What is History?

When I was in High School, I didn't enjoy studying history. I felt like I was just expected to regurgitate a list of dates, names, events and other information that simply reflected my caring enough about the class to pay attention and memorize the material. This was my mistake. In my mid twenties, a friend who happens to also be a high school history teacher encouraged me to read Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. This book changed my perspective from thinking that history is a bland retelling of what everyone knows already happened, to appreciating it as a study of how the perspectives of the people living at that time resulted in things turning out the way that they did. Rather than seeing the past as a drab happenstance of obsolete events, I see both history and our current lives as an ongoing study of human nature, with the past informing the present.

What does this have to do with Orthodoxy? Well there is a simple first layer of "Church history is like secular history in that the interest lies not only in the events and decisions that were made, but also in the role of the people involved, and specifically the work of the Person of the Holy Spirit as one of the participants in the life of the Church." If we leave it at that, however, then we miss that the "history of the Church" is not really just the past because Spiritual Time is not past, present and future but rather an Eternal Present. If instead of treating history like a series of events, but rather as a window into a reality of how things happen in our world, then Church "history" in some way should also take into consideration future events that we know will happen based on Faith.

Allow me to illustrate with an example, as I fear that neither of us thinks that I am making any sense. Let's take a historical event that informs our understanding of human nature. Any event will do, but let's take something a bit controversial like the moon landing of Apollo 13. Most people take this event as a historical fact, but there are some who paint it as a government conspiracy intended to fabricate an air of superiority over our Soviet rivals. If this event did happen, then it opens up a whole world of possibilities and astronauts are inspired to further our understanding of space by sending a rover to Mars, launching probes that travel into outer space and even land a space probe on a comet. Furthermore, there are myriad lessons to be learned in studying how we got an astronaut on the moon less than ten years after President Kennedy vowed that we would. Alternatively, if the whole thing is a giant government conspiracy then there is an alternate reality with different downstream events that some purport to be true. 

Another historical example that falls in the linear past (and Eternal Present) is the Resurrection of Christ. If this event did happen, then He has conquered death by death, and has given life to those who are dead in sin. Furthermore, there is an infinite amount of knowledge that we can glean from studying the person of Christ, the Incarnate Word. However, "if Christ is not risen, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins! Then also those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished" (1 Corinthians 15:17-18). The message here is that the Wisdom of the Church relies on the Truth of the Resurrection, which must have happened in order for anything we believe to hold water. The interesting thing, is that we are not just looking at this as a historical event in the past, but by saying that we believe that the Resurrection of Christ is a historical fact then the resurrection of the human race must also be an event in time ... it just happens to be in the future.

Looking at history in this way is a shift from the "memorize and regurgitate" approach that I was guilty of taking in high school. Instead of studying events as facts, we can see them as a way of understanding ourselves and each other, thus allowing the study of history to fit in with the study of other disciplines that help us to appreciate the incomprehensibly beautiful world that He has created for us. May God help us to see history as a way of learning about ourselves, each other, and His Love for us. May He help us to see everything past, present and future as part of His Economy of Grace. May He give us the spiritual eyes to see His hand in everything that happens in the world.

Take Not Your Holy Spirit

The Apostles were not always on the best terms with each other. They argued. They debated. They parted ways. All the while they continued to seek God. All the while they allowed the Holy Spirit to work in them to teach them to forgive. Rather than insist on their opinion they let the Holy Spirit work among them to help them clarify which issues needed to be a certain way and which issues were not matters of strict dogma. They chose Unity. They chose the Love of the Trinity. God blessed their choice and gave them a unified community that reflected their unified heart. 

We no longer have this unified Christian community and the greatest obstacle is the lack of unity in our hearts. The church of St. Mark and the church of St. Peter and the church of St. Andrew are in dialogue and are making progress towards unity. However, until the day there is a mutual declaration of Communion, we remain divided. It is heartbreaking for me to attend a Eucharistic service in another denomination without being allowed to partake of the Body and Blood of Christ. 

The key question I want to ask is - "did that make you uncomfortable?" I referred to the Communion in the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Catholic Church as the Body and Blood of Christ. If it didn't make you feel uncomfortable then you didn't think about it. This should absolutely make you feel uncomfortable. The Mystical Body of Christ is on the altar. It is either on the altar in all of these churches, some of these churches or none of these churches. Those are the only three options, and none of them make sense until all the churches are in Communion with each other. 

