Life Along the Orthodox Way
If you are looking for a charity to support or an almsgiving opportunity as you prepare for Christmas please consider Jakob. This young man is a member of the parish I serve and his cause is the real deal. His struggle with illness defines courage and whatever you could do to help would be appreciated. Thank you.
https://www.gofundme.com/sh6z66ad
Pray, first, because we are more alike than different. Given the money, fame, and access, which one of can say with certainty that we could have kept the powers of sin, struggle, and addiction away from our lives? Even without them we often fall so it is perhaps a grace that we don’t have more and thereby increase our risk.
Pray, again, because more than likely that wealth and access will be quickly gone and the fame will grow very shallow. There will be lawsuits by those who were deceived and damaged. There will be opportunities lost and expenses incurred. When the good times stop the good time friends may disappear, replaced by a kind of loneliness softened only by the discovery of those who were true and good all the time.
Pray, some more, because these wonderful drugs that keep people alive also rule the lives of those who take them. Life is measured by the dates and times and doses and everything must be done with great precision and little spontaneity Far away from the lights and the public persona there will always be a Charlie who knows that his life hangs by a pharmaceutical thread and even the lowest of viral loads doesn’t mean that this infection is gone, just hidden somewhere in a quiet spot where the current tests still can’t reach. This will be his life.
Pray, as well, because the potential of his life is still enormous. Sanity, health, and wholeness are often found through difficult circumstances and as long as there is life there is always hope. Truly, as St. Augustine is reputed to have said “There is no Saint without a past or a sinner without a future.” God is not done with any one of us and neither is he done with Mr. Sheen.
Pray, finally, for ourselves. Seeing someone struggle and bear the consequences of that struggle should never elicit any thought or emotion in us save for humility in knowing that we, too, are capable of our own kinds of struggles, sins, and darkness. Yes, perhaps this was not our particular sin but we each have our own and in their own way they are deadly to us as well.
If he were here, I guess I would say only this to Charlie, “God loves you more than you can possible imagine and His grace is greater than any darkness you or I may wrestle with in our lives. There is better for you if you want it and God’s door is always open.”
born of selfishness and entitlement unfulfilled. All around me the world I live in shouts “What you feel is what is real and what you feel you need is what the rest of the world is obligated to provide.” When this is not true, which is more often the case than not, I am told that raging against whatever is outside of me that has failed my feelings is my right, my obligation even, until the ever-changing feelings and needs inside of me are satiated.
I reject this even as I understand that in doing so it can be like a fish rejecting water. This is the ocean I swim in, the river that is my home, and the pond where I was born, and yet I know this, all around me, is not the real world even as it surrounds me everywhere. So I resist as I can, asking God for peace, for insight, and a sense of eternity in the world of time. My own world is too small and it is constantly unsettled and angry because of its smallness and in moments when I am distant from the Truth I can feel the anger of my tiny world’s unfulfilled entitlement swelling inside until I am ready to burst.
I must die, daily even, to this small world and its rage. Daily I must recall its illusions, its shadows, and its emptiness. Instead of the thousand shouting voices all around me telling me to burn and hate and consume and make war I must listen to the one voice that matters, the still, small, voice that comes after the storm and earthquakes and fire have passed. That is the voice of God. The rest is madness.
This life, this Christian way, is not a path for cowards. Our Lord was not joking when he told his followers they would have to, if they wished to be with him, “Take up their cross…” and the longer you travel along this Beautiful Path the more you will see of just that.
Still, although there are often temptations to step back from the challenges, go with the flow, and somehow find a way to walk without always having to face into the wind there is, above all, Christ.
There is a deep and profound beauty in Jesus, a vibrant and lively truth, and a sense of eternity embodied in Him that endures through time. When we draw close to Him there is a deep blessedness and even when we wander away there is still a light and hope that can draw us through the darkness.
In this world, our Lord says, we will have many troubles but his voice also adds this calm assurance “Do not fear for I have overcome the world…”. Banged up and bruised, crawling through the night if that’s the best we can do, we remain his and he is ours and those who truly understand this can never go back.
in a certain kind of way. Yet, before you get worried or call 911 or think I’m off my rocker I need to explain what I mean because in a Christian context that statement is remarkably different from how it may be expressed in the world.
As I get older I have the advantage and disadvantage of having more experience, of having seen more of life than I did when I was in my youth and physical prime. There’s a good to that because one can learn much and gain wisdom if their eyes and ears and heart is open through the years to take in and learn the lessons of life. I sometimes tell people that I wish I had everything I know about the world now and my 18-year-old body. Alas, my whole self has had to travel through time to get to this point and while parts of my body are already beginning their slow decline, I feel a sense of depth, wholeness, and understanding flourishing within of the kind that only comes with age.
The disadvantage that comes with age is that experience is also the experience of years of struggle and pain. The longer one lives the more one sees of war, poverty, brokenness, all the pathologies birthed in human sin. Such things stack up over the years and they can be wearying to the soul. Within myself I am continually reminded of enduring temptations and challenges and without I see a world simultaneously full of great beauty and great pain. It can be overwhelming.
