DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF ST. JOHN, ARCHBISHOP OF SHANGHAI AND SAN
FRANCISCO
ORTHODOX CHRISTIAN WITNESS (USPS 412-260)
is published monthly by St. Nectarios American Orthodox Cathedral,
10300 Ashworth Avenue North, Seattle, Washington 98133-9410.
POSTMASTER: Send address changes to
OCW, 10300 Ashworth Ave. N., Seattle, WA. 98133-9410
Fr. Neketas S. Palassis, Editor Email: frneketas@stnectariospress.com
Telephone (206) 522-4471; (800) 643-4233 U.S. & Canada;
Fax: 206-523-0550
JULY, 2004, Vol. XXXVIII, No. 7 (1538)
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
1. A LETTER FROM THE PAST
2. SEEING WITH ORTHODOX CHRISTIAN EYES
3. NEW ITEMS FROM THE BOOK CENTER
See my child, how good obedience is when it is undertaken for the Lord.
. . Oh, obedience, salvation of the
faithful! Oh, obedience, mother of all the virtues! Oh, obedience,
discloser of the Kingdom! Oh, obedience, opening of the Heavens, and
making men to ascend there from earth! Oh, obedience, food of all the
Saints, whose milk they have sucked, through you they have become
perfect! Oh, obedience, companion of the Angels!
-Abba Rufus
1. A LETTER FROM THE PAST
1/14 June 1984
Holy Martyr Justin the Philosopher
Dear Father A.,
Thank you for your letter of May 30, 1984. It was very kind of you to
invite me to be one of the speakers at
the Symposium on Orthodox Church Music. Unfortunately, my duties here
at the monastery preclude my attending the Symposium.
In addition to my duties, there are other considerations as well which
form an obstacle to my participation in the Symposium. I brought your
letter to the attention of our abbot, Fr. Panteleimon, and together
with the
other senior fathers of the monastery, we felt that the following
observations should be made. For Orthodox Christians, and especially
for us who have espoused the monastic life, the daily cycle of sacred
services - vespers, matins, Compline, the vigils and the Divine
Liturgy, as well as our private rule of prayer - form the
core of our very existence. No one but an Orthodox Christian finds it
necessary to stand for many hours in church, "worshipping God in spirit
and in truth," as Our Saviour told the Samaritan Woman at Jacob's Well.
And as so much of our sacred hymnology points out, "in spirit and in
truth" does not mean only "spiritually and sincerely," but also "in the
spirit - the Holy Spirit - and in the truth": hence the many services
to the
martyrs and confessors of the Faith, who from ages past down to our own
days have died at the hands of various
heterodox - that is to say, the Arians, the Monophysites, the
Iconoclasts, the Roman Catholics, the Lutherans,
etc.
However, in recent years, with the growing involvement of the Greek
Archdiocese in the Ecumenical Movement, this basic scriptural and
patristic tenet of "worship in spirit and in truth" has been seriously
compromised by the participation of your hierarchs, clergy and
laypeople in joint prayer with the heterodox, and even in isolated (but
numerous) instances of inter-communion. There are many official
documents and published sermons of your bishops which confirm the truth
of what I have written above, but, certainly, this is not the place to
quote them for you.
The essence of what I am trying to say, Father, is that we cannot
worship God "in spirit and in truth" if - contrary to the injunctions
of the Holy Scriptures and the Holy Fathers - we join together in
prayer with those who cleave to erroneous and false doctrines.
Since this spiritual and true worship is the very basis and foundation
of all the liturgical arts of the Church - including liturgical chant -
I could not in good conscience take part in a symposium in which the
participants no longer adhere to the Orthodox Church's teaching in this
particular matter. The non-Orthodox principles that underlie the
Ecumenical Movement (of which the Greek Archdiocese is now an organic
member) and the subsequent incidents of joint-prayer with the heterodox
were the reasons why our monastery and many priests and laypeople
withdrew from the jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarchate in the
first place. As much as we love you personally, and feel bound to you
by cultural and ethnic ties, we cannot agree with your altered
ecclesiology and your hierarchy's practice of joining in prayer with
those who are in heresy. As a result, since I am not merely an isolated
individual, but a member of the monastic community of Holy
Transfiguration Monastery, my participation in the October Symposium
might be interpreted by many as signifying that these doctrinal
differences between the Greek Archdiocese and ourselves do not really
matter, whereas the truth is that, to us, they matter very much.
