Are we asking HOW or WHY?

Many of us have grown up in the Church. Our parents grew up in the Church. Their parents grew up in the Church. You get the idea. We have always been Christian and we may not know any different. Yes, we have questioned our faith from time to time, but we have always fundamentally believed that God exists, and that He wants a relationship with us. Some of the seeds of doubt that are sown in our hearts and minds are the questions: "What if it is all imagined? What if we are just starting with a set of assumptions that are simply self-validating? What if it is not so much the existence of God but rather the idea of God that really matters?" This is the position of some atheists who now practice a "Religion Without God". When our fundamental belief in God is challenged we may look for validation and are overjoyed when we hear that "Science Increasingly Makes the Case for God." The reality is that this is not in any way a new question - for centuries people who don't believe in God have been using science to "disprove Him" and people who believe in God have been using science to "prove Him." Neither one really makes any sense.

The reality is that the existence of God is non-falsifiable. There is no way to design an experiment that will tell you that He does or does not exist. This puts the question outside the realm of science. Period. End of story. Any attempt to prove or disprove God using science is not scientific - this inexorable paradox puts us in the position to either believe that God exists or that He does not - either way it is an act of faith. To illustrate the futility of science in telling us anything about God's existence let us look at two extreme positions. 

The first extreme is the extremely simplistic person's view of the world - the one with really no science. You can make this as simple as you can imagine. Take away the internet, airplanes, electricity, sanitation, and even fire if you like. This prehistoric cave man existence may be seen by some as the perfect breeding ground for the ignorance that is necessary for someone to believe in God. Since this person cannot explain anything about the world then everything must be left to "the hand of God." This is what Newton did with physical phenomena that he could not explain so this cave man who can't explain anything will have to use it to explain everything. Yes? Well, I don't think it's that simple. Isaac Newton understood enough about the world to know that there are things that are beyond his understanding and in some cases the more we know the more we are in awe of the improbability of our existence. The cave man, who knows nothing about the world, has no concept of how complex the world is and has nothing that is in need of explanation. The world just "is what it is" to use a tired modern colloquialism. Therefore the lack of knowledge does not in any way impart a tendency toward theism. 

The other extreme is the current or even future understanding of the world. We currently have a great appreciation of the world that includes command of our physical world (aeronautics, modern medicine, computer science, etc.), a deep understanding of the creatures that occupy that world (biology), an ability to manipulate the invisible properties of matter (chemistry), and even the ability to "create" matter with high energy colliders (particle physics). In the future we will understand even more and with new theories and discoveries that may 1) integrate all known physical phenomena and obviate the need of the "hand of God" cited by Newton and others, and 2) address the mechanism of creation of our complex world and thus question the very need for God in a probabilistic sense. While I find these scientific discoveries very interesting and illuminating I take issue with the assumption that if I understand HOW something happened then I also understand WHY it happened. If a car is driving down the road, the designer of that car can tell you in great detail about how the engine works and how it is that the car is able to get from point A to point B; however, the designer can tell you absolutely nothing about why the driver is going to point B in the first place. 

My goal here is not to convince you to believe in God because He can't be disproved by science. Similarly my goal is not to make you doubt in God because science can explain how everything happens even if God doesn't exist. My real goal is to clarify that science can only explain the HOW but not the WHY of our existence. God is my answer to "why?" Someone else may have a different belief of why we are here but that is still a belief that is only true to them because on a faith that is often based on a priori assumptions (Abolition of Man by CS Lewis). May we all act in faith and in love allow others to do the same.

On Imperfection

We live in a world that values perfection. We idolize people that look perfect, act perfect, and seem perfect. We watch sports and entertainment events that instill in us a reverence for a perfect score, a perfect game, and perfect records. Why then are we surprised when we feel dissatisfied? The standard has been set for our psyche to refuse to accept our lives, which rarely meet this unrealistic standard of perfection. 

