Why do good people need the Church?

by Andrea Elizabeth

One thing that a survivor of abuse is usually told is that it is not their fault that they suffered emotional and physical abuse and neglect. One tactic of abusers is to play upon feelings of guilt in their victims. The victims then try to earn better treatment by being good. While some abused people become abusers themselves, others end up being very good people, possibly out of a motivation for being treated better, as well as a determination never to be like their abuser(s).

Say they become successful at being this good, non-abusive person and end up with a healthier situation when they grow up. Why do they need the Church who tells them to repeatedly say the prayer, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner”? The last two words can remind an abused person of the degradations inflicted upon them in the past. Some are counseled by their priest not to say those two last words if they feel oppression.

Oppression is a wounded state. If one is vulnerable to being easily triggered into this state, then they are in need of healing. Meditative prayer and Psalm reading are often prescribed, such as in the book Orthodox Psychotherapy by Metr. Hierotheos Vlachos, and in the services of the Church and private prayer books. The Psalms are a very detailed account of how to deal with oppression. There are also the Sacraments of the Church that offer us physical means of healing. All of our wounded senses are brought into alignment with a heavenly state of communion with goodness through the water and oil, incense, holy icons, candles, chanting and singing, and ultimately, Christ’s Body and Blood. When one partakes of these through the Priest and with others who are seeking healing, another word for salvation, then the proper relationship with God and one’s fellow man is attained.

I believe that when a person has dealt with their past and received healing, including through the Sacrament of Confession for the revealed nature of their own sins, then one can forgive their abusers and not be as sensitive to offenses committed against them or to finding out things they need to correct in themselves.

Ancient Christian Wisdom and Aaron Beck’s Cognitive Therapy: A Meeting of Minds

by Andrea Elizabeth

At Second Terrace I learned about a group blogging project providing excerpts from a new book that explores the relationship between “secular” behavioral-cognitive therapy and the wisdom of the Church Fathers (yay). Here’s a sample paragraph from Mystagogy, the first post of four.

With that introduction in place, I should mention that I have been an Orthodox monk for nearly twenty-five years. I lived on the Holy Mountain for a decade during which time I got to know some wonderful fathers who tasted the most sweet fruits of the prayer of the heart and intimate communion with Christ. I also encountered novices and monks discouraged by the struggle and wondering why those same fruits seemed beyond their reach. I saw acts of self-sacrifice and love that moved me deeply. I also was saddened to see others who were so obsessed with certain thoughts that they missed opportunities to serve their brethren and although they desired to act virtuously and to love sincerely, insecurities, feelings of inferiority, and suspicions compelled them to react in ways that they themselves deplored. My heart went out to those monastics. I prayed for them, but what else could I do?

- Ancient Christian Wisdom and Aaron Beck’s Cognitive Therapy: A Meeting of Minds, by Fr. Alexis Trader.

Please see the two posts linked above for more, links to the other posts, excerpts from Orthodox Christian Info, and a link to Amazon for the book itself.

I’ll go ahead and include another paragraph; this one from Orthodoxinfo.

At first glance, the similarities between patristic pastoral tradition and cognitive therapy are indeed striking. Byzantine epistemology with its unity between theoria and praxis has been functionally described as “rationalism and empiricism,”[18] the very terms that could be used to characterize the epistemology utilized in cognitive therapy. In fact, the church fathers, as empiricists,[19] follow the pathway that underlies cognitive research—clinical observation followed by theoretical composition,[20] or put differently, empiricism and then rational discourse.[21] Both the fathers and cognitive therapists are committed to honesty and avoiding deception.[22] Both “assume limited freedom and a partial determinism.”[23] Both are motivated by compassion for suffering people and a desire for their restoration to health.[24] Both recognize that talking can be a means for behavioral change.[25] Both affirm the centrality of the thought-life or meaning-making structures of cognition in psychological functioning.[26] Both view unhealthy thoughts about the self, the environment, and the future as a source for psychological problems.[27] Both recognize that the correction of the thoughts[28] or the purification of the thoughts is the foundational dimension of the return to health and wholeness. Both see the use of reason as instrumental in better human functioning.[29] Both assert that a human being is able to exert “personal control over thoughts and behaviors that promote change in a healthy direction.”[30]

