Sex Before Marriage

All my life, I've been trying to figure out what it means to "do the right thing." As a Coptic Orthodox Christian, you would think it would be simple - just follow the rules of your religion, and you'll be fine. Even if I were not one to question everything (which I am), it has not always been clear to me what it means to be Coptic Orthodox Christian, or who even makes the rules.

Let's not be so naive to say "God makes the rules." Anyone who likes a rule will tell you that God made the rule, and anyone who doesn't like a rule will say "God never said that." To speak for God is a presumption that should be reserved for the foolish or the divine, and you never know which one you're dealing with.

Sex Before Marriage

We all think we know the rules for a good boy or a good girl in the Coptic Orthodox Church: you do not have sex before marriage, and as soon as you get married you only have sex so you can make grandchildren and deacons, the prized possessions of any Coptic community. This is not complete nonsense, but it's hard to parse out what's the truth, what's the Truth, and what's the nonsense.

The truth is what we really believe as a community. The Truth is what God would want us to believe if we could truly discern the Mind of God. The nonsense is what happens when we allow culture to speak for God.

A community is defined by its members, and it can be any size. A recently immigrated Coptic family is a small community. Egypt is a large community. Each community will have a way of establishing and enforcing norms, which are often framed as both enforceable and unenforceable rules. These rules are not arbitrary, but they are a combination of existential realities and sociocultural preferences, both of which are key to forming a shared community identity.

An existential reality is a rule that you cannot change even if you try. It is a rule that God made that becomes clear to us as a rule through what I like to call spiritual physics. Just as there are physical laws of nature, there are spiritual laws of nature. Just as we can discern the law of gravity, we can discern the spiritual world that God created for us.

Sociocultural preferences will vary from one community to another. Depending on the size and complexity of the community, they can even vary within a community. We have Coptic Orthodox Christians who think it is "not Christian" to dance, get tattoos, or drink alcohol. Are these things inherently bad? If you dance provocatively, get a naughty tattoo, or drink irresponsibly then yes these things can become damaging to your body, soul, and spirit.

I understand there may be genuine confusion about what is an existential reality and what is a sociocultural preference; however, we must resist the temptation to declare something to be True, when all we mean is that we believe it to be true and have agreed together as a community that we will behave as if it were true. Unlike murder, which is universally recognized as morally wounding to the murderer, it is hard to make a strong case that sex outside of marriage is inherently evil.

Let's pause to take a deep breath and reread what we have said so far to be crystal clear that I have not said "It is ok to have sex outside of marriage." What I have said is that there are different reasons that we choose to do or not do things. We choose to wait for marriage as Coptic Orthodox Christians because this is the sociocultural norm that we have agreed upon as a community. This is as good a reason as any to do something.

Managing Diabetes

Let's take a little detour and settle our frustrations by talking about diabetes for a few moments. We have many people in our community who struggle to control their blood sugars, and their success or failure in doing so relies on the rules that govern their diabetes management. These rules are not arbitrary, but they are a combination of existential realities and sociocultural norms that each individual uses to create a personal rule book to follow.

It is an existential reality that consuming carbohydrates elevates your blood sugars, some people have insulin deficiency/resistance that makes it impossible/harder for them to clear that sugar from their bloodstream, and consistently elevated sugars wreak havoc on all of your organs including your heart, your kidneys, and your brain.

It is a sociocultural norm that Egyptian people love to eat carbs. It is simply cruel to expect a human being to feel truly alive knowing that macarona bechamel exists, but you can't have any. There is a reason my good friend and colleague, Dr. Tamer Yacoub, is a very busy diabetes specialist in Fall River, MA. Most of the population near our medical practice is Portuguese and for some reason, it is typical for a Portuguese meal to be served with rice, bread, and potatoes.

A friend recently told me that one of the reasons he has trouble managing his diabetes is because he does not want to live longer at the expense of his happiness. His father lived to a ripe old age but at the cost of not being able to eat anything more than chicken and vegetables. My friend would rather eat whatever he wants and be happy than extend an unhappy life.

The tensions between our existential realities and our sociocultural norms are real. Biology tells us that we should eat healthy, and our culture tells us we are required to gain 30 pounds in the Holy 50 Days. We do not have to submit ourselves to a false choice between two extremes. Finding a balance requires an understanding of what is the right thing to do, and what would make us more or less likely to do the right thing.

Proclivities and Propensities

We all have different proclivities and propensities. Our proclivities are the sources of dopamine that we are drawn to, and our propensities are the potential negative consequences that we are prone to facing. A person who has a proclivity to eat Nutella out of the jar and a family history of diabetes is in a risky place.

We only have partial control of our proclivities and we have little control of our propensities. The partial control we have of what gives us pleasure comes in the form of how well we are able to control our personal experience. Once we expose ourselves to a source of dopamine, it is impossible to un-know how it feels. Different people respond differently to the same exposure. One person's temptation is another's poison.

The goal is not to avoid all sources of dopamine. The goal is to be aware of which sources of dopamine are most appealing to us and which are the most dangerous for us. This awareness of our proclivities and propensities helps to inform us what rules we should put in place for ourselves to protect us from ourselves. I am not saying that nicotine, cocaine, and alcohol are not dangerous, but I am hoping people realize that sugar may be the most dangerous substance for the Coptic community.

