The Ultimate Meaning of Death: Lovelessness

It’s true: to be unable (or unwilling) to love – and by this we mean loving as Christ loved us, with a freely-willed, unconditional, self-sacrificial love that asks nothing in return and includes so-called enemies – to be without this kind of love is the worst aspect of death (as we had known it before Christ). It’s worse than being without sight or speech, worse than being without breath, worse than your heart being unable to beat. It’s far worse.

To be without this kind of love is to be dead already, spiritually. Yes, that’s exactly what spiritual death means: lovelessness. To be spiritually dead does not mean we cannot, with divine assistance, come to believe or that we cannot repent. It simply means love in us is inoperative. That’s another way of saying our spiritual life, life in and with the Spirit of God, doesn’t (yet) exist. “God is love, and he who lives in love lives in God, and God in him.”

And it (lovelessness) also affects us bodily, distorting our perceptions, darkening our reason, deforming our emotions, motivating our sins, making us miserable. In fact, the lovelessness (spiritual death) in us is the ultimate cause of the physical death to come.

Perhaps this explains why the saints often seem to us to be so profound and even clairvoyant. The love they have cultivated inside themselves, the life of Christ in them, cleanses the perceptions, the reason, the emotions, the motivations. They see and understand a lot more than the rest of us can. They are more aware than we are, are more alive than we are, who go about like sleepwalkers.

This also explains why “good works” (somehow a very wrong term) are something we Orthodox insist are necessary for salvation, and not merely symptoms of it. What we mean is, we must work hard at learning to love, at removing the obstacles within us and the many resistances to love. We must cease what Olivier Clement calls “the daily murder of love” in us. Because the more we grow in love, the more Christ’s life, which is eternal life, grows in us. The more awake and alive we become, the more conscious, the less crippled, the more whole, the healthier, the freer, the more full of joy and peace. The more able to live and rejoice in the glorious, divine Life hereafter, as well as here and now. The “more saved”.

Repentance: It Is Not Awareness of Individual Guilt

Here is one of countless wonderful passages from On Human Being: A Spiritual Anthropology, by Olivier Clement (New City Press, New York, London, Manila, 2000, pp.2-23).

3 Then the scribes and Pharisees brought to Him a woman caught in adultery. And when they had set her in the midst, 4 they said to Him, "Teacher, this woman was caught in adultery, in the very act. 5 Now Moses, in the law, commanded us ] that such should be stoned. But what do You say?" 6 This they said, testing Him, that they might have something of which to accuse Him. But Jesus stooped down and wrote on the ground with His finger, as though He did not hear.
7 So when they continued asking Him, He raised Himself up and said to them, "He who is without sin among you, let him throw a stone at her first." 8 And again He stooped down and wrote on the ground. 9 Then those who heard it, being convicted by their conscience, went out one by one, beginning with the oldest even to the last. And Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst. 10 When Jesus had raised Himself up and saw no one but the woman, He said to her, "Woman, where are those accusers of yours? Has no one condemned you?" 11 She said, "No one, Lord." And Jesus said to her, "Neither do I condemn you; go, and sin no more."

An intolerable text! It is missing from several manuscripts. Our moral conscience, indeed our religious conscience, cannot admit that Christ refuses to condemn this woman who says nothing, who shows no repentance. She has been taken in delicto flagrante; the crime she has committed is one of the most serious known to the Law, not only because it undermines the patriarchal structure of Jewish society, but because Scripture describes the relationship of God with his chosen people in terms of marital faithfulness and unfaithfulness. Christ confounds her accusers by reminding them that evil is universal: spiritually, they also are adulterers; they also, in one way or another, have betrayed love. ‘Let him who is without sin…’ No one is without sin. And he concludes by saying, ‘Go and sin no more’, giving her a new start in life.

Being aware of our state of separation, while longing to end it, is a prerequisite of the breaking up of the superficial self, of the shattering of our stony heart. Without this breaking up, Christ cannot be resurrected in me. That is why the monks say that repentance is the ‘reminder of death’, making us personally aware of our state of separation.

St. John Climacus says, ‘To define repentance as the awareness of individual guilt is to risk emptying it of meaning (Sermons, ed. Constantinople, P. 118). Again, to define sin as mere individual guilt would be to do without God, since all we should have to do in order to quieten our conscience would be to keep the Law. But, as St. Paul reminds us, the law cannot ‘make alive’ (Galatians 3:21). We who are reminded every day of our death, that is of the daily murder of love, know that only the victory of Christ over hell and death can ‘make alive’.

