CALLED TO HOLINESS — 20170122

Posted on by

The call to holiness is a call to personal salvation! The problem is that, while we have all heard these words, we are not really sure what they mean. They appear to be two words that are intimately connected.

When most people, I believe, think about holiness they think about some of the saints they have heard about and who have achieved perfection, that is no longer prone to mistakes or sins. This understanding, fortunately, cannot be the meaning for this word. Why? Because the Gospels tell us that no one is without sin except God alone and Jesus, the Christ. Perfection is beyond human ability. While it seems that we humans can, during this earthly life, lessen the mistakes we make, being perfect is not possible. So holiness must have a different meaning since we are called to holiness.

Holiness, in the highest sense, belongs to God and to Christians who are conformed in all things to the will of God. Personal holiness is a work of gradual development. It is carried on under many hindrances, hence the frequent admonitions to watchfulness, prayer and perseverance.

Holiness, then, becomes real when we focus our efforts on developing a genuine relationship with God and attempting to do His will to the best of our ability.

When most humans think of salvation it is my guess that they think that it is something that happens after death, that it means meriting heaven and escaping hell. Salvation, it would seem therefore, is a reward for trying to live a good life.

Salvation for Eastern Christians is the process of attempting to achieve greater union with God by growing in the likeness of Jesus. It is an ongoing, voluntary act by which we seek an entrance to life in Christ here and now. Salvation is something that transpires right now, not after we die.

I am sure that my readers can immediately sense how holiness and salvation are intimately connected.

The Spirituality of the Christian East — 20170122

Posted on by

I would continue sharing thoughts on the 28th Step of John’s Ladder, PRAYER. In the last several issues I have suggested that one way to curb distraction in prayer is to make it more physical. Do things that can engage your body in prayer: Make the sign of the Cross, make prostrations, raise your hands, kiss icons or other actions that make your prayer more physical, engage your body and your mind.

Thus our prayer is not passive but active, and it involves our whole being – body and soul. All of this can help us create a sense of purpose at our time of prayer, instead of it feeling like an obligation that we hastily squeeze into a free slot of time. In other words, it helps to have a particular place in the home that is set aside for prayer: a small table on which lies a prayer book, a Bible, an incense burner, a candle or vigil lamp; and on the wall above the table icons of Christ, the Mother of God, and our patron saint. For families, it is helpful for parents and children to say a few simple prayers together at this prayer corner. The parents could continue with their own prayers together after putting the children to bed.

What about when we are not at home? When traveling, some find it helpful to have some small, portable icons with them. When we are staying in hotels, we can set the icons up, thus providing ourselves a place of prayer. Of course, prayer is no less prayer without icons. They are only meant to be a reminder of what we do when we pray – that is to lift-up our hearts and minds to God.

What I have been writing about in these last weeks is called “spoken prayer.” There are two other types of prayer that St. John speaks about: Mental Prayer and Prayer of the Heart. In the coming weeks I will share some thoughts about these two other types of prayer. Most people need to begin their prayer life with Spoken Prayer. It’s the first step.

Understanding Our Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church — 20170122

Posted on by

Our Church has a number of feasts which are dedicated to remembering events in the life of Mary, the Mother of God. They fall within what is called the Marian Group. The first, the Feast of the Presentation occurs forty days after the Nativity and, although it falls within the Marian Group, celebrates the presentation of Christ in the Temple and ritual purification of Mary according to Jewish custom. It first appeared in Jerusalem under Cyril where, like the other Cyrillian Feasts, it had a theological objective. The feast carries theophanic overtones. A line from Cyril’s own homily on this feast, “I see the infant and I recognize God,” is enough to clarify the Eastern Church’s view of the Presentation. By now Cyril’s anti-Arian bias is well known. However, when the feast was finally taken up two centuries later it was for purposes other than Cyril’s. Theophanes’ text, Chronographia, is practically our only direct historical evidence that Justinian instituted the Feast at Constantinople in the fifteenth year of his reign (542). Justinian had taken a commanding position in Church affairs, basing his ecclesiastical policy on the Council of Chalcedon. The Council condemned both Nestorianism and Monophysitism (belief that Jesus had only one single nature which was either divine or a synthesis of Divine and human), fixing the Church’s position between the two. The schismatic doctrine of Monophysitism arose in opposition to Nestorianism, claiming that Christ’s two natures became a single divine nature at the Incarnation. The Council of Chalcedon magnified the tension which already existed between Dyophysite Constantinople (i.e., two natures) and the Monophysite East to such a degree that espousing Monophysitism became a means of defying the Imperial government. For its part, the government, especially under Justinian, alternately persecuted and tried to win over the Monophysites.