Back to the Sex

The core question that we are wrestling with is "Why should we wait till marriage to have sex?" The answer, as you have already suspected, is a combination of existential realities and sociocultural norms. I do not think it is possible to make an airtight argument for waiting till marriage based on just logic and data. There are definitely very good reasons to wait, but at the end of the day, we will still be left with a remnant of reasonable rational skepticism. Just as we cannot prove that God exists, we must be comfortable declaring our faith, not because we think we are right, but because we are seeking the mystery of what it means to know God.

Sex outside of marriage is a common practice outside of, and not unheard of inside of, our Coptic community. Let's not pretend that this is not the case. Does sex outside of marriage make sense to some people? Yes. Are there objective issues and concerns about sex outside of marriage? Also, yes. Even serial monogamy without a lifelong commitment puts couples in a position where one may be expecting more than the other is willing to give.

The value of the Sacrament of Marriage is more than just the obvious theological and pastoral requirements prescribed by the Coptic Orthodox Faith. There are universally generalizable reasons why it makes sense for two people to stand up in front of everyone they know and make a commitment. It is not just a matter of having witnesses to hold each of them accountable - it also requires each of them to truly examine himself and herself before entering into a hasty decision.

Sex is the ultimate unitive and procreative human experience. It is unitive because of the hormonal release of oxytocin that promotes human bonding and the dopamine that evokes a sense of pleasure. It is procreative in that this is how we create more humans. Are there other acts that are unitive? Yes, but less so. Are there other ways for humans to be productive, generative, and participants in God's divine plan? Yes, but they are all shadows of this unique gift that we have been given to co-create human life with God.

Once we have shared in the making of life, we are responsible for that life. It helps to know that someone will share that responsibility with us, no matter what happens. This partnership is an icon of the Trinity who are the origin and source of love. Parenting is hard, and it is only by the grace of God that we become icons of Christ to our children, as we are helping them to be formed into icons of Christ themselves. It is important to mention briefly here that it is possible to raise children outside of marriage, and some of the clearest images of God's love are seen in single and adoptive parents.

Going back to proclivities and propensities, I do believe that it is a nearly universal proclivity to want to have sex and a universally risky propensity to desire sex in a way that is not edifying to yourself or the object of your desire. This is why it is so important to understand that sin of any kind, including sexual immorality, is damaging to not just your body, but also damaging to your soul and spirit. Like the diabetic eating Nutella out of the jar, any human indulging in sexual promiscuity is playing with fire.

A Godly marriage is one in which each person individually is growing in virtue as an icon of Christ, and the couple collectively is working in cooperation as an icon of the Trinity. This is an existential reality that is True. This is much easier to do if both people in the marriage share the same sociocultural norms and work out of the same rule book.

In Conclusion

I realize I have not made any friends here. The hope of some is that we can prove the inherent wisdom of abstinence from sex before marriage in the same way that they hope to prove the existence of God. Others hope that we can justify all of the ways that we put ourselves in harm's way simply because it is hard to do the right thing.

I started by saying that I am always trying to figure out what it means to do the right thing. Knowing what to do and doing it are not the same thing, even for the great St. Paul as he writes the seventh chapter of his epistle to the Romans. As he also says in 1 Corinthians 13 we now see dimly, as in a mirror, and we are working to discern what it means to love.

Sex is a beautiful thing, and it teaches us more than we hoped to know about love, intimacy, and the sacrifice that is required for two to become one. It is not out of judgment for those who do not wait, but out of encouragement to those who do, that we honor the sanctity of this beautiful act by encouraging everyone to wait.

Fathers Passing

This morning I woke up with a dream in which I was attending my friend's father's funeral. The woman giving the eulogy was telling us that he moved to the United States so long ago that music was different then. She played some of that music, which was timelessly eclectic. It had a beat that made it alive, and a soul that made you feel it in your chest. The young blood in the room reacted with approval, and some of them even chimed in and sang along to these classic songs. My friend's dad is loved by all of the people in the room. They love his timeless soul as much as they love his favorite music.

Losing my father when he was 60 and I was 25 has put me in a bittersweet family of people that have lost their fathers too soon. It is always too soon. The youngest members of this family of mine lost their dad at the ages of 1 and 3 almost 40 years ago. The oldest members are friends who were lucky enough to call their fathers geddu (grandfather) for many years. It is always too soon. The sooner you lose your father the more you feel like he could have passed on to you so much if he were around longer. The later you lose your father the more you feel like he has passed on to you so much and there was still so much more to learn. 

When my father first passed I felt guilty for a long time. I wished I were a better son. I wished I appreciated him more, and I were attentive enough to learn what he had to teach me. Now almost twenty years later I realize this was just another piece of the mosaic of grief that represents the loss of the intellectual contributions of my father in my life. This concept of the mosaic of grief is crafted beautifully by Melissa Kelley, in her book Grief: Contemporary Theory and the Practice of Ministry, where she explains:

"While traditional grief theory can often seem to encourage 'paint-by-number' results, the contemporary field allows us - invites us - to understand each person's grief experience as a particular mosaic, fashioned out of innumerable and varied aspects of one's life, such as one's history of losses, one's relationships, one's ways of making meaning, one's experience of the Divine, one's religious resources, one's sense of community, one's culture, and so on. Each grief mosaic is unique, nuanced, and intricate."