And because of that as I get older I am growing less wary of death. Yes, I would still like to live because there is much that is worth keeping alive even in a fallen world. There are places to go, things to see, people to meet, and above all there is still, despite our best efforts to extinguish it, love and hope everywhere if people would only look up from their phones to see it. This world is still a place of God’s grace and an arena where we can know and live in it.
Still I see the gift that is death, at least if you see it from the Orthodox perspective. While death is an expression, the ultimate expression, of our brokenness and alienation, it has within it it, because of Christ, the seed of eternal life. It would not be good, I think, to live perpetually in a broken world. It would be wearying and deadly to us to experience over and over again the countless challenges and struggles of this world as it is. There is a kind of mercy in death, a mercy God provides so that we can rest and be taken from this world to be with Him until such time as God returns this world to what it was meant to be. In that sense I sometimes envy those who have gone to be with Christ. Their course is finished. Their tasks are completed. The pains of this present world have no power over them. They rest, and there are days when that rest in Christ can be quite appealing.
Still, my turn, for sure, will also come. I don’t plan to either hurry it along or needlessly attempt to delay its arrival. When it comes it comes and I hope that its presence will find me in faith and doing good things until the very last. Christ’s transforming death is also, for me, Christ’s transforming of life. My prayer is that because death has been transformed I can be transformed even now in anticipation and hope of that day when I, too, will rest in hope.
22 If I am to go on living in the body, this will mean fruitful labor for me. Yet what shall I choose? I do not know! 23 I am torn between the two: I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far; 24 but it is more necessary for you that I remain in the body. 25 Convinced of this, I know that I will remain, and I will continue with all of you for your progress and joy in the faith, 26 so that through my being with you again your boasting in Christ Jesus will abound on account of me. Philippians 1
on Sunday mornings so I have the place all to myself at least for a few minutes. I know, the point is that we gather in community but before the work of the Liturgy I have time to do little tasks, light candles, fire up the censer, warm some water, the little details that will make everything flow in the hours ahead. Such things are a kind of offering for me, tidying up the place is a kind of worship because of Who we expect to be with us.
I find a kind of shelter, as well, in those quiet moments of simple tasks. My world can be busy, electric, digital, and full of people. I crave the silence of the early morning church, the time to take deep breaths and try to distance my heart from the world outside. I’m not trying to hide. I’ll go back into that world soon enough. Still, a moment or two of peace in a holy place is a enduring kind of sustenance.
Perhaps visitors who come to my church will see the colors, vestments, and beautiful things and think only about the practicality of it all. Couldn’t you have done with less? Don’t you know that there are poor people out there who could have benefitted from what you paid for that chalice? All of that is true in its own way and a very real part of our lives is dedicated to making sure that those enduring human needs are being met in the name of Christ.
Yet, I need beauty and holiness as well, the idea, the reality that there are places in the world where the world itself stops for a while and heaven seems close. I know God is everywhere but at the same time I cherish being in a place where He is the only reason for its existence, a place where God is deliberately and lovingly invited to be with us and all the angels and Saints are welcome as well. Such places are growing rarer in this world, and, simple or elaborate, each one is a refuge from time and space, a place where the weary can find some rest and where in the quiet moments before Liturgy, alone in a room full of candles, icons, and the smell of incense, I become truly alive.
has been on my mind since my return from there in the earlier part of this month. The people, the places, everything I saw and learned has been, and is, being processed back in my busy world of city lights and noise.
Alaska is wild and immense, a cluster of towns and many more very small villages and wide spots in the road surrounded by vast, barely, or entirely untamed, places. Two states of Texas would easily fit inside Alaska and the people there have mostly dispensed with the idea of roads from place to place in favor of airplanes and ships to cover the distances. There is civilization, for sure, but all of it always seems to be on the edge of something that hints of the days before modern humans brought their machines.
It is certainly, at least legally as legalities go these days, part of the United States. I wonder if the people who had been living there for thousands of years were puzzled, perhaps even infuriated, by the idea that two countries much less timeless than their nations could sell and trade that which was not theirs to begin with. Sill the native culture is resilient and distant laws created by people without an understanding are usually quietly endured or ignored whenever possible. The rules of living in this land seem to make certain things so regardless of foreign machinations.
And those rules, those rules of nature and the endless motion of the seasons, ensure that those who would seek to thrive in this Alaska need to learn to adapt. The foods that are eaten, the kinds of shelter that can be built, the ways of moving across the land, all of them are ultimately decided by nature’s larger wisdom and direction. You may have an airplane, but when the fog comes in off the ocean and nothing can be seen, that plane must stay where it is and whatever you were hoping it would bring will have to wait as well. There is much to eat but you have to know what it is, where it is, and how to harvest and keep it as Alaska itself determines the menu unless you wish to pay the significant costs of an imported diet. Seasons are larger than days, the weather larger than planners, and the people have a directness with the wisdom that comes from living in a place where safety nets may be few and far between.