What does God say? He tells us to strive for perfection but accepts us despite our imperfection. So what is the requirement? Are we good enough as is or are we expected grow? The answer is "yes" ... we are both good enough as is AND we are expected to grow. In Mere Christianity, CS Lewis teaches us: "As a great Christian writer (George MacDonald) pointed out, every father is pleased at the baby’s first attempt to walk: no father would be satisfied with anything less than a firm, free, manly walk in a grown-up son. In the same way, he said, 'God is easy to please, but hard to satisfy.'" So at once we must strive for perfection and at the same time accept an intermediate stage that serves as a stepping stone on that path to perfection. We see this concept in Christ's healing of the blind man in Mark 8:22-26, who is healed in stages, first seeing "men, like trees, walking" before his sight is completely restored.

At every point in our spiritual warfare, our own personal Wormwood (Screwtape Letters, by CS Lewis) will try to keep us from striking an appropriate balance between accepting ourselves and striving for better by constantly trying to push us either to complacency (wallowing in sin) or misguided perfectionism (beating ourselves up and falling into despair). In either case the end result is that we find ourselves focusing on the sin by saying it is either too much for us to handle (despair) or that it is manageable enough as it is (complacency). In either extreme we are becoming "sin-centric" and taking our eyes off God, which is exactly what happened to Peter when he "saw that the wind was boisterous" and began to sink (Matthew 14:22-33). Peter was doing fine when his eyes were on Christ and it was only when he took his eyes off Christ that he became afraid and began to sink. So we need to constantly ask ourselves what is tempting us to take our eyes off Him - at this moment are we feeling overwhelmed by sin and being pushed to despair or do we feel ok and are thus being pushed toward complacency?

We sometimes struggle with despair when we have trouble accepting ourselves the way that God accepts us. We should stop and ask ourselves a very important question - do we accept his acceptance? Oftentimes we hold on to guilt because we don't feel that we are worthy of his acceptance. Sometimes we even feel that this guilt is from God because he wants us to be better and he (like maybe our parents) uses this guilt to "encourage" us to improve. I still remember when I heard for the first time that "guilt is not from God." This was a mind-blowing revelation and it took me years to fully process it. Soon after hearing that phrase I heard And Can it Be by Church of Rhythm, which I listened to over and over again, trying to convince myself to accept that God is looking to love me much more than I am letting Him.

As soon as we find ourselves comfortable in accepting God's love, our spiritual warfare immediately shifts to pushing us toward complacency, with our Wormwood telling us "good job, God loves you, relax and enjoy yourself a bit," which unfortunately sometimes means that we get dragged back into our former sins by "the remembrance of evil entailing death." When St. Paul struggled with this question he felt the need to stop and ask if God's unconditional love means that we are allowed to sin, to which he immediately answers himself: "certainly not!" (Romans 6:15) So then if we are loved unconditionally then what is the point of avoiding sin? Stop and think about that for a second. If we are loved unconditionally, then there is a natural temptation there to say "well, that's great, now I can do whatever I want." Clearly this idea does not hold water, and I can't give a better explanation than St. Paul did in Romans 6-9 or St. James in his epistle. The answer there is "you don't avoid sin because you want a reward or to avoid a punishment - you avoid sin because you don't need sin anymore because you have Christ." I am a sinner. I am imperfect. God loves me anyway and that love is unconditional. This should make me love God and avoid sin not because I want to impress God but because sin is no longer on my agenda ... or is it? 

The reality is that despite the grace of God's forgiveness I still find myself sinning. Despite Christ freeing me from the bonds of sin I still find myself going back, sometimes to what feels like square one. However, it is important to figure out whether I am actively struggling with sin or I have given up and let myself become someone who accepts sin. In The Great Divorce, CS Lewis gives us the example of the woman who grumbled so much that she ceased to be a person because she had become "a grumble." We each have our personal sins, but as long as we are struggling against sin then we agree with God that the sin is bad and we hope and pray and wait for Him to give us the strength to get rid of the sin. It is when we give up the struggle that we are at risk of sliding so far into the sin that we are no longer "people who do a a certain sin" and become "people who are that sin." Part of our spiritual warfare is to resist the temptation to submit to a sin simply because we constantly find ourselves falling. Would it be better not to sin? Yes, of course, but God accepts the effort that we make as long as it is genuinely and sincerely our best effort. We must embrace this intermediate stage where we "see men like trees, walking," not because it is good enough forever but because it is good enough for now. If we do not accept this intermediate stage then we fall into despair and if we accept it too much then we fall into complacency.