Therefore, even though losing my father was a profound loss, it was accompanied by an equally profound process of ongoing meaning making that continues to shape who I am becoming as a person. Even though my life will never be the same again without him, his death did not mark the end of his deliberate and methodical work of raising me to be someone he is proud to call his son. He continues to pass on to me wisdom about life, about himself, and about the world that he envisioned. These lessons are not written in books or recorded on YouTube videos, but more like trying to retrace your steps back to a place that you remember well enough to think you can get there without a map.

Every time we welcome new members into our family of people who have lost their fathers, I am tempted to write something like this. I am tempted to sit down and share how much I love them, how much I love their fathers, how much their fathers loved them, how much I can appreciate of why it hurts so much to lose them, and so on. The problem is that we are all still left without our fathers, and a silly little essay or blog entry will not change that ... but we do have each other, and our fathers have each other.

I sometimes reflect on what it would be like when Mounir meets Victor and Talaat and Samir and Chuck and Raafat - do they know their kids are friends, and if so, does this make them closer friends in the eternal realm? Do they introduce each other and say "hey, I want you to meet Sameh, he's new, but he's one of us now?" I sure hope so. We have each other here, and it gives me comfort to believe that they have each other there. Maybe they like the same music.

Three years is a long time ....

Over the course of the three years between 2014 and 2017 I contributed to this blog as a means by which to work through some intellectual challenges I was having as a person of faith. One of the reasons I did this in a semi-public forum was to be able to share it with the youth in my community who struggled with some of the same questions, and the other reason was to commit to the ideas in a way that invites dialogue from anyone who comes across what I wrote. It has now been almost three years since my last post, and I am revisiting the content in hopes to incorporating it with new material into a spiritual leadership curriculum that helps in mentoring the future leaders of the Coptic Church. To that end, I will reorganize the previous posts here in a somewhat cohesive narrative, in order to better clarify the gaps that need to be addressed. 

Science/History/Physics

As a scientist by nature and by training, I first have to clarify for myself the relationship between how we learn about the world through science and how God reveals to us why we are here in the first place. Just as it is a metaphysical statement to reject metaphysics, as was done by the logical empiricists of the Vienna Circle, it is an act of faith to believe that God does not exist. The belief in the multiverse is still hypothetical and it currently does not have an even hypothetically falsifiable scientific standing, and it is crucial to distinguish this as a hypothesis and not mistake it for a well worked out theory of science. While I do accept the reality that some people do not consider the existence of God to even be a worthwhile question, I do think it is worth asking, and I have faith that God exists. Within that framework, it is then possible to consider how God has given us the capacity to align our physical reality with our spiritual reality to a unified understanding of the the mystery of time, the relationship between perception of gravity to our spiritual depth, and living in the present. This orients us eschatologically to history as not something that is removed from us in the past but unified with us as we are able to perpetually live out the life of Christ through the anamnesis of the Sacramental life of the church.

Relationship to the Mystical Church

While the relationship to the physical church may be complicated at times, the unity of all Christians to the mystical Body of Christ inthe Eucharist allows us to experience the antifragility of radical unity. Each faith community and each of its members take on a unique combination of differentidiosyncratic elements, but ultimately the spirituality of each church or individual is more than just about the language used in worship or other superficial factors that do not affect the essence of our relationship with God, but rather add to the flavor of how the worship is experienced. The Coptic Church is our mother, and previous generations have passed her down as a gift for us that nurtures us and guides us to engage with God in a physical reality that is a window into a greater spiritual reality. We must therefore avoid seeing the rules of the church as a burden, while at the same time not just treating them as an end in and of themselves. Our relationship with our church is as complex as any other relationship, and we must decide if we are willing to be committed to it despite the ongoing challenges.

Christian Anthropology/Psychology

If we continue to participate in the Sacramental life of the Church, we are then also able to see everything in the world around us through the eyes of its teachings. Our very nature as human beings created to be in the image and likeness of God makes us more than just a physical mortal body. Since we are called upon to be icons of Christ, we must strive to see ourselves and the world around us through God's eyes, so that we can better appreciate how far short we fall of that standard and that it is only through the grace of God that we can grow spiritually. This will be a constant struggle, but we are invited to follow in the example of the saints to serve without expectations and accept our spiritual lives as a perpetual work in progress. The reality is that if we could have complete control over our spiritual growth, this would have a negative effect on its raw, intrinsic beauty. 

Hopefully this train of thought is connected enough and helpful enough that you engage with this material. If there is an inconsistency or fallacy please give me the gift of your voice and the benefit of your correction. To God be glory in all things known and unkown.

Horizons

Watching a full moon set over my roof tonight, I noticed a superficial similarity to the sun setting over the horizon. From where I was sitting, I watched it dip over the edge of the tiles out of sight, but unlike a sunset, all I needed to do was move back a few feet and the moon was still there in full sight. 

Just before this, I was staring at the planets and stars, and wishing as I often do that I could soar out to see them up close. Like a little fly on the wall of a NASA drone, I wish I could look out and enjoy the beauty of outer space. I wonder if one day, when all is said and done, that we will have the freedom to do so. I also wonder if on that day we will still have the same desire to see what we wish to see now. 

