CALLED TO HOLINESS — 20160821

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Dormition of the Mother of God

Dormition of the Mother of God

The call to holiness would have us also think about life in the same manner as the Church reveals it to us. Consider this. Today we celebrate the feast of the Dormition of Mary. It provides us with a vision of human life which we are called to embrace as Christians. It is a affirmation that life is immortal, which means that it is eternal. Since it is God’s own life that animates us, then we are immortal since God is immortal. This is why the icon has Jesus actually carrying Mary, in her essence, into the next dimension. God has revealed that the essence of who we are as humans survives in God.

So the call to holiness is a call to believe that God created us as eternal beings, even though that may seem impossible given what we know about death. This is where faith is needed. All of this may seem totally impossible. Faith, however, allows us to embrace this vision of life.

Belief in this vision of life also satisfies our desperate hope as humans that there is more to life than just this earthly existence. There is a longing deep in the human psyche for eternal life. This is partially due to the fact that most people sense that, if this is all there is to life, then what is the meaning and purpose of life. Further, if this present life is all that there is and yet there is a God, why would He have created us. It just doesn’t make sense.

It is our belief that God understood that humans would be confused about the meaning and purpose of this earthly existence and so He came Himself in time and revealed, through His Son Jesus, the truth about human life. This makes sense. Think about it. When an artist creates something, s/he hopes it will project her/ himself into the future. It seems that we humans have an innate desire to leave something behind that will remind others that we existed. Why? Because it makes the struggles of this human existence more reasonable. The call to holiness is a call to realize that LIFE IS WORTH LIVING.

Gaining a Deeper Understanding of Our Faith — 20160821

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image379While the Christian belief in God as Trinity is most profound, it is also most complex and can only be accept by faith. There are many humans who cannot accept this idea of God, especially many monotheists. They refuse to believe and accept something they cannot understand. Of course, as I always say, if we only accept those things that we can understand there is no need for faith. Faith means believing in those things I cannot understand as truth.

Although difficult to understand, Gregory Nazianzen wrote that THREE is a name which unites things united by nature, and never allows those which are inseparable to be scattered by a number which separates. Two is the number which separates, three the number which transcends all separation: the one and the many find themselves gathered and circumscribed in the Trinity. He wrote:

When I say God, I mean Father, Son and Holy Spirit; for Godhead is neither diffused beyond these, so as to introduce a multitude of gods, nor yet bounded by the small compass than these, so as to condemn us for a poverty-stricken conception of deity, either Judaizing to save the monarchy, or falling into Hellenism by the multitude of our gods.

St. Gregory is not seeking to vindicate the trinity of persons by human reason. He simply shows the insufficiency of any number other than three. But we may ask whether the idea of number can be applied to God. St. Basil replies:

We do not count by addition, passing from the one to the many by increase; we do not say: one, two, three, or first second and third. For I am God, the first, and I am the last. Now we have never, even to the present time, heard of a second God; but adoring God of God, confessing the individuality of the hypostases, we dwell in the monarchy without dividing the theology into fragments.

As you can tell, the Holy Fathers of our Church, in putting forth the idea of God as Trinity, addressed a multitude of objections, even to the fact of using the number three as being very unique. The Church has defended vehemently the mystery of the Holy Trinity against the natural tendencies of the human mind that finds it incomprehensible. While we say that there are three Persons in God, there is still only one God.

What do you believe about God?

Live Streaming of Funeral Services for Bishop Richard on You Tube through

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Click on the link above and watch the services Live through YouTube 
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August 22
7:00 pm    Parastas for a Hierarch
St. Nicholas Ukrainian
Catholic Cathedral in Chicago, IL
August 23
10:00 am  Divine Liturgy and
Funeral Service
St. Nicholas Ukrainian
Catholic Cathedral in Chicago, IL

Reflections on the Scriptural Readings for this Weekend — 20160814

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judgement08Our readings for this weekend are taken again from St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians and St. Matthew’s Gospel. The selection from St. Paul’s letter just happens to be the final chapter of his letter and he provides us with these directions: Be on your guard, stand firm in the faith, and act like men. In a word, be strong. Do everything with love…. If anyone does not love the Lord, let a curse be upon him. O Lord, come!