The next question I want to ask is "does this fixation on guilt and misguided expectation of perfection affect other things in our life?" Let's look at how the complacency-despair problem affects how I look at forgiveness, prayer, and unity in organizations.

Imperfect forgiveness: In dealing with others, we should strive to forgive others as God forgives us fully and unconditionally. I'll be the first to admit this is hard. There are people that I have "forgiven" in that I am not willfully holding a grudge against them, but no matter how hard I try to forgive, I still feel a twinge of resentment. This emotional remnant is an indication that my forgiveness is imperfect. How do I react to this? Just as we discussed with sin, there are two mistakes I can make: 1) complacency - "I can't fully forgive so this halfhearted forgiveness is good enough," or 2) despair - "I am a terrible person because I don't know how to forgive." In reading Romans 12:19-20 I was always confused that St. Paul was telling us not to avenge ourselves but rather forgive because this would make it worse for the person we are trying to forgive, "For in so doing you will heap coals of fire on his head.” This flies in the face of Christ's words on the cross that we should forgive completely and unconditionally. To me this is, once again, evidence of an intermediate stage of forgiveness that is only acceptable if that is the best we can do. In the end, I may eventually be able to truly forgive, or maybe I will not be successful. The result is not as important as the process of continually struggling and asking God to help me forgive as He forgives. 

Imperfect prayer: I was recently asked to comment about the practice of asking for a saint's intercession with the promise that if the request was granted a donation would be made in the name of the saint. This phenomenon is quite common, so I will first start with the bright side that there are positive elements here in that the believer is 1) praying in some way, 2) developing a relationship with a saint in some way, and 3) making a donation or performing a good act. The discomfort some people have with this practice is that it is a bit of a "genie in a bottle" type of magic trick and not reconcilable with the idea that we should not be praying for our will but rather for God's will. In the Great Divorce, CS Lewis says that “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, in the end, 'Thy will be done.'" So, yes, I completely agree that holding a donation ransom for a certain outcome is not ideal, but I hope we can see it as an intermediate stage that will hopefully eventually lead to a true relationship with the saint and with God that is not predicated on "what have you done for me lately?"

Imperfect unity: We are all part of multiple organizations in some way shape or form, and for many of us the Church is one of those organizations. The relationship that we develop with God and each other within the Church is called fellowship, or koinonia in Greek. This unity through the Holy Spirit has guided the Church through the ages and continues to bind us on multiple levels: individually to God, individually to each other, as a group to God, as a group to each other, etc. So now you may be thinking, "ok, so if the Holy Spirit is supposed to be unifying us perfectly, then why are people constantly disagreeing and arguing about things in church?" Once again, we are asked to accept an imperfect unity as an intermediate stage that may be the best we can do ... for now. We must not be complacent but rather strive towards a more perfect unity, and the Church in its wisdom reminds us of this every morning when we pray that we "Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace" (First Hour Prayer excerpt from Ephesians 4). We also should not fall into despair, questioning the presence of the Holy Spirit, but rather work with Him to wage war against this disunity. 

In conclusion, when we struggle with sin, imperfect forgiveness, imperfect prayer, and imperfect unity we must find a balance between the frustration of things not being how we want them and the complacency of accepting something as a final product that should just be a work in progress. This is even true in how we approach how we follow the rules of the Church, which are set before us as a guide to help us get to know God but are not a goal in and of themselves. Sometimes we fall into despair because we can't follow all the rules or become complacent feeling that we "follow enough of them to get by." To quote a recent Sunday sermon, "the teachings of the Church are clear, but in teaching the teachings I have to know what is my intention." If following the teachings of the Church becomes a system of checking boxes then I am missing the point because it will never be about how many boxes are checked but rather whether or not checking those boxes is bringing me closer to Christ. Keep struggling. Keep forgiving as best as you can. Keep praying as well and as much as you can. Keep working towards unity. God loves us in our imperfection and will bless our effort to be perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect (Matthew 5:48). 

