The Anastasis Dialogue

Father Stephen Freeman is a great one for putting his finger right on the problem.

Our reluctance to pray (let us be honest) is a manifestation of the
primordial sin. It is not the time or effort we avoid – but communion
with God that causes us to recoil. It is the hardness of our heart that
avoids participation in the heart of God. But it is also His mercy that
continues to call us to the life of prayer despite our selfish rebuff.

This is a hard saying, but absolutely true. I think it is true above all because communion with God will always lead us to see ourselves as we really are. If that is disgusting to us, then God Himself will be no less revolting.

Lord, Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.

Sticking my toe rather gingerly back into these blogging waters following our move, may I offer for your edification a learned and challenging article by Father John Erickson of St. Vladimir's. It goes well beyond the narrow question of a single conciliar canon, opening up important insights into the problem of primacy. It is especially helpful, I think, to understand that we should really be talking about "primacies" rather than "primacy."

This is an important point, though not an easy one to boil down into the kind of slogan that too many apologists seem to prefer!

Christ is risen!

We're moving. Our new contact information is here. I doubt there will be much posting on this blog until after May 3rd, our first weekend at St. Andrew's. Please remember us in your prayers during this significant transition!

Brethren and Fathers, while the sufferings of our Lord Jesus Christ when they are recalled are always able to pierce the soul, they do so especially in these present days, on which each of them reached its end.

What then are they? The murderous council against him, the Jewish arrest, his being led away to death, his arraignment before Pilate's tribunal, the interrogation, the scourging, the blows, the spittings, the insults, the mockeries, the ascent of the Cross, the nailing of his hands and feet, the tasting of gall, the piercing of his side and all the other things which blazed forth with them, which the world cannot contain, nor can anyone worthily proclaim, not human tongue, nor even all the tongues of angels together.

For let us consider, brethren, this great and ineffable mystery. The Lord who reveals the counsels of hearts [1 Cor. 4:5] and knows every human desire is the one who is taken before a council of death; the Lord who bears all things by the word of his power [Hebrews 1:3.]is the one who is handed over to sinners; the Lord who binds the water in the clouds [Job 26:8.] and sows in the earth in due season and uniformly is the one who is led away prisoner; the Lord who measures the heavens with the span of his hand and the earth in a handful and weighed all the mountains in the balance [Isaias 40:12.] is the one who is struck by the hand of a servant; the Lord who adorned the boundaries of the earth with flowers is the one who is dishonourably crowned with thorns; the Lord who planted the tree of life in Paradise is the one who is hanged upon an accursed tree.

O great and more than natural sights!

The sun saw them and faded, the moon saw them and was darkened, the earth perceived them was shaken, the rocks perceived them and were rent, all creation was turned back at the outrages done to the Master. The lifeless elements which have no senses, as if endowed with life and sensation from fear of the Lord and from the spectacle of what is seen, were amazed and altered; and do we, who have been honoured with reason, for whose sake Christ died, remain untouched and unweeping in these days? How could we be less rational than things which have no reason, more unfeeling than the stones? In no way, my brothers, in no way.

Let us rather be amazed in a manner worthy of God, by being changed with a fair change; let us draw down tears, sacrifice the passions, changing insults for insults and exchanging wounds for wounds, the one through obedience, the other through unflinching confession.

Do we not see the burning incitements of divine love? Who ever dwelt in prison for a friend? Who accepted slaughter for their beloved? But our good God not only did the one and both of them, but accepted ten thousand sufferings for the sake of us, the condemned. Fittingly then the blessed Apostle, when he thought on these things and became powerfully aware of the love of God, said For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, neither angels nor rules nor powers, neither present nor future, neither height nor depth, nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord [Rom. 8:38-39].For such was the love God had for us that he gave his only Son, that all who believe in him might not perish, as it is written, but have eternal life [John 3:16.].

As an exchange for this love, the saints, when they had nothing to offer, offered their own bodies and blood by asceticism and struggle, singing with blessed David the song: What return may we make to the Lord for all that he has given to us? [Psalm 115:3.] Let us also, brethren, cry out these words each day, as we serve him with an unceasing attitude of love, striving again and again for what is better, so that we may become heirs with the saints of the eternal blessings in Christ Jesus our Lord, to whom be glory and might with the Father and the Holy Spirit, now and for ever, and to the ages of ages.  

