Since I stayed home from Church yesterday with a sick child, I watched some of the Sunday Morning commentary shows. I was most impressed with David Brooks on Meet the Press talking about the modern muddy sense of morality. He said we need to be scripted on what is evil and the proper response to it. What? Spontaneous, individual interpretation can’t be trusted? hmmm.
I have explored the idea that the essence/energies distinction enables multiple objects to co-exist. One thing doesn’t get totally absorbed or annihilated in union with another. One popular way of self-preservation is to place oneself as preeminent. This has the effect of annihilating the other instead. Or one can disappear, so to speak, in order to let the other have a place. But is this spoiling the other? Or does it place too great a burden on the other to take turns so that they don’t feel selfish. Ideally both feel fulfilled in relationship. This is where needs are met without selfishness. Is a child selfish when it is receiving food and shelter from its parents? They shouldn’t feel that way. Parents seem to hold that over their head as a manipulative tool though when they imply that the children owe them for it. When someone is in need, we owe them to help fulfill it. To not do so is neglect. To do so doesn’t mean that more is owed back. “Each according to their need” is provided by the Father with human cooperation. To not cooperate is to be in a person’s debt. “Forgive us our debts,” in Orthodox teaching, is about when we don’t give to others according to their need when it was ours to fulfill it, not necessarily for a breach of voluntary contract. Selfishness is when needs are met in sinful ways. When we take things that aren’t ours.
I just saw a PBS documentary about a sperm donor and his “children”, who as older teenagers have sought him out after he revealed his donor number. He is basically a beach hippie who had been an “exotic dancer” and was also somewhat of a philosopher. He believed most things weren’t real and wouldn’t last (annihilation), but also in “I”ness (everything but me will be annihilated). He also had an icon of Mary who he considered the cosmic mother, and he regularly prayed for and blessed, after he smoked something out of a pop bottle contraption, the mothers and all the countless souls that had emanated from him. Four of the donor siblings (a fifth didn’t want to go) said they felt a positive energy after they arranged a reunion with him. And they also knew not to expect anything from him (except honesty), but felt good that he was there, nice spirited, if paranoid about conspiracy theories, and not some disembodied liquid in a frozen test tube. If he believed in the I-ness of himself and other souls and animals, it seems he did not believe in cosmic re-absorption. Maybe he believed in the beatific vision of essences that does not share energies. Regarding other things being of limited existence, he may have somewhat of a point. The children that he spawned are eternal beings whom he helped bring into the world. They have grown up with the physical gap of the lack of his presence, but did seem to have somewhat of his spirit about them, which they commented on. The California donor facility also played a part in their conception, including the rooms with the visual aids. I tried to observe any affect that had on the kids, and it’s hard to sort out if the way the girls dressed was a result of that or because almost all available clothing is of that type these days. Yet to have that be such an exaggerated aspect of their origination must do something. However, I got the sense that 20 years later, it had been diluted, if not annihilated altogether.
Regarding the mothers, they had entered into an agreed-upon contract with him to preserve his anonymity with no expectations, and desired no continued involvement. All but one, the one whose daughter had initiated the reunions, appeared at least hesitant about their children’s curiosity and subsequent actions. That same daughter was the most open to subsequent involvement while the others kept a safe, “oh, so that’s who he is” attitude.
I didn’t post this the other day when I wrote it, and now, after watching the exhausting game 6 of the World Series, I’ll tie this post into baseball. The pitcher is like the father. The best ones put a lot of action on the ball. It is not a piece of trash that they are getting rid of and don’t care about after it leaves their possession. Some pray over it, some talk to it, but all have a committed interest in how it leaves their hand and how what they do to it will affect its future. The batter is like the mother, very tuned into the pitcher and how they can best receive and also guide the ball. The outfielders are like the community who want the ball properly placed and guided back to the pitcher. Homeruns, well I guess they go to heaven. In the world, that would be that they are able to transcend all obstacles and reach new heights of achievement. It’s sad that the pitcher and batter are often on different teams. That could be like divorce or even the situation above. Teams oppose each other because of the fall and ultimately the battle with demons. Both those in your own team and those in the other’s. Either way, nothing is annihilated. Everything has eternal significance in that it influences the course of the game, even if some things are forgotten, or are very distant, for now.