We are very grateful that, despite our sins and unworthiness, we are
under the omophorion of Metropolitan Philaret of New York who loves and
reveres our holy Orthodox Faith and who rightly divides the truth, and
who gives us most edifying examples of true asceticism and the life in
Christ. Hence, we do not wish, either
by any act or word on our part, to bring confusion to the minds of any
of our people, or of yours, regarding the stand that we have taken on
Ecumenism and its attendant doctrinal and liturgical abuses. We would
not want
to give the impression - even in the slightest way - that we are having
second thoughts about these matters, when we are not.
Please forgive me, Father, if I have offended you in any way. My only
intention was to speak to you sincerely
and from my heart.
With the love in Christ,
Ephraim, monk*
(Presently, Metropolitan Ephraim of Boston)
2. SEEING WITH ORTHODOX CHRISTIAN EYES
Fr. Seraphim Johnson
"For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face." I Cor.
13:12
In the life of Papa Nicholas Planas we are told that once when he was
serving Liturgy, Saints John and Panteleimon appeared to him at the
Holy Table and told him that one of his spiritual children was about to
die.1 Another time when he was serving Liturgy, an unknown woman
offered him a prosphoron; but he refused to take it, because he
knew-correctly-that she was living in sin.2 On another occasion, when
Papa Nicholas was going to a country chapel and had trouble finding his
way, an angel appeared to him in the form of a young man and guided him
to the door of the church; then the young man vanished.3 The Elder
Ieronymos of Aegina told a story about his elder, the Priest John. When
Fr. John was serving Liturgy, there was a very long pause
in the middle of the Anaphora. The choir had to chant "We hymn
Thee..."over and over, while they were waiting
for Fr. John to finish the prayers invoking the Holy Spirit and asking
Him to change the bread and wine into the Lord's Body and Blood.
Finally, the people asked him why it took him so long to say the
prayers, and he
explained that the Holy Table was surrounded by flames when he came to
that part of the service. He had to pray and make prostrations until
finally the flames parted and he dared to put his hand into them to
bless the Holy Gifts.4 I suppose most of us are familiar with these
stories and others like them from the lives of
the saints and modern elders and holy people. They saw angels and
saints, they worked miracles, they were shown things about the future
or about other people which they could not have known by human means.
And it is not just the saints who had these experiences. In fact, many
simple, pious people have seen angels and saints, and even more have
experienced miracles; i.e., they have seen God's hand at work in the
world. So, the question is: Why don't we see God acting in our lives?
Why does it normally seem to us as if God is absent from our world? Or
at least, as if He takes no direct part in it? Perhaps we will answer
that this is
because we are not holy enough; and surely, that is partially correct.
But then we have to wonder: Why are we not holy enough? Why do we live
in a way which ignores God (which is what it means when we say we are
not
holy)? This is the question I want to consider today, but in trying to
answer it I am going to go a bit far afield initially.
In the last thirty years some very interesting work has been done in
the history of science. Thomas Kuhn5 began some of his research because
he was puzzled that Aristotle could seem, on the one hand, to be such
an acute observer of the world, but could, on the other hand, make such
strange and inaccurate statements
about the natural world. At first he thought that perhaps Aristotle
just was not as clever as we are. But
with time he came to understand that Aristotle had an entirely
different framework in which he made his observations. When Kuhn tried
to enter into that framework, he discovered that Aristotle's
observations made perfect sense. Aristotle's view of the details was
different because his view of the world was different.
Kuhn then studied the history of "progress" in science and found that
what he had in science, and found that
what he discovered about Aristotle was true in many other cases, some
of which we would find amazing today.