Translated by Archimandrite Ephrem (Lash)

I heartily recommend a prayerful consideration of the writings of Father Stephen Freeman. He has developed a metaphor to articulate what really marks an authentic Christian view of reality: the one-storey universe as opposed to the two-storey.

His aim is to expose false platonizing and gnosticism for what it is. And don't be fooled into thinking only Christians are guilty of dividing things into sacred and profane, heaven and earth. Any scientific atheist is effectively doing the same thing when he treats ideas as one thing and facts as another. Anything that robs the world around us of meaning assumes the existence of some other storey where real significance lies undisturbed by messy life here on the ground.

I once tried to work out a way to say something of the same thing, using instead of the architectural metaphor Father Stephen employs, a distinction between seeing reality as "things" or "events." At least I think the two sets of metaphors are trying to say the same thing. It seems to me that what distinguishes a sense of reality as a single storey is that God, salvation, angels, saints, demons, grace and spiritual warfare become events experienced, not objects pondered (or ignored). And if that doesn't affect how we experience each other, I don't know what will.

There is much to think about in Father Stephen's writings, especially on this day when Heaven reveals Himself to us as food. That's about as single storey an event as I can think of. As Father Stephen puts it:

Christ’s promise to us is that “he who eats my [Christ’s] flesh and drinks my blood abides in me and I in him” (John 6:56). It doesn’t say that if you do this you will have visions of a second storey heaven or such things. The language is very “first storey.” Eat, drink, abide. The words are very here and now, though they change the nature of here and now. We are suddenly indwelt by Someone Whom even the universe cannot contain. That reality changes us.

Judas is tragedy. But the harlot is hope. The one tries to barter a little more life by wasting the Source of life. The other throws away all that's left of her life out of longing for a new beginning. In Judas the old world, the cruel world of fate closes in and consumes. In the woman, alone of all those that day in Simon's house, the new dawn of freedom begins to arise.

Keep us from tragedy's false promise of noble despair, the lie revealed in Judas, broken on the ground beneath the hanging tree. 

Give us instead, O Lord, the harlot's hope, the saving sadness of another Tree and a Body broken, not for itself, but for love.

The Aposticha of Matins:

Today Christ comes to the house of the Pharisee and a sinful woman draws near and flings herself at his feet, crying, ‘See one who has been drowned by sin, without hope because of her deeds, yet not rejected with loathing from your goodness, and give me, Lord, forgiveness of my evil deeds and save me’.

The harlot spread out her hair for you, the Master; Judas spread out his hands to the lawless: she to receive forgiveness, he to receive silver. And so we cry to you, sold and who set us free, ‘Lord, glory to you!’

A woman foul-smelling and defiled drew near, pouring tears upon your feet, O Saviour, and proclaiming your passion. ‘How can I gaze upon you, Master? For you have come yourself to save a harlot. You roused Lazarus from the tomb after four days, raise me who am dead from the deep. Accept me in my misery, Lord, and save me’.

Rejected because of her life, well-known because of her ways, she approached you carrying sweet myrrh and crying, ‘You, who were born of a Virgin, do not cast me out, who am a harlot. Joy of the Angels, do not despise my tears; but, Lord, as I repent, accept me, whom you did not thrust from you when I sinned, through your great mercy’.

Lord, the woman who had fallen into many sins, perceiving your divinity, took up the role of myrrh-bearer, and with lamentation brings sweet myrrh to you before your burial. ‘Alas!’, she says, ‘for night is for me a frenzy of lust, a dark and moonless love of sin. Accept the fountains of my tears, you who from the clouds draw out the water of the sea; bow yourself down to the groanings of my heart, you who bowed the heavens by your ineffable self-emptying. I shall kiss your immaculate feet, and wipe them again with the locks of my hair, those feet whose sound Eve heard in Paradise at the cool of the day, and hid herself in fear. Who can search out the multitude of my sins and the depths of your judgements, my Saviour, saviour of souls? Do not despise me, your servant, for you have mercy without measure’.

I shouldn't be grumpy in Holy Week. (Or rather I should be grumpy about other things.) But since no-one's going to read this at such a time, perhaps I can justify getting it off my chest.

