. Strangely, our instincts were correct.
The teachings of Christ are not, primarily, metaphysical pronouncements about the nature of things. Instead, they are commandments regarding what we should do – based on who God is. “Love your enemies – because God is kind to both the good and the evil.” This pattern holds throughout Christ’s teachings. It is a directive that intends to shape our lives such that our lives themselves become a “living theology,” a revelation of the nature of God made known in the shape of our actions.
It’s not about rules
Orthodoxy is not about following rules but about inner transformation. Extremists and schismatic Orthodox are not Orthodox, in spite of any Orthodox appearance and rigorous observances, because they lack an Orthodox phronema.
Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox
Going to the well and finding it shallow
What J. S. Bach gained from his Lutheranism to inform his music, what Jonathan Edwards took from the Reformed tradition to orient his philosophy, what A. H. Francke learned from German Pietism to inspire the University of Halle’s research into Sanskrit and Asian literatures, what Jacob van Ruisdael gained from his seventeenth-century Dutch Calvinism to shape his painting, what Thomas Chalmers took from Scottish Presbyterianism to inspire his books on astronomy and political economy, what Abraham Kuyper gained from pietistic Dutch Calvinism to back his educational, political, and communications labors of the late nineteenth century, what T. S. Eliot took from high-church Anglicanism as a basis for his cultural criticism, what Evelyn Waugh found for his novels in twentieth-century Catholicism, what Luci Shaw, Shirley Nelson, Harold Fickett, and Evangeline Paterson found to encourage creative writing from other forms of Christianity after they left dispensationalism behind — precious few fundamentalists or their evangelical successors have ever found in the theological insights of twentieth-century dispensationalism, Holiness, or Pentecostalism.
Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind
Humility
Shallow ideas can be assimilated; ideas that require people to reorganize their picture of the world provoke hostility. … Tolstoy: “I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.”
James Gleick, Chaos
The Beatitudes, tell us the way blessedness works. I’ll take that over political “strength,” “force,” or “power” any day of the week, not just Sundays.
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Tipsy Teetotaler ن 