The Spirit of this Age: Consumerism & Belief in God

Anthony Sacramone, managing editor of First Things, recently interviewed Pastor Timothy Keller, senior minister at Manhattan's Redeemer Presbyterian Church. Keller has recently published a book, "The Reason for God, currently No. 18 on the New York Times bestseller list, Keller offers what one might call his summa: the meat of his preaching, teaching, and confession of Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior for a world of unexamined materialist presuppositions, genetic determinisms, and endless digital cross-chatter." I thought in light of our recent conversation of Bishop Fulton Sheen, G.K. Chesterton and the spirit of this age, the exchange between Sacramone and Keller of faith and doubt might be of interest.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

Above: Icon of the Holy Prophet Job

You've always been very careful, both in your preaching and toward the end of The Reason for God, to remind people that they should examine their motives for embracing the Faith, to make sure that Christ is not a means to an end but that God is the end. But how many times have you had someone come up to you and say, "I tried Christianity but it didn't work. I still felt lost, I still felt depressed, it didn't make sense of the narrative of my life, and so I gave up on it." What do you say to someone like that?

"Be specific." There's almost no good answer to that if you allow a person to stay at that level of generality: "It didn't work. It didn't really make sense of my life." And, of course, that seems to contradict the book: The book says it will make sense of your life. Once I find out what the particular problems are, I can fix it. I mean, there's no way even to answer your question because it's so general. I can tell you the kinds of things I usually hear when I ask, "Be specific." In many cases, it's a short-term disappointment. Which is, "I really was sure that God was calling me to do this, and every door closed." You can always go to the "Evil and Suffering" chapter, chapter two, which says, "If you can't see any good reason why God let something happen, does that mean there can't be any good reason why God let that happen? The answer is no, so why are you acting as if there can't be any good reason? That's the motive problem. In other words, you got into this faith in order for God to serve you, not for you to serve God."

A second area, if I say, "Please be specific," is that they feel that Christianity is too hard. For example, a lot of times I'll have a young man say, "I know I'm not supposed to sleep with girls until I get married, but I don't have any prospects and I just can't do it. I just can't go without sex." Or something like that. You know, Christianity's too hard. That's a much better argument. But then you can always say what Lewis says about "is Christianity hard or easy," in Mere Christianity . . . In some ways, Christianity is for sinners and for people who do fail, not for people who are good. And yet at the same time you are going to fall down. Everybody's going to fall down at various points. But if you're actually addicted, as it were—if you say, "Here's something I shouldn't do but I just can't stop," then there's an addiction going on, there's something going on. You need to get in touch with that. Even if you weren't a Christian, you shouldn't be violating your conscience. There's something else going on, there's something that's too important to you, you have to deal with your heart. You need counseling.

It's not something I would imagine you heard a lot in the sixteenth century, though: "It didn't work for me."

No. But that's what I mean by saying, usually it's a disappointment. And that's where I can come back and start to say, "If there's a God, then you should relate to him"—and I do talk about this in the last chapter—if there's a God, you should be going to him because you ought to go to him, not because it works for you. I think, when I was a younger man, if somebody said, "It doesn't work for me," I think the right answer, as you just alluded, is "What do you mean 'work for you'? You should be doing this because God is God and you're not. And he's the Lord and you're his servant. What are you talking about 'work for you'? You're being selfish, you're being individualistic, you're being a consumer" Now, even though that's probably true (laughs), I'll try to find out what the specifics are, and usually the person's got some real—the individualistic culture's created this victim mentality and this feeling like God's gotta be there to meet my needs. It's created that and it's the background, but many people have had real disappointments, real sadnesses, real failures, real—

There are also real promises in the gospels for the healing of one's life.

That's also why I don't throw the consumerist thing at people anymore . . . Don't forget Job. I think the point of the Book of Job was that the only way he could turn into somebody great was he had to be profoundly disappointed. The only way for God to use him was he had to suffer. So at a certain point you do have to counsel the sovereignty of God, but before you get there, you have to be pretty thoughtful, pretty sympathetic, because people see those promises and they want to be healed. I can tell people a lot of stories, but you'd have to give me specifics, and there's no reason to go there . . .

At some point you have to get back to this consumerist problem that they have with it. But you have to be very very gentle on the way.

And the consumerist problem hasn't been helped by certain ministries, the health-and-wealth gospel, and other bestselling authors who shall remain nameless.

Yeah. It's the background for people's legitimate—I think people in the sixteenth century were asking questions like, "If God really loves me, why have four of my five children died of dysentery?" Surely they were struggling with that. But the background of "if there is a God he ought to be meeting your needs"—our consumerist culture makes that almost unbearable. Almost unbearable. But it does irritate me to hear people say, "I don't believe in God because bad things happened to me."

"Hospody Pomylui": Lord, Have Mercy

One of the great myths of Orthodoxy in America is that we cannot fulfill our evangelical mandate if we use Greek, or Slavonic, or Arabic, or Serbian. While I there is much to be said for using English as the base language of our liturgical life, we ought not to underestimate the importance of using Greek, or Slavonic, or Arabic, or Serbian as a way of reaching American inquirers to the Orthodox Church.

In light of this I offer the following video of the "Soul Children of Chicago" for consideration:



What the children are singing is "Hospody Pomylui!" or "Lord, Have Mercy!" in what I Ukrainian (the audio quality is not what I would hope--so it is a bit hard to make out).

A cute story from back in the day: I had a family of lapsed Evangelical Christians who were investigating the Orthodox Church. The parish I was serving at the time used a small amount of Greek in the Divine Liturgy. The youngest son in the family, then 7 or 8, was quite taken with the Greek phrase "Kyrie Eleison" or "Lord, have mercy!"

Well, on afternoon his mother told me that her son had been sing "Kyrie Eleison" all afternoon. She asked him what he was sing and he told her, "Mom, I'm sing 'Lord have mercy' in Greek" When asked how long he was going to keep singing this (he'd gone on for several hours by this point), he answered "Until it happens."

While the exclusive use of Greek, or Slavonic, or Arabic, or Serbian or any other traditional Orthodox liturgical language is rarely a good idea, we cannot limit ourselves exclusively to English (or in coming years, Spanish). The question of language is pastorally complex and we would do well to not artificially limit ourselves to only some parts of the Church's tradition.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

For Consideration

"One way to make enemies and antagonize people is to challenge the spirit of the world. The world has a spirit, as each age has a spirit. There are certain unanalyzed assumptions which govern the conduct of the world. Anyone who challenges these worldly maxims, such as, 'you only live once,' 'get as much out of life as you can,' 'who will ever know about it?' 'what is sex for if not for pleasure?' is bound to make himself unpopular. ...

"To marry one age is to be a widow in the next. Because [Jesus] suited no age, He was the model for all ages."

— Fulton J. Sheen, Life of Christ

Hat tip: Dawn Eden, The Dawn Patrol

"[Orthodoxy] is a Religion of Peace"; or, What Martyrs Do

While I understand the feeling, it was disappointing to me to see the report of this on CNN earlier today.

From CNN:

Angry demonstrators protesting Kosovo's independence from Serbia attacked the U.S. Embassy in Belgrade on Thursday, throwing rocks, breaking windows and setting fires.

Flames light up the facade of the U.S. Embassy in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia.

Serbian TV showed someone trying to set fire to the U.S. flag at the embassy, which was closed and unstaffed when the masked protesters attacked.

Riot police fired tear gas at the rioters and lines of armored vehicles were on the streets before the embassy perimeter was secured. A State Department official told CNN "things are under control."

Kosovo declared independence last Sunday and the United States was among the first countries to offer official recognition of its split from Serbia.

One charred body was found in the U.S. Embassy compound, embassy spokesman in Belgrade William Wanlund said. The only Americans at the embassy during the violence were Marines, who are all said to be accounted for.

Bratislaw Grubacic, chief editor of VIP magazine in Belgrade, said police reported 32 people injured, including 14 police officers.

Hat tip orrologion:
"When we are cursed, we bless; when we are persecuted, we endure it." (1 Corinthians 4:12)

A Mission With A Mission

After reading the different comments that recent posts have generated and thinking about things a bit more, I realized that I have failed to be clear about the idea of a missionary parish. So let me first ask forgiveness for any distress caused by my lack of clarity and express my gratitude for the patience of my readers and for the love of the Church and generosity toward me, that your questions and comments demonstrate.