Getting a little tired of hearing that the "Church" exists only at the local level. The claim is peppered all through online discussions of the various disputes over authority in the Orthodox Church on this continent. Adherence to this belief is supposed to be a sovereign remedy against the charmingly named "papist heresy." There was an egregious example in an uncharacteristically silly podcast by Dr. Clark Carlton. Apart from denying the existence of "America" as a basis for a united Orthodox Church (an argument which, if implemented universally would certainly see the end of every autocephalous Church in the world, with the possible exception of Jerusalem!), Dr. Carlton also claimed as heresy the idea that the Church exists in any way except as a local eucharistic assembly under the presidency of the Bishop. He, naturally, gave the usual misquotation from St. Ignatius, "where the Bishop is, there is the Catholic Church."

What St. Ignatius actually says to the Smyrneans is "wherever the bishop shall appear, there let the multitude [of the people] also be; even as, wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church." It's not the presence of the Bishop that makes the Church, but the presence of Christ, the "Bishop of all" (Magnesians 2:3). Christ is present in many ways. Certainly He is pre-eminently present in His Mysteries, to which every priesthood is ordered and for which reason no-one is ordained to any ministry higher than that of Bishop. But the notion that Christ is somehow absent from the Church in other ways is, well, strange.

Part of the problem lies with convert Protestants (and here I'm not really thinking of any individual in particular) for whom sacred history used to end with Acts and is permitted to extend now as far as Ignatius to the Romans. The history of the Church demonstrates over and again the tendency of local churches to grope toward primatial structures like plants for the light. The Godbearer Ignatius himself called Rome the church that "presides over love" using a word for presidency (prokathemai) with distinct liturgical overtones. The popes of Alexandria always (as far as we know) managed the local nilotic episcopacies under their jurisdiction. St. Chrysostom was notorious, or renowned if you prefer, in his time for appointing and removing bishops on his own patriarchal authority.

And let's not even get into the second millenium, which, to put it as mildly as I can, is hardly testimony to an unbroken dogmatic tradition of the inviolable integrity of the local Church and the merely vestigial, temporal and easily dispensible authority of structures of wider ecclesial governance.

I'm not talking here about a lack of knowledge of historical facts. I'm talking about a lack of appreciation for the way the Spirit works within history, even very recent history, to form and sanctify. I'm talking about history as synergy. Where that is not understood, what emerges instead is some version of the golden age fallacy.

None of this proves the papal claims, far from it, and that's not what I'm trying to do anyway. I'd just like people to stop assuming Afanasiev's eucharistic theology that they read about in seminary somewhere constitutes the last dogmatic word on the question of where the Church "is".

At least stop throwing that word heresy around so much!

Beautiful. If you only read one Easter pastoral this year....

Beloved brothers and sisters in the Lord,

Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. (Philippians 4:4)

It is when the world seems to be crashing in all around us that it is most important to recognize some of the fundamentals of our faith. It is one thing for us to appreciate some of the great things that belonging to one of our parishes has to offer, such as the sense of family, of tradition, and of belonging that we experience. The beauty of the Byzantine liturgy and the sense of God’s closeness that we experience in the sacraments are among the most precious gifts of our heritage.

Sometimes we take the things we always knew for granted. Like our heartbeat, which has been going on nonstop almost from the beginning of our days, those things that are most familiar and most intimate to us are the ones that most often escape our attention and reflection.

Those of us who have been lifelong members of our Romanian Catholic parishes do not always have the sense that visitors and those who are newly joining our parishes from other traditions have of our faith and practice. It seems somehow strange to us that people who have entirely different ethnic and cultural backgrounds find value in our small and homely experience and want to be part of something that, in all honesty, we had become used to seeing rejected instead by the offspring of our communities’ founders.

What is going on? In the opinion of some of our members, our parishes exist only in order to remain precisely as they recall it from their childhood, and then die as the powerful process of cultural assimilation grinds all immigrants into the same homogenized American powder. What is the use of trying to hold on to our parishes when all around us there are larger, better organized, and vastly better financed Roman Catholic parishes that we could belong to? Is it somehow preordained that only the Latin rite should have a permanent home on these western shores (though even our Roman Catholic sisters and brothers are having a difficult go of it in an environment with fewer and fewer priests)?

Although I can scarcely speak from my own experience regarding what happens in Romania, it has occurred to me, too, that many whose families had been Greek-Catholic prior to past and present political attempts to eliminate the Greek-Catholic Church from national life in Romania may have likewise found it too hard to swim against the cultural tide. Perhaps they have simply chosen to remain where history and political repression have put them. It is just easier to be Orthodox where Orthodoxy is big and powerful, and Roman Catholic or Protestant (or Evangelical) where western Christianity commands the privileges of a majority.

