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The BBC International News- Pontifications
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Monthly Archives: September 2006
“God wanted to unite people among themselves. So He made things in such a way that the good of one is inseparably bound to being useful to others. It is in this way that the world is united.”
-St John Chrysotom
Sampson from Guerilla Orthodoxy has returned to posting and I for one couldn’t be happier. Go check him out for updates and please read his archives. He has great stuff on what our relationship with the poor should look like.
From a recent post:
I think many of us are looking for precisely this. We are not looking for another volunteer opportunity. We are looking for a tribe, a community, a group of people with whom we hold values and a vision of the world in common, with whom we can share, not just work, but cooking and laughter, washing dishes, working in the garden together. We are seeking a sense of belonging, a connectedness that overcomes the isolation that has been imposed upon us by race, by class, by gender, and by a thousand others meaningless distinctions, the ways by which we size up others and say, “like me” or “not like me.”
I think there are many, many people out there who are still looking for their tribe. Some of you have been looking for years.
Sometimes priests come away from hearing confessions with a sense of profound sadness. That sadness is often due to the realization that we have allowed our faithful to acquire and live with images of God that are woefully distorted, images that seem to have little to do with the One who reveals Himself in Scripture and the Church’s worship. This is hardly surprising, since the popular media presents Christianity either as a fundamentalist cult or as “life-enhancing” therapy. And most of us read Time or Newsweek more religiously than we do the Bible. If “we are what we eat,” then this popular fare will inevitably leave us malnourished, burdened with an understanding of God that has little to do with reality as we know it from Holy Tradition and ecclesial experience.
Many Christians, of both East and West, suffer from an image of God that goes back to the period of medieval scholastic theology. They conceive – and dread – Him as the vindictive Judge who, angered by our sinfulness, demands from us some form of propitiation: a payment to allay divine wrath. Although they believe in Christ’s saving work on the Cross, they are also convinced that to be saved from eternal damnation they must make personal penance for their sin through some form of “work” they themselves offer: through an accumulation of good deeds that outweigh their sins on the scales of divine justice, or by enduring personal suffering, in order to purge themselves of their guilt and to free themselves from the consequences of sin, which is death. Without such penance, construed as punishment, there can be only eternal condemnation: consignment to a place where there is endless weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth. A classic example of this type of thinking is the way some people, including some theologians, present the dubious tradition of “toll houses,” stages of purifying punishment through which the soul must pass in its quest for eternal life. But we find it as well in the comments people make about their daily experiences: “However much I may have confessed, however faithful I may try to be, God is punishing me because of my (past, present or future) sins.”
In reaction to this way of thinking, others adopt today’s “feel good” religion that rejects the very notion of sin, and dismisses as quaint and irrelevant any threat of divine wrath or judgment. The biblical affirmations “God is good” and “God is love” mean God lets us get away with anything we want, so long as we have “faith.” Which means, so long as we are convinced that God fits the benign, domesticated, and “maternal” image in which we have recreated Him/Her/It. The Protestant Reformers’ rejection of purgatory and a treasury of merits, appropriate as it was, merely set the stage for the “once saved, always saved” dogma, the notion of “assurance” that for many people today means little more than “insurance” against God’s judgment and our responsibility. As so often when things become polarized, the truth lies somewhere in between. Many Orthodox (and certainly many other Christians) recognize and celebrate the gospel promise of total forgiveness of sin, where that sin is confessed and an attempt at repentance is earnestly made. They know from Scripture, liturgical worship, and personal experience that we cannot save ourselves, but that Jesus, the eternal Son of God, has effected our salvation by His death and resurrection: He has utterly defeated the power of sin and death that held us in bondage. Yet they often harbor, consciously or not, the notion that their personal suffering – whether physical, emotional or spiritual – is a result of God’s need to exact retribution. His forgiveness they see as contingent on an act of “repentance” on their part that inevitably involves “penance,” construed as a form of punishment. It has to be said, though, that insofar as penance is conceived as the means by which we free ourselves from the consequences of sin, rather than as a pedagogical tool to aid us in a quest for holiness or sanctification, then we have misunderstood the very core of the gospel and have set ourselves outside the bounds of Orthodox Christianity.
