Think It, Think It! Part II

In case anyone should misunderstand my post, “Think It, Think It!", I wish to clarify that I am not against thinking. Anyone who has followed this blog for long knows that in fact, I regularly rail against the oft-heard admonitions from certain heterodox quarters to “Stop trying to sort it out rationally and just adore the mystery!” First of all, only the Holy Trinity is to be adored, but no doubt this is what they mean, so never mind. The thing I want to point out here is, this is exactly when we need to keep on thinking, lest we mistake sheer nonsense for genuine Mystery. (How to tell the difference is discussed in this post and in the 48 comments that follow it.)

I think it is just as dangerous to stop thinking as it is to reduce spiritual things to mere concepts (and/or emotions). And in fact, the latter mistake is what usually causes the confusion that results in the former.

This has made it all the more delightful for me to discover a new (to me) blog, The Well Thought-Out Life, by Kacie, a young Evangelical. The subtitle of the blog is a quote from Galileo: “I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forego their use.” I love it!

If you check out Kacie’s profile, you’ll discover she grew up the daughter of missionaries “on the islands of Indonesia and the mountains of Papua” and you’ll find a link to her other blog, Papua Girl in Dallas. It’s also an interesting blog, more newsy and personal, while the first one is more her place for wrestling with theological matters. I’ve enjoyed both blogs enough to recommend them to you.

And while you’re at it, another new blog I like is Thesauros. It’s anonymously written but as of this writing already has 13 thoughtful and edifying posts. No idea what tack it may take in the future, but so far, so excellent!

Think it, Think it!

That’s what my husband and I say to each other whenever we come across an example of somebody trying to reduce a spiritual reality to a concept –a tendency we think has pervaded all of Western culture for several centuries.

We derived, “Think it, think it!” from this excerpt from a book I bought many years ago at a used book sale. It’s a collection of essays by notable Catholics, most of whom explain why they no longer practice that religion. This passage in particular struck us hard.

A beautiful Mass is very important, and the Russians and the Greeks have that. I can intellectualize, but I’m more intuitive and I like that whole multisensory approach where you can see and smell and feel instead of just having to think over and over again, This in holy, this is holy, this is holy.

I deeply resent Vatican II. Mother Church doesn’t embrace you anymore. You go there and she says, “I love you — think about it.” But she’s not going to hold you and make you feel warm. She wants us to be tough — tough grown-ups who just think. Now it’s all conceptual. It’s as if at the Last Supper Jesus said, “Take and eat, this is My concept.” That’s what the Mass has become…conceptualism replacing Incarnation. But man does not live by concepts alone.

--Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt,  artist, in Once a Catholic by Peter Occhiogross (Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston 1987), p. 34.

The Bravest Mouse of All

A mouse stealing a leopard's Lunch.... Are you serious?

This extraordinary scene was captured by 19-year-old photography student Casey Gutteridge at the Santago Rare Leopard Project in Hertfordshire, England. The student, photographing the leopard for a course project, was astounded by the mouse's behavior.

Seemingly unaware of the beast towering over it, the tiny rodent grabbed at scraps of meat thrown into the African Leopard's enclosure. But instead of pouncing on the tiny intruder, the 12-year-old leopard Sheena kept her distance. After a few minutes she tried to nudge the mouse away with her nose, but the determined little guy kept chewing away until he was full.

Perhaps there's a fence we don't see here, but it kinda looks to me like the bravest photographer of them all, too.

God’s Risk

Here is more from Olivier Clement, in his Book, On Human Being: A Spiritual Anthropology. This is from page 37.

The human being, the being who is personal, is the pinnacle of creation. With humanity the omnipotence of God gives rise to something radically new. Not a lifeless reflection or puppet, but a freedom which can oppose God, and put the fulfillment of God’s creation in jeopardy by excluding him from it. In the supreme achievement of God’s creative omnipotence – for only lifegiving Love can create a free living being – there is an inherent risk. Omnipotence finds fulfillment in self-limitation. In the creative act itself, God in some manner limits himself, withdraws, to give human beings space in which to be free. At its highest point omnipotence thus conceals a paradoxical impotence; because the summit of omnipotence is love, and God can do everything except force human beings to love. To enter into love, as we know, is to put ourselves without protection at the mercy of the worst suffering, that of rejection and abandonment by the one we love. Creation is in the shadow of the cross. The Lamb of God, according to the Book of Revelation, is slain from the foundation of the world.

God is Love, Period.

I’ve sometimes thought it might be a good idea to go through all our religious literature and cross out the word, “God” and substitute, “Love.” But then again, that might mislead people who have wholly inadequate notions of Love and similar notions of God, so that for them, “God has got to be more than that!” Or, “Yes, God is love, but that is not the whole story.”

Well, it is the whole story. God is Love. Is God nothing else besides? Is He not, for example, also Just?