Now to work.

The notion of a mission committed to the catechetical and spiritual formation of the laity is not, as Chrys points out, something that is contrary to the goal of any Christian community. Our commitment to Christ, as with our commitment to our spouse, our children, must be intentional. If it is not intentional, it does not exist. In this light, I would say that the project that I'm proposing is less programmatic and more attitudinal.

What I mean by this is that we can, and should, structure our communities around the idea of carefully, and systematically, not only explaining the Gospel, but helping people shape or form their lives by the Gospel.

If there is any credibility in the recent demographic studies of Orthodox communities here in U.S. this intentional formation of the faithful is either not happening, or is happening with scandalous infrequency. We need only look at the difference between the claimed membership in an Orthodox jurisdiction and its actual or effective membership to see that something is spiritual wrong in the Church. If some 75%-90% of the Orthodox faithful are not at Liturgy on any given Sunday morning, something is terribly wrong not only in parish life and ministry, but seminary education and even more fundamentally in our approach to the faith.

What I am proposing under the rubric of "A Mission With A Mission" is that we focus all the ordinary activities of the parish around helping people (1) come to know who they personally and uniquely are in Christ (their vocation) and (2) embodying or incarnating that identity in the concrete circumstance of their daily life (the life of Christian virtue). For the mathematically inclined among us: F= D + I where F = "formation," D = "Discovery of Identity in Christ," and I = "Incarnation of Identity."

How might this be done?

What I've done, and actually still do, in based on a variation of the standard three point sermon. In my own preaching, teaching and counseling, the three points that I touch on are pretty consistently these:

1. What does the Church believe?
   
2. What does that faith look like in practice?
   
3. What are the different ways that we either undermine or foster the living of that faith in our daily lives?
   

So for example, in the Sunday sermon I might ask myself what aspect of the faith of the Church's do I see reflected in the Epistle and/or Gospel for the day? In answering this question I am guided not only by the text of Scripture itself, but also parallel Old and New Testament texts. In addition, I often find guidance in the hymnography for Vespers and Matins as well as the liturgical season. And of course, I take into account the concrete needs of the community.

In seeking to answer the second question, I again will look to the text of Scripture. But I do not limit myself to the biblical text as I try and describe the faith in action. I will draw from the history of the Church, the lives of the saints, as well as literature or current events. The goal here is to flesh out the faith so that—whether immediately applicable or not—my listeners have a sense of how the Gospel is embodied concretely in human life.

Third and finally, and what is for me the most challenging and interesting part of the sermon, catechetical class or counseling session: How can we put this faith into practice?

In answering this question I'm guided by the biblical and patristic notion that the spiritual life begins in the practice of the virtues. Interestingly for many of the fathers the practice of virtue begins not with doing good deeds, but in abstaining from sin. For this reason I am concerned here with articulating the obstacles to living the aspect of the faith that I've just described. What are the things we do that, for example, make it impossible for us to have the humility of the publican? This "negative" approach is complimented by a consideration of what one of my professors in graduate school called the "facilitating conditions" for living the faith. Basically, what are the habits of thought and action (virtues) that contribute to our living, to return to the above example, the humility of the publican in the circumstances of our everyday life?

In the applicative section I allow draw not only from the fathers, but also works on theological and philosophical anthropology. I also look at what I know from psychology and sociology. But above all, I am guided by what I know about the community or person. It is in the applicative phase where I think my own commitment to serve in truth and love the community or the person is tested. It is here, in my ability, or lack thereof, to guide the community or person in the life that Christ's called them to live, that I demonstrate (or not) my effectiveness as a pastor of souls.

It is this third applicative aspect that is really the heart and goal not only of the sermon, but also the whole of the parish's catechetical program, each and every single pastoral counseling session, our evangelical outreach. But it is also the work of every meeting of the parish council, the building committee and stewardship program.

It is this third, applicative, aspect that is really the "mission of the mission."

To accomplish this requires from us, personally and community, not only a commitment to the good of others, but also simplicity of life. While I will explain this in a later post, let me simply suggest that if I am really serving your good, then I need to remain detached from the pursuit of my own good. Creating as we have a parish life that seems at time to see the parishioner as almost the "property" of the parish this pursuit of the good of the person is very difficult. So often, and this is where material simplicity is important, the "mission" of the parish is subsumed under the goals of the building committee. After 5 years in western Pennsylvania and northeastern Ohio, I can't help wonder if we have not overemphasized the church building at the expense of the church community.

But that is for another essay.

As always, I welcome your comments and questions.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

Intentional Disciples: The Parish As a House of Formation for Lay Apostles

I've gotten a number of very good comments and questions in response to my "Immodest Proposal." Rather then deal with them in the comment box, I thought I would address them here.

Sherry W over at Intentional Disciples has an interesting post on "the parish as a house of formation for lay apostles." She begins by quoting the (Roman Catholic) "Deacon James Kennedy's thoughtful essay in Envoy":

Where real Eucharistic community exists, one sees fruit in bold public witness. If I think my Catholicism is private, I would be unwilling to risk my job, profession, or, in the case of politicians, an elected office, in order to stand up for what is true. Why should I risk all only to find that no one is there to help restore my life and pick up the pieces when my witness to Christ has been rejected and I am fired or lose an election. Barring negligence or fanaticism, it should be the rule of the Catholic community to support any layman spiritually, economically, and emotionally when authentic witness to the Gospel costs him or her dearly in the secular world. Without such a community rule, who would reasonably risk public sanction? The Pope informs us that "all the members of the People of God — clergy, men and women religious, the lay faithful — are laborers in the vineyard. At one and the same time they all are the goal and subjects of Church communion as well as of participation in the mission of salvation. Every one of us possessing charisms and ministries, diverse yet complementary, works in the one and the same vineyard of the Lord" (CL 55). So we need to first develop community through sacramental worship, charitable service, and formation in the Word of God and then send people forth to be leaven in the secular world

I think Deacon James does a much better job of putting into words what I have been trying to say here (and yes, I think that fidelity to the biblical and patristic witness would demand from us that we be ready to offer not only emotional and spiritual support, but economic support as well).

Sherry also quotes some of our discussion here. She points out that

Much as I resonant deeply with writers like Russell Shaw, James Kennedy, and Fr. Gregory, it seems from their writing that they are describing an ideal whose need they see very clearly - but which they either have not seen happen in real life or have seen only rarely (for instance, Kennedy's reference to the vibrant adult Sunday school in his parish).

To which I offered the following observations:

Your comments about what I'm describing are pretty much on target. When I was a mission priest in northern CA, the parish I pastored actually was structured along the lines I describe. In a part of the world where 75% of the adult population had NO religious affiliation, I received at least one new adult into the Church every month for almost 7 years.

In addition to those who came to Christ, that time the parish produced 3 seminarians, 1 monastic novice, and 3 iconographers. Members of the community were also instrumental in founding 4 other mission parishes.

What you and I and others have been talking about can be done (I'm looking forward to following the links you provided). I've seen it done, I've done it (thanks be to God!).

But again, your are right, the communities that do this are few and far between--and sadly even less so in the Orthodox Church.

Sherry concludes with links to several Roman Catholic parishes that are stand out examples of lay formation. These sites I think offer the Orthodox Church not only some interesting models of how to reorganize our parishes, but also maybe even potential partnerships.

Anyway, if you have not done so, please go over to Intentional Disciples and look around. There's much food for thought there.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

Kosovo: Pandora's Box

In light of the recent US sanctioned declaration of independence by Kosovo, I thought the following essay by John Couretas at the Action Institute's Powerblog worth reading. I will confess my grasp of Eastern European politics and history leaves me unprepared to offer any substantive observations.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

Nearly two years ago, in "Who Will Protect Kosovo's Christians?" I wrote:

Dozens of churches, monasteries and shrines have been destroyed or damaged since 1999 in Kosovo, the cradle of Orthodox Christianity in Serbia. The Serbian Orthodox Church lists nearly 150 attacks on holy places, which often involve desecration of altars, vandalism of icons and the ripping of crosses from Church rooftops. A March 2004 rampage by Albanian mobs targeted Serbs and 19 people, including eight Kosovo Serbs, were killed and more than 900 injured, according Agence France Press. The UN mission in Kosovo, AFP said, reported that 800 houses and 29 Serb Orthodox churches and monasteries - some of them dating to the 14th century — were torched during the fighting. NATO had to rush 2,000 extra troops to the province to stop the destruction.