The assigned passage from St. Matthew that serves as our Gospel presents the Parable of the Wicked Tenants. In this parable the tenants, who leased a vineyard, did not share with the landowner his share of the harvest. Although the landowner tried several different approaches to obtain his share of the harvest, the tenants, in hope of gaining the vineyard for themselves, did everything they could so they did not have to pay for the lease on the vineyard. They even killed the landowner’s son, believing that if they eliminated the heir to the property, they could claim it for themselves.

So in both readings we see an exhortation to live in a manner which is loving, just and not self-serving. Both readings highlight, I believe, the fact that it is important how we live this life on earth and that there are consequences to our behavior. Jesus, like Paul, ends His exhortation by saying: I tell you, if you act like the wicked tenants the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a nation that will yield a rich harvest. As the Gospel further says: When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard these parables, they realized he was speaking about them.

This raises a point. Do we, when we hear Paul’s words and the parables of Jesus, truly understand that the Scriptures are not just relating something written by Paul or said by Jesus to people in the past. They are exhorting us to be genuine in our faith and that, if we are genuine in our faith, our behavior must reflect our belief.

Our belief is that it is important how we treat others and how we live in order to develop our union with God. To truly be in union with God, we must treat others in a manner that is fueled by love and justice. If we are self-centered, focusing only on feeding our own self-interests, we make ourselves unable to treat and love others as ourselves. If we are selfish and self-centered, we cannot truly love God and make it impossible for ourselves to be in God’s Kingdom.

Learning Our Faith From the Greek Fathers of the Church — 20160814

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Maximos the Confessor

Maximos the Confessor

I ended this article in the last issue of the Bulletin by expressing the fact that Maximus, in expressing his understanding of the person of Christ, did not imply any absorption of humanity or any lessening of the properly human, created energy and potential, but a fulfillment of the human being, because this union is a meeting of the living god and the creature in a communion of love – not a merger or confusion of impersonal essences. You, my readers, have heard me on more than one occasion assert, together with Maximus and Cyril and the other Fathers of the Church, the human nature of Jesus, the Christ, was not ruled by His divine nature. This is the wondrous mystery of God’s incarnation.

The doctrine of deification, as understood by Athanasius, the Cappadocian fathers, Cyril, or, finally, Maximus, is not based on a limited or narrow understanding of Christology. It reflects the true trinitatrian “economy of salvation,” and particularly the economy of the Spirit. What the role of the Holy Spirit in the mystery reveals is that deification “in Christ” is necessarily the result of a freely accepted new birth in the Spirit. According to Maximus, Jesus himself has taken this choice in his humanity. Of course, the doctrine of hypostatic union implies that the subject of the choice was still the Logos, not a separate human individual named Jesus, but the choice was “human”.

This all says this: Jesus, although one of the three Persons of the Trinity, freely chose, as a human, to actualize the human potential to come to a deeper union with the Godhead. So, as a human, Jesus chose to live the way that He did so that He could truly reveal to us how to think and behave. If He did not have a choice as a human person, we could never imitate Him and God would be calling us humans to an impossible task. That is something that God never does. His grace is always sufficient for us to accomplish the tasks presented to us by life and also to be successful in meeting the challenges of life. The challenge of this earthly life – Theosis – is not an impossible task or challenge. Humans have the ability to work with God’s help (grace) to actualize the real potential we have to be more like Jesus and enter into a deeper are real relationship with God. That is the wonder of human life. God so loved us that He created us with the real ability to freely return His love. It is a matter of our own choice!

The Divine Liturgy and Our Worship of God — 20160814

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Holy Eucharist IconWhere we left off in looking at our Divine Liturgy, was the prayer/hymn of the Seraphim and Cherubim: Holy, Holy, Holy. What immediately follows this hymn/prayer is the prayer to the Father which is said by the priest on behalf of the community. This prayer begins with these words: With these blessed powers, O loving and kind Master, we too cry out and say. The beginning of this prayer connects us with the angelic host and captures in slightly different words what the prayer of the angelic hosts says. The priest prays: Holy are you and all holy You, and Your only-begotten Son and Your Holy Spirit.