I have written before on Radical Unity and now I want to ask "what are the criteria for unity?" Having this conversation with people brings out many obstacles to unity, some of which I understand and some of which I don't. The reality is that we will most likely never fully reconcile on doctrine. Maybe that seems pessimistic but I would say that in the crucifixion of the "unity in doctrine" approach we can find the resurrection of the "unity for the sake of unity" approach. Now before you decide that this is ultra liberal, relativist, left wing propaganda, please understand that I am not saying that everyone and anyone should be able to take communion anywhere any time. 

What I am saying is that if someone is baptized, chrismated and fully participatory in a church that celebrates the Eucharist as the True Body and Precious Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ then we must, in Charity, accept their Faith. We must accept the children of St. Andrew and St. Peter and hope that they accept us as the children of St. Mark. We must work out our differences and disagreements as the Apostles did. We must continue to recognize that we may disagree with each other, but God has mainatined his presence with each of us. 

We find further proof for this approach within our own denominations. People, even scholars, within each denomination disagree with each other on key theological points. We do not respond to this by sounding the alarm and telling everyone to stop taking communion until we work out our differences. We continue to invite the Holy Spirit to descend and convert the bread and wine into Body and Blood. We continue to commune individually in that same Mystical Body that unifies us despite our differences. Within each church the Mystery of the Eucharist unifies a church that in many ways is divided among itself. 

If we wait for dogmatic unity we will never find unity. If we wait for agreement on theological points of contention we will never find unity. If we prioritize ideas over people we will never find unity. Unless one can make a rational argument that proves that one of these apostolic churches has the True Body and Blood and the others don't, I would say that we already have Unity. We may not be "allowed" to take Communion in the other churches, but we already take Communion there when we partake of the same Body and Blood in our church. It is time that we consider making it official.  

Grace in Conscious Incompetence

We all want to be good. We all want to make a difference. We want our parents to be proud of us. We want to feel successful. Previously, I have written that to be truly successful is to be a hero, which by definition comes with sacrifice. I have also expressed my personal frustration with how God's calling to submit our will to His will becomes a little overwhelming at times. Eventually, we experience that His yoke is sweet and His burden is light, and we learn to accept our own imperfect participation in His economy of grace. The question today is where does one start on this path?

St. Augustine taught us that our spiritual life starts with God's grace. It is not we that effect our own salvation (Pelagianism) or even we that initiate it by approaching God (Semi-Pelagianism), but rather God who formed us, created us, and placed us into the paradise of joy, and when we disobeyed His commandment He did manifest Himself to us through our Lord, God and Saviour Jesus Christ (Coptic Liturgy of St. Basil). How do we respond to that rapprochement that God is seeking?

If we look at our spiritual life as our "capacity to submit to and accept God's love" then let us evaluate that as any other skill with Maslow's Four Stages of Competence. Briefly, as we learn any skill we first know so little that we do not even know how little we know (Stage 1 - Unconscious Incompetence). As we start to learn, we first simply realize how little we know, without necessarily having learned anything (Stage 2 - Conscious Incompetence). With time, we learn more and more, but it takes very deliberate attention to what we are doing to demonstrate the skill (Stage 3 - Conscious Competence) and eventually the skill becomes second nature (Stage 4 - Unconscious Competence). The most dangerous person is the person who thinks they are competent, but they are simply unaware of their incompetence. 

This awareness of limitations is critical in fields like surgery, where the individual is given full license to do "what they feel is appropriate," which tempts some surgeons to overestimate their abilities. This is equally relevant for people in a position of authority in the church, who are not just responsible for the body, but the soul and spirit of the parishioners. It is for this reason we are discouraged by St. James from becoming teachers because of the high stakes associated with leading someone astray (Mark 9:42; James 3:1). Therefore, I would argue that the most important take home message from Maslow's Four Stages is not that we should learn to be competent but that we should learn to be conscious of our incompetence and aware of our limitations.

If we think deeply about conscious incompetence, we realize that it is essentially our permanent spiritual state on earth because we can only see Him dimly for now no matter how much "competence" we may gain over the course of our life (1 Cor 13:12). Therefore, we cannot be better than Moses who "continually climbed to the step above and never ceased to rise higher, because he always found a step higher than the one he had attained" (St. Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Moses). Our spiritual conscious incompetence is simply a longer, more technical term for humility, which is not a virtue that we should actively seek, but rather a virtue that is a natural byproduct of being conscious of our own incompetence. This increase in awareness comes either naturally, as a function of grace, or from suffering, which Dr. Jean-Claude Larchet teaches us that God, "without ever being the cause of sickness and suffering, can nevertheless allow them to occur, and he can use them to further the ill person's spiritual progress" (Theology of Illness, page 47). Perhaps we must wait for God's surgical excision of the cancer of our pride, but with self-examination we may reach the realization that we perpetually do not know as much as we think we know.