(In both these situations, of course, I am referring to those who exercise religious “preferences” as a path of least resistance in their worlds, not to those who have chosen where they belong out of conviction and an experience of truth. Far be it from me to judge the mystery of another’s life. I am sure that some of our people who have found a spiritual home elsewhere have done so in response to a spiritual hunger they have not been able to satisfy in our parishes, for whatever reason. I have often said that there are two reasons that people leave our communities: either because they don’t love God or because they do.)

Yet, it is precisely into this situation that I believe the Holy Spirit has stepped in—not because we Greek-Catholics are better than anyone else or more deserving of divine grace than other Christians. Rather, it is precisely because we are small and poor and powerless and a little odd that we are more available for God’s purposes in the great march of human destiny. It is easier to divert a trickle than a flood, to water your tomato plants with a garden hose than with a swimming pool. God chooses the little ones of this world to accomplish his will; what we need to do is simply choose that will over our own grandiose pretentions.

This is where the fundamentals come in (note: one can focus on fundamentals without becoming a fundamentalist!): the very simple faith expressed in our Creed and sung in the Gospel reading of Easter, the Prologue of the Gospel of John. As elaborate as our liturgy is, as elaborate as our ceremonies may be, it all comes down to the simple celebration of our faith that God is Father, unconditional love and everlasting mercy; that in Jesus Christ God becomes one of us and shares our story, even unto his own death on a cross; that by enduring death, Jesus has conquered it, has freed humanity from enslavement to it, and has healed this congenital defect that has come down to each woman and man since Adam and Eve. Furthermore: it all comes down to an acknowledgment that, despite the foibles of every age, the Holy Spirit has come to dwell in the world, in an especially unique way in the Church, making of us the Mystical Body of Christ, the extension in time and space of the words and works of our Master through an unbroken communion with him who promised to be with us all days, even to the end of the world.

It is particularly easy to forget this simple story when everything comes crashing down on us, when we are too sick or too busy to keep on doing what we think we are supposed to be doing; when thoughts of our own eventual death or the actual death of one we love threatens to make a mockery of our hope; when all we have worked and sacrificed to build collapses in smoldering ruin because, yes, greedy people (perhaps ourselves among them?) have thought that a house built on plastic could be as sturdy as one built on the Rock. These are times when just being can seem a bitter prospect, and every tomorrow brings fresh disappointment.

But these are also the times that even the Divine Liturgy itself cries out to us, “Wisdom! Be attentive!” If we pay attention and stop to think about it, we can see all around us little signs of life. If you are fortunate, as I am, to belong to a parish that has seen new members you know what I am talking about. Something about us, something so intimate or familiar that we have taken it for granted and barely notice anymore, that something has drawn others into its light while we were busy worrying about our heating bills and parking lots.

That something is the risen Lord Jesus. Somehow, hen we gather to sing “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and bestowing life to those who are in the tombs,” there can be no doubt in the heart of any visitor that this is the truth, and in a cynical and weary world this Truth itself is risen from the grave. We sense his presence in the proclamation of his resurrection, and those who have been looking for him can find him among us: And the word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only-begotten Son from the Father (John 1:14).

It is not enough to say that Jesus is God-made-human. This is indeed true, but the point the Evangelist wishes to make is that Jesus, that is to say God, dwelt—indeed, dwells—alongside us. The Greek verb in this passage carries the notion of pitching one’s tent, becoming a fellow traveler and sojourner. Therefore when we are doing our job as a church, we enable other travelers to know and experience the One who is always with us on our way.

For it is Christ who is risen—not someone else, not Moses, nor Muhammad, nor Mother Theresa. Christ is not Napoleon, Caesar, or Alexander the Great. The one who has conquered death is the only one who could conquer it, and the rest of humanity awaits its call to rise from the tombs. Alexander the Great, Caesar, and Napoleon all conquered lands and enslaved kingdoms, and they did so by inflicting great misery and death. They, and others like them, were not conquerors, in truth, but the conquered, having become lackeys and instruments of the great Enemy of the human race, that is, death itself. The one who has overcome death and destroyed this Enemy, who has granted freedom to every child of God, used only the weapons of forgiveness (grace) and truth to accomplish his victory.

