The Orthodox Church regularly remembers important Biblical people and events that other traditions may overlook. This goes beyond following a prescribed cycle of scripture readings in the liturgy and other services of the Church. It’s even built into the prescribed hymn texts. And in some cases, Protestant Bibles omit whole, wholesome passages.
One example is the Myrrhbearing Women, who figure much more prominently in Orthodoxy than even in “high Church” Protestantism.
Another is the three holy youths in the furnace. At the Vigil of Great and Holy Saturday, we read the account of their praying and singing from the “fiery furnace.”
This passage is sadly omitted from Protestant 66-book Bibles. It is included, if at all, only in the disparagingly-misnamed “Apocrypha,” which in fact are part of Christian Scripture, recognized by Rome and Orthodoxy alike. So until I became Orthodox, I was completely unfamiliar with this treasure. Continue reading “Singing in the Flame”→
Ah, the human capacity for self-delusion! I do not exempt myself by any means.
In the Orthodox “Trisagion Prayers” we ask:
All-holy Trinity have mercy on us. Lord, cleanse us from our sins. Master, pardon our iniquities. Holy God, visit and heal our infirmities for Thy Name’s sake.
I think of this not just as repetition, of which Orthodox piety has abundant supply, but of subtle distinctions among sin, iniquity and infirmity.
Our delusional lapses like consumerist simplicity strike me more as sinful (Greek amartia, “missing the mark”) or infirm than as iniquitous. Still, for those we implore cleansing and healing, respectively.
Father Stephen this time mediates a YouTube video (okay, it’s two still photos, some text, and some appropriate background music) frame for one of the Twentieth Century’s great Saints’ poetic reflections on the nexus between (1) humankind’s various sins, transgressions and iniquities and (2) natural calamity:
I don’t think Saint Nikolai is saying “God is doing this stuff to punish us” or even “God is doing this stuff to get our attention so we’ll straighten out” (i.e., to chasten us). He says in conclusion, after all, that the Lord will come and set things right.
Nor is he drawing a cause and effect line between sin X and natural calamity Y, a la Pat Robertson.
I think, having now spent some 12+ years Orthodox, that he’s talking about a mystical connection between us and nature, consistent with Biblical anthropology that sees us as part of nature and yet apart from it as well, bearing the image of God and appointed as steward and priest over creation.
Others might fault this from Orthodox Wiki, but I personally couldn’t describe in prose the tradition I’m describing better that this, from Orthodoxwiki:
The Relationship between Man and Material Creation
Man as a microcosm
The idea of man as a microcosm is most commonly associated with St. Maximos the Confessor. In his Mystagogia he speaks of an indissoluble relationship and unity between man and world: “[St. Paul] put forward another suggestion, along the lines of the same imagery, that the whole world of visible and invisible things can be thought of as a man; and man, made up of body and soul, as a world” (Mystagogia, Chapter 7). Lars Thunberg, in his “Man and the Cosmos” describes St. Maximos’ understanding of man as a microcosm by virtue of his constitution and for the purpose of mediation. Being both material and spiritual, all things in the world are reflected in man, who then has the vocation to bring together mortal and immortal creatures, rational and non-rational beings. However, St. Maximos does not view this vocation of man in separation from God. Rather, he states that it is Christ who achieved this unity. Again Thunberg, analyzing the Ambigua, says that man needs to leave the sphere of creation behind and be united with God beyond his own nature. Thus, man’s mission in relation to creation can only be fulfilled in and through Christ: “Man created in the image of God is thus, according to Maximus, a key to understanding creation not only in order that he may understand it as it is, but also that by actively understanding it in his process of divinization he may elevate it to the supreme level of its full soteriological comprehension (Ambigua 10).” (Thunberg, “Man and the Cosmos, p.76)
St. Gregory of Nyssa also uses the image of man as microcosm, though his use of the expression is rather less uniform than for St. Maximus. In his conception, the parallelism seems to be limited to a common praise of God: “as the cosmos continuously lifts up a hymn of praise to God, so it is the duty of man to engage in continual psalmody and hymnody.” Metr. Paulos Gregorios postulates that St. Gregory’s reservation regarding a more in-depth parallelism stemmed from a concern that man’s high standing within creation not be attributed to his similarity to the universe (Gregorios, “Cosmic Man”). However, St. Gregory also views man as a mediator between creation and God whose mediation is made possible by the incarnation: “in Christ, Man, and through Man the whole creation, directly and without intermediaries participates in the creative energies of God Himself” (Gregorios, “Cosmic Man, p.103).