All this happened despite the presence of UN peacekeeping forces. According to news reports posted by the American Council for Kosovo, Albanian separatists are opposing the expansion of military protection of Christian holy sites by UN forces. A main concern of Christians is the fate of the Visoki Decani Monastery - Kosovo's only UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Now that Albanian separatists have declared the Serbian province of Kosovo to be an independent nation -- and won backing from President Bush -- a chain of events has been put in place that EU lawmakers are already describing as a Pandora's Box.

Why? Because the secessionist move in Serbia is likely to kindle others in places like Georgia, Moldova and Russia (which now much entertain similar aspirations from places like Abkhazia, South Ossetia, or Transdniester). This explains Russia's opposition to the Kosovo breakaway, but it's not alone. Spain, which has contended with Basque, Catalan and Galician separatist movements for decades, refused to recognize an independent Kosovo, saying the move was illegal. Then there's Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece and Cyprus. Some Asian countries also view the Kosovo split as a dangerous precedent. Sri Lanka said the move was a violation of the UN Charter. Canada has officially remained mum on the question so far.

For a good balanced look ahead for Kosovo, see "After Kosovo's Secession," by Lee Hudson Teslik on the Council of Foreign Relations Web site, and the online debate between Marshall F. Harris, Senior Policy Advisor, Alston + Bird, and Alan J. Kuperman, Assistant Professor, University of Texas, LBJ School of Public Affairs.

But I am a skeptic, in case you were wondering.

In a recent Washington Times commentary titled "Warning Light on Kosovo," John Bolton, Lawrence Eagleburger and Peter Rodman argued that partitioning Serbia's sovereign territory was not in the best interest of the United States:

The blithe assumption of American policy — that the mere passage of nine years of relative quiet would be enough to lull Serbia and Russia into reversing their positions on a conflict that goes back centuries — has proven to be naive in the extreme.

Recognition of Kosovo's independence without Serbia's consent would set a precedent with far-reaching and unpredictable consequences for many other regions of the world. The Kosovo model already has been cited by supporters of the Basque separatist movement in Spain and the Turkish-controlled area of northern Cyprus. Neither the Security Council nor any other international body has the power or authority to impose a change of any country's borders.

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the current policy is the dismissive attitude displayed toward Russia's objections. Whatever disagreements the United States may have with Moscow on other issues, and there are many, the United States should not prompt an unnecessary crisis in U.S.-Russia relations. There are urgent matters regarding which the United States must work with Russia, including Iran's nuclear intentions and North Korea's nuclear capability. Such cooperation would be undercut by American action to neutralize Moscow's legitimate concerns regarding Kosovo.

In "Let's Avoid Another Kosovo Crisis," Ruth Wedgwood, a professor of international law and diplomacy at Johns Hopkins University, wrote in the Wall Street Journal:

Kosovo has been part of the territory of Serbia since before the First World War, and its ancient monasteries are iconic to the Serbs. Belgrade's government coalition is already in crisis on the issue.

It is a dangerous precedent to tear apart the territory of a member state of the United Nations. And the timing could not be worse. No one needs a Kosovo crisis, while NATO remains short of troops in Afghanistan and maintains 16,000 troops in this autonomous province of Serbia. A Kosovo blowup would provide an easy excuse for gun-shy European allies to reduce their Afghanistan contingents.

And what of the Serb Christians? Orthodox Bishop Artemije of Ras and Prizren issued the following statement on Jan. 31:

Should Washington and its followers make good on their current threats to recognize Kosovo, Serbia would never accept it. Not only Russia but many other countries, especially those outside of Europe, would reject recognition. Kosovo would never become a member of the United Nations. We would regard the international presence in Kosovo, including the mission now being considered by the EU, as an occupation force. We Serbs have suffered many occupations in the past and triumphed over them. If necessary we would survive this one as well. Despite any intensification of the terror to which we Christians have been subjected since 1999, my flock in Kosovo has no intention of leaving their homes.

I do not welcome having to direct these critical words at the United States. Serbs have always regarded America as a friend and continue to do so. Americans and Serbs were allies in both World Wars. We are not the ones who are pursuing a confrontation today. But it is impossible for America to profess friendship with Serbia while demanding the amputation of the most precious part of our homeland.

Mercy and Justice

The last two Sunday sermons (the Sunday of Zacchaeus and the Sunday of the Publican and the Pharisee) have focused on the theme of mercy and justice (you can hear these sermons on the parish web site here and here). My thesis, which I will continue develop this coming week on the Sunday of the Prodigal Son, is that far from being opposed to one and other, mercy and justice represent two facets of what the "shalom" or the peace that comes from our right relationships with God, others and self.

As I outlined last Sunday, mercy is how I respond to my neighbor in his or her need. Mercy in this sense reflects my willingness to lift up my neighbor. Thinking about those times in life when we have experienced mercy, we see that, common to all of them, is a felt deficiency of one kind or another. The person who extends mercy to us does so precisely in response to our need. Likewise when we are merciful to others, for example when we forgive, we do so in response to a real lack either in the other person or in our relationship.

To help people understand justice, I asked them to think for a moment about when they have felt unjustly treated. Injustice is more than simply not getting what is due me it has as well the quality of denying me something I need to continue to grow and develop. One of the sins that cry to heaven, withholding wages due a worker, is so horrible because, like murder, it undoes or undermines the future. Injustice betrays our need for a hopeful future, which is to say that justice, grows out of, and completes, mercy.

But where mercy reflects my response to my neighbor's need, justice is concerned with his or her potential. A just relationship is one in which I commit myself to adding my neighbor in the realization of his or her abilities. The inter-dependence of mercy and justice as well as their centrality in the Christian life, or so I suggested in the sermons, are much misunderstood by many contemporary Orthodox Christians.

Too easily we dismiss the works of justice in favor of what we imagine to be the works of mercy. But mercy, responding as it does to human need, has a transitory quality. Once I identify and met my neighbor's need, I'm done. Justice, one the other hand, is open-ended and commits me to a rather more demanding relationship. Why? Because unlike mercy's commitment to make up that which is lacking either in my neighbor's life or between us, just requires from me the willingness to travel with him or her from "glory to glory."

Precisely because justice is a response to human potential, it has a more dynamic, and this demanding, quality. At what point can I really and truthfully say that I have fulfilled my commitment to help another human being grow more fully into his or her own unique likeness to the Thrice Holy God?

Starting as I did on the Sunday of the Zacchaeus, I also highlighted in the sermons that both the works of mercy and justice also make demands on our material wealth. Zacchaeus committed not simply his excess, but the substance of his wealth both to the care of the poor (that is, the works of mercy) and the restitution of anyone that he harmed (that is to say, the works of justice). So too I argued, we how are Christian must commit the substance of our lives to the works of mercy and justice. This of necessity includes, by the way, our material wealth.

Personally and communally, a life of mercy and justice requires from us first of all an attention to our neighbor not only in his or her need, but also in his or her potential. It is not enough to simply say no one around me is in need, is suffering a lack. I also must take positive action to help the person discover and develop their own unique gifts.

This in turn requires from me (and I hope to develop this more this coming Sunday) that I renounce envy and jealousy.

Too many Orthodox Christians, as I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, set mercy and justice against each other. While there is a certainly biblical and patristic witness that supports this position, I suspect that the "justice" that is condemned is not justice as I have articulated it here, justice as grounded in mercy. Rather what is condemned is an understanding of justice that is used to excuse, or worse blesses, our lack of a generous spirit. It is this deficient sense of justice that Christ condemns in the Gospel:

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith. These you ought to have done, without leaving the others undone (Mt 23.23).

