All the Gentiles

“‘Come and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob. He will proclaim His way to us, and we shall walk in it.’”
–Isaiah 2

The “prolegomena,” the first things
In the first preaching of Christ we are told outrightly to “repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand.” this salvific exhortation is the beginning, and presents to us the disposition by which we avail ourselves to “the Way,” the Way itself not being the process of working out our salvation–repentance is the process–but Christ Himself is the Way, as He guides us quite directly in stating “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life…” If repentance is the starting point and the process both, then there is also a precondition for the human person that he may even receive the exhortation: “repent.” The precondition is faith, the same faith as that held by the artificer of the altar “To the Unknown God” that St. Paul encountered in the Areopagus. The precursor to the beginning of our salvation is the acknowledgment of the limitation of our own knowledge, and such a humble awareness of it that it causes us to express the necessity of acknowledgment of what is beyond knowledge, of what cannot be fully known. This is a powerful precondition requiring a certain humility and awareness of need, a realization of the dependency that characterizes all of creation.
If we want to evangelize we may need to pray: “Prepare their hearts with such a precondition, O Lord!” We also must seek to become attuned to identifying such a condition in others, a fertile soil upon which the grain of wheat (Christ) may land and die, that it may rise therefrom to bear more fruit–the fruit of the resurrection.
It is easier to acknowledge-without-knowing, to have no mental bound in place regarding the Unknown, but this ease is insufficient, it can lean to a self-governed style of mysticism, an escapism from having to be attached to any concept aside from the limitlessness of unknowability, and ultimately diverts one from having a personal encounter with Love, that is, with the God Who made heaven and earth and all that is in it. So St. Paul addresses some “partial believers,” revealing to them the “Unknown” which has been so easily acknowledged, and he proclaims to them that the “Unknown” is “God, who made the world and everything in it…He is not far from each of us; for in Him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17).
In this “precondition” is the willingness of the person to entrust himself to the Life-Giver, and then the belief that knowledge can only be borne from trust. Trust is the laying up of oneself upon another–’I did not create myself and I do not uphold myself, but, rather, I am upheld’–that is, upon the One Who sourced the personhood of he who longs for true knowledge, the kind that is not possessed by the person and cannot be quantified.
Let us avidly pray for realization of the longing for true knowledge, first for ourselves, and then for all others. “Repent,” Christ calls out, and all who have ears to hear do respond, not judging of themselves any quality of worthiness to be among some group of those “chosen,” but responding so as to purely fix their eyes upon Christ, looking to Him with no need even to glance to the left or to the right. We begin with repentance, this “turning toward,” by which we come to fix our eyes upon the Savior, and find salvation not by progressing beyond this starting point but by abiding there, and also finding of ourselves the ever-present need to return in this way, to return to the “prolegomena,” that is, to the beginning.

Convenience

“…that which we call today convenience is in fact inconvenience. Convenience is for one to simplify one’s life and to limit its to the essentials. Then the person is liberated.”
–Elder Paisios the Athonite

trust…

“I did not create myself and I do not uphold myself, but, rather, I am upheld”

undisguised

Undisguised questions beckon undisguised answers, and I think that we are afraid of both.

“A man who gives way to his passions and suffers for it is like a man who is shot by an enemy, catches the arrow in his hands, and then plunges it into his own heart. A man who is resisting his passions is like a man who is shot at by an enemy, and although the arrow hits him, it does not seriously wound him because he is wearing a breastplate. But the man who is uprooting his passions is like a man who is shot at by an enemy, but who strikes the arrow and shatters it or turns it back into his enemy’s heart. As the psalmist says, ‘Their own sword shall enter their own heart and their bow shall be broken to pieces.’”
–Abba Dorotheos of Gaza, Discourses and Sayings pg. 171

‘Tear from me the limb that causes me to sin!’

‘No. Remove it from yourself with prayer and fasting.’

A Call to Prayer

Prayer is intensified by fasting, not fasting by prayer…

“First increase your prayer, not by quantity but by consistency; pray with regularity and then you may strive for ceaseless rememberance of God. Strive to pray with warmth of heart, if it seems false–as if empty structures are being born from your lips in the form of words–pause and ask for help! Prayer is an act of communion with God and no mere formality.”