Fr. Stanley Harakas summarizes the Orthodox position thus far: “[t]he creation exists for the use of humanity; but humanity exists as a microcosm to sanctify creation and to draw it into the fullness of the life of the kingdom of God, to bring it into communion with its maker.” (The Integrity of Creation: Ethical Issues, in “Justice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation,” p.73)
While both St. Maximus and St. Gregory note that the mediation of man is directly related to Christ’s incarnation, the details of that mediation are filled in by modern day theologians.
Man as Priest of Creation
The Genesis passage which started this article is open to other interpretations. An interpretation which gives man a certain responsibility towards the environment, presents the commission which was given to man as a stewardship. K.M. George in his essay “Towards a Eucharistic Ecology” points out that good stewardship, in the sense of the Greek ‘oikonomos:’—manager or administrator of a house,—requires trustworthiness, dependability, and wisdom. He goes on to add: “[w]e offer the creation as a thank-offering to God in liturgy” (George, Towards a Eucharistic Theology, in “Justice, Peace and the Integrily of Creation”, p.46) This statement contains within it the seed for the idea of that several contemporary theologians, among them Vigen Guroian, Metr. Paulos Gregorios, and Metr. John_(Zizioulas)_of_Pergamon, consider as the most important in defining man’s relationship to creation: man as ‘priest of creation.’
Metr. Paulos Gregorios of the Orthodox Syrian Church of the East, who was one of the most ardent advocates of Christian ecology wrote, “Nature, man, and God are not three disjunct realities on the stage with a space-interval between their respective boundaries. […] Christ has become part of creation, and in his created body he lifted up the creation to God, and humankind must participate in this eternal priesthood of Christ” (Gregorios, “The Human Presence”) Metr. John Zizioulas adds: “The priest is the one who takes in his hands the world to refer it to God and who, in return brings God’s blessing to what he refers to God. Through this act creation is brought into communion with God himself. […] This role of the human being as the priest of creation, is absolutely necessary for creation itself, because without this reference of creation to God the whole created universe will die.” He goes on to argue that ethics, as commonly understood, cannot provide a solution for the environmental problem; this is the place of the Church. Metr. John argues that the solution to the environmental problem cannot be based on a set of impersonal principles. What is needed, rather is a particular way of life based on relationships with one another, with the material world, and with God. Specifically, the Metropolitan mentions fasting, respect for the material world and acknowledgement (within the Liturgy) that creation belongs to God, as specific means by which the Church can effect change (Zizioulas, Man the Priest of Creation: A Response to the Ecological Problem, in “Living Orthodoxy in the Modern World”).
The exercise of this priesthood encompasses both our lives within the church temple (the Liturgy) and outside of it (the liturgy before/after the liturgy).
This is the sort of thing, in the end, that may be better said poetically, as Saint Nikolai say it, than in dry propositions like my introduction or like Orthodoxwiki.
Do you know, my child, why the earth overturns restlessly
and why it spews forth into the sky?
Because men have overturned the voice of conscience
Calling evil good, and good evil
and have spewed forth hatred toward those who still speak truth.
The Orthodox Church will get the same treatment as we grow and become better known. Orthodoxen: get used to it.
Yes, I just “compared” today’s sexual revolutionaries — i.e., about 90% now (or so it seems sometimes) — to Nazis, if you’re looking for merde to throw. No, I don’t think sexual revolution is Nazi or Nazi-inspired.