For example, in the Middle Ages in Western Europe there was a
philosophical belief that the stars are fixed
permanently in the sky. All during this period, no one ever reported
changes in the stars, i.e. the appearance
of new stars or the disappearance of existing ones. The Chinese, who
had no philosophical objection to changes
in the stars, recorded many changes during this same period. It was
only after Copernicus changed the Western view of the heavens that
Western Europeans were able to observe changes in the sky.6 It is hard
to believe that two groups of people could look at something that seems
as "given" as the stars in the sky and see different things, but that
is exactly what happened. And the difference was caused by their frame
of reference, not by anything in the sky itself. Another example is
provided by the planet Uranus. For centuries astronomy believed the
number of planets to be fixed at six. As telescopes improved it became
possible to see details in the sky which had never been observed
before. As a result, on at least seventeen
occasions between 1690 and 1781 astronomers, including some of the most
eminent, recorded a star in the
position we now know to be Uranus's. One even saw it on four nights in
a row, but did not see the motion
which would have shown it to be a planet, rather than a star. Herschel,
the first one to discern the motion,
concluded that he must be seeing a comet. Only after tying
unsuccessfully for months to fit its movements
to a comet's orbit did another scientist decide they must be seeing a
new planet. Suddenly astronomy's view
of the world changed, and now it was possible to have more than six
planets in our solar system. Remarkably,
after this shift in paradigm astronomers found 20 additional minor
planets and asteroids in the 70 years following the recognition of
Uranus as a planet.7 Once again, we see that one's perceptual framework
largely
determines what one sees, even in a context which seems as large and as
objective as the sky. Similar shifts in perspective have occurred in
other areas of science also. Before Lavoisier, no one saw oxygen in
chemical
experiments; burning was believed to occur in dephlogisticated air or
in nothing at all, but there was no hint that oxygen was necessary for
burning to occur. Also after oxygen was discovered, substances that
earlier
were viewed as elemental earths were suddenly found to be compounds
containing oxygen.8 In each of these cases, the people who came
afterwards were in some real sense living in a different world than the
ones who had gone before them, They looked at "the same things," but
they saw them as very different things.
From these examples, we can draw a vital conclusion: The world is a
mass of sensory impressions too vast and inchoate to be understood
without a frame of reference, a paradigm. When scientists perform their
experiments, they cannot even know what to measure and what their
measurements mean unless they have a paradigm into which they can fit
them. Try for a moment to think of all the possible things you could
measure in something as simple as a glass of water. But suppose you did
measure a lot of different things (temperature, clearness, chemical
composition, smell, color, age, volume, weight, etc., etc.); how would
you know what any of them meant? First of all, without some frame of
reference, how could you even measure them at all? Without a
temperature scale, how could you measure the temperature of the water?
How would you
rate the color? And then, what would you do with the measurements you
made? Why are you making them? If you
want to know if the water is safe to drink, you probably don't care
about its volume or weight. But if you just want to know how much of it
you have, you may not care much about its color or clarity. In other
words, measurements are not made in a vacuum, but only within some
context, and that context may not be the same for all people at all
times. In scientific research your reference framework tells you what
to look for, how
to measure it, what units of measure are meaningful, and what
instruments to use to make your measurements. Scientific progress
results from a shift in the frame of reference, so that suddenly the
world is viewed in a different way, with things that earlier meant
nothing now critical. A change in reference framework, or paradigm,
tells you to measure different things and to measure them in a
different way than you have done before. In the process it also causes
you to live in a different world than you lived in before, because it
makes different things matter to you in ways they earlier did not.
Without a paradigm, the world is literally meaningless; but the
paradigm you use determines what meaning you see in the world. It
determines what you perceive and how you perceive it.
As an aside, another one of Kuhn's conclusions is that most changes of
framework come about early in life.
Normally, new scientific breakthroughs which change an established
paradigm are made either by young researchers or by amateurs who have
not been fully trained in the ways of the full-time scientists. It is
also the case that older scientists may convert intellectually to the
new paradigm, but they rarely are able truly to learn to see the world
from that standpoint. If they think about it, they can operate in the
new framework, but it does not really come naturally to them and
they are in constant danger of falling back into their earlier way of
viewing the world. It is interesting
to see that Dr. Kalomiros9 noticed the same thing about converts to
Orthodoxy: unless they are young when they convert, they tend to find
it very hard to learn really to see the world in an Orthodox way. They
can
learn to speak as Orthodox Christians, but they usually have to use a
certain amount of force to keep themselves in the Orthodox paradigm.
This is sad, but something of which we must be aware. Once it is set,
it is hard to change one's fundamental understanding of the world and
how it works. With God's grace and great attentiveness it may be
possible, but converts, especially those who are older or who were
well-indoctrinated in non-Orthodox views, will always have to be on
their guard to see that their earlier
presuppositions do not creep back in and draw them away from an
Orthodox outlook.
