"...the focus comes by relating everything to God; or rather perceiving God through everything learned, discovering that He is everywhere and always seeking relation with us. (Incidentally, focus, my dictionary says, is simply the Latin word for 'hearth'.) We still speak of the universe, the whole, without losing in that wholeness one particle of the marvellous array of particular, organic and inorganic, visible and invisible and well nigh untrackable. Learning, even in the world's terms, is vast; our capacities are limited and our time here very short. How can we catch the illimitable in our little bottles? Yet we must learn precision with particulars as well as spacious thinking across centuries. In practical terms we keep building between these extremes"
...We need all our minds and all our hearts and souls and strength (or bodily energies) - we need it all to - understand? to love, rather, when the object of our love is the One who is sole source of 'seeing', and of caring and doing and growing. It sounds strenuous. But 'nothing could preserve its own nature as well as go against God,' wrote Boethius, early in the sixth century [Consolatio Philosophiae III.12, iii]. The same truth is jubilantly celebrated in Psalm 148 where 'great sea creatures and all ocean depths...do His bidding,' i.e. where this kind of cosmic delight is a by-product of simply being who we are made to be - that is His will, His bidding!
...We say we 'see', at moments of understanding. But we do not see with the multi-faceted eyes an insect brings to the act. Our limitations, once we acknowledge them, liberate us to steady plodding, and occasional awe. One of Pascal's thoughts turns on an undefined 'it'. ('Be comforted; it is not from yourself that you must expect it, but on the contrary you must expect it by expecting nothing from yourself.' [Pensees. no. 202).
...The truth given in the Holy Word is a disciplined, but not a manageable enterprise. One of our craftiest evasions is trying to manage it, working up by ourselves from the living Word a system we feel sure will keep us on the rails all they way. But no system we work out from the inexhaustible wisdom of the Word will do. Truth is final, but our mortal grasp of it never can be final. The word of truth is living and probes us continually as we live our days and nights. It is a Voice that speaks, revealing truth: 'the sound of many waters', in one passage; 'a still small voice' in another; overpowering one moment, companionable as an aside the next. Some passages are familiar, we think? In the needy moment, one of those threadbare passages will become steel, surgical steel.
...Have I spent two evenings to say that misunderstanding and understanding alike lead to damage and pain? But is that surprising, since our understanding is always partial, a step forward into another part of what we sometimes feel is a maze? It will never be our understanding or intelligence that will rescue us. Oddly, that is the shining hope."
('Understanding is Costly.' A Kind of Perseverance. Erin, Ontario: The Porcupine's Quill, 2010. pp. 47, 48, 49, 50, 52).
Friday, October 14, 2011
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
from Margaret Avison's 'A Kind of Perseverance'
"In our culture, we do not really know or respect the moral code given in the Bible however much we may deplore the lawlessness that seems to be taking over. Alister McGrath sees lawlessness as the prison: when Christ delivers a person, it is a jail-break out of lawlessness into freedom.
It is his assumption, and mine, that it is impossible either to be bored by or to reject Jesus Christ. 'But I am bored, and I do reject Christianity,' you may think. No. You are bored by or reject some notion of what it is, put off by somebody's notion who presents a blurred picture, or by a misunderstood idea from other people's ideas. It is a Person with whom you will have to do, and He is not boring; seen clearly, He could not be rejected. Jesus is consistent with all the difficult-to-accept disciplines and commands but in a new dimension; He is, as it were, God translating Himself into the language of our kind of being, so that we can understand and, in Him, want the goodness of those disciplines and commands.
Evade Him we can, and it can seem the less dangerous course. I knew a child through all her growing-up who became a university scholar; she kept lending me books like Castaneda on peyote-visions, or various rationalists' arguments; and I read in order to keep in contact. But finally I said, 'I have been reading your books off and on for two years now. Isn't it about time you ready my Book - at least one of the Gospels in it?' Her answer, after a minute, was as honest as all her thinking: 'Margaret,' she said, 'I'm afraid to.' She is right. The greatest danger is to stop evading. Unless you consider it damaging to grow." (Avison 32)
It is his assumption, and mine, that it is impossible either to be bored by or to reject Jesus Christ. 'But I am bored, and I do reject Christianity,' you may think. No. You are bored by or reject some notion of what it is, put off by somebody's notion who presents a blurred picture, or by a misunderstood idea from other people's ideas. It is a Person with whom you will have to do, and He is not boring; seen clearly, He could not be rejected. Jesus is consistent with all the difficult-to-accept disciplines and commands but in a new dimension; He is, as it were, God translating Himself into the language of our kind of being, so that we can understand and, in Him, want the goodness of those disciplines and commands.