And from his fulness we have all received, grace upon grace. For the Law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ (John 1:16-17). Christ’s resurrection means resurrection for everybody. The task for each of us is to live our immortality here and now, being witnesses to the truth of the grace that has been poured out upon the world. Following Christ in our present lives, and then for all eternity, is something available to us no matter what the circumstance. It is something every one of us can do, no matter how the world cracks and fizzles at our feet, no matter how threatened or frightened or vulnerable we may feel. It takes neither an army, nor money, nor an education, nor powerful connections to be a follower of Christ. It only takes a willing heart and a trusting spirit. And one another.

That is why I am glad to be where I am, part of a little flock that is truly God’s own. As I listen to you sing “Christ is Risen” on Easter Sunday, I know that I am safe at home with you, sheltered in the loving arms of our Savior and wrapped about with the protecting mantle of his Mother. Come what may, I know this simple truth shines from the heart of all our communities, because I have seen how people of all kinds have found light, life, and safety in our midst, as have we. It does not matter whether the Berlin Wall or Wall Street is crumbling to bits all around us. We are safe and we are free, for Christ is risen indeed.

May the Spirit of the risen Christ bring great joy to your hearts this Easter, and may you abide in that joy for all your days. With every good wish and blessing this bright season, I remain

Your brother in the Lord,

(Most Reverend) John Michael Botean
A sinner, and Bishop
Eparchy of St. George in Canton

Fr. Stephen at the Glory to God for All Things blog has a lovely reflection that draws on the themes of all our holy days, old and new calendars. These are beautiful words:

All of which brings us to the Cross of Christ. There, all the insanity of the world and its mad rush towards self-destruction is gathered in one lonely cry, “My God, my God, Why have you forsaken me?” Of course, in context, Christ is reciting Psalm 22 which is both a prophetic description of His crucifixion as well as a promise of His victory. But it is also an echo of the cry of our empty existence. On our lips, of course, it is a lie. God has not abandoned us - we have abandoned Him. But we feel abandoned, nonetheless.

But this is a day of great good news. For all of you who are sitting in hell (I reckon myself among your number on many days and only flee there because I am afraid to stay and pray for us all) Christ is coming to break down the doors and reveal the brightness of His resurrection.

H.B. Metropolitan Jonah's latest paper on ways to reform his own Church's governance provides much interesting reading. Much of it deals with practical matters of relevance mostly to the OCA. But the first part deals with a theme to which His Beatitude returns frequently: hierarchy as the mechanism for distributing accountability and mutual responsibility. "Hierarchy is about the facilitation of conciliarity." This is fundamentally different from the way most people understand hierarchy as a method of control.

Question: why should this model of hierarchy not apply also at the universal level of the Church??

Archimandrite Elpidophoros was hammered by people claiming that you could replace "ecumenical patriarch" with "pope" and not change his argument. Even a mischievous Metropolitan Jonah took his shot in this direction, "if we wanted a pope we'd be under the real one."

But honestly, if you look at this latest paper, transposed it to an international level, and replaced "Metropolitan" with "Pope" .....

Ok, I realize we're talking about a massive re-thinking and re-working of the papal office and its relationship with local churches. But didn't John Paul II open that door, in theory at least, in Ut unum sint?

I read this today from the "internet monk", a protestant evangelical with an ecumenical, radically Christian attitude to repentance:

I fall down. I get up….and believe. Over and over again. That’s as
good as it gets in this world. This life of faith, is a battle full of
weakness and brokenness. The only soldiers in this battle are wounded
ones. There are moments of total candor- I am a “wretched man” living
in a “body” of death. Denying this, spinning this, ignoring this or
distorting this reality is nothing but trouble in the true Christian
experience. 

I tried to find things to disagree with. The only thing is that he seems to think nature is the problem, rather than a potential ally in the fight (when disciplined by asceticism). Our tradition would probably want to speak of external forces (demons and death especially) as much as the enemy nature:

The sin we are killing in Romans 8
is, in a sense, ourselves. Not some demon or serpent external to us.
Our battle is with ourselves, and embracing this fact is the compass
and foundation of the Gospel’s power in our lives.

It needn't be either/or. It's both, as the fathers teach and scripture makes plain.

And does Christ only dwell in sinners (per Luther)? Change "sinners" for "humble" to include the saints who know nothing other than their complete need for Christ. Make that change and I'm happy.

