11.30.07
4995 Tune-ins
Thanks to everyone for listening. Today I posted my heart on my other blog if you care to hear that too.
11.29.07
Who am I to talk?
There’s a children’s joke about a big mouth frog who goes around asking people, while opening his mouth extra wide as he talks, “Hi, I’m a big mouth frog, who are you and what do you eat?” to various animals. Then he comes to an alligator who responds, “big mouth frogs”, “oh” said the big mouth frog tersely with very pursed lips. I feel like the big mouth frog after reading this section from Orthodox Psychotherapy, page 31:
Only those who have passed from praxis to theoria, from purification to illumination, can speak about God. And when is this? “It is when we are free from all external defilement or disturbance, and when that which rules within us is not confused with vexation or erring images.” Therefore (Saint Gregory Nanzianzen) advises: “For it is necessary to be truly at ease to know God”.
Neilos the Ascetic links theology with prayer, principally with noetic prayer. We know very well from the teaching of the Holy Fathers that anyone who has acquired the grace of prayer of the heart has entered the first stages of the vision of God, for this type of prayer is a form of theoria. Therefore all who pray with the nous have communion with God, and this communion is man’s spiritual knowledge of God.
11.28.07
The Church as Hospital
I finished reading, if not squeezing out every truth of, The Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ, so now I turn back to Orthodox Psychotherapy. It may make me sound like some sort of nut, but as the Orthodox view sinfulness as illness, we also view the cure for the human condition to be found in the Church, though some are more open to secular healers for various types of infirmity than others.
From page 28 of Chapter 1, What Christianity Is:
In St. John Chrysostom’s interpretation of this parable [of The Good Samaritan] it is clearly evident that the Church is a Hospital which heals those sick with sin, while the bishops and priests, like the Apostle Paul, are the healers of the people of God.
These truths also appear in many other places in the New Testament. …(Matt. 9:12, Mat 4:23, 1Cor. 8:12). The Book of Revelation says that John the Evangelist saw a river of the water of life proceeding from the throne of God and of the Lamb. “On either side of the river was the tree of life…and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations” (Rev. 22:1)
So the work of the Church is therapeutic. It seeks to heal men’s sicknesses, mainly those of the soul, which torment them. This is the basic teaching of the New Testament and of the Fathers of the Church. In what follows in this chapter as well as in other chpaters many passages from the Fathers will bring out this truth.
(John Romanides) says: “Having faith in Christ without undergoing healing in Christ is not faith at all. Here is the same contradiction that we find when a sick person who has great confidence in his doctor never carries out the treatment which he recommends. If Judaism and its successor, Christianity, had appeared in the twentieth century for the first time, they would most likely have been characterised not as religions but as medical sciences related to psychiatry. They would have a wide influence on society owing to their considerable successes in healing the ills of the partially functioning personality. In no way can prophetic Judaism and Christianity be construed as religions that use various magical methods and beliefs to promise escape from a supposed world of matter and evil or hypocrisy into a supposed spiritual world of security and success.”
In another work the same professor says: “The patrisitic tradition is neither a social philosphy nor an ethical system, nor is it religious dogmatism: it is a therapeutic treatment… The spiritual energy of the soul that prays unceasingly in the heart is a physiological instrument which everyone has and which requires healing. Neither philosophy nor any of the known positive or social sciences is capable of healing this instrument. That can only be done through the Fathers’ neptic and ascetic teaching. Therefore those who are not healed usually do not even know of the existence of this instrument.”
So in the Church we are divided into the sick, those undergoing therapeutic treatment, and those – saints – who have already been healed. “The Fathers do not categorize people as moral and immoral or good and bad on the basis of moral laws. This division is superficial. At depth humanity is differentiated into the sick in soul, those being healed and those healed. All who are not in a state of illumination are sick in soul… It is not only good will, good resolve, moral practice and devotion to Orthodox Tradition which make an Orthodox, but also purification, illumination and deification. These stages of healing are the purpose of the mystical life of the Church, as the liturgical texts bear witness.”
11.26.07
Nineveh was a great city before God, of about a three-day journey
Jonah 3:3
more from Ad Thalassium 64
Permit us to fill in this gap with a few observations. We must assume that the thee-day journey signifies the three different ways of the godly life, or in other words, the discipline proper to each of the three universal laws. By universal laws here I mean the natural law, the scriptural law, and the law of grace. For each of these laws has a peculiar mode of life and appropriate course of action, since each generates a different disposition of the will for those who follow it.
Maximus explains that the Natural Law “prevents the senses from overpowering reason” in how we treat others, typified by Christ’s teaching, Whatever you desire for men to do to you, do likewise to them (Mt. 7:12, Lk 6:31). Maximus says that this law provides a type of unity among people who overcome their selfishness.