We have now seen something of the importance of one's paradigm in
determining what one sees in the world,
what has meaning in the mass of facts in the universe around us. The
question we must now consider is: What is our framework? Do we see the
world from an Orthodox Christian perspective, or do we have some other
view of the world? And what is the paradigm of our society, since we
are likely to be heavily influenced by
it without our even being aware of it? Sadly, all of Western society,
very much including Russia and the countries of the former Soviet
Union, has adopted a paradigm which is directly opposed to the Orthodox
Christian view of the world. Its primary elements derive from its
denial that God plays an active part in His world at all. Its
scientific approach to the natural world assumes that everything
operates according to natural laws and that everything came 'into being
by chance, through a process of natural evolution which
is in fact completely meaningless. Similarly, it believes our social
system is derived from a process of evolution, supplemented by the
brilliant insights of men who deny God any place in their lives. Thus,
its social organization is totally secular, i.e. limited to this world,
with no consideration of any values outside a pragmatic concern for
whatever appears to works best or is most convenient at any given
moment. Such a society teaches its members that their lives have no
meaning beyond comfort and pleasure: "Eat, drink,
and be merry, for tomorrow you die." And this is a lesson which has
been taught very well to all of us, a
nd to our children even more.
To illustrate how this secular view permeates our paradigm of how the
world works, let's consider a number of specific examples.
Welfare. Since our society assumes there is no ultimate value to human
lives, the goal of its welfare system
has become one of insuring the maximum comfort for those who are
unable, or unwilling, to work. If we look at any city in this country
today, we can see the fruits of this assumption: large numbers of young
adults who have no sense of responsibility at all, and who think
nothing of killing others for the most trivial reasons.10 Morally
speaking, these people have been destroyed by their upbringing and
humanly speaking are
fit for nothing of value in this life or the next. To guard against
such destruction, St. Paul taught a very
different approach to welfare: "For when we were with you, we commanded
you this: If anyone will not work, neither shall he eat. For we hear
that there are some who walk among you in a disorderly manner, not
working at all, but are busybodies. Now those who are such we command
and exhort through our Lord Jesus Christ that they work in quietness
and eat their own bread" (II Thess. 3:10-12). And yet, how many of the
so-called Christian Churches today support our soul-destroying welfare
system and actually lobby for its continuation
and extension!
Deficit. St. Paul instructs us to "owe no one anything except to love
one-another" (Rom 13:8); similarly, St David the Psalmist warns that
"the wicked borrows and does not repay (Ps. 36:21) and King Solomon
teaches,
that "the borrower is servant to the lender" (Prov. 22:7). Since our
society, however, denies any life after
death, it recognizes nothing beyond its immediate desires and
pleasures. As a result, our rulers have had no
hesitation about spending incomprehensible sums of money which they did
not have and which there is no prospect they can ever repay. This is 'a
burden which very likely will destroy our society during our lifetimes,
and which will certainly cripple it for our children and
grand-children. This approach is
completely opposed to the prudence which God instructs us to follow and
would have been considered reprehensible by almost all societies
throughout history.
Medicine. In earlier, God-fearing times, medicine was tightly linked to
religion. It was properly understood
that sickness is often a judgment on sin,11 and the proper treatment
for it must include prayer, as St James
commands us: "Is any among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the
church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name
of the Lord" (James 5: 14). In fact, this is precisely the reason the
canons12 forbid Christians to go to Jewish doctors; they assume that
any doctor will treat his patients with a combination of medical and
spiritual prescriptions, including prayer, and Christians are not to
join with non-Christians in prayer. Even when today's secularized
medicine does recognize any spiritual component in healing at all (as
in "holistic medicine"), it usually practices a pantheistic paganism,
which teaches that
each person has a god inside and can heal himself by getting in touch
with that god. How many people today would even think of praying to the
living God for healing, much less having a service of unction or taking
holy water when they are sick? Sickness has come to be seen as
something in which God is not involved, and medicine is analogous to
auto repairs-something to use to fix a broken machine. And if it can't
be fixed, hen you throw it away. Medicine has been corrupted into
providing abortions on an unheard-of scale, so that
instead of bringing healing to the sick, it brings death to the unborn
innocent. Furthermore, we are now seeing a movement toward killing
those who are judged to lack a sufficient "quality of life." Initially
this
will be the elderly and the handicapped, but in time it may easily come
to be anyone who is in society's way,
e.g. Orthodox Christians. Lest you think this sounds far-fetched,
remember that something very similar has already been seen in Russia
and Germany earlier in this century.