I was thinking about repentance again yesterday during Vespers. That's the good news.

The bad news is that these pious thoughts occupied me while I was fiddling around a little at the Altar (where it's my week to serve), re-arranging the Gospel book and peeking into the little artophorion where we keep the consecrated Lambs for the Presanctified Liturgies this week. One of the Lambs was on its side, so I reached in and righted it, so the little purple stain was facing up, showing where I daubed a bit of the Precious Blood last Sunday before putting the Gifts away into their small golden box.

And it occurred to me that I had just touched God. I had just touched the God of the universe, creator of heaven and earth, Lord of glory worshiped by myriads of angels and archangels, borne upon the Cherubim, who makes his spirits messengers and his ministers as flames of fire. I had touched God, and He felt just like a small piece of dried up bread.

I wish I could say that this realization struck me with force, sent me to my knees in awe, wonder, regret for my impiety, an overwhelming sense of unworthiness. The truth is, it came as a purely intellectual event. The thought was no more electrifying than the feel of dried up bread to the finger. "Oh, that's right. This isn't bread. It's God."

In my preaching and retreat work this year I've found myself coming back often to the 18th Step of the Ladder of Divine Ascent in which St. John Climacus deals with the passion he calls, anaisthesis, "insensitivity." He defines it thus:

Insensitivity both in the body and in the spirit is deadened feeling, which, from long sickness and negligence, lapses into loss of feeling.

Insensitivity is negligence that has become habit, numbed thought...

Among its effects, he says, are a complete loss of reverence, or compassion or indeed any sense of the truth of things. In paragraph 5, the passion itself is made to say:

My subjects laugh when they see corpses. When they stand at prayer, they are completely stony, hard and darkened. When they see the holy altar they feel nothing; when they partake of the holy Gift, it is as if they had eaten ordinary bread.

How has it come to this? I thought. How have I become so anesthetized in mind and spirit that I cannot recognize my God in the bread? Where has this heart of stone, this darkened mind, this body inured to impiety, where has it come from?

That's for me and my God to work out of course, with some help from my spiritual father. But it seems to me at least raising the question as a way of helping to amplify what I said in my last post on repentance.

The point I want to make is this. If repentance is seen primarily as an event, causally related to other events we might call sins, then what happened to me in my thoughts at the altar last night was a simple intellectual tussle with a temptation to doubt. From a forensic point of view I was not doing anything wrong in performing my ministry at the altar. Nor is it a spiritual crime to have a moment of doubt (if that is what it was), provided one immediately makes an act of religious assent to the truth of faith under question.

Thinking of sin and repentance as discrete moments, means that nothing terribly interesting happened to me at all last night. I've had confessors who would have told me this. "Don't beat yourself up." "Where's the sin in that?" In one sense they'd be right. Yet in another....well they'd have missed the very force at work in me that is sending me to hell, that is in fact making life hellish for me at this very moment by killing all sense of God's presence. The very force that sends God away, hiding in the bread.

Anaisthesis, like many of the passions cannot be reduced to events. You don't "commit" insensitivity. It takes root in you and grows. It's fed by a thousand, a hundred thousand little acts and omissions. A sarcastic word here, an angry silence there, hypocritical gestures, a mind open to theories of charity while despising people in need of it. Insensitivity metastasizes until you stand at an altar one day and, by God's mercy, realize that you have no idea what you're touching.

This is a spiritual cancer. And like any such disease it cannot just be wished or legislated away; it can only be treated, cut out or at least shrunk by powerful, and sometimes painful, medicines.

This is a spiritual cancer, and it's widespread. How else can people not see God in the poor, the unborn, the aged, the unlovely? We live in an age full of righteous anger fuelled by theories and ideologies, philosophies and policies. But it's all talk and no action, because the talk deadens and does not enliven. This is spiritual cancer, and treating the symptoms--abortion, pollution, violence, prejudice, whatever--will not make the cancer go away. We need to repent more deeply than that if we are ever to see God in the other, God in the ordinary, God in the bread.

Repentance is not worthy of the name unless it really gets to the heart of the disease. Repentance is nothing unless it touches every part of life, not just the sinful events, but above all the diseased motivations, the darkened sight, the hardened heart.

