Human – orthopraxy.com

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.

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.

Notes on Pleasure

Someone yesterday was saying that Aristotle’s idea of pleasure is doing something well. I think that’s one good definition. Contemporary man treats pleasure as stimulation, but without other purpose or meaning. Constant stimulation that we get from video games, sex without love, or mindless dissipation in simulated pleasures – which might be rehashed TV or music, or reading crappy magazines.

: Image by Lorika13 via Flickr

I think pleasure is always other-related, it’s always outward, not merely auto-erotic or entirely in the self. I’m not knocking those things, but I’m saying there’s a distinction between pleasure and stimulation, and that pleasure is derived, ultimately, from meaning, like all other human qualities. I just got back from conducting a 2hr training, and then another appointment for 2hrs of consulting. I left knowing I did well, and deriving an ongoing attitude of pleasure from it. My experience suggests that Aritstotle, as we may interpret him, has this right.

But how does one evaluate doing “well”? Lots of people on American Idol think they sing well, when clearly they don’t. You’ll see someone belting it out, but it’s awful. Some will say it doesn’t matter, that it’s singing “well” if you derive pleasure from it. This is fundamentally backwards. It’s a heresy against man’s energies, against the order of creation, to say such a thing. No, it is possible to seem to derive pleasure illicitly – pleasure from acclaim, from attention, from an illusory self-image, but these aren’t actually pleasure – they’re merely the stimulation of the passions. In such a case, meaning is alien to the activity, in that meaning is an interaction with others, not merely a presentation of an image to others or the receiving of a stimulation from others. To act “well” implies an interaction with others that is more substantive than self-gratification alone. Actual pleasure is derived from doing well in the sense that meaning, external to the self, but thereby residing in the self, is the source and fruit of one’s activity.

It’s not writing a poem that only you understand. That may have “meaning” to just you, but it’s not Meaning, in a universal or cosmic sense. By definition, that which is utterly autonomous is not a source of cosmic meaning. Doing something well is doing something that benefits or enriches creation, and you as part of it. Meaning is that which is derived from acting in coordination with creation as a whole. And genuine pleasure is derived from meaningful activity.

If you cook well, it is well when it provides comfort, nourishment, and peace to yourself or to others. If you made an intricately detailed casserole and then just threw it away, that’s not cooking “well”. You can claim all you want that you showed expertise, skill, and creativity, and that may be true in the barest sense, but those things only derive their meaning by finding a place in the grand (cosmic) scheme of things – in conjunction with creation. Autonomy from meaning is the curse of pleasure. And nothing is done well that is devoid of meaning.

So, in the quest for meaning, which all people are on, whether it’s to find for the first time, to find what was lost, or to continue to find what is nearby and identified (the quest for meaning is, in this way, like the quest for food), it may be helpful to distinguish pleasure from stimulation, doing something well from doing it with mere technical skill (again a chef who makes a souffle for the garbage is not doing well in the same way as a mother who makes scrambled eggs for breakfast), and to distinguish between meaning and self-gratification (what people erroneously refer to as “meaning to me” – as though we all live in separate cosmoses and get our own cosmic meaning – meaning is meaning precisely because it can be shared in by all of creation).

It is an opinion, but taking a queue from Aristotle, I believe this is some of what our Faith would say about it. As ever, I don’t speak for the Orthodox in this, because it’s just an opinion (we would say “speculation”), and I acknowledge with the fathers that speculation is dangerous and to be avoided where possible. One reason for this journal is to remove from my mind through expression those things that, if I hold them inside it too long, can become an endless source of speculation that will surely lead me to the pit. Sometimes people will pick up something off the ground and run with it. Please keep in mind, if that’s you, especially if you are not of the Faith, the one, holy, and true Orthodox Faith, this is trash. This is not a gem. It is cast off here for a reason. It is only the byproduct, the emission of a mind that is striving to obtain union with the source of meaning, the most holy Trinity.