For now, I see us all struggling to know more, to see more, to understand more. For now, I see us lamenting our constrained reality, knowing that there is so much more out there that we are not able to experience. If you are like me, you think that if only we could loosen these shackles, even for a few moments, it would open up a window into the reality that we can only now see by Faith.

How many times have I watched a sunset and wished I could watch it over and over again because of its striking, majestic beauty. Tonight, with of the angles and distances involved, I could the moon set over the roof as many times as I wish ... but I only watched it set once. For some reason, my control over the situation was inversely proportional to its intrinsic beauty. What I am guessing is that if I had the same control over the sunset (e.g. if I were in a fast airplane and I could fly back and forth to see the sun set over and over again) I think the sunset would also lose some of its beauty.

It seems as though we are chasing control, but oftentimes this control is not just an illusion but an actual detriment to our appreciation of beauty. Perhaps God can still appreciate the beauty of a sunset. Perhaps He can appreciate it a different way. Perhaps the beauty of a sunset is a metaphor for some kind of beauty that only He can see, for now. All I know, is that I realized tonight that if I somehow obtain the ability to fly out to see the planets and the stars, that the price I pay may be that sunsets will no longer be what they used to be. May God grant me the patience to see what He allows me to see, and no more.

Giving God Space

We have discussed before Maslow's stages of competence and how they relate to spiritual competence. The take home message there is that while we will never be really "competent," we were created to be loved by God and we should strive to accept his grace to help us learn to love Him and each other. If that is the case, then how do we increase in our knowledge of God and not just in our knowledge about God, with the distinction being that we should be improving our relationship with him rather than just "stalking God."

We can start this time by asking what prayer is and how we should pray. We realize that we are limited in our ability to pray by our limited knowledge of God. The more we know God the more we know how to pray, and the more we pray the more we know God. If our destination is prayer, we need to figure out how we are going to "get there" without losing our way with shiny, worldly distractions. We used the analogy of trying to get to Chicago from Boston and accidentally getting on I-87 South at Albany. The sooner you figure out that you're heading in the wrong direction, the sooner you can do something to correct the error and start heading to Chicago, and we identified three ways:

1) Listening to the Holy Spirit or your conscience - this is the equivalent of seeing the road signs and exits a few miles south of Albany and realizing you're heading South on 87 and you need to turn around and go back so you can keep heading west on I-90. To do this, you must be sensitive to the voice of the Holy Spirit, and this can get better or worse with time depending on how attuned you are to His voice.

2) Listening to Spiritual Guidance - this is the equivalent of someone seeing you are driving south through NY or DC and asking "aren't you supposed to be going to Chicago?" We can either listen to their advice or insist that we are heading in the right direction. The more someone knows us the sooner they will notice and hopefully intervene. The more trust we have and the more open we are to taking spiritual guidance, the more likely we are to listen and change direction.

3) Waiting for rock bottom - this is the equivalent of being on a boat to Cuba and finally asking "wait, I'm going to Chicago, why am I on a boat???"

We then discussed many different types/methods of prayer (e.g. psalms, agpeya, psalmody, attending liturgy, singing, personal prayer, petitionary prayer, etc.) and mentioned that it is important that the method does not become the final destination. If we are praying to say that we prayed, then we are still the center of our prayer. We must be most careful not in choosing the method but in our intention - we must keep God at the center of anything we consider to be a prayer.

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. 

The Mystery of Time

How does a novice dare to speak of time? As I have stated before, it is with immense trepidation that I dare to write about anything. For an incredible explanation of the sanctification of time that we experience through the Church, many have recommended the third chapter of Father Alexander Schmemann's For the Life of the World. For the beautiful insight that "the present is the moment that touches eternity," I see the Holy Spirit speak through both CS Lewis in chapter 15 of The Screwtape Letters and Metropolitan Anthony Bloom in the chapter of Beginning to Pray on Managing Time. For a timeless study of human nature in general, and specifically on our (mis)perception of time, I am blown away by book 11 of The Confessions of St. Augustine, where much of this contemplation is drawn from. Having properly tried to deflect you to multiple other sources, I will try to here conform to St. Augustine's exhortation to "increase and multiply" our understanding of our created world, by reinterpreting current scientific knowledge in the Light of God. 

Before getting into the spiritual interpretation, I must first catch up the non-nerds on a few scientific concepts that will be relevant to our discussion here:
1) Time is relative. If person A is moving more quickly than person B, then time will move more quickly for person B than for person A. This was first theorized by Einstein in a thought experiment where he imagined himself traveling alongside a beam of light and concluded that, if the speed of light is constant for any observer, then time must be relative. This video is an excellent explanation of why reference frame is so important, and I encourage you to watch it before moving any further along. If you already knew this "simple stuff" and want something else to blow your mind and make you question our perception of time and space, then you can check this video out instead.
2) Mass and energy are the same thing. One of the most famous equations in the history of science is E=mc², in which E is energy, m is mass and c is the speed of light. This interchangeable nature of mass and energy is seen in the resurrected Christ, Who is a flash of light imprinted on the Shroud of Turin when He exits the tomb, and reconstitutes himself into a physical presence that is not only touched by the disciples but is even able to eat in their presence (Luke 24; John 20).