Evade Him we can, and it can seem the less dangerous course. I knew a child through all her growing-up who became a university scholar; she kept lending me books like Castaneda on peyote-visions, or various rationalists' arguments; and I read in order to keep in contact. But finally I said, 'I have been reading your books off and on for two years now. Isn't it about time you ready my Book - at least one of the Gospels in it?' Her answer, after a minute, was as honest as all her thinking: 'Margaret,' she said, 'I'm afraid to.' She is right. The greatest danger is to stop evading. Unless you consider it damaging to grow." (Avison 32)
Friday, October 7, 2011
Christ above & below
"He is at once above, and below: above in Himself, below in His people; above with the Father, below in us...[Long for] Christ above, recognize Him below. Have Christ above bestowing His fullness, recognize Him here in need. Here He is poor, there He is rich...So then Christ is rich and poor. As God He is rich, as Man poor. Yea, rich too now as Very Man, He hath ascended into heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of the Father; yet is He still poor here, is a-hungered and athirst and naked"
(St. Augustine, Serm. (de. Script. N.T.) CXXIII, iv.4; qtd. in Pryzwara 187)
(St. Augustine, Serm. (de. Script. N.T.) CXXIII, iv.4; qtd. in Pryzwara 187)
Thursday, October 6, 2011
more from Augustine
"How great is the multitude of His sweetness, which He hath hidden for them that [long for] Him; which He hath wrought for them that hope in Him (Ps. xxx, 20). For now we know in part, until that which is perfect is come (cf. 1 Cor. xiii,9 seq.). And that we might be made fit to understand this, He, the equal of the Father in the form of God, and made in the form of a servant like to us, remakes us to the likeness of God; and He, the unique Son of God, made [to be] the Son of man, makes us sons [and daughters] of men [to be] sons [and daughters] of God, and the servants whom He nourished through the visible form of a servant [in Christ], He perfects in freedom that they may see the form of God..."
(Serm. CXCIV, iii.3; qtd. in Pryzwara 188)
(Serm. CXCIV, iii.3; qtd. in Pryzwara 188)
Monday, October 3, 2011
St. Augustine on Christ the Medicine
"The Son of God took upon Himself man[kind], and therin suffered the things which belong to man[kind]. This Medicine is for men so great that thought cannot reach to it. For what pride can be healed, if it be not healed by the humiliation of the Son of God? What avarice can be healed, if it be not healed by the poverty of the Son of God? What anger can be healed, if it be not healed by the long-suffering of the Son of God? What ungodliness can be healed, if it be not healed by the charity of the Son of God? Finally, what fearfulness can be healed, if it be not healed by the resurrection of the body of the Son of God?" (De ag. christ.xi.12; qtd from 'An Augustine Synthesis.' Arr. by Erich Pryzwara.)
Sunday, October 2, 2011
original grace in Bulgakov
I was reading earlier today in Paul Valliere's Modern Russian Theology about Bulgakov's unique thinking about the relationship between Nature and Grace in creation, and the Church. This topic has been on mind since I saw (for the second time) the fantastic new movie by Terence Malick, entitled Tree of Life. See here for a trailer.
If Nature and Grace are opposed, eventually a dualism results which opposes God and the world, which distances God's activity from all natural processes (like mating insects...see below), which are then reified rather than seen as sustained by God, without occassionalism. For the Church, there can no such thing as pure, mere, autonomous nature since nature itself is the free creation of God, and therefore has freedom and love as its very substance, deeper even than - or perhaps somehow equivalent with - what we call 'matter.' (For more on the insidiousness of a concept of 'pure nature', see Conor Cunningham's amazing article, here.)
Yet creation must, in patristic fashion, be held as distinct from God, Who is the Uncreated; pantheism is avoided, divine and human freedom preserved, and yet the Incarnation affirms that God is closer to us than we are to ourselves, for the human nature has been taken up and transformed by the divine nature, and humanity - in the risen Christ - somehow participates in the life of the Trinity.
