The Woe of the Scribes and the Pharisees

This should have gone out last night, but I was too tired to finish it up before services. My apologizes.

Behold, the Bridegroom comes in the middle of the night, and blessed is that servant whom he finds watching; but unworthy is the one whom he finds slothful. Take care then, my soul, not to be overcome with sleep, lest you be given up to death, and be shut out of the kingdom; but rouse yourself and cry: Holy, holy, holy are you, O God; through the prayers of the Foreunner, have mercy on us.

(Troparion, Bridegroom Matins For Great & Holy Tuesday)

The Gospel ( Mt 22:15-23:39) assigned for Matins records some very harsh language and sharp comments from Jesus. Seven times our Lord says to the Jewish authorities: “W oe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!” And after each utterance, our Lord summarizes their hypocrisy:

• You shut up the kingdom of heaven against men; for you neither go in yourselves, nor do you allow those who are entering to go in. (v. 13)
• You devour widows' houses, and for a pretense make long prayers. Therefore you will receive greater condemnation. (v. 14)
• You travel land and sea to win one proselyte, and when he is won, you make him twice as as much a son of hell as yourselves.
• 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. (v. 23)
• You cleanse the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of extortion and self-indulgence. (v. 25)
• You are like whitewashed tombs which indeed appear beautiful outwardly, but inside are full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness. (v. 27)2

And finally, in His last call to repentance Christ summarizes their offense:

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! Because you build the tombs of the prophets and adorn the monuments of the righteous, and say, 'If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets.' Therefore you are witnesses against yourselves that you are sons of those who murdered the prophets. Fill up, then, the measure of your fathers' guilt. Serpents, brood of vipers! How can you escape the condemnation of hell? Therefore, indeed, I send you prophets, wise men, and scribes: some of them you will kill and crucify, and some of them you will scourge in your synagogues and persecute from city to city, that on you may come all the righteous blood shed on the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah, son of Berechiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar. Assuredly, I say to you, all these things will come upon this generation. (vv. 29-36)

I said last night that these first service of Great and Holy Week radically relativize my own propensity to plan, to imagine that my life is subject in an absolute sense to my own will and desires.

Instead of planning, the service of these first few days call me to be vigilant. A central theme of Bridegrooms Maitns is watchful preparedness.

But are preparations are not like that of an adolescent who decides never to decide. Yes, we are to remain open and expectant, but our ready is like of a soldier who, having prepared for war, find himself waiting out the last moments before the battle begins.

And what is it that we wait for? We wait for the revelation of Divine Love.

It is here that the scribes and Pharisees have failed. Though they scrupulously kept the Law, their very fidelity blinded them to the revelation of God's love. What they did not see, maybe even what they could not see, is that when God's love comes to us it comes with a human face. This is why when Jesus is challenged by the lawyer to name to greatest commandment of the Law He offers a two-fold answer:

But when the Pharisees heard that He had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together. Then one of them, a lawyer, asked Him a question, testing Him, and saying, "Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?" Jesus said to him, " 'You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.' This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets." (vv. 34-40)

Looking back at the woe of the scribes and the Pharisees, their sorrow is that their love of God made them indifferent to the love of neighbor and insensitive to their neighbor's poverty and need. The woe of the scribes and the Phraisees is this: The love of God killed in them compassion for their neighbor!

In this the scribes and the Phraisees are mirror image of many of us today. If once the love of God obscured the love of neighbor, today it is rather the other way around. Compassion for my neighbor in his or her weakness has now come to trump our love and fidelity to God. For the scribes and the Phraisees their love of what was greatest became to excuse to disregard what was smaller, but closer; for us today, we love what is small and close but we often neglect what is greatest.

In either case though, our severing of the “two commandments” on which “hang all the Law and the Prophets,” inevitably leads to violence and even bloodshed. Again, why? Because love comes to us with a human face.

The human face of love is, I think, one of the most extraordinary elements of the Gospel. It is not simply that God loves me, it is not simply that God comes to me as a human being, it is also that He comes to me in you. Love, forgiveness, mercy, compassion for my neighbor in his weakness and need, all of these are essential to the Gospel.

And it is because of these, that I will at times find myself having to be—like Jesus—harsh. But my harsh words or actions are not, or at least should not, born from a desire for power and control. Rather, and again mindful that the model here is Christ, my harsh words reflect my willingness (and again, like the soldier) to place myself between the innocent and those who would victimize or exploit them.

Much is sometime made of the fact that God offers us mercy and not justice. This is true as far as it goes, but only if we understand carefully what we mean by “justice.” It is certainly true that I often appeal to justice to hid my desire for revenge or to rationalize my hatred or desire for power and control. Justice in this sense has nothing to do with the Gospel much less with God.

But there is another understanding of justice. We can think of justice in this second, more radically sense, as consonance, harmony or (if you prefer) synergy , that profound working together of the Divine and human wills that the Apostle Paul alludes to when he calls us “co-workers” with Christ (see, Phil 2.25). The woe of the scribes and the Pharisees is the fruit of a lack of justice in this second sense.

And so, to yesterday's counsel to eschatological preparedness, we should add I think this: A willingness to work for justice in human affairs. Not justice as vengeance or control, but of synergy , of a cooperative working together of the whole Church not only with Her Lord, God and Saviour Jesus Christ, but all the members with Him and each other and indeed all people of good will.

Kalo Pascha!

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

Behold the Bridegroom

Behold, the Bridegroom comes in the middle of the night, and blessed is that servant whom he finds watching; but unworthy is the one whom he finds slothful. Take care then, my soul, not to be overcome with sleep, lest you be given up to death, and be shut out of the kingdom; but rouse yourself and cry: Holy, holy, holy are you, O God; through the protection of Bodiless Powers, have mercy on us.

( Troparion for Bridegroom Matins)

This evening in many Orthodox parishes, we will gather to begin our liturgical celebration of Great and Holy Week. Having left Great and Holy Lent behind with our celebration of Christ's entrance into Jerusalem, we now fix our gaze more intensely on the Resurrection of Christ (Pascha or Easter).

We begin our journey—o f if you prefer, continue our journey—to Pascha by recalling not historical events (though we do that aplenty this week) but rather giving voice to our hope for the future. For all that we refer this week to the events in the last week of Christ's life before His crucifixion, our point of reference is eschatological and not strictly speaking historical. Or to put it another way, the Church only looks back to the past in order to look look forward to a future that is wholly outside of our own control.

My daily life, my everyday attitude, is often filled plans. Just this morning after Liturgy, for example, I sat with the parish council and made plans for the near future. Planning is certainly not wrong—and more often than not it is essential.\

But there is something undeniably seductive about planning. You see my plans our mine. Whether I am planning a desirable future toward which I race or a future I dread and would flee from if I could, in both cases my plans can become for me an idol of my own making. G. K. Chesterton's observation about the relationship of truth and fiction are applicable to the relationship between the future and my plans for the future. “Truth, of course, must of necessity be stranger than fiction,” Chesterton writes in his work Heretics , “for we have made fiction to suit ourselves.”