What do we do with this information? I will sit with myself. I will question myself. I will study theology only so far as it brings me to the Eucharist to partake of His Body and Blood in a perpetually anamnestic search for spiritual competence. I will value love over dogma, praying for more bold steps toward radical unity. May God give us the gift of humility to know our limitations, so that we may give space for His grace to work.

Faith Sucks

We struggle to try to "do the right thing." We struggle to know God's will. We struggle to reconcile His will with our will, which often means bargaining for some time and fooling ourselves that it is ok to be faithful in fulfilling God's will on our own terms. Ultimately, we hope to eventually learn to carry our cross and be patient, waiting for God to work. This is hard, and it helps to vent to a friend from time to time and share the struggle.

I was commiserating about spiritual struggles over dinner with a friend on Thursday night, and there was a group of people talking next to us about religion and church attendance. We only overheard snippets of the conversations like "that's why I love the Lutherans because you can do whatever you want!" It seemed as though their conversation shared the same bit of our anxiety in managing the challenges of our Christian spiritual lives. Then we overheard one young lady at the table responded to all this with "I wouldn't know, I'm an atheist." This stopped me in my tracks with envy. My immediate reaction was "how fortunate you are." 

I wish I were an atheist. I wish I could deny God's existence. I wish I could escape the responsibility of being a witness for Christ. Clearly, faith is a laudable characteristic in the Judeo-Christian ethos (1 Sam 2:35, Rev. 3:14, I Cor 4:17, Col 4:7, II Tim 2:2, Matt 25:21) and we admire all the members of the hall of faith in Hebrews 11. However, there is not a single example of someone who did not suffer in some way for this faith, and in the short term their life would have been much easier to deny their faith. Jonah is a good example of someone who recognized the challenge of being faithful to God's will. His decision to go in the opposite direction of Nineveh was not just an act of defiance - it was based on a hope that God did not exist on the boat or in Tarshish. He wanted to be an atheist. The captain of the boat woke him up and reminded him that God exists and that his faith in God comes with a responsibility. 

Maybe I'm the only one. Maybe all the other Christians in the world are in perpetual honeymoon bliss with Our Lord, the Beloved. Maybe I need more faith. Unfortunately, I cannot say that I feel that way sometimes. When I feel my spiritual life is making demands I cannot meet, I do not naturally wish to have the faith of Abraham - I wish to have the faith of Jonah. I do not want to sacrifice Isaac, I want to run away and pretend God does not exist. This may not make any sense, but it doesn't have to make any sense as long as I end with #justsayin.

Be a Hero

There are many words in the English language that have partially lost their meaning as a result of colloquial overuse (like, literally, love, etc). One of those words is "hero." We say things like "X is my hero" when X is a person that is famous for being rich or funny or fun to be around. It's not bad to be any of those things but does that really constitute heroism?

If we try to think about how to properly define the modern hero, we should come up with a common attribute that is shared among people that anyone would consider a "real hero" like a firefighter who risks himself to save others, a father who invests his whole self in supporting his family, or even Christ Himself who sacrificed everything for the sake of Love. The common denominator, the DNA of heroism, is self sacrifice for the sake of someone or something else. 

This element of self denial is crucial because if someone makes a sacrifice for his own sake, it is not really a sacrifice but an investment or calculated risk. This is all fine and good if we are talking about success, but once again, I think we need to make a real distinction between success and heroism - only then can we ask ourselves which one we should really admire. If we aspire to have a world that is filled with successful people, then we would expect everyone to be above average. This the world of inflated grades, participation trophies and entitlement in the workplace. If we are tired of this world, we can only escape it by aspiring to have a world that is filled with heroes, so that we may expect everyone not to care where they are in the bell curve but rather care how much they sacrifice of themselves for others. 

This is a new world that admires St. Therese of Lisieux, the little flower of Jesus, not because she "did anything special" but simply because she exchanged love with God and others without expecting that to be a currency for self aggrandizement. We have much to learn from this idea of loving and giving up of ourselves without expecting that this will in some way increase our stature. It is a soft deception to love with expectation. 

Again I write here to myself. Again I write hoping someone will read this and see me one day in my hypocrisy and say "didn't you write about this and say not to do that?" May God help us all to repent from our selfish ways. May He help us to see others ahead of ourselves. May He help us to be heroes like Him who first loved us.