This is not a "east vs west" issue. It's basic Christianity. But I do think that the Eastern Churches have been able to preserve in their liturgical and spiritual praxis a clear reminder of this most basic of all Christ's words, "repent and believe in the Gospel" (Mark 1:15). Repent and believe that He is here in the ordinary, that He washes us in water, strengthens us in oil, feeds us in bread, comforts us in wine. That He is the face that asks for help in hunger, prison, sickness, pain and grief. Repent and believe; repent so that you can believe, and trust what you believe. Repent so that you can come to life inside, raised up from the tomb of your deadened, anesthetized, numbed heart.

The forensic attitude to sin and repentance can get in the way of this deep, fundamental notion of sin and repentance not as different moments in life, but as different modes of life. Repentance is nothing if it is not a way of being, a lifestyle choice at its most urgent. It is not something you endure for a time so that you can get on with the business of changing the world, ending abortion or social inequity or environmental degradation or whatever the agenda must be. Repentance isn't the thing you do before you move on, it is how you move at all, its your motive force.

There's a reason why God hides in the bread. It's not to fool us, but to draw us in, to give us Someone to find. As every child knows, hide and seek doesn't work unless you keep getting warmer and warmer, not cooler and colder. God is always in the bread. Waiting.

I've done the Great Canon twice this year. That's one of the perks of being an Old Paschalion island in a New Paschalion ocean.

I really mean that it's a perk. What a joy to be able to serve this most beautiful office twice, and to hear again the life of St. Mary of Egypt! I've never known anyone who has experienced this service of repentance seriously to grumble at the length, or the arduous prostrations and bows, or the repetitive refrain sung hundreds of times, "Have mercy, on me, O God, have mercy on me."

Last week I was in Aurora, IL serving at the Romanian Catholic parish of St. George. While serving in the parish I enjoyed the hospitality of a large Benedictine Monastery. The morning before the evening service I was in conversation with one of the OSB's, and I told him about the Great Canon Matins that would be served that evening. "It's about four hours long" I told him. He looked thoughtful and said, "But what do you do for four hours?"

I've got to admit this question set me aback. What do we do for those four hours? "Oh," I said lamely, "it's a beautiful reflection on scripture."

Ok, that's true. But somehow it just seems so ludicrously inadequate to characterize the Great Canon of St. Andrew and the Life of St. Mary as a kind of extended Bible study. The service challenges and engages us in such deeper ways. It's not a study, for a start, it's an action.

A better answer I could have given him was, "What do we do for four hours? We repent."

Why didn't I give that answer? Largely because I know that between the Eastern and Western mind lies a considerable distance on what repentance means. I've heard some Orthodox say the distance is un-bridgeable. I beg to differ. But I do believe very strongly that it is almost impossible to span the gulf by words.

The best answer I could have given my monk friend was, "What do we do for four hours? Come and see."

Come and experience for yourself a spiritual and moral vision in which repentance produces joy, not shame. Come and see a way to repent that requires less examination of conscience and more prostration, less concentration on self and more worship of what transcends the self. Come and see, and hear, and feel.

This is why I really believe to be so important about what my monastery is doing by moving next to another western monastery. If I'm right that the distance between traditions can be bridged, then it is in just such a place and in just that kind of relationship.

Oh and maybe by preaching repentance to others by inviting them to see our liturgy, I'll finally learn to do it myself!

The Ochlophobist's recent post is very thoughtful and thought-provoking. This seems to sum up the dilemma, which is so often not even noticed as such:

I have heard many Orthodox in America speak in a manner that suggests that a conversion to Orthodoxy provides a means of escaping the enlightenment, at least with regard to religion. I have been explicitly told this by a few. I disagree. In America there is no way to escape the Enlightenment.

This is a problem for all apostolic, ie. hierarchical, Churches in the Anglo-American world.

The magnificently named Archimandrite Dr. Elpidophoros Lambriniadis delivered a speech on March 16 in the chapel of Holy Cross Greek Orthodox Seminary in Brooklyn, MA. If you haven't heard about it yet, you soon will. It's a scorcher.

Take these passages, for example on Hellenism and Christianity:

Our cultural heritage and our national conscience is not, by any means, an obstacle for our progress and for the successful witness to our faith, especially insofar as ecumenicity is the heart of Hellenism and by definition alien to any form of nationalism or cultural chauvinism.