A thousand years are as a day means that God doesn’t have to learn thousands of things one at a time like we do.
What if in the techno age employment is unnecessary? A few geniuses program computers and robots to make all of our complex equipment and products, which we order online and have delivered to our door. Everyone is granted enough unemployment benefits to buy the latest gadgets and be informed and entertained amap. So if unemployment is paying for the gadgets, then the government must also own gadget production. How can they profit if they are essentially the buyers and the sellers? They don’t. But since they also manufacture the money, they don’t need to. It becomes a meaningless circle.
Traditional Americans value hard work and food earned. At the end of the day, if one has a full belly, filled with the fruit of one’s labor, one can rest well. But what if labor is eliminated and food is doled? One becomes a spectator of other people’s labor. The writers and the actors will be the only ones motivated to produce. But if their writing and subsequent embodiment is only paid for by the government, then, well I guess we get the 50′s all over again where the government controlled content. In the 40′s the Catholic Church controlled content. I used to enjoy 40′s movies the most, but I haven’t been able to get back into their tidy little morality schemes as much lately. Maybe with everyone so satisfied, the government wont need to worry about content. People wont care enough to do anything about the warnings about the dangers of all this. These warnings will just cause a momentary blip on our adrenaline monitors. Adrenaline used to be pumped in for fight or flight, but since everyone’s on government controlled life-support, what’s the point of fleeing or fighting?
Lost is the only modern serial I’ve gotten into, but the way that ended is increasingly unsatisfying. Everything that happened pretty much ended up being meaningless. Wouldn’t they all have ended up in the abstract church even if no one had saved the island? If journeys are so important, what about little babies that die and go to heaven?
Who knows? Somehow it’s important to pray, keep clean, eat healthy, make things and then give them away. But where do churches fit in with the government control? I think they’ll fund them because churches also keep the people satiated. There will be no bans on anything in order to prevent the people from rebelling.
In Wall-E, everyone got fat. Obesity is too negative for modern man however. I think technology will eventually eliminate it. The government will be a good parent. Vices will go out of style. I think people’s happiness will come from being healthy. They will embrace health as the end all be all. They may even become bored with entertainment and start to meditate. It will be a godless meditation though. They will meditate about their own healthiness. They will inhale their technologically bio-filtered atmosphere with a proud sense of accomplishment and go on their hikes in peace. They will have destroyed what God made and will have remade it almost the same way, but this time, they engineered it, not God.
except for the Author’s Note.
In the last part of the Epilogue, Tolstoy outlaws freedom! Where he puts God in the course of human events is uncertain. He pretty much says that science has killed God, so bringing God into the equation is not acceptable. I don’t think he believes that, but he is playing by their rules regardless. Whether the inevitable course of events is destined by God or pure science, perhaps decreed by God, is immaterial to his explanation.
His contrasts of freedom and/or necessity, consciousness and reason, and causes and/or laws is quite fascinating. The part that seems to contradict his conclusions is the lack of an “or” between consciousness (where we believe ourselves free) and reason (which defines things according to existing laws). No, he is consistent in that at the end he says we have to believe what we do not feel, the same as we have to believe the new revelation that the earth is moving even though we don’t feel it.
On one hand I think his conclusions, research and observations are very valuable. There are certain laws that govern human behavior. I think he pretty much nailed the inevitableness of why people go to war and how women are dependent on men. But these are the laws of the fallen universe. And these are the laws by which I think we need to understand dysfunctional behavior so that we don’t judge others. However, there is a way out. Female monasticism demonstrates freedom from dependence on men, pacifism (apparently Gandhi was very influenced by Tolstoy) demonstrates freedom from dependence on the urge to dominate, and the higher levels of monasticism demonstrate freedom from anything except the Lord’s Supper. All three are healings of the original Curses. While reading, I was going to argue for when the sun stood still for Joshua, but then he mentions it without me understanding where he thinks that fits in. I’ll reread that part in a bit and make an edit if I understand better.
