Orthodoxy, adjacent, and approach
Local Parish Chrismates Four
Today, my Parish receives a family of four, who came, saw, stayed, sought instruction, and finally is ready — nay, eager — to leave the Roman Catholic communion. Though we’ve been receiving many new members, I feel a special affinity for this family because the husband is the son a Reformed pastor, and my penultimate tradition was Reformed as well.
I’m always particularly gratified when the decision to become Orthodox appears cautious and deliberate, as this family’s has been.
We don’t have to flim-flam people. My impression is that most Orthodox Priests are telling serious inquirers “Slow down. Take your time. Get to know us. Let’s see what happens.”
A Distinctive
The Orthodox Church does not offer exact definitions and explanations for theological mysteries. The Orthodox Church has always preferred apophatic theology, that is, expressing what God is not, since God is beyond description.
Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox
Coming to Orthodoxy from a posture of know-it-all Calvinism, this was first unsettling, later liberating.
Learning how not to need to think
How do we become uncomplicated and unsophisticated? Can we simply unlearn all that we have learned?
No, we cannot, but what we can do is to separate ourselves from it in order to look at it with new eyes. For us Westerners to truly enter into the ancient Christian transmission and catch the essence of Christ’s teaching, it is necessary for us to crucify our rationalizing minds and arise above the level of thought and emotion. For a society founded on Descartes’ proposition “I think, therefore I am,” this of course means a kind of suicide; and it is to precisely such an ego-death that Christ calls us. Contemporary western Christianity trained us how to think and what to think; whereas Christ himself, as did Lao Tzu before Him, taught us how not to need to think.
Monk Damascene, Christ the Eternal Tao. If you think there’s something fishy about finding anticipations of Christianity in Lao Tsu, remember that this was a central theme of C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man
Hell
How can I go out like this among a lot of people with real solid bodies? It’s far worse than going out with nothing on would have been on Earth. Have everyone staring through me.
C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce. That was the reaction of one of Lewis’s day-trip visitors to heaven from hell.
No book by Lewis, including my favorites That Hideous Strength and The Abolition of Man, has affected me more profoundly than The Great Divorce. On second or third reading, roughly 27 years ago, a little light went on: what are you doing not to become the kind of self-absorbed person who’d get back on the bus instead of staying? And I found little to nothing in the Reformed tradition was receptive to such a question, because of the hated suggestion that what we do here and now might have something to do with our eternal happiness. That probably would have been dismissed as rank Pelagianism (though I was bound by my oath of office as an Elder not to discuss my doubts outside narrow channels, so I never found out).
Poet Dana Gioia glimpses a somewhat different alternative vision of hell that Lewis’s, but another in which God does not send people their against their wills:
…
V. Delegate, Delegate
“Watching the place unravel, Satan saw
An opportunity beyond the chaos.
What if he found a way to let the damned
Punish themselves? They liked to make bad choices.
Why not allow them to repeat their sins?
Let Hell become a game they never win,
A wheel that always hits on double zero.”
Our true telos
Each of us must become a saint to fulfill our human and Christian destiny.
C. S. Lewis anticipated this conciliar teaching when he noted that most of us, suddenly caught up to heaven, would probably feel a little uncomfortable. Why? Because we are not yet saints. And saints, Lewis suggested, are those who can live comfortably with God forever. How can the saints live that way? Because, in the Eastern Church Fathers’ striking image, they have been “deified.” So the entire point of the Christian “journey” is to cooperate with God’s grace so that we grow into the kind of people who will feel at home at the Wedding Feast of the Lamb: overflowing with gratitude for the invitation, and not feeling like party crashers.
George Weigel, Synodality and Sanctity.
I don’t remembers C.S. Lewis saying that in those words, but this is an extremely apt description of a conviction about my life (derived from my second or third reading of Lewis’ The Great Divorce) that lead me from Calvinistic Protestantism to the Orthodox Church — the permanent home of those Eastern Church Fathers.
Halfway conversions
There is no point in converting people to Christ if they do not convert their vision of the world and of life, since Christ then becomes merely a symbol for all that we love and want already – without Him. This kind of Christianity is more terrifying than agnosticism or hedonism.
Journals of Father Alexander Schmemann, 1973-83
Other
King Conscience?
Growing up evangelical, I was taught that your personal conscience is law …
…
True conscience is not a hyper-individual inner experience, but a knowing with others, a cleaving to the wisdom of God’s Word and the witness of the church.
Alan Noble, Living with Religious Scrupulosity or Moral OCD.
This article was painful to read. My immediate reaction, to the opening paragraph (which also opens my block-quote), was “I grew up Evangelical and was never taught such pernicious nonsense.” (I was taught a slightly less pernicious nonsense, and by teachers who were acting in good faith to all appearances.)
But the interesting point emerged much later: if “true conscience” is as Noble says, a “knowing with others” (and he is etymologically correct), then “personal conscience” is an oxymoron, and those who claim to follow such a thing are crypto-antinomians.
Martin Shaw on Job
Martin Shaw has been thinking about the book of Job, and especially its ending:
There’s not much in the warm and fuzzy feelings department. No more than I would have those feeling for a swooping hawk, or a grizzly on the path, or a bush suddenly erupting into flame. What I can feel is awe.
Reading Job has cleared this up. I can’t mainline Baby Jesu cosy cosy when I’ve got God walloping thunderbolts about and waxing poetically about how bad ass the leviathan is. Job strengthens my back in its final section, I’m out of the psychological and completely into the mythological, my wonder-eye is OPEN.
And – as I said last time – this is where I think modern Christianity often goes awry. We could cater less for our psychological needs and attend more to our mythological longings.
