“christianity is more than a theory about the universe, more than teachings written down on paper; it is a path along which we journey-in the deepest and richest sense, the way of life.”
bishop kallistos ware-”the orthodox way”
from fr stephan freeman’s blog:
O Heavenly King, the Comforter, the Spirit of Truth, Who art everywhere and fillest all things; Treasury of Blessings, and Giver of Life – come and abide in us, and cleanse us from every impurity, and save our souls, O Good One.
On this day (Sunday) the Orthodox Church marks 50 days after the feast of Pascha and commemorates the gift of the Holy Spirit to the Church as recorded in the Book of Acts. In Russian tradition, the feast is known as Troitsa, the Trinity, and is the first of three feast days (including Monday and Tuesday). It is customary to bring boughs and branches into the Church – with the priest vested in Green. Thus, the Temple becomes a very green place on this feast – emphasizing not only the gift of the Spirit to the Church, but the Spirit as the Lord and Giver of Life.
Our secular world (and our culture – even our religious culture in America is decidedly secular) tends to see God and the world in very distinct compartments. This is the essence of secularism – not that there is no God – but that the world can be seen as somehow distinct from Him. From a proper Christian point-of-view the only name for the world existing apart from God is Hell. We do not have a feast which celebrates Hell.
Instead we have this glorious feast of Pentecost in which we once again begin to sing “O Heavenly King.” In this we proclaim that God is everywhere present and fillest all things. There is nothing that exists of its own. “In Him we live and move and have our being,” the Scriptures say.
God and creation are distinct in the sense that God Himself is not created; He is not contingent. But we do not see the world rightly if we see it apart from God. It is difficult for us, given our modern habit of thought, to think of things existing only relationally – but this is the teaching of the faith. When we are united to Christ, we do not become something other than we were created to be – we finally become in fact what we were created to be.
We do not exist alone – we are contingent beings. The truth of our existence is found only as we are known in relation to God and to one another. Thus love becomes the most fundamental existential reality. I love, therefore I am.
(andrea, me, derek. kady is taking the pic.)
Prepare for stream of consciences:
This week I learned God likes to throw curve balls. I shouldn’t be surprised at this point in life, but I constantly am. This trip to Vancouver was easily one of the best experiences of my life. I learned a lot of myself, and developed friendships I would have never had. And that amazes me. Friends I now have that I would never have had if I didn’t come up. Places that I would have never seen. Experiences I would have never shared. Feelings I would never have felt. And jim taylor is now playing on the xm radio station on the plane. Life’s good.
Been thinking about next moves in life. It’s a weird place to be in. I’ve been accepted into seminary and that’s certainly an option. But right now, right here, 30000 miles over the us, I’m not sure that’s where I want or need to be this year. I’m thinking more extensively, more expansively… I think I’ve been way to comfortable lately. And I think if there is one thing I learned from Vancouver, it’s ok (and sometimes the best thing that can happen) to step outside comfort. To take a risk and see what happens, even if the results aren’t what you hoped they’d be. Cause it’s in the struggle, the suffering (though that seems like an extreme word to apply to my life) that transformation is found. I see myself for who I am when I stumble into situations that are hard. I see where my faith lies, or doesn’t. and I can seek change. And the best thing is to see what God then brings into your life. Like an amazing friend. (and through that friend-more amazing friends). Life has all of a sudden become that much more enriched. That much better because I’ve extended my community.
Random Thoughts:
You do the next thing,. then the next. life is found in living.
Moms are great.
I am soooo blessed with great friends at home.
I like peeling grapefruits.
I love the smell of the ocean.
Never fly on an empty stomach, and right behind that, projectile vomit is never cool.
Snow capped mountains are amazing from 33000. That’s purely random, but must not go left unsaid.
Things I loved in Vancouver
1. Camping in tofino (minus tents :) ), great conversations, beautiful scenery, endor, the most wonderful trees, ferry rides, heart stories, feeling strong feeling toward nature and weather that felt whole, whale watching from the zodiac: humpbacks, grays, 5 foot swells, roy henry vickers storytelling, cold hands, salt spray, sea sickness, the wild pacific, peppermint tea with Australians, bison burgers (that never get eaten).