Certainly there are some who appeal to an understanding of justice that is static and narrow. But it is also worth noting that there are also those whose understanding of mercy is sentimental, manipulative and debilitating of others. In both cases what is lost is the healthy balance; there is a necessary and in this life irreducible tension between mercy and justice as the two facets of the biblical understanding of shalom.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

An Immodest Proposal

Comments on recent posts (you can review them here and here) have been extraordinarily good and have provided me with more food for thought then I can quickly digest, much less respond to quickly. For this I say thank you.

These comments came to mind as I was reading Fr Richard John Neuhaus's "The Conversion of England." Neuhaus's comments are part of his review of a new book by Adian Nichols, O.P. entitled Realm: An Unfashionable Essay on the Conversion of England," in which Nichols argues that the Catholic Church should pursue actively the conversion, or if you prefer, reconversion of England to the Catholic Church. After all, as Neuhaus observes:

From a Catholic perspective, the Church of England is a schismatic form of the Church in England that should be restored to full communion with the bishop of Rome and those in communion with the bishop of Rome. In this ecumenical age, to be sure, this is not usually stated so bluntly. Father Nichols' candid reopening of these questions is, as he says, unfashionable.

In an interesting turn, Neuhaus contrasts the argument made by Nichols with that made a 150 years earlier by John Henry Cardinal Newman. As Neuhaus tells it "While many followed Newman into full communion [with the Catholic Church], he was extremely cautious about encouraging conversions that were not as thoughtful or driven by theological and moral necessity as his own. And he was sharply critical of those who attacked the establishment of the Church of England."

What was Newman's motivation?

This reluctance to press for conversions was a constant in Newman's thought, as was his view that the Church of England was, while not part of the one true Church of Christ, a valuable "bulwark" against infidelity. This was joined, as students of Newman know, with his distinctly uncomplimentary view of the leadership of the predominantly Irish Catholicism in the England of that time. He did not think that leadership was up to replacing the religious and cultural establishment rooted in the Church of England.

But as Neuhaus observes neither Newman's England, nor Anglican Communion of his time, exist anymore:

More than a century and a half after Newman, the circumstance is dramatically different in which Father Aidan Nichols makes his "unfashionable" proposal. It is very doubtful that the Church of England is today a "breakwater" against infidelity. Many view it as a source of infidelity, or at least of doctrinal and moral frivolousness that undermines fidelity. Nor is it, as Newman thought it was in his day, a guarantor of national cohesion. In today's England, there are more churchgoing Catholics than Anglicans, and more observant Muslims than either.

In addition, the worldwide Anglican Communion, once anchored in the Church of England and thought to be a compelling reason for its preeminence, appears to be on the edge of dissolution. Moreover, with large numbers of English converts, plus large communities of committed Catholic immigrants from Central Europe and elsewhere, Catholicism is increasingly viewed as the only candidate to lead in the evangelization, or re-evangelization, of England. If the English are ever again to be something like a Christian people, Father Nichols' proposal appears to be less unfashionable than inevitable.

Having traveled in England (as well as Scotland and Ireland) as an undergraduate and, later as an adult and an Orthodox priest, I am hard press to deny Fr Neuhaus's observations. I would apply also his observation to Europe generally. Having taught theology for two years at Duquesne University and served as a college chaplain for some ten years, I think the situation in the United Kingdom is applicable to most Catholic and secular college and university campuses. And lest you think I am on a polemical jag, I would also apply Neuhaus's concerns about England to Greece, Russia and most traditionally Orthodox countries and yes, even to the Orthodox Church here in North America.

In other words, it is not simply the Anglican Communion that is struggling with doctrinal infidelity and the "moral frivolousness that undermines fidelity." There seems to be generally state of spiritual exhaustion in many parts of the Christian community.

So what are we to do?

Alasdair MacIntyre in his book After Virtue calls for a new St Benedict, or if you prefer, a restoration of monasticism, as key to the renewal of the spiritual life of the Christian community. My own experience as a mission priest leads me to believe that there is a great deal of merit in MacIntyre's proposal. Monasticism with its focus on community life, shared work, liturgical prayer, asceticism, material simplicity of life, mutual obedience to God and each other, and above all conversion of manners, is a powerful tool for not only evangelism, but also the ongoing formation and reformation of both the person and the community.

Most powerful in this model is they way in which it lends itself to seeing a mission parish not as an end in itself, but as a school of charity. As a school of charity, the mission parish is concerned not with its own numerical growth, but with preparing men and women to undertake their own ministry within the Body of Christ. Practically speaking, there are things a small community is better able to do then a large one.

Borrowing from St Benedict and modeling itself on the Holy Rule, one can think of a mission parish not as a community that will grow into a full parish (though it might), but as a formation community concerned with forming missionaries. In this model the community intentionally remains small, and poor, in order to offer a "noviate" for lay Christians. These men and women would eventually leave the mission for other, more established parishes, for seminary or the monastic life.

What I am purposing is this: Taking seriously the concerned outlined by Nichols, Neuhaus, MacIntrye and others could we not as Orthodox Christians (and, Catholics, Protestants and Evangelical Christians could do this as well), establishes mission communities whose mission is not to grow, but to form missionaries, lay catechists, seminarians, monastics vocations and above all active lay Christians committed to the work of the Church in all areas of life?

Your comments and questions are, as always, most welcome.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

You're Not On Drugs

You are on the Lawrence Welk Show. Look at this clip of "one of the newer songs," which is pretty much the ne plus ultra of clueless squaredom. Ah one and ah two and ah...



Do wait until the very end of the video for Lawrence Welk's characterization of the song.

Hat tip: Rod Dreher.

Going Out On A Limb

Looking at the comment boxes for the last few posts, especially the post where I reference Bradley Nassif's interview, it seems that the nature and the practice of the priesthood as well as the character of men we ordain to the priesthood are topics of more than passing interest. This of course is as it should be—we should exercise great care and concern over those who we put in positions of authority in the Church.

I think we can all agree that Nassif's statement about some Orthodox clergy not having a living relationship with Jesus Christ is shocking. It is that and more. The real question, whatever might be the inadequacies of how he expressed himself, is this: Is he correct? Is it possible to become a priest in the Orthodox Church and NOT have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ?

Even a cursory reading of the disciplinary canons that pertain to the clergy would suggest that, yes, it is possible for a man to be ordained and have no real relationship with Jesus Christ. It is also possible for a man, after he is ordained, to lose that relationship.

Some have sought ordination out of pride or ambition. While I hope less common today, it was not unheard of for a man to become a priest because his dad was a priest. Still others come to holy orders in an attempt to overcome a deep inner void or lack of a sense of their own personal self-worth.

None of these necessarily preclude the man becoming not only a good priest, but even a saint. As with marriage, the man most grow into the office he receives at ordination. I hope that, after almost 23 years of marriage, I am a better husband to my wife then when we were first married. Likewise I hope that, after 11 years, I am a better priest then when I was first ordained.

In marriage and in ministry growth is not simply a matter of learning new things—though there is plenty of that in both. There is also a necessary purification of heart and an ever deepening understanding and appreciation of that to which Christ has called me. For this reason even the best of beginnings must be transcended, moving as we do in our spiritual life from "glory to glory."

A bad beginning then does not necessarily mean a bad ending.

At the same time, so much of what we do not simply as clergy, and even more fundamentally as Christians, necessarily flows out of both divine grace ("that makes up that which is lacking"), and our own character. Yes, there is the example of Balaam's ass (Num 22.1-35). Or if you prefer there is response given to the Pharisees who demand that Jesus silence His support that, "I tell you that if these should keep silent, the stones would immediately cry out." (Luke 19:40). So yes, through asses and stones, the Gospel can be proclaimed.

But this is not the whole of the story.

The Apostle Paul reminds us that the Gospel can be proclaimed with great profit by those motive by "envy and strife" and "selfish ambition" with the hope of "to add affliction." And "What then? Only that in every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is preached; and in this I rejoice, yes, and will rejoice" (see for example, Phil 1.12-18). Great profit? Yes, but not for the unrepentant preaching who clings to his darker motives and allows them, often by neglect, to blot out the Light of Christ.

St Paul says the Church at Philippi:

Only let your conduct be worthy of the gospel of Christ, so that whether I come and see you or am absent, I may hear of your affairs, that you stand fast in one spirit, with one mind striving together for the faith of the gospel, and not in any way terrified by your adversaries, which is to them a proof of perdition, but to you of salvation,
and that from God. For to you it has been granted on behalf of Christ, not only to believe in Him, but also to suffer for His sake, having the same conflict which you saw in me and now hear is in me (vv. 27-30).