Immoral Behavior. St. Paul warns us to avoid all sorts of immoral
behavior: "Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the
kingdom of God? Do not be deceived. Neither fornicators, nor idolators,
nor adulterers, nor homosexuals, nor sodomites, nor thieves, nor
covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners will inherit
the kingdom of God" (I Cor. 6:9-10). These are frightening words, but
our society ignores them and tends rather to glorify people who do
these things. Consider our political leaders,
the actors and actresses, rock performers, and writers who are held up
as examples for us and our children:
They are clear examples of the unrighteous who will have no part of the
kingdom of God. We are bombarded by messages on every side-ranging from
television and movies, to condom distribution in our schools-to
persuade
us that casual sexual relations are unavoidable and to be encouraged,
as long as they are "safe." No one cares that such things violate the
Seventh Commandment (Ex. 20:14), forbidding adultery, or the Apostle's
commandment against fornication (Col. 3:5), much less the Church's
canons.13 And now we are seeing an amazing new phenomenon,
demonstrating how much our society hates God and His gift of life: the
support being given to homosexuality. Not so many years ago we made
every effort to protect our children from an exposure to this vice, but
now our cultural leaders, including the President of the United States,
are supporting this sin; they discriminate against the Boy Scouts
because they refuse to allow homosexuals to be
scout masters. God has clearly condemned this behavior,14 but even many
so-called Christian Churches today attempt to defend it.
Race Relations. One of the areas in which much of our society was very
deficient in the past was the relations between various races. Racial
discrimination is clearly a sin, since we are taught that in Christ all
races become one (Gal. 3:28). St. James warns us not to show
"partiality" toward others, using the rich as his examples, but surely
the same principle applies to other sorts of discriminations on the
basis of external qualities. He warns that when we discriminate, we
"become judges with evil thoughts" (James 2:4). Our Lord pointedly and
repeatedly ignored the Jewish animosity toward the Samaritans, who were
racially and religiously
separate and despised by the Jews.15 For a time, it looked as if our
society was actually going to correct its sin in this area, but
unfortunately, we have now unerringly adopted the exact opposite as the
supposed cure. Where once we discriminated against people whose skin
was a different color from that of the majority, we now discriminate in
favor of them. In fact, racism is far more deeply embedded in our
society today than at any time in the past, since now it is used as a
primary criterion throughout all areas of the country for
decisions which once were based more on merit (e.g. in awarding
scholarships, in hiring and promotion practices, in grading tests, in
making bank loans, etc.). Once again, a great many of the so-called
Christian
Churches are encouraging this blatant, but unacknowledged, racism, and
they are doing it in the name of stamping out racism.
False Orthodoxy. One of the worst examples of the intrusion of secular
paradigms is in the false Orthodoxy which is being taught in so many of
the churches which still dare to take the name of "Orthodox." Much
modern intellectual scholarship draws conclusions which are totally
foreign to Orthodoxy, but it cloaks its soul-destroying conclusions in
the guise of the Orthodox Christian Faith. Many recent publications,
especially
those coming from the so-called Evangelical Orthodox, show a spirit,
which is alien to Orthodoxy, even questioning the authority of the Holy
Scriptures and the Lord Himself in His Church.16 These people, both
those born into Orthodox families and those coming as converts, are
bringing a worldly, secular approach to
Orthodoxy. Rather than approaching the Church as seekers asking to be
instructed in the soul-saving mysteries
of prayer and obedience to God, they come as judges, with the intention
of "reforming" Orthodoxy so that it will be in tune with the
surrounding secular world. How grievous it is that so many of these
"reformers" have
seized the patriarchal thrones, the seminaries, and the publishing arms
of the historic Orthodox Churches! Through their efforts, it is
becoming nearly impossible for honest seekers to find the true Orthodox
Faith, since those who claim to represent and present it are instead
denying it and betraying it.