2. Battlestar Galactica tour with great new friends: caprica!, the alibi room, good beer, great food, smokes in the rain under the canopy, poutine!, beach games, Cyclonians
3. Trailblazing in lynn canyon-deep canyon water, suspension bridge, rock hurling contests, the beaten path, cheerleaders, mr stumpy treehousen, jumping fences, talks of fangorn.
4. Pizza and blade runner-with milk and long laughs and talks with strangers who became quick friends, music swapping, snobby dogs, potato gardens
5. Theatre sports: complete with saboteurs and dustin hoffman look-alikes, caravanning, Walkie talkies: mating goose, dirty blogger, roger-roger, speeding down the interstate, cars that unlock with your fingerprints, backstreet boys
6. tea time in the mornings with cherise
7. Homemade tuque!, train ride down the coast, Jackie the student applying for the seattle times, the retired Canadians imparting life advice as they travel north america, drinking beer with friends in seattle,
8. Seattle: walking tour of seattle, hitchhiking, the waterfront, pike place market, the moore, lisa gerrard, pirates walking out of subway, meeting wesley the indie rocker girl at the hole in the wall bar and sharing drinks and fries as we talked of our love of music, and her novel, the couple next to me at lisa gerrard who tried to convince me to come to the hot clubs after the show, as we sought to spot vampires, being “bus-stupid” by being oblivious to my route and instead of going to the airport, going to the university of Washington. Meeting nice people on the bus, who basically hold my hand as they pity the poor confused southern boy on the big city bus.
People I love from Vancouver:
Andrea
Sam
Derek
Keela
Jamie
Aaron
Daniel
Kady
Justine
Cherise
Laura
Grant
Dawn
Steve
Bruce
Thanks to everyone for making me feel at home, and part of a bigger family…
I just realized the beautiful grapefruit I bought at pike’s market is still in my backpack. I hope it’s ok.
i was recently brought back to these quotes that i had of cs lewis from a previous post. because of life, they feel much more important to me today:
“I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation.”
–Reflections on the Psalms
“The Psalmists in telling everyone to praise God are doing what all men do when they speak of what they care about.”
–Reflections on the Psalms
“Nothing is yet in its true form.”
–Till We Have Faces
“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”
–Mere Christianity
“All joy…emphasizes our pilgrim status; always reminds, beckons, awakens desire. Our best havings are wantings.”
–from an unknown letter
“Until you have given up your self to Him you will not have a real self…”
–Mere Christianity
“Poetry too is a little incarnation, giving body to what had been before invisible and inaudible.”
–Reflections on the Psalms
“‘Nothing, not even what is lowest and most bestial, will not be raised again if it submits to death.’”
–The Great Divorce
my summation of vancouver is coming soon.
it’s rare that i actually choose to write something of a more personal nature. this blog’s been designed to be somewhat of my own personal blog aggregator on things things that really make me think. during my time maintaining it, i’ve hardly felt the need to write something myself, mainly because i think a lot of people have said things better than i ever could. but through the last couple of years i’ve met a lot of people through this medium and i’m constantly amazed out how small the world can become. this week i’m off to vancouver to visit a friend, and through her, a lot of other friends i’ve met virtually. so i’ll be outta here for a while. please continue to enjoy the blog. and i’ll leave you with a link to a previous post on the ascension that we’ll be celebrating tonight.
Who am I? The answer is not at all obvious. My personhood as a human being ranges widely over space and time. And indeed it reaches out beyond space into infinity, and beyond time into eternity. Our human personhood is created, but it transcends the created order. As is said in 2 Peter 1:4, I am called to be a “partaker of the divine nature.” I am called to share, that is to say, in the uncreated energies of the living God. Our human vocation is theosis, deification, divinization. As St. Basil the Great says, “The human being is a creature that is called to become God.”