The Apostle enjoins us to bring our lives into conformity with the Gospel. Again, the proclamation of the Gospel is not dependent on human character. Failure to grasp this was the downfall of the Donatists. But my salvation is very much dependent on my character.

While certainly no one who has posted on this blog has done so, to remain indifferent to brother or sister in Christ who we know cannot remain chaste, or sober, or be trusted with money or children or something told in confidence is, at a minimum, irresponsible. More likely it is cruel since, even if they hurt no one else, they are hurting themselves.

I cannot prevent simple human failure in myself, much less others. Nor can I prevent grievous human sinfulness. Any attempt on my part to do so is not only doomed to failure, it is also very likely a sin on my part. Why? Because sin is the misuse of our freedom. I cannot in any absolute sense prevent you from sinning unless I curtail in some way your freedom.

But if prevention in the absolute sense is impossible, what is left?

My response.

Thinking a bit more deeply about Nassif's words, as well as the universally insightful comments offered in the comment box, the concern that each priest has a living relationship with Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour, is a moral and practical imperative because we love our spiritual fathers the clergy. Clergy will fail, even with the best of intention and education. How they, and we, respond to that failure will largely be determined by quality of the spiritual lives and character of those concerned.

If we fail to place the living, vibrant relationship of each member of the Church at the center of all we do then when the inevitable failures, in our clergy and in ourselves, happen, what resources do we really have?

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

Depression as an advantage?

Philip Dawdy over at Furious Seasons (which the author describes as "A blog about the crazy world of mental health and America"), has an interesting interview with Tom Wootten on depression as an advantage. Wootten is the author of The Depression Advantage (2007) and The Bipolar Advantage (2005). According to Dawdy, Wootten "has different ideas about how to address depression than does the rest of the Western world" and so he "recently interviewed him via email about his bold claim that depression is an advantage."

To give you an idea at what Wootten is getting at:

Depression is an advantage. What are you talking about?

How we choose to look at our experiences in life and how we react to them determines whether it is an advantage or a disadvantage. Depression is a very painful state that has a very real chance of killing you. Most people would say that it is the worst thing that ever happened to them. A few have chosen to use it as a catalyst that changed their lives while they gained power over it.

It is not the hardships we face that matter, it is what we become as a result of facing them. Some of the greatest people in history have said that depression is what made them great. The Depression Advantage is about facing our condition while accepting the possibility that we might gain from it instead of trying to hide from the experience. Avoidance leads to a diminished life where we live in fear that some day depression will return and we will not be able to handle it. When we learn from it we find that we gain power over it and it does not affect us the same as it used to.

Our first depression seemed impossible to survive, but as we experience deeper states we find that the level that first seemed impossible can now be managed very well. We can even help others because we understand it and can empathize with them. At least in lower levels, we gain an advantage over depression instead of it having the advantage over us. Taken to the extreme, Saint John of the Cross said that it was his "Dark Night of the Soul" that made him a saint.

Information on Wootton's integrative approach to depression can be found in the Success Center section of his bipolaradvantage.com website.

As I mention in my comment, both personally and pastorally I have found it of immense value to be able to integrate the darker moments of life into a wider context of meaning (what Wootten calls the "big circle'). As he says:

"Some people think that the problem is that we have wrong thinking. They propose that we catch ourselves thinking sad thoughts and replace them with happy thoughts, as if that is going to change the picture. It is the same as focusing on the two small circles. We will never fully understand our condition until we begin to focus on the big circle and find meaning in our experiences. As long as you think that sad thoughts are an illness you will not find the advantage of your condition.

"The example of our saints is that they got to a point that they were in the same state of oneness no matter what happened to their body or mind. Saint Francis was in incredible pain at the end of his life, yet had the ability to keep focused on the big picture. It is not that he was somehow separate from his experiences; he experienced them just as you and I would. But since he was focusing on the big picture, he was in bliss. Bliss is the state that is not affected by the duality.

"As our saints grew in understanding, they still experienced the pain, but from the perspective of bliss it did not affect them as much. That is why Saint Teresa said: 'All these illnesses now bother me so little that I am often glad, thinking the Lord is served by something.'

"It takes the perspective of extreme pain for some of us to see the truth of bliss. The Depression Advantage is that we have the chance to understand something that few ever will."

Surf over and take a look at Furious Seasons. Some of the things I agree with, others I need to think about. Having cut my theoretical teeth through my readings in the anti-psychiatric movement, I find Furious Seasons well worth my time.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

p.s., You can find my comments on Wootten in the comment section of the post.

+FrG

Do the Orthodox "Know the Gospel"?

Over at The Path, there is an interesting post on an issue near and dear to my heart: the spiritual formation and discipleship of Orthodox Christians. Here are my comments on the post Do the Orthodox "Know the Gospel"?

First of all, thank you for this post!

I think that, even more pressing then bring new people into the Church is our retention of the people that we have.

Having listened to the interview (click here to listen: Is There A 'Revolving Door' In The Orthodox Church") with Dr Bradley Nassif (click on Dr Nassif's name to read the article he wrote on this subject of Word magazine) and reading over Matthew Gallatin's comments, I find myself leaning more toward the former.

I appreciate, and agree with, Gallatin that those who leave the Church "either didn’t understand, or were unwilling to shoulder, . . . the tremendous responsibility that comes with being Orthodox." But this it seems to me leaves a number of questions not only unanswered, but even asked. Specifically, how were those who leave catechized?

It is not unheard of for someone to be received after only a few months, or even weeks, after they approach the priest. How many times are people received without even any formal instruction in the faith?

Then there is the question of the community. It is one thing to welcome converts, it is another thing to actually integrate them into the community and nurture their growth in the faith.

In the early Church the catechumenate lasted years. It was proceeded by a period of inquiry and followed by a period of further instruction (mystagogy). Even assuming that all our clergy and faithful are personally committed to Christ, we can't neglect the fundamentals of a serious period of instruction for inquirers, catechumens and the newly illumined.

And this must happen within a community that is itself committed to integrating new members. This means that it is not simply converts who need to change, we need to change as well.

Many of those who were baptized as infants have for all practical purposes fallen away. Unreasonably we seem to think that parishes that have an uneven record of fostering a personal commitment to Christ in those born into Orthodox families are able to do so with adult converts.

Convincing someone of the truth of the Orthodox faith, in my experience at least, is relatively easy. it is much harder to take people through the often long and labor intensive process of being inquirers, catechumens and then provide them, as newly illumined members of the Church, with the spiritual formation that they need to grow into mature, committed Orthodox Christians who place Christ at the center of their lives.

Again, thank you for the post--it is a issue that, like you and many in the Church, I am very concerned with.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

Great Catholic author coming to town

From fellow blogger Mike Aquilina of Way of the Fathers, I have received the following announcement. If you are in the area and can make the time, why not stop by?

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

One of my favorite writers on early Christianity is Fr. Michael Giesler, author of the novels Junia and Marcus, both set in second-century Rome. They're great page-turners of the Ben Hur/Quo Vadis variety, and they deserve a wide audience. Fr. Giesler is coming to our town, and I hope you'll be able to meet him (and pick up his books) at one of his appearances. The dates and times follow.

THURSDAY, FEB. 7

8:30 p.m. — Lecture, "The Glory of the Early Christians: Family Life and the Gift of Celibacy," Gentile Gallery, Franciscan University of Steubenville

FRIDAY, FEB. 8

11 am — Mass at Aquinas Academy (2308 West Hardies Road, Wildwood, PA 15091)

12 noon – 2 pm — Booksigning in lobby of Aquinas Academy

3-5 pm — Booksigning at Kirners Bookstore (219 4th Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15222)

Fr. Giesler holds a doctorate in sacred theology and an advanced degree in philosophy. In addition to his novels, he has published many scholarly articles.

Please spread the word! If you have questions, don't hesitate to ask me.

Tag! I’m It?

I've been tagged!

From: Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the HIGHLY IMPROBABLE. New York: Random House, 2007, p. 123.