This part in particular caught my eye, “Both recognize that talking can be a means for behavioral change.” My first reaction is that Orthodoxy, imo, teaches silence instead of encouraging people to talk. We are to silence our thoughts, rationalizations, self-justifications, and even our imagination (btw, there’s an interesting Kierkegaard quote about the imagination that I’ve been thinking may be blog-worthy). We are told what to say in prayer and in worship. Personal innovation and spontaneity is discouraged. On the other hand, we are to seek counsel, which is what this book is about, and go to confession to talk about our failings. I very much like the focus of this book in that it isn’t so much about failing God and each other (guilt, guilt, guilt), but how we fail ourselves.

Three tales of an ambivalent paranoid

by Andrea Elizabeth

The dump truck sped to 70 miles per hour up and down the hills

to keep ahead of me and thus subjected to the rock clods that sifted off its top.

On the other hand, he may have been trying to go fast enough

to keep them out of reach. I passed him anyway.

 

The checkout clerk took forever double bagging the cold and canned goods.

The three hands are environmental, insulating, and time oriented. She should have asked.

 

The girl at the dump, I mean landfill, got out of the little building by the scales

to inspect our truck, give instructions, and take my credit card and drivers license.

On our way out, she stayed behind the glass and used the sliding drawer.

I think she wanted to see how much I weighed by subtraction. She was too young to be tired.

However, she may have been trying to protect herself from the terrible smell out there.

On our other trips, not nearly so leaden, it smelled worse. Now the smell’s mixed with some sort of deodorizer.

Just keep swimming

by Andrea Elizabeth

I guess it will take me a few days to get over my emotional investment in the Rangers and my last dissapointing Pysanky egg so that I can engage in reading and/or another Pysanky egg. Meanwhile, it is easy for me to watch PBS.

Last night there was a pretty engaging story about elevators. The emotional hook was provided by the experiences of a man who was trapped in an elevator for forty-something hours, and a lady who has a phobia of them. The man who survived the Twin Tower collapses was okay, but the brief footage was all that was necessary to evoke a distanced, but voluntarily recollectable trauma. Back to the lady with the phobia. She had gotten to the stage with her therapist that she was able to actually try riding in an elevator for the first time. Once the doors closed she started to say, “They’re not opening. They’re not going to open,” right before they would open. This kept happening. She never trusted that the doors were going to open. The therapist said, “we can’t change the symptoms, we just make them ok.” This is why I don’t go to therapy. I know they wont change my symptoms, and I’m functional enough so that I can keep putting myself out there. But I find the goal of making these symptoms ok with me, ridiculous. Yes we have to learn to live with and accept pain in our lives, but to say its ok is a silly mind trick. I think it’s better to say that it wont last forever. Hopefully.

I wonder if there was trauma in that lady’s childhood that made her fear being trapped. Relief must not have come soon enough. A person can reach a point where they lose hope. The people who were supposed to care didn’t care enough and they can’t be trusted. That’s the point the guy who was actually trapped came to. There is security camera footage of the whole forty-something hours of him pacing, pushing the buzzer, prying open the doors where the number 13 was emblazened on the shaft wall, laying down, etc, and no one saw him or paid any attention. He got $200,000 in a settlement with the elevator company and the building’s sercurity company.

So can we tell people that pain wont last forever? I sometimes think there is a special grace for people who are abused or neglected. That they’ve already gone through enough hell and will be comforted in Abraham’s Bosom someday. But abused people sometimes grow up to abuse or neglect others, what about them? Lord have mercy.

Faith and Science (‘Lost’ 3)

by Andrea Elizabeth

At the outset, I believe that this post is probably going to be wishy-washy. That may be best because my contention is that science and faith are usually divided with too opaque a wall between them. Therefore it is meet and right to take them out of their respective closets, and throw them both in the wash and let them agitate together. That metaphor has too much conflict. Let’s instead take them out of their respective cabinets, pour them into the bowl, and knead them together, not only harmoniously, but with the communication of properties (however without confusion, separation, or change – keep forgetting the four nouns of Chalcedon – oh, or division).