Fifteen hundred years before Einstein's scientific theory of relativity, St. Augustine philosophically mused that "we measure the passage of time when we measure the intervals of perception." Wisdom is again justified by her children, science and philosophy, both teaching us that time is an example where "perception is reality" and the frame of reference of the observer determines not just how time is perceived but determines the actual, real passage of time. Again, I cannot stress enough the importance of spending even a little bit of time allowing your mind to be blown by the experimentally verified scientific reality that time moves more slowly for objects that move more quickly. If we accept that time is dependent on your frame of reference, then we can see time differently if we understand that a spiritual reference frame will have a very different perception of time from a physical reference frame. I deliberately use spiritual vs. physical and not God vs. man because 1) when God was incarnate as the person of Jesus Christ, He submitted himself to the constraints of time and space as any human, and 2) man is not just body but also soul and spirit, and if we are led by the Holy Spirit we can partake of the divine nature and perhaps see with our spiritual eyes how God sees time. 

How then does God see time? We turn here to St. Augustine and without adding or taking away I will try my best to summarize two key points he makes in book 11 of The Confessions:
1) Time is an illusion and the only reality is the present. The past is not real because it only exists as a memory. The future is not real because it only exists as an expectation. Therefore, instead of thinking of time as "past, present and future" we should consider the alternate interpretation of "three tenses or times: the present of past things, the present of present things, and the present of future things."
2) Even the present does not really exist because it is undefinable. He explains this by dividing a year, into a month, into a day, into a second, into a fraction of a second, and finally into an indivisible, infinitely small unit of time, which we can then label "the present." Unfortunately, "even this flies by from the future into the past with such haste that it seems to last no time at all." Therefore, even the present is a fleeting illusion. 

How can we then see we with our spiritual eyes the Eternal Present, with which God sees all of history? It is not by ignoring the past and the future because they are both part of this Eternal Present. It is not by denying the fact that we are not just spiritual beings but also physical beings that are constrained, for now, by the limits of space and time. This is precisely why the sanctification of time by our life in the Church is so important because "if Christianity were a purely 'spiritual' and eschatological faith there would have been no need for a [Church calendar]*, because mysticism has no interest in time" (Schmemann). By His Incarnation, God has blessed time and allowed us to participate in His Eternal Present through the anamnesis of our experience of God in the Church. Putting this together with Einstein's relativity of time, we can see that anamnesis makes it possible that the spiritual frame of reference and physical frame of reference are both valid interpretations because they have different observers. For example, the Eucharist is timeless from a spiritual frame of reference and a discrete event from a physical frame of reference.

The real life implications of how we perceive time are not trivial. While the physical frame of reference may be "real and valid" it is not necessarily beneficial to us. It traps us into a purely physical existence that ignores our needs as partially spiritual beings. A misconception of time may lead to depression/anxiety, false notions about prayer, confusion about free will, and other time sensitive theological and christian anthropological subjects. So what is the solution? As much as possible, we must try to live in His Eternal Kingdom while we are still here on earth. Once again, this is where the anamnesis of the Church experience is invaluable. Ultimately, what we are truly seeking is to "become human" and fulfill God's desire to create us in His image and likeness. To tie in the equivalence of mass and energy, we can now contemplate on the fact that the resurrected Christ was not physically constrained as He was prior to the crucifixion, and we can do a thought experiment as Einstein did with the beam of light. What if we followed Christ around as He left the tomb and joined the disciples on the road to Emmaus. When He was "pure energy" and "purely spiritual," what was His perception of time? When He reconstituted his mass to be physically present with the disciples, did his perception of time change? The more we can comprehend of this mystery, the more we are able to live in the present physical world, while knowing there is a deeper, more meaningful spiritual existence that we were created to discover. Without extracting ourselves from the physical, linear, discrete, event-dependent perception of time, we can appreciate the spiritual, eternal, incorporeal, Divine perception of time.

Two major criticisms I often get when tying physics into spirituality, are 1) who cares?, and 2) are you trying to explain God with science? I answer the first criticism with "sorry, it's ok, don't worry about it, this is much less important than the Presence of Christ on the altar." I answer the second criticism with St. Augustine's apophatic encouragement to perpetually try to increase our knowledge of God: "Quaeramus inveniendum, quaeramus inventum. Let us seek him till we have found him; and still seek him when we have found him." Clearly there is more to God than we will ever be able to grasp. I am not trying to intellectualize our Faith, but rather appreciate the beauty of His creation and in some small way try to see it through His eyes. May God help us to see time how He sees it so that we may continue live in the mystery of His Eternal Present.


* I have taken here Father Alexander Schmemann's discussion of Sunday as the day of the lord and substituted the exact text of "fixed day" with "Church calendar" to extrapolate the same logic to the sanctification of any day by the Church. 

You Can't Change the World

"I can't believe you said that. It's so defeatist. What are you going to do, just hide under your bed?"

Ok, now that we got that out of the way, let's all take a deep breath. And #sorrynotsorry but I mean it, sincerely, you can't change the world. One of the paradoxes of Christianity is that we are called on to change the world without expecting it to change. Christ Himself promised us that the world would not accept us, just as it did not accept Him (John 15:18-21), which kind of makes no sense when He later tells us to "be of good cheer" because He "has overcome the world" (John 16:33). What gives?