His big insight is that bank employees who sell you a house that's not theirs just don't care as much as the owners; Tony knew very rapidly how to talk to them and maneuver. Later, he also learned to buy and sell gas stations with money borrowed from small neighborhood banks.

Tony has this remarkable habit of trying to make a buck effortlessly, just for entertainment, without straining, without office work, without meeting, just by melding his deals into his private life.

Here are the rules:

Pick up the nearest book of 123 pages or more. (No cheating!)
Find Page 123.
Find the first 5 sentences.
Post the next 3 sentences.
Tag 5 people.

I tag Irenaeus, Sherry W., Fr John W Fenton, Stephen Paul, Fr Tim Finigan.

A SWOT Analysis for the Priesthood?

A few weeks ago one of the members of the parish I currently serve suggested that it would be helpful to do a SWOT Analysis focusing on the ministry of Orthodox priests.

"A what kind of analysis?" you ask. 'A SWOT Analysis," I answer.

Wikipedia, that online encyclopedia of, well, just about everything, says this about SWOT analysis:

SWOT Analysis, is a strategic planning tool used to evaluate the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats involved in a project or in a business venture. It involves specifying the objective of the business venture or project and identifying the internal and external factors that are favorable and unfavorable to achieving that objective. The technique is credited to Albert Humphrey, who led a research project at Stanford University in the 1960s and 1970s {using data from Fortune 500 companies}.

As I've thought about what such an examination of the priesthood might look like, I've been stymied as to how I might try and characterized the goals of the priesthood in a manner that lend themselves to any sort of strategic analysis. After all, the goal of the priesthood is the salvation of the human race.

Yes, we can try and break that down into steps, but even this lends itself to a rather broad range of skills that characterized Orthodox Christian priestly ministry. What reading I've done that focuses offers any sort of analysis of priestly pastoral ministry tends to assume, often unintentionally, a particular type of priestly service, specifically parochial ministry. Assuming that this is the norm for the priesthood (itself a debatable proposition), the first question that we might want to ask is this:

Is there a normative model of the parish? In other words, do we even have a model or touchstone parish against which we can evaluate not only the ministry of the priest, but the life of the parish?

The answer, I would suggest, is no.

After all when we say "the parish" do we proceed in our analysis based on the needs of a large, wealthy suburban ethnic parish?

Or, do we want to do our analysis with a small, relatively poor convert mission parish as our touchstone?

Or possible, we want to proceed with an eye towards the priest serving an older, graying community in decline?

And, to complicate matters further, who decides what needs are legitimate, and how do he, she or they, make this determination?

You no doubt are coming to see some of the challenges that face us when we undertake any type of analysis of the priesthood.

In my own ministry I have served all three of the communities I just described. While this gives me a fairly broad range of pastoral experience, I also realize that I have a fairly minimal understanding of parish life here in the US. Actually, if there is anything I have taken away from my pastoral experience is that there really isn't a "typical" (in the sense of normative) Orthodox parish in the U.S. One advantage that I might claim for myself is that—again because I've served in a variety of circumstances—I know that there isn't a typical parish and so I am on guard against generalizing my experience to the broader Church.

Especially when we turn our analytic attentions to a complex (and vague) social situation we need to be guard that we don't succumb to what psychologist call confirmation bias. In a nutshell, confirmation bias is the tendency we all have of only paying attention to (or to over valuing) evidence that supports our experience.

At the same time we often ignore (or minimize) evidence that disagrees with our preconceptions. Or, as I will tell people, the joy of being a psychologist is not that I am unbiased, but that I am differently biased, when it comes to parish ministry.

So where might we wish to being an analysis of the priesthood?

Let me suggest that where we might want to being is with a consideration of marriage and its relationship to priestly ministry. I would invite your comments on this as I work towards as further, and later, elucidation of the goals of a SWOT Analysis of the priesthood.

It might be very instructive for both clergy and lay leaders to think about the priesthood both as the fruit of marriage (which is the biblical model) and in relationship to its effects on marriage. Do we, for example, foster the kind of marriage among our clergy that the Scriptures say is the prerequisite for ordination?

I will offer more thoughts later, hopefully with your input.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

13,000 +

Hey the blog broke 13,000 hits today! Thanks everybody!

If you could, please encourage people to take a look at the blog, maybe even leave a comment or two. I realize it is purely vanity on my part, but it'd be great to break 15,000 hits by the end of the month.

So what d'ya say? Want to help put me over the top?

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

“Spiritual Ecumenicism, Empathy and Christian Unity”

One of the themes I am interested in addressing on this blog is what some call "spiritual ecumenism" or the reconciliation of divided Christendom through the mutual appreciation of the gifts found in different Christian communities. John Allen in his weekly online column makes a number of interesting points on just this topic as part of his coverage of events in Rome for the annual Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.

Allen begins with a summary and analysis of Walter Cardinal Kasper lecture this past "Thursday afternoon at the Centro Pro Unione, in an event co-sponsored by the Friars of the Atonement along with the Lay Centre in Rome and the Vincent Pallotti Institute." While Allen characterizes the talk as the "by now become more or less his standard stump speech," there was also one (and I would say more than one) "striking note" in Kasper's presentation

According to Allen, Kasper drew an "explicit link . . . between ecumenism as largely intra-Christian effort, and ecumenism as a witness of reconciliation and peace to the broader world." At its best, ecumenical dialog between Christians bears witness to our own respective communities and the larger human family of what Kasper calls "eschatological shalom," or the lasting peace that comes as a free gift from God only. In Kasper's own words:

In a century which was one of the most dark and bloody ones, where two world wars cost the lives of millions, where two totalitarian systems and many dictatorships produced countless innocent victims, Christians stand up to overcome their centuries-old divisions, giving witness to the fact that despite guilt on all sides, reconciliation is possible.

For Kasper, ecumenical discussions over the last 100 years are "a light shining in the darkness, and a powerful peace movement." The evangelical and eschatological witness of ecumenicism, however, is not primarily a matter of modeling what might call good communication skills or an expression of an appropriate approach to conflict resolution. Rather, the power of ecumenical witness is grounded in "Spiritual empathy [the] inside understanding of a different and initially strange Christian and ecclesial form of life as well as an intimate understanding from the inside."

This empathy, this attempt at understanding Christians in other traditions, is not "a form of compromising doctrinal relativism." Far from it in fact. Understanding is impossible if one simply abandons "one's own identity in favour of an ecumenical 'hotch-potch.'" Real spiritual empathy for each other does not aim at finding "the lowest common denominator." Such an approach to ecumenicism results, at best, in the "spiritual impoverishment" of at least one side. And because they have denied their own gifts, the impoverished side also has effectively denied to its dialog partner the possibility of growing in how they understand themselves and their own tradition.

The goal rather of spiritual empathy is the "mutual spiritual enrichment" of those who seek to understand each other from within. In such an encounter, Kasper says, "we discover the truth of the other as our own truth. So through the ecumenical dialogue the Spirit leads us into the whole truth; he heals the wounds of our divisions and bestows us with full catholicity."

The standard by which we come to recognize an authentic spirituality of ecumenism according to Kasper is Pneumatological:

To think that the Spirit would not bring to an end and to fulfilment the work he initiated, would be pusillanimity. Ecumenism needs magnanimity and hope. I am convinced that, as long as we do all we can, God's Spirit will give to us one day this renewed Pentecost.

Later in the same article, Allen quotes Fr Nicholas Lossky, a Russian Orthodox priest serving in Paris. Fr Nicholas addresses in a more practical way what Kasper outlines theoretically.

Fr Nicholas is clear that the goal of ecumenicism is "the restoration, or the installation, of visible unity in a single Eucharist." I share Fr Nicholas's skepticism, however, of ecumenical prayer services that are simply a "mix and match" of elements from different Christian traditions. "For my part," Fr Nicholas writes, "I think it would be much more edifying to come together in a church and to participate there in the office of vespers of that church, whether it's Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran, Reformed, Anglican, Baptist or Pentecostal." Why? because it is only "In that way, [that] we truly learn the way in which the 'other' prays."