“Pray adopting the words of our holy forebears, as an act of trust, and ask of the Holy Spirit to activate those very words within you. Only by the activity of the Holy Spirit can we come to know the meaning of our prayers in speaking and chanting them. Oh, how difficult it is for someone so weak as me to pray with mindfulness–so immature is my action but so God-given is my desire!”

Faith/Works

Here’s one of my more recent writings, a little reflection upon the relationship between faith and works in the Epistle of St. James.

——————————————————————————————–

Faith precedes works, is proven by works, and is increased by works.  What is meant by this word “works”?  The Greek term “ergon” has the simple literal meaning of “work” as in the plain English usage–a task or job, or the means by which a task for job is carried out.  As with most words their purpose is to serve a function within a context–the context of a sentence or a thought.  The meaning of a word is often determined by the context of its usage.

In the case of the epistle of St. James, 2:14-26, the word is used in relation to the other principal term “faith” (Gr. pistis).  Based on the usage by St. James we find that the two are not rightly understood unless seen as in a relationship of mutuality, complimentarity.  This is gathered from such statements as “..faith, if it has no works, is dead” (v. 17), and “…as a result of the works, faith was perfected” (v. 22).  The righteous Patriarch and friend-of-God Abraham is given as the example of one in whom both faith and works were embodied, “..and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.”

Now faith comes when one concedes to the fact of the limitation of his own knowledge while realizing there is much more to reality than his personal perception and/or experience of it.  For the Christian this means placing our hope in the incomprehensible yet self-revealing God Who has made Himself known to us as three persons in one essence–a relational-ontological unity.  This also mens, then, that God is the source of all knowledge, and that “knowledge” (Gr. gnosis) is a quality of relationship rather than a quantity (as in the phrase:  ”he knows a lot.”  

Faith, I believe, is hope in the potential–the God-given capacity–of human people to know God.  A relational knowledge of God is not static, it is not a state-of-mind (even of the active mind), it transforms the whole of one’s being, forms the thought of man by the Holy Spirit, and informs the actions of the one who is being transformed.

We cannot say “my faith is sufficient,” as if faith is merely an internal disposition.  In Christ we begin to regain the “birthright of beauty” [St. Athanasius] that had been sold by our first-parents.  What was beautiful about our first-parents was not an inherent beauty-of-self that made them greatly attractive, but the purity of their love and innocent knowledge of God.

All action of man prior to the Transgression was not an artificial attempt at expressing inner disposition, but was as much a part of his being as his thoughts.  So now we, by the gift of faith, gradually move toward living in the knowledge of God–which is rendered spurious if done as only inwardly (by “faith”) or only outwardly (by “works”).  The statement of St. James “…faith, if it has no works, is dead, being by itself” (v. 17b), is one regarding the essential unity of the human person.  Just as the God in Whose image we have been created is a relational unity in Whom there is no division between outward and inward, so we who are being re-made must not hold in ourselves a dead faith (a faith that belongs to the mind alone), but must allow for the enlivening of our entire being by enacting our faith.

Look to the stars…

Look to the stars and consider Christ…

Here is a poem that my wife wrote for the Nativity that I am just sharing now, it is relevant even now;  Christ is with us!

 

In the winter of humanity

When man was in his darkest hour and our own pride had failed us

You came.

A tiny radiant star in the arms of your mother

with glory shooting out into the darkness

Whose beams shone forth and pierced the rotted hollows of despair

A glimmer of what was to come

wrapped in the body of a sleeping babe

With blue veins and ivory nails

And eyes that reflected the awesome mysteries of Heaven  ….sparkling like two fresh stars 

There, in the solemn veil of the midnight hour, our great redemption came

Into the care of the meek and dutiful

whose faith revived our fallen joy

and set the clock against the bonds of death

So that all the world heaved a hopeful sigh

And made the mightiest of kings give pause and follow

To see that glorious salvation shining outward on the earth

Like shimmering slivers of starlight

That settled bright upon the faces of the lost.

[written by Kara Vollman, 2008]

 

—————————————————————————————————-

For those interested, here’s a link to a recently posted article by Metropolitan Jonah Paffhausen titled, “Creativity and Tradition”:  http://www.oca.org/jonah-2009-0202.html

(my lack of savvy prohibits me from posting an active link)