One of the main themes of ‘Lost’ is the relationship between faith and science, which was originally presented as either/or in the characters of John Locke and Jack Shepherd. Throughout the series Island Jack developed faith and sideways Locke decided to have surgery. I like this turnaround even though it was Locke’s conviction that the Island alone had healed him. Sideways Locke didn’t have this relationship with the island, but had to learn to “let go” of his past in order to seek medical help. This letting go was an act of faith. It seems that the two different circumstances called for different paths to healing. Island Locke let go of the abusive world he knew, Sideways Locke let go of seeing himself as a victim. Escape vs. detachment. Island Rose faced the same thing as is brought out in the article I linked in my second post about ‘Lost’, which I’ll make a new linkable category for.

The false division between science and faith also characterizes the false division between spirit and matter. It is common sense to realize that we must take care of our bodies with physical interventions such as eating and bathing, so why is going to the doctor seen as giving up on faith? I will say that the great ascetic Saints can live without food and bathing, but this is not to be tried at home. It is also true that miracle working Saints heal people without traditional medicine. However these Saints are rare, though miraculous healings are still heard of.

Because these miracles do occur, one can feel like a failure if they can’t walk on water and if they have physical or emotional problems that aren’t healed by normal Communion at their Church. I’ll have to make a common sense leap again and say that between Church services we still have to rely on things of this world for our survival, and not just that, but abundant life. There is a way to see this through Christ’s Incarnation by which he assumed all of creation in taking a material body. This recapitulation destroys the division between spirit and matter as St. Maximus teaches us. Our communion with matter can be an extension of our communion with Christ. I would still seek healing at Church first, but it may be God’s will to also seek it from a medical doctor.

I wrote in a comment at The Ochlophobist’s a few weeks ago that I am a literal materialist. I do not think it is for me to see (yet) the uncreated light with my spiritual eyes. It seems to be for me to see God’s glory in a candle or in the sunshine or my children’s faces. To hear his voice in birdsong or human singing and instruments. To feel his love through my husband’s touch, the warmth of the sun, and soft, smooth cloth. To smell prayer in incense, flowers and cedar trees. To taste Him in the Eucharist above all, as well as other places’ offerings. And to find spiritual healing in prayer and physical healing in prayer-accompanied medicine, which can be part of the answer.

Sense and/or Affection

by Andrea Elizabeth

After having listened to the first third of David Copperfield, it seems to me that our Mr. Dickens believes that sense and affection cannot dwell together in the same person. Perhaps this is a literary device in order to make a point about extremes, and maybe David will end up being the example of reconciling these two “opposites” peaceably, which I think he may do in the latter portions of the book if the movie and my remembrance of it are faithful to the story. Still Mr. Dickens makes a point to regard affection over sense, even though the lack of sense can cause one to starve to death. But the lack of affection can apparently cause people to suffer even more. I find the way affection is presented to be a little on the mushy, unnecessary side, but the cruelty of others is also very difficultly born, especially by a young child. Since this is known as Mr. Dickens’ most autobiographical work and knowing his experience as a child laborer, I can validate, fwiw, the excruciating pain he went through under similar circumstances which I think he truly avoids thinking about as he explains towards the end of this first part. He seems to prefer, but does not totally endorse, the affection of the simpleminded. I don’t know if he would go so far to say that their not being aware of his suffering, which he did not burden them with, classified them as neglectful. I find them so and had a similar reaction to his mother’s and Peggotty’s forgetting him, or at least not investigating his circumstances in their distraction with other people, as I did the Green Lady’s not noticing the tortured and dead “frogs”, who were supposed to be her dear friends, all over the beach in Perelandra. Affection is not love, to me, if it is not aware. Love takes maturity, investigation, intervention (at least in prayer), unselfishness, habitual practice, and strength, not just nice, warm feelings.