The Greek term metanoia, which we translate “repentance,” actually signifies a “turning,” a changing of direction or orientation. Once this radical reorientation begins, we enter on a pathway often marked by struggle and even suffering. But if we truly “seek first the Kingdom of God,” we quickly learn that the Hand that guides along that pathway never punishes us out of vengeance or vindictiveness. As the Risen Lord declared to Saul, what He seeks from His followers is a transferal of their loyalty and their liberation “from the power of Satan to God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me” (Acts 26:18). Suffering endured in this light is not punishment; it is not the bitter recompense for our sinfulness. It is, like any “penance” a spiritual father may impose, a call and an encouragement toward true metanoia, toward that reorientation that leads us through life’s struggles and temptations, and ushers us finally into the open arms of the God of infinite compassion and mercy.
We can reply to our original question, then, with a simple “no.” No, God does not punish us. Rather, He guides, chastens, purifies and strengthens us through every event and every experience, with the single minded concern to embrace us forever in the fullness of His love .
The final word belongs to St John, the Beloved Disciple, who knew Christ perhaps better than any of the other apostles. Before the fearful day of judgment, he declares, “we may have confidence,” not in our merits nor in punishing penances we may have endured, but in the love of the God whose very essence is Love. “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment….” The Way into the Kingdom of Heaven is not through punishment, through suffering imposed by a wrathful God whose justice outweighs His mercy. It is through love: the boundless, self-giving love God has for us, to which, in an attitude of ongoing repentance, we respond with love for Him and for one another (1 John 4:16-21).
***This weekend i decided to feature some bios on women saints of the Church.***
Between approximately the years 726 and 843, the Byzantine world was rocked by the controversy of iconoclasm. Pious Orthodox believers argued over whether venerating icons was an allowable Christian practice or whether it amounted to idolatry. A series of Byzantine emperors came down in support of iconoclasm or the “breaking of images.”
Countless icons were destroyed during this period and many iconodules, or “lovers of icons,” becamemartyrs and confessors. Their position is captured by Saint John of Damascus, one of the great apologists for icons: “In former times God, who is without form or body, could never be depicted. But now when God is seen in the flesh conversing with men, I make an image of the God whom I see. I do not worship matter; I worship the creator of matter who became matter for my sake . . .” (Saint John of Damscus, On the Divine Images). Among the many who suffered during the iconoclastic period were pious laywomen and nuns. Two of the most well-known of these saints were Theodosia of Constantinople and Anthousa of Mantineon. One became a martyr and the other a confessor for their heroic defense of icons.
Saint Theodosia was a nun who became one of the first martyrs of the iconoclast period. She was placed in a convent at the age of seven, sometime in the early eighth century. Saint Theodosia came from a wealthy family and eventually received a generous inheritance. She used a portion of the money to commission elaborate icons of Christ, the Theotokos, and Saint Anastasia. In 726, the emperor Leo III ordered that the famous and beloved icon of Christ which hung over the palace’s main gate be destroyed. A huge crowd of local people gathered to defend the icon and among them was a group of “pious women” which included the nun Theodosia. The Synaxarion of Constantinople, a collection of saints’ lives written in the tenth century, describes how an imperial guardsman climbed a ladder to reach the icon of Christ in order to destroy it. Saint Theodosia and the other women grasped and pulled down the ladder on which the soldier was standing. Many of the women involved were taken away and decapitated but Theodosia, as the perceived “ringleader,” was brutally stabbed in the throat with a ram’s horn. After the veneration of icons was restored some eighty years after her martyrdom, Saint Theodosia’s relics were placed in a Constantinople convent. The remains were carried in church processions several times a year and hundreds of years after her death, there are records of miraculous cures effected by Saint Theodosia’s relics.
Saint Anthousa of Mantineon, like Saint Theodosia, was a nun. She was born in the early eighth century and around 740 founded a small monastic community near Mantineon. The community eventually grew into a huge double monastery that housed about 900 monks and nuns, according to one contemporary source. (Double monasteries were adjacent communities of monks and nuns.)