Generational Sacrifice

Our parents sacrificed more than just their home countries but rather even their identities by leaving Egypt and becoming less Egyptian, more American and thereby becoming really neither one. They identify most, not with Americans or Egyptians, but with fellow Egyptian-Americans who know what it means to be in a watershed of cultures that would otherwise never coexist. 

The first generation has the benefit of being more congruous with our environment but, as even pop culture seems to understand, we do not quite fit in with our moussaka into the white bread world around us. This has more than just simple effects on our social comfort but rather far reaching implications on our choice of schools, careers, spouses and other major decisions that are both consciously and subconsciously affected by our upbringing in an immigrant household. 

The real assimilation does not happen until at least the second generation of immigrants who are raised by parents who (somewhat) understand the world that their children are growing up in. Rather than simply reacting to one new "foreign demand" after another, these parents can anticipate the challenges their children will face and help them navigate them accordingly. This is a complex undertaking that requires more than a simple checklist of items like making sure to apply for scholarships for college - rather, this requires the parents to decide a priori what values they want to instill in their children, ideally picking and choosing the best traits of the two cultures that they have known as part of their own identity. 

This is where the Coptic Church being self aware becomes critically important if the Church is going to be part of that value-molding process. I think we all agree that not all Egyptian values are Christian values, but we may not necessarily agree on which ones are which. Furthermore, the more fuzzy we leave it the more room we leave for even first and second generation Coptic Christians to be confused as to what values they really need to pass along to their children. I'm not saying we need to have a papal decree or a referendum or some kind of official document that says "these are the values we have decided to actually mean something." What I am saying is that everyone from the bishops to the clergy to the servants to the parents needs to be mindful of this cultural gap and thoughtful about what it is that makes us "Us." If we know who we would want to be then we will know who to teach our children to become*. 

Footnote:

*Please note that I do understand that the simple answer is "be like Christ" but everyone seems to have a different caricature in their heads of who He is so it seems more straightforward to engage in a personal and communal discussion on actual values. 

The eye cannot see ...

"The eye cannot see what the mind does not know." This is a common adage in medical training, during which doctors see things over and over again many times so that when it comes up "in real life" it is not missed. One corollary to this comes when a clinician says "I've never seen that" and the response is "yes, but has it seen you?" In any field of expertise the first challenge is not to learn but rather to gain insight into the scope of the burden of knowledge. The dangerous doctor is not the one who says "I don't know" but rather the one who doesn't know that he doesn't know. Similarly for us in our spiritual lives the challenge is not so much that we make mistakes but rather that we don't recognize them; likewise it's not so much that we are often erroneous in our interpretation of God but rather that we are unjustifiably confident in our false understanding. 

Someone can ask "how can we be in error if we have the Church and the fathers to guide us?" My response is that St. Paul himself recognized the necessary limitation of his own understanding while in the earthly body (1 Corinthians 13:12). This does not mean that we should give up on growing or lose sight of the value of mentorship. However, why is it that we often neglect to seek counsel and even when we do it may be difficult to see the situation with the same clarity as our mentors? The answer is that learning is always preceded by a recognition of one's ignorance. When we, like the Phari
sees in John 9, overestimate our own understanding, we are in danger of hearing from Christ "If you were blind, you would have no sin; but now you say, ‘We see.’ Therefore your sin remains."

This self righteous ignorance is the first stage of learning, which is called by educators the stage of unconscious incompetence. Simply seeing our limitation moves us into the second stage of conscious incompetence, during which we can start to work on closing the now recognized deficit. Eventually we can hopefully reach the fourth and final stage of unconscious competence, characterized by an effortless expertise that does not require constant attention and mental effort, such as a baseball player who can hit a 90mph fastball. Before this final stage is the third stage, conscious competence, in which the student needs constant effort to demonstrate competence, which at times can be dangerous; for example, if someone is consciously competent at doing a complex task like surgery, it is easy to make a mistake if he takes his mind off the task to think about something else. At times, the distracting thought is along the lines of "wow I'm getting really good at this" - I warn you that if this thought crosses your mind your are about to make a mistake because you are consciously competent and taking your mind off your task. 