There is a generosity in the people as well, a kindness of heart to strangers as long as they are willing to listen, learn, and not exploit or condescend. Alaskans, especially the natives, are not stupid or unsophisticated. They have lived in this very different place since, in some cases, the beginning of time as we understand it and know the rules, the actualities, the way things really are. If you are a guest and wish to share in this, the doors, the dinner tables, and hearts will always be open. If you come with theories, lab results, or a sense you know better, you will be, like distant laws, either quietly endured or ignored.
As there is a beauty to the people there is also beauty to the land. Even the most, as we would describe them, barren spaces have a kind of awesomeness to them. There are places, here, where people have still not been, places where time stands still, and nature presents on a scale that is stunning to those whose whole lives have been lived in tiny boxes in big cities. In certain places human beings are potentially still part of the food chain and this wildness can go on for what seems like forever.
It would behoove a person, I suppose, to visit Alaska at least once in their lives. Still, if you go take the place as it is and leave it exactly as you found it. Spiritually, physically, geographically, and culturally, the whole place will always be thousands of miles from where you live and trying to mold it into your image will be as futile as trying to stop the rain from falling. Enjoy, visualize, bask, and then take all of that, and nothing else from the place because that is enough.
I suppose, to be an atheist. I think I would find it a very difficult way of life.
The hardest part of it, for me, would be this. If I were to truly be an atheist it would behoove me to understand that everything I see around me and that which I sense within, the things like love, beauty, truth, hope, faith, and more, have no connection to anything transcendent or trans rational either in the universe or myself but are simply illusions created in the wiring of my brain, biochemical reactions that billions of years of random mutations have given me for the sole cause of the continued reproduction of my species. Even the fact that I was aware of such things would be no more than a series of evolved electrical impulses.
That would seem, to me, to be an empty kind of life. Be born, do what’s needed to sustain and pass on my genetic material, and then return to nothingness. Just the realization that this is all there is and that nothing of the spirit, the arts, the beauty, the love, of the world is anything more than a highly evolved survival mechanism would seem to empty any sense of “life” from existence.
I presume, of course, that an atheist would beg to differ but I would be interested in discovering on what grounds? Hope, I suppose would be one answer, hope that the random roll of the dice is still happening and that in some future moment the answers will come, the why of all of those things that seem to make us most human being revealed in a way that requires nothing or no one beyond ourselves. Still, that hope sounds a lot like faith, perhaps even religion.
and we all should be grateful for that because if God were of mind to practice strict justice with humanity, with us, “Who” as the Psalmist would say “could stand?”
But why is God merciful? One reason, among the others, has been on my mind.
God extends mercy to us so that we have the potential to return to him. Our brokenness is so deep that God, in love realizing that the strictest form of holy response to our numerous sins, struggles, and failings would be our eternal undoing, gives us time, time to come to ourselves, time to come to him, time to turn from the various sins which challenge us, and time to have some beginning, at least, to heal.
When Jesus encountered the woman who committed adultery he refused to join in with those who were seeking immediate justice and retribution for what she had done, even though he, being without sin, could really have been the first to throw the executioner’s stones at her. Instead he told her two things. First, he was not going to be like those who were ready to condemn her to death and, second, he was giving her the gift of mercy, the gift of time to “Go and sin no more…”
I suppose it is possible, when we really think about it, that God has given each of in our lives more mercy than we could ever imagine or measure, more times when He chose to stay the immediate implementation of righteous judgment in favor of granting each us broken and fallible people the chance, the time, and the potential, to realize our lost state and find our way home.
Without this great gift where would I be? Where would any of us be?
When it comes to sin if I haven’t done it I’ve probably at least had a passing thought about it and I suppose that if God would give me an unvarnished and undeceived view of myself I would discover things I would definitely rather not know or share.
Yet that doesn’t mean I’m hopeless.
I’m on a journey, you see, a journey of transformation where, by God’s grace, I hope to be changed, even if it’s at a very slow place, into something that looks more and more like Jesus who is purity, truth, love, freedom, and joy itself. And as I travel I’ve seen glimpses, short ones for sure, but real nonetheless, of what that destination is like. They are beautiful, peaceful, integrated, whole, and full of indescribable light. In a weary world their brevity still brings great peace to me, fresh water from a pure stream, a cloudless summer day, and the sense that time itself is temporary.
So I’m not pure. Yet I’ve seen what that purity looks like. It looks like Jesus, and I’ve decided that even though I know I’ll fall sometimes, and even though my life and my most profound ideals won’t always match, it would still be better trying to gain those lofty heights than to settle into the comfortable numbness of an ordinary life, a life spent achieving everything less than what the God who loves me would like to share.
It’s just that I’ve seen life as it could be, and even if I trip and fall I’m not able to go back.
The Beautiful Path 