Father Stephen Freeman, whose thought and spirit I greatly appreciate, has this evening posted on Metaphors of the Atonement. I commend it to Orthodox readers especially, but it may be of interest to western Christians (Roman Catholics and Protestants) to see how their characteristic “forensic” understanding differs from the unfamiliar Orthodox view – which I have come to cherish.
This is not some arcane theological backwater, by the way. The differing views of Christ’s atonement and “descent into hades” are quite fundamental differences that ramify extensively through the churches – and individual Christians – who hold them — not just in express doctrinal propositions, but in how the two sides of the Great Schism have come to perceive the world and the place of people in it.
A second difference, not touched on by Father Stephen in this post, is what Wikipedia not unreasonably calls Experience of God (Theoria) vs Scholasticism. Theoria is the Orthodox emphasis; Scholasticism (a term of art, not to be confused with intelligence or intellectual bent) was a post-schism development largely of Thomas Aquinas and his fellow schoolmen in the pre-Reformation Roman Catholic Church, and which influence Protestant thought as well.
Both are deep differences, which make Orthodoxy worth a look by folks burnt out on the western Church(es) they’ve known, but haunted by Christ.
There’s no explanation for the traffic spike today besides Doug Masson’s kind words at his blog. Welcome to you all.
I’ll see if I can come up with something new to say, but meanwhile those of you converging from the left coasts should like “Places not worth caring about” from last night. James Howard Kunstler posits, among other things, that if we keep building places not worth caring about, we’ll soon have a Country not worth caring about – a point on which there should be ample ground between thoughtful liberals and conservatives, I’d think. We’re embodied creatures, after all, and the space we inhabit affects us powerfully.
Like a lot of young men, I once thought I’d be an architect. I quickly learned that I did not have what it took, so I thought I’d be a homebuilder. I abandoned that for different reasons – heck, it was the 60s and early 70s and everything was unsettled – and eventually landed in the disreputable profession of law, having tired of making an honest living. [Note to self: locate smiley-face icon. Or winky-face.]
Doug described me as a true conservative, which I’ll take as high praise. Religiously, I went off the scale 13 years ago, embracing Eastern Orthodox Christianity – which it’s critics fault for not changing with the times. To that, I say, “Damn straight!” That’s as conservative as it gets religiously, though you’ll find some Obama bumper stickers in our parking lot on Sunday. Religious and political conservatism are not, except for perhaps a few issues, a package deal.
Back to places worth caring about. I’m Chairman of my Church Building Committee as we plan a new building that we intend to be very much worth caring about. Here’s a few thoughts I shared along with two key renderings. [Note to self: incorporate PayPal button for friendly Church Building Fund donations.]
We’ve hired a Charleston, SC designer to lead in the design of an Orthodox temple and site to cherish for centuries. His sensibility is New Urbanist, but we’ll be building at 43N and 225 just west of Battle Ground, on 8 acres currently supporting corn or soybeans.
As important as the temple itself – which will even have real plaster walls to receive iconography in the future – is the site plan, creating a fitting sense of both invitation and separation, with a courtyard that will serve a fairly important purpose at “Orthodox Easter.” The idea is not alien to the points Kunstler is making about urban spaces in “Places not worth caring about.”
(This posting may be of limited interest to non-Orthodox readers.)
I just discovered a new Orthodox blog that looks somewhat promising, Koinonia. The owner/host has completed a very manageable 3-part series, Barbarians at the Gate, where he takes to task not the barbarians (he just identifies them fairly trenchantly), but the indifference or capitulation of the Orthodox Church to those barbarians. Part of his solution is that we cease and desist from bashing Western Culture and get down to the work of transforming it.
Our alliance with barbarism has happened because we have rejected the Christian roots of Western culture in a misguided effort to (1) keep the Church Greek (or Russian, or Arab, or Serbian) or (2) to distinguish “True Orthodoxy” from “false Catholicism” or (3) because, like Frank Schaeffer, we are simply cultural-despisers who have found that the Orthodox tradition is a convenient cudgel with which to continue waging our political or cultural battles. Whatever the reason, this amounts to a refusal to engage in any meaningful way with the cultural marketplace of ideas. As a result, it leaves the public square utterly naked – even as we moan and complain about it privately. Worse, it makes us the tools by which Nietzsche could proclaim that God was a non-factor (“dead”) in modern life. Itputs us in a position where we not only fail America – to be salt and light for our neighbor and our country – but also Christ and ourselves.