Christ shows us that God, the author of laws, is not subject to them. This is the basis for miracles, which are really evidence of how we are intended to live. We are meant to be free from laws. But initially we have to choose negatively. Fasting teaches us freedom from the law of necessity. Choosing to die as true, not prideful, martyrs also frees us from this law.
Like I say I don’t understand why he mentions the one miracle, or how we are made in God’s image, when he seems to otherwise stick with his thesis.
[2nd addendum of the day: This is the part where I thought he talked about man being made in God's image, but I was wrong. "Man is the creation of an almighty, all-good, and all-knowing God. What then is sin, the concept of which follows from the consciousness of man's freedom? That is a question for theology." (p. 1202) I guess he takes the Calvinist's answer to that.]
Over the triply celebrated birthday lunch yesterday, a university hypothetical was discussed: If you purchase a semester’s (nonrefundable apparently) parking spot and find that you prefer to take your bike instead, should you? The professor’s purely economic standpoint was that it wouldn’t make any difference because it’s a “sunk cost”. A certain dinner faction agreed with him believing that you should just do what you feel like. Another faction disagreed and said it’s not right to waste your money.
I said, from my “everything’s connected” feminine standpoint that you cannot isolate actions on a purely economic basis. What about the elderly person who had to purchase the last available spot further away from the door while yours sits there unused? On thinking about it now, things probably do trickle down economically because if the elderly person’s health declines because of walking further in scorching hot, Texas heat, then either their resources, or the state’s resources, will have to be consumed.
The other scenario was, if you purchase a soft drink (again apparently unrefundable) for your daughter, then when she gets to the drink stand she decides to have water, should you let her? The two factions were consistent with their positions.
I have to say that I somewhat admire the people who don’t worry about the money spent and would rather take a bicycle and drink water. They are in reality skinny people while the vocal ones for not wasting money or food struggle with their weight. On one hand I worry about disrespecting the value of what goes into purchasing things, the hard work, natural resources, space involved, etc. But on the other, perhaps this American priority is why we have such problems with obesity. I do get upset if one of my skinny children only eats one plate at a buffet. Buffets are priced so that you really have to get at least two plates full to make it a “good deal”. Otherwise you feel like you’re wasting money. This also relates to the “starving people in China” argument which indeed never made sense to my skinny kids. “How does it affect people in China if I eat my food or not?” The counter implication is that if they saw you throw away food they’d think you were mean. But that’s because they had a lack of supply. If they had the same supply we do they would probably become obese too, as I think studies have shown on people who move here from other countries. They develop the same health problems Americans do.
When you have lived in a state of perceived deprivation, wasting becomes repugnant in a very visceral way. I suppose the American sense of deprivation could be because of our history of the Great Depression, Protestant(?) work ethic, the hardships of frontier living, and varying modern individual circumstances. So how can people in the same family not have the same reaction? I guess it depends on how much an individual “feels” this deprivation. Perhaps some genetically don’t experience deprivation in the same way. They aren’t as sensitive to dropping blood sugar, or the discomforts of walking in the heat. Or they aren’t the type to feel responsible for all the cares of the world. Is that “wrong”? I am personally often glad for their care-free attitude. Many times it has brightened my day. I guess it takes all kinds, or is my way wrong? I don’t know, but I’m pretty stuck with it. If I should change, I tend to think it would be in not buying too much in the first place.
Gogol’s The Overcoat just came to mind, as well as Guy de Maupassant’s The Necklace.
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.
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.