Likewise my plans. Whether comforting of frightening, my plans for the future always seem somehow my attractive, more reasonable, and much less frightening than the future since—unlike the future—my plans are made to suit my own views of how the future ought to be. There is something inescapably narcissistic about planning.

Not, I want to emphasize, that we shouldn't plan. We should plan; planning is an essential part of our stewardship of God's many blessings to us. But it is easy to confuse my plans for the future with the gift of the future itself. It is easy to confuse my desire for the coming years, next week or tomorrow, with the future itself as it comes to me from the hand of an All-Loving God.

And so for sound theological and anthropological reasons, we begin Holy Week by recalling that we do not such much move toward the future as it is that the future comes to us, to me. And when the future comes, it comes as a judgment.

The judgment of the future is not a narrowing of human life as if somehow God were some kind of Victorian moralist. No the future that comes toward me is God Himself, His Glory revealed; the judgment which is to come is His love for me, for my neighbor and the whole creation made manifest. I am judged by love revealed in all its fullness and it is in this Divine Light the narrowness, the self-satisfaction of my own heart, will be revealed.

Every year during Holy Week and Pascha I am challenged less by fasting and the many (and longer!) services and more by the smallness of my love when compared to not only to Christ's infinite love but also the finite, but still overwhelming, love for Christ in the hearts of those whose confessions I will hear.

Is it any wonder, as the troparion for the day suggest, that when faced with this challenge I am tempted simply to sleep? To lay down the burden of joy and instead allow myself the illusory luxury that the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas calls the “natural atheism” of the soul that seeks to consume creation rather than be responsible for neighbor in his poverty and need?

And so, this year again like last year, I being Holy Week by being reminded that the future belongs to God. My plans and projects have their place—they are even after a fashion necessary—but they are not ultimate. As necessary as my plans might be, what is more necessary is that I remain ready and open to the grace that rushes toward me through the Cross and the Tomb from the Kingdom of God.

Kalo Pascha.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

The Enthusaism of the Crowds

Sunday, April 12, 2009: ENTRY OF OUR LORD INTO JERUSALEM (Palm Sunday). St. Basil the Confessor, Bishop of Parium (8th c.). Hieromartyr Zeno, Bishop of Verona (ca. 260). Ven. Isaac the Syrian, Abbot of Spoleto (550). Monk Martyrs Menas, David, and John, of Palestine (7th c.). Ven. Anthusa the Virgin, of Constantinople (801). Ven. Athanasia, Abbess, of Aegina (860). Ven. Acacius the Younger, of Kavsokalyvia (Mt. Athos—1730).

Then, six days before the Passover, Jesus came to Bethany, where Lazarus was who had been dead, whom He had raised from the dead. There they made Him a supper; and Martha served, but Lazarus was one of those who sat at the table with Him. Then Mary took a pound of very costly oil of spikenard, anointed the feet of Jesus, and wiped His feet with her hair. And the house was filled with the fragrance of the oil. But one of His disciples, Judas Iscariot, Simon's son, who would betray Him, said, “Why was this fragrant oil not sold for three hundred denarii and given to the poor?” This he said, not that he cared for the poor, but because he was a thief, and had the money box; and he used to take what was put in it. But Jesus said, "Let her alone; she has kept this for the day of My burial. For the poor you have with you always, but Me you do not have always. Now a great many of the Jews knew that He was there; and they came, not for Jesus' sake only, but that they might also see Lazarus, whom He had raised from the dead. But the chief priests plotted to put Lazarus to death also, because on account of him many of the Jews went away and believed in Jesus. The next day a great multitude that had come to the feast, when they heard that Jesus was coming to Jerusalem, took branches of palm trees and went out to meet Him, and cried out: Hosanna! 'Blessed is He who comes in the name of the LORD!' The King of Israel!" Then Jesus, when He had found a young donkey, sat on it; as it is written: Fear not, daughter of Zion; Behold, your King is coming, Sitting on a donkey's colt." His disciples did not understand these things at first; but when Jesus was glorified, then they remembered that these things were written about Him and that they had done these things to Him. Therefore the people, who were with Him when He called Lazarus out of his tomb and raised him from the dead, bore witness. For this reason the people also met Him, because they heard that He had done this sign.

(John 12:1-18)

The Gospel for Palm Sunday divides neatly in to two different, though internally related, stories.

We have the first half of the story that looks back to yesterday's celebration when we commemorated the restoration of Lazarus to life after four days in the tomb. The second half of the Gospel commemorates Jesus' triumphal entrance into Jerusalem. The first half looks backwards to what was done, the second half forward to what is yet to be done: the death of Christ on the Cross and His glorious third day resurrection from the dead. And in both parts of the Gospel, there are the various human actors who never quite seem to understand Jesus.

Jesus is shown sitting at table Lazarus with Martha—as always—busy with much serving. And there is Mary who, again, has chosen the better part and anoints His feet with costly ointment. There is Judas, the disciple, the thief and the one who will soon betray his friend and teacher.

Outside this domestic tableau there are the Jewish authorities who jealousy and fear of Jesus has turned murderous not only toward Jesus but Lazarus who restoration to life has caused many to come to believe in Jesus.

And of course, as always, there are the crowds. Today the crowds welcome Jesus as their King and Liberator. As St John Chrysostom has it, today the crowds “showed now at last that they thought Him greater than a prophet: And went forth to meet Him, and cried, Hosanna! Blessed is the King of Israel, that comes in the name of the Lord.”

In this, of course, the crowds are more correct then they know.

Unlike the undisciplined enthusiasm of the crowds, St Augustine, looking at the events of Palm Sunday with the eyes of sober faith. He knows that it is “a small thing to the King eternal to be made a human king. Christ was not the King of Israel, to exact tribute, and command armies, but to direct souls, and bring them to the kingdom of heaven. For Christ then to be King of Israel, w as a condescension, not an elevation, a sign of His pity, not an increase of His power. For He who was as called on earth the King of the Jews, is in heaven the King of Angels.”

It is in the space between undisciplined enthusiasm, or if you will a faith that is untempered by asceticism and reason and the sober faith that has been so purified that will grow the seed of the crowds later rejection of Jesus. The crowds, for all their passion and noise, cannot bear the difference between who they think Jesus is and Who He is actually.

As with the crowds, so to I think with each of us in our own spiritual lives. It is easy for me to fall in love with my idea about God or (for that matter, my neighbor) and to love the image more than the Person that the images points me toward. Like the crowd, I am tempted always to sentimentality, to falling in love with my own feelings and thoughts at the expense of my supposed Beloved. In the Church's more exact language, like the crowds, I am subject to prelest , spiritual delusion.