So what is the solution? First we need to recognize that every one of us has a bias and our personal experience affects our interpretation of any situation. On the most basic sensory level what we "see" is not just a function of what light pattern hits our retina but rather how our it is perceived by our visual cortex, which is really more of an interpretation and not just a reception of a stimulus. If you doubt this look at this optical illusion that should prove to you that you and your brain are an active participant in what you think you are passively seeing. "So what? Maybe my eyes can be fooled but I know I am not biased when it comes to important things." How can you be so sure? What are the odds that a simple stimulus like vision can be subject to bias but a complex stimulus like "do I like this idea" is immune?  Indeed, there is a tremendous amount of social science research that supports the idea that how we perceive and react to a situation is highly dependent on our previous experience. 

If you come away with nothing else from reading this I hope you at least stop to question yourself and ask: 1) do I really know as much as I think I know?; and 2) am I sure that I am formulating an unbiased opinion? If the answer to either of these questions is potentially "no" then you need someone to give you another perspective. Ideally this is not just someone with more experience but also someone with a different enough background that there is at least a chance that this person will have a dissenting opinion. If all we do is discuss ideas with peers who have a homogenous background then we can't be surprised if it seems like we are "always right" and never hear correction. 

You either know exactly what I'm talking about because you have made enough mistakes to know your own limitations or you think I need to speak for myself because this does not apply to you. Let us pray for God to help us find ourselves in the first category. Let us see that when we are facing trials and tribulations it may be God teaching us that we are always going to be limited and we need to rely on our mentors and the guidance of the Holy Spirit rather than on our own understanding. May God help us to see our blindness so that we may begin to see. 

Why so many rules?

I have written previously on finding a balance in the personal application of rules in our spiritual lives. The question I have today is - why are the rules there in the first place? Rather than taking a passive role in simply accepting the idea that "of course there are rules, that's the way that it is," can we instead engage in actively thinking and asking "why did God's Wisdom dictate that there must be rules?" If we look back at the Old Testament we find reasons and explanations there that are surprisingly modern and applicable to our current situation.

First let's start with a time where there were no rules - a time in which there was only a relationship between one man and his God. Abraham became the father of many nations because he believed God and it was accounted to him as righteousness (Genesis 17; Romans 4; Galatians 3; James 2). We have heard it explained elsewhere that it is natural that if we choose to be away from God then this will naturally create death in us because God is the source of all life (sermon link here). Here we see Abraham actually does the opposite of what Adam did - he chooses God, he chooses life, and it is accounted to him as righteousness. This is not complicated - it is a simple relationship based on trust and mutual affection.

Fast forward five hundred years or so and now God approaches Moses. It is quite evident that the intimate, fatherly relationship that Abraham shared with God was also experienced by his physical and spiritual descendant Moses. When Aaron and Miriam rebelled against Moses, God rebuked them and reminded them that Moses was the only one who at that time spoke to God face to face (Numbers 12). So what was the nature of that relationship that the rest of the Israelites had with God? Clearly it wasn't the same face to face, intimate relationship that Moses enjoyed. However, it is clear that God wanted them to be his people and wanted them to know Him.

What we see is that rather than approach each person individually, He approached Moses as a leader and used him as a mediator to the rest of the people. Doesn't this make more sense than each individual person getting his own individual message and essentially his own separate religion? We can maybe imagine what that could have looked like in a parallel universe where there were hundreds of thousands of burning bush-like stories. Would that make sense? To me, this would defy the scientific principle of Occam's Razor and unnecessarily complicate the situation. It certainly would not make sense to run a modern organization this way, and you see in any company there are layers of organization and delegation. You can say "yes, but God is infinite and omnipresent so He, unlike a human CEO, could effectively communicate and interact with each individual person." My response to that would be that yes of course He does, but he doesn't need a different set of rules for each person in order to be able do so.

What was the first rule? We may mistakenly think that the first rule was "do not eat of this tree," but the first rule God gave Adam and Eve was to eat of any tree in the garden (sermon link here). Yes, of course, in order to be human and not robots we must have one forbidden tree to allow for free will, but why dwell on that one tree when there were hundreds if not thousands of trees that were permissible? Even this one simple rule, we as a human race were not able to follow. 