But perhaps I’m being uncharitable. This all brings up the point of confrontations. If we consider ourselves the chiefest of sinners, and that others are more worthy than we, how can we dare to investigate and intervene in the wrongdoing of others? Perhaps it should be left to a third party. David’s Aunt Betsey (Audiblebooks doesn’t help with spelling, thank you google) is presented at the end of this third, as being of the slightly more balanced, sensible sort, but she values the advice of her sweet, simpleminded lodger, Mr. Dick. It seems that she is afraid to give in to her sweet side, so she needs him to validate it and take responsibility for charitable actions. I can appreciate a sensible person realizing that they may have a weakness and seek out a more affectionate person to balance them out. But I don’t think it should end there. Both need to grow towards attaining a more complete wisdom. She, however, is put in the position of judging on behalf of another, not herself. Though she had judged for herself when unhappy in the marriage of her youth, and sent her husband off (or let him go off, I don’t remember) to India. So taking up for onesself is still up in the air. We are to love others as we love ourselves, so if we believe we should intervene when others are ill-used, then shouldn’t we do the same if we are? And wouldn’t we want to be confronted if we were treating others ill, if we desired to love others? Nathan confronted King David gently by using a third-person story. But David’s heart was disposed towards truth and God. So are criminals’ not? We have discussed how people, even criminals, are seeking their own version of good. Perhaps salvation is knowing who to trust – the prophets of God. But David Copperfield also took matters in his own hands, was he wrong?

There is no pat answer. Perhaps some are called to endure certain kinds of abuses as their temporary cross in life. Others are called to be deliverers, others to be delivered, and some to deliver themselves. And these can all occur at different times in a person’s life. Not to mention that one may be deluded about who is the abuser and who is the abused, as were the Murdstones. Perhaps this is how we can keep from judging others’ real life situations.

There actually is a pat answer in that there are three steps steps to clear sight (knowing what to do): Purification, Illumination and Theosis. This is the Orthodox way of salvation, and one can read about it in many places including Orthodox Psychotherapy by Metropolitan of Nafpaktos Hierotheos (exerpts linked to the right).

Perelandra 2 and Patristic Theology 2

by Andrea Elizabeth

I have said before that I am a disillusioned optimist. I keep believing that there is an answer and a fix to all the mess. I can’t help myself. And I have found answers, and when I do, like in Out of the Silent Planet, I hitch my wagon to the horse from whose mouth it came. Every time. I can’t help myself. Then the horse stumbles – how could he not? C.S. Lewis did not become an Orthodox Christian, but I so wanted someone in the western tradition to speak Orthodox, and I think he comes close many times because Orthodoxy is the language we were all meant to speak and lies in potential in all of us. What is not Orthodox is foreign, and sometimes we develop foreign habits. In Perelandra, Lewis shows his Protestantism in that he believes that Christ was incarnated because of the Fall, instead of the Orthodox belief that Christ’s intention in creation was to join with us in the Incarnation from the beginning and would have happened without the Fall. So on Perelandra when the unfallen Green Lady and the King get married, it is seen as a less great thing than what happened on earth as a result of the Fall.

Then Ransom’s sacrifice is seen as an unmeritorious act I assume because of the Protestant creed of Glory to God Alone. But this causes him confusion when he sees the King’s face who is created in the image of “Maleldil”.

“You might ask how it was possible to look upon it and not to commit idolatry, not to mistake it for that of which it was the likeness. For the resemblance was, in its own fashion, infinite, so that almost you could wonder at finding no sorrows in his brow and no wounds in his hands and feet. Yet there was no danger of mistaking, not one moment of confusion, no least sally of the will towards forbidden reverence. Where likeness was greatest, mistake was least possible.”

He continues to struggle with idolatry when he talks about man-made images,

“A clever wax-work can be made so like a man that for a moment it deceives us: the great portrait which is far more deeply like him does not. Plaster images of the Holy One may before now have drawn to themselves the adoration they were meant to arouse for the reality. But here, where His live image, like Him within and without, made by His own bare hands out of the depth of divine artistry, His masterpiece of self-portraiture coming forth from His workshop to delight all worlds, walked and spoke before Ransom’s eyes, it could never be taken for more than an image. Nay, the very beauty of it lay in the certainty that it was a copy, like and not the same, an echo, a rhyme, an exquisite reverberation of the uncreated music prolonged in a created medium.”