While the Apostle Paul does not use the word, he nevertheless is aware of prelest and its effect on the person. He warns the young bishop Timothy to not “give heed to fables and endless genealogies, which cause disputes rather than godly edification which is in faith.” (1 Tim 1.4) He warns Timothy that those who do give themselves over to prelest eventually stray from Christ and instead give themselves over to “to idle talk” and pride “desiring to be teachers of the law,” but fail to be such since they understand “what they say nor the things which they affirm.” (vv. 6-7)

The idle talk that Paul mentions is rather more serious than we might imagine. It is because of idle talk that over the next week the crowds will turn against Jesus. Their prelest inspired disappointment will quickly turn to rage, a rage that not only kills their own souls, but is unwilling as it is to accept any limits on itself, will turn Christ over to be crucified.

Compare this to the words we heard last night at Vespers:

Thus says the Lord, 'Rejoice, daughter of Sion. Shout, daughter of Jerusalem! Rejoice and exult with all your heart, daughter of Jerusalem! The Lord has taken away your iniquities, he has ransomed you from the hand of your enemies. The king of Israel, the Lord, is in your midst. You shall see evils no more. At that time the Lord will say to Jerusalem, 'Be of good courage, Sion Do not let your hands grow weak. The Lord, your God, is in your midst. The Mighty One will save you. He will bring joy upon you and renew you by his love. He will rejoice over you with delight, as on a day of festival. And I will gather your afflicted. Alas! Who has taken up a reproach against you? I will work for your sake at that time. And I will save her that was oppressed and receive her who was rejected, and I will make them a boast and famed in all the earth'. ((Zephaniah 3:14-19, LXX)

The therapy for prelest is, I think, found in the prophet's words: I must rejoice in God. I must do this not in undisciplined enthusiasm, but as the fruit of repentance, of my acceptance of God's forgiveness not only of me, but all humanity. To do so requires from me courage. Why? Because once I see all humanity as loved and forgiven by God in Jesus Christ, I set myself against those who imagine—as did the Jewish authorities—that they, and they alone, know God's mercy, a mercy they hold fast to as if it was something of their own making. Those who do this are like Judas, for their own selfish ends they steal from the common grace of God for all humanity. If I am like this, how can I imagine that I will not murder God once I have Him in my grasp?

My brothers and sisters in Christ, God delights over His People today; God delights over you and all humanity. He knows that in a few days they, we, I, will betray Him and yet this in no way lessens His delight, His love, His forgiveness, for us, for you and for me. Even though by my own actions I give myself over to sin again and again, God in Jesus Christ will renew me, as He renews all of us, by His love.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

Mourning, Melancholia and the Clergy

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One of the things I come to understand over the years is that depression is simply part of the background noise for many clergy. And this holds true whether the individual in question is Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant or Evangelical Christian, male or female. This isn't to say that the cleric in question is incapacitated. Far from it in fact. Many of the clergy I know who are depressed are rather high functioning and often considered to be successful and even exemplary examples of pastoral ministry in their tradition.

But depressed they are nevertheless.

Freud somewhere argued that depression is a result of the loss of one's love object. In Freudian psychoanalytic theory, the love object is that person or project in which I invested my libidinous energies. While the term libido now has sexual connotations, this was not the case for Freud. Rather libido, was more a generic term for psychic energy (though granted, this energy can, and often is, in Freud's view sexual in character).

When that love object is lost, whether literally or figuratively, I experience depression, or (to use Freud's term) melancholia. Robert Clark, a Reader in English at the University of East Anglia​, in his brief essay on Freud's essay on depression, “Mourning and Melancholia”> (1917), writes that Freud thinks of depression or

melancholia as a “profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-revilings, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment.” (Penguin Freud Library, Vol. 11, p. 248).

And again, as I said a moment ago, while melancholia results from “the death of a loved person, but it might also occur when something has been lost as an object of love, or even when 'one cannot see clearly what has been lost. (254).”

Mourning, on the other hand, has a slightly different content. Again, as Clark writes, “In mourning 'it is the world that has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself' (254).” Clinically, “Freud noted that melancholics were inclined to accuse themselves of many failings in an entirely unjustified way, and noted that the accusations were such as should have been more correctly directed against someone whom the patient loves or has loved.”

Freud's description of depression then is of loss and anger turned inward against the ego or the “I” that should, more reasonably, be directed outward at those who have abandoned or failed me (and again, this might be literally or symbolically). While there is much that I would reject in Freud, it seems to me that his insight into depression is profound. It is all the more profound as I think about my own, and other's, experiences in ministry.

Loss is inseparable from ministry because it is inseparable from human life in general and the Christian life in particular. It is hard, for example, to read the sayings of the desert fathers and not come away with the realization that mourning is essential to the Christian life. For example, Abba Poeman says that “He who wishes to purify his faults purifies them with tears. . . . ; for weeping is the way the Scriptures and our fathers give us, when they say, 'Weep!' Truly, there is no other way than this.” And Isaac the Syrian goes so far as to say “The man who follows Christ in solitary mourning is greater than he who praises Christ amid the congregation of men.”

But if mourning is essential to the spiritual life, melancholia/depression has no place and reflects mourning that has gone terribly wrong. Again, as Freud reminds us, in mourning, I come to sense the poverty of the world—m ourning (to transpose Freud into an anthropology more consonant with the fathers) is the realization that though this world is a great and beautiful gift, it is nevertheless “transitory.” It is only to the degree that I realize this that, as St Gregory the Great somewhere says, I am able “to stretch out the mind in humility to God and [my] neighbor.” Mourning is what helps “preserve patience against offered insults and, with patience guarded, to repel the pain of malice from the heart.” Mourning is to foundation of my love of the poor and makes it possible for me to “give [my] property to the poor, not to covet that of others, to esteem the friend in God, on God's account to love even those who are hostile.” It is through mourning that I am able to be and lead others to become evermore that “new creature whom the Master of the nations seeks with watchful eye amid the other disciples, saying: 'If, then, any be in Christ a new creature, the old things are passed away. Behold all things are made new' (2 Cor. 5:17).”

While mourning and melancholia are similar, they are not the same. Worse, if we are not careful we can easily confuse mourning and melancholia. It is unwise to expect clergy, or for clergy to expect from ourselves, a life of selfless service if we are not also clear that such service is different in tone and content from depression. I think rather too easily we all of us—whether clergy or not—allow ourselves to confuse mourning and melancholia; too easily when we ought to counsel detachment we are instead fostering depression.

Too simply be angry with myself, to see my own failings and shortcomings in isolation from any larger content that realizes my own (and other's) weakness is a way of life that is psychologically and spiritually unsustainable.