As I have said in earlier posts, I do not wish to minimize the importance of formal, theological dialog. At the same time, and especially on the grassroots level, ecumenical encounters must proceed along a path that allows for the mutual spiritual enrichment of Christians of different traditions. To be of value in this way, we must take seriously the ascetical task of empathy for one for another. As we search for such an empathetic encounter, we must guard against any form of relativism. Far from expressing a concern for the other, or a respect for our differences, relativism dismisses our differences and (in so doing) dissolves both our own uniqueness and that of our dialog partners.

In a marriage it is easy to lose sight of the fact that a disagreement is not about who is right and who is wrong in any absolute sense. Disagreements between husband and wife are, or at least should be, reflect their mutual attempt to discern together God's call for their shared life. Thinking about a divided Christendom in terms of marriage is helpful for me. In the Orthodox Church we have a service for the restoration for a marriage of those who have been divorced. It is a brief service, the central part of which is this prayer said by the priest:

Master, lover of mankind, King of the ages and Creator of all things, who destroyed the middle wall of enmity and granted peace to the human race, we pray and implore you, look on your servants, N. and N., pour your blessing upon them. Restore the peace that had been troubled and plant in their hearts love for each other. Bestow richly on them spiritual calm and life unassailed, so that, having lived out their days in calm of soul, they may enjoy your own good things and glorify you, alone God of love and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, to whom belong all glory, honour and worship, now and for ever, and to the ages of ages.

We can leave for another day the difference in Orthodox and Catholic pastoral practice in the face of divorce. But for now, it seems to me that whatever other lesson we ought to draw from the annual Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, we ought to first mourn that, because of our own sinfulness, Christians remain divided. For this reason, we are like the divorced, but not as yet, reconciled couple. Following the example of those who reconcile after the tragedy of divorce, we must ask God to restore to divided Christendom "the peace that had been troubled and plant in [our] hearts love for each other."

Most importantly we should cling to the reality that God is All-Merciful and that, as the prayer above suggests, He longs to destroy "the middle way of enmity" between us and through us grant "peace to the human race." If we allow God to do so, we will pour out on us and our communities, "spiritual calm and life unassailed" so that we may live out our "days in calm of soul" enjoying together the many "good things" He has given us each in the other.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

Harry Potter and Ministry Where the Music Doesn't Matter

S. M. Hutchens has a provocative post on Touchstone's blog "Mere Comments." In his essay, "The Helpful Discovery of Dirt in Potter's Field," he reflects on the recent Christian criticism of the Harry Potter novels. He writes:

I recently read yet another Christian complaint about Harry Potter. The critic's thesis was that Joanna Rowling is a "contemporary transgressive artist par excellence," who holds lightly to the canons of Judeo-Christian morality and of traditional children's literature in the west, the Potter tales being a catalog of rule-breaking, disobedience, lying, vengeance-taking, and whatnot, its final installation containing the revelation of the Snape-Dumbledore murder-suicide pact that insinuates euthanasia into the minds of children--not to mention that all of this is done in a pagan context by witches and wizards, no less.

My reaction was--yes--but did he miss something? Like the Point of it All?

One wonders just what kind of literature a person like this can read. Must everything be reduced to black and white, not only with unwelcome details smoothed over, but with tools that, by neutralizing elements the critic prefers not to see in his desire to define the work by the ones he finds obnoxious, guts it and renders invisible the message of the whole?

He observes that, whatever might be the moral flaws we see in Harry Potter, he is certainly a type of Christ and "Christian children who are old enough to read Harry Potter are old enough to understand the imperfections of heroes, and judge the flaws of literary characters." But for this to happen children must be "given the standards by which to render the judgments." He continues:

Shall we train their instincts to flee imperfect human beings rather than love and embrace them--not for the imperfection, but in spite of it--in hope of redemption, both of their imperfect selves and those they embrace? If we train them to flee, those who castigate our faith for making people who hate first themselves, and then by extension, others, are quite correct about our faith, but wrong in thinking it Christian.

Hutchens then turns his attention to Jesus Christ. He writes:

Given what we are shown of our Lord in the Gospels, I strongly suspect if he were accurately depicted by friendly and sympathetic eyes in accounts that did not have the status of holy scripture, and without the overlay of piety, we would see a good, but flawed, perhaps deeply and fatally flawed, man. He would not in fact have the imperfections we would lay to his account, but he would be far from measuring up to our expectations for a perfect man. He would not be prudent enough, respectful enough, humble enough, patient enough, pious enough, obedient enough, considerate enough, or kind enough to be God Incarnate (and only rarely are we visited by the capacity to admit that we secretly attribute the same flaws to God himself).

Even though we would notice prodigies of all these virtues in him, we would also see evidence of their lack in certain instances--of inconsistency. We would see his tragic end on the cross as heroic, perhaps, but it would not surprise us, given certain qualities we had observed--connected, perhaps, with persisting questions about the moral uprightness of his parentage. It is for this reason he can be represented to us, while imperfectly, in stories of imperfect heroes; it is why these stories lead back to him. It is because we are what we are, and Almighty God has regarded our low estate.

Thinking on this, I realize that the problem that many have with Harry Potter, and which many more of us have with those in positions of authority in the Church, or with humanity more generally, is really a Christological problem. It is not Harry Potter, or the bishop or the priest or the parish council or the people I met at church on Sunday that is my problem, but the with the uncomfortable truth that Jesus entrusts the Gospel to "imperfect heroes, or heroes we may easily assume share our imperfections, handsome princes though they may be."

During Liturgy this morning, I was blessed to have the presence of Deacon James Gresh (he and his family recently returned to the States after 5 years in China for the Deacon's job) and so had a bit more time to reflect during the service. I found myself lamenting my inability to get Orthodox liturgical music into my head. For whatever reason, I just can't quite ever learn the music that I've heard week after week for the last 15 years.

As I thought about this I began to realize that maybe, just maybe, I can't learn the Church's music because God has not called me to serve in those situation in which the Church's music is most important.

Thinking on this a bit more I began to wonder, how often do we limit our service to those situations where the "Church's music" is important? How often do we, do I, close my heart to the voice of Christ because I do not want to go to those place were the "music matters"? When I go place where the wealth of the Christian doesn't matter, I have to go without the security of my position in the Church and the concealing cloak of Tradition. When that cloak is taken away, what else is there to see but that Christ has called an "imperfect hero" or a "handsome," if flawed prince?

Certainly the Tradition of the Church, her music, her theology, her liturgy, is a great blessing. Too easily though we assume that Christ calls us to serve only in those areas where the Tradition is important, where, if you will, it is the music that matters, that is to say, where we are important.

But isn't this simply preaching to the choir? What do we read in the Gospel:

Then He went out again by the sea; and all the multitude came to Him, and He taught them. As He passed by, He saw Levi the son of Alphaeus sitting at the tax office. And He said to him, "Follow Me." So he arose and followed Him. Now it happened, as He was dining in Levi's house, that many tax collectors and sinners also sat together with Jesus and His disciples; for there were many, and they followed Him. And when the scribes and Pharisees saw Him eating with the tax collectors and sinners, they said to His disciples, "How is it that He eats and drinks with tax collectors and sinners?" When Jesus heard it, He said to them, "Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance." (Mark 2.13-17)

If Jesus followed what seems to be the mindset of many Orthodox Christians, it is doubtful that Matthew (or any of us) would be His disciple(s). Unlike us, Jesus did not limit Himself to where the "music matters" and so we have been admitted to the Heavenly Choir along with our Jewish brothers and sisters.

Failing to understand that I cannot limit the Gospel to those times and places where the "music matters" is to repeat the mistake of many in Israel at the time of Jesus. The Apostle Paul in Romans warns us of this. He writes:

I say then, have they stumbled that they should fall? Certainly not! But through their fall, to provoke them to jealousy, salvation has come to the Gentiles. Now if their fall is riches for the world, and their failure riches for the Gentiles, how much more their fullness! For I speak to you Gentiles; inasmuch as I am an apostle to the Gentiles, I magnify my ministry, if by any means I may provoke to jealousy those who are my flesh and save some of them. For if their being cast away is the reconciling of the world, what will their acceptance be but life from the dead? For if the first fruit is holy, the lump is also holy; and if the root is holy, so are the branches. And if some of the branches were broken off, and you, being a wild olive tree, were grafted in among them, and with them became a partaker of the root and fatness of the olive tree, do not boast against the branches. But if you do boast, remember that you do not support the root, but the root supports you. You will say then, "Branches were broken off that I might be grafted in." Well said. Because of unbelief they were broken off, and you stand by faith. Do not be haughty, but fear. For if God did not spare the natural branches, He may not spare you either. Therefore consider the goodness and severity of God: on those who fell, severity; but toward you, goodness, if you continue in His goodness. Otherwise you also will be cut off. And they also, if they do not continue in unbelief, will be grafted in, for God is able to graft them in again. For if you were cut out of the olive tree which is wild by nature, and were grafted contrary to nature into a cultivated olive tree, how much more will these, who are natural branches, be grafted into their own olive tree? (11:11-24)

Harry Potter evokes such harsh responses from Christian critics for much the same reason we want to only go to those places where the "music matters."

We have lost sight of the fact that the mission of the Gentiles is a mission to the wild olive branches, to those people and places where the music simply doesn't matter, at least yet. And it is a mission that has been entrusted by Christ to us who are imperfect heroes and handsome, if flawed, princes and princesses.

"It is no coincidence the keys to the Kingdom," Hutchens writes, "were delivered to the most robustly flawed of all Christ's disciples." When I limit my service to those places where the "music matters," I perform a bit of sleight of hand. I trick myself in to believing that, maybe, just maybe, in my case at least, Christ has not called a "robustly flawed" man to be His disciple. And maybe, just maybe, in my case, I can be that perfect hero, that handsome prince without flaws.

But, and again as Hutchens's astutely observes, when I do this I "sanitized" the Gospel according "to [my own] standards" and so will "never look like the Lord."

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

Sunday, January 20, 2008 (Luke 18:35-43): The Healing of the Blind man

Then it happened, as He was coming near Jericho, that a certain blind man sat by the road begging. And hearing a multitude passing by, he asked what it meant. So they told him that Jesus of Nazareth was passing by. And he cried out, saying, "Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!" Then those who went before warned him that he should be quiet; but he cried out all the more, "Son of David, have mercy on me!" So Jesus stood still and commanded him to be brought to Him. And when he had come near, He asked him, saying, "What do you want Me to do for you?" He said, "Lord, that I may receive my sight." Then Jesus said to him, "Receive your sight; your faith has made you well." And immediately he received his sight, and followed Him, glorifying God. And all the people, when they saw it, gave praise to God (Luke 18:35-43).

The more I try and ground my preaching in the words of the fathers, the more I come to appreciate the fathers as preachers, as pastors whose main concern is the healing of souls and bodies of the consequences of Adam's transgression. And what I am most struck by is not simply the reverence, but the fearless and even playfulness, with which the fathers approach the text of Holy Scripture.

Take for example St Ambrose in his Exposition of the Gospel of Luke (8.80). It does not concern him that, while St Matthew relates that Jesus heals two blind men, "Luke depicts one." He then proceeds to bring to the fore the other differences between the two Gospels: Where "Matthew depicts [the miracle] as Jesus was leaving Jericho (Mt 20.30), but Luke [depicts it] as he was approaching the city." Ambrose then says something that, to the contemporary reader at least, is nonsensical: "Otherwise there was no difference" between the two writers. For most of us the question of whether or not there were two blind men or one, and whether the healing happened as Jesus was leaving or entering Jericho is of great importance. If the Gospel writers can't agree on these rather simply facts, how can we trust them on the weightier matters that pertain to our salvation?

But these differences don't matter to Ambrose. Why?

Or maybe, a better question is why do they matter to me? What did Ambrose see that I'm missing? I'll tell you unlike me, Ambrose read the Scriptures with faith.

Contemporary readers want the Scriptures to be a newspaper, a history or science textbook. We want this because we fancy our "objective view" of history and current events. But what is it that we mean when we imagine that what we are saying is "objective"?

There is a curious pride in our attempt at a journalistic reading of Scripture. The contemporary notion of the objective observer whose view of the world is one not influenced by outside facts, is a view of the human person divorced from community and tradition. To say that I am "objective observer" is fundamentally different from saying that I am telling the truth. Objectivity (in the modern sense) is based on my separation from others—really my intentional isolation from them. It is only a consequence of my isolation from the human community, or so the thinking goes, that I am able to understand reality better then my neighbor.

And the sin is that I allow myself to believe that it is this insight born of separation that best serves the common good.

In other words, for the modern mind we are most fully human not through love and communion, but through separation and isolation. It is alienation not fellowship that is the defining characteristic of the contemporary view of the human person. This anthropological model holds that I know you best not when I draw close to you in love, but stand far from you. This is does not place dispassion (apatheia) at the center of human life, but indifference.

These notions are utter foreign to Ambrose and the Tradition of the Church East and West. The goal of human life is not objectivity modeled on the scientist in the laboratory, but our willingness to "proclaim the truth in love" (compare, Eph 4:15). This demands from me not simply an what I say be objectively valid, but also, and primarily, my subjective commitment to be for others as Jesus is for me and for the whole human community.

Think of this in terms of the Apostle Paul. His commitment is not simply to the truth of the Gospel, but also for the salvation of the Jewish people, of his people. So what does he say?

I tell the truth in Christ, I am not lying, my conscience also bearing me witness in the Holy Spirit, that I have great sorrow and continual grief in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my countrymen according to the flesh, who are Israelites, to whom pertain the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the service of God, and the promises; of whom are the fathers and from whom, according to the flesh, Christ came, who is over all, the eternally blessed God. Amen (Rom 9:1-5).

No for Ambrose and for the fathers in general, we read Scripture not simply within the Church, as if the tradition of the Church existed objectively like a mathematical rule, but within the matrix formed by Christ's love for us and our own love for Him and each other. This is a love that, in its purest form, would forgo even my own salvation for the salvation of others.

It is the absence of this commitment that blinds me to the
truth of Scripture, the Gospel, and the life of the Church. And it is this blindness that keeps me from acting as I ought when called upon by Christ to do.

But if we, to borrow one of the petitions from the various litanies we hear in the services, remember "our most holy, pure, blessed, and glorious Lady, the Theotokos and ever virgin Mary," and "with all the saints, let us commit (or, "commend," or "entrust") ourselves and one another and our whole life to Christ our God" well then things can be different.

Whether intentionally or not, when we try and rationalize or justify the differences in the Gospels, we do so because we have fallen into a trap—we have allowed ourselves to act as if human reason were separate from divine grace. Faith and reason are not separate; they mutual presuppose each other as the two wings by which we ascend to God in response to His invitation.

And through the exercise of a faith-filled reason and a reasonable faith, we begin to see that whether Jesus healed two men or one, whether He did so while he was on His way out of Jericho or His way out, or whether Matthew is recounting one event and Luke another, is simply not the point. Rather what matters is that "the Gentiles," those of us born outside God's covenant with Israel, have through "the divine blessing received the clarity" of faith. So Ambrose continues:

It makes no difference whether the Gentile people received the healing through one or two blind men since, taking the origin from Ham and Japheth, sons of Noah, they set out the two others of their race in two blind men.

St Cyril of Alexandria reminds us that the healing of our spiritual blindness, like the healing of physical blindness, "cannot be . . . by human means but requires, . . . a divine power and an authority such as God only possesses" (Commentary on Luke, Homily 126).

When we read the Scriptures we are like the blind man in the Gospel. When Jesus approaches him the blind man cried out and said, "Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me." Meditating on this St Ephrem the Syrian (Commentary on Tatian's Diatessaron, 15.22) says that "The beggar's hand was stretched out to receive a penny from human beings and found himself receiving the gift of God!" We receive from God more than we can imagine, but because of our, my, lack of faith I do not know what it is that I have already in Christ.

According to Ephrem, "Christ did not say to him, 'It is your faith that has caused you to see,' in order to show that faith had given him life and then bodily sight." Faith is not what we see, but is a way of seeing. Faith is not objective (in the sense I used that word a moment ago) as much as it transformative. Faith does not show us new things, but renews our understanding of God, of self, of neighbor and the creation. Faith shows us that all that is, is held together in God and that it is divine love which unites creation.

And it is our love of God and neighbor that brings us into the great all encompassing communion.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory