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.
Gordon Crovitz of the Wall Street Journal summarizes nicely here:
Presumably Gays & Lesbians for Individual Liberty do not share the CLS view of human sexuality. But they understand exactly where Dean Martinez’s logic is taking us.
“[U]nder Hastings’ forced membership policy, only majority viewpoints (or those viewpoints too banal to interest the majority) are actually assured a voice in Hastings’ forum,” argues their brief. “That is a patently unreasonable way to ‘promote a diversity of viewpoints.'”
Sadly, it appears that this is shaping up in the popular press as a case about the legal status anti-gay bigotry if religiously motivated. Few in the press note that the CLS sexuality standards bar from office unrepentant straight fornicators as well as unrepentant gay fornicators.
As well it should: so far, the sexual revolution and no-fault divorce have done a heckuva lot more damage to the formation of Christian consciences and the institution of marriage than has the gay rights movement.
Oh, my! The saga continues! This is asmore confusing asthan the the Intelligent Design versus Evolution kerfuffle!
The weight of professional opinion seemed to me to have become that same-sex orientation was unchangeable.
So I had pretty much come to the conclusion that Christian people with exclusive same-sex attraction simply needed to gird themselves for life-long sexual abstinence, without even the hope of an abstinent bachelor or spinster (I know the former is neutral, the latter deprecatory in connotation – sorry) someday finding Mister or Miss Right. (I generally say “chastity” instead of “abstinence” when dealing with, say, teen sexuality of clients at Matrix Lifeline, because of chastity’s relatively positive connotation. But chastity outside Christian marriage means abstinence and repentance for lapses.)
I would not have urged a gay or lesbian Christian, in other words, to try to become heterosexual.
I might have encouraged them to consider a monastic vocation to get away from our hypersexualized culture and, for an Orthodox monastic, to engage in this ultimate battle against all the passions. But monastic vocation should not be undertaken toward the specific end of sexual reorientation, as if to say “I’ll be a monastic until I’m straight, and then I’ll laicize and marry.”
But here is a flawed column citing provocative information to the effect that I may have been wrong.
[T]he American College of Pediatricians … recently began a campaign to educate schools on sexual orientation and youth. “Facts About Youth” cites research that shows that over 85% of students with homosexual attractions will ultimately adopt a heterosexual identity as adults.
Okay, the American College of Pediatricians can be, as is being, faulted as a Christian front group impersonating the American Academy of Pediatrics. Point taken. But the American Psychiatric Association did not dispassionately de-list homosexuality as a disorder because of the great weight of scientific evidence. They did it for the same reason that the American Bar Association endorsed abortion – just before I resigned: a powerful lobby with an agenda mau-maued the APA (and the ABA). It’s hard to find neutrality on some subjects.
But what of these studies they cite?
If they exist, and are methodologically sound, they at least suggest that sexuality in youth is highly confused – perhaps even malleable. Mightn’t it be premature to tell conflicted adolescents that “you’re gay (or bi-); get used to it and celebrate it”? As long ago as Kinsey, there were claims that an astonishing proportion of people had experienced some same-sex encounter in their lives. And there are, after all, even adults who get sexually aroused by things like feet or underwear. Adolescent arousal by a member of the same sex may not mean much about one’s ultimate sexual destiny. (Would you think you were destined to get off with shoes forever if they turned you on?)
[There is a] growing body of research demonstrating that changing one’s sexual orientation is indeed possible.
Among those being ignored is Columbia University’s Dr. Robert Spitzer, whose 2003 landmark study was published in the prestigious journal Archives of Sexual Behavior. To his surprise, Spitzer – who ironically spearheaded the removal of homosexuality from the APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1973 – found that the majority of his 200 subjects experienced significant change in their same-sex feelings through therapy and support groups: “Like most psychiatrists, I thought that homosexual behavior could only be resisted, and that no one could really change their sexual orientation. I now believe that to be false. Some people can and do change.”
If that’s not convincing enough, in 2009 the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality published a comprehensive overview of research, citing over 500 scientific studies spanning nearly 100 years of research that demonstrates change is possible. However, these facts aren’t being communicated to young people. What is being educated to our youth is based on political correctness, not sexual freedom.
Dr. Robert Spitzer has no known ax to grind, but is a fairly dramatic “conversion story.” NARTH may have an ax to grind; that’s not clear to me.
By all means stop the persecution of young people who have doubt about their sexuality or who have come out as gay or lesbian (or are harassed for other reasons, like Phoebe Prince), but let’s have a little retiscence about showing 13 year old boys how most safely to sodomize or be sodomized, and suchlike.
And I’m not ruling out the possibility that some adults can change from gay to straight. It won’t upset my worldview if it proves false, but I may have closed my book prematurely.
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.
The world of punditry is full of opinions about filling the seat of Justice John Paul Stevens upon his long-overdue retirement this summer, so important has become the Supreme Court to our polity.
