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.