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.