The Hebrew word for holy is qodesh and means apartness, set-apartness, sacredness, separateness and, it can also mean otherness, transcendent and totally other. Why? Because when predicated of God, it signifies that He is totally above His creation and His creatures. Holy has the idea of heaviness or weight of glory. In the New Testament, the word for holy is hagios and means set apart, reverend, sacred, and worthy of veneration. This word applies to God because God Himself is totally other, separate, sacred, transcendent, reverend, and set apart from every created thing. Since God is spirit this is why the Third Person of the Trinity is called the Holy Spirit. He too is fully God and all three Persons of the Trinity are holy and have the weight of glory abounding in them.

So we begin our remembrance of what Jesus did on the night before He died, by recognizing our Triune God. We also add to this that we recognize that His holiness gives Him great glory. To have glory is to be of great value and importance. We profess, when we pray this, that God has great value and great importance to us.

In order to make these prayers our own prayers, we have to recognize, when this is prayed, that this is what is meant. So we must immediately ask ourselves: Does God truly have great value and importance in my life? (By the way, we begin to make our worship our own by asking ourselves such an important question).

We begin to see, as we reflect upon the prayers that we use, that it is characteristic of our prayers to God that we first recognize his greatness. Remember, this is exactly how the emperor was approached: the fact that he was greater than his people was first recognized!

 

CALLED TO HOLINESS — 20160814

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As I shared in last week’s Bulletin, the call to holiness is a call to personal transformation. This call comes to us from God Himself. It is a call to freely and voluntarily imitate the way that Jesus lived. The emphasis is on VOLUNTARY! Because God created us in His image and given us the potential to grow in His likeness, He gave us an opportunity to freely come to know, love and serve Him. As His children, He wanted us to have the freedom of return His love. As you know, when we feel forced to love another person, our love is sterile and quite meaningless. God’s only desire for us is to come to love Him as free humans.

When you think about the chance God took when He created us with a free will, you have to know that He unconditionally loves us. Even though He infused His life into us, He was willing to take the chance of us rejecting His love because He wanted us to be free – to be more like Him.

When you think about this you have to know that God sees us as His greatest, creative achievement and that we are joined to Him in a very intimate and unique manner. This is proven by the fact that He voluntarily embraced human nature and actually came into our world in order to demonstrate His love for us.

Out of love, He was willing, as a man, to confront the challenges that life presented to Him so that He might show us that life’s challenges and struggles are not punishments but, rather, that opportunities to spiritually, psychologically and socially grow – to actualize the potential He has given us to be like Him.

He came into our world in order that we might discover, by reflecting on the way that He lived, the true meaning and purpose of life. When we discover the real meaning and purpose of life we begin to experience the absolute beauty and wonder of life and, yes, true happiness. True happiness is knowing that life is a most precious gift and that this Gift is none other than the Giver – God – Himself.

Gaining a Deeper Understanding of the New Testament — 20160814

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edrodsui1In this article I have been attempting to present some background about how Catholics have come to understand inspiration and the bible. As you have probably already guessed, we do not believe that God dictated word-for-word the Sacred Scriptures and, this will become evident, He did not oversee the various translations of the Bible. People who base their total understanding of the Bible on one of the many translations that exist, are not really representing the intent and content of the Bible.

Though the human element in the origin of the Bible may and should be regarded as truly causal and creative, yet this human causality differs from the divine causality in extension. To understand this, it should first be noted that the Bible is not a mere collection of more or less related documents on the same general subject matter; it is an organic unity, a totality. God is the author of the totality that is Scripture, whereas the individual human writers are creative causes only of the particular parts of the Bible which they composed. This is not without certain repercussions in the matter of interpreting and understanding the different books of the Bible. The work of the exegete (i.e., an expounder or textual interpreter and especially of scripture) will not be complete when, for instance, he understands Isaiah only as a separate entity; he must also understand Isaiah in its place in the entirety of Scripture. To put it another way, two particular values may be distinguished in the books of Scripture: The value that each book has in itself (and this may well be the only value that the human writer himself perceived, created and communicated) and the plus-value that the same book derives from its rule in the over-all architectonic plan in the mind of God, the author of the entirety of Scripture.

In the light of all this, perhaps the contribution of an individual sacred writer may best be stated in this way: He writes only a part of Scripture, but he affects the entirety of Scripture. An artist, while concentrating on painting a given section of his canvas, is painting directly only that particular area; yet he is thereby altering and modifying the entire work that will eventually result. Similarly the individual writer of a part of the Bible directly composes a limited literary entity; but what he does will affect, modify, and change the total pattern of the final unity, namely the Bible as a whole. Think about this!

Gaining a Deeper Understanding of Our Faith — 20160814

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cross_vineI have been sharing thoughts about the most important belief of our Christian faith, namely God as Trinity. I must hasten to point our, however, that the doctrine of the Holy Trinity is not merely an article of faith which men are called to believe. It is not simply a dogma which the Church requires its good members to accept on faith. The doctrine of the Holy Trinity is not merely an invention of scholars or the result of intellectual speculation, philosophical thinking, or human fabrication. The doctrine of the Holy Trinity, we must admit, arises from man’s deepest and truest experiences with God. It comes from the genuine living knowledge of those who have come to know God in faith.

To grasp the words and concepts of the doctrine of the Trinity is one thing; to know the Living Reality of God behind these words and concepts is something else. We must work and pray so that we might pass beyond every word and concept about God and to come to know Him for ourselves in our own living union with Him: “The Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit” (Ephesians 2: 18–22).

The main question for the Church to answer about God is that of the relationship between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. According to Sacred Tradition, there are a number of wrong doctrines.

One wrong doctrine is that the Father alone is God and that the Son and the Holy Spirit are creatures, made from nothing like angels, men and the world. The Church answers that the Son and the Holy Spirit are not creatures, but are uncreated and divine with the Father, and they act with the Father in the divine act of creation.

Another wrong idea of doctrine is that God in Himself is One God who merely appears in different forms to the world: Now as the Father, then as the Son, and still again as the Holy Spirit. The Church answers once more that the Son and Word is in the beginning with God as is the Holy Spirit, and that the Three are eternally distinct. The Son is “of God” and the Spirit is “of God.” The Son and the Spirit are not merely aspects of God, without, so to speak, a life and existence of their own.

There are several other wrong ideas about our Triune God that I will share in coming issues. First, think about your own thoughts about God.

Who IS He in your own mind?

Acquiring the Mind of Christ — 20160814

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christ_iconAs I suggested several weeks ago, acquiring the mind of Christ, I believe, and be helped by reflecting on how He prayed. To this end I have been sharing my thoughts and ideas about the seven petitions that comprise the prayer. This short prayer takes a mere 15-20 seconds to say, yet is filled with incredible meaning. If ever there was a prayer that summarized our faith and what’s expressed in the Gospels, the Our Father is it.

On his reflection on this prayer, St. Cyprian of Carthage, a third century bishop wrote, “My dear friends, the Lord’s Prayer contains many great mysteries of our faith. In these few words there is great spiritual strength, for this summary of divine teaching contains all of our prayers and petitions.” As you reflect on this prayer, you find that it is truly the prayer of a child – son or daughter – of God. It has that very personal and individual sense about it, that is if we pray it with attention and reflection. It is truly one of those prayers that we should not just “rattle off.” I realize that we have to “work” to make the words our own. It is a work that each and every Christian should embrace with all of the heart, mind and soul. It can truly help us to see ourselves as God’s children. We must always remember that this prayer places into our mouths the words that we address to OUR HEAVENLY FATHER.

To truly acquire the mind of Christ we must be determined to see God as our FATHER – ABBA – DADDY. If, however, we did not have a particularly good relationship with our earthly fathers, we might have to work at seeing our Heavenly Father as the loving and kind father who has spared nothing in order to know that He unconditionally love us.

So the OUR FATHER is a beginning in any attempts to put on the mind of Christ. What can we do next in order to help ourselves change into persons who act like and think like Jesus.

The next step is to a very personal assessment of where we are at in becoming like Jesus. It usually means recognizing how we condition our love for others. Are we totally accepting of all others OR do we only selectively accept other – those who think like and act like us. This usually means looking at any stereotypes we might have. These usually develop almost without our awareness. Identification of stereotype is critical.