The second law, the Scriptural Law, “curbs the unruly urges of the more foolish by the fear of punishment, and trains them to look only for equitable distribution… of justice” which slowly turns the fear (of punishment) into a disposition [of] “deliberate willing of the good.” This will eventually engender a love of others, and a desire for mutual loving unity with them. “The law of nature consists in natural reason assuming control of the senses, while the scriptural law, or the fulfillment of the scriptural law, consists in the natural reason acquiring a spiritual desire conducive to a relation of mutuality with others of teh same human nature. Therefore the Lord himself specifically says, Love your neighbor as yourself (Lev 19:18, Mt 5:43; 19:19; 22:39; Mk 12:31) and not Regard your neighbor as yourself. The one indicates only the connatural sharing in being, while the other signifies the providence leading us toward well-being.
So he’s saying natural law leads to fairness, but Scriptural law leads to love of those like us.
The third law is the Law of Grace, which “teaches those who follow it directly to imitate God himself, who… loves us, his virtual enemies because of sin, more than himself, such that, even though he himself transcends every essence and nature, he consented to enter our human essence without undergoing change, and while retaining his transcendence, to become a man and willingly to interact as one among men. He did not refuse to take our condemnation on himself, and indeed, the more he himself became a man by nature in his incarnation, the more he deified us by grace, so that we would not only learn naturally to care for one another and spiritually to love others as ourselves, but also like God to be concerned for others more than forourselves, even to the point of proving that love to others by being ready to die voluntarily and virtuously for others. For as the Lord said, There is no greater love than this, that a man lay down his life for his friend (Jn 15:13).
…The law of grace consists in a supernatural reason, and transforms nature, without violating it, unto deification. It also displays, beyond comprehension, the supernatural and superessential Archetype in human nature, as in an image, and exhibits the permanence of eteranal well-being.
…For the entire orderly arrangement of the Church (indeed the individual human soul) is encompassed in these three laws, having its length defined in virtue, its width in knowledge, and its depth in the wisdom of mystical theology. [notes: This triad of virtue, knowledge, and mystical theology evokes the three dimensions of the spiritual life - ascetic practice, contemplation, and mystical theology - which Maximus appropriated from Evagrius and expounded abundantly in his spiritual writings.]
11.23.07
The Victorious Grace-filled Human Nature, Church or Soul: the more than Twelve Myriads of Men
who do not know their right hand from their left
cont from Thalassium 64
He represents as well the Church of the Gentiles, which, like Nineveh has turned to God amid numerous tribulations, dangers, adversities, sufferings, persecutions, and deaths…which by no means [is] completely destroyed. For there is nothing in creation capable of impeding the advance of the grace proclaimed evangelically to the gentiles: neither tribulation nor distress nor persecution nor famine nor danger nor sword (Romans 8:35). On the contrary, grace was confirmed by these very circumstances and subdued everything which arose against it…and turned our errant nature toward the true and living God, just as Jonah turned Nineveh toward Him. Even if the evil one appears to conceal grace amid the torrent of persecution, as the whale concealed the prophet Jonah, he was nevertheless unable ultimately to hold grace in check, and remains unable to alter the strength of God’s ability to activate his grace.
…For as long as we live we are constantly being consigned to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus may be made manifest in our mortal flesh. So death is at work in us, but life is at work in you (2 Cor 4: 12)… For the prophetic grace toward the Gentiles is commended both as a gift of God…and as God’s labor: God’s gift since it bestows the light of true knowledge, and it furnishes an incorruptible life for those who receive it; God’s labor because it convinces its servants to take pride in their own labors on behalf of truth, and teaches those who are too anxious about their life in the flesh to extend themselves more through suffering than through remission of suffering. To such as these grace makes the natural weakness of the flesh in the face of suffering the basis of a transcendent spiritual power.
So too it prepares them completely to renounce their former evil ways and, from the least to the greatest of them (Jon 3:5), to (later: fast and) don sackcloth (meaning, that is, to pursue earnestly the mortification of the passions)… propitiating with humility him who is able to grant forgiveness of their former ways, and asking him who readily bestows on those who ask, the realization of morally superior pursuits and the preservation of the power of free choice in a morally immutable state.
Twelve can mean the five senses plus the seven days of the week, in other words time and nature, or more precisely the knowledge that cannot comprehend visible nature apart from those principles. The more than twelve myriads are the Church, those who namely in their virtue and knowledge have gone beyond the principles of time and nature and passed over to the magnificence of eternal and noetic realities. For whoever, by reason of his genuine virtue, forgets the passions of the flesh on his “left”, and who because of his impeccable knowledge, does not succumb to the disease of a growing conceit over his accomplishments on his “right”, becomes a man who does not know his right hand (or does not, as it were, long for fleeting glory) or his left hand (or is not, as it were, roused by carnal passions).