Carrying on with the theme of inherent vs. fallen matter and it’s union with the soul, from Ambiguum 8,
From Gregory’s same Oration, “So long as matter bears with it chaos, as in a flowing stream…” [notes say "But whether the affliction they suffer comes from God is not clear so long as matter carries with it chaos, as in a flowing stream." Maximus sees this statement, like the one under discussion in Amb. 7, as fitting into a larger explanation of how the evils associated with bodily existence have come about, not as punishment for the sins of pre-incarnate souls, but as the result of the origins of material instability and corporeal mutability within God's providential economy. In the background is the vexed question, already addressed by Gregory of Nyssa and taken up once again by Maximus of how such instability and mutability could be only an effect stemming from Adam's sin in paradise and not somehow an antecedent cause of that sin. Was Adam not a passable being before he lapsed? Did he at first dwell in a state of virtuous impassibility? (Polycarp Sherwood)]
Having devoted as much of his discourse as possible to those infatuated with matter and the body, Gregory adds these statements so that whoever examines the saint’s intention with proper piety (me: note how individual standing affects interpretation) can interpret it as follows. Man came into being adorned with the God-given beauty of incorruptibility and immortality, but having preferred the shame of the material nature around him over spiritual beauty, (me: materialism) and in addition wholly forgotten the eminent dignity of his soul-or rather the God who beautified the soul with divine form-he plucked a “fruit” which, according to the divine decree that wisely administers our salvation, was worthy of the deliberative will, thus reaping not only bodily corruption and death, and the liability and propensity to every passion, but also the instability and inequality of external and material being, and the capacity and proneness for undergoing change.
Possib(ly) from the beginning God, in his foreknowledge, formed the soul in the aforesaid way (blended our soul together with our body) because he foresaw the ocming transgression, so that by suffering and experiencing evil on its own, the soul would come to an awareness of itself and its proper dignity, and even gladly embrace detachment with respect to the body.
I suppose that “detachment” is at first necessary in our sinful state to reorder our motivations. When we are in sin, our body is in control to the detriment of our soul. So the soul, not liking to be in a sorry state, has to say ‘wait a minute’ and then tell what the body to do.
For the all-wise Provider of our life allows what we do by our own impulses to be used, quite naturally and frequently, for our correction. In the case of us who frantically deal with our impulsive acts amid the confusion and the disorder of which those acts are both an object and a cause, our Provider guides the irrational love which, in the meantime, we have directed toward present diversions, back to that which is beloved by nature. [notes: the conversion of irrational love, the soul's natural desire, to the true Good, is a familiar theme to the Cappadocian Fathers and in Maximus himself, as is the notion of the soul being converted, as it were, to its own inherent beauty, the image of God.] For there are three general ways by which, they say for our instruction, our passions are healed. Through each of the three (me: I think they will be listed in the next chapter), God renders a healing treatment of the self-directing evil vexation of the passions, as he wisely sets the chaos of matter in good order (Jacob, I’m skipping the Greek words!), according to the better plan which transcends us and leads toward the beneficial outcome that God himself knows.
Gregory is therefore advising those who think of nothing beyond this present life that they not put their confidence in bodily health and in the course of affairs that “bears” [their material life] along as in a “flowing stream”, nor exalt themselves at athe expense of those who lack these things, so long as the present life endures and they embrace its corruption, to which is related both mutability and change; and so long as there is uncertainty that something will happen to them arising from both the inequality and disordered state of their body and their external affairs. this is what Gregory means, I think, by saying “so long as matter bears with it chaos…” instead of “so long as this whole realm is subject to corruption and change.” It is his way of saying that we are clothed in the body of humiliation, and likewise we are subject to the manifold evils that arise from it because of its inherent weakness; and rather than magnifying ourselves over others in view of the inequality all around us, we should by prudent consideration even out of the disparity of our nature, which in its own right is equal in honor, by filling others’ deficiencies with our own abundances. [notes: Maximus has gleaned from Gregory Nanzianzen a corrective response (to Origen) Bodily inequality (and mutability) is rather a fact of material life, an evidence of the latent chaos of material creation out of which God is workin, in the lives of the virtuous, to bring about a blessed orderliness, a gracious equality. The virtuous must, then, actively engage in the ministry of “equalizing” both by their own internal discipline of their bodily passions, and by their extraverted acts on behalf of those who are even more severly challenged by bodily infirmity or by the “chaos” of the passions. Our “abundances”-embodied, paradoxically it seems, in our own acts of humility-help reconcile their “deficiencies.”