Before we even talk about changing the world, let us first admit that we can't even change ourselves. The person in the world that you have the most control over is yourself, and if you are anything like me, it is just as hard (if not harder) to change yourself as it is to change anyone else around you. Think about it. Even St. Paul himself struggled with this problem in Romans 7, where his confession comforts me in my burden that I am not the only one who feels like a captive to Sin. Against my will, I find myself to be falling short of a standard. This feeling of perpetual imperfection is normal, but the key is that we must have the self-awareness to readily confess that the power to change comes not from the self but from God, the physician of our souls.

So then let me get this straight. You can't fix yourself, but you want to change the world? Why? How? As the metaphoric athletes spoken of by St. Paul, we are exhorted to worry more about ourselves than our preaching, lest we become disqualified (1 Corinthians 9:27). If I were the one on the cross and the chief priests mocked me and said "he saved others, himself he cannot save," they would be completely correct (Matthew 27:42). Why do I say that? Because my response to the cross is not the same as Christ's. He stayed on the cross and saved us by accepting His call to suffer.

If the injustice we see around us is the suffering, if that is our cross, then how do we respond to that injustice? Do we respond as Christ did? Do we stay on the cross? Do we stick it out and witness to the Truth? Or, rather, do we see the cross as an affront to our ego? Do we see the humiliation of our failures as servants as something that we cannot accept? I feel like sometimes I decide that "enough is enough and this needs to get better," so I get down from the cross to save the world. Is that what Christ did?

If anyone reading this knows me, they are thinking to themselves "what a hypocrite!" Yes, I am a hypocrite and much worse. I get down from my cross on a daily basis. I can't take the suffering. I can't take the tension. I want it gone. I want it to go away. I'm tired. I want things to get better so we can all take a break. Christ felt the same way. He felt the same stress. He felt the same temptation to escape. The difference is that He stayed on the cross. He endured the shame and the suffering, not just as an atonement but as an example. May God help us to keep our eyes on His cross, that He may help us do our best not to get down from our cross, and change the world.

Personhood and Free Will

What is our interpretation of the human person? Are we just a body? If so, then books like The Illusion of Conscious Will make perfect sense in explaining the world around us and our consciousness in deterministic terms, using physical and biological processes as the explanation for everything, making free will an illusion.

As a thought experiment, let us ask that, if we are just a body and we could "make a human" with a 3D atomic printer - is that a product considered a person?

YES ABSOLUTELY! For someone who believes that the universe is fundamentally a physical place with no such thing as a spiritual world, then I would understand completely if they said "yes, that is a person made up of the same atoms as you and me and is, therefore, a person." In that case, the reductionism of the person to their physical and biological processes makes perfect sense. In that case, free will is on shaky ground because if everything is a physical process then there is some credibility to the idea that "I know your brain, so I know you." The advent of biological processes being subject to the uncertainty paradigms of quantum physics will call much of this physical determinism into question even within the purely scientific realm.

I DON'T KNOW, MAYBE? The next layer is someone who doesn't believe in God but believes, for any reason, that there is something "more" to the universe than the four dimensions of space and time. They may believe in "a spiritual interpretation of string theory," they may believe in non-physical human elements, they may believe that they are "not religious but spiritual," or any other belief that questions the premise that "if you know the physical state of a brain then you know the brain." For this person, who doesn't necessarily ascribe to Christian anthropology, it would still not make sense that just by knowing where all the atoms are in my brain right now, you could theoretically tell me what I will choose to do tomorrow.

ONLY GOD KNOWS - Our opinion should be framed by a Christian anthropological world view that teaches us that the person is made up of not just a body, but also a soul and the spirit. Without getting into the far-reaching implications of this definition of personhood, we can just say here that a human body printed on a 3D printer needs to be more than just a body to be a person. The obvious next question is - "well, does that printed body get a soul and spirit from God?" This is a similar question to "if we clone a human, are they a person?" In both cases, it is beyond the scope of my understanding, but I welcome your thoughts in the comments section, below.

The conclusion I want to make is that our anthropology will have a direct effect on our interpretation of free will. If we see a person as just a physical body, then free will is questionable. If we see a person as an image of God, then free will is an essential part of our nature as physical, emotional and spiritual beings.

Why Share?

When I first started writing this blog, I asked myself why I wanted to write anything in the public domain. There was a natural resistance in thinking about this question because of the concern that there was just an underlying ego problem that was looking for an outlet through which it could rear its ugly head. This is still likely to be the case, at least in part. That being said, I think all of us are entitled to an opinion, and in having any opinion there is by definition some ego in saying "this is what I believe." This is not pathologic or even problematic as long as we keep the ego in check and recognize that others are entitled to their opinions, as well, and that our opinion should not get in the way of our unity. So why share anything at all, if there is a risk that our opinion may offend someone? I see three reasons:

1) It is not until we share an opinion that it becomes "real." There have been many times when I have been thinking about something and other people are talking about it around me and as they are talking I am processing the idea in my head, but it is still swimming around in a primordial soup phase of ideas. It is not until I start speaking or writing something about it that ithe idea really starts to take its form and substance. It comes out of my mouth or gets down on paper and it is then "out in the open" for criticism from both myself and others. I may immediately correct myself, realizing that what I said sounds really dumb when I say it out loud. The point is that until the opinion is shared, even if only with yourself, it is still not quite fully grown.