At the same time that Justinian instituted the Feast of the Presentation he began a new offensive to reconcile the Monophysites, hoping to gain their favor by contriving the condemnation of three Nestorianizing theologians. The new Feast may have been another of Justinian’s efforts to aggravate the Nestorians and thereby ingratiate himself with the Monophysites. Since it honored both Christ and the Theotokos it represents a somewhat diluted attempt to establish a major Marian feast in the Church calendar. However, as a truly Marian feast it was only a preclude to those that would follow.

The history of how our Church Feasts came about is fascinating to me.

Gaining a Deeper Understanding of the New Testament — 20170122

Posted on by

Despite a renewed emphasis today upon biblical studies in our seminaries and parishes, critical exegesis of the Bible remains an enterprise little understood and still less appreciated by most Christians. The Holy Gospel, most feel, should be heard and venerated in the Church as the divine Word. Some ask, by what pretension do we presume the right to criticize God’s self-revelation. Also, some believe they know exactly what God is revealing through His word by just listening to it. In fact, one of the main tenants of the Protestant Reformation is that each person can interpret the true meaning of the Holy Scriptures.

Our Church, it must be added, does not share with fundamentalists a notion of biblical literalism and inerrancy. Even those who are theologically less sophisticated appreciate the divine-human character of Scripture; they are fully aware that God discloses His Person and will through human experience interpreted by human language. The problem, however, is that in most instances people tend to say they know exactly what God means in Holy Scriptures even though they are using translations on which to base their interpretations. We often find that languages like Hebrew, Greek and Latin – the first languages that conveyed the Scriptures to us – have nuances that cannot be accurately expressed in English. To assert that one has the true meaning of a biblical passage based on an English text, is truly foolish. You can assert what the passage may mean to you but you cannot truly say that the meaning you derive is the meaning that the author intended when he wrote it.

The aim of exegesis is to understand and to interpret the meaning of written documents, particularly the Bible, by applying to the text pertinent insights of the historical, philological, archaeological and also philosophical sciences. Exegesis itself is a scientific discipline insofar as it uses historical-critical methods to answer questions pertaining to the origin of the text (who wrote it, when and where), its purpose (why it was written, its aim (to whom and to what situation it was written), and its function within the life of the particular community that accepted it. At the level of “lower criticism,” exegetical research attempts to establish the original text of a biblical document as the author or “school” of authors composed it, and to lay the groundwork for “higher criticism” that seeks to determine the meaning or message of a given passage

Gaining a Deeper Understanding of Our Faith — 20170122

Posted on by

St. Cyril of Alexandria

In the last issue of this article I actually shared the text from the Council of Chalcedon which finalized an actual dogmatic statement about Who the Church believes Jesus Christ to be. On the Cyrillian side, particularly noteworthy is the repetition of the pronoun “the same” eight times (excluding the Nestorian “duality” between the Son of God and the son of Mary) and the use of the title Theotokos. On the Antiochene-Latin side is the insistence on the integrity of each nature, each keeping its respective properties within the union. The formula is clearly a “committee document,” lacking the straightforward, kerygmatic and soteriological fire of earlier Cyrillian statements. But it reflects a “catholic,” charitable – we would say today “ecumenical” – concern for possible objections from either side of the debate. (If you kept last week’s Bulletin, go back over the statement).

Can it be said that the Council of Chalcedon solved the Christological problem? Certainly not. Like all balanced, conceptual formulas, it solved certain problems but created new ones. Actually the Fathers of Chalcedon were conscious of this limited character of all doctrinal definitions, including their own. Not only did they deny any novelty on their part and insist that their only intention was to follow the fathers and the prophets and further clarify the statements that began at Nicaea. They also formally declared their inability to exhaust the meaning of the mystery in a verbal form. This is the significance of the famous four negative adverbs included in the definition: “without confusion, without change, without division, without separation.”

In spite of this declared humility of the Chalcedonian fathers, objections to their terminology were voice immediately. Indeed, on the one hand, by declaring that Christ was to be seen “in two natures,” they were using the word “nature” in a more abstract sense than Cyril did, for whom nature designated a concrete reality and was synonymous with hypostasis. On the other hand, by designating the union as a concurrence into one person, or hypostasis, they were not making it quite plain that this hypostasis was the preexisting hypostasis of the Son of God (although their Cyrillian expressions hinted in that direction). Finally, Chalcedonian theologians would always be at pains to try to explain how, according to the Cappadocian fathers, God was still one God, although in Him there were three Hypostases and one nature.

Learning Our Faith From the Greek Fathers of the Church — 20170122

Posted on by

I have been sharing ideas about why we should be aware of the Fathers of the Church and what they taught and wrote. They are the foundation for our understanding not only of the New Testament (NT) but also our worship as a Church. We also realize from their example, that we have to wrestle with the dog-mas of the Church so that we can come to a real un-derstanding of them and internalize their meaning. This process makes our faith real.

No Christian’s ideas or practices have been shaped in a familial, cultural, ecclesiological or theological vacuum. Theological knowledge, awareness, practice and, occasionally, prejudice are formed within a number of contexts. Purposefully and systematically moving out of these familiar boundaries, that is, taking a theological voyage to other times, places and personalities, rebukes the tendency of us all to think that we are the only people who genuinely comprehend the truth and who practice it faithfully. It is the height of arrogance to believe that we, and only we, have a corner on the whole truth. Exposure to foreign theological terrain can surprisingly highlight the fissures in our own theological understanding and remind us of the continuing need to listen to other voices carefully and respectfully. This doesn’t mean, however, that we immediately abandon those things that we believe when we hear different opinions. We study the thoughts of others, just as the Fathers of the Church did, in order to refine our own thoughts. It is critical, I believe, that we get to a point where we formulate our own set of beliefs and then not become insecure when others express a difference of opinion.

However, a broadening and deepening of theological perspective, insight and sympathy is not the only happy fruit of working outside of one’s home theological turf. A thorough immersion in patristic theology will continually put us toward the center of the Gospel and help to guard against the danger of transforming peripheral issues into the heart of the matter.

As I have attempted to present, the Fathers wrestled with their understanding of God, Christ and creation and came, through their study and debate with other Father, to the understanding of our faith that we now profess. What this tells me is that they were deeply concerned about the faith and gave time to coming to a true and deep understanding of that faith. We do well to imitate them. What do you really believe?

The Divine Liturgy and Our Worship of God — 20170122

Posted on by

The section of the Divine Liturgy that transpires immediately after the completion of the Anaphora, is the Communion Service. When a deacon celebrates the Liturgy with a priest, a litany traditionally serves as an introduction to this section of the Liturgy. If there is no deacon, the priest introduces the Communion Service by calling the community to offer the prayer that Jesus gave us, the Our Father. As an indication of the importance of this prayer, we pray it as we begin the Communion Service. Before we pray the Our Father, the priest proclaims, “And grant, O Lord, that we may with confidence and without condemnation, dare call upon You, Father, the God of heaven and say.” It is indeed most daring to address God as “Our Father”. It recognizes Him above all else as our Creator and most loved Lord Who will provide for us and protect us. To say it requires a deep faith in God – a faith which is filled with “awe” and “love” and not fear.

In the Our Father, we also ask that He, our Father, “give us our daily bread”. When we recite this during the Divine Liturgy, our daily bread becomes none other than the Body and Blood of Christ and so we are asking Almighty God to truly make Jesus Christ a part of our lives so that we might, from His presence within our lives, become God’s children. This prayer is powerful for several reasons.

It should not be prayed, by the way, unless we are willing to live by what we pray. The pray says to God that we are willing to “forgive” those who trespass (i.e., offend) against us and we say to God that we are willing to forgive them just as we know that He forgives us. If we are not willing to forgive others, regardless of how they have offended us, then we should be careful when we say this prayer for we are telling God that we are willing not to be forgiven by Him for our offenses.

It is important, I believe, that we understand what we pray and mean what we pray. The words, especially of the Our Father, are not idle words with no meaning. It is important that we think about what we pray.

The celebrant ends the prayer with the words: “For thine is the Kingdom and the power and the glory, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, now and ever and forever. The AMEN agrees with this statement. The western world has added the priestly ending to the prayer, which was miscopied to the prayer in an ancient manuscript.

Reflections on the Scripture Readings for this Weekend — 20170115

Posted on by

Our readings for this week are taken from Paul’s letter to the Colossians and Luke’s Gospel. Our Epistle reading tells us that, because we are God’s chosen ones, we should clothe ourselves in virtue. Paul then articulates a number of virtues that we should embrace, ending with this exhortation: “Let the word of Christ, dwell in you.” He tells us indirectly that Christ taught us that it is a virtuous life that allows us to grow in our likeness of God. The virtues that Paul writes about are mercy, kindness, humility, meekness, patience, forgiveness, thankfulness and love. He also clearly indicates that if we attempt to make these virtues a real part of our lives, we will achieve true, interior peace.

Our Gospel story is about Christ’s encounter with one of the “ruling class” who wants to know what he must do in order to “share in everlasting life.” Jesus’ response to the man is that first he must keep the basic commandments that involve true love of neighbor. Jesus does not indicate the ten commandments of Moses but highlights those which guide us in our relationships with others (i.e., adultery, murder, stealing, lying and lack of respect for others).

After the man declares that he has kept these basic commandments, Jesus tells him that if he really wants to spiritually grow, he must “sell all you have and give to the poor and then follow me.” The Gospel then tells us that when Jesus said this the man grew “melancholy” because he was rich. Jesus ends the encounter with the man by responding to the questions of others who had heard this and then asked: “Who, then, can be saved?” To which Jesus replies, “Things that are impossible for men are possible for God.”

So what message can we derive from these two readings? When you think about the story of the man from the ruling class, you realize that Jesus is telling us that if we become concerned about the things we have. spiritual growth is impossible. But, if we enlist the help of God and attempt to make virtue a part of your life, you can achieve the fullness of life. Things of this world can distract us from the primary task of life, namely to learn how to love our neighbors as ourselves and not to think about worldly things but, rather, about spiritual things. All things are truly temporary. We must learn what is important in life, things or others. We have a choice! How do we live our lives? That’s the question

Learning Our Faith From the Greek Fathers of the Church — 20170115

Posted on by

Athanasius the Great

After spending a great deal of time presenting the ideas of our Greek Church Fathers, I realized that I have to answer this question for my readers: Why should we spend the time and effort to learn theology with the Church Fathers? Truly indeed, many of our modern Christian religions disregard the writings of the Fathers as unimportant and “out of date.”

For one thing, the Fathers can help us to understand what it means to be a Christian and how the early stages and models of Christian worship, practice and reflection have shaped Christian perspectives and practices throughout the Church’s history. The Fathers were formative figures in the formulation and modeling of Christian faith and practice and can be a healthy antidote for the theological and ethical faddism and foolishness that marks too much of the modern Christian world. The Fathers will consistently remind us that the content of Christian belief and its lived practice in worship, prayer and the many relationships of life must always remain one piece. They can help us understand what it means to be a true Christian, a follower of Jesus Christ and not the follower of charismatic, modern-day preachers.

Further, the Fathers can help us to understand what the writers of the New Testament (NT) really meant since they lived closer to the source. I have found that frequently modern-day interpretations of the NT are skewed by what is happening in our non-Christian society.

In fact, the Fathers insist that it is in the womb of worship and the experience of God’s redemptive act in Christ that theology is born, nourished and developed. Athanasius’ response to his Arian opponents was largely based on the Arians’ inability to make sense of Christian worship. How, Athanasius asks, can the Arians deny the full divinity of Christ and yet still worship Christ? To do so is to worship a creature, however highly elevated in status, as God. Surely, Athanasius will argue, something is wrong here.

Not only were the Fathers key figures in the formulation of Christian faith, but they were much nearer, as I said, to the apostolic writers than we are. Their ability to interpret what the writers of the NT meant is much more accurate than all of our present-day biblical scholars. They, because they wrote in the same language, were much more aware of various nuances in the language the NT writers used.

More to follow.

The Spirituality of the Christian East — 20170115

Posted on by

I am, in this article, still considering the 28th Step on St. John’s Ladder, which is PRAYER. In the last issue I touched on the issue of being distracted during prayer.

Being distracted during prayer does not mean taking time to pause and meditate on certain words of the prayers we are saying. If we are moved to tears or deeper contrition by a penitential prayer, or if we are overwhelmed by a sense of deep gratitude and wonder, we should not ignore this and just push on, even if it means we will not have time to complete our set prayers. St. John tells us: “If it happens that, as you pray, some word evokes delight or remorse within you, linger over it; for at that moment our guardian angel is praying with us.”

It can be helpful, especially when we struggle to concentrate, to involve more than the mind in prayer. Rather than read our prayers silently, we can utter them aloud. This helps keep the mind focused. In addition to hearing the words of our prayer, we can involve the sense of smell by offering incense with our prayer. We can also involve sight by praying before an icon and a candle or vigil lamp. Thus prayer becomes not just something we say, but something we do. It becomes a physical action, a ritual of sorts.

I have found, however, that it is important not to fight to stay attentive to our prayer. If our minds remain distracted after attempting to use strategies to focus our attention, then it is better to just stop and come back to our prayer at a later time. I have found that when the struggle to maintain our focus, prayer becomes too overwhelming and we begin to dislike prayer. It is better to stop and allow ourselves to regroup and come back to prayer a little later. Don’t make prayer a chore. Discover what is distracting you and resolve it. By the way, there is no one proper way to pray. Each of us must develop our own way.