His iconoclasm is showing, but he knows that there is something to marvel at in humanity. It is so hard when converting from Protestantism to be able to make peace between the Creator and the created. We have been so conditioned to believe that it is a sin to appreciate the greatness of creation. Proper veneration has become foreign. We are more afraid of committing idolatry than to venerate man’s intended end, and that which represents and communicates those who have accomplished deification, or theosis – icons.

But it is because of Christ’s and the Saint’s union with God that venerating them is not idolatry. God is in them, unseparated, unmixed, distinct, and undivided. To venerate the Saints is to worship God and His intention in Incarnation. Perelandra is full of What Would Jesus Do? Instead of God filling His Saints so that they can reach their potential – deification. Lewis presents a copy, but not the real thing.

Back to disillusioned optimism, less than perfect people can still impart improvements to where we are at present, so I’ll not give up on Professor Lewis. And I’ll not give up on Father John Romanides who has also let me down with this unsubstantiated ad hominem on page 90 of Patristic Theology, “If we use the criteria of the Apostle Paul and the Church Fathers such as St. Symeon the New Theologian regarding who is truly a theologian, we will see that contemporary modern Orthodox theology, under the influence of Russian theology, is not Patristic theology, but a distortion of Patristic theology, because it is written by people who do not have the above-mentioned spiritual prerequisites [that they be in theosis].” This is all he says about Russian “theologians”. I’m very disappointed and now will have to force myself to finish this book as I did with Perelandra.

I struggle with disillusionment a lot, but I know I can’t keep retreating forever from the less than perfect. Part of it is dealing with being offended and learning to forgive and have a humble attitude about how much I fail myself and require patience and forgiveness from others. But also I have read that love requires perfection, so it is ok to notice when something is not perfect and to bring it to attention when it is presented as the truth. We are easily deceived and must fight it in ourselves and others. Father John Romanides is motivating me to seek theosis through purification and illumination by prayer and repentance, so I will keep reading him even though he must be one of those ethnocentric Greek Orthodox. It just takes some of the fun out of it is all.

Transcendent Theology

by Andrea Elizabeth

It must be emphasized that a theology that is not the result of purification, that is, of ‘praxis’, is demonic. According to St. Maximus, “knowledge without praxis is the demons’ theology”.

St. Thalassios, who had the same perspective, wrote that when man’s nous begins with simple faith, it “will eventually attain a theology that transcends the nous and that is charcterised by unremitting faith of the highest type and the vision of the invisible”. Theology is beyond logic, it is a revelation of God to man, and the Fathers define it as theoria. Here too theology is chiefly vision of God. In another place the same saint wrote that genuine love gives birth to spiritual knowledge, and “this is succeeded by the desire of all desires: the grace of theology”.

St. Diadochos of Photiki [teaches that] theology is the greatest gift offered to man by the Holy Spirit…. Therefore knowledge of God “comes through prayer, deep stillness and complete detachment, while wisdom comes through humble meditation on Holy Scripture and, above all, through grace given by God”. The gift of theology is a work of the Holy Spirit but in cooperation with man, since the Holy Spirit does not actualise in man a spiritual knowledge of the mysteries “apart from that faculty in him which naturally searches out such knowledge”.

…All these things show that theology is properly the fruit of man’s healing and not a rational discipline. Therefore in the Orthodox patristic tradition theology is linked and identified with the spiritual father, and the spiritual father is the theologian par excellence – that is to say, the one who experiences the things of God and so can lead his spiritual children unerringly.

Father John Romanides’ writes: “The true Orthodox theologian is the one who has direct knowledge of some of God’s energies through illumination or knows them more through vision. Or he knows them indirectly through prophets, apostles and saints or through scripture, the writings of the Fathers and the decisions and acts of their Ecumenical and Local Councils. 

…Theology is not abstract knowedge or practice, like logic, mathematics, astronomy and chemistry, but on the contrary, it has a poemical character like logistics and medicine. The former is concerned with matters of defense and attack through bodily drill and strategies for the deployment of weapons, fortifications and defensive and offensive schemes, while the latter is fighting against mental and physical illnesses for the sake of health and the means of restoring health.

pages 33-36, Ch 2. – Theology as a Therapeutic Science.

True Theology

by Andrea Elizabeth

Metropolitan Hierotheos speaks of Theology as a Therapeutic Science in Chapter 2, page 32:

St. John Climacus introduces true theology in many places in his spritiually delightful ‘Ladder’. “Total purity is the foundation for theology.” “When a man’s senses are perfectly united to God, then what God has said is somehow mysteriously clarified. But when there is no union of this kind, then it is extremely difficult to speak about God”. On the contrary, the man who does not actually know God speaks about Him only in “probabilities”. Indeed according to patristic teaching it is very bad to speak in conjectures about God, because it leads a person to delusion. This saint knows how “the theology of demons” develops in us. In vainglorious hearts which have not previously been purified by the operation of the Holy Spirit, the unclean demons “give us lessons in the interpretation of scripture”. Therefore a slave of passion should not “dabble in theology”.

I love how Orthodoxy explains things more in an inclusive “and” way instead of “either/or”. He is obviously not saying that to know God, one should not listen to or read theological works or that one should enter in a lonely extreme ascetic form of repentance and apophatic isolation. He is saying that to understand what God has revealed through the Scriptures and the Church, one should simultaneously be engaging in practices of repentance and purification while being externally instructed. Then the more one is synergistically purified, the more one will internally know God. We work on emptying ourselves of passions, with God’s help, and offer up the newly cleared space to be filled with His presence and instruction.

The saints received “divine things without thought”, and according to the Fathers, they theologised not in an Aristotlean way through thinking, but “in the manner of the Apostles”, that is to say through the operation of the Holy Spirit. If a person has not been cleansed of passions, especially fantasy, beforehand, he is unable to converse with God or to speak about God, since a nous “forming notions is incapable of theology”. The saints lived a theology “written by the Spirit”.

If my mind was a clean slate I suppose I could be in a more receptive mode to learn of God without “forming notions” which sounds to me like reasoning. Orthodoxy is different in many ways from the Baptist/Calvinist/Methodist/non-denominational theology that I came to it with, that my mind has to really switch gears to accommodate the change. But perhaps it’s like how relationships are non-dialectic except when dealing with fallenness, Theology is strictly by personal revelation except when it is dealing with error, then we have to work through identifying and diagnosing our error, through God’s mercy working in our minds. But once the error has been purposefully cleared out, room is made for Truth to be imparted.

Next the Metropolitan offers us St. Maximus,

We find the same teaching in the works of St. Maximus the Confessor. When a person lives by practical philosophy, which is repentance and cleansing from passions, “he advances in moral understanding”. When he experiences theoria, “he advances in spiritual knowledge”. In the first case he can discriminate between virtues and vices; the second case, theoria, “leads the participant to the inner qualities of incorporeal and corporeal things”. St. Maximus goes on to say that man is “granted the grace of theology when, carried on wings of love” in theoria and “with the help of the Holy Spirit, he discerns – as far as is possible with the human nous – the qualities of God. Theology, the knowledge of God, is unfolded to the person who has attained theoria. Indeed in another place the same Father says that a person who always “concentrates on the inner life” not only becomes restrained, long-suffering, kind and humble, but “he will also be able to contemplate, theologise and pray”. Here too theology is closely connected with theoria and prayer.

It sometimes confuses me that such an emphasis is placed on personal prayer, but I have too look at the lives of St. John, St. Maximus, and to the Metropolitan which seem to me deeply involved in the physical, Sacramental, Orthodox Church, whose members, I believe, are their audience. Our whole lives become prayer, whether in Church, at work, or during our free time.

Who am I to talk?

by Andrea Elizabeth

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.