In light of all this, Bulgakov creatively extends the Orthodox position by describing creation itself as an act of grace. Valliere explains this well:
"The key to the Orthodox position [on the question of nature and grace] is the concept of ‘natural grace.’ The idea is that all creation, by virtue of its being and beauty, reflects the divine ground from which it springs:
All cosmic activity, from angelic contemplation to the mating of insects, conforms with divinity “in as much as creation bears within itself the living image of the creator and stands in a relationship with him.” This ontological relationship is a divine gift, the original endowment bestowed on creatures by their creator as the “precondition for [their] sanctification through reception of the Holy Spirit.”
Indeed, Original grace is the foundation for all subsequent works of sanctification, including the outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon the church. […] The blessing of material things so exuberantly practiced in Orthodoxy – blessing of water, oil, bread, wine, crops, buildings, viands, and so on – [is an example of this] … The challenge is to forge creative linkages between the original grace which sanctifies all creation and the Pentecostal or ecclesial gifts revealed to the historic church” (Valliere Modern Russian Theology 352, 354).
One such creative linkage is inherent here, for Bulgakov (and Valliere) stress that the 'stuff' of creation is intrinsic to our priestly role in offering all of creation - freely given by God to us - back in praise and worship to him. In other words, to incorporate wine, bread, oil and water in the grace-bearing sacraments of worship is reciprocal to our use of them in our daily lives, as sustenance for our bodies which comes naturally from the earth. May we cultivate them to the health of both our souls and bodies, naturally, which is to say, grace-fully.
If Nature and Grace are opposed, eventually a dualism results which opposes God and the world, which distances God's activity from all natural processes (like mating insects...see below), which are then reified rather than seen as sustained by God, without occassionalism. For the Church, there can no such thing as pure, mere, autonomous nature since nature itself is the free creation of God, and therefore has freedom and love as its very substance, deeper even than - or perhaps somehow equivalent with - what we call 'matter.' (For more on the insidiousness of a concept of 'pure nature', see Conor Cunningham's amazing article, here.)
Yet creation must, in patristic fashion, be held as distinct from God, Who is the Uncreated; pantheism is avoided, divine and human freedom preserved, and yet the Incarnation affirms that God is closer to us than we are to ourselves, for the human nature has been taken up and transformed by the divine nature, and humanity - in the risen Christ - somehow participates in the life of the Trinity.
In light of all this, Bulgakov creatively extends the Orthodox position by describing creation itself as an act of grace. Valliere explains this well:
"The key to the Orthodox position [on the question of nature and grace] is the concept of ‘natural grace.’ The idea is that all creation, by virtue of its being and beauty, reflects the divine ground from which it springs:
'The beauty of the world is the effect of the Holy Spirit, of the Spirit of Beauty, and Beauty is Joy, the joy of being: 'Joy eternal nourishes / The soul of God’s creation.' This effect of the natural grace of creation, this breadth of the Holy Spirit in creation, the continuing, ongoing ‘brooding’ of the Holy Spirit over the ‘waters’ of creation, is the positive power of being.' (Bulgakov)
All cosmic activity, from angelic contemplation to the mating of insects, conforms with divinity “in as much as creation bears within itself the living image of the creator and stands in a relationship with him.” This ontological relationship is a divine gift, the original endowment bestowed on creatures by their creator as the “precondition for [their] sanctification through reception of the Holy Spirit.”
Indeed, Original grace is the foundation for all subsequent works of sanctification, including the outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon the church. […] The blessing of material things so exuberantly practiced in Orthodoxy – blessing of water, oil, bread, wine, crops, buildings, viands, and so on – [is an example of this] … The challenge is to forge creative linkages between the original grace which sanctifies all creation and the Pentecostal or ecclesial gifts revealed to the historic church” (Valliere Modern Russian Theology 352, 354).
One such creative linkage is inherent here, for Bulgakov (and Valliere) stress that the 'stuff' of creation is intrinsic to our priestly role in offering all of creation - freely given by God to us - back in praise and worship to him. In other words, to incorporate wine, bread, oil and water in the grace-bearing sacraments of worship is reciprocal to our use of them in our daily lives, as sustenance for our bodies which comes naturally from the earth. May we cultivate them to the health of both our souls and bodies, naturally, which is to say, grace-fully.
Monday, September 26, 2011
on Peter, and Love
After a church-packed weekend, I decided to type out some of my thoughts on Fr. Larry's homily on Sunday. What stuck with me most related to the exemplarity for us of Peter's responses to Christ (in Luke 5:1-11).