Speaking of Martin, here’s a description of him I came across recently:
Martin is like the Lost Inkling, the one who wandered into the forest of Devon as a child, and grew up in Tom Bombadil’s cottage.
(Rod Dreher, The Martin Shaw Interview, Part I). When I first read that last November, I had no idea how spot-on it was. Now I understand, after following Martin for a while, why Malcolm Guite (or someone) said Martin would become Orthodox “because he’s too wild for anything else” or words to that effect. (Not that we’re wild, but we have room for wild ones: I have an icon of a Georgian wild man — a “fool for Christ” — hanging in my prayer corner.)
I alone have seen the light
Zwingli’s work also repudiated the entire patristic and medieval theology of the sacrament: “I can conclude nothing else but that all the doctors have greatly erred [vil geirret habend] from the time of the apostles…. Therefore we want to see what baptism actually is, at many points indeed taking a different path against that which ancient, more recent, and contemporary authors have taken, not according to our own whim [nitt mit unserem tandt] but rather according to God’s word.” Just like his Anabaptist opponents, Zwingli was following God’s word.
Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation.
The multiplication of denominations, not to mention the countless non-denominational religious fiefdoms, was a major factor in my disenthrallment with sola scriptura Protestantism. (I provide the link because I discovered ~25 years ago that not all Protestants have even heard the historic term for what they claim to live by.)
Pick one: Modernity or Christendom
The West was Christian in the Middle Ages, but is so no longer; if anyone should reply that it may again become so, we will rejoinder that no one desires this more than we do, and may it come about sooner than all we see round about us would lead us to expect. But let no one delude himself on this point: if this should happen, the modern world will have lived its day.
René Guénon Guénon, The Crisis of the Modern World
If Indiana Jones were real, wouldn’t he be a Christian by now?
By the end of “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” archaeologist Indiana Jones had learned enough to know that he should close his eyes when facing the wrath of God.
Apparently, that kind of power can melt Nazis – without changing the hero’s soul.
“Why won’t Indiana Jones convert? We aren’t insisting that he convert to our faith or to his father’s faith or really to any faith in particular,” noted Jack Bennett, in a Popcorn Cathedral video marking the “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” release.
“What we want to know is why he is always back to square one at the start of every adventure – a skeptic, or even a scoffer. I mean, think about it: He has seen the Ark of the Covenant opened and the destroying angels pour out God’s vengeance on his enemies. He has seen the sacred Hindu stones come to life. …He has seen the true cup of Christ heal his own father from a fatal gunshot wound – on screen, with no ambiguity.”
After all of the miracles he has seen in his life, why doesn’t Indiana Jones truly believe?
Modern worship
[A]ny attempt to “modernise” liturgy in terms of making it more acceptable to modern society (i.e. “pastoral respectability”) should be undertaken with extreme caution; the warning of Charles Davis is paramount here:
My thesis is that there is no modern form of worship, because worship itself is outdated in the modern world and Christian Faith a state of deviancy from contemporary culture.
Bryan D. Spinks, “Christian Worship or Cultural Incantations?”, Studia Liturgical, vol. 12 (1977), 1, 12-13 (quoting Charles Davis, “Ghetto or Desert: Liturgy in a Cultural Dilemma” in Worship and Secularization (1970), pp. 10-27, p. 12).
Thanks to @letters on micro.blog who appears to read such things voraciously.
Wordplay
Blink
neglect, fail to acknowledge
John McWhorter on Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s usage of blink: “This contention blinks both history and reality in ways too numerous to count.”
McWhorter’s whole column on this is enjoyable. (Paywall)
Exploitation
We are all to some extent the products of an exploitive society, and it would be foolish and self-defeating to pretend that we do not bear its stamp.
Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America
“Times smaller”
But I can’t help wondering about how it feels on those dark Welsh evenings — in a house so big he could be comfortable if it was ten times smaller.
Ben Sixsmith (emphasis added)
Is there something wrong with me, some blind spot, that instinctively and invariably recoils from the locution “[X] times smaller”?
Something can be “ten times larger,” or “a tenth as big,” but I just cannot accept 1/X being “X times smaller.”
Immigration
Gratitude is of the essence of immigration.
Carl R. Trueman, Why I Became an American Citizen
Bombast
Bombastic does not mean “overly emotional” or “excited” or anything like that: It refers to language that is artificially refined or formal, made high-sounding in an attempt to sound smart, “high-sounding but with little meaning,” as the Oxford people put it.
Williamson said most people use bombastic incorrectly. When I
use it, which I don’t think is often, I’ve certainly been misusing it.
Toes
We don’t appreciate toes enough.
John Brady, commiserating with someone who injured a toe and is surprisingly debilitated thereby.
Bad Luck
You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.
Cormac McCarthy via the Economist
Barbie & Ken
Simply existing in America over the past few months meant having the bronzed images of Margot Robbie as Barbie and Ryan Gosling as Ken staring you down everywhere you turned, not unlike Mao Zedong’s portrait in Tiananmen Square.
Suzy Weiss, Don’t Hate the Barbie Girl, Hate the Barbie World
‘Mur’cans
This fellow said: “I am a free-born sovereign, sir, an American, sir, and I want everybody to know it!” He did not mention that he was a lineal descendant of Balaam’s ass, but everybody knew that without his telling it.
Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad
Martin Shaw
Martin is like the Lost Inkling, the one who wandered into the forest of Devon as a child, and grew up in Tom Bombadil’s cottage.
(Rod Dreher, The Martin Shaw Interview, Part I).
We are in the grip of a grim, despairing rebellion against reality that imagines itself to be the engine of moral progress.
The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it. I’m even playing around a bit here, but uncertain whether I’ll persist.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 