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The Battle of Hours

I’m fascinated by how no matter how something is phrased, it can be right there in front of you, simple and plain as day, but that doesn’t mean you’ll hear it. I’m not talking about some ‘self-annointed’ gnostic’s personal interpretation of a religious text – I mean something that’s dyed in the wool tradition but still, somehow, eludes the grasp. When people ask, “Why didn’t Christ tell everyone what was coming and what to do about it?” the answer is ‘He did, but that doesn’t mean “everyone” or even many peopleÂ have heard him.

I seem to have stumbled upon something effective for overcoming sin. I know our fathers have told me this. I can go to my library and come out with armloads of books that will tell me this. I know that it has passed through my ears. But I know I haven’t heard it. Or I’ve forgotten it, which happens too.

It seems counterintuitive (and almost cowardly) not to fight sin head on. Not to attack it where it is, or defend against it where it comes. The fathers have told me this lacks humility, that I am already beginning from Death, “in sin did my mother conceive me” – the very context of that fight and defense has itself been corrupted – how then do I presume that I can make a stand? But I have heard them and thought ‘what else can I do?’ I didn’t hear the rest of what they were saying. And I know something about synergy. I am not mystified as to what’s me and what’s God, as though I have not learned the Orthodox thinking in this matter. I don’t presume either to struggle alone, or to wait for God to come and save me. There is no struggle and no salvation that is not both of us fully engaged together – my will, my mind, my emotions, my body, and God’s energies as well.

But the other part of it – I didn’t realize is so effective. Fighting and defending *indirectly*. As I say, it’s counterintuitive (to a man infected with Death). But it seems that praying the hours, that pushing through to sing the liturgical prayers of our people, helps overcome sin, helps not only drive away the evil one, but make a mind for overcoming the world, and also a disposition to overcome the passions. It makes a self less inclined to sin in the body, which is somehow raised through prayer, as though less corruptible, and it makes a soul less inclined to interest in sin, as though the fullness of prayer has filled an aching void that sin always promises to fill but never does, require addict-like returning to the needle of passions.

Now the fathers have said again and again, “pray so that you might not fall into temptation”. They have bled their voice onto the ground before me with admonition and encouragement, and I have not heard them. And I have been proud. I have thought to fight and to defend, to take sin on head on. But this is arrogance, not bravery. And this “indirect”, “counterintuitive” fighting and defense – I think this is what they meant. I think they meant I’m incapable of winning, but if I turn to God not to fight for me, but to fix me, to fix the broken, damaged, savaged by Death corruption in soul andÂ body that has eaten me away, then I will be raised to taste incorruptible life, and Death won’t succeed in owning me, forcing me back to the ‘needle’ of passion-addicted slavery.

I walk away from the Hours, and I don’t care about the ‘needle’. I walk away and am happier, and it lasts, and I want to return to the Hours. And I think that, if I don’t, I will be overcome again. The passions – pride, anger, rage, envy, fear, lust, vengeance – these will come for me and find me broken for them, open for them, unclothed, needing, agonizing, incomplete, with a void they crawl into like roaches into a gap in the wall. The prayers, said with every attempt at fitting attention and devotion, with persistence and sincerity, they place the house on a high rock.

It’s not like the noon witching hour on “church day” when drivers roar out of parking lots and onto roadways with their “how dare you get in front of me, I am important and not to be trifled with!”, and the restaurants and buffets are packed with “I demand service. I will be catered to. How dare you fail me in any way!” No, that would be stupid. I don’t mean walking away feeling so good about yourself that you won’t do bad things – won’t kill someone, but will burn in the acid bath of pride. I mean that if the prayers are fitting and devoted, it seems like God does what he promises, fills up the gap between the man standing saying them in his Death with unworthy lips and the goal to which he aspires. As C.S. Lewis said, God “directs our arrows to himself”, apart from which they could never hit anything except an idol of our deluded imaginations. And God saves through prayer, deifies one a little more, heals a little more the disease, and abides with one a little more when in the dark cave surrounded by the slaver and the enemy and the dire wolf. And it’s stronger. The center is more well, and it holds more easily, to cite Yeats.

For me, it is the ‘discipline’ to say the words in private, to stand in the icon corner and sing the hour without help, without others, without anyone but me and God and the Saints knowing I am there. Which is really not ‘discipline’, but it is discovering and ever rediscovering that comfort is there, healing is there, health and wellness are there, that God abides especially there, in those prayers said “fittingly and with devotion”. The synergy is in going out to meet him. “Keep me this night without sin.” It’s amazing that one could say these words many times and not realize that they are exactly what is happening – I am saying the words, for my part, fittingly and with devotion – and God is keeping me this night without sin. This is the simple prescription. This is what I must do. Not dig in, stand, and fight, which it is my inclination to do at the first sign of trouble. But flee to the ‘altar’, choose good ground there, and call upon the host of Heaven to come to my aid, trusting not even the words of my own imagination, but the time-honoured implements of holy men who have withstood flame and sword and tooth and claw, and are there in prayer with those who honour them.

Lord have mercy on my blindness. Pray for me those who see.

The Rome of Christ and Antichrist

You know, ever since the gnostics there has been an apocalyptic, quasi-occult culture of superstition, pseudo-scholarship, and titillation surrounding the future – what the evangelical fundamentalists like to call “prophesy”. One of their key themes is the re-creation of a “Roman Empire” that will wed the economic and political structures of society into a globally pervasive environment, with people finding it impossible to do business (buy, sell, trade), make a living, and support their families unless they adhere to the system. In other words, it’ll be a pugilistic entity that uses pressure, leverage, and force to compel participation in its system. It’ll starve, bankrupt, or make war on and ultimately (with much suffering wreaked upon the poor) absorb peoples that don’t want any part in it. This empire is essentially the cultural face of antichrist.

: Image by quapan via Flickr

For the past 100 years or so, all kinds of entities have been called that “revived Roman empire”. The League of Nations, the UN, the European Union, NAFTA and GATT – all kinds of things. Most of this has involved all kinds of selective information and reasoning, dubious analysis (to onlookers), and again a quasi-occult culture of superstition, pseudo-scholarship, and titillation surrounding the future. The enlightened who “see it” (gnosticism) get together for prophesy conferences and do a brisk trade in tithes, tapes, tabloids, and book sales. Everyone is convinced they need to explain their version of it to you (how else would they make a living?) but it’s really just the same sermon repeated again and again. Daniel and the 7 weeks, etc. etc.

Now of course, we Orthodox don’t think the same way. There have been many antichrists, many romes, and we expect there will be more again, until Christ comes. We have no need to understand all prophesy, as if analysis were understanding, or numerological theories were the same as knowledge. We say the books are sealed, and not yet opened. So we have written in the holy scriptures. But we’re not above some speculation, tho the best speculation is merely recognizing the typologies that we know from the holy gospel. We recognize Pilate. We recognize the Evil One who met us in the desert. We say this emperor, potentate, nation, or false prophet – these are antichrist. Stalin was antichrist. Pol Pot was antichrist. Hitler was antichrist. One might have more contemporary leaders in mind, if they did what those persons did – torture, bomb, and subjugate others, etc. Typology. I’ve no objections to calling any such person antichrist, even if he bleeds red, white, and blue. Perhaps especially then.

But I find it quite compelling that these fundamentalist prophesy gurus (vicarious prophets offering derivative visions of the future) have not pegged the United States as the best example in all of history of a “revived Roman empire”. It’s the seat of international lending and credit institutions and currency exchangers, “food” and chemical conglomerates, energy conglomerates, NGOs (world bank, IMF, etc.), private military-security forces and “intelligence” networks… if ever there were horns coming out of some beast, the metaphor would certainly be the most apt in this case. The US has fundamentally wed political and economic (commerical/corporate) interests, and created a global system into which it compels participation, by subjugation, leverage, and all manner of economic extortion – it is the Walmart of world powers – it is *the* world power – you basically can’t do business, as a people, unless you’re involved with the US system. And if you’re the exception, holding out and giving the US the finger, you get bombed into oblivion and made a client state as we ‘rebuild’. One way or another, you break and yield – if we have to claim there are WMDs hidden somewhere under your house, and fabricate documentation, we’ll do it. If we have to claim you have “ties” to nebulous global organizations that threaten us, we’ll do it, even if you’re fundamentally incompatible with those organizations. If we have to say that you attacked us, not the other way around, that’s in the contingency plans – always has been. Whatever it takes, one way or another, you get the mark. That flag will wave, that dollar will prevail – you’ve got to be in bed w. the leviathan, the behemoth, the enormous, all-consuming world empire that sets the markets, manipulates the rise and fall of governments, and wages war on those who stand against it.

I think one would be hard pressed *not* to say, using the Orthodox ‘hermeneutic’, that this is one of the “Roman Empires”. As I say, I think it’s the best example ever. It’s on a grand scale, compared to all the localized Romes we’ve known. Sure, we think there’s a final Roman Empire, and there’ll be a final antichrist, out of many. Whether this is it, or is just one more, from which once again there will be redemption, God knows. I merely think it’s silly to fill our eyes with flags and love of McDonalds and Oprah and Chevy trucks, and pretend it’s always the other guys. The rest of the world knows. We’re the only ones who go around thinking we do little wrong, that the rest of the world either must be like us, wants to be, or should be, and that it’s OK to profess our friendship with a gun pointed at someone’s head and the other hand taking the food from their children, while we crap under their dinner table. If someone were to ask for an example of what Christ is talking about in the gospels, this is what I’d tell them.

Of course, the fundamentalists are busy trying to figure out how to make their “bibles” fit with President Obama being “the” antichrist. They want to stop just short of his “blackness”, what there is of it. But they’re just not being creative: he’s a pugilist and a bully, too. He’s continuing, not discontinuing, the extension of the system of global US influence, control, and possession of markets through military, economic, and cultural force that his predecessor was also continuing and extending. Parties change – this underlying global policy does not. It’s too important to leave to the exigencies of a single executive. The duality of parties is like the difference between being bludgeoned or merely beaten – it’s a form of words.

I share more faith with those who used to shout that the US is the “great Satan”, before we set up secret prisons in their countries, and helped get them rounded up and tortured to death by their governments. They at least have a correct analysis of typology, and are doing it in an Orthodox manner. Listen to the rational ones, and they’re saying that the US is trying to dominate the world culturally, economically, and militarily in a global empire of influence and control. In other words, they’re saying, “look, here is Rome”. Remember, all roads lead to it. Or put another way, our “worst” critics are also most accurately describing what we, in our speeches and white papers, declare as our express goals, whenever we talk about “pursuing US interests” – those aren’t your interests or my interests, but those of the entity – the ‘beast’, if you will. It’s as if our biggest problem is with those who don’t cooperate, and our second biggest is with those who say “Look, there is Antichrist!” Let those who have understanding count the number of the “beast”. Hell, a turnip could understand it when it’s this obvious.

It’d be interesting to see those toting around their prophesy pamphlets and Scofield bibles work up a set of “parallels” (their concept), representing Christ’s words about Antichrist and his empire and US economic, industrial, political, and military endeavours over the past 70 years. “Hers” for those of you into ‘inclusive’ bibles and female antichrists. Instead of the manifest destiny bit in the back of their Birch Society minds about “America” being “special” or “chosen” or a “Christian nation” (that one makes me laugh) – just assume for a moment that all of that is made up – foolish blathering – that none of it has been correctly understood (that’s certainly the way almost everyone else on the planet looks at it). Instead, play devil’s advocate and just compare Christ’s words in the gospels with things like the decade of Reagan’s secret wars or, more blatantly, every military and international banking action, and every US trade dispute since the Berlin Wall came down, and its plethora of effects in the world. My favorite quotation right now from the US is “We’re going to open up new markets, one way or another.” Sounds pretty much like that ‘Bible’ to me, if you ignore the notes in the margins, and just listen to the beast talk. 🙂

Incidentally, the Protestants will never understand the Rome of Antichrist until they understand the Rome of Christ, and how it is said (in one of our prophesies) “Two Romes have fallen, a Third stands, a Fourth there shall not be.” Amen.

Also, the fundamentalist “prophesy” sticklers will say I missed one. They say the empire weds political, economic and *religious* aspects of the culture together, and we’re back to that “but we’re a Christian nation” rhetoric. If that’s all we’re missing, I’ve got two words for you: Max Weber. If there was ever a wedding of those three elements, it was right there at the beginning, when the US was founded (and it continues to this day). The US was founded as a “Christian” nation only in this sense that, utilizing Weber’s thesis (“The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism”) it’s in perfect symmetry as an Antichristian one. Remember, these are their criteria – economic, political, religious- I merely point out that Weber answers that nicely. Give it a read. It’s a required text for any US political science degree. Then grab Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations (also required reading, if you do US foreign policy) for his delightful diagrams of the “end times”. That’s the real “prophesy” in use in US foreign policy. What is ‘prophesy’ anyway, but the belief in the inevitability of a thing?

And just to be fair to Walmart, I think it’s one of the “little” beasts. I didn’t want to leave that out. It’s got horns everywhere.

By What Authority?

In the sense in which the West offers it, I don’t recognize any authority “over” me. No president, congress, pastor, leader, boss, block captain, warden, or petty supervisor has authority over me. I accept none. I’m obliged to keep my word, compelled to follow my honor, and committed to adhere to my ethics. But these are comments on my own inclinations, on the authority of character, not of any external force.

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I used to take a lot of flack for this from the evangelical fundamentalist crowd that talks in terms of overseers, and “the leadership” (as though it were an objective entity that should rightfully rule the world), and that does not distinguish their political inclinations from objective religious obligations – claiming, in their support of corporate structures, that the boss is appointed by God and that the president is “Il Duce” – nothing short of messianic, provided he’s Republican. “You don’t submit to authority,” they would shout.

Right. I don’t recognize an authority to submit to, and wouldn’t if I did – I’d rebel against him and join the opposition. They’ll appeal to the “Bible” (a Protestant contraption made out of clippings and arranged parts from some of the Holy Scriptures we Orthodox authored).

And yes, there are words about authority in there. However, they are several in kind. One is adherence to the Bishop, which the evangelicals certainly are not. Those who think you can think and feel a “church” into existence and then appoint yourself or others to “positions of authority” certainly cannot accept that Christ objectively founded a historical Church in a place and time, laying hands physically on bishops, empowering them to lay hands on others, and so they themselves must adhere to the Church that has never ceased to exist down to our own day. In short, the Protestant cannot accept that rather than inventing the Church, they are required by the only authority to locate and be received into it.

Another type of authority reflected in the holy scriptures is that conditional authority given to rulers, which is limited, not absolute or blanket (not fascist in character) and which is practical and de facto. Remember, Pilate had “authority” to murder Christ. He did not have the right to do it, the divine ordinance or sanction to do it. He merely had the ‘authority’ in the sense that God literally put the power to make it happen in his hands. It’s not so different from the authority of Bishops. Bishops *are* in authority, in the sense that who the bishop is is not a matter of opinion – you don’t create him, you locate him, and adhere to him. With a ruler like Pilate, he’s got the guns and the tanks and the legions – you pretty much can identity who he is. This in no way implies you can’t oppose him, resist him, or even ignore him (things Christ did more than once). Being Pilate doesn’t make you good or right, or make his decisions good or right or the divine intention.

Another kind of authority in the holy scriptures is authority in terms of experience. Obviously the monastics, who have walked long in the desert, fasted fiercely and humbly, and have overcome the Evil One, have experience that may be regarded as authority. If you were consulting an authority on engine overhauls, you would consult an experienced mechanic. He’d speak with some authority. His boss, who might be a corporate geek who has never rolled up his sleeves, has no such authority in that sense. The Orthodox Faith is eminently practical in this way.

We’re basically mechanics of the body and soul, attempting to accomplish our union with God, not create a religious philosophical system to which we can then provide membership or advocacy. As our fathers would say, we don’t have time to argue with your religious philosophies, we’re too busy trying to save ourselves.

So, I know there is a kind of authority in various governmental and industrial (same thing) figures of power – I am usually opposing them, so of course I accept that they exist.

Obviously, I know that there is a kind of authority in the Bishop – I can’t be saved without him – I’d be a fool not to locate him, and be a part of his Church – he is Christ on the earth – to separate myself from him, is to be without Christ.

And finally, I listen to our fathers in the Faith, because they are our authorities – the repositories of the Word of God, which always comes to us as persons. Trying to “cook my own meth”, so to speak (invent and live out my own religious experience) would be a delusional exercise, a kind of inner Protestantism – “personal savior” indeed. I can’t really get by without looking to and seeking the help of those who have gone farther ahead, been proved and made perfect, living and praying for us in their glorified union with God. An example is an authority on what it represents.

This is why our ikons are authorities – they are repositories, in person, of our Faith. When we say “faith” we don’t mean first and foremost “content” in a religious philosophical way, but “history” – experience – what happened, what is happening, and what will happen. That’s the gospel, the Creed, and the means of our salvation – practical, real, tangible, personal, historical, experiential events. We don’t “believe” our Faith so much as live it out.

When we say the words “I believe” in the Creed, it’s not “here follows didactic content” but “here is what happened to us”, “here is what we are responding to”, and “here is how we intend to live”. That too, is authority – the authority of simply being true. A thing that is so has the authority to command our adherence, and when we dispute or disdain it, evading history and experience and reality, we are disdaining that authority.

So, no I recognize no authority in heaven or earth in the sense that Western, Protestant, Republicans do. No such thing. Figment of their imagination. False god – Baal – idol. Illicit authority. But neither do they recognize the authority that layed hands on the apostles and gave them all authority, binding and uniting heaven and earth together as one. If they did, they would join their Church and become their disciples, thereby becoming disciples of Christ who gave them such authority. Not the authority of power – but of truth, reality, and the body of Christ himself. It’s not a Western Protestant, Republican story – it’s the gospel.

I feel completely free to be at once an anarchist (if I like) and an Orthodox Christian. I know some would take exception to that, but then we’ve got all kinds of things that creep into any religious context, including neo-conservative fascism that repudiates the very Faith of the adherent. Someone is bound to think that loyalty to their political system is required of those who follow Christ within it. They no doubt would take exception to Christ having worked on the Sabbath, had they been Jews. I’m OK with someone taking exception. As I said, it’s following Christ, not joining the party of those who trumped up the charges against him. A little more disdain for the significance of one’s government, and a lot more concern with those persecuted by it, would be far more Christian if, by Christian, we mean Orthodox.

Responding to Accusations

When accused of a general failing – pride, foolishness, laziness, always agree. Be the first to admit it. You needn’t go out of your way to announce these passions, but the moment someone points the finger, join with them. When you accuse yourself, you avoid judgment. When you think them correct always in their observations, you avert the very passions attributed to you, and so overcome them. Don’t defend yourself. If they say, “So, you admit it!” say “Of course.” If they say, “then why don’t you change” say “because I am obstinate, too. Forgive me.”, or “that’s how far gone I am, pray for me”. It doesn’t matter whether technically they see anything real or not. God has granted them words, whether they are false prophets who pretend to see your sins instead of their own, or whether God is graciously reminding you of your sins. If you think with the fathers, you think that all these things that can be said about you are true, and that you cannot recount all the ways in which you have failed. If you think with the desert, you think that you fail in all ways, that every failure that can be attributed to you is true. But don’t be depressed by this, or let others insist that you be depressed. Shame is best expressed in acknowledgement and worship, not in self-pity. Genuine shame is in gratitude for being allowed to live without being struck down for your sins and utterly destroyed – weep over your sins, but don’t be destroyed by them, or it mocks God who has not destroyed you in judgment. If your accusers want you to fall down before them, you cannot – it is a thing you can only give to God. Even the angels do not ask as much. As the fathers say, “keep your mind in Hell and despair not”. So you can be cheerful, even tho remorseful, happy even though sad for your faults.

If someone accuses you of a fault, acknowledge it, and ask forgiveness. If they say that you must do something to gain forgiveness, say you’ll discuss it with your Confessor. It is not appropriate to arrange ‘penance’ from just anyone. The mysteriological significance of penance cannot be replaced with our assigning it to one another. This is likewise why we don’t bless one another. You and I are not priests – unless you’re a priest – I’m certainly not, so I won’t be blessing anyone today, or presuming to assign penance. At some point, another person’s inability to forgive your faults is their own burden, and must be something they work out likewise with their own Confessor. You don’t have to just shrug it off, but you aren’t a slave to someone else’s probationary program for you to fit in with their agenda. In response to “pray for me”, someone once said, “you make it hard to pray for you”. All I can say to that is, “I understand”, leaving it at that. Something similar might be “then we can pray for each other.” It needn’t be arrogant. We are taught to say, “by (that person’s) prayers save me”, believing that our sins are so corrupting that we cannot be saved apart from the prayers of others. Ask forgiveness, but asking isn’t agreeing to a 12-step plan where you mow someone else’s lawn. On the other hand, if you ruined their lawn, it’s probably the right gesture.

When accused of a specific crime, such as lying about something, don’t lie by confessing it falsely to anyone. You can say, “I am a liar”, and you know it’s true, because you have spoken words of God with your lips but not your heart. But don’t say, “yes, I lied about what I told you yesterday” unless that is true. The fathers don’t ask us to become liars in order to admit to being liars. If someone says, “but the fathers say you should admit every fault”, freely admit to any fault, but not to historical events that did not happen.

When there is a subtle blend of accusations – “you’re being proud about this – what you’re claiming happened didn’t happen” – just separate the failing from the facts. “I am indeed very proud. I have no doubt that I am being proud right now, and that I was proud before you even noticed it. Pray for me. However, what I have said is true, and I have not lied about it. Forgive me if I seem to be saying you’re mistaken.”

Accusations are a gift, so that all your enemies, as St. Nikolai Velimirovic has written, may be your friends. In this way, God makes peace in the whole world. “You’re too proud of your intellect.” Answer: “That is certainly true. Thank you for helping me remember.” But mistakes of history – “You cheated on the exam. No one could have gotten all the answers correct.” – are just that – mistakes. When someone is mistaken, especially about you, you don’t have to correct them. Don’t tell them “you are wrong” or “you are mistaken”, but also don’t join them in the error – that kind of accusation is the Evil One tempting you, though they don’t know it. “I disagree” is enough. “I don’t believe so” is sufficient. Keep it subjective – “I don’t think so”, not objective “you are in error”, to allow for your own weakness, blindness, or delusion – in humility – and because in this way you aren’t also accusing them, which otherwise you would be. But if they say, “You are a cheat”, say “Yes, certainly.” and remember that you’ve cheated yourself of paradise. Say, whenever accused of a fault, that the accuser is right. Then neither of you can be wounded by you fighting with them. When they offer the Enemy’s accusation, don’t even say “I think differently” – which is a positive statement – don’t offer your thoughts – humble yourself and leave no room for fighting over your ideas – instead say “I don’t think as much” – adding, if you wish, “though I am certainly capable of it”.

By leaving nothing for anyone to fight with, you leave nothing for them to stumble over, and nothing for the Enemy to seize from you and make into a weapon. You cannot be pulled into a war, if you become like a lamb, though I find it a very hard thing to do. In this humility, the Enemy’s arrows leave no mark. In this self-accusation, Judgement won’t destroy you. In this willingness to concede all that can be conceded, finding any way possible to agree over your own failings, you become a peacemaker – taking, as did Christ, all sins on yourself. Say, if you fail in it, “it’s my fault. It’s all my fault.” Love, as the apostle says, covers a multitude of sins.

And yes, it’s a tragic facet of public life (corporate culture, academia, politics, religion) that acknowledging weaknesses and following Christ can ruin your ability to be promoted, to even retain your position, and can be spread as gossip like wildfire, distorting your reputation and making life intolerable. In a religious environment, leave. You’re in the wrong one. For the rest of it, though, most of us developed two voices – the one that tells the truth, and the one that responds to manipulation. I don’t fault anyone for it. I have done what was needed to feed my family, and to survive, too. It’s a commentary on public life and the people who make it what it is that integrity is converted into just a means of destroying you, and people who cover their sins are rewarded by the same people with prosperity. When I was in those environments, I always tried to determine whether I was dealing with people who didn’t think of sin as sin, but as merely leverage to convert into a weapon, and those who were genuine. The latter were almost nonexistent, in my experience. And in corporate, academic, and political life I gave very little ground. That’s still how I would do it. For those who would condemn this, did every Christian present himself to be burned in the genocides against our people? Some did, some didn’t, but Saints are among both. But in religious environments, I have preferred to let the chips fall where they may. It is one way I have distinguished cults, with merely the appropriate religious affiliations and blessings, from genuinely Christian communities.

I will say again that to be an Orthodox Church, while incredibly important since there is no other Church, does not mean that you are a Christian community. Cults abound everywhere, because there is little else that religion can do when it embeds itself among people, than to turn the worship of the Creator into the worship of our own personalities. One group is busily ‘defending the truth’ but with clubs and virtual burnings at the stake. Cult, not Christian, whatever its pedigree. Another is busily replacing the Faith with a social theatre, a “mega-church” with a complete absence of genuine Orthodox tradition – in fact a campaign to eradicate it as some kind of vestige – it wishes more than anything to be the biggest non-denominational religious centre in its region, disguised as an Orthodox Church. Bigness and social acceptability are its twin idols. Cult, not Christian. In either environment, reputation can make or break you – it’s very much the same principle at work in corporate, academic, and political circles. Again, it’s better to leave them behind. Staying means accepting the ground of warfare by which they are busily converting human beings into cogs in an ideological and social apparatus that bears little resemblance to the Faith of our Fathers, whatever sign is on the door.

“You’re full of pride,” they would say. And they would be right. I am full of pride. Pray for me. “Separating yourself is a sin,” they would say. “I don’t believe so.” I really don’t believe so. Besides, I have not separated myself from the Church, merely from some versions of it that I don’t think have a monopoly on what it means to be Orthodox. In fact, if pressed, I suppose I would say I haven’t really learned any Orthodoxy from them at all. Surely, that’s my own failing. But nonetheless, to guard my soul, and to protect my family, I stay away. The community I am more or less a part of (I really like the ‘more or less’ – I find it much less prone to spiritual violence) doesn’t beat me up much. I show up twice a year at least, and I send my checks. “Not spiritual”, someone may say. “Of course, I fail in all such matters.” But what I am not, also, is very concerned about my reputation. As for corporate, academic, and political life, I’ve finally been granted, by God’s mercy, emancipation from those too.

Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Blogger

Update on Haiti: Don’t be discouraged by the reports of overwhelming aid, and too much of one thing at one time. The aid is going to be needed for the long haul. There is no decent running water, and where that’s true, and people have no homes, families are destroyed, and most things are just a pile, it’s going to be an ongoing need to get people to the point they can survive and rebuild. The “overwhelming” part is a testament to how quickly the world responded – quicker than ever before on anything. The duplication – e.g. with so many countries sending field hospitals – demonstrates the need for better international coordination of aid. We still act like nations – we still believe in the made-up construct of nationhood and act in a disjointed way, because of it. At a minimum, we need to act as a federation of nations, with some federal coordination. But that doesn’t mean the ongoing aid is not needed. Please keep helping.

As usual, that was preface, and I don’t intend a discourse on the passion of anger or divine anger or any such thing. It’s preface to personal confession. I experience anger whenever I start something new. It’s a kind of outrage. And I don’t know if it’s the passion of anger or not. I’m not going to try to sort that out here. It’ll take more than a platitude or two. I just know it’s there. When I first decided to work for myself, I felt anger at all the pretences that had been foisted on me by the culture and corporate life, the bondage I had placed in, unknowingly, since infancy – sculpted to become a slave. And I spent the first weeks after expressing that anger, or outrage, or what have you. When battered by ridiculous pagan mantras (no negative energy, no negative energy…) I became outraged and began throwing those shackles off. It felt as if they would handcuff me to something that can’t sustain life, mold me into the output of a philosophical meat grinder – a concept not a human. Nothing more complex than a few mantras. And I railed against it. When I began writing again here, I also felt anger. Anger at the chains put on others, and the chains once clamped on me. And I cried out and am still crying out against them. If my experience here matches the other venues, this will last a while, and then it’ll be done, and I’ll either talk about other things or have nothing more to say for a while, so that it becomes a protest venue, for when raids are made against my sanity and my liberty by the world. I don’t know which it’ll be, of course.You know, we deny that there is such a thing as righteous anger, good anger, or the anger of God – if, by that, we mean anything remotely like human anger. God is not subject to the passions, because God is not subject to death. To deny this is to make God part of the universe – not the creator, but rather himself the created. To deny it is heresy and gnosticism. It is also to turn the scriptures against themselves, a common characteristic of both gnosticism and Protestantism – quoting proof texts that elsewhere are seemingly contradicted. When the Apostle calls anger a passion, how then can the prophets say that God is angry? The apparent disymmetry comes from attempting to treat the scriptures like a book, external and separate from the thinking community that wrote them – external to its liturgy, it’s understanding. And even now, as people convert to Orthodoxy, from other religions or from the culture at large, they bring with them this disymmetry and find it difficult to learn to understand the holy scriptures in an Orthodox manner. As Christ said, “let him who has ears to hear, let him hear”. It is difficult to hear when listening with ears that are alien to the faith of the first man, the faith of our fathers, the faith of all ages. But the Orthodox mind does not attribute anger to God as some higher form of the passion experienced by man, any more than we can think that God forgets or that God grows weary. Genuine Christianity is all of one piece, not a jumble of statements in a book that you can toss onto your kindle and get your head around on a plane. In fact, the more people attempt that, the less they really understand, because they acquire the delusion that they have understood. The books are liturgical, and cannot be understood externally to the liturgy. That’s just the facts.

I believe anger is so often the result of pain. I know from experience that mine is. The Haiti thing tho is the latest example. I think it’s one thing to listen to ongoing interviews on the ground, listen to people pulled from the wreckage, listen to the husbands burying their wives, listen to the overwhelmed doctors and the people trying to find others in the rubble, and the people learning that their loved ones have died. When you listen to that, if you’re human, if you haven’t converted your humanity into ideology, which is genocide on all human beings everywhere for all time – Christ included, you feel… solidarity, symmetry with the suffering, pain. Not pain like theirs, not suffering like theirs. After all, you have a radio, you are driving a car, you are on the way to buy food or to earn money. You take a drink of water or coffee and you have everything they do not have. You cannot feel what they feel. But you don’t feel nothing, either, unless you’ve killed your human soul. You feel pain.

It’s another thing entirely to listen to 40-second clips on TV news punctuating 3-hour rants by a Rush Limbaugh figure on how it’s being politicized, ironically politicizing it just by making that statement. Over and over, building it into an ideological agenda. No pain, no humanity, just ideology. An intellectual meat grinder for quasi-intellectual, half-intelligent armchair philosophers. The Sadducees of our time. The cultural gnostics. There is no Christianity in that. To borrow from Lewis Black, right wing, conservative cultural religion is to Christianity what KFC is to chicken. And it distorts, warps, and finally deprives one of humanity. It eradicates the human soul, substituting for it a set of platitudes, much like Protestantism and gnosticism from which, unrealized perhaps by the listener, it originates. It is the translation of those premises into popular culture.

And it doesn’t let you feel pain, it causes pain. It doesn’t lessen the suffering of the world, it adds to it. And when you feel the pain in your soul that is the shared life with other human beings, and someone comes along and turns on a loudspeaker of droning, caustic, antagonistic vitriol against and pollution of the fundamental connection we share with all of creation, and foremost with all human beings, not only are they attacking the gospel, by which God became a human being, the very meaning of salvation – the Incarnation, they are trying to crumble the underpinnings of your human soul – creating their own earthquake, their own disturbance, to bring down the part of you that makes you a man. And the pain felt by sharing, by connection, by what we Christians can only reach for and describe as love, is drowned out by the pain of blunt trauma to all connections, all sharing, all solidarity, in fact to the very nature and essence of man, which is one thing, summed up in Christ, expressed in the diversity of all. And that pain fills me with outrage. It makes me angry. And I try to overcome the passion. And fathers help me, saints save me, but I don’t know whether what’s left is my sin or something else. St. John Cassian, I completely submit to thy teaching that there is no righteous anger. And I have no recourse but to do as the fathers tell me – namely, when in doubt, attribute sin to myself, and so escape the wrath of God, which is not like my illicit wrath, not a more nobler version, but is justice in the very uncreate energies of an all-consuming God. Consume me so I am not destroyed. Consume me, so that my life is preserved.

We say, among the faithful, that God does not absorb us. But union with God, theosis, to be consumed, is the very preservation of our unique persons, the very protection of diversity, while the God who became man, wedding but not confusing the two natures, joined in on person, joins us to himself. It is not a thing for the armchair theologian. It is a thing to understand by becoming a real part of the community of people whose liturgy expresses through the year the mystery of this union, enacted through the days of the calendar and the fasts and the feasts, and in the life inside the timeless temple that is one with the temple in Heaven, all us with the angels in the one liturgy, with all the Saints, everywhere unceasingly, mystically representing the Cherubim, finding thereby the union with “all mortal flesh”.

That talk radio garbage is an outrage against God and an enmity with all men. But I don’t wish to fight on God’s behalf. I am not a nice man. I am “meaner” than that. The worst thing one can do to one’s enemies is to refuse to strike them, consigning them instead to the judgment of God. Christ withheld his hand, though he could have turned the world inside out and swallowed them in flame bathed in blood. But he went like a lamb. “I am not here to judge. There is one who judges.” How foolish to think this means he was not hear to point out wrong and elevate good. He did precisely that, all the time. No, but real judgment is when God decides what to do with each of us. And that is a “terrifying thing”, is it not? I am angry, but I am trying not to strike, because God will do what is right, and know what is right, and the passions will not be his guide. He is ever free from Death, and has liberated us likewise to his freedom. I wish to go into it. Lord have mercy.

The Historicity of the Scriptures

I got a note yesterday from someone who is leaving religion, because they don’t any long believe in the “historicity” of the scriptures.

: Image via Wikipedia

I don’t know why people feel compelled to announce this sort of thing. I mean what, are we supposed to keep an empty chair down at the “club”? I don’t even know this person, not really. Maybe it’s to make a clean break. Maybe it’s because we’re all supposed to rush out with “don’t go”. It’s sort of like standing on a ledge, maybe. But invariably these sort of notes are arrogant. This one worried about wounding any “weaker brothers”. It made me sort of chuckle but also wince, like when a TV anchor says something stupid and doesn’t realize it.

The other thing about these sort of notes is that they might as well be multiple choice. They usually contain one of a handful of reasons that we’re all familiar with. I’d really rather get a form letter, like when someone unsubscribes from one of my mailing lists. “We’re sorry to see you go (or uninstall). Is it a) you’re planning to reinstall, b) service didn’t meet your needs, or c) you found one you like better.” Actually, I shouldn’t joke, there are mega-“churches” who actually do that sort of thing. And you know, if you don’t take them seriously, they send their parking lot security goons out to your house to let the air out of your tires.

This one was “I just can’t believe anymore in the historicity of the scriptures.” Yep, that’s one of the usual five. It’s a real yawner though because, only an idiot casts a blanket aspersion against the historicity of the scriptures. What, you don’t believe there were Hittites? Heck, a lot of people didn’t, until we dug them up. I mean, which part? I had a friend who once said he wasn’t sure there ever was a person called Jesus. I pointed out that there’s better support for the existence of Jesus than for Homer. I mean the documentary evidence kept by his enemies is pretty darned good. No serious scholars say there wasn’t a Jesus. They doubt that he is God, but not that he exists in history. There are nut jobs like Madeleine Murry O’Hare, of course, but come on. She’s like the Shirley McClain of atheism. Not to offer an ad hominem, but she’s not exactly basing her thinking on science. It’s like taking financial advice from Joel Osteen. My friend relented, of course, and then we could have a more honest discussion. You can’t even be honest about what’s bothering you unless you’re willing to stipulate to the obvious facts. After all, it’s hard to claim religious people live in a fantasy world when they’ve got logic, science, and archeology and you’ve got blithering belief in the absence of something.

So anyway, no great refutation here. I just don’t care. You want to go, “I’ll hold the trap door to hell open for you”, as a Protestant comedian once said. Why be impolite? Blunt, perhaps, but courteous is my approach. We all know someone who doesn’t believe in something, and goes off to grow their beard (all we Orthodox men should have beards if they grow on us), or live on granola, or tour Buddhist shrines, or whatever. Send me a postcard. But it’s not something that needs a lot of drama. “I mean it, I’m going…” Did you ever run away from home, when you were a kid? “Dinner is a 6:30.”

Look, you want to claim that there was no King David, even though there’s better evidence for that than for who built the pyramids, you go ahead. People “believe” or “don’t believe” all sorts of things. If we were Protestants, we might get all bent out of shape and have a prayer circle around you. But if you’ve been involved with genuine Orthodoxy, we’re not really built on a foundation of beliefs anyway. When people ask, “What do you believe,” the best response is that that’s a Protestant question, and we should really refuse to commoditize (commodify?) our Faith in that manner. Protestantism is the religion of mental beliefs, which is one reason everyone goes out and starts their own ‘talk show’, so to speak. You get gazillions of groups in storefronts, precisely because belief is central, belief is everything, belief is the basis for it all.

Orthodoxy is based on history, not belief. We’re not a knowledge-based religion, like Gnosticism and its modern equivalents in Protestantism – we’re historical. For us, the “I’m leaving” spammer got one thing right, it really is important that there was a David. Not that you believe there’s a David – that’s different. Only a neurotic confuses his own belief with whether something is actually there or not. It matters not whether you believe, or even whether you exist (I push you off a building, and your belief ceases to matter much – you’re gone, the world goes on). It matters whether something is real. And since we live in time, live in history, all real things are historical. That’s why we don’t share a theology with the Protestants or Roman Catholics. Time is a creature. Reality is a creature. They’re created. In that sense, we don’t say that God is “real”. We don’t believe in God’s “existence”. You can’t think like that and really be Orthodox.

In fact, Orthodoxy is the religion of unbelievers. Our Faith is really historical. But our doctrine is really antithetical – to everything else. Our theology is negative theology – the via negativa – we deny things – we disbelieve things. If you look at how our doctrinal statements have been formulated and why, they’re mostly statements that we, like the “I’m leaving” spammer, “don’t believe” – a whole host of things – or that we are “not persuaded” and so don’t intend to convert to something else. It is because I am an unbeliever that I am Orthodox in a sea of neurotic religious speculation. Our councils came about, because it was necessary to rise up and deny things – namely things that religious people had come up with by doing “positive theology” – cooking their own meth, so to speak. All our various statements, which we don’t like making for their own sakes (“Hi, welcome to our church. Here’s our doctrinal statement. We have a great youth program!”), are statements of disbelief or of opposition to belief foisted upon us by others – they’re refutations of the insanity and nuttyness of religion. To quote Vladimir Lossky’s “Mystical Theology” (emphasis is mine):

Unlike gnosticism, in which knowledge for its own sake constitutes the aim of the gnostic, Christian theology is always in the last resort a means: a unity of knowledge subserving an end which transcends all knowledge. This ultimate end is union with God or deification, the theosis of the Greek Fathers… All the development of the dogmatic battles which the Church has waged down the centuries appears to us, if we regard it from the purely spiritual standpoint, as dominated by the constant preoccupation which the Church has had to safeguard, at each moment of her history, for all Christians, the possibility of attaining to the fullness of the mystical union. So the Church struggled against the gnostics in defence of this same idea of deification as the universal end: ‘God became man that men might become gods’. She affirmed, against the Arians, the dogma of the consubstantial Trinity; for it is the Word, the Logos, who opens to us the way to union with the Godhead; and if the incarnate Word has not the same substance with the Father, if He be not truly God, our deification is impossible. The Church condemned the Nestorians that she might overthrow the middle wall of partition, whereby, in the person of the Christ himself, they would have separated God from man. She rose up against the Apollinarians and Monophysites to show that, since the fullness of true human nature has been assumed by the Word, it is our whole humanity that must enter into union with God. She warred with the Monothelites because, apart from the union of the two wills, divine and human, there could be no attaining to deification—’God created man by his will alone, but He cannot save him without the co-operation of the human will.’ The Church emerged triumphant from the iconoclastic controversy, affirming the possibility of the expression through a material medium of the divine realities—symbol and pledge of our sanctification. The main preoccupation, the issue at stake, in the questions which successively arise respecting the Holy Spirit, grace and the Church herself this last the dogmatic question of our own time—is always the possibility the manner or the means of our union with God. All the history of Christian dogma unfolds itself about this mystical centre, guarded by different weapons against its many and diverse assailants in the course of successive ages.

In short, we are an army of unbelievers who wish to be united to God, and defend ourselves against the seduction by which religion would deprive us of it. We are very practical about it. Try to force your religion on us, and separate us from God by means of it, and we declare an anathema against you, and all our people cross their arms, turn their backs, and leave your “belief system” to die in the ashheap of history. We are the people of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, David, Daniel, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and of the seed of David, Jesus Christ. So yeah, if you become ahistorical like the Protestants and create a religion based on a belief system, or you become anti-historical like the “I’m leaving” spammer, and start denying the holocaust or the existence of Assyria (same thing, in principle), or whatever, then you’re right, you’re leaving. You’ve left. Good luck. But let’s not be confused about it – it really doesn’t matter what you “believe” or “don’t believe” in and of itself. What matters is what happened. History doesn’t need our belief to make it so. Once you accept that, you might as well believe you’re Elvis, because the distinction between belief and tangible, historical, scientific reality – the rock under our feet – well, that’s just gone off into lulu land.

Anyway, I still like the form letter idea. Maybe one of the atheist groups should create an online form, and you can fill in (by blind copy) the e-mail addresses of your religious group, and check off the appropriate boxes, before hitting send. I’ve got a belief system or two in my past I wouldn’t mind sending a test form to. 🙂 But come on, because of history? Next you’ll be denying Masada, and that’s just wrong!

Review of Avatar

It’s the connections of things. That’s what it is about Avatar, the James Cameron film. And I don’t mean in a Gaia, goddess, neo-gnostic, pagan kind of way. But it’s something else. The way they interacted with animals – the metaphor of actually plugging in – and what it suggests about how animals are. The way they plugged into the earth and with each other to the trees, not because they’re trees, but because it’s creation – it’s the same as with the animals. It situated them in creation. I really don’t respond other than with delight to the trees being connected as a network. All creation derives its meaning through man. But the fact that they were connected to the network too, that’s the story. The real story of us. That we are situated in creation by the economy of Christ – by God becoming a man, flesh of the womb of the Virgin, Adam’s flesh and Eve’s. Avatar gets it – the network is a network of trees sharing human memories – human souls, as well as their own. It isn’t connectedness that matters, but interconnectedness, of all things.

: Image by marcotruiz via Flickr

This has always been huge for me, but because it’s huge for mankind. When I wrote my first critique of environmentalism, this is what I was aiming at. When I write about the Economy of Christ and a lot of people don’t understand me outside our Faith, and some within don’t, this is what I mean too. The economy is all that is not God – all that is created – there’s nothing that is not God that is not created, including time – including history. And all that is created – all things that are not God – are created with one purpose, the salvation of man. The deification of man. The entire creation is God’s salvific act. The Economy is God’s action toward creation, and is the creation itself. And it culminates in God becoming part of creation, entering creation, entering time and history, taking flesh of our flesh – “plugging in” – but much more than that, by becoming us – the only act that would save. And by becoming us, he took in his body all minerals, plants, all elements, all history, all categories in which all creation participates. By becoming one of us, he summed up all creation, and brought it all together in one. His salvation is salvation of the animals, and of the plants, and of rock and stone, and of all things. Nothing is abandoned, nothing lost, nothing without participation in the glory. All things will be deified. All that is created or ever has been will become God. And by participation in him, by our own deification, we participate in that recapitulation of his.

People often don’t realize what this means. Simply saying that death will end, so we will not eat animals in the kingdom, is greeted with surprise. But saying that all things are being deified – everything – anything conceivable – anything that ever was or will be – that can shock and scare people. But it is our Faith. It is the meaning of existence, the very definition of creation. Creation *is* the Economy of Christ. Creator becoming creation *is* the gospel. And of course, if you ask the priests or the scholars, the decent ones who are not arrogant asses pursuing their own exaltation by trying to pick apart the holiness of this, they will all agree, of course. They will tell the people who don’t know, yes that’s right, of course, didn’t you know that is our faith?

But then to point out that this means that when we look at animals, we see, not in the same depth as we see in man, but still see Christ. We see them being deified. We see that they are not fodder, not machines. And then again, when we look at other living things, all living things, plants, trees, algae, we see deification, we see that which will become God. And then even, finally, in perhaps a wider radius, that which is inanimate matter, though we don’t really know as much about that as our scientific dogma pretends when it talks to us – I prefer to listen to the high level scientists talking to each other – they’re less dogmatic and arrogant about “the facts” that always turn out to be just the bare intelligence of public school science dogmatics and popularizers of Darwinism.

That which is rock and stone and mountain is not, as we may think, “dead” if by “dead” we mean it will be lost, has no value, or can be disregarded as profane or not sacred. All the earth, and all that is beyond it is sacred. The skies, the sun and moon, the mountain, the trees, the earth, and all that lives on it, and we – we are connected to it through Christ our saviour, the saviour of all creation, the deliverer of animals and trees from death, the redeemer of mountains and stars and stones and algae and insects and all that is, not merely all that lives. That, this kind of talk, at least in US circles, scares people of presumably “christian” faith. But theirs is not a “christian” faith, if they deny this.

To deny it is to deny that God became man. It is to say “not really”, “not in fulness”, “not entirely”. It is to deny as surely as the heretics and gnostics of old that Christ is one person with two natures. It is to “protect” Christ by insulating him from creation, and so severing our line to creation too, our ability to plug in, it is to separate and alienate us from creation so that we abuse it and do not consider it in our salvation, it is to set us against it and embrace death, not salvation from death, as the natural norm. It is to make distinction the basis of opposition. It is the heresy of all heresies. It is the language of hell. Francis Schaeffer’s book Pollution and the Death of Man is fantastic on this.

That’s why I put together my earlier essay on the topic – the pagan environmentalists are simply trying to defend the sanctity of creation by suggesting that “god” made it “out of” himself (or herself) – that it is deified in that way. But that’s not the only avenue to take. It’s damned close. We insist that God’s creation is through his energies (energia), which are uncreate, and are God. Not God’s essence but, still God. In that sense, yeah, God could be said to have created the cosmos out of himself, if you can also allow that he created it out of nothing, meaning that there was no pre-existing material that co-existed alongside God – because then, he’s not God at all, which is why the gnostics have to cook up a creative “demiurge” alongside him – where did the demiurge come from? What the pagans are not prepared to accept, partly from the influence of Darwinism corrupting their paganism, and making it pseudo-paganism, is Death, and how it came upon the world. They consider Death *part* of the natural order, not an alien infection upon it. And that’s their undoing. But the sanctity of creation *is* protected in the deification of all creation, as we insist. Paganism is a left turn into theoretical invention to accomplish something, unsuccessfully, which is already accomplished from the outset by the Creator. It’s just that a lot of people passing themselves off as “christian” and representing “christianity” aren’t really offering a Christian understanding of the Economy at all. What the pagans are really running up against is gnostics in “christian” media.

All of creation is sacred. We are saved through water, and through wine, and through bread, and through oil, through fishes and loaves, and through all things that participate in Christ. All things around us, everything that is, is a vehicle of our salvation and co-participant, and to be one with us, and one with God, so that all are one. This is the only Christian faith. Anything that detracts from it is a different “christ” – one who is either not God or not man, not creator or not creation, and then we are all lost, and all is hopeless and despair. It is Christ who joined creation and Creator, deifying the one by the other, in his one person by the two natures. To be of Christ at all is to participate in this joining – this interconnectedness.

Or else they make him creation but not God, and so then we are just men among men trying to be wise, and nothing has the power to connect us to all things or connect us and all things to God. And then creation is futile, because that which was created is not to be redeemed, and creation and redemption are irrevocably torn apart, and the Enemy is right that death is all that will be forever. And no faith is then true. All is nonsense, even disbelief becomes madness, and we are lost to chaos with no ground for our minds, and no ground for our bodies, and no ground for anything.

When I watch the blue movie, as I call it, I see it showing me how we are connected, but not insisting that I fall down and worship a god who did not become man, which cannot make all things one, or worship a god who is just a man, and can therefore give nothing meaning. True, it’s full of religious references, but not offensively. They’ve asked more than preached. And for this, I can live in the film.

And do you know what it means to someone who is alien even from aliens to be connected to all things? “No longer strangers. No longer aliens. Now, we are citizens with the Saints in the Kingdom of God.” For someone who has searched for meaning, for meaning all over, to find in Christ’s Incarnation that all things have been joined, united, put together? And for someone who suffers at the suffering of the world, the cosmos, the “groaning and travail” that is the slaughter, disease, warfare? It is a profound deliverance. Not that Avatar has given me that meaning – this is our Faith and always has been – but that I feel an immense and abiding joy when it is articulated visually.

Anyway, if you’ve seen it, see it again. And again. There’s so much detail, if you look. And do see it on the big screen. You have to be immersed in it, not spectating from outside when, at the end, they are all plugged in to the earth, to the roots of trees, and are seeking a transformation.

Oh, and yeah, if you were expecting the standard review with commentary on special effects, you can get that anywhere, so no.

9th Ode of the 2nd Canon of Christ's Nativity

Magnify, O my soul, her who is more honorable and more exalted in glory than the heavenly hosts.
I behold a strange and wonderful mystery: the cave a heaven, the Virgin a cherubic throne, and the manger a noble place in which hath lain Christ the uncontained God. Let us, therefore, praise and magnify Him.

: Image via Wikipedia

Magnify, O my soul, the God born in flesh from the Virgin.
When the Magi saw a new and strange star appearing suddenly, moving in a wonderful way, and transcending the stars of heaven in brightness, they were guided by it to Christ, the King born on earth in Bethlehem, for our salvation.

Magnify, O my soul, the King born in a cave.
The Magi said, Where is the Child King, the newborn, Whose star hath appeared? For we have verily come to worship Him. And Herod, the contender against God, trembled, and began to roar in folly to kill Christ.

Magnify, O my soul, the God worshipped by the Magi.
Herod ascertained from the Magi about the time of the star by whose guidance they were led to Bethlehem to worship with presents Christ Who guided them, and so they returned to their country, disregarding Herod, the evil murderer of babes, mocking him.

Today the Virgin giveth birth to the Lord inside the cave.
Verily it is easier for us to endure silence since there is no dread danger therefrom for us. But because of our strong desire, O Virgin, and Mother of sameness, to indite well-balanced songs of praise, this becometh indeed onerous to us. Wherefore, grant us power to equal our natural inclination.

Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit: Magnify, O my soul, the might of the indivisible and three-personed Godhead.
O pure one, Mother of the Word that appeareth newly from thee, O closed door, verily, as we behold the dark shadowy symbols pass away, we glorify the light of the truth and bless thy womb as is meet.

Both now and ever and unto ages of ages. Amen. Glorify, O my soul, her who hath delivered us from the curse.
The Christ-pleasing people, O Virgin, having deserved to be granted its desire by the coming of God, doth seek now with tears thy help to worship the glory of His enlivening appearance wherein is the renewal of birth; for it is thou who dost distribute grace, O pure one.

The Gospel Summarized in the Anaphora

With these blessed powers, O Master and Lover of Mankind, we sinners also cry out and say: “Holy are You, truly all-holy!” There is no limit to the majesty of your holiness. You are revered in all your works, for in righteousness and true judgment You have ordered all things for us. When You created man and had fashioned him from the dust of the earth and had honored him as your own image, O God, You set him in the midst of a bountiful paradise, promising him life eternal and the enjoyment of everlasting good things by keeping your commandments.

: Image by shioshvili via Flickr

But when he disobeyed You, the true God Who had created him, and was led astray by the deceit of the serpent, he was made subject to death through his own transgressions. In your righteous judgment, O God, You exiled him from paradise into this world and returned him to the earth from which he had been taken. But You provided for him the salvation of rebirth which is in your Christ Himself.

For You did not turn Yourself away forever from your creation whom You had made, O Good One, nor did You forget the work of your hands, but You visited him in different ways. Through the tender compassion of your mercy, You sent forth prophets. You performed great works by the Saints who in every generation were well-pleasing to You. You spoke to us through the mouths of your servants the Prophets who foretold to us the salvation which was to come. You gave us the Law to aid us. You appointed angels to guard us. And when the fullness of time had come, You spoke to us through your Son Himself, through whom You had created time.

Being the Brightness of your Glory and the Stamp of your Person, and upholding all things by the power of his Word, your Son did not think of equality with You, Who alone are God and Father, as something to be grasped. And so, although He was God before time began, He appeared on earth and dwelt among us. He was incarnate of a holy virgin and emptied Himself, taking on the form of a servant and being conformed to the body of our lowliness so that He might conform us to the image of his glory. Since sin entered the world through a man and death through sin, so your Only-begotten Son, Who is in your bosom, our God and Father, was well- pleased to be born of a woman, the holy Birth-giver of God and ever- virgin Mary. He was born under the Law, so that He might condemn sin in his own flesh, so that those who died in Adam might be made alive in Him, your Christ.

He lived in this world and gave us commandments for salvation. He released us from the delusions of idolatry and brought us to the knowledge of You, true God and Father. He procured us for Himself as a chosen people, a royal priesthood and a holy nation. Having purified us with water, He sanctified us with the Holy Spirit. He gave Himself as a ransom to death by which we were held captive, having been sold into slavery by sin. He descended into the realm of death through the Cross, that He might fill all things with Himself. He loosed the sorrow of death and rose again from the dead on the third day, for it was not possible that the Author of Life should be conquered by corruption. In this way He made a way to the resurrection of the dead for all flesh. Thus, He became the first-fruits of those who have fallen asleep, the first-born of the dead, that He might be first in all ways among all things. Ascending into heaven, He sat at the right hand of your Majesty on High, and He shall come again to reward each person according to his deeds.

— Liturgy of St. Basil, the anaphora

The World and Death

Sometimes the world seems to leave you no option but to ‘spill everyone’s blood’, so to speak, no room for peace at all, because it will keep coming until you respond and leave you no response but to defeat it.

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I think this is one of the great traps of the world. I don’t think the world always wants to win. I think the world sometimes wants you to do what it takes to defeat it, because doing that will be gruesome and require you to become something you don’t want to be – it pulls you into the battle, so you have to destroy your enemies in order to defend your loved ones.

This is how the world defeats strong men. The world wins by making itself vulnerable to defeat, but only by a bare margin that requires maximum suffering to accomplish, and then it attacks your loved ones until it leaves you no choice. This is, in fact, the theory of war currently at work in the world. I don’t mean that I sympathize with the Cheneys and Rumsfelds and the men behind the scenes (e.g. in The Family). I mean that even the innocent are pulled into the kinds of fights the Cheneys and the Rumsfelds wage, precisely so that we can cease to be innocent. It seems to be the goal to corrupt us all. If someone beats down your family member and makes it to where you have to become a beater to protect him/her, then it corrupts you quite successfully. Happy are the martyrs more than the fighters.

This is my Faith, that one definition of Death is that there is not always a just, good, or right decision. But that sometimes all decisions sully us, because what is broken, in Death, is not just our moral capacity, but the world itself, and all things related to our existence. Death is the great problem, not sin. Death causes sin, even unavoidable sin, because it has broken everything. This is why we pray “my sins voluntary and involuntary, in knowledge and in ignorance” – because even though Death breaks our will, it goes further to break the very possibility of a right choice – it leaves only ones, at times, that are all wrong. Likewise, Death doesn’t just break our knowledge of good and evil, but it goes farther to break the possibility of knowledge of what is good or evil in many cases. So we pray “voluntary and involuntary, in knowledge and in ignorance”, because Death didn’t/doesn’t just break us, it broke/breaks all our works, all we have made, all the processes involved in working and making, and it broke/keeps breaking the entire cosmos, and every principle of the cosmos, so that it turns in on itself, with decaying, entropy, dying, corruption, conflict, fragmentation, and dissolution. The volcanos rage and the hurricanes destroy and the species wipe each other out and we club each other and put each other in chains and make tools out of one another, defacing and depersonalizing ourselves and others, because of Death at work still unraveling it all – defacing and depersonalizing it all.

And when it’s all done, all that will be left of all that is in Death’s power is a void, and not even the void, because that at least is a concept of something. Death itself will remain, unable to find or consume anything left that is not Death, and endlessly consuming itself.

Death is therefore the one thing against which Christ set himself, the hero, to destroy – the Destroyer. Not the “world, the flesh, and the devil”, as the Protestants like to say, but Death. He both overcame the world and trampled the Evil One, by overcoming Death, which is why the enemy didn’t see it coming. Crushing one enemy and leaving another? No, Death is the cause of all our passions, and our complicity with the world and bondage to the enemy. The curse was not “you will be cast from Eden into the world” – that came after. The curse was not “the serpent will bite your heel” – that came after. The curse, as it’s often called, is Death – the meaning of all curses. The only possible curse. The definition of “curse”. But because of my sins and mercy, and as a mercy for space to repent, I live in Death, granted life in the world and a life of animosity with the Evil One, because any living at all is a mercy, because it is living in and through the energies of God. But I experience Death, in my sins – experience the brokenness, and so again… for what I have done, for what I do, for what I will do… with knowledge and without it, in my will and against it… mercy. Mercy.

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Addendum: I recently became able to choose whether to be depressed. It’s hard to explain to people who are physiologically standard – I won’t say “normal” – none of us is normal – Death just wreaks upon us unique ‘kindnesses’ based on our unique personalities – hard to explain what it’s like not to have had a choice all one’s life – not to have the physiological conditions necessary to make a choice – so that Death gets in behind your will and owns you from there, like its puppet. You either know, or you can’t imagine. It’s not without the help of some pretty helpful supplements that this has been overcome – and no, I won’t write about them – I don’t make prescriptions – we are not generic, you and I, even if some people have standard equipment. But with this help, I have a choice now. It’s like being blind all one’s life and then discovering you were made for seeing, because there’s healing mud in your eyes. But seeing doesn’t take away what you saw with blind eyes – it enhances your vision, in fact. You see more horror, too, with open eyes than blind ones.

But while I have a choice, I have decided not to let Death have despair out of me, too. It is one thing to constantly get cut to one’s knees, and sometimes for some people all responses to it are equally devastating choices – depression, destruction, whatever. You can’t judge them – you would be foolish to do so. I have been foolish, in my life – I know. It is another thing entirely to surrender what you have a choice about surrendering, out of despair. Despair is not the same thing as what people call “clinical depression”. Both are results of Death, but they’re not entirely the same. The depressed person, physiologically so, has no choice about despair. His will is ravaged by Death. If you are granted life with a way to fight depression, you may begin to recover that choice – that ability to choose not to despair. And that’s what I’ve been given and what I’m not giving back. What is needed is acknowledgment of the gruesome truth of Death at work in the world, not pansy-ass prettying up the situation – not the “just think positive thoughts and Death will have no power…” Gee, Christ really blew it then, didn’t He? He didn’t have to die for all of us to conquer Death – he could have just thought some positive thoughts for all of us! What is needed is acknowledgment, but with defiance. Acknowledgment without willing surrender, where you can find your will. You set your will to fight whether you’ll win or not. Do you have the courage for that? Or do you have to win to have ‘courage’? That’s the question I put to myself when even the barest temptation to depression comes now. I find myself faced with untenable choices on all sides, but I have at last this choice. To make the untenable choice, to sin perhaps, but without despair. With sadness, with remorse, and to confess and to repent, but without despair. Glory be to God.

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Addendum Too: By the way, someone once demanded an answer to this question: “If Christ has destroyed Death, defeated the Evil One, and overcome the World, in fact has redeemed the World, isn’t the World redeemed, and therefore shouldn’t we immerse ourselves in it? And why then do we still see Death? So either Christ didn’t do these things, or he did – either one leaves you saying things that make no sense.” Superficially, this is an intelligent question. But it contains some flawed assumptions, much like Origen’s problematic. He was proud of his question, but it was a false one. Protestants will tell you that you have to “accept” these things for them to be true for you – an ultimately subjectivist rendering which, if you’re paying attention to anything, can’t make any sense. So let’s just get it out of the way, I’m not going to say something like that. I can give a discourse on synergy, on free will, on theosis, and perhaps say some true things in response, but the asker of the above question won’t hear them, because the question itself is being asked from Death. Death is the condition out of which it comes, and into which all answers to it will be rendered. Sometimes answering a person is not as useful as responding. I will respond, tho frankly I don’t do it often, and probably won’t be doing it again soon. And I won’t use illustrations like tearing down a jail and the prisoners being unwilling to leave, or proving a concept untrue only to find that the other person wishes to keep believing it, or exposing a huxter only to have people still following him – even claiming they’re still hearing from him and his flying saucer after he died of some disease he wasn’t supposed to be able to get. We’ve all experienced those things or know people who have or know people who know people. What good will more illustrations do? If you can’t look around you for references, my description won’t help. I have given answers of all kinds in the past, and there are many, and many are true, but that doesn’t mean they’re doing the other person any good.

The question is based on a theoretical – if/then. I will simply respond that I don’t have to answer an if /then because I am not referring to merely theoretical events – rather, you have to answer a did / did not. If you determine, really, if the events I refer to happened, your question will change. The same if you determine they didn’t. But I do not agree to what your question is really asking me to do – that is to stake historical events on a theoretical condition. In other words, I don’t have to satisfy your understanding of theoretical matters in order for historical events to be truthful or not – the order of priority in a sane epistemology is that what is governs and supersedes what I think – if it’s the other way around – if a did/did not actually depends upon a what if or an if/then as a rule – then we all become neurotic solipsists living in worlds we dream up in our heads. A thing is so or not so (did/did not) regardless of whether your understanding of it is satisfied. Get the so or not so first, then you get more understanding (or less, if you got it wrong).

So that’s it. Your question offers a false means of analysis – a false epistemology and, frankly, an ultimately subjective one. You would be more at home asking it to the Protestants who will likely give you exactly the kind of answer you are hoping for, one way or another. I will not pretend it’s a legitimate question. Again: you first answer the did / did not (Did Christ destroy Death? Did Christ defeat the Enemy. Did Christ overcome the world and redeem it?), and then ask questions appropriate to what is or is not. A question staked on a theoretical doesn’t yield understanding – it just yields another theoretical, and I’m not in that business. Once more, because some infernal wretch will insist I repeat it in different words, if I don’t do so from the outset, you do not, logically get an is from an if. How you answer the historical questions will determine not only your next question but its context – whether it is asked out of Death or something else. And then again, if the order of your analysis is incorrect, I or hopefully someone else, since I was unlikely to do it even this time let alone later, will show you again where you have gotten the order wrong.

If you were looking for a profound answer, rather than a response, that presumes your question is meritorious – but it isn’t – it’s fallacious and cannot be met but with an answer that not only slanders our Faith, but also leads you astray in your own mind, thinking you know how to think. Your epistemology is just as affected by Death as everything else is, in other words. And I can’t help you with that. I can barely help myself. So if I seem a bit negative, it’s because I’m telling you I’m no guru and not going to have wisdom that I’d dare to share with you, lest it run out of my fingers, coil up and become a serpent, and strike us both dead. I have responded, which is what we do when to answer a question would be to falsely accept as real the ground presumed by the questioner, thereby fooling both of us, me into thinking I’m wise, and you into thinking you have figured out something real. Better we don’t understand one another at all, than that. Good luck, by which I mean without presumption, “God have mercy on us both, and by your prayers save me, the sinner.”

Christ and the Feeding Tube

My wife and I have an understanding. Resuscitate, revive, and sustain life as often and as much as possible. Neither of us will accept any prodding to pull the plug, sign DNR orders, or any such thing.

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We do this, not only because we love one another, and want to live together forever, as we shall in paradise, but also for religious reasons. And we know full well there are those who claim it is Orthodox thinking to “let people go”, to refuse to use “artificial” machines and techniques to save or sustain life. And we think many of these people have imbibed deeply of the spirit of the world, and are not espousing Orthodox thought at all. Some, we allow, have simply misunderstood technology and medicine, or have not thought it through. The prevalence of thinking doesn’t indicate good thinking.

Now to sustaining life: What we’re talking about, quite often, in real terms, is food, water, oxygen, etc. So much of removing “life support” is quite literally what it sounds like – it is removing the things needed to support life. In fact, the most common causes of death in this way, are starvation, thirst, and suffocation. Not only are they painful forms of death, but grotesque and violent, however ironically the very technologies being removed are replaced with technologies to make these less painful or less grotesque – more presentable.

But these are the very things that we are bound by Christ to provide for our families, our brethren, indeed those who have need of them. Feed them. Give them Drink. Etc. “If anyone doesn’t provide for his own, he is worse than an infidel.” and “If one has the world’s goods, and seeing his brother in need shuts his heart against him, how does the love of God abide in him?” “If anyone’s son asks for bread, does he give him a stone?” “I was hungry, and you fed me. I did thirst, and you gave me drink. Therefore…”

You will hear the religious pundits and armchair religious philosophers tell you that technology has extended life beyond what God intended (as though they know what God intended), and that therefore we have to ask “new questions” about when to stop sustaining life. This is gnostic thinking. I won’t expand on that here, but it is, and this is our response:

The questions aren’t new. The ancients dealt with very real issues of the responsibility to sustain life, or to let it expire. Indeed, the early Orthodox established the first convalescent homes for the elderly, not to mention all of their hospices for the homeless, abandoned, and those dying of leprosy and disease. And they fed them, clothed them, and cared for them with whatever means they had. Once you say that we will give this much care, and no more – this much we will sustain your life, but no longer – under these conditions, but not those, you are engaged in a kind of philosophical relativism that has nothing to do with the love demonstrated by the Church. The testimony of the lives of the Saints stands in stark contrast to and repudiation of the decadent, murderous lives of these contemporary religionists. Denying the Saints, they are neither Catholic nor Christian, nor Orthodox and partakers of our holy tradition.

Raising the dead and healing the sick, those who were not of the Faith prompted the apostles to protest to Christ, and Christ told the apostles to let them be – these were doing their good work in Christ’s name. Even greater things would eventually be done in his name. The parable of the Good Samaritan is a similar example.

And so now to the question of saving life. Left for dead, without care, the Jew would have died, but the Samaritan, the one with love, says Christ, provided care and feeding, sustained and revived him.

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What technology has done is made it possible to do that better, for longer, perhaps more expensively and with more finesse and precision, but it hasn’t changed the questions. Who dares say that Christ needs to come and preach a new gospel, and address the questions that he forgot or couldn’t forsee. Who dares to say they will do this for Christ, with their religious philosophy? Gnostics. Gnostics every one. Denyers of the gospel. Repudiaters of the Incarnation. Blasphemers of the Holy Spirit.

What is “artificial” is their philosophies, their contrived gospels. Medicine, using the tools and techniques at hand, has been around forever. And Christ himself, sanctified the concept of medicine, by himself accepting the attribution “Great Physician.”

Honour a physician with the honour due unto him for the uses which ye may have of him: for the Lord hath created him. For of the most High cometh healing, and he shall receive honour of the king. The skill of the physician shall lift up his head: and in the sight of great men he shall be in admiration. The Lord hath created medicines out of the earth; and he that is wise will not abhor them. Was not the water made sweet with wood, that the virtue thereof might be known? And he hath given men skill, that he might be honoured in his marvellous works. With such doth he heal men, and taketh away their pains. Of such doth the apothecary make a confection; and of his works there is no end; and from him is peace over all the earth, My son, in thy sickness be not negligent: but pray unto the Lord, and he will make thee whole. Leave off from sin, and order thine hands aright, and cleanse thy heart from all wickedness. Give a sweet savour, and a memorial of fine flour; and make a fat offering, as not being. Then give place to the physician, for the Lord hath created him: let him not go from thee, for thou hast need of him. There is a time when in their hands there is good success. For they shall also pray unto the Lord, that he would prosper that, which they give for ease and remedy to prolong life. He that sinneth before his Maker, let him fall into the hand of the physician. – Sirach 38

We hear so often, “for all practical purposes they are dead.” Practical purposes? What does life have to do with practical purposes? And you rail against machines? You’ve just declared that a human life is nothing but a machine.

Did not even the Lord raise one who had died? Was already dead. Was long since dead. He raised him, “Lazarus, come forth!” Indeed, Christ raised all the dead, and when Christ died, the dead rose and walked around and were seen by those who knew them. Christ is the antithesis of these theories of life which are hostile to our history, Faith, and tradition. Christ is the one who goes far beyond the stench of the grave, descending even into Hell to retrieve those who have long since reposed.

Speak against the Lord, Gnostics, if you dare. You repudiate the very one who can save your life, now and forever. But you Orthodox, who are you to decide with the philosophies of the Protestants, the metaphysics of the heretics, who should live and who should die – who is kept alive and cared for too long, and who should be abandoned and their care removed? When you mouth their vanities, you are not my brothers, when I or my wife are sick. Don’t come near our bedside. Stay out of our hospital room. Keep the bony fingers of your heresy from our lives. You are not our brothers; the Samaritan is. Give us the Samaritan. The pagan that saves our lives is the Christian, and the Christian that says, “let them expire” is the pagan, and we will not pray with you.

I have even seen one blasphemer’s “Orthodox” web site that is offering up these “withhold treatment” orders for his congregation and others, as he preaches his vain personal philosophy as though it were the truth. Schemer. Ideologue. There’s one frock in which I cannot find life, one stole under which I cannot find shelter.

Now, I’m not interested in debating this with anyone. Above all else, I see our religion as a religion of life. Did not Christ say as much? God is God of the living. All the enemies of life can offer is religious philosophy – they have no appeal to the one that created life, not recourse to our Holy Tradition that is not polluted with the whispering of others. It is true that some holy men held varieties of opinions on varieties of things. No doubt someone can easily find such an opinion. In the end, I will forgive an opinion, as you must forgive mine.

But if you come near us with your gleaming knife of sacrifice, I will call you “pagan”, which is what you are. Keep away. May God curse the knife that is raised over our living bodies, the testament of his greatness and power. As much as you do not sustain us, you do not sustain Christ. As much as you do not save our lives, you do not save the life of Christ. As much as you withhold treatment from us, you withhold treatment from Christ. And what will the Physician say to you in the Judgment? That you were philosophically right? “Physician, heal thyself!” He has already spoken.

And may God preserve the physician that shows forth the glory of God, with machines, with mixtures, with tubes and tools, with wires and computers, with whatever means he may have. As the Samaritan gave from what means he had, so in the case of my family, give, and you will be rewarded by the Most High God who created us both, who made Heaven and Earth and put it into your hands for this purpose. You are the instrument of the Almighty. Save us, by the prayers of all the Saints.

And even if we babble insanities, “Kill me. Let me go. Starve me. Suffocate me. Abandon me. Go away. It’s my time. I want to die.” What friend hides from his own friend in time of need? What suffering person calls out, “leave me be” that you shrug and leave them be? Who are you? What kind of friends are you? What friend sees his friend on a ledge saying “I don’t want to live,” and thinks, “all right then. To each his own.” If you’re my friend, you will ignore me if I plead for death. You will give me life, because in life is the Spirit of God. Because I get old, you want to abandon me? How is my life less valuable than an infant’s? Who are you to decide which lives have more or less value? Or if I’m unconscious? Is the infant able to tell you his preference for life or death? If you are knocked out, shall I wait until you wake up to ask if you’d like treatment? Try to get around it all you want. Good people, like the Good Samaritan, care for those who are sick and dying. Bad people offer up philosophies over their sick beds.

And to hell with your religious arguments. Christ healed even on the Sabbath. Your argument is with him; you won’t find it here.

Christ the Miracle Speaker

“And it came to pass in those days, that he went out into a mountain to pray, and continued all night in prayer to God. And when it was day, he called unto him his disciples: and of them he chose twelve, whom also he named apostles; Simon, (whom he also named Peter,) and Andrew his brother, James and John, Philip and Bartholomew, Matthew and Thomas, James the son of Alphaeus, and Simon called Zelotes, And Judas the brother of James, and Judas Iscariot, which also was the traitor. And he came down with them, and stood in the plain, and the company of his disciples, and a great multitude of people out of all Judaea and Jerusalem, and from the sea coast of Tyre and Sidon, which came to hear him, and to be healed of their diseases; And they that were vexed with unclean spirits: and they were healed. And the whole multitude sought to touch him: for there went virtue out of him, and healed them all.

And he lifted up his eyes on his disciples, and said, …

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The Sermon that Recapitulates the Entire Gospel

“Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.” – Christ, The Olivet Discourse (Another Sermon on the Mount)

Comment: Who is the hungry? It is all those who want for anything, tangible or intangible. Christ is the hungry, who persevered in fasts for 40 days. Who is the thirsty? It is all those whose bodies are deprived of water, impeding their salvation, and who are deprived of the Spirit, keeping them in slavery, and who are deprived of baptism, keeping them in darkness concerning the Holy Trinity. Christ is the thirsty, who was given bitter gall. Who is the stranger? The stranger is the immigrant, the alien, the foreigner, the ethnic, the non-ethnic, the newcomer, the illegal alien, the person of another culture, even a hostile culture, the deviant, the dissident, the outsider, the antisocial, and the person whom we feel we will never understand. Enemies are strangers. These are days in which it is frequently forgotten that the stranger is Christ, who comes to us as a stranger. He comes to those who are really his own, and we do not know him, even denying him in the world when the cock crows. Who is the naked? The naked are all vulnerable people in the world, and the vulnerable among us. The naked is Christ, for whose clothes we drew lots. Who are the sick? The sick are all of us, because we are all sick with the affliction of Death, the source of all sickness. Christ became sickness for us, became sin, taking our infirmity that we might be healed. Who is the prisoner? The prisoner is the person kept in physical bondage, kidnapped, traded as a slave, captured as enemies and imprisoned for interrogation, tortured, jailed for crimes – the prisoner is the guilty as well as the innocent. The prisoner is all those kept in emotional or physical bondage by the wielders of power, control, and wealth. The prisoner is the one deprived of the means of freedom. The prisoner is the one who lifts up his eyes in Hell or Hellish existence. The prisoner is every one of us who in any way yields to the passions; we are the wrongly imprisoned, on a self-imposed sentence, and we too are in need of mercy. The prisoner is Christ, taken in chains to Golgotha, tortured, mistreated, unjustly convicted, and sentenced to death at the hands of civil and religious authorities. All these, the hungry, thirsty, stranger, naked, sick, prisoner, and us, and Christ, are “the poor”. But “blessed are the poor in spirit,” those who “consider themselves inferior to all.” As the fathers say, “there is only one sin, that of despising anyone.” or as Christ put it, “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” Christ’s sermon then shows us the Passion, and also the gifts of the Spirit, telling the whole gospel. And it is actually a full explication of the answer to that pressing question: ‘How should we then live?’ – DD

The fullness of God and Man

“We must, then, maintain that Christ has two energies in virtue of His double nature. For things that have diverse natures, have also different energies, and things that have diverse energies, have also different natures.” – St. John Damascene

Christ, fully God, fully Man

“O faithful, let us acclaim the lover of the Trinity, great Maximos who taught the God-inspired Faith, that Christ is to be glorified in two natures, wills and energies: and let us cry to him: Rejoice, O herald of the Faith.” – Kontakion to St. Maximus the Confessor