The Spirituality of the Christian East –20170723

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Spirituality in the Christian East means the everyday activity of life in communion with God. The term spirituality refers not merely to the activity of man’s spirit alone, his mind, heart and soul, but it refers as well to the whole of man’s life as inspired and guided by the Spirit of God. Every act of a Christian must be spiritual, every word, every deed, every activity of the body, every action of the person. This means that all that a person thinks, says and does must be inspired and guided by the Holy Spirit so that the will of God the Father might be accomplished as revealed and taught by Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Doing all things to the glory of God is the meaning and substance of life for a human being. This “doing” is what Christian spirituality is about.

Christian spirituality is centered in God; in fact, its very goal is communion with God, which is really only attainable through the accomplishment of His will. We see this clearly in the life of Jesus. The Father wanted Him to reveal to us how to live life, which includes how to deal with suffering, betrayal, hatred and disappointment. We know, from the life of Jesus, how He dealt with these human experiences. He always took responsibility for His response to the experiences of life. He chose to love, when hated. He chose to forgive when betrayed. He chose to be kind when He
encountered others in need. He chose to accept those who were rejected.

We all have the power to choose how we react to the experiences of life. One of the lessons that life calls us to be “master” is our own responses to the events of life. Our feelings are our feelings and no one can make us feel what we feel!

Gaining a Deeper Understanding of the New Testament — 20170723

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I have been sharing information about the “CANON” of the New Testament. In modern times, when the problem of authorship has been divorced from that of canonicity, the sharp distinction evident between the style of Hebrews and that of the Pauline writings has convinced most scholars that Paul was not the author. Catholic writers, influenced by the decree of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, have tried to protect the Paulinity of Hebrews by stressing that Paul used a scribe to write the epistle. Now, however, they are beginning to recognize that Hebrews probably has no real relation to Paul, other than that the author may have had some acquaintance with thought like Paul.

The same problem of authorship affects those epistles of Paul that are called the Catholic Epistles. Unless they were attributed to apostolic figures, there was reluctance to accept them.

In form 1 Peter is a treatise or even a homily associated with baptism (and perhaps with the paschal celebration) that has been adapted to the letter form – notice the continuing Christian preference for this genre. The work is purportedly written by Peter, and therefore a date before Peter’s death (ca 65” CE) has been traditional. Many non-Catholic scholars look upon the epistle as pseudonymous and suggest a later date. There are, however, no absolutely compelling reasons why either the traditional date or authorship must be rejected.

The problem with 2 Peter is much more difficult, for here we have a work that most critical scholars today, both Protestant and Catholic, recognize as clearly pseudonymous. The use of abstract theological language and the reference to a collection of Pauline letters suggest that this may well be the last of the canonical New Testament Books to have been written. Some non-Catholic scholars date it as late as 150 CE, but a date between 100 and 125 is quite tenable. The contention that the work must have been written before the death of the last apostle and the close of revelation implies an over-simplified view, not only of the close of revelation, but also of the apostles (a group wider than the Twelve).

So, as we can see, the New Testament, like other things in our religious history, is not as clear as we might expect. All this does, however, is call us to BELIEVE – to have faith. If everything was clear and without any confusion, we would not need faith. I would ask you: What is it that you do believe? Belief is not based on proof. It is based on what we accept!

CALLED TO HOLINESS — 20170723

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I’m sure that if you have been following this article you have come to realize that the “call to holiness” is a call to become the person that God intended when He created you. It is a call to become a genuine human being who is making every attempt to grow in your likeness of God as seen in the Person of Jesus. It is a call to “put on Christ”, as we say during a person’s initiation into the Church.

I put on Christ when I make every effort to “think” and “act” like Jesus did when He was here on earth. I put on Christ when I begin to realize that this earthly life is given to me to learn how to unconditionally love others and myself.

Is this a challenge? It certainly is but there are no gains in life without certain challenges. Life’s challenges are meant to help us develop the courage, strength and fortitude to always place our trust in God regardless of how difficult the challenge might be.

One of the first steps we have to take, however, in this process is to become convinced that with God’s help we can truly accomplish this task. If you tell yourself you could never be more like Jesus, you never will. What we must say to ourselves is that: With God’s help I can accomplish the task of actualizing my potential to become more like God as seen in the Person of Jesus. God’s Spirit, which is within us, will give us the strength to accomplish what we desire to accomplish and believe we can accomplish.

One of the bad things about our society is that many have been fooled to think that “life is supposed to be easy”, that “pain is bad,” and that “challenges are bad.” This type of thinking paralyzes our spirits and keeps us from directing our attention to the task of spiritually growing and becoming the persons that God intended when He created us. Think about this!