Once we have made this great return journey across the flood, receiving presentiments of the nature of death, we are thenceforward filled with a sorrowful joy. Our whole being is pervaded by a tenderness which is not the denial of passion, but its transfiguration by the passion of the Lord. We become capable of receiving others no longer as enemies but as brothers and sisters – this is the mysterious ‘love of enemies’ of the Gospel – of welcoming them without judging them, and perhaps of finding the right words to enlighten them in their turn. Without any effort on our part, we become different in our most ordinary words and actions, and may succeed in conveying to others that there is a meaning to life, that death has not the last word.

Patience and Wisdom and Kindness...

They spare us so much!

A young lady was waiting for her flight at a big airport. As her wait would be long, she bought herself a book to pass the time, and a packet of cookies.

Then she sat down in an armchair in the VIP lounge to rest and read in peace.

Beside the armchair where the packet of cookies lay, sat a man reading a magazine.

When she took out the first cookie, the man took one also. She felt irritated but said nothing. She just thought, “What a nerve!”

For each cookie she took, the man took one. It was infuriating, but she didn’t want to cause a scene.

When only one cookie remained, the man divided it into half, giving her one half.

This was too much! She took her book and her things and stormed out of the lounge to the boarding area.

It was only when she sat down in the plane that she opened her purse, and to her surprise, her unopened packet of cookies was there, where she had put it.

Patience and Wisdom...

...are highly useful virtues!


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(Photo received in an e-mail, originally coming from heaven only knows where.)

On Pins and Needles!

(In the UK, knitting needles, I believe, are called knitting pins.)

So, at last, my lace project is on the needles! Doesn't look like much yet, but I'm pleased with the start and thought I'd share pictures of the front and the back.

The the circular needle distorts the shape of the work but it's actually going to be a square afghan, knitted from the center outwards in rounds.

Evening with Met. Kallistos

For anybody who may be interested, Andreas shares his synopsis of the lecture Met. Kallistos delivered here in Richmond Wednesday night.

As I mentioned, it's a good, if lengthy, reply to those who accuse Orthodoxy of being overly influenced by Greek paganism.

"Snow"

The weatherman says our chance of snow is only 30% Friday, much higher on Saturday, but the "main event" will be on Monday. I don't like the sound of that. I'm ready for it all to go away.

One nice thing about it is that the reflection from it really lights everything up. Our house is light and airy anyway; we've worked hard to make it so, even adding three windows and making liberal use of the color white inside. With the light reflecting off the snow, everything looks VERY white.

So today I was inspecting the image in the mirror. With glasses on. (And I am sorry to report that my mirror's strange ailment has not cleared up; it reflects a worse and worse image as time goes by.)

Time to color my hair again. Cover up the ugly, dark gray roots. Wait a second. What gray roots? I don't see many. Most of my hair looks blonde right down to the scalp. In fact, brighter than blonde. Well, that's weird. Oh, of course, it's the reflection from the snow.

Isn't it? Look again. Part the hair frantically with the fingers. Oh.my.goodness. How in the world???

Flashback: Grandmother A to Grandmother B: "So what color is your hair, really?"

Grandmother B to Grandmother A: "How the heck should I know? I've dyed it red about as long as I can remember!"

Never mind. The hair color will cover up the snow-white roots just as well as the gray, or even better.

Met. Kallistos Comes to Town

Despite all the new-fallen snow, there was a big crowd at church last night for Met. Kallistos' Lecture, Athens and Jerusalem.

The event was sponsored by an organization whose purpose is to promote hellenism, so it was a scholarly lecture rather than His Eminence's usual, more spiritual fare.

It was still very good. It constituted an answer to those who, ironically, accuse Orthodoxy of having swallowed whole too much of pre-Christian Greek philosophy. Ironically, because usually our critics are the ones who turn out to have done that, and they don't realize it.

Maria snagged Demetrios the moment we got there, and marched him (with me close behind) up to two men in the front pew wearing RC clerical garb. "Here's the man who can answer all your questions," she said.

What they wanted to know was, who was that man in the icon painted on the back of the big chair up there?

Demetrios said, "That's where a Bishop sits when presiding over services, and the icon shows Christ, dressed as our Great High Priest. He is our true Bishop."