It would be possible to go on much longer showing examples of how our
present society not only does not have a Christian framework informing
its view of the world, but on the contrary is guided by a positively
anti-Christian paradigm-one which denies God and His commandments at
every opportunity. Let me discuss one final contrast between the
Christian's view of the world and that of our society. Consider all the
grievous circumstances around us: our cities are being destroyed by an
underclass of people with no moral values or self control; taxes are
taking away more and more of the money families need to live; our
economy is teetering on the edge of collapse; in recent times we have
seen a particularly violent hurricane which did
billions of dollars worth of damage in South Florida, this year (1993)
the Midwestern United States was
flooded for months and billions of dollars worth of property was lost.
A Christian looking at all these events would see God's hand judging
this nation for its sins, as the Prophet Joel saw God's hand in a
mighty plague of locusts. When the Prophet saw the destruction caused
by God's hand, he cried out, "'Now, therefore,'
says the Lord, 'turn to Me with all your heart with fasting, with
weeping, and with mourning.' So rend your heart and not your garments;
return to the Lord your God, for He is gracious and merciful, slow to
anger, and
of great kindness; and He relents from doing harm. Who knows if He will
turn and relent, and leave a blessing
behind Him - a grain offering and a drink offering for the Lord your
God?" (Joel 2:12-14). If such a hurricane
or such floods had occurred in the last century, it is quite likely
that the President of the United States would have declared a solemn
day of fasting and repentance, as the Prophet calls for. But to do so
today would not only invite ridicule from the molders of opinion, it
would also undoubtedly lead to a legal challenge, with the courts
forbidding any such expression of faith in God.
Now we are in a position to understand our problem as Orthodox
Christians and to see why we do not see God's
angels and saints at work in the world around us: We are deeply
infected by the secular, God-denying, God-hating framework with which
our society views the world. We have so deeply absorbed this paradigm,
that we are unable to see the world which is really there-the world
created by God and sustained by Him through His holy angels; the world
whose purpose is to produce saints to rejoice with God forever in His
Kingdom; the
world which one day, perhaps soon, will be consummated in glory, when
our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ
returns to rule over it forever. Instead of "natural laws" working on
their own, we should see God's angels,
His ministering spirits, guiding and sustaining this world. Imagine how
it would be if you saw every cloud, every chemical reaction, every
change in plants and animals as an expression of God at work through
His angels
in our world to provide us with the opportunity for sanctity, not as
blind laws acting without sense or purpose! How different the world
would be! And yet, that is precisely how the world is! The only thing
is, our eyes are so blinded by our secular paradigm, inspired by Satan
to deceive us, that we cannot see what is actually there in front of
us. How different our lives would be if we saw everything in the world
working together for our spiritual benefit: some things to reward us,
and others to punish our sins; but everything
harmoniously directed toward the great goal of making us saints of God!
What a vision! And what a sorrow (and yes, a sin) that we do not have
such a vision. Each of us must ask: Is there any way that I can change
my framework and learn to see the world as God made it, not as Satan
has portrayed it?
At this point, the great question is: How can we acquire a Christian
framework from which to view the world? Let me suggest the outlines of
such a framework, an outline which is taken from one of the Church's
deepest
theologians, St. Dionysius the Areopagite. St. Dionysius describes the
order and hierarchy, which exists in
the world, the order by which God rules over His creation. For the
creation is orderly. We read in the beginning of the book of Genesis
that the world was shapeless and void, but God brought it into
increasing order through the process of creation, working through His
uncreated, ever-existing Word. As St. Dionysius
teaches,17 before God made the world, He created the Angels in three
ranks of three orders each: the Cherubim, Seraphim, and Thrones;
Authorities, Dominions, and Powers; and Principalities, Archangels, and
Angels. The chief angels - the Cherubim - stand directly before God,
although even they cannot see Him in His true being, since He cannot be
comprehended by any created being. Each rank conveys God's grace and
instructions to the next rank, order by order, until they are brought
down to our created world. And similarly, our prayers ascend up to God
through the ranks of angels, each rank purifying and transmitting the
prayers it has received. This is not to suggest that we have no contact
with God; on the contrary, we ourselves fit into this blessed
hierarchy, in which everything is done decently and in order. For the
rank
below the Angels is mankind itself. And as the Angels are divided into
three ranks, so mankind is also divided into three ranks: the clergy
(divided into bishops, priest, and deacons), the sacred people
(monastics, divided into novices, professed, and schema-monks), and