I am reminded of the story of the Fall at the beginning of Genesis, of the promise of the serpent, who says to Eve, “You shall be as God” (Genesis 3:5). The irony behind that story is that this was exactly the divine intention. The humans were indeed called to divine life. But the Fall consisted in the fact that Adam and Eve grasped with self-will that which God, in His own time and way, would have conferred upon them as a gift.
The limits of our personhood are very wide-ranging indeed. We should adopt a dynamic view of what it is to be a person. We shouldn’t think that our personhood is something fixed. To be a person is to grow. To be on a journey. And this journey is a journey that has no limits, that stretches out forever, that goes on even in heaven. Some people have an idea of heaven as a place where you do nothing in particular. But surely that is deceptive. Surely heaven means that we continue to advance by God’s mercy from glory to glory. Heaven is an end without end.
St. Irenaeus remarks, “Even in the age to come God will always have new things to teach us, and we shall always have new things to learn.” So even in heaven, we shall never be in a position to say to God, “You are repeating Yourself. We have heard it all before.” On the contrary, heaven means continuing wonder and unending discovery. To quote J.R.R. Tolkien in The Hobbit, “Roads go ever ever on.”
Now there is a specific reason for this mysterious and indefinable character of human personhood. And this reason is given to us by St. Gregory of Nyssa, writing in the fourth century. “God,” says he, “is a mystery beyond all understanding.” We humans are formed in God’s image. The image should reproduce the characteristics of the archetype, of the original. So if God is beyond understanding, then the human person formed in God’s image is likewise beyond understanding. Precisely because God is a mystery, I too am a mystery.
Now in mentioning the image, we’ve come to the most important factor in our humanness. Who am I? As a human person, I am formed in the image of God. That is the most significant and basic fact about my personhood. We are God’s living icons. Each of us is a created expression of God’s infinite and uncreated self-expression. So this means it is impossible to understand the human person apart from God. Humans cut off from God are no longer authentically human. They are subhuman.
If we lose our sense of the divine, we lose equally our sense of the human. And that we can see very clearly from the story, for example, of Soviet communism in the 70 years which followed the revolution of 1917. Soviet communism sought to establish a society where the existence of God would be denied and the worship of God would be suppressed and eliminated. At the same time, Soviet communism showed an appalling disregard for the dignity of the human person.
I think those two things go together. Whoever affirms the human also affirms God. Whoever denies God also denies the human person. The human being cannot be properly understood except with reference to the divine. The human being is not autonomous, not self-contained. I do not contain my meaning within myself. As a person in God’s image, I point always beyond myself to the divine realm.
I remember a visit in my student years in Oxford from Archimandrite Sophrony, the disciple of St. Silouan of Mt. Athos. He gave a talk on Orthodoxy, and there was a discussion afterwards. Towards the end, the chairman said, “We have time for just one more question.” Somebody got up at the back of the audience and said, “Fr. Sophrony, please tell us—what is God?” And Fr. Sophrony answered very briefly, “You tell me—what is man?” God and the human person are two mysteries that are interconnected, and neither can be understood apart from the other. “In the image of God” means there’s a vertical reference in our personhood. We can only be understood in terms of our link with the divine.
But then, let’s think of another point. “In the image of God” means in the image of the Trinity. As St. Gregory the Theologian says, “When I say God, I mean Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” That is what as Christians we mean by God. We don’t understand God as a series of abstractions. We understand God as three Persons. And that we see very clearly from the Creed. We begin in the Creed by saying, “I believe in One God.” And then we don’t continue by saying, “Who is an uncaused cause, who is primordial reality, who is the ground of being.” This is the way many modern theologians speak. But in the Creed we say, “I believe in One God . . . the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” We continue, that is to say, in specific personal terms.
God for us is Trinity. And if we’re in the image of God we’re in the image of the Triune God. What does that mean for our understanding of our personhood? Let’s think first of the Trinity, and then of ourselves.