Death, Burial and Resurrection
Ad Thalassium 64
Background on the Scripture, in which more than twelve myriads of men dwell, who do not know their right hand from their left. (Jonah 4:11)
The prophet Jonah therefore signifies Adam, or our shared human nature, by bearing in himself mystically a figure of the following. Human nature has slipped from divine benefits, as from Joppa, and has descended, as though into a sea, into the misery of the present life, and been plunged into the chaotic and roaring waters of attachment to material objects. It has been swallowed whole by the whale, that spiritual and insatiable beast the devil himself. It has been enveloped with water all around it, the water of temptations to evil, up to the soul, in the sense that human life has been submerged with temptations. So to our nature has been engulfed in the deepest abyss, that is to say, it has been imprisoned by the complete ignorance of the mind and the overwhelming of rational thinking by the sheer pressure of vice. Our nature’s head has sunk into the clefts of the mountains in the sense that its primary principle of unity by faith vis-a-vis the Monad is like the head of the entire body of the virtues, which has become confined within the machinations of the wicked powers, as in the dark clefts of mountains and been dashed into a multiplicity of errant beliefs and illusions. For the Scriptural text calls clefts of mountains the delusional designs of the spirits of wickedness who hover in the depths of the deepest abyss of ignorance. Human nature has descended into the earth, whose bars are its eternal constraints, that is, it has fallen into a virtual desert of all divine sensibility, where its disposition has been deprived of the vital activity of virtue, and where it has no sense at all of goodness or any active desire of the mind for God… Like eternal bars, human nature has ingrained proclivities toward material objects which keep the mind from being freed from the darkness of ignorance to behold the light of true knowledge.
…His being swallowed by the whale and his impassible submission for three days and three nights indicates the mystery of Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection (Matt 12:40). Thus his name can fittingly be translated “repose of God”, “healing from God”, “God’s grace to them.” And perhaps he is rightly called “labor of God” because of his voluntary suffering. For by his own actions the prophet mystically prefigures the authentic “repose” of those who have labored amid physical pain, the “healing” of those who have been broken, the “grace” of the forgiveness of sins – our God Jesus Christ. For our Lord and God himself became a man and entered into the sea of life like ours, insofar as he descended from the heaven of Joppa (translated “contemplation of joy”) into the ocean of this life. As Scripture says, he is the one who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame (Heb 12:2). He even descended willingly into the heart of the earth, where the evil one had swallowed us through death, and drew us up by his resurrection, leading our whole captive nature up to heaven. Truly he is our “repose”, our “healing”, our “grace”: our repose since, with his timely human life, he freed the law from the situation of its carnal bondage; our healing since, by his resurrection, he cured us of the destruction wrought by death and corruption; our grace insofar as he distributes adoption in the Spirit by our God and Father through faith, and the grace of deification to each who is worthy. For it was necessary, necessary in truth, for him to become the light unto that earth (cf Jonah 1:9), to be the power of our God and Father (cf 1Cor 1:18) in the earth with its abiding darkness and eternal bars, so that, having dispelled the darkness of ignorance – being the Father’s light, as it were – and having crushed the bars of evil insofar as he is the concrete power of God, he might wondrously liberate human nature from its bondage to these things under the evil one, and endow it with the inextinguishable light of true knowledge and the indefatigable power of the virtues.
11.22.07
Taking notes while waiting for Thanksgiving dinner
Love is experience
experience has a cause
God is love
love causes experiences
creation are objects who receive the experience that has no beginning.
The perceived experience of love is not constant, though faith in its presence may be
But does God intensify grace, the experience of love, upon request only?
Probably not, but it still helps to ask.
11.19.07
Don doesn’t ramble
What a serendipity to find Don and Blake’s new blogs. Check out this incredible story about the son God gave Don.
11.18.07
Another Nativity Fast Reflection
Even though I’m seeing my sin as more serious and am patting it on the head less, I still notice, especially in rereading what I wrote, that I have anger issues surrounding how I feel I have been hurt. Forgiveness is a complex thing. I don’t want to be in denial of real problems, mine or theirs, or tolerate these problems to the extent of passive acceptance. Wading through discernment, honesty, mercy, righteous indignation, judgementalism, codependence, and unrealistic expectations requires the balance of a tight-rope walker. Self esteem is a whole nother issue. Humility is looking at myself realistically and honestly, though seeing people through the lens of the past, present, and future are all legitimate viewpoints, though the third is meant for trained professionals.