He is, but the question assumes that justice and Love are two different things. For us human beings, in our fallen state, they indeed often are two things, but in God they are one because they are perfect, and nothing is “just” unless it is an expression, an application, of Love. That is why Justice, for God, requires not punishment, but restoration.

God is also Truth, but there is nothing true that is not Love. Neither is there anything good, nor worthy, nor mighty, nor creative, nor beautiful, nor immortal, nor all-knowing, that is anything different from Love. Love is that beside which there is none other.

So I was relieved and grateful to find this in Olivier Clement’s book, On Human Being: A Spiritual Anthropology, page 43. The author is discussing how communion in God on the one hand doesn’t destroy our unique personhood, but affirms it, yet on the other hand, does not admit of any separation or duality:

Personal existence has a ‘vertical’ dimension, a desire to be plunged into the fullness of God. And this fullness is not a solitude but an ocean already alive with the movement of infinite love. The depth is not an unrelieved gloom; it contains reciprocal activity, interchange, the presence of the other, while duality is avoided in the communion of the Three in One. The depth itself suggests the inexhaustible character of the Persons and of their love. We can now say boldly, ‘God is love’, without fear of blaspheming by appearing to trivialize.

So maybe it wouldn't be all that bad to cross out "God" and write in, "Love."

And it came to pass, that at midnight the LORD LOVE smote all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh that sat on his throne unto the firstborn of the captive that [was] in the dungeon; and all the firstborn of cattle.

Now THAT would give us a lot to think about, wouldn't it?  And yet, this is how we must learn somehow to interpret the passage.

The letters in the "spokes" of Christ's halo say, in Greek, He Who Is, recalling God's Name as revealed to Moses: YAHWEH, I am the 'I am'.  Here, crowned with thorns, is Yahweh.

"Be Still and Know That I am God."

The Lenten struggle, which is but an intensification of our everyday struggle, involves all sorts of things: fighting against temptation, learning to trust and to hope and to love and to forgive, weaning ourselves from addictions to the things of this earth, acquiring virtue, rooting out vice.

None of which we can accomplish ourselves, even though love prompts us to struggle with them. Struggle we must, but the main struggle must always be to stand still and simply receive God's grace and mercy, to let Him work in us. If we can but be faithful in this, all the rest follows.

Happy Birthday, Wendy!

Today is my sister's birthday. She is 59. HAPPY BIRTHDAY, SISTER! Happy Birthday to you! Happy Birthday to you! Happy Birthday to you! Happy Birthday to you! Happy Birthday to you! Happy Birthday to you! Happy Birthday to you! Happy Birthday to you!


With Our Brother, Mike

Sloth, Disguised as Humility

It's no good being ever so humble about your lack of Christian maturity if continually acknowledging it becomes a substitute for doing anything about it.

Test Swatch and Tentative Verdict

Top photo shoes the "Print o' the Wave" pattern I've published here once or twice recently.  Bottom photo is my attempt to reproduce it

Can you tell that the difference is (other than that mine is so inexpertly stretched and pinned out)?  That could be fixed. What can't be fixed is that it still needs to be knitted more loosely; viz., on even larger needles. (These are US 11s.)

The other difference is that in real life, my sample here is probably twice as large in scale as the lavender one. What I actually need is not larger needles, but finer yarn. And of course, real wool instead of acrylic, so it will block. This is fingering yarn and I need laceweight.

Verdict:  I don't think I will bother. First because I've never knitted with such fine yarn before and feel intimidated. Secondly, and more importantly, because I don't know what I'd DO with the pattern. It's too sheer to be good for a blanket or sweater. Can't be attached to a solid backing without spoiling the effect. I don't wear shawls. I wouldn't want curtains out of this because (a) I'd be afraid moths would get to the curtains and ruin them and/or (b) I'd have to block them all over again (and blocking is a royal pain) every time they were washed or drycleaned. And finally, the pattern, with its 17-stitch repeat, takes so much concentration to knit that all the enjoyment of doing it is spoiled.

Lesson:  there are many reasons, other than gauge, that it's important to knit a test swatch before undertaking a project.

Tough to Take

Demetrios' patient Kevin (not his real name) of whom I've written before (here), died early this morning. His death was totally unexpected and sudden.

He got up from bed just after midnight, with a very runny nose. The physician on duty offered him a little Benadryl, but Kevin refused. He sat up for a while, not appearing at all ill (except mentally, of course), and finally went back to bed around 2:00. The nurses, making their routine checks at 3:00, found him dead in his bed.

The suddenness of it probably means heart attack, stroke, or blod clot, any of which is surprising as his cholesterol was low and his blood pressure normal. He was not a smoker and not obese. He was not on any particularly dangerous drugs.

He was only 49 years old.

We hope he is in better shape now. Please pray for him. And I think Demetrios could use your prayers, too.