"And any bishop who sits on that throne isn't going to forget it!" I added.

They laughed, and one said, the other agreeing, "I wish our bishops knew that!"

"Well, if you know it," said Demetrios, "your bishops will soon learn it!"

More laughter.

Then they wanted to know what the open book meant, which Christ was holding open but, curiously, not reading.

I said, "That's the Bible. He's teaching us. He's excercising his episcopal teaching office."

I met these two clerics again at the reception after the lecture, and they turn out not to be Roman Catholics at all, but "Anglo-Catholics." And what's an Anglo-Catholic? I asked.

They're a group that broke away from the Episcopalians when the latter began ordaining women.

So I told them I, too, used to be an Episcopalian, and we compared notes for a while. I told them how my Episcopalian pastor had once commented to me: "Your trouble is that you have a love-hate relationship with the Church. You have no problem with God as your Father, but you are deeply ambivalent about the Church as your Mother." And how that was so true and so insigtful. I said I never resolved that issue until I became Orthodox, because Orthodoxy turned out to be everything I had always hoped the church would be but she never seemed to be. And I added that I hoped these two would find their way to Orthodoxy, as well. To my surprise, they both nodded and said, "We hope and pray the same. We want our entire church to become Orthodox."

So I said I'd join them in that prayer, and I'm sure they would be glad if you would join them, too.

Well, Maybe One Theological Thought in My Head...

The past couple of days, as I sit knitting, I've been pondering militant atheism. Now a tentative atheism, or an agnosticism, or doubt, all those I can understand and respect. But militant atheism is just very hard for me to take seriously. The trouble is, people like that expect us to believe so many things that to me are just outlandish, that stretch credulity far more than Christianity does.

The only outlandish thing Christianity asks you to believe is that God became one of us, weak, hungry, tired, sometimes in need of washing - and suffered and bled and died for us. Now that is outlandish.

But it's not as crazy as thinking the universe happened by chance, or that there is no inherent meaning in things, or that intelligent life (us) came about by chance. There's a better probability that my cat designed the Internet. C'mon, dear atheists. Get serious.

My Latest Obsession: Lace Knitting

Or, No, There isn't a Theological Thought in My Head

Warning: this post will be of no interest to non-knitters.

Here, mistakes and all, is my first attempt to knit up a swatch of the "Shetland Bead and Madeira" lace pattern I've been stewing about for a couple of weeks now. (The background is actually fire engine red; I don't know why my computer distorts it so.) Both sides are done in 4-ply worsted weight yarn.

It's not quite lacy enough.

So I tried it again, this time with baby fingering yarn for the front side.

It looks better in person, somehow, than it does in the photo, but in my opinion, this is TOO lacy, too cobwebby.

So now I've bought some sport weight yarn and I expect it will be just right to give the effect I'm after.

Meanwhile, I believe I've FINALLY, at long last, found (for free) the "Print o' the Wave" pattern for which I've been searching high and low. It's this one, which I have NOT yet knitted. This picture is from the Internet and not (yet!) from my hand, unfortunately.

And the pattern is here. The picture that goes with it looks different from this one, but I think that's because the picture here was knitted using much larger needles. I've done a little swatch using fingering yarn and US size 9 needles (5.5 mm) and it's still tighter than in the picture, even stretched, so tomorrow I am going to try with size 10.5 (6.5 mm). Those are huge needles for yarn that looks more like dental floss!

The pattern is simple in a way, using only 4 stitches any beginning knitter knows (Knit, purl, K2Tog, and YO). Plus, every wrong-side row is plain purl, no pattern stitches. And the scalloped bottom edge creates itself.

And then in another way it's difficult: the pattern repeat is 17 stitches. That makes it hard to memorize and thus, easy to lose ones place. This will be a project to be done in solitude, at least in the beginning; maybe it'll become more or less rote later.

Christ's Sacrifice

Do check out Christopher Orr's blog for a post on the Christian meaning of expiation, here. It's a very helpful article by Fr. Patrick Reardon.

In the Midst of Winter, Endless Summer

It's always Summer in our wonderful sunroom. Sunday we sat there almost all day, talking, reading, knitting. Yes, the view was wintry. We watched the icicles melt. We watched snow on the branches turn to little water drops that shimmered in the breeze and turned into prisms in the bright sunshine. We listened to the meltwater gurgling down the raingutters, and to the snow sliding off our roof. We watched the sunshine clear our driveway and street.