First, that Peter's initial objection based on his 'rational standards' of knowledge (as an expert fisherman) is superseded by an obedience to Christ's request that he "go out into the deep and let down your nets"; Peter says: "Master, we have toiled all night and caught nothing; nevertheless at Your word I will let down the net."
Peter's 'nevertheless' is a hinge-point of repentance, of a turning from the wisdom of the world (and its expertise, or trends, or even 'common-sense') to the "foolishness" of Christ, a folly which will be manifest most distinctively in the Cross as a sign of victory (followed by the empty tomb). And so part of our movement toward Christ is a movement from an over-reliance on "the slavery of our own reasoning" toward a quest into the "deep" of God's life.
The second example Peter provides was in his response to catching such a huge load of fish: "Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord!"
Fr. Larry spoke of how this reaction embodies in itself a helpful critique of the modern tendency within certain forms of Christianity to be 'fishers of men' by first trying to convince others of their own sin, and only afterward, and as a result, of their need for Christ. This it to go about it all backward! Rather, if we truly desire to 'catch' others as we are being caught (in the net of Christ, which draws up the teeming cosmos, into the boat of eternity), it is an awareness of and longing for the person of Christ which comes first, since it is this that truly reveals to us the hindrance of our sin, our own unreadiness and unwillingness to face a Love so strong it binds the worlds together and breathes through all things.
And - Lord have mercy! - we are called to offer Christ to the world in this way through the language of our own gestures, actions, words and life - to undergo micro-martyrdoms in each moment, bearing witness to the unseen One in what is seen.
Archbishop Anthony Bloom describes something similar with regard to prayer; that sometimes God's seeming absence in prayer is a gift from Him which may signify that more preparation - more humility, more compunction, contrition, self-awareness - is needed before we can even detect the alarmingly because unwaveringly intimate proximity of God to our very selves, his whisper in our hearts, His fathomless form in our dreams.
The presence of Christ is a consuming fire, and it burns off the dross and grime from our hearts; as Fr. Kaleeg said in his last homily, in the presence of Christ (and He has an infinite number of ways of becoming present to us, as many ways as there are moments in time), our hesitations and doubts melt like wax. May his grace prepare us for Himself.
First, that Peter's initial objection based on his 'rational standards' of knowledge (as an expert fisherman) is superseded by an obedience to Christ's request that he "go out into the deep and let down your nets"; Peter says: "Master, we have toiled all night and caught nothing; nevertheless at Your word I will let down the net."
Peter's 'nevertheless' is a hinge-point of repentance, of a turning from the wisdom of the world (and its expertise, or trends, or even 'common-sense') to the "foolishness" of Christ, a folly which will be manifest most distinctively in the Cross as a sign of victory (followed by the empty tomb). And so part of our movement toward Christ is a movement from an over-reliance on "the slavery of our own reasoning" toward a quest into the "deep" of God's life.
The second example Peter provides was in his response to catching such a huge load of fish: "Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord!"
Fr. Larry spoke of how this reaction embodies in itself a helpful critique of the modern tendency within certain forms of Christianity to be 'fishers of men' by first trying to convince others of their own sin, and only afterward, and as a result, of their need for Christ. This it to go about it all backward! Rather, if we truly desire to 'catch' others as we are being caught (in the net of Christ, which draws up the teeming cosmos, into the boat of eternity), it is an awareness of and longing for the person of Christ which comes first, since it is this that truly reveals to us the hindrance of our sin, our own unreadiness and unwillingness to face a Love so strong it binds the worlds together and breathes through all things.
And - Lord have mercy! - we are called to offer Christ to the world in this way through the language of our own gestures, actions, words and life - to undergo micro-martyrdoms in each moment, bearing witness to the unseen One in what is seen.
Archbishop Anthony Bloom describes something similar with regard to prayer; that sometimes God's seeming absence in prayer is a gift from Him which may signify that more preparation - more humility, more compunction, contrition, self-awareness - is needed before we can even detect the alarmingly because unwaveringly intimate proximity of God to our very selves, his whisper in our hearts, His fathomless form in our dreams.
The presence of Christ is a consuming fire, and it burns off the dross and grime from our hearts; as Fr. Kaleeg said in his last homily, in the presence of Christ (and He has an infinite number of ways of becoming present to us, as many ways as there are moments in time), our hesitations and doubts melt like wax. May his grace prepare us for Himself.
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