Mainly I think I need to lower my expectations and blaming of others. For one reason, who am I to judge them. I need to work out my own salvation. I don’t think I should just put up with everything, but instead of aggressively confronting what I perceive as an offense, to me, God, my kids, husband, or other people I feel are being hurt, I think I’m seeing that withdrawal is usually called for. I can withdraw without condemning or even being sure that they are wrong and I am right. It’s just giving the situation some space until peace can happen. And who knows if peace will ever happen in close proximity with them ever again whether it’s my fault, their fault, or nobody’s fault. But forcing a situation too violently will bring post-traumatic stress (my amateur diagnosis), and after 40 years, it can make a person pretty jittery. I think proximities can be made closer, looking from the point of view of me being the withdrawer, if genuine love or truth seeking is sensed by my fallible self. I am too shell-shocked and cannot tolerate pressure where I feel I am being manipulated or guilted into taking care of a person who wants more from me than I can or should give, which is my working definition of co-dependence.
I have withdrawn a lot over the years since Isaac died. Some blame my withdrawal on Orthodoxy, but it started before that, not that I ever was a highly social person. But all the same, I have found myself being particularly needy to people in certain specific situations. I don’t want to analyze what I have been looking for, part of which I talked about in my last post, but I think there’s more to it than just romantic fantasy, but if feels like naval gazing and giving too much credit to Freud to analyze it further. Point is, I’m trying to transfer that certain neediness to God and not “put my [hope and] trust in princes and the sons of men”, though I still believe in the intercessions of the Saints, the common man, and donkeys for that matter. I’m just trying to be less graspy about them, and see them in a more Incarnational way, but not possessively. God’s will be done, and to Him be all glory, honor, and power, not that He doesn’t synergistically share it with others, now and ever and unto ages of ages, amen.
11.15.07
On the Trinity
From the end of On Heresies by Saint John of Damascus
We believe in Father and Son and Holy Ghost;
one Godhead in three hypostases;
one will, one operation, alike in three persons;
wisdom incorporeal, uncreated, immortal, incomprehensible,
without beginning, unmoved, unaffected, without quantity,
without quality, ineffable, immutable, unchangeable, uncontained,
equal in glory, equal in power, equal in majesty, equal in might, equal in nature,
exceedingly substantial, exceedingly good,
thrice radiant, thrice bright, thrice brilliant.
Light is the Father, Light the Son, Light the Holy Ghost;
Wisdom the Father, Wisdom the Son, Wisdom the Holy Ghost;
one God and not three Gods;
one Lord the Holy Trinity discovered in three hypostases.
Father is the Father, and unbegotten;
Son is the Son, begotten and not unbegotten, for He is from the Father;
Holy Ghost, not begotten but proceeding, for He is from the Father.
There is nothing created, nothing of the first and second order, nothing lord and servant;
but there is unity and trinity
- there was, there is, and there shall be forever -
which is perceived and adored by faith -
by faith, not by inquiry, nor by searching out, nor by visible manifestation;
for the more He is sought out, the more He is unknown, and the more He is investigated, the more He is hidden.
And so, let the faithful adore God with a mind that is not overcurious. And believe that He is God in three hypostases, although the manner in which He is so is beyond manner, for God is incomprehensible. Do not ask how the Trinity is Trinity, for the Trinity is inscrutable.
But, if you are curious about God, first tell me of yourself and the things that pertain to you. How does your soul have existence? How is your mind set in motion? How do you produce your mental concepts? How is it that you are both mortal and immortal? But, if you are ignorant of these things which are within you, then why do you not shudder at the thought of investigating the sublime things of heaven?
Think of the Father as a spring of life begetting the Son like a river and the Holy Ghost like a sea, for the spring and the river and sea are all one nature.
Think of the Father as a root, and of the Son as a branch, and the Spirit as a fruit, for the substance in these three is one.
The Father is a sun with the Son as rays and the Holy Ghost as heat.
The Holy Trinity transcends by far every similitude and figure. So, when you hear of an offspring of the Father, do not think of a corporeal offspring. And when you hear that there is a Word, do not suppose Him to be a corporeal word. And when you hear of the Spirit of God, do not think of wind and breath. Rather, hold you persuasion with a simple faith alone. For the concept of the Creator is arrived at by analogy from His creatures.
Be persuaded, moreover, that the incarnate dispensation of the Son of God was begotten ineffably without seed of the blessed Virgin, believing Him to be without confusion and without change both God and man, who for your sake worked all the dispensation. And to Him by good works give worship and adoration, and venerate and revere the most holy Mother of God and ever-virgin Mary as true Mother of God, and all the saints as His attendants.
Doing thus, you will be a right worshiper of the holy and undivided Trinity, Father and Son and Holy Ghost, of the one Godhead, to whom be glory and honor and adoration forever and ever. Amen
From Death to the World