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The spiritual genius of the Orthodox Church has always been the ability of the Church to take on and transform the dominate culture. This means that just as Jesus was the authentic Jew among Jews, the Church has been – in turn – authentically Greek among the Greeks, and authentically Russian among the Russians, so too we must be authentically American among the Americans. While have rarely done this perfectly, we have largely done this without sacrificing the Gospel or the communion of the various local or ethnic churches.
Is there any reason, other than sloth or despair, why we think we cannot do this in America as well?
It hit a nerve. My posts in the short life of this blog have been relatively heavy on culture-bashing. I bash because I really do care – like an inarticulate father who doesn’t know what to do with a sick child except to yell.
Part of the challenge in Barbarians at the Gate is that there are people outside the Church with whom we can and must make common cause. He suggests, among a handrul, the Catholic Church.
I suggest that James Davidson Hunter, author (coiner?) of the influential Culture Wars in the 90s, is also one with whom we can make common cause. I highly commend this paper he gave at Trinity Forum 8 years ago. That “briefing” finally has grown to a book of the same title. I am greatly looking forward to reading it (if I can moderate my blogging long enough to fit it in).
Davidson’s main points from the briefing eight years ago:
Culture is a resource, and as such, a form of power.
Culture is produced.
Culture production is stratified into a rigid structure of “center” and “periphery.”
Culture changes from the top down; rarely if ever from the bottom up.
World-changing is most intense when the networks of elits and the institutions they lead overlap.
Another with whom we can make common cause is Ken Myers at Mars Hill Audio Journal, who has been inspiring me for several decades now. I think we have some examples to emulate as well from the folks at Front Porch Republic.
The work at hand is not revolution, but the slow permeation of salt and the absorption of light. We need to be about it sooner rather than later.
The passion narratives having been read during the week, we come on the Day of Resurrection to read … not an explicit Resurrection narrative, but John 1: 1-17.
The choice of John 1 (“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God ….”) might seem an odd one, but:
In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.
Given the Orthodox emphasis on the Resurrection as Christ’s conquering of death (not – or not exclusively – a vindication of his “His message” or even of the deity of “His person,” as if to say “See? I’m God. I can do anything? Got that, dummies?”), the inability of light to “comprehend” the light takes on added power.
Another reason, however, may be the tradition of receiving Catechumens on Great and Holy Saturday. In other words, their formal catechesis having been completed, adults are received into the Church. We had no litany for Catchumens in the Liturgy today.
But what has that to do with why we read from John today? When I was a Protestant, we passed out the Gospel of John, separately printed, as a veritable evangelistic tract because of what we considered its warmth and accessibility. I believe it’s still the case that Wycliffe Bible Translators will translate and publish the Gospel of John in a new (to Wycliffe) language before any other Scriptures.
But it was not so in the early Church. The early Church actually withheld the Gospel of John from Catechumens, having them learn the facts of Christ’s life from the synoptic gospels. The Gospel of John was considered too theological for a novice. That’s right: the superficially warm and fuzzy Gospel of John is heavy theology!
Therein, no doubt, lies a rather large tale about how historic Christianity and Evangelicalism even conceive theology. Obviously, we’re seeing something more in John than its heart-warmingness. Something, even, that might be missed or misappropriated if John is read to early in a spiritual pilgrimage.
So – or so it seems to me – the Gospel for today from John may be appointed not just for its evocative power, but to continue the instruction of the “Newly Illumined” who were received the day before – and are now “ready for meat” in more than one sense. I wish I were equipped to flesh out this little epiphany better than this, but there it is.
I sometimes have trouble focusing. My mind careens around like a pinball. I see connections between X and Y and my mind races off to how Y connects to Z and so forth. Or it can be as simple as “what’s the next thing to sing in this long Good Friday service?” So I sometimes miss things.