At Mantineon, the men’s monastery was located on the shores of a lake while the convent was situated on an island. The monks and nuns had a mutually helpful relationship in which the nuns wove cloth and sewed for the monks while the male monastics brought food to the convent so that the nuns would not have to leave their island home to get provisions. Interestingly, Saint Anthousa apparently served as superior for both the monastery and the convent although her nephew, who was also her assistant, was primarily responsible for the monks.
Constantine V (741–775) was among the most fanatically iconoclastic emperors of the period and he took a strong dislike to Abbess Anthousa and her thriving monastic community. Monks and nuns were in general strong supporters of icons. Constantine V decided to make an example of Anthousa and her nephew. The emperor made a public visit to Mantineon and ordered the nephew publically whipped. Leaving the monk barely alive, Constantine V next ordered Saint Anthousa to be whipped. After this torture, burning icons were placed on her head. Hot embers from the icons fell all over her body. Miraculously, Saint Anthousa survived her ordeal and was even able to soften Constantine’s hatred of icons by prophesying that his wife, who was then in the midst of a difficu
lt pregnancy, would give birth to healthy twins. The prophesy proved true and the empress was so grateful to the abbess that she placed the monastery at Mantineon under her personal protection. Saint Anthousa continued to serve as abbess of her community until her death.
Sources:
Talbot, Alice-Mary, ed. Byzantine Defenders of Images: Eight Saints’ Lives in English
Translation. Washington D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks
Saint Theodosia and Saint Anthousa:Defenders of Icons was originally published in the “Heroines of the Faith” column in the volume 7 number 4 issue of The Handmaiden.
The Office is to me the best comedy on tv right now. Last night’s episode proves. This show is so funny that even the deleted scenes leave you with hearty guffaws. check them out at the office’s nbc page.
Ed Helms is the best addition to this show, eh Big Tuna?
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Here’s a nice understanding of the place of icons in Orthodox worship. It’s by Fr Michael Gillis is B.C. Take note Andrea, he’s from your neck of the woods :)
Question: While I am an evangelical Christian, I am close to people who have converted to Orthodoxy. I’m trying to understand the place of icons in the Orthodox Christian faith, as they make me very uncomfortable. They seem like a distraction from what’s truly important, a vain tradition of men. Isn’t it more important to have a relationship with God than to focus on pictures? And shouldn’t prayer and reading the Bible be central to that relationship?
Answer: It is more important to have a relationship with someone than to look at his or her picture. However, isn’t your house filled with pictures of people with whom you have relationships, and even with pictures of people you have never met but who are important to you (like great-grandparents)? Having pictures of someone does not mean that the pictures are more important than the relationship; it means that the relationship is so important that you keep pictures of the people around (even if you never met them). I think you have created a false dichotomy—“either relationship or picture.” For the Orthodox, it is rather “because of relationship, picture.”
I agree with you that prayer and reading the Bible are central to our relationship with God. But they cannot be everything, as we know in part because most Christians for most of history couldn’t read at all. It was the icons—paintings of the events and people of the past—along with the interpretation of the symbols in these icons that taught the people the content of the Bible and the theology of the Church.
Christians have never made just any image they wanted and called it an icon. There are very strict rules and traditions that must be followed before what someone paints can be called a genuine icon. The Church believes that the icons preserve in picture form the divine teaching that the Bible preserves in written form. Even the Jewish synagogues that have been unearthed from the early Christian and pre-Christian eras had paintings of biblical scenes on their walls. This is not a new thing or a corruption of some early purity. We don’t have to choose between icons and the Bible. Just as I might look at a picture of my girlfriend before, during, and after reading a letter from her, so I might read my Bible while standing before an icon of Christ.
But the real question at the heart of your discomfort with icons may have to do with the role of tradition. Colossians 2:8, 1 Peter 1:18, and all of Jesus’ sayings that mention tradition make it clear that human tradition should never keep us from following Christ. But Paul praises both the Corinthians and the Thessalonians for keeping the traditions that they had learned from him (1 Corinthians 11:2; 2 Thessalonians 2:15; 3:6). The problem with traditions is not that they are traditions; the important thing is whom you receive them from. People have all sorts of traditions. Do the traditions help or hinder one’s relationship with God? That’s the real question.