But we were enveloped in Summer. Even on the shortest days of the year, that room is drenched in sunlight and warmth, mostly solar warmth, with very little artificial heat added, and none at all from about mid-morning until sunset. Being in it is downright mood-altering! It's therapy, as Demetrios says, like a sauna or steamroom or a good massage. Or lying on some tropical beach. We picnic there, on a little glass-topped table. We nap there, on a very comfy sofa. We can't get over how much we love being in it.

I no longer resent winter, as I always used to. It no longer depresses me. I have a roomful of Summer right here, year-round.

Had we known all this, we would have built this sunroom many years ago!

More Snow

This is the most snow we've gotten in the Richmond area since 1996, a year I remember well because that is when Madison was born.

We still had about 5 inches on the ground yesterday morning when this latest storm began. The stuff is still coming down. We've gotten about 5 new inches so far. I have the feeling we'll miss church tomorrow for the second Sunday in a row, due to weather.

Schools have been closed all this week.

Demetrios is doing some dictation for the book he's working on. I've been knitting.

I went to the yarn shop earlier in the week and bought the stuff to use on my new lace project. I'm working on a swatch, which I'll show you later. I'm going to force myself, though, to finish the current project before starting the new. Current project is a cranberry colored blanket identical to the one I knitted for Ero (photo here), but much larger, king-sized. It still lacks nearly a foot in length, and still needs the edging added.

They're calling this a blizzard up in the D.C. area. Mom is ensconced in her retirement community and not cut off from any of her regular activities or her friends, most of whom live there, too. The place is laid out like a college campus, with "dormitories," and you can get to every building from any other building without going outside. So she can still play bridge, do her Wii bowling and her volunteer work, and get to the medical clinic (if the doctors can get there!) and convenience store and library and dining rooms and everything. Enviable, huh?

The Catholic Archdiocese there, according to our local news, "is urging Catholics to watch Mass on TV tomorrow and not risk coming out in this weather." Watch on TV? Well, I've never been Catholic, so what do I know? Maybe it is the same thing, or close enough. If you don't count receiving Holy Communion.

Sadness

Our friend in Greece, Christos, had a massive stroke and was near death. When his wife Chrysoula heard about it, she immediately suffered a massive heart attack.

Christos has reposed in the Lord. Chrysoula has recovered and is back at home.

These two wonderful people could both use your prayers, and so could their family. (These are the in-laws of Elpida, daughter of our dear Kostas and Mena.) Thank you.

OSAS?

Sermon to Self on “Once Saved, Always Saved?”

People who believe you can never lose your salvation always point to a series of Bible verses about how God WILL save you. But I don’t know what they do with that whole other series of verses (and whole parables) warning that we can indeed fall from grace.

The Parable of the Sower, for example, speaks of those who “received the Word with joy” (emphasis mine) but then withered away. The Parable of the Talents says, at the end, that if a person does not profit from the great gift, then “even what he has will be taken away.” (Matthew 25:29, Luke 19:26)

St. Paul writes, “…though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not love, I am nothing.” (I Corinthians 13:2). Nothing. Not a child of God.

In Matthew 10:22 and Revelation 2:10 we learn that if we are faithful unto death, we shall receive the crown of life.

There is the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant, who was forgiven much, yet failed to forgive his fellow servant a trifling amount.

Probably the clearest verse of all on this subject is John 15:2: “Every branch in Me that bears not fruit He takes away.” And further on in the same chapter (v. 6): “If a man abides not in Me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast [them] into the fire, and they are burned.” This passage clearly refutes the idea that if a person falls away, he must not have been a real Christian in the first place. You can! You can be a true Christian and then then turn your back on Christ, even learn to despise Him. And then what? You’ll never find heaven even inside the Pearly Gates.

You’ll be there, alright. That’s not the question. The question is, will you like being there? Or will you hate it, because it is full of Truth but Truth tortures your guilty conscience? Because it is full of love, and love only makes you jealous? Because it is full of Christ, and you despise Christ?

A guilty conscience, lovelessness, jealousy, despising truth, these are the torments of hell, worse than fire. It is a flat contradiction to say you are saved unless you are – well, saved! Saved from all these.

So take heed. There is more for the Christian to do than simply celebrate. Let us take up our crosses and deny ourselves and follow Him.