“God is love” (1 John 4:8). And St. John in the same chapter says, in verse 18, “There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear.” In true love there is no exclusiveness, no jealousy. True love is open, not closed. God is love. There is no fear in love. And so God is not the love of one. God is not love in the sense of being self-love, turned in upon itself. God is not a closed unit. God is not a unit, but a union. God is love in the sense of shared love, the mutual love of three Persons in one.
When the Cappadocian Fathers in the fourth century are describing God, one of their key words is koinonia, meaning fellowship, communion, or relationship. As St. Basil says in his work on the Holy Spirit, “The union of the Godhead lies in the koinonia, the interrelationship, of the Persons.” So this then is what the doctrine of the Holy Trinity is saying: God is shared love, not self-love. God is openness, exchange, solidarity, self-giving.
Now, we are to apply all this to human persons made in the image of God. “God is love,” says St. John. And that great English prophet of the eighteenth century, William Blake, says, “Man is love.” God is love, not self-love but mutual love, and the same is true then of the human person. God is koinonia, relationship, communion. So also is the human person in the Trinitarian image. God is openness, exchange, solidarity, self-giving. The same is true of the human person when living in a Trinitarian mode according to the divine image.
There’s a very helpful book by a British philosopher, John Macmurray, entitled Persons in Relationship, published in 1961. Macmurray insists that relationship is constitutive of personhood. He argues that there is no true person unless there are at least two persons communicating with each other. In other words, I need you in order to be myself. All this is true because God is Trinity.
From this it follows that the characteristic human word is not “I” but “we”. If we are all the time saying, “I, I, I,” then we are not realizing our true personhood. That’s expressed in the poem of Walter de la Mare, “Napoleon”:
What is the world, O soldiers?
It is I:
I, this incessant snow,
This northern sky;
Soldiers, this solitude
Through which we go
Is I.
Whether the historical Napoleon was actually like that or not, de la Mare’s point is surely valid. Self-centeredness is in the end coldness, isolation. It is a desert. It’s no coincidence that in the Lord’s Prayer, the model of prayer that God has given us, and which teaches what we are to be, the word “us” comes five times, the word “our” three times, the word “we” once. But nowhere in the Lord’s Prayer do we find the words “me” or “mine” or “I”.
In the beginning of the era of modern philosophy in the early seventeenth century, the philosopher Descartes put forward his famous dictum, “Cogito ergo sum“—”I think therefore I am.” And following that model, a great deal of discussion of human personhood since then has centered round the notion of self-awareness, self-consciousness. But the difficulty of that model is that it doesn’t bring in the element of relationship. So instead of saying “Cogito ergo sum—I think therefore I am,” ought we not as Christians who believe in the Trinity to say, “Amo ergo sum“—”I love therefore I am”? And still more, ought we not to say, “Amor ergo sum“—”I am loved therefore I am”?
One modern poem that I love particularly, by the English poet Kathleen Raine, has exactly as its title “Amo Ergo Sum.” Let me quote some words from it:
Because I love
The sun pours out its rays of living gold
Pours out its gold and silver on the sea.
Because I love
The ferns grow green, and green the grass, and green
The transparent sunlit trees.
Because I love
All night the river flows into my sleep,
Ten thousand living things are sleeping in my arms,
And sleeping wake, and flowing are at rest.
This is the key to personhood according to the Trinitarian image. Not isolated self-awareness, but relationship in mutual love. In the words of the great Romanian theologian Fr. Dumitru Staniloae, “In so far as I am not loved, I am unintelligible to myself.”
If, then, we think of the divine image, we should not only think of the vertical dimension of our being the image of God; we should also think of the Trinitarian implication, which means that the image has a horizontal dimension—relationship with my fellow humans. Perhaps the best definition of the human animal is “a creature capable of mutual love after the image of God the Holy Trinity.” So here is the essence of our personhood: co-inherence; dwelling in others.
What is said by Christ in His prayer to the Father at the Last Supper is surely very significant for our understanding of personhood: “That they all may be one, as you, Father, are in Me, and I in You; that they also may be one in Us” (John 17:21). Exactly. The mutual love of the three Divine Persons is seen as the model for our human personhood. This is vital for our salvation. We are here on earth to reproduce within time the love that passes in eternity between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
This article originally appeared in AGAIN Vol. 27 No. 2, Summer 2005.