those being purified (divided into the
initiates-the believing Christian laity, the repentant-those preparing
for Baptism or those who have fallen
into serious sin after Baptism and the possessed-those outside the
Church of God). Grace is mediated from God to the created world through
these ordered hierarchies, showing us the beautiful and elegant
structure which sustains the world. Each of us has a place in the
hierarchy, a place that God has given us. Think how
different this view is from that of modern science. In St. Dionysius's
understanding of the universe, God's guiding hand is everywhere,
mediated in an orderly and loving manner. There is no blind chance at
work; there are no mindless "natural laws"; there is no purposeless
evolution. Rather, there is meaning and purpose
in every single act, because every one of our acts is either a proper
participation in the process of passing
on God's grace through our order and returning our prayers to Him
through the Celestial Hierarchy, or it
breaks the link in the hierarchy and damages the whole creation. For
the point of the hierarchy is that each member must play his assigned
role for it to work properly. Some of God's grace may fail to reach the
repentant and the possessed, if the initiates do not transmit it. And
the prayers of the initiates and those below do not ascend upward as
well if the monastics and the clergy are themselves careless and
impure. The
significance of a hierarchy is precisely this: it only works properly
if each rank performs its functions correctly. Satan's fall removed
some members of the higher orders, and in a real sense weakened God's
creation. Man's fall disrupted the hierarchy even more, since there are
now no human beings who truly meet
their calling in the Divine Hierarchy. If we look at the state of the
world around us today, we cannot fail
to see the disastrous results of the failure of Christians to fulfill
their assigned functions. And the horrors of our world-all those sins
we talked about earlier-are substantially our fault, because we do not
even see our role in sustaining God's creation, much less fulfill it.
We desperately need to correct our vision as Orthodox Christians, to
see what we truly are and are called to
be: grace-bearers to God's creation! We must devote our fullest
attention to our true function. We must learn to see God at work in the
world, casting off the blinding lies we have absorbed from the world's
paradigm, and replacing them with the truth about God and our
relationship with Him. To acquire this vision, it is necessary that
every Orthodox Christian immerse him or herself in the things of God,
the things which convey God's truth and grace to man. St. Peter teaches
us how we must acquire this Christian vision: "...add to your faith
virtue, to virtue knowledge, to knowledge self-control, to self-control
perseverance, to perseverance godliness, to godliness brotherly
kindness, to brotherly kindness love"
(11 Peter 1:5-7). As the Apostle shows, first of all each of us must
strive to attain moral purity. Sin has disrupted the hierarchy and
distracted us from our proper role in God's order. Until we at least
begin to wipe sin out of our lives, we cannot hope to understand the
purpose for which God created us.
Once the process of moral purification has begun, you must start to
replace the false goals and teachings of
the world with knowledge of God's true goals and purposes. To find the
truth, take the lives of the saints as examples, and see how they
fulfilled their God-assigned callings to be a means of grace to the
world and to convey men's prayers to God's throne. Steep yourself in
them, for in the saints' lives everyone can find profit. No matter how
simple or uneducated (and no matter how complex and over-educated you
may be, you can
draw strength and instruction from the struggles of those who have been
faithful to God. Turn also to the Holy Scripture and the spiritual
writings of the Holy Fathers. The God-breathed words you find there
will show you God Himself as fully as man is able to grasp Him, For
some, these sources are harder, but with constant reading and with
prayer for enlightenment, along with the guidance of the Church, they
will open up and teach you the true understanding of this world and
your place in it. Immerse yourself also in prayer.
The Divine Liturgy is the fullest expression an earth of God's
hierarchy. At the Liturgy you can see the orders of the earthly
hierarchy present before God's throne. The clergy stand at the front,
immediately before the Throne of God, the Holy Table. The initiates
stand in the body of the temple, the nave. The repentant stand outside
the nave, in the narthex. And the possessed are completely outside the
temple of God. The Liturgy is offered with beauty and order, raising
our prayers to the Celestial Hierarchy to convey to God's throne and in
return bringing down God's grace to us on earth. At the Liturgy we join
with the whole Divine Hierarchy in heaven and on earth, and we truly
see our place in God's creation. For
this reason, our temples should be orderly, and all the people should
be quiet and reverent, realizing where they are and what great order
they are participating in. When the Liturgy is over, we must not lose
sight of
God's order for the world. We must continue to send our prayers upward
to His throne in everything that we
do, and we must look for His grace to continue to descend to us through
our private prayers at every moment
during the day.