Examining, then, ourselves, I believe that we ought to be more careful towards the easiness with which we are ready to abandon our Hellenism, both as language and as tradition. As we have already said, it is nothing but a myth the opinion that Hellenism is an obstacle to the creative and successful incorporation in the American reality. Hellenism is identified with its ecumenical character and for that reason it can never be nationalistic for both of its manifestations, its culture and its Orthodox faith are concepts that transcend the boundaries of the national.

Having read those last night, I confess to a mildly un-lenten chuckle at Orthros this morning, when the Triodion offered the following from the second canon of the 9th Ode:

Peter speaks, and Plato falls silent; Paul teaches, and Pythagoras is heard no more. The company of the apostles, preaching the mysteries of God, has buried the dead voice of the Greeks and called the world to the worship of Christ.

Gotcha? Not really. The fact is there was always something a little coy in the Church Fathers' denunciations of the Hellenic tradition, when they were up to their philosophers' beards in that vast intellectual and cultural heritage. Homoousion anyone?

Likewise, there may be something just a little precious in the idea among many American Orthodox that the only level of ecclesial authority that is pure and uncontaminated by papist heresy is that of the bishop. Other levels of ministry: Meropolitans, Archbishops, Patriarchs all whiff a bit of that Romish scent. Frankly Archimandite Elpidephoros is right to call them out on this:

Let me add that the refusal to recognize primacy within the Orthodox Church, a primacy that necessarily cannot but be embodied by a primus (that is by a bishop who has the prerogative of being the first among his fellow bishops) constitutes nothing less than heresy. It cannot be accepted, as often it is said, that the unity among the Orthodox Churches is safeguarded by either a common norm of faith and worship or by the Ecumenical Council as an institution. Both of these factors are impersonal while in our Orthodox theology the principle of unity is always a person. Indeed, in the level of the Holy Trinity the principle of unity is not the divine essence but the Person of the Father (“Monarchy” of the Father), at the ecclesiological level of the local Church the principle of unity is not the presbyterium or the common worship of the Christians but the person of the Bishop, so to in the Pan-Orthodox level the principle of unity cannot be an idea nor an institution but it needs to be, if we are to be consistent with our theology, a person.

Strong stuff. But just as the Fathers happily used Greek philosophical methods while just as happily condemning Greek philosophers, there are some contemporary Orthodox who blithely condemn current structures of primacy while trying hard to establish those same kinds of structures in an "American" form.

Wherever you go in the Orthodox world, local primates have much more prominence than simply being one bishop among others. Russia, Romania, Serbia, Greece, Cyprus: in all these places there are probably many ordinary believers who know far more about their patriarch or archbishop from their nightly news shows than they will ever know about their local bishop. And the fact is that by calling for a primate for an autocephalous church in the United States, local Orthodox are simply reinforcing the significance of a primatial office, even if they claim to be opposed to it as papism in Orthodox vestments.

I recently posted a reflection by Eamon Duffy on the historical realities of the papal office. Whether we like it or not, much of what is claimed as "tradition" is really simply the ways things have been done for a long time. I have no problem with that. I'll take a living tradition over a dead idea any time.

Well, almost any time. I've recently argued for the central importance of seeing the bishop as wedded to his diocese. However much people intuitively like a strong central authority, nothing can replace the importance of an equally strong, vibrant evangelical worshiping community centered on the local primacy of a holy father in Christ. Somehow both poles of primacy have to be kept in perfect balance. Show me the Church that's managed that!

But here's what is so exciting about this debate within American Orthodoxy. It's about stuff that really matters, that really needs to be debated. We're having the same debate in the Catholic Church, of course, but it's so complicated by the way in which attacks on authority are mixed up with all kinds of Christological and moral heresies. In Orthodoxy the problem is much clearer, because it's less cluttered. People don't want to slough off a Patriarch so they can paint themselves blue and worship a nature goddess. They want to do so because they honestly believe that's the best way to orient their own ecclesial community toward a serious appropriation of the Orthodox faith. And vice versa.

I've seen this lecture spoken of in military terms. It certainly seems to be intended as a shot across the bows of various other visions for Orthodox organization in America, especially those enunciated by the OCA and Antiochian leadership. My prayer is that, just as the holy Fathers hid their reliance on Greek thought behind their constant use of it, and thereby established a theological tradition radiant with divine Light, so too our Orthodox brothers and sisters might be building behind their rhetorical walls a new and enduring ecclesiology for today's time and place.