I have it on pretty good authority that I’m not alone in this, by the way, and that single-mindedness is part of that toward which our salvation – our spiritual healing and restoration – tends.
But last night, my mind stopped racing for a moment. John nearby was chanting Ezekiel chapter 37 – “the Spirit of the Lord … set me in the midst of the plain, which was full of human bones ….”
I thought that was a prophecy of the restoration of Israel! What’s it doing in a Good Friday service!?
The Fathers taught that it prophesies the Final Resurrection:
Great is the lovingkindness of the Lord, that the prophet is taken as a witness of the future resurrection, that we, too might see it with his eyes … We notice here how the operations of the Spirit of life are again resumed; we know after what manner the dead are raised from the opening tombs … And finally, he who has believed that the dead shall rise again ‘in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump (for the trumpet shall sound) … shall be caught up among the first in the clouds to meet Christ in the air’; he who has not believed shall be left, and subject himself to the sentence by his own unbelief.
Ezekiel 37:1-14 (4/3-4/16) Prophecy at Lamentations Orthros of Great &Holy Saturday
The Mystery of Resurrection: Ezekiel 37:1-14 SAAS, especially vs. 3: “Then He said to me, ‘Son of man, can these bones live?’ So I answered, ‘O Lord, You know this.’” God speaksthrough His Prophet Ezekiel to show us“…a great multitude of bones on the face of the plain. They were very dry”(Ezek. 37:1,2).We confront bleak death. Can it be undone?
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Archpriest Georges Florovsky faces the vast plain of dry death, and he adds a notable disclaimer: “Human death did not belong to the Divine order of Creation. It was not normal or natural for man to die.” Death is not according to the will of God. It is alien, an enemy in league with the father of lies, the purveyor of death. Father Florovsky recalls that in Scripture death is “the wages of sin” (Rom. 6:23). Therefore, he stoutly refuses the conception of death “…as a release of an immortal soul out of the bondage of the body.” Rather, he counters with the great truth that “…death is not a release, it is a catastrophe,” following the world-view of Scripture.
By bringing us into the valley of dead, dry bones, God sets a mystery before us: “Can these bones live?” (Ezek. 37:3). Cancer, heart attacks, tsunamis, suicide bombers, earthquakes, and the graves of our war dead press us to say, “Unlikely!” But the Prophet does not answer this way. He defers to the power, mercy, and boundless love of God. “O Lord, You know this” (vs.3). Yes, death defies us and the image of God within us. We cry out, “What of death, O Lord?” Is the end just weathered bones on the valley floor of hades?
But, the word of the Lord stops the mind to arrest our attention: “Thus says the Lord to these bones: ‘Behold, I will bring the Spirit of life upon you. I will put muscles on you and bring flesh upon you. I will cover you with skin and put my Spirit into you. Then you shall live and know that I am the Lord’”(vss. 4-6). The Prophet Ezekiel was a deported slave. The life of Israel was virtually ended by conquest and deportation. Still, God promised, “Thus says the Lord: Behold, I will open your tombs, bring you up from your graves, and bring you into the land of Israel” (vs. 12).
God’s promise was no less incredible for the disciples scattered at the arrest and crucifixion of the Lord Jesus. He died on the cross. He crossed into the plain of dry bones. Where was God with His promise? Learn from Ezekiel. The Prophet obeyed God: “So I prophesied as He commanded me, and the Spirit entered into them and they lived and stood upon their feet, and exceeding great assembly” (vs. 10). Likewise, the Lord Jesus kept His promise as well: “They will scourge Him and kill Him. And the third day He will rise again” (Lk. 18:33). “Christ is risen from the dead, and has become the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep….even so in Christ all shall be made alive” ( 1 Cor. 15:20,22). Ezekiel discloses the way. The Lord Jesus’ Resurrection is just the beginning. And many shall follow!
The gates of Hades didst Thou shatter, O Lord, and by Thy death Thou didst destroy death. And Thou didst free the race of man, granting life and great mercy to the world.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 