Understanding Our Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church — 20170723

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More on the second. With hands raised in prayer the Mother of God reminds us to Whom worship is due. It is the symbol of each Christian and also of the Church. It is the many forms of liturgy – the Divine Liturgy, Akathysts, Matins and Vespers –the prayers of a community of believers as well as personal prayers. It is the whole fabric of human existence at rest and at play, in daily tasks, in suffering and in celebration. All of these can become part of our prayer life if we so choose. As the Mother of God stands there in eternal prayer, she gives us Christians confidence of the closeness to Our Father, Who hears us and is merciful.

I have purposely spent more time on the meaning of the Annunciation in our Kyivan tradition, because it will help us make the necessary connections between liturgy and faith that was very obvious to the countless saints of the Kyivan Church, Orthodox and Catholic alike. Mary of the Sign focuses on Christ, the Messiah and Savior, and the Oranta reminds us of the centrality of worship to our Christian living.

From Images to Experience

The implications of the way Eastern theology sees the Annunciation are many. First of all it is liberating, because it recognizes all faculties of the human being — physical, psychological, intellectual, and spiritual. And secondly, it places the invitation to holiness directly at the doorstep of personal discernment every time we confront life’s varied paths. Because thinking is a creative process, it is the real means to internalize Christ and His teachings in which liturgy through its prayer form is a soft spoken teacher. The saints show us how it is done.

The historical development of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church from the Kyivan Church and before that from Byzantium can offer invaluable insight. Although it is a subject too large to be discussed here, suffice it to say, that the Kyivan aspect of our spirituality is a gold mine of spiritual wealth.

In the summer of 1999, the Sheptytsky Institute at the Mt. Tabor monastery in California concentrated on the homilies of the Kyivan Church. The participants were moved by the extent of the loving and merciful God permeating the homilies. At the same time they noted the absence of the fire-and-brimstone approach. And yet, the Church of Kyiv shows the tremendous commitment of her believers guided by their thought processes and discernment. It should be thought provoking for us today that so many of the ruling elite elected monastic life. Many women founded scriptoria for copying and disseminating books, herbaria for the healing arts, schools and so on. Besides St. Olha of the women saints of Ukraine, what do we know of Saints Irena, the wife of the Grand Prince Yaroslav the Wise, or Evfrozynia, the Princess of Polotsk, or of Paraskeviya, the sister of Prince Volodymyr Monomakh, or Anna also affectionately known as Yanka, daughter of the Kyivan Prince Vsevolod?

Truly, our Kyivan spirituality is a blend of Byzantine Spirituality with a touch of the Slavic experience.

FROM OUR DEACON CANDIDATE — 20170723

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TOPIC: Theology of Liturgy
By Len Mier

Thy Kingdom Come: Social Justice and Salvific Outlook in the Anaphora of St. Basil the Great Part 2

Salvation as Theosis
The essential act in the celebration of the holy mysteries is the transformation of the elements into the Divine Body and Blood; its aim is the sanctification (salvation) of the faithful. (Cabasilas, Hussey, & McNulty, 2010)

Salvation is the mission of all mankind, its goal is to become one again with the Holy Trinity. This state is best described in the beginning of the book of Genesis that we are to be once again in the perfect image and likeness of God, or deification. This is also found in the writings of St Basil. “Through the ‘soul’s operations’ of ‘man,’ it is possible to deploy this potential and to develop it into likeness of God when ‘man’ becomes what he/she was supposed to be from the beginning of the world.”(Druzhinina, 2016)

Olga Druzhinina in her book Ecclesiology of St. Basil the Great: a Trinitarian Approach to the Life of the Church states clearly:

‘The mystery of salvation’ in St Basil’s thought is perceived as the gradual process of human education in which they are brought to perfection in their training for godliness where godliness is always connected to the love toward others.(Druzhinina, 2016)

Another dimension to Theosis and salvation is, “a life in communion with Jesus Christ will be characterized by generosity to the needy human beings in whom the Lord is present.”(LeMasters, 2015)

The anaphora: the basis for Philanthropia (Φίλάνθρωπίά)
St Basil’s liturgy as taken in my local parish setting does not do justice to the beauty and nature of this anaphora. Because of its length, many of the prayers are said in a quiet voice by the priest while the congregation sings their part of the liturgy, rendering the worshiper to read the anaphora to themselves or reading it outside of the actual liturgy in order to appreciate the meaning.

Paraphrasing Fr Schmemann, the predominate practice of the priest reading the prayers secretly in a voice inaudible to the people, often with the doors closed and curtain drawn, has the practical effect of the prayer being dropped from the church service. (LeMasters, 2015) It was only when reading the whole anaphora outside of the liturgy do you see the philanthropic and salvific themes emerge.

Liturgy in general tends to be separated from daily life for most Christians. We see liturgy as the work of the people only to worship God. This narrow view of liturgy can be reversed if we look at one line from one prayer in the liturgy. The line I am talking about is from the Lord’s Prayer, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”. It has been stated, “There is a certain social ethic that is loaded into that phrase, when we remove the social aspect from liturgy we see a, ‘failure of correspondence between liturgy and ethics which amounts to an understandable separation between the sacred and the secular’