This is our calling as Christians. How different this is from what the
world wants us to believe! We are not
little lumps of meaningless flesh that live for a few years seeking
maximum pleasure, and then die and cease to exist. Rather, we are God's
creatures, made by Him for a specific purpose, and assigned a place in
the order of the universe. Only you can fill the spot for which you
were created. And if you fail to fill it, you
detract from and damage all of God's creation. How awesome our role!
How frightening to look at the world around us and realize that our
failure to be what we were made to be is the root cause of many of the
social
and moral evils we see! One day our eyes will be opened and we will see
God's creation as it is. I pray that day may be now, while there is
still time for each of you to begin to take your place in it. But, if
it is not now, it will be at the dread judgment seat of Christ when it
will be too late to do anything but gnash your teeth and cry out in
rage, frustration, and grief. Seize the opportunity while you can.
Learn to see the world as it truly is. And take your place in God's
order with obedience, love, and joy.
NOTES
1. Holy Transfiguration Monastery, Papa Nicholas Planas, Boston, 1981,
pp. 19-20.
2. Ibid., p. 32.
3. Ibid., p. 20.
4. Botses, Petros, Gerontas Ieronymos, O Hsychastis tis Aiginas [in
Greek, Athens, 1991, pp. 28-29.
5 Described in: Kuhn, Thomas S., The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions, Chicago, 1962,1970.
6. Ibid., p. 116.
7. Ibid., pp. 115-116.
8. Ibid., p. 118.
9. Kalomiros, Dr. Alexandre, Against False Union, Seattle, 1967, 1978,
1990, pp. 45-46
10. As an example, in a recent case a young man's car ran out of gas
and he had no money to buy more-, so he killed a passerby and took the
$4.05 from his pocket to get more gas. This man valued another's life
less than a tank of gas for his car.
11. 'But if you do not obey Me, and do not observe all these
commandments, and if you despise My statutes, or if your soul abhors My
judgments, so that you do not perform all My commandments, but break My
covenant I also will do this to you: I will even appoint terror over
you, wasting disease and fever which shall consume the eyes and cause
sorrow of heart (Lev. 26:14-16). Similarly, when our Lord cured the
paralytic at the pool of Bethsaida, he warned him, 'See you have been
made well. Sin no more, lest a worse thing come upon you' (Luke 5:14).
12. IV Fcumenical Council, canon I 1.
13. For example, St Basil, canon 26.
14. 'If a man lies with a male as he lies with a woman, both of them
have committed an abomination. They shall surely be put to death. Their
blood shall be upon them." (Lev. 20:13). Similarly. St Paul teaches,
'Professing to be wise, they became fools ... For this reason God gave
them up to vile passions. For even their women exchanged the natural
use for what is against nature. Likewise, also the men, leaving the
natural
use of the woman, burned in their lust for one another, men with men,
committing what is shameful, and receiving in themselves the penalty of
their error which was due' (Rom. 1:22,26-27).
15. For example, John 4-9.
16. The recent Orthodox Study Bible (Nashville, 1993) puts forth many
non-Orthodox views on the Scriptures;
e.g., the introduction to St. Marks' Gospel (p. 8 1) suggests it is the
earliest Gospel, although all the
early Fathers and Church writers affirm that St. Matthew's was the
first Gospel (see Trembelas, P. N., Ypomnema eis to kata Mathaion
Evangelion, Athens;, 1989, pp. 18-19, which cites St Irenaeus, Clement
of Alexandria, Eusebius. Origen, St. Epiphanius, St. Jerome, and St.
John Chrysostom for this view). Similarly the Study Bible raises
questions in the reader's mind about the ending of St. Mark's Gospel
and all through the New Testament it prints variant readings proposed
by modem critical scholarship, even though these readings have never
been used by the Orthodox Church. In its comments on Matthew 14:14-21
it says that Our Lord 'probably" performed two miraculous feedings,
thereby challenging our Lord's
own words in Matthew 16:9-10, where He clearly teaches that there were
two separate feedings, one of 5,000 and one of 4,000. See also the
comment on Mark 9:38-40 which suggests that all creeds are equal and
that no one can know who is a heretic and who is Orthodox.
17. In The Celestial Hierarchy and The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy.
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