So his premise is that the soul has retained the divine image, though marred by sin originating in the body. But since the divine image resides in the soul, even though it permeates the body, it is the soul which must wake up and seek correction. I find it interesting how he brings out inequality – I believe in the soul’s goodness over the body’s undisciplined nature, introversion – with those around us, men and matter, and how we are to seek to regain order in ourselves as well as our environment. By the way, I started a compost pile today.
With my delicate feminine sensibilities I sort of got off on a tangent, so I’m recopying this from the previous post,
Further on in the oration Gregory makes this clear: “But it seems to me, for this reason none of the good things of this present life can be relied on. They are shortlived. The things we see, though made by the creative Logos and the wisdom that transcends all wisdom, are always changing, now one way and now another, born upward and then downward. That is why it seems we are being played with. Before something can be laid hold of it flees and escapes our grasp. Yet there is purpose in all this, for when we reflect on the instability and fickleness of such things, we are led to seek refuge in the enduring things that are to come. For if life always went well, would we not become so attached to our present state, even though we know it will not last, and by deception become enslaved to pleasure? In the end we would think that our present life is the best and noblest, and forget that, being made in the image of God, we are destined for higher things.” [Oration]
There is a tension between the now and not yet. Since the Orthodox believe in the Second Coming, Final Resurrection, and Judgment day, there will be a time when things are different. Yet in seeking salvation, God meets us where we are with grace. We are given glimpses either in our own lives or in reading about others’. Through ascetic struggle to maintain ceaseless prayer and mutual attentiveness with God, we are made aware that God is with us here and now. And through the Eucharist at Church Christ is physically present with us – don’t want to define that too much as I can’t.
But through experience I think I know what he’s saying about this fallen world. When we receive grace through a physical vehicle (I want to develop the idea the through the Incarnation God has made it His will to reach us through the physical things of the world which He united Himself to where there is distinction but not confusion), like a sunset, timely words from others, the faces of those we love, etc, we become gravitationally pulled towards they physical source of the blessing. We can loose sight of God in the thing and can worship the created rather than the creator. I think this is because we want to own and possess and control our source of blessing. We can’t control God, we have to continually submit ourselves to Him and to do that we have to turn our eyes from the physical source of blessing. But just prior to that, He communicated grace to us through the physical thing that we had to receive. But we have to then let the thing go, give it back to God – it will only putrify if we close our hands around it. We hold God with an open hand, and the “things” that He puts in it come and go according to His good pleasure.
But perhaps as things or people get divinized, through prayer and consecration, like the things of the Church – icons, relics, the building – they become more substantial and permanent. C.S. Lewis described something similar in The Great Divorce where as the people achieved Theosis, heavenly grass no longer cut their feet. Consecrated things become ours permanently, and continuously bless through their union with God through the prayers of the people. Do we have that much power? Our cooperation is necessary for the consecration of the whole world and those in it. I think this is why monasteries radiate the grace of God. Mother Christophora of The Orthodox Monastery of the Transfiguration said that grounds and icons gain grace the more they are in the presence of prayer. It’s not the innate logos of a thing that saves, it’s how it is brought into comformity with God’s will through obedience, and to that extent it will become the source of salvation, grace, to others. Everything has grown according to its logos to some extent or it would cease to exist.
If we loose sight of God and seek personal pleasure, the people and things around us will suffer, if we continuously seek His face and learn His will, commandments and precepts, we will right the fallen universe around us so that it fulfills it’s telos, grow into what it was created, according to it’s implanted logos, to be permantently. Meanwhile, we and the things around us reflect their fallen, impermanent, unstable, fickle state.