When did the rules start to expand? When the Israelites left Egypt, Moses was left with the task of leading hundreds of thousands of people through the desert to the promised land. This would have been an unmanageable task if it weren't for the rules given to him by God. Many of the rules related to sanitation and interpersonal relations are common sense to us today, but some of them seem completely arbitrary for any time period. Why wear tassels? Why not trim your beard? Why the Sabbath? The key to all of the law - the rules that make sense as well as the ones that don't - is it gives people the choice to follow God ... or not. God made a covenant with the people of Israel that was contingent on their willingness to accept Him as their God and their genuine desire to be His people. Time after time God told Moses to tell the people to do something, simply because the following of the rule was a confirmation of this covenant. If we squint just the right way, we can see through the Levitical rules and see the relationship behind the rules that God wanted to establish with Israel.

Why do we still have so many rules if we have Christ? There is an argument based on Romans 6-8 and the entire book of Galatians that supports that we should not be subject to the law if we live a life in Christ. This argument holds water if what we mean is to echo the words of St. Augustine that we are to "Love God and do whatever we want." We have the freedom in Christ to dwell on the relationship with Him rather than on the rules, but this does not make the rules of no value. We can imagine a situation where God is a CEO who tells everyone in the company that they all have to wear bowties on Thursdays; clearly, it would be understood that the point is not so much the bowties but the unity of the company that He is trying to promote. 

The rules put us all on the same page. When we throw the rules away we are creating unnecessary disorder. If all at once we abolish the traffic laws, it may be fun for about 10 minutes to drive 100mph on the highway, but very soon it will be impossible to get anywhere without getting into an accident. I am not going to rehash the utility of each of us following every rule (previous entry), but I need to call attention to the difference between saying "I do not think it is beneficial for me to follow this particular rule right now," versus saying, "this rule is stupid and we need to get rid of it." One example is fasting with abstention and the effect it has on the length of the Great Lent - whether you follow the rule or not is between you and your father of confession but whether the rule exists or not is entirely the prerogative of the Church. 

Whether or not we want to submit our will to God's will becomes then the central issue. Will we bow down? Will we follow? Will we allow him to tell us what to do? Once again, (broken record) I'm not advocating for a blind following of the rules! I am simply saying that in order for God to have a relationship with more than one person at one time in a meaningful way that is not entirely haphazard, the two (or more) people need to agree in the Spirit to follow the same rules so that they may be one in the Spirit (Ephesians 4). The important thing is that in distinguishing the tradition from the Tradition we follow the latter with all of our hearts and recognize that at least some of the former is necessary simply to keep the unity of the congregation. For example, we cannot legitimately argue that our Faith will fall apart if the deacons do or don't wear tunics - clearly lower case "t" tradition; however, does that mean we get rid of the tunics because they don't matter? No, of course not. There is no reason to - this is something that can continue to be done simply because "that's the way we've always done it" without a real downside. 

The final layer of rules is the category in which some may argue and say there is a real downside that affects the unity of the congregation. Without getting into much detail and diatribe we can all quickly come up with a short list in our heads. Perhaps some of us have a long, laminated list with cogent theological arguments. My hope and dream is that the leaders of the Church are taking these arguments into consideration and will make a decision that preserves the sanctity of the Tradition without losing the forest in the trees of tradition. That being said it is their decision and not mine. I do agree that we as the laity have not the right but the responsibility to ask "why this rule?" and maybe even "is this really necessary?" That doesn't mean, however, that we necessarily need to personally dwell on these issues and make them a stumbling block. There are so many positive rules in the Tradition and even some nice traditional ones. Rather, "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—meditate on these things." Philippians 4:8

So hopefully we can agree that we need rules. Hopefully we can agree that some of these rules are central to our salvation and we consider those the Church Tradition. Hopefully we can agree that at least some of the rules that we consider non-essential lower case "t" tradition are valuable simply as a glue that holds together the organization that in its heart is dedicated to the Tradition. Hopefully we can agree that we can at least to try to find a balance in our questioning and accepting of the controversial rules. May God give us the grace to submit to the rules of his Church that He has established for us as the vehicle of our salvation and the place of meeting Him in the Spirit and in the Flesh.