2) It allows others to know what we think. We are social beings that benefit emotionally, psychologically and spiritually from positive interactions with each other. While we can restrict ourselves to interacting on a purely superficial level, this results in equally superficial relationships. In order to deepen our relationships we must run the risk of sharing something that is left in the open to be rejected. Ultimately, I believe that our deepest desire is to be known and accepted by others. This is why in his epic treatise on love, St. Paul says that for now "I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known." We look forward to the day when we are in heaven with God, where we know each other and we know God, as intimately as God knows each one of us. For now, we selectively parcel out pieces of ourselves that we carefully screen on the basis of whether or not we think they will be well received. This is where the notion of the false self originates, in that we want to protect our true self out of the fear that it will not be accepted.

3) It allows others to disagree with us. For me, this is the most important reason that I write anything because I am looking for others to sharpen my opinion like iron sharpens iron (Proverbs 27:17). If I don't share my opinion, I can go on thinking something is 100% correct when it is 100% wrong. Even if what I am thinking or saying is "mostly correct," I do not think that I have a perfect understanding of anything, and any opportunity to be corrected is an opportunity to grow in understanding. When my friends read my posts, they can use what I wrote as a reason to share with me their dissenting viewpoint. If I don't share, they don't know what I think so that they can disagree, and I wouldn't learn from them so that I can change my opinion. For the record, I don't go back and change what I posted, so if you see something today from a previous post that you disagree with, don't be surprised if I also disagree with myself. 

In this day and age where we have the propensity to "overshare" with too many people saying too many things in public media that really should be kept private, I don't really need to advocate for people speaking their minds. However, it is important to recognize that what one says in a public forum will be open to scrutiny, and this is not a bad thing. If I say something in a public forum and it inspires vehement opposition, I should not automatically dismiss the opposing view as ignorant, but rather take a step back and ask myself if I should reconsider my view. If I am not ready to reconsider my opinion, then the only reason I am sharing is for other people to change their mind or see how smart I am. This is a dangerous position. The only person who gets to have the last word and be unequivocally correct is God. The rest of us are just trying to compare notes with each other in a measly effort to understand a little more today than we did yesterday.

The Antifragility of Radical Unity

Open letter to anyone who uses the words "us" or "them":

Please know that I am first addressing this letter to myself. I am guilty of saying "us" and "them" as much as anyone else - and it is toxic. This sort of mentality is everything that is wrong with the world today. It doesn't have to be in an overt "we hate everyone else, we are ISIS" kind of way. It can be in a #blacklivesmatter kind of way that is intended to create awareness of the disenfranchisement of a specific group but, unfortunately, results in a backlash of misunderstanding that argues that #everylifematters. It can be in a #lovewins kind of way when you don't really mean "everyone deserves to be loved," and you actually mean "screw you, we got what we wanted." It can be in a "the church loves everyone" kind of way when you are just setting up for the "but we don't approve of what you do" judgment that follows.

Just so you don't think I am paying lip service to being a major offender of this "us" and "them" phenomenon, let me share with you the extent of my dissociation with both parties of the ugliness that has transpired over the last few weeks:
"THEM #1" To the Ultraconservative who says gay marriage is an abomination - I think gay marriage should be legal. The "sanctity of marriage" argument (a.k.a. "the Church defines marriage argument") went out the window when there was no outrage over the divorce rate or people getting "illegally" remarried outside the church, and we chose gay marriage as the time to send letters and protest and post on Facebook and overall lose our minds over something that does not affect us in any way. The "what if they make us do it in the church" fear mongering has no foundation or legal precedent. We will be required to marry gay people no sooner than we will be required to marry a Jewish couple, who has the same constitutional right to marry. Which brings me to ...
"THEM #2" To the Ultraliberal who says that gay marriage is exactly the same as the Sacramental Union between a man and a woman - I have wrestled with this question for years, and for the sake of love and inclusivity, I want to say "yeah, ok, why not? Let them get married. It's no big deal." I can't do it. I'm sorry. You can get married in a court. You can have the same legal rights in the eye of the government. I still love you the same, as a person. I still respect you the same, as a couple. Unfortunately, from a theological standpoint, and from a Christian anthropological standpoint, I cannot see any precedent in the Bible or Church Tradition that supports same sex marriage. "Things change." Yes, some things do. Biology does not. Two men and two women still can't reproduce naturally. This is not a matter of fairness, it's a matter of fact. I understand that the Episcopal Church has already accepted gay marriage and there is a request that the Roman Catholic Church do the same. I would love to hear more discussion on this, but ultimately I cannot see this being flexible.