Doug Masson, perhaps half-jokingly, defended what I’d call a moderately activist judiciary. It’s moderate because the activism Doug advocated involved pulling legislative chestnuts out of the fire more than inventing new constitutional “rights”:
What occurred to me only later is what immense responsibility this would place on legislators if they were actually forced to deal with nothing but strict constructionist judges. They’d have to think through the full implications of what they wrote into law without being able to trust that judges would be, well, judicious in how the law was applied …
I’ve read enough legislation and draft legislation in my time to shudder a bit at the thought of judges applying the language absolutely in all situations unless the text specifically instructs them not to regardless of whether doing so makes sense or seems remotely just. That would really up the pressure on legislators to craft legislation meticulously, being sure to describe every caveat and exception.
I agree completely with Doug that lots of legislation is drafted shoddily, but I think that’s partly a consequence of knowing that the Court’s will bail them out.
I’d love to see our legislatures become something other than the Branch of Grand-and-Voter Pleasing Platitudes. Courts legitimately resolve ambiguities in positive law (i.e., legislative enactments), but a law can be unambiguously stupid. Unless there’s no rational purpose to it, judges should enforce it with perhaps a rebuke thrown in for the legislature (e.g., “What in heaven’s name they were thinking when they wrote this is beyond me, but ….”)
I am particularly appalled at the increasingly common disregard of legislators – at all levels, including County Commissioners – to shrug off their oath to uphold the Constitution by saying, in effect, that “constitutionality is for the courts to decide; I think this law will please my constiuents, so to hell with my oath.” (Okay, I exaggerate, but only a little.)
His retirement, which was announced on Friday, makes possible something that would have been unimaginable a generation or two ago — a court without a single member of the nation’s majority religion.
I cannot recall what Protestant allegiance Stevens ever claimed, but were it not so implausible, I’d suspect he was a soul-competency Baptist. As I wrotequoted soon after his announcement:
[I]n four different places in an opinion barely five paragraphs long, Justice Stevens used the word “indoctrination” as a synonym for religious education. Stevens asserted that the voucher program was being used to pay for “the indoctrination of thousands of grammar school children.” He surmised that an educational emergency might provide a motivation for parents to “accept religious indoctrination [of their children] that they otherwise would have avoided.” He decried the fact that “the vast majority” of voucher recipients chose to receive “religious indoctrination at state expense.” And he depicted the voucher program as a governmental choice “to pay for religious indoctrination.”
This is not an unfair summary of Justice Stevens’ hostility to any religion that actually has doctrinal content that adherents think should be preserved and transmitted. I infer that his deprecatory use of “indoctrination” reflects the view that everyone should decide all this stuff for himself or herself – a very, very American approach that has led to countless sects, cults and semi-Christian denominations, not to mention multiply-countless unaffiliated Churches (unaffiliated means you get whatever the Pastor feels like today – kind of like following a blog, except that bloggers, taken with the appropriate grain of salt, are less likely to lead you to delusion and damnation).
See also Ann Coulter’s entertaining take on the last Protestant. (Coulter is like a 15 car pileup – I feel guilty for reading her sometimes, but it’s irresistible. She is quite smart about the law, too.)
I agree with George Will that political experience is not a prerequisite, and I always have shuddered when someone like Oren Hatch is mentioned as a potential Supreme Court nominee because his colleagues respect him, he could be confirmed fairly easily, and he once upon a time went to law school.
Lastly, I’d say Timothy Egan is right on the facts about Harvard and Yale being disproportionately represented on the Court, but I’d sure hate to see law school diversity become a criterion for nomination. Yeah: Michigan, Chicago, Stanford (Justices O’Connor and Rehnquist, I believe) are top-tier, and I wouldn’t expect a Justice from the top tier of one of those institutions to be appallingly stupid. But I suspect, especially from his title (“Supreme Club”) that Egan is engaged in a little populist posturing at the highly elitist New York Times.
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.”
For political leaders, who increasingly struggle to make a connection with their publics, and the media, which has an unhealthy appetite for poverty porn, the attraction of Geldof was always that he was a maverick, a doer rather than a thinker, whose quickly thought-up campaigns — from Live Aid in 1985 to Live 8 in 2005 — provided politicians with an opportunity to shoulder-rub with rock stars and look caring at the same time and gave the media yet another opportunity to publish photographs of emaciated foreigners. This is also what riled Geldof’s then small number of critics, which included me. Some of us argued that the depiction of Geldof as Africa’s “messiah” both rehabilitated the outdated idea of the White Man’s Burden and also distracted from any serious debate about the kind of massive economic development sub-Saharan Africa really needs, and how it might go about getting it.
(Note to self: add “poverty porn” and “celebrity savior” to sound bite collection. Second note to self: don’t use it to the point of cynicism.)
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 