On the Tragedy and the Glory of Human Freedom

Here is more from Olivier Clement, in his Book, On Human Being: A Spiritual Anthropology. This is from pages 35-36.

Then the question arises: Why has God created us tragically free, tragically responsible – so heavy a burden that we constantly lay it down at the feet of idols and inquisitors? To which the great Christian Tradition replies unanimously: God created us free because he summons us to deification – to a divine-human condition in which our transformed humanity will find its fulfillment. This call demands a free response. Union that resulted from mere magnetic force would be automatic, instinctive, unworthy of a personal existence which, even in its wish for union, requires complete responsibility.

There does exist, it is true, an impersonal love which is the working of desire. Some contemplatives have stressed the spontaneous return or nature towards its origin. Denys the Areopagite, for example, saw the world as a kind of immense liturgy, a sacred dance revolving around the divine Centre, held in its attractive force. However, Denys was accepted into the Tradition only when corrected by Maximus the Confessor who, in his own writings and experience, emphasized the terrible freedom of man.

That is why Adam had to undergo the test of freedom, to grow in maturity towards a conscious love. That is why sacrificial Love could not be revealed until Abraham’s knife had glinted in the eyes of Isaac …That is why the chosen people were a stiff-necked people, who got their name – Israel – after wrestling in the dark with the unnamed Stranger. That is why, finally, when God took on himself the destiny of Isaac and of Job, he came in secret, so that only by the free love of humankind could he be recognized in a crucified slave, defiled with blood and spittle.

. . .

We can really love God only because we can refuse him. The book in the Bible which most clearly expresses this truth is possibly the Song of Songs, where the one painstakingly seeks the other. God seeks us more than we seek God.

When Metphors Become Literal

I love it when this happens!

The first time I can remember it happening was one morning when I was changing the sheets on the bed. You know how you sort of flap the top sheet to make it billow? Well, I let this sheet go too high, and it got caught by the rotating blades of the ceiling fan. I yelped.

"What's wrong?" called Demetrios from the next room.

And I said - are you ready? - I said, "The sheet hit the fan!"

Another time was while I was raising a baby robin. I stood looking out the window one rainy afternoon, wishing aloud I had gone out in the rain to collect some of the worms that had emerged from their flooded holes in the ground.

"Why don't you go out now and get some?" asked Demetrios.

"Too late; they'll all be gone by now. The other birds will have gotten them all."

"You mean...?"

I nodded, and in unison we said: "The early bird gets the worm!"

Yesterday, it happened again when I went to transfer a load of our undies from the washer to the dryer. The washing machine stretched and twisted one pair into a long rope, which got caught in the agitator and snagged half a dozen other pairs into a huge, tangled mess. I was bending over the washer, my head almost inside, tugging and muttering to myself, when Demetrios came to see what was the matter.

"Panties all in a wad?" he asked.

On Learning to Live

Repentance is not awareness of my personal guilt, as St. John Climacus says in the Olivier Clement snippet I posted yesterday. Repentance is awareness of “the daily murder of love” in me, of my loveless and therefore separated condition. Repentance is that awareness plus the longing to overcome it.

Simply keeping the Law won’t help. And this is not because I cannot do it, although that is also true. It is because there is no law that could give me eternal life even if I did keep it. (Galatians 3:21). Eternal life is the very same thing as true love, and no keeping of any (or every) law can instill in me that kind of love, the love we find perfectly expressed only in Christ, and less perfectly (but still marvelously) expressed in His saints.

Such love comes only from Christ, for only He has it, or rather, is it. Put another way, “Only [Christ] has immortality.” (I Timothy 6:16; see also John 5:26) Christ, by that immortal Love, transfigured death, proving Love stronger than every torment, and stronger even than Hades.

To be rescued from death, I need the Immortal Life, that is the Love, found in Him, in His Person. That is what Baptism and Chrismation together accomplish; the one plants me into Christ, into His death and resurrection, and the other plants His Holy Spirit deep in my own heart.

Now I am immersed in Love, in Life. Now He breaks the bread of Life with me.

There remains one issue, the one we tackle especially during Great Lent, and that is learning what to do with that new life, how to exercise that new love. As the wings of a newly-emerged butterfly do him no good unless he flaps them, so new and eternal life avails me little or perhaps even nothing unless I learn to live it. I have been awakened from sleep, but what does that mean if I never open my eyes, get up, move about? I am a newly-delivered infant; but what does that mean unless I breathe this new thing called air, unless I suckle, unless I can cry and move? Or what does it mean to be a fish that cannot swim?

Great Lent is for exercising our weak spiritual muscles and learning to use our new spiritual faculties, that we not enter the realms of light blind, nor deaf to the heavenly anthems, nor mute instead of singing, nor paralyzed instead of soaring.

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.