I am very much taken by St Gregory the Great's notion that the mournful person is able to stretch out, in humility, his mind to God and neighbor. To understand humility as if it were some species of melancholia is, I think, to misunderstand humility. Yes because of my manifold sins and transgressions, I fall short of the glory of God (see Rms 3.12). But do I realize that even if I were not sinful, I would—; as a creature—fall short of the Divine Glory?

Real mourning—as opposed to its counterfeit, melancholia—gives birth to real humility. And what is this real humility? I think St Gregory Nyssa offers a good a description as any I've read:

This is true perfection: not to avoid a wicked life because like slaves we severely fear punishment, not to do good because we hope for rewards, as if cashing in on the virtuous life by some business-like arrangement. On the contrary, disregarding all those things for which we hope and which have been reserved by promise, we regard falling from God's friendship as the only thing dreadful and we consider becoming God's friend the only thing worthy of honor and desire. This, as I have said, is the perfection of life.

To befriend God and neighbor is, it seems to me, the fruit of humility and a heart that mourns for its own sins and the sins of the world.

Many clergy struggle valiantly to be friends with God and neighbor But their struggles are often undermined by their own, and others, confusion of melancholia and depression. Thinking about this I wonder if it might not be helpful for clergy, but also for all of us who love Christ, if we made a bit more room in our communities for saying goodbye and seeing all the little (and great) losses of life as blessings and not curses?

Nicholas Ray in his essay (“ Trauer und Melancholie”) on Freud's theory of depresstiont, writes that for Freud, mourning is “not – or at least is not only – a process of remembrance; it is a labour of severance, of slowly cutting ties with what has gone. The painful re-traversal of memories and expectations connected to the lost object is undertaken by the psyche with a separative aim in view.”

Watching the different disagreements and divisions that seem to be inflicting the Orthodox Church in the States, as well as the suffering of my fellow clergy, I wonder, if in fact we have not in someway undercut the hard work of mourning that Freud and the fathers describe? And, if we have, I wonder, what is the way back?

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

Informality. Formality and Spiritual Formation: More Thoughts from CAPS

Friday afternoon at CAPS I sat in a plenary session by Saul Cruz entitled “Hope and Healing through Care and Counsel to the Suffering in the World.” Together with his wife Pilar, Saul is co-director of Armonia Ministries. Together this husband and wife team ministry heir to the poor communities in both urban and rural areas in Mexico. Saul is by profession a psychologist and family therapist, and has also been a university lecturer.

Unfortunately because I had to take care of details for a funeral in my parish back in Canton, I was in and out of the presentation. One thing I did hear was the presenters argument that (I'm quoting from my notes):

Transformation require NOT that I solve your problem, but rather help you accept RESPONSIBILITY for your own life. In this process, I promise to walk along side you—but I cannot replace you in your own life. For example, if a mother brings me her children, I can't raise her children for her—I can't become their mother—but I can offer to help her accept and bear her responsibility for her own children.

The fruit if this approach (again, quoting my notes on the speaker's presentation) is that “not only is the other person transformed, but I am transformed with them.”

Thinking about the informal approach popular among Evangelical Christians, I wonder, if something similar might be necessary with Orthodox missionary activity especially here in the US. My reason for asking this is that so few Americans have much background that lends itself to the Gospel in its fullness.

Unlike the New Testament and early patristic era, we seem to lack (or maybe more accurately, devalue) the great cultural touchstones of the ancient world, moral law and philosophy, that someone like St Justin Martyr saw as the two great preparations for Jewish and Greek acceptance of the Gospel. Large segments of those we would reach out to have little, if any, appreciation for philosophical reasoning (and indeed, this would include not a few Orthodox Christians among both the laity and the clergy). As for the moral law, if they think of it at all, many Americans see morality and natural law as oppressive and opposed to freedom, self-expression and self-determination (and again, this is so not simply generally, but also among many Orthodox Christian laity and clergy).

The value of a more informal approach in the current pastoral circumstances can be seen in two ways. First, there is the positive value of friendship in the spiritual life. To take only one example from the patristic era, there is the friendship of St Basil and St John Chrysostom. Each was able to support and encourage the other as he sought to do the will of God for his own life.

Spiritual friendship has deep roots not only in the tradition of the Orthodox East, but also the Catholic West. There is for example in the spiritual tradition of the ancient Celtic Church the notion of the “soul friend” or in Gaelic the anam cara. On his blog “ Soul Friend,” Chuck Huckaby writes that in “a culture steeped in the idolatry of individualism we call postmodernism, nascent attempts at creating community and godly order all too often tilt to the opposite extreme of cultic authoritarianism. In contrast, the "Soul Friend" seeks to build community and establish order based on the model of sacrificial servanthood, patient instruction and gentle admonition.”

Moving beyond the arena of Celtic Christianity, there is also the role of spiritual friendship in the monastic tradition—again both East and West. I mentioned above the example of Chrysostom and Basil, there is also the example of the 6 ^th century elders and saints Barsaniphus and John.

Moving to western monastic life, we have the example of the father of monastic life in the West St Benedict. Add to this, the example of Francis of Assisi and his companions as well as the life and ministry ofBernard of Clairvauxthe great monastic reformer and the work of one of his “spiritual sons,” the great English saint and author Ailred of Rievaulx who wrote, among other things, a treatise entitled “ Spiritual Friendship.”

Huckably's point about “cultic authoritarianism” speaks to my rationale for a more informal approach to Orthodox outreach and evangelism. Looking back on my own personal and pastoral experience, I realize more and more the importance of robust tradition of both moral law and philosophical reasoning in the development of a health sense of self. Again both in my own early life and in my pastoral experience, the general cultural absence of these twin preparations for the Gospel leaves the developing self deeply wounded.

Switching if I may to a more clinical approach, the wounding of the self, or more accurately the sense of self, is part of who in the psychoanalytic tradition we understand the development of a personality disorder, or a character disorders. According to the American Psychiatric Association, personality disorders are characterized by "an enduring pattern of inner experience and behavior that deviates markedly from the expectations of the culture of the individual who exhibits it".

Within the pastoral sphere, I often see people with avoidant personality disorder or (again to borrow from the APA): a "pervasive pattern of social inhibition, feelings of inadequacy, and hypersensitivity to negative evaluation, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by four (or more) of the following:

1. Avoids occupational activities that involve significant interpersonal contact, because of fears of criticism, disapproval, or rejection

2. Is unwilling to get involved with people unless certain of being liked

3. Shows restraint initiating intimate relationships because of the fear of being ashamed, ridiculed, or rejected due to severe low self-worth.

4. Is preoccupied with being criticized or rejected in social situations

5. Is inhibited in new interpersonal situations because of feelings of inadequacy

6. Views self as socially inept, personally unappealing, or inferior to others

7. Is unusually reluctant to take personal risks or to engage in any new activities because they may prove embarrassing.”

Those who suffer from an avoidant style of relating to self and others often will look to the formality and structure of the Orthodox Church to serve in place of their own underdeveloped and wounded sense of self. In other words, rather than developing a healthy and robust sense of self, with all that implies about accepting one's strengths and limitations as well as being responsible for one's decisions, a significant minority of people look to religion.

In the case of the converts I've know this means that the look to the Church, and especially the liturgical /ascetical tradition of the Church, to offer externally the structure to their lives that should emerge from their own sense of self.

Because the Church, and especially her liturgical and ascetical praxis, serve as person's ego (which again has been wounded), if the the formality of the Church's tradition is not balanced with a more informal approach, we risk confirming and deepening the very deficient sense of self that has caused the person so much suffering in life. Or, to put it more directly, the weight of the Church's tradition crushes already fragile sense of self.

This is why, I think, we often see such polemical defenses of their new tradition from many converts (and not just Orthodox Christians converts): The tradition has come to serve as the self and in those struggling with a personality disorder (unlike a more typical psychopathology such as depression) the fault for their own unhappiness is always external. And how could it be otherwise, since there is no healthy, internal sense of self that can bear the responsibility for their pain.

Again this I think is the great wisdom of the Evangelical Christian approach to ministry, outreach and evangelism in general and Saul Cruz's own work in particular. Informality is I think a good beginning. It is not sufficiently certainly, we need to introduce and incorporate the person in to Great Tradition and this not only intellectually but also sacramentally. Why? Not only because of the wisdom of tradition and the objective importance of the sacraments for the life of faith, but for sound anthropological reasons. We need the Great Tradition, and especially its liturgical and ascetical witness, to develop the sound and wholesome view of self that many of us lack.

If people cannot bear a formal beginning—even if l the desire it like an addict does his drug—this does not mean we can forgo the formality of the Church. We cannot come to wholeness of being without the liturgical and ascetical tradition of the Church. If their cultural absence has made them seem foreign and deadly to us and so necessitates a more, indirect approach to the life of grace, this does not mean that the moral, philosophical, liturgical and ascetical elements of Tradition of the Church are optional. To think they are is to confuse sound, Christ-centered, spiritual formation with pedagogy.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

Metropolitan Jonah on Orthodox Unity

From The Crunchy Con:

Last night at Pan-Orthodox Vespers here at St. Seraphim Cathedral here in Dallas, Metropolitan Jonah of the OCA responded. Watch his sermon here. It's a bombshell that will rock the Orthodox world. Concluding line: "We might affirm to our bishops that they might tell the churches of the Old World: 'There is an American Orthodox Church. Leave it alone.'"

While I can appreciate that to some, especially those in Constantinople, might find His Beatitude's words harsh at time, I think he is correct in his assessment of the situation of the Church here in the States.

His Beatitude says in his sermon:

"It is imperative, brothers and sisters, imperative on us, that we come together, and with one voice, as the Orthodox Church in North America, to say to the holy fathers of the Old World: the Orthodox Church exists in North America. We're grateful for the support that you have given us. We love and support your work, and we rejoice in your victories, and we're sad with your tragedies. But you have to give us the freedom to take care of our own church in our own country in our own culture, and not to be controlled by people who have never heard a word of English, much less would allow a word of English to be spoken in the liturgy. We can't allow our church to be controlled by people who have no appreciation for our culture, and who have to bow to the Turkish Islamic authorities."

His Beatitude concludes by addressing the faithful, the clergy and the bishops in America and asking them totell the churches in the Old World: "There is an American Orthodox church. Leave it alone."

As Rod Dreher concludes his own post on the matter: "Boom! It's on. Hold on to your mitres."

I am unimaginably proud of His Beatitude and thank God for his words last evening.

It is worth your time to give a listen.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

p.s., The text of His Beatitude's sermon can be found here (NB: it is a pdf).

+FrG

Pan - Orthodox Sermon by His Beatitude Metropolitan Jonah @ Yahoo! Video

My Notes From Taylor's Presentation on Sexuality

Having referenced Debra Taylor's plenary session talk at CAPS in the post below, I thought some of my readers might be interested in the notes I took. (I could do this because my wife encouraged me to get a spiffy new netbook computer with an amazing 5-7 hours of battery life. Thank you Mary!) Needless to say, these note reflect what I took away from Taylor's presentation and any errors are mine and mine alone.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

Debra Taylor, MA, “Prisoners of Hope: Is Healing Possible for Sexual Strugglers?”Institute for Sexual Wholeness (graduate program/ministry), Secrets of Eve (book)

Lk 4:18-19: The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me...: we are all of us the recipients of this same call to proclaim liberty to the captive, to set free those who are burdened and battered.

SECRETS OF EVE: survey of 2000 Christian women about the sexuality

Then and Now...

1. 
   
   Sexual desire
   1. 
      
      Women and sexual desire: we've been pathologizing women for being women
   2. 
      
      Masters & Johnson, Kaplan; desire—excitement--orgasm--resolution (linear model)
      1. 
         
         developed in a lab watching people having sex while hooked up to ekg and measuring sexual desire mechanically.
      2. 
         
         focused on women who were able to achieve orgasm through intercourse alone (only 1/3 of all women)
      3. 
         
         Question: is desire really the basis of sexuality in women? Is M&J model really true? And how is desire measured?
         1. 
            
            Inadvertently, many people—e specially women—were pathologized because their sexual desires did not match the research
2. 
   
   Basson's model of sexual desire: women's desire begins in sexual neutrality [You can download a pdf of the model here.]
   
   1. 
      
      Sexual stimuli (psychological factors)
   2. 
      
      Sexual arousal
   3. 
      
      sexual desire & arousal
   4. 
      
      emotional & physical satisfaction (orgasm not necessarily present)
   5. 
      
      emotional intimacy (and then, much her partner's confusion, sexual neutrality)
3. 
   
   Some, but not all, women, have spontaneous sexual desire. Some, but fewer still, have a higher sex drive then their partner
4. 
   
   Receptive desire counts (receptive desire IS sexual desire)
   1. 
      
      The central question from the research: Am I good enough

Body image

1. 
   
   primary factor influencing sexual desire in women
2. 
   
   98% women dissatisfied with their bodies
   1. 
      
      clinically and personally, the best thing I can do for the women in my life is to encourage in them a more positive body image
3. 
   
   protective factors
   1. 
      
      family of origin
   2. 
      
      gender role satisfaction
   3. 
      
      health
   4. 
      
      effective coping strategies (identify and resist harmful cultural stereotypes)
   5. 
      
      sense of holistic balance and wellness
4. 
   
   pain is a bigger problem than we knew in the 90's
   1. 
      
      we don't know the incidence of sexual pain disorders
   2. 
      
      little research has been done
   3. 
      
      1-6% of women have vaginsmus; 16-19% experience chronic or recurrent sexual pain.

STD's

1. 
   
   in the 1960's we knew about only 2 STD's syphilis & gonorrhea
2. 
   
   NOW we know about 30 STDs
3. 
   
   >50% of all people in the US will have an STD
4. 
   
   in a national survey of US physicians, fewer 1/3 test routinely for STD's
5. 
   
   50% sexually active persons will have an STD by 25 years of age
6. 
   
   2008 CDC reports HIV/AIDS spreading quickly among young males 13-24; number of males jumped 12%
7. 
   
   15% of all new HIV/AIDS cases are over 50

Prisoners of Hope

1. 
   
   hope is our most important tool
2. 
   
   to inspire hope in our clients, we have to experience hope ourselves
3. 
   
   what do you do when you lose hope?
   1. 
      
      What are my skills for maintaining/recovering hope in the face of human suffering?
   2. 
      
      Compassion is not a flaw, but a strength.

“Broken heart syndrome” a real, medical condition, we can physically die because of extreme sadness and lose.

Comment Section

The comment section was set to not allow anonymous comments. You should now again be able to leave comments without leaving an email address. My apologizes for those who have not been able to leave comments. Please let me know if you are still having trouble commenting.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

Entrepreneurship & Evangelism: More Thoughts on the CAPS Conference

An interesting comment on economic recovery from Tyler Cowen of the Kauffman Foundation by way of Michael Giberson at the Knowledge Problem.  Referring to video of Cowen talking about blogging economics and other topics, Giberson quotes Cowen's  concluding comments on current economic conditions in the United States:

If there is one point I could get through about the mess we're in, it's that even if you think that the government needs to do something proactive, that is a holding action. Recovery is about entrepreneurship.

While Cowen's economic prescription has much to recommend it, what caught my attention is this: I think that it is not only the economic recovery but also the Church that needs to embrace the spirit of entrepreneurship.

Let me explain.

With the reception of Fr Peter Gillquist and the other clergy and lay members of former Evangelical Orthodox Church by the Antiochian Orthodox Archdiocese of American, there was an increase both in awareness of the importance of mission work and actual missionary activity undertaken both in the US and overseas by American Orthodox Christians. Unfortunately, as I have said before, that initial zeal was not always (in my opinion) always wisely guided and indeed has lead to an unfortunate narrowing of the Church's evangelistic outreach.

While not absolutely the case, in the main Orthodox evangelical outreach (especially in the US) tends to focus on disaffected mainline Protestant and Evangelical Christians and very little to either the vast number of unchurched Americans or our own lapsed Orthodox Christians.

Beyond our quasi-official policy of proselytizing and neglect of the unchurced and the fallen away, I am also concerned that we have largely neglected the worlds of academia and public policy and morality. While in the latter case there is some hopeful progress—f or example Fr Hans Jacobe's American Orthodox Institute—in the former situation we have limited our engagement to a few, woefully underfunded, campus ministry programs. And while we have built seminaries and one undergraduate college, after more than 200 years in the States, we still do not have even a viable parochial school system for our children.

All of this was very much on my mind this weekend while I was at the CAPS conference. In session after session, I saw people who desired the riches of the Great Tradition in both its Western and Eastern forms. Unfortunately, there was in attendance only two priests, myself representing the tradition of Orthodox Church and my friend Fr Christian Mathis, a Roman Catholic priest.

Let me say upfront, I am ambivalent about the lack of a numerically substantive Orthodox presence at CAPS. We have in the last 30 or so years gotten rather comfortable talking down to people. Oh granted, we're gracious when we do so, but in the main we are more comfortable talking to people who want to join the Church. We our happy to enter into conversation, really often a monologue, with those who affirm us, who see us the solution to their problems. We are less comfortable with those who wish to relate to us as peers—as our brothers and sisters in Christ.

I am not convinced that, with a few exceptions, we would prefer to avoid conversations with those people who have competencies and expertise in areas about which we know little or nothing. Let me offer an example of a CAPS presentation I found not only interesting and valuable but challenging.

On Saturday morning the first plenary session was presented by Debra Taylor, MA, of Institute for Sexual Wholeness (a graduate program/ministry focusing on sex therapy). Taylor offered us an update on the research into women's sexuality that she published in her book that she co-authored with Archibald D. Hart andCatherine Hart Weber, Secrets of Eve .

Taylor's presentation,“Prisoners of Hope: Is Healing Possible for Sexual Strugglers?”was a challenge to the gathering to imitate the words of Jesus in Lk 4:18-19: (the Spirit of the Lord is upon Me...) and ourselves as psychologists and pastors to proclaim liberty to the captive, to set free those who are burdened and battered in the area of sexuality.

What made the presentation unique was not just what was said, but what wasn't said. Taylor did not focus on sexual immorality—we did not hear about homosexuality, adultery, fornication, or masturbation. Instead she spoke with great eloquence on the suffering of married men and women as they try and understand each other's different, but equally legitimate, sexuality.

At the core of this struggle is not simply the fact that husbands typically don't understand their wives sexuality. This lack of understand is situated within a social (and for that matter, research) context that pathologizes women's sexuality and foster in women (and so also in men) an increasingly unrealistic and unnatural view of feminine sexuality and the woman's body.

Listening to Taylor as she related experiences from her own life and clinical practice, I wondered how I might apply her insights to my own pastoral work. How many married couples who come to see me either together or individually, I wondered, are suffering because of the very lack of mutual understanding that the speaker has articulated? Having spoken with current and former seminaries, I know that if sexuality is addressed at all in their coursework, it is only done so in terms of morality (and even this, I suspect, is rather deficient, but that's for another time). But sexuality is never addressed as it was in Taylor's work.

Considering the apologetic energy we expend on the fact that—u nlike Rome—we have a married clergy, this lacunae is troubling. If, as Taylor argued, many, even most, married couples suffer because of a lack of information about human sexuality, how can this not be true for clergy couples? And how can this lack of information not but have an negative influence not only on the personal lives of clergy couples, but the pastoral practice of the Church?

Let me return to the question of an entrepreneurial approach to outreach and evangelism. As in my experience at CAPS, as well as in my participation in other professional settings, I have found that my willingness to participate as a peer—albeit one who wears cassock, cross and cap—has always brought a rich reward both for me personally and for my ministry. And, not incidentally, it has also resulted in new Orthodox Christians.

Over the years, I have spoken with man men and women from various professions who have become (or have always been) Orthodox Christians. A consistent theme in the stories they tell me is the joy and gratitude to God they have for their Orthodox faith. But they also tell stories of frustration that there seems to be little interest among the clergy to make use of their professional skills and gifts. While these professionals are happy to be the spiritual children of the Church, they are also competent adults whose potential contribution to the Church is often greatly limited by the inability of the clergy to engage them as professional colleagues.

At its core, I think this inability of some—maybe even many—c lergy to engage the laity as professional peers (though different professionals to be sure) both is the reflects our limited vision of evangelical outreach and is also a contributing factor to our narrowness of vision.

One of the participates I spoke with at CAPS was quite taken by the patristic notion that what is not assumed by Christ is not redeemed. I wonder, are willing our we as a community and personally to work to redeem academia and the professions? Are we willing to engage those who challenge us not simply because of their interest in the spiritual life but because they bring to the Church skills and insights that are new to us?

Or, let me make this personal, do I want ADULT spiritual children who insist on the integrity and value of their own professional contributions to the life of the Church?

As always, your comments, questions and criticisms are not only welcome but encouraged.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

Thoughts from CAPS

The opening plenary session here at CAPS was interesting. Gary Moon, Ph.D., who teaches at Richmond Graduate University offered a presentation titled “Psychology and Christian Spirituality: Puttting the Soul Back in Soul-o-logy.” Having studied as an undergraduate with the Jungian James Hillman I was interested in the direction that Moon would take with his own presentation. Hillman was (at least when he was my professor) antithetical to any suggestion that Christian (or really, any religion) could have a place in what he called “soul work.”
Moon argued, correctly I think, that historically modern psychology developed out of philosophy and ultimately Christian theology. Where his argument took a provocative turn when he referenced Nicean Christology. Where his presentation took an interesting turn was his argument that just as Christ held together divinity and humanity in Himself, so too Christians are called to do the same. Correctly, Moon identified this as the Orthodox doctrine of theosis (deification). Remember, that CAPS is composed primarily of Evangelical Christians and you have a sense of the radical nature of Moon's talk.
It was noteworthy for me that in many of the presentations I heard—as well as in my side conversations with conference participants—there is a clear desire for the the Great Tradition of the Church (East and West). While this desire for the Great Tradition does not extend to an explicitly stated desire to join the Church, my experience at CAPS suggests that there is more that we can do as Orthodox Christians in our evangelistic outreach. We have, as I've said before, not really extended our outreach to the academic world in general, much less the world of the social and natural sciences.
But we need to—not simply because people are interested, but because Christ has commanded it of us!
Anyway, I'll post more on CAPS tomorrow.
In Christ,
+Fr Gregory

Erikson and Orthodox Pastoral Care

(This is a re-write of an earlier post that had a number of errors.  I'm using a new netbook with a smaller key board and screen, so my already minimal editing skills are being rather stretched.)

I'm sitting in the airport (my flights been delayed 1 hour and 20 minutes) on my way home from to the CAPS International Conference in Orlando, FL. Yes, I know, I've got a tough life—actually what I have is an incredibly supportive wife who encourages me in my undeniable eccentric priestly ministry.
In addition to being able to speak with colleagues, I did a poster presentation this year. My presentation—based based on a paper I presented at a conference last year—is a comparison of the. work of Erik Erikson and St Maximos the Confessor. Specifically, I'm looking at how they both look at the experience of failure.
While I say more on the content of my presentation later, as with most my academic work in psychology, the paper my presentation is based is more theoretical than applicative in orientation. My goal is to try and deepen how we in psychology understand the human person. So, my concern is not with St Maximos as such, but with (in the present case) the developmental theory of articulated by the psychologist Erik Erikson.
For those who know me, my interest in doing this is no particular mystery—this is simply a matter of transposing my own spiritual journey from the personal to the theoretical. In other words, my own spiritual life, my own faith as an Orthodox Christian, and my own admittedly eccentric ministry as a priest for that matter, grew out of my interest in psychology. For me, reflecting on Erikson (in the present case) is what inspired me to draw closer to Christ and His Church. Sort of like what the fathers call “natural contemplation,” or a reflection on creation that points the soul beyond creation to the Creator.
So why am I interested in Erikson's work?
One of the most interesting things about Erikson's development theory is that it is teleological. Human growth and development is not a matter of the blind working out of our genetic inheritance in response to environmental stimulus. To be sure as a disciple of Freud, the body (and thus later genetic research) has a role to play in Erikson's theory, but (unlike Freud) Erikson does not limit human development to simply the deterministic working out of bodily needs.
For Erikson human development not only has an identifiable goal it proceeds along following identifiable benchmarks. And not only that, there in Erikson's view of the matter there are also the possibility for missteps. These missteps are possible throughout life and while not necessarily fatal to our consonant development, neither are they inconsequential. At any point along the way, I can at any step off the path of wholesome development that would ordinarily lead from birth to death.
This potential for failure begins in infancy when the new born and is my constant companion throughout my life. It is this possibility of failure that I find most interesting in Erikson's work. Like other, more humanistic psychologists, Erikson has a generally optimistic view of potential. Unlike these other thinkers, however, he is clear about the possibility of failure—and this failure is one that increasingly is a consequence of the misuse of my own freedom.
The summit of human development is ego integrity. At this stage I come (or not) to embrace the totality of my life with all its successes and failures. Part of this embrace is the appreciative acceptance of my own contingency, that my life is the product not only on my genetic inheritance and free decisions, but also of factors over which I have no control (like the culture in which I am born and raised) and which could in fact have been different.
But I can also come to a point in which I refuse to be thankful for my life; I can deny or resent my failures just as I can overvalue or minimize my successes. Whatever the concrete form my lack of acceptance takes, it is grounded in a refusal of my own contingency as the condition of possibility for my own life. It is here, in my exercise (or not) of what Erikson calls the virtue of wisdom, that I have the opportunity to find not only myself, but also to reach out in beyond the limits of my own life and embrace others in compassion.
While Erikson's work fall short of the Church's understanding of theosis (deification) as the goal of human life, his work nevertheless articulates much of the human dimension of this process. In doing so, I think, Erikson's work has a valuable contribution to make to Orthodox pastoral care.
In Christ,
+Fr Gregory

Webinar CANCELED

Owing to parish obligations, the webinar on the psychology of leadership for this afternoon has been canceled.  Sorry.  I will post an announcement when it is rescheduled

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

OCL responds to the EP talk at Holy Cross | AOI Observer

Some thoughts about a recent speech at Holy Cross School of Theology from the American Orthodox Institute blog. Your comments are, of course, welcome (but please, keep them charitable, by which I mean gentle.)


In Christ,


+Fr Gregory

George Michalopulos, Orthodox Christian Laity board member and frequent contributor to the AOI blog, penned the official OCL response to Arch. Elpidophoros Lambriniadis recent talk at AOI. Original article is posted on the OCL website.

An OCL Board Member Responds to the Message of Chief Secretary of The Holy and Sacred Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate
George Michalopulos

March 25, 2009 - the Feast of the Annunciation

I. Introduction: An Archimandrite Speaks

Recently, a certain archimandrite, the Very Rev Dr Elpidophoros Lambriniadis, spoke at Holy Cross School of Theology in Brookline, Massachusetts. His position is one of auxiliary professor at this seminary but his formal title is “Chief Secretary of the Holy and Sacred Synod.” His remarks thus were more than the observations of a mere academic; indeed he stated from the outset that they were authorized by the Ecumenical Patriarch himself and “with the consent” of Archbishop Demetrios, the primate of the Greek archdiocese.

What began as astute observations of American Orthodoxy by a highly educated clergyman-scholar quickly descended into vituperation, slander against other jurisdictions, and almost total ignorance of America. Moreover, his understanding of canon law and Byzantine history itself was questionable. It is unknown whether this was deliberate or merely the result of ignorance. At best, this willful twisting of history can be viewed as Phanariote propaganda, which like all good propaganda uses words and ideas for some higher purpose. The purpose of this reply is not only to identify that which is propagandistic, but to point out the severe internal and logical contradictions contained therein.

It has been reported that several of those who attended his lecture left in disgust in the midst of his speech and that of those who remained, disgruntled comments were audible upon the completion of his oration. The following day, during a private meeting with the faculty of Holy Cross, clear disagreements were enunciated towards him and his views. Others have pointed out in the interim that his speech should be viewed by many as the intellectual case (such as it is) of the Phanar regarding the claims it will press at the upcoming “Pan-Orthodox Synod” which is in the planning stages at present. Given his standing at the Phanar, his speech deserves serious consideration. More importantly, as seen within the turmoil of the GOA in the aftermath of the Ligonier Conference in 1994, the Phanar’s capabilities for mischief cannot be underestimated. (Henceforth, for purposes of brevity, I will refer to Archimandrite Lambrianides as “the speaker” and his remarks as “the speech.”

Read the rest here: OCL responds to the EP about Holy Cross talk.

Job and the Defense of the Weak

In his anger, he overturns the weak;

Therefore when he rise up,

No one believes his own life is safe.

(Job 24.22, LXX)

Having just been slandered by Eliphaz in chapter 22, Job responds with his own mediation on the both God's will and the lot of the wicked in chapter 23-24.

In reflecting on God's way of relation to him, Job implicitly rebukes Eliphaz and the rest of those who seeing Job's situation accuse him of wrong doing:

Who then would know, that I might find Him,

And might bring this matter to an end?

I would state my case before Him

And fill my mouth with arguments.

Would that I knew the words He would answer me A

And could understand what He would tell me. (23.3-5, LXX)

Job knows what he doesn't know, what he doesn't understand; he doesn't know or understand the will of God. And yet, unlike his accusers, Job is not afraid to acknowledge his poverty before God (and implicitly the human community represented by Eliphaz and the others).

Why? Job says that while God is a God of strength, He—unlike Job's critics—does not use His strength against humanity. God will always speak the truth, He will even rebuke us (and Job expects to be rebuked) but He does so with exceeding gentleness.

Like a warrior, it is His own strength and love of truth that restrains God in the presence of frail humanity. And not only that, God limit's Himself not out of any human insecurity as if God were somehow, as fathers reminds us, subject to human passions, but in the service of liberating Job from his suffering at the hands of both Satan and his human opponents:

Though He would come on me in His great strength,

He would not use the occasion to threaten me.

For truth and rebuke are from Him.

And He would bring my judgment to an end. (vv. 6-7, LXX)

This passage brings into sharp focus the intent of words in the epigraph. Job's accusers—both human and demonic—are motivated by anger; they threaten and bully and humiliate others in order to raises themselves up over others. In the words and actions, Eliphaz and the others stand in sharp contrast to God.

Reflecting on these verses, St Gregory the Great sees in Job's words about God a veiled revelation of the coming of Christ. The saint writes, it is “the only begotten Son of God” Who remains “invisible in the strength of the divine nature.” Why does the Son do this? Following the letter to the Hebrews (2.11-19), Gregory says that God assumes “our weakness, that He might elevate us to his own abiding strength.” (“ Morals on Job,” 16.36-37, quoted in ACCS , vol VI, p. 125)

In the divine economy, my strength is at the service of your weakness. Strength, power, authority are all at the service of the good of others.

But as we see in the example of Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar, it is not enough to simply be formally correct in our words and actions toward each other. Our words and actions must be truthful, yes certainly, but they must also be applicable to the truth of the situation of the person to whom we are responding.

While I must “speak the truth in love,” (see Eph 4:15) I must be at least as certain I am loving as I am that I am right. As has become clear by Eliphaz's words in chapter 22—and Job's retort to him in 24.22—this is not how things are in his case. Truth has trumped love. Or maybe more accurately, having forsaken love, Eliphaz cannot speak the truth and instead resorts to unjust accusations against his suffering friend.

As I think about all of this, I come to see a different facet of Job's response to his critics. Yes, Job is more than a little frustrated with his circumstances. And yes, I imagine that Job is hurt that he has been so misunderstood by his family and friends.

For all this his external circumstances have changed, and changed radically to be sure, Job is still, well, Job. He is still the man we meet at the beginning of the book.

And if he is no longer able to care for naked (22.6), give water to the thirst, provide food for the hungry (v. 7), care for widows and orphans (v 9) because of his impoverishment, this does not mean that he has forgotten the poor and the outcast. Job still cares for those who have no one to care for them.

Where once that care was material, and so external in some ways to him, his care for them is now more internal. Where once he offered clothing, water and food, now he offers words. Not sweet words or easy words to be sure. Job's words are powerful and directed at those who abuse their power through their neglect of the weak.

That Job does this by referring to himself, to the injustice of his own circumstances, does not make his witness any less effective. Like Christ, Job offers the poor, the weak and the forgotten among us the only thing he has, the witness of his own life. And his witness is a witness on behalf of the poor,the weak and the forgotten is this: Job stands, weak and crushed as his is, in opposition to those who would neglect and oppress those who cannot defend themselves. Having himself been stripped of everything, Job nevertheless finds in his own poverty and suffering the strength to defend others.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

Webinar Announcement

Just a reminder, I'll be leading a webinar on the psychology of leadership THIS afternoon. We'll be looking at some of the recent research on leadership as it applies to parish ministry. The seminar starts TODAY , Tuesday March 24, 2009 at 2pm CDT (3pm EDT).

This afternoon's seminar will look primarily at the theoretical foundations of leadership in general. The will be a second seminar, next Tuesday, March 31, 2009 at 2pm CDT (3pm EDT) that will look at the application of the psychological research to the concrete circumstances of the parish.

Open to whomever wishes to participate, the seminars are sponsored by the OCA Diocese of the Midwest Parish Health. You do need to register however and can do that for today's presentation here.

A number of people from varied backgrounds, both clergy and laity, Orthodox Christians as well as Christians from other traditions, so it should be a very good gathering.

See you online later today!

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory