religious philosophy – orthopraxy.com

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.

: Image via Wikipedia

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.

: Image via Wikipedia

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.

The Rush to Qualification and the Danger of Orthodoxy

You’re coming within earshot in the middle of this conversation…

Gregory: … well, one hopes we’re actually making progress in theosis, otherwise what are we doing?

Basil: Sure, but how do you measure that? I mean it’s not like notches on your belt.

Gregory: No, but the fathers do speak of increments to enlightenment, though I think those are helpful ways of discussing it, where it’s actually quite fluid.

Basil: Enlightenment? I don’t know that I’m comfortable with that word.

Gregory: That’s the word they use. fairly frequently, from ancient times. It’s used that way in the scriptures.

Basil: But I think you have to qualify that – explain what you mean. Otherwise, it’s dangerous. People might misunderstand.

Gregory: I think if you have to immediately qualify something, you can’t really hear it. Its meaning gets systematized, defined, lost amid all the qualifications. I prefer to listen to the fathers than perhaps misunderstand because I qualified them

Basil: Sure, for you and I, that’s fine. But you have to be careful about talking about these things around people who can get easily misled.

Gregory: But that’s just it, I think we’re the ones likely to be easily misled, thinking we understand something better than people who can hear it without qualifications.

Don’t worry: This conversation didn’t actually happen, nor does it mirror a recent one in which I’ve changed the names or the topic. It’s just an amalgam of discussions I’ve been in (often involuntarily) or witnessed (and from which I’ve quietly walked away – like a ticking package).

We like our religion as white meat. Pretty, and well-behaved. It sits up straight; it doesn’t chew with its mouth open, and it doesn’t smell.

I think, though, it’s illustrative of two approaches to understanding. One tries to hear, and one tries to explain. One tries to understand, and one tries to make it understandable to the public. One is looking to learn from the fathers, even if they’re speaking about radical things that challenge our understanding of what the basic questions are, and the other is looking for how to “balance” the fathers, so our basic questions remain answered to our satisfaction.

I fully expect someone will wish to “balance” this post as well, kind of illustrating my point. The rush to qualification precludes us really hearing anything – the intent of the author, the reality to which they’re speaking… what we end up with is the Protestant impulse to classify things, immediately upon hearing or encountering them, as “true” or “false”, “right” or “wrong”, “extreme” or “balanced” (whatever that means). We like our religion as white meat, pretty, and well-behaved. It sits up straight; it doesn’t chew with its mouth open, and it doesn’t smell. Like a dutiful son, it’s got one hand in our cultural mother’s lap. In other words, it’s Protestant.

Who of us presumes to “balance” the fathers who attained enlightenment and achieved theosis? It is they who would “balance” us, if we even presumed that “balance” is a Christian objective.

But that’s not the true religion we Orthodox have received. Not at all. Our religion, very often, quite literally doesn’t bathe. Our Faith has stubble – a bit more than stubble, actually, if we keep it whole. It isn’t a neatly-defined set of categories. We don’t carry around “study bibles”, with glossaries in the back (despite recent Quixotic attempts to adapt them to us). We have messy religion. Not Anglican-messy – I don’t mean that (and no offense meant to you Anglicans, but you couldn’t exactly get offended unless you already know what we’re talking about. Here we don’t buy the: “We can say the N word, but you can’t!” reasoning.). But we have religion that says repeatedly, “you’re not able to understand, no matter what you do, and you may have to live with that.”

The rush to qualify is the rush to make truth safe, even before it can be understood. To make it fit the pre-existing conception of the puzzle – the mental picture on someone’s cognitive box. And as such, it means we can never learn again, not really. We can never sit at the feet of the holy fathers and learn, because we are not willing to go back and question the shape and structure of the puzzle, once we started filling in the pieces. The rush to qualification blinds us, so that our initial assumptions become unaccountable absolutes, and we are no longer subjecting our own thoughts to the rigours of Christian thought and the pedagogy of Christian ‘thinkers’, but now are the makers of our own Faith. Again, Protestantism.

Our religion, very often, quite literally doesn’t bathe. Our Faith has stubble.

The rush to qualification is a Protestant impulse as surely as the rush to fragmentation and, indeed, they are causes of one another. The attempt to nail down a definition of all religious understanding and experience, a thoroughly Protestant approach, to afford a unified theory of Faith (Sound Roman Catholic? That’s where it came from.), is ironically the very creator of factions that, by that same Protestant impulse (defining the “church” and the “faith” by acceptance of definitions of other doctrines) spawns tens of thousands of denominations. In other words, the rush to qualification is the genus of denominationalism. It is the beginning of the crumbling of that authentically catholic understanding of Christendom that we begin with when we read the fathers in the first place, and from which Christendom fell (read Western Christianity), when it proclaimed itself sole arbiter fide.

As to the particular form of qualification we’re calling “the rush to balance” – who of us presumes to “balance” the fathers who attained enlightenment and achieved theosis? It is they who would “balance” us, if we even presumed that “balance” is a Christian objective, which we don’t. Yes, I’m aware of various proof texts that one may like to cite when trying to fashion Christianity into an expression of the culture – into Christendom, but we’re Orthodox, not Episcopalians (OK, you can fault me for that one). That’s just the thing, you see, arranging a bunch of texts so they say what we want them to say is itself a form of qualification, definition – it too can, if we haven’t really listened first, mitigate actually hearing the fathers teach. And hearing the fathers teach is NOT a safe thing. Not at all.

Talk about unsafe… union with God, becoming God, theosis, deification… what we Orthodox mean when we say the word “salvation”… that’s not a safe thing at all.

This is why the one ‘qualification’ that is commended to us by the fathers themselves, is having a guide in our Father Confessor, one who imitates the fathers and follows in their path, so that in reproducing in ourselves the teachings of the fathers, we find we are reproducing the behavior of those who follow them. That’s not safe, either. If you’re an amateur logician, like me, you’re already seeing how this could be subjective, how it could go astray – how, frankly, it’s a fallible source of knowledge and understanding, and even a dangerously reproductive one. Yup. Indeed. Let me say again, yes, you’ve got it. It’s not safe.

It comes down to whether you believe, like the heterodox, that reason can take you all the way (or that you need a religious component, too, but you really mean religious reason – that scripture, tradition, and faith produce an ever evolving succession of agreed statements or more religious philosophy), or whether you believe that the Holy Trinity must work with you in synergy to save your mind, and it can’t all be nailed down, even in trying to define what constitutes a “mystery” (wow – if you succeeded, you’d fail, because they wouldn’t be mysteries anymore). You can’t prove synergy in a logician’s “laboratory” – you can only demonstrate the need for it. Nor can you get by with a “leap of faith”, as you might hear from Rome (might as well give your credit card number over the phone). It’s an activity, though, and one that’s embarked upon as a path into the fullness of Orthodox experience, and not as reducing all these questions to matters of religious philosophy. We are an asceticism, not a belief system.

The attempt to nail down a definition of all religious understanding and experience, to afford a unified theory of Faith, is ironically the very creator of tens of thousands of denominations.

It is certainly true that any one father does not speak alone, but speaks within the consensus patrum. And if you wanted to call that the fathers “balancing themselves”, it’s hard to object. Though, personally, I think you’re reducing patristics then to a discussion of emphases and feelings and missing the point. Once you’ve got an entirely pliable discussion of emphases, you can pretty much mold what you want, and we’re just as easily back to fashioning the puzzle each according to our own cognitive maps, whether priest, layman, or monk. Flesh is something – there is a form to it – an Orthodox attitude, if you will – it’s neither in the glossary and the index, on the one hand, nor in the ever-mutable amalgam on the other. We’ve seen that argument play itself out on the field of Western religion, and it’s not our argument. Our thinking has a body. But the point being, it’s not a safe body. As C.S. Lewis would say, Aslan is not a tame lion.

Talk about unsafe… union with God, becoming God, theosis, deification… what we Orthodox mean when we say the word “salvation”… that’s not a safe thing at all. God is a consuming fire, we have said – by which we mean that we don’t know him – not from without, and we cannot define or explain him – his essence is incompatible with any understanding, but that union is possible in the unsafest of ways. It is as if to say, in great danger and mortal threat lies your union with the one you don’t know. How do you qualify that? Some will try, but they’ll really only be qualifying words, and not the thing itself, which cannot be grasped, understood, dissected, defined, or nailed down. It cannot be carried under the arm or explained in a podcast or a blog post or a meeting with a dynamic guest speaker. It is beyond safety, beyond qualification, cannot be balanced, since no other thing can be compared to it or set beside it. Welcome to the entirely dangerous world of the Orthodox Faith.

The creation groans and is in travail. The demons believe and tremble. Angels long to look. The mountains quake. And God walks around in our midst. It’s a dangerous place, a place that’s difficult to qualify and looks much different when you don’t.

Knights of the Desert

Increasingly, I find dissidence and social resistance are considered, among the religious, to be either un-Christian, or somehow an unpleasant aspect of Christianity that is best swept under the rug along with keeping the fasts. Actually, fasting and resistance to the world, in fact open warfare with the world, are related. The very purpose of asceticism is to save us – from the world and unto God. So often, you’ll find those who don’t do one (e.g. fasting or resisting the world) don’t appreciate the other. I’ll be called judgmental for that, but I really don’t care – I only care, at this point, if it’s true. But what is true religion? To relieve the poor and keep oneself unstained by the world. Increasingly, I’m thinking that all of orthopraxy (or orthopraxis for you misguided sticklers) is summed up in that statement.

The other day someone asked a personal question at coffee hour – namely, why I tendered my resignation at a particular company. I explained that I’m not a big fan of corporations and what they’ve done to the culture, the world of work, and people. I find they tend to create a climate of fear and compliance that’s antithetical to what I value. My boss tried to make me afraid and, when faced with an invitation to fear, I tend to break it. So I broke it; I handed in my resignation. You should have seen how people stiffened. You’d have thought I smacked the Bishop. Literally.

So what’s so radical about this? Before you go nitpicking it, I’m not an idiot – this is just one of many examples I could cite, across the interactions of many different kinds of people in many different religious environments. I’m not taking it personally, nor is it about anything personal. Not really. What I’m talking about is the perception that true religion is Mitt Romney, or at least religion should allow for it.

But I see genuine religion quite differently. I see it as much more similar to the placing of a Crusade on laymen-knights who have before them both an ascetic quest in the desert and a moral and ethical battle in the cities of the world. [Just to be clear, ethics is a science, based on those principles necessary to the survival first of the individual and, second, of the species. Morality is a revelation, something that requires a personal source and standard, a person or persons that are of the same image as the species or, more to the point, vice versa.]

Placed on us is not a commission to go forth and blend in, or go forth and adopt the world’s way of life, or go forth and invest your primary energies and essence into the world. Ours is a commission to go forth and do battle, call people out of the world while remaining within it (live in the desert in your own backyard), and defend the downtrodden, the exploited, the weak, and the oppressed. Religion (the kind I would criticize) is simply the translation of the world’s principles into liturgical language. True religion, the kind that is focused on relieving the poor and keeping oneself unstained by the world, is an ascetic warfare on the world and an ascetic conquest of the self, by which in both cases, we overcome the Evil One. True religion is not a sigh of frustration and defeat but a horn of challenge. As C.S. Lewis has said, Christianity is not defense but attack. We defend the weak, but we attack the dragon.

One of the most basic forms of attack, that helps us solidify our sense of resistance and rejection of the world (imo), is boycotting. You can boycott fear in a workplace (like I did), or you can do it in defense of others.

Recently, I was at a restaurant and the manager was yelling furiously at an employee, taunting and threatening him. I walked to the cashier, canceled our order, and explained that I won’t do business with someone who abuses workers, tries to make them afraid, and attacks their dignity. The manager came up and apologized for doing it in public, and I explained that it’s even worse to do it in private, where he’s free from accountability. I cut them off for six months, because it is the duty of Christians to defend the weak, the poor, and the dignity of work and of mankind, and to resist evil and work toward its downfall.

Some months later, I was in a supermarket, and the manager was pacing the front of the store, screaming over a cell phone at an employee who wasn’t coming to work, telling her she was fired. I stepped to the counter and informed the clerk, in the full hearing of all, that the behavior was illegal and immoral. The manager had not only violated the rights of this worker, but had tried to use shame and fear as weapons, and to exude toughness and volatility in the midst of a culture that is already overflowing with it and awash in the resultant blood and violence.

A while back, Yahoo was handed a request by the Chinese government for information that would identify dissidents contributing to internet discussion that was critical of China’s government or form of government (i.e. corruption, abuse of power, exploitation, and a history of genocide, torture, and untold agony). Without the slightest fuss, Yahoo offered up these people, who were then taken from their families (where they were breadwinners) and imprisoned for the best years of their lives. Google, so you know, was given the same request and not only completely refused, but moved their data servers offshore, where they could not even be seized by force. Google’s stated attitude (on this and other repeated occasions), is that there are some things you just don’t do. A common slogan at Google, posted around facilities, used in boardrooms, and guiding the decisions of decision-makers is “Don’t be evil.” That’s not the kind of organization Google wishes to be.

Frankly, I sent a gmail invite to every yahoo user in my contact list, suggesting they upgrade to a provider with better features and superior intangible benefits. I realize it’s a greed-based grabbing culture, and people flock to Walmart (one could write books on the evil giant) for a few dollars and change, helping sentence its workers, and all employees of companies who follow their model, to low wages, laughable insurance and benefits and, essentially, a shorter lifespan and poorer health, inadequate medical prevention and care, and all the attendant ills of chronic poverty. For a few dollars, we don’t care if we deal with the Devil himself. But we should.

You start talking boycotts, and the apostles of the dominant culture in our midst will pull out every “bible” verse about compliance and meekness they can lay hands on, not caring if it really adds up to the Christian worldview or just a bundle of proof texts that help prop up the world with religious stakes and servants. Expedience rules, just as it does at the checkout counter. Why would we expect any other kind of behavior from those in the line? It’s quite predictable. They’ll conjure up shibboleths of evangelical radio or left-wing newsletters, but in fact they’ll never talk of St. John Chrysostom and scores of other Saints who publicly denounced illicit behavior and worked diligently and openly to have it stopped. This will either have escaped their notice or be dismissed as the very proof-text piffle they’re offering at the outset.

Amazingly, you’ll even hear that boycotts is ‘participation in the world’ instead of resistance to it! You’ll hear it in the car on the way to Walmart, ironically, but that’s what’ll be said. In the end, the lines are drawn not between those who attend our churches and those who don’t, but rather between those who worship at the altars of the world and those who smash them, because they’re altars of human sacrifice. You’ll hear all kinds of “but we should be tolerant” until you realize they’re chewing on human bones.

The question is the same question Google asked, to our shame: What kind of people do we choose to be? The Walmarts of the world would dress up expediency as virtue: “Do something for your family, save money at Walmart.” If you haven’t heard the ad their running, you should. They ask you to look only at the surface, think only of instant gratification, consider only the end and ignore the means. The very basis of the conversation is anti-Christian.

Pretty it up, dress it up in a cassock, and lay it on the altar, but it’s still excrement with the stench and stain of the world. And we’re still facing the question of whether, as more and more people are gobbled up, pressed down, turned into means to an end that all good men must reject, we will get up off our lard asses and fight back, for ourselves and for them. For the very dignity of being human beings, made in God’s image, and for the sanctity of even the basic quest for goodness. If we can’t save the world, and deliver it from The World – the dominant culture – the world system – the evil artifice and Babel of principalities and powers, can we at least get up the gumption to get off the sofa and chuck a spear at it? And refuse to eat its dead.

That’s what it is. Eating the dead. And when the apostle said to at least stay away from blood and from strangled things, I see in that exhortation a command to correct, admonish, and resist the world’s edifice that it builds on the backs of the poor, the minds of all men, and the souls of the weak. It is hard to be a knight in the desert. If it were easy, everyone would be doing it. Remember the 80/20 rule, and hold the line. And I for one will be made stronger and more likely to stand, because you’re standing.