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Benedict Seraphim is continuing his series on his journey to Orthodoxy. another great post on what Orthodoxy is all about:
As a Protestant, when I encountered Orthodoxy, I did what any good Protestant does: I read about it and studied it. This is how a Protestant enacts his faith: through intellectual study. After all, in the churches in which I was raised, when we wanted to find answers for our questions, we studied the Bible. The Bible was, for us a textbook of sorts, a treasure trove of information from God’s mind to ours, which we were to mine for information on what to believe, on what ethical principles to hold–but rarely, if ever, on how to live the sort of life Christ lives. So, for the first two years of my investigations of Orthodoxy, I read and studied. Oh, sure, I went to a handful of Divine Liturgies, and I adopted an Orthodox prayerbook and Psalter. But nearly all my engagement with Orthodoxy was in the head. Even when I first decided to worship regularly at All Saints, I spent the next six months studying and writing essays related to the questions in my mind regarding the Orthodox Faith. None of those essays dealt with worship or the Orthodox way of living.
But when encountering philosophia and its distinction from philosophy, and especially noting how some of the Church Fathers, such as St. Justin the Philosopher, characterized Christianity as “true philosophia,” that really opened up to me that Orthodoxy is not just a set of doctrines, as was my Protestant experience, but a way of life. A way of life characterized by the ascetical struggle of the libertarian, gnomic will toward the establishment of virtue in the soul, always and ever energized by divine grace in such a struggle.
These were the keys that opened up for me what Orthodoxy was all about. It wasn’t just a neater, more “high liturgy” way of doing Sunday worship. It wasn’t just a greater devotion and connection to the historic Church. It wasn’t “Catholicism without the Pope.” It was, rather, a very real and peculiar way of living, a way of living that has been held and maintained in unbroken continuity and consistency with the Church of the Apostles. It was, in fact, not just a different way of living. It was, to be brutally blunt: life itself.
From that life sprang genuine, cosmic worship. From that life sprang an organic connection to the historic Church. From that life sprang Truth, and thus true doctrine, dogma and discipline. From that life sprang a particular way of living. But beneath it all was life: the life of Christ as given to his Church by way of his hypostatic union with his Body. The sacraments are not “genuine” simply because one can trace a tactile succession of the episcopate. The Orthodox Mysteries are “genuine” because they spring from the life of Christ himself, the life he gives to his Body the Church, and which the Church, then, may, as a living organism, give to the various members which that Body is.
benedict seraphim has some thoughts on his past year over at his site, This is Life!
he writes a smattering of something that i’ve loved about Orthodoxy, but many times fail to communicate as well as he does here:
It was that conceptual change that helped me to better grasp the Orthodox understanding of salvation, and St. Paul’s admonition to “work out your salvation with fear and trembling.”
It became clear to me that it was the habitual action, the continuous struggle, the life of the repentance that was, indeed, the point. It wasn’t a juridical declaration from God on high. It was, rather, the union with God that God fashions from our freely willed ascetical struggles in choosing that union, that love. It wasn’t that my struggle somehow earned God’s favor. It wasn’t that my efforts somehow merited grace. It was, rather, that in the struggle, in the effort, God in love freely energizes in me the infinite goods of his grace to not only do but become by his grace that which he is by his nature.
Gone was my semi-Pelagian, Restoration Movement understanding. It now made sense to me how it is that the Orthodox Church is, in some ways, the most ascetically demanding of Christian bodies, and the one place where I have come to know grace, to come finally to realize that God is, indeed, the lover of mankind. Not a God of wrath and judgment, but the God who is love, and who in love, extends his divine goods toward me that I might not merely know about him, but know him in my very being, insofar as my being can contain the tiniest sliver of that sort of knowing.
read the rest of this thoughts at his site
The BBC International News Pontifications