"So where do you get off saying 'don't say us or them' when you are the worst offender?" That is why I am first asking you to please forgive me. Forgive me for judging the culturally driven homophobia we suffer from in the Coptic Church and wanting to leave and pray somewhere else. Forgive me for being so embarrassed at the posts of some people that I want to publicly apologize on their behalf (not in a really apologetic way but in a judgy "sorry my three year old is throwing a tantrum" kind of way). Forgive me for your perception that I don't love you because I am saying that you can't marry your same sex partner in my church. Forgive me that my fallen intellect keeps me from fully understanding what God intends or desires in a way that allows wisdom to shine through and be justified by all her children (Luke 7:35). Forgive me that my broken heart is not healed enough to unconditionally love those whom I disagree with as much as God loves them. Forgive me as I forgive you.

Forgiving each other is the start of unity. Saying "I don't agree with you but I love you and respect you" is a prerequisite for progress. Forgiveness is the seed. The fruitful tree is Radical Unity, which will come with many years of ongoing forgiveness and after much discomfort in being unified with "them." People prefer the "mirage of unity," which has all the comforts of general anesthesia, over the extreme initial discomfort of waking up from surgery in severe pain, but is really the start of the road to recovery towards Radical Unity. For example, people want feel "unified" with their fellow members of the Coptic Church by brushing aside major internal theological disagreements on Theosis, Original Sin, etc. rather than come to grips with the fact that we have within our ranks people that are "kind of sort of Eastern Orthodox" in full communion with people that are "kind of sort of Catholic" in full communion with people that are "kind of sort of Evangelical Protestant." Rather than enter into the uncomfortable discussion of "what do we really believe?" we dismiss everyone that disagrees with us, whether they are in or out of the church, as a heretic. This kind of approach didn't work in 451, it didn't work in 1054, and it will not work in 2015. We must embrace Radical Unity as a way of saying "I disagree with you on some things but we agree on something things that are really meaningful and 'whatever things are true, whatever things are noble, whatever things are just, whatever things are pure, whatever things are lovely, whatever things are of good report, if there is any virtue and if there is anything praiseworthy—[let us] meditate on these things'" (Phil 4:8).

How can that be possible and how does that make any sense?! How can we be in communion with another faith with which we disagree on major dogmatic issues?! Like I said, we disagree more internally than we do externally. To say it differently, one individual member of the church (laity or clergy, novice or theologian, take your pick) is equally likely to agree with someone outside of the church, as with someone inside the church. Should we stop all liturgies until this is sorted out? Maybe we should, if you think dogma is more important than unity. I suggest that we keep praying liturgies, we keep taking communion, and we keep working toward Radical Unity. Ultimately, I do not think we will unify with the other apostolic churches based on unification of theology or dogma. We will unify based on our commitment to unity for its own sake and work out the details later. The theological and dogmatic disagreements will continue to exist in the Unified Church in the same way they do in the current Coptic Church, and the Holy Spirit will continue to guide the Mind of the Church as it has for two thousand years.

Ok so that means we just let everyone in off the street and anyone can take communion?! No, I didn't say that. Why would someone even want to take communion if they don't really believe it is the Body and Blood of Christ the same way we do? Unity with Protestant Churches is not off the table, but our understanding of the Eucharist must be unified in order for us to be technically "In Communion" with each other. How is that still Radical Unity? Because we are unified in the Creed. We do not need to be in full Communion with each other to love and respect each other in the spirit of Radical Unity. The crucial element is that we focus on where we agree while we maintain healthy boundaries in the places where we disagree. 

What about non-Christians? What about atheists? What about Satan worshippers? We need to find a common ground. We need to start with love and respect. We need to say "we are all human and whether you love Him or not, I believe that God loves you." This brings me back to our initial discussion of gay marriage - it just doesn't matter. The crusade for it is a reaction to feeling unloved, and the crusade against it is a spiritual warfare that is intended to create disunity. Let us rise above the disunity in faith and be convinced that for all mankind "neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Romans 8:38-39) - that is, of course, unless you believe the heresy that God only loves Christians or that He loves us more.

Antifragility is a concept developed and popularized by Nassim Taleb and, briefly, is an idea that as the opposite of "positive" is not "zero," the opposite of "fragile" is not "sturdy/robust." We don't have a word in any language that expresses the property that something gets stronger the more that you beat it up. He makes a very convincing argument that in medicine, business and life in general we need to design systems to be "antifragile" so that they don't just withstand the natural entropy and uncertainty of the universe but are strengthened by it.

Radical Unity is Antifragile. I stated earlier that I feel that I am stuck in the middle between two warring parties, empathizing with both but agreeing with neither. How do I reconcile that? By choosing unity over disagreement. By saying I love you even though I disagree with you, and I love you enough to say "I am you, and you are me, and we are one, even though we disagree." Note the difference between this and the formation of factions that happens with the "we disagree with them" mentality that we see everywhere these days. That "us" and "them" mentality is very fragile and is, in fact, actively destructive. In contrast, Radical Unity is antifragile in that I can say "you can say whatever you want, but I can still love you, and I am committed to finding a common ground." Isn't this what Christ did? Did He not find any excuse to find any common ground? Did He not break down every social, political, and religious barrier between Himself and the Samaritan woman? Why are we afraid to be like Him?

Forgive me for offending you if I have. If this is nonsense to you, please suffer me as the fool that I am, praying for my weakness and lack of understanding. If this does happen to make sense to you, then please pray with me for Radical Unity. May God guide us all to be united in His Love.

In Christ,

A Christian of the Orthodox Church