Learning About the Practices of Our Religion — 20140504

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hagiasophialastChrysostom no doubt officiated in each of the several large churches with which the city of Constantinople had been adorned since 330. In addition to the original Hagia Sophia (Holy Wisdom), the Great Church which served as the Cathedral and begun by Constantine and completed in 360 by Constantius, there existed the High Church, Hagia Irene (Holy Peace), close by, and the Church of the Apostles, the former enlarged and beautified by Constantine, the latter built by him. These churches were all basilicas. Although none have survived as active places of Christian worship, they are museums and we are certain of their features and their influence on the Liturgy. Worshippers first entered through an imposing portico, whose doorway might be hung with rich curtains. They found themselves in an atrium, or forecourt, surrounded on three sides by a columned arcade. In the middle was a fountain where the faithful could wash their hands on their way into church, as much in preparation for prayer as for receiving the sacrament. The atrium was also where the poor gathered in the hope of  receiving alms from the churchgoers.

The church itself was entered by way of the narthex, or porch (now called the vestibule), on the fourth side of the atrium. Several doors led into the narthex, where people could gather before the service began. Whether or not they entered the church before the bishop arrived is not clear (there was always a procession of the clergy, with the bishop, into the church. In the renewed Latin Liturgy, we see this reinstated and we still see this when a bishop visits the church).

Certainly in the first half of the seventh century the congregation seems to have gathered outside the church, and to have entered it only after the bishop had made his ceremonial entrance. The larger churches all seem to have had doors at the east end, on either side of the apse, as well as at the west end, and often in the north and south sides too. The central doors leading from the narthex into the nave were known as the royal doors, and it was through them that the Emperor entered with the Patriarch into the church on those occasions when he took part formally in the Liturgy. The name royal doors was only later given to the doors that eventually developed on the iconastasis (originally the iconastasis had no doors).                      Al-Masih-Qam!

Called To Holiness — 20140504

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During the past several weeks I have been sharing with you what I believe to be an essential realization that every person desirous of being called a Christian must have, namely that they are called to holiness. The goal and purpose of life is to help us grow in holiness.

Holiness has been defined as having the attitude of belonging to or devoted to God. It includes being pure in heart, devout (i.e., active in worship and prayer) and pious (i.e., showing reverence for God and being righteous). Holiness does not necessarily mean being so wrapped up in religious practices that you don’t live your daily life. Saints are not unreasonable people.

For me holiness means being centered on living your life as God intended you to live it when he created you and using Jesus as a model for your attitudes and behaviors. Perhaps one of the primary prerequisites for holiness is acceptance of self. It seems that each of us have been created with very definite strengths and weaknesses. They are given to us to help us spiritually grow during this lifetime in the image and likeness of God. They are uniquely balanced, I believe, to help us achieve holiness if we turn our efforts to this goal. I believe that holiness cannot be achieved unless we desire it and            consciously turn our attention to the task of achieving it. Holiness doesn’t happen by osmosis.  It doesn’t happen to us but, rather, is something we can achieve with God’s help.

It does mean that God must be important in our life. It does mean that we accept that we have a spiritual nature as well as a physical nature.

Having said this, it means that we must see ourselves as spiritual-material beings – flesh and bone that is animated and invigorated by a spiritual force that is truly individualized. While all humans are brought into and kept in existence through the same spiritual force, each human being is incarnated by a unique personality. So while I am like all other human beings, there is something within me which is completely and totally unique, easter1my person – that unique element which makes me who I am.

Once I begin to think about myself in this manner I can embark on the road to holiness. For to be holy means that I am truly the person God created me to be.

In some way I think that holiness means that I truly discover who God created when He created me. For it is truly ME He has called to holiness.  Χριστός Ανέστη!

A Look at the New Testament – St Paul — 20140504

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12_stpaulicon_270It is important to note that the earliest, extended treatment of the Resurrection of Jesus in the New Testament (NT) is in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians (cf. Chapter 15). Paul’s earlier letters to the Thessalonians and Galatians presuppose and affirm it but say nothing more about it. Paul devotes the entire fifteenth chapter of his letter to the Corinthians to the subject of the resurrection.

Paul actually reports a list of people to whom the risen Christ appeared. He uses the word appeared. The list includes, Peter, the 12 Disciples, more than 500 brothers and sisters, James and the rest of the apostles. He includes himself in the list: Last of all, as        to one untimely born, He appeared also to me. The risen Christ had appeared to Paul in a vision, and his inclusion of himself in the list and his repeated use of appeared suggest that Paul saw his experience as very similar to the experiences of others.

Paul also emphasizes the centrality of the resurrection of Jesus. Indeed, as Paul sees it, the resurrection of Jesus IS the one event which proved that what He taught was true and of God. He states, If Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain. If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile. Paul’s language could not be stronger. The fact that God raised Jesus from the dead IS the proof that Jesus is God and that His teachings are directly from God.

These verses are often quoted by Christians who insist upon the physical, bodily resurrection of Jesus as the factual foundation of Christianity. For them, if His physical body wasn’t raised, if the tomb wasn’t really empty, Christianity is not true. In the context of Paul’s words in his first letter to the Corinthians, this is not what these words actually mean.

This is clear in part from Paul’s list early in the chapter of those to whom the risen Christ appeared. Did Paul’s vision and the experience of others actually involve an encounter with a physical, bodily Jesus? Paul’s certainly didn’t! Those traveling with Paul in the three accounts presented in ACTS did not experience what Paul did.

It is also clear from the last part of the chapter where Paul addresses the question of    exactly what kind of body the resurrected body is. His images affirm continuity even as they emphasize radical discontinuity between the earthly body and the resurrection body. It is like the difference between a seed and a full-grown plant.

I would encourage you to take the time to read the fifteenth Chapter of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. Paul speaks of a spiritual body. What does it mean? What is not denied is that Paul and the others had an actual, real experience of Jesus being alive. This is what is of the greatest importance.       Χριστός Ανέστη!

Learning Our Faith from the Church Fathers — 20140504

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easter3In the last issue of this article, I began sharing information about how the Church sees the unity that exists within the Trinity. As you know, the idea of the Trinity finally emerged in the Christian community when the Church Fathers finally began to truly      understand who Jesus is. Once the Church knew Jesus to be God Himself incarnate as a human, they had to conceive a new understanding of God Himself.

The first issue they had to deal with is how to still maintain that there is only ONE God – they couldn’t   revert to polytheism, the approach of pagans, and yet they believed that Jesus, Who was also human, was also God. Then, after they became aware of the Holy Spirit, they had to find some way in which they could maintain monotheism and yet   account for Jesus and the Holy Spirit. As I shared in the last Bulletin, the Greek Fathers reasoned that truly the function of the divine Persons corresponds to the place each occupies in the bosom of the Trinity. They were able to devise a statement which states that while there are Three Persons in the Godhead, there is only ONE God.

Spiritual writers have always preferred the Greek way expressed in traditional formulas which summarize it in two movement, one downward: the Father creates man through the Son and sanctifies him in the Spirit; the other upward: man gives glory to the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit. This, the Fathers, said is the royal highway of human deification. St. Basil wrote: Thus the way of the knowledge of God lies in the One Spirit through the One Son to the One Father, and conversely, natural goodness, inherent holiness, and royal dignity extend from the Father through the Only-begotten to the Spirit.

It should be noted that this approach created no religious problems as did the Latin concept where the Persons remain in the background. However, it had to wrestle with the problem of the oneness of God which seemed to be unveiled here in an entirely new and mysterious manner, as the unifying force of divine love.

As the Eastern Church has always maintained, we cannot comprehend God with our human intellect. All we can truly say about God is what He is not. So the Eastern Church sought to speak about the function of each Person in the Godhead and not define God, if that makes any sense. The Church came to know the function of each Person through experience. The Church had a memory of Jesus and also felt, in a real way, the movement of the Holy Spirit and from Judaism they knew God as Creator.                          Христос Воскресe

The Spirituality of the Christian East — 20140504

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Theophan, you will recall from last week’s Bulletin, gave us a different image, I believe, of what sin is by giving us characteristics of a sinner. A sinner can be described as a person who is concerned about many other things than his or her relationship with God. A sinner is a person who   deprives himself of God’s help or grace.

In his writings Theophan presents what he sees as the general features characteristic of a sinner. He states:

Having turned away from God a man becomes centered on himself and puts himself as the main object of his entire life and activity. This is certain, because after God there is nothing greater for a man than himself.

This is why we can state that all of us are sinners since the natural tendency in all of us is to think more about ourselves than about others. This is also why the message of Jesus is challenging. He challenges us to be selfless and other-centered instead of self-centered. This, I believe, is one of the primary lessons that all humans must learn during this lifetime. We must learn how to be other-centered.

One author, who I tend to agree with, sees the following as some of the characteristics of our modern society:

· Disenchantment of the world: the loss of sacred and metaphysical understandings of all facets of life and culture;

· Secularization: the loss of religious influence and/or religious belief at a societal level;

· Alienation: isolation of the individual from systems of meaning (e.g., family, religion, meaningful work);

· Commodification: the reduction of all aspects of life to objects of monetary      consumption and exchange;

· Decontexutalization: the removal of social practices, beliefs, and cultural objects from their local cultures of origin; and

· Individualism: growing stress on individuals as opposed to meditating structures (e.g. , as family, village, church).

Think about this!          Christos Voskrese!

FROM THE PASTOR’S DESK

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easter2I would offer a big Thank You to all those who worked to make our Easter Dinner a special event. I especially would like to thank Art Borodich who did the main cooking. I would extend thanks also to Corinne Boyko & Mary LaDouceur who gracious stepped in and helped when plans changed. A Big Thanks to all who made desserts. They were absolutely delicious and delightful. Despite our small number, we had a wonderful time.

Sunday April 27, 2014

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Though the tomb had been sealed, from the tomb You arose, O Life and Christ our God. Though the door had been locked, You appeared among the  Disciples, O Resurrection of All; and thus You restored an upright spirit for us according to Your great mercy. Tropar

Christ IS Risen! Indeed He IS Risen!

This weekend we celebrate the Anti-Pasch, which brings to a close, in imitation of the First Passover, our eight day celebration of the New Passover. Just as Moses led the Jewish people out of captivity in Egypt, so Christ our Savior, through His Resurrection from the dead, has led us out of captivity to sin and death and to God’s Promised Kingdom. The Resurrection is the new Exodus (Passover) and Christ is the new Moses.

During Bright Week, which we have just completed, we celebrated the Lord’s Resurrection every day (in fact Resurrection Matins can traditionally be celebrated every day of this special week). After this special week, the Church celebrates the Resurrection of Christ only on  Sundays (this is why we have the eight different Tones for our Proper Prayers during the remainder of the year).

Bright Week also initiates a change in our liturgical calendar. During the 50 days between Easter and the feast of Pentecost, Sundays become the first day of the week (during Ordinary Time, the rest of the liturgical year, Sundays are considered the last day of the week).

The Eastern Church is brilliant in her celebration of this great feast. On the very first weekend after Easter she recalls, for the sake of building our faith, that even one of Christ’s Disciples, Thomas the Twin, had refused to believe that Christ arose from the dead. She shares the story of Thomas’ disbelief so that we might believe rather than disbelieve in the Lord’s Resurrection.

Many modern people find it difficult to believe that Jesus arose from the dead and dismiss this story as a myth or a contrivance by the disciples. Even the disciples had a difficult time, at first, to believe in this miracle. But many experienced Jesus as alive, as did Thomas, and disbelief was changed in to belief. Our faith in this mystery is fortified by the testimony of first-hand witnesses. All we know about the disciples and followers of Jesus tell us that they were not deceivers. The proof? They were willing to die for their belief. It is difficult to deny the truthfulness of   people who were willing to die for what they knew to be true. Believe! This truth will set you free.     Христос Воскрес

A Look at the New Testament – St. Paul – 20140427

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Before the Great and Holy Week, I was sharing my thoughts and those of the Scripture scholar Marcus Borg about the Letters of St. Paul which were written much before the four Gospels and, it is believed, probably influenced the writers and compilers of the Gospels. The focus of the thoughts shared were about Paul’s letter to the Corinthians.

As I shared, the first part of the letter dealt with the complaints that Paul received from the community about some of the things that were happening. In part it dealt with the fact that       the community was becoming fractionalized because of some of the distinctions that were being made between the more affluent members and the poorer members.

Portions of the rest of the letter responds to specific questions that the community directed to Paul.

The beginning of chapter 7 (it is suggested that as you read this you also open your New Testament to his first letter to the Corinthians), refers explicitly to this: Now concerning the matters about which you wrote. The verse then continues: It is well for a man not to touch a woman. Is this what Paul thought? No. That sentence is from a letter to Paul from the community in Corinth. Some were advocating total abstinence, and others wanted to know Paul’s teaching on the matter. The sentence functions as a section heading for Paul’s comments on marriage, conjugal relations and divorce which occupy the rest of the chapter (It is interesting that they ask a man who was not married about these things).

In the next chapter, Paul addresses the question of whether food sacrificed to idols, especially meat, can be eaten by Christians. In the urban Gentile world, most meat was from animals that had been sacrificed to various deities – idols from a Jewish and Christian point of view. So could Christ-followers eat it? Paul’s answer: yes.

It must be remembered that Paul was writing to Gentiles and Jews who were followers of Jesus and living in the Roman Empire. Roman religious ritual would sacrifice various animals and then offer the meat for sale to citizens. The Roman temples were what we would now call the community butcher shop. Paul answers yes because he reasoned that eating the meat did not imply worshipping a Roman god.

This was not an uncommon practice. Even Judaism at that time offered animal sacrifice to Yahweh. Some of the meat was eaten by worshippers while, on other occasions the animal was totally burned.

This approach to worship probably seems foreign to most modern people since our worship of God has become so abstract and symbolic. The reality is that we offer food in worship of God, which is symbolic of life, and consume it. Think about it.                      Krisztus feltámadt!

Getting to Know Something About Our Greek Catholic Faith — 20140427

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The state of mind, the forms of worship, the spirituality and theology of the Eastern Church are not merely a matter of rite: they imply a specific vision of life and eternity, uniting Easterners of many different backgrounds: Melkites, Ukrainians, Ruthenians and other Slavs in one Church, under one Lord, Jesus Christ. The Eastern Church was highly influenced, originally, by the thinking and philosophy of Greeks, Syrians, Semites and even Egyptians.

The Eastern Church and its culture are not truly Eastern, although born and developed in the Eastern part of the Roman Empire. The words East and Eastern are historical and geographical terms designating a rather nebulous    reality with uncertain contours. They encompass nations and cultures from the Bosphorus to the Far East, passing through Asia, China and Japan, and from the Ural Mountains in Russia to the peninsula of Kamtchatka on the Pacific Ocean.

For Americans, these words are so confusing that when applied to the Byzantine Church, they may submerge its identity in a shadow of unreality, since in our language these terms are generally applied to Far Eastern countries and not to the Near-East, or Levant to which this Church belongs.

It is the Near-Eastern nations, or Levantines, which Hellenic civilization penetrated, without dispossessing them completely of their original ethnic characteristics. Both Syria and Palestine, which occupied very special places and positions in the formation of the Byzantine Church, used the Syriac language, which was later replaced by Arabic. Georgia and Armenia spoke the Armenian language. Near-Eastern nations, with their particular cultures, were in some way united by a common element, the Greek language, without becoming Greek themselves. In later   history, they all converged on Byzantium to contribute to its formation and development without making it Eastern. The definitive history of Byzantine science and philosophy, literature and theology has yet to be written, but the main lines stand out in sufficient details to reveal their attractive beauty and diversity in their harmonious unity.

It should be noted that each of the ethnic groups that have become encompassed by the Byzantine Church have, especially in terms of spirituality, added to the original Byzantine approach. The temperament of each   ethnic group has added to the expression of the faith as originally received from Byzantium.

Χριστός Ανέστη!  

The Spirituality of the Christian East — 20140427

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Before the Great and Holy Week, I began to share the thoughts of one of our Father among the saints, Theophan, as a means of sharing some insights into Eastern spirituality as it is experienced by Slavic peoples. He was Slavic.

In his writings he has much to say about the state of a sinner. It is very important that we hear what he has to say.

Theophan writes that the sinner who is to be renewed through repentance is often described in the Word of God as being submerged in a deep sleep. The distinctive feature of such persons is not necessarily their manifest depravity. It is rather the absence of an active, heart-felt, and selfless desire for pleasing God, together with a resolute aversion for everything that is sinful. Piety is not the primary object of their concern and labor. They are concerned about many other things, but are absolutely indifferent to the matter of their own salvation and are not aware of the danger they are in. They are neglectful of a good and righteous life and lead a life that is cold to faith, although this life may sometimes be outwardly irreproachable.

In many ways this gets at the heart of what Eastern spirituality sees as sin. Sin is a state of being unaware of the work that must be done during this lifetime – namely the work of making sure that our thinking, attitudes and behaviors are congruent with the teachings of Jesus. Many people fail to think about their attitudes which, most frequently, are formed by our society and not by the Gospel.

This is one reason why the Slavic Byzantine Church always talks about our voluntary and involuntary sins. Our sinful nature is not defined by the things we do but rather by our attitudes, thinking and lack of awareness about our spiritual life. Example: God doesn’t care that we lie 30 times. He cares that there is something within us that seems to require that we lie about things.                    Χριστός Ανέστη!