In the fourth and fifth centuries, the persecutions had stopped and the Church was trying to figure out what it really believed, while fringe groups were making all sorts of weird claims (just as they are today). A man named Vincent in what is now France came up with a formula that was very useful. He said that to claim that Christians believe something, that thing would have to meet three criteria: universality, antiquity, and consent. Or in other words, it would have to be believed everywhere in the world, not just in one geographic area; it would have to have been believed from the beginning, not just in the past two hundred years; and it would have to be believed by everyone, not just one group. The icons, like the rest of our Orthodox faith, have passed that test.
Fr. Michael Gillis is pastor of Holy Nativity of Christ Orthodox Mission in Langley, British Columbia.
This article originally appeared in AGAIN Vol 27 No 1, Spring 2005.
Go to “noise for toaster” now and download their morning mix of covers. especially the maroon five cover of “pure imagination”. not because it’s maroon five, but because someone actually did a cover of a song from Willy Wonka.
Much has been made in the last week about the the Pope’s recent statement and the Muslim reaction to it. Here are some good comments being made on the web this week:
First from Muslim commentator Magdi Allam:
It is sad and worrying that Muslims have given birth to a united international front to attack the Pope and ask for public apologies. From Bin Laden to the Muslim Brotherhood, from Pakistan to Turkey, from al Jazeera to al Arabiya, the transversal and universal alliance, which has already come into being following the Danish cartoons affair, has reappeared. Reaffirming very clearly that the root of evil is like a blind and prevailing ideology which outrages the faith and darkens the minds of many Muslims.
Why do not Muslims, especially the so called moderates, react with such strength and intensity against the real and eternal desecrators of Islam, that is, the Islamic terrorists who kill other Muslims in the name of the same God, radical Muslims who legitimize the destruction of Israel and teach the faith on Islamic “martyrdom?” Why do they now believe they must start a kind of Islamic “holy war” against the Chief of the Church who does have the right to express his views about Islam, with respect but at the same time with all clarity due to the natural difference between the two religions?
The Pope’s words, while quoting the Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologus, about the expansion of Islam through the sword, either at Muhammed’s times inside the Arabian Peninsula and after his death outside it (with some exceptions), underline an undeniable historical truth. The Quran itself states it; furthermore, the forced conversion to Islam of the whole Byzantine Empire in the East and South of Mediterranean, and the further expansion northwards in Europe and Eastwards in Asia, demonstrates the point made by the Byzantine Emperor. It is foolish to deny the truth, as it can only engender insane reactions. In the mid Nineties one of the most prominent scholars in Islamic studies, the Egyptian Mohamed said al-Ashmawi, told me that he did not approve the Arab tribes’ military conquest of Christian lands in the Mediterranean and that he would have preferred Islam to expand in peace like it did in South-Eastern Asia. The Pope is threatened because he has said things that every single honest and reasoning Muslim should accept: the historical truth.
It is time that both the West and Christianity stop thinking that they are the cause of all that happens, either good or evil, inside Islam and all over the world. The ideology of hate is an ancestral reality inside Islam, since its early beginnings, due to his refusal to recognize and respect the plurality of religious communities which are natural since in Islam the relationship between the believer and God is personal and there is no unique spiritual guide who embodies the absolute dogmas of faith. And it is true as well that since the defeat of the Arab armies in the war of June 5 1967 the situation has been worsening along with the rise of Islamic extremism from Iran to Indonesia. Until the rise of global Islamic terrorism which turned the West into a “factory of suicide bombers”.
This is the tragic truth of the ideology of hate which binds together all Muslims obsessed by anti-Americanism, anti-Westernism and by the prejudicial denial of Israel right to exist. They are able to find many pretexts to fly into a rage, from Israeli occupation to the American war, from the cartoons about Muhammed to the Pope’s words. Nevertheless the problem is inside Islam itself, an Islam that extremists turned from a faith in God into an ideology aiming at the imposition of a theocratic and totalitarian power on everyone who is not like them. And I am really scared when I realize that even the so called moderates have given up their minds to enter upon a “holy war” in which they will be the first victims.
Also from Abu Daoud:
I think that every culture has this tendency: to idealize an earlier period of time as being the golden age. Christians have this, whether it is found in the Apostolic period, the High Middle Ages, the Reformation, or what have you. Countries have it as well. But Islam has a totalizing and universal aspect to it, as does Christianity, but Christian revelation is primarily found in a person, Jesus Christ, the Word of God–not in a book, not even in the Bible. If it were found in a book then God’s Word would be frozen in time and inextricably and completely linked to a particular instance of cultural, linguistic, ethnic, and political history. But Islam is such a religion, thus it is also a religion that Arabicizes in a very special way. One former Muslim said that Islam destroys cultures, while Christianity fulfills them. And before you think of all the stumbling and ineptitude of colonial missionaries, consider that this man was from Africa, a colonial land par excellence.
Read the rest at Even the Past Must Submit
By Fr. John Hainsworth
“The Glory of God,” said St. Irenaeus of Lyons in the second century, “is a man fully alive.” Quite a remarkable claim. It is not enough that God is worshipped by the myriads of angels. It is not enough that the sun and the moon, the earth and the seas, the mountains and the valleys, the creatures great and small reflect His glory and express His beauty. God’s glory is somehow completed in man being fully alive. So what does it look like and what does it mean to be fully alive?
The apostolic answer is clear. Life looks like Jesus Christ. If we would truly live, we must follow His example and teaching. There is no better answer to the question, “What does it mean to be fully alive?” than the nine descriptions of blessedness spoken by Christ Himself in Matthew’s Gospel (5:3–12). Taken individually or studied together, they are an icon of Christ, the Man fully alive, and of every genuinely holy person.
This article will focus on the first beatitude, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” As we will see, it is not only first in Gospel order, but provides the foundation on which all the others are built. But first, we must understand what a beatitude actually is.
What Is a Beatitude?
At a Bible study once, a conversation started up about the meaning of “beatitude.” One man said he’d heard that the word was a composite, meaning that we should be these attitudes, be-atitude. Some fought down smiles, but I thought this was a charming, albeit naive, approach. These are indeed attitudes that we should recognize and adopt as the proper state of being.
However, the word itself comes from beatus, the Latin translation of the Greek word macarios, which begins each of the sayings. There is no English equivalent to macarios; the best match, the one used in most translations, is “blessed.” This blessedness, this macarios, is unassailable joy, a state of matchless peace; it is the glory of God in a man fully alive. Being macarios means being a Christian.
Nine times from the mountaintop, as if pealing down from the courts of heaven, the Messiah proclaims the blessedness of being His disciple. He does not promise this blessedness as a future reward only; He describes it as a present reality, the state of being belonging to the poor in spirit, the mournful, the meek, the hungry and thirsty, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemaker, the persecuted and reviled. This blessedness is the quality native to a disciple of Christ, and this is why the beatitudes are immediately sobering as well. The French philosopher Leon Bloy said, “There is only one real sadness in life, that of not being a saint.”
Do we yet know unassailable joy? Is bliss our normal state of being? Are we in fact blessed? If not, then the beatitudes are a call to faith. The desert fathers said that God gives us His Spirit when we give Him our blood. The Lord says as well, “the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and the violent take it by force” (Matthew 11:12). This does not mean hair-shirts and violence to the body. It means an uncompromising loyalty to the words and example of Christ; it means allowing Christ to take mastery of our life; it means, most succinctly, “not my will, but Yours, be done” (Luke 22:42). For those of us taking up this call to discipleship, the best place to begin is the first of the nine beatitudes.
“Blessed are the poor in spirit”
From the beginning of the beatitudes, we have a challenging claim. Sometimes this beatitude is read as meaning that we will be blessed and truly full of joy if we are fully aware of how insignificant we are, how truly meaningless our state is before God, if we cower in our state of spiritual poverty. But is this so?
The word used for poor is ptokos, and it describes an emphatic state of poverty: not that of a low-income wage earner, but that of someone who is without a wage at all, and indeed must ask for everything he receives. Commentators often use the image of a beggar to describe ptokos, but this is misleading. Disciples of Christ are not beggars; they are children, and beloved children as well, ones sought out by God even to death on the Cross. The more appropriate image of one “poor in spirit” is a child.
My little daughters are utterly dependent on me for everything. If I did not feed them, they would starve; if I did not clothe them, they would freeze; if I did not give them a house to live in, they would be totally exposed to the elements. A child, at least in circumstance, is ptokos. An adult is too, at every level of his or her existence. We forget our total dependence on God, the degree to which God permeates our reality. We forget this, or we just don’t know it. So, if we want to understand what poverty truly means, the first beatitude demands that we acknowledge from the beginning God as Creator of heaven and earth.
News about God
We claim first of all that the ineffable, inconceivable, invisible, incomprehensible, ever-existing and eternally the same God made everything we can see and know, and everything we can’t. The billions and billions of stars and galaxies, places we will never reach or know about, all exist because He took pleasure in making them. Yet not only the vast architecture of this universe springs from His deep pleasure, but the unfathomable fabric of it too.
Bill Bryson, in his book, A Short History of Everything, shares a remarkable story of a group of scientists who discovered that if you separate two subatomic particles by a distance of seven miles (a nearly incalculable distance at the subatomic level), and spin one to the right or to the left, the other will simultaneously spin in the opposite direction at exactly the same speed. This was a discovery which was left, at the time it was discovered, unexplained, because it opened a horizon at the subatomic level which the scientists felt was beyond their capacity to comprehend. This prompted James Trefil to remark that scientists had encountered “an area of the universe that our brains just aren’t wired to understand.”
There are universes within universes, and everything is God’s, and everything reveals and expresses Him. This is the first consequence of claiming that God created heaven and earth, namely, as Gerard Manley Hopkins puts it, that “the world is news about God.” “The heavens declare the glory of God; / And the firmament shows His handiwork. / Day unto day utters speech, / And night unto night reveals knowledge” (Psalm 19:1, 2).
What, then, is the news about God that we can read from His creation? First of all, it is that God loves to make things. As a young boy, I went on a seven-day backpacking trip into the Rocky Mountains with my family. We traveled to places few or none had ever been to before. After a whole day of climbing a difficult mountain pass, of cutting our way through thick undergrowth until we were sore and sorry to have even come, we came out into a vast mountain meadow between two glorious peaks. I saw miles and miles of every kind of flower in every conceivable color. Even then, as a boy, I felt in communion with the Divine, and I really wondered why so much beauty would exist and be so lavishly displayed for no one to appreciate—unless, like us, one happened to discover it all, and even then never return again. Clearly, this all existed because God took pleasure in making it.
God Loves to Create
But the news of that mountain meadow was that God loves to create. That creation exists because it was loved into existence. Man and beast, mountain and flower, camel and flea have their being in God’s love, and therefore express it to those who yearn to see it.
“This is very strange that God should have want,” says the great seventeenth-century English poet and mystic, Thomas Traherne, “It is incredible, yet very plain: want is the fountain of His fullness. Want in God is a treasure to us. For had there been no need He would not have created the world, nor made us, nor manifested His wisdom, nor exercised His power, nor beautified eternity, nor prepared the joys of heaven. But He wanted angels and men, images, companions. And these He had from all eternity.” What is more, Traherne says, this creation “is all filled with the majesty of His glory Who dwells in it . . . and we need nothing but open eyes to be ravished like the cherubim.”
We must understand, as central to our creed, that the world is news of His love, because God’s love creates the world, out to the furthest stars and down to subatomic particles. And He is still creating. As the rabbi states in Bishop Seraphim Sigrist’s book, The Theology of Wonder, “With God the act of creating and the act of sustaining are one act.” You are being created as you read this sentence. And the moments, the pages, the breath, the room, and the whole cosmos are being created with you through an act of love. God is not some clockmaker who, having assembled His masterpiece, sits back and lets it tick through until the end of its wind. He is nothing so mechanistic, so human, or so modern.
The Source of Our Dependence
This leads us to the deeper mystery of our dependence on God. God not only creates the cosmos, he is the pulse of His creation. He is the life in us, the blood in us, the thoughts in us, and not just in us but in everything. Dylan Thomas calls Him “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.”
A few years ago, I was getting my daughter ready for church. At that time in her life, she was asking a lot about where to find God. “I can’t see Him—I want to see Him.” She once walked into the sanctuary of the church and asked forcefully, “Where’s Jesus?” This seems like a good way to enter church. On this particular morning, she asked again where God was. I replied that He was in her heart. She put her hand to her chest and asked, “Is He my heartbeat?” This affected me deeply. God is not just in our hearts, He is the beat in our hearts, He is the pulse of man. I told her to feel her heart beat again whenever she needed to know that God was near.
God is not, as one popular song claims, “watching us from a distance.” He is not so passive as to be an observer, or even a cheerleader, to our lives. He is nearer to us than we are to ourselves, and so engaged in our lives and in all life that without Him nothing would have being. Christ incarnate and Christ crucified is the icon of that nearness. We might want God to be at a distance, and all sin is an attempt to put Him out of our way. But if we are alive, He is alive in us, and we through Him. When we sin, we in fact work against that life in us, and that is why “the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23).
We are like the grape on a vine: so long as we are connected to the branch, we are healthy, nourished, sweetening in the sun. When we remove ourselves from the branch, we fall and begin the slow process of rot and decay. This is dependence. This is poverty. This is ptokos.
The Poor in Spirit
So by claiming that God is the Creator of heaven and earth, the Orthodox are also claiming that we are connected to everyone and everything, and all things find their origin, existence, and meaning in God. Not a sparrow falls, not a flower blooms, not a fruit ripens, not a child is born, not a man dies, without Him. When we know this, and truly understand it, then we know that we are totally dependent on Him for everything, and can literally call nothing our own, not even our next breath. Like children, we are ptokos, we are utterly reliant, even if our fridges are full and our bank accounts flush. The fool, as the Lord defines Him in Luke (12:16ff), is the one who claims anything as His own, and those who trust in their riches are the most fragile people on earth.
The poor in spirit see wealth and poverty, health and sickness, as instruments of faith, opportunities for thanksgiving. They possess nothing and so give thanks for everything. They do this because their hearts are somewhere else. The kingdom of heaven is their only concern in this life. If they are sick, they make their illness an offering to God and rejoice that they can participate in Christ’s suffering, making their own sickness redemptive like His. If they are healthy and wealthy, they offer these gifts to God, to their neighbor, and use it all to make friends in heaven, giving always so that they never come to trust in their possessions.
When the young man came to Jesus to become His disciple, but asked to bury His father first, Jesus’ response—“Follow Me, and let the dead bury their own dead” (Matthew 8:22)—was not cruel indifference. He was making the point (which only the divine Son of God has the authority to make) that no matter what we have going on in this life, the Kingdom of heaven and the Gospel of salvation will always be pre-eminent and more urgent.
This is why the poor in spirit are filled with unassailable joy, why they are blessed, because knowing how totally dependent they are on God, knowing how fully the world reveals God’s presence and how beautiful this presence is, they know that they in truth possess nothing, and possessing nothing they possess everything. “Theirs,” the Lord says, “is the kingdom of heaven.” The poor in spirit are therefore an invincible force in this world, because they can be given the riches of nations, or cast to the streets of ghettos, and they will give thanks and find a way to offer it to God. They know how near He is and therefore how near is His Kingdom, the true gift that gives meaning to all gifts.
Fr. John Hainsworth is pastor of All Saints of Alaska Orthodox Mission of Victoria, British Columbia. Fr. John converted to Orthodoxy in 1992. He graduated from St. Vladimir’s Seminary in 2002 with a Master’s degree in Divinity.
This article originally appeared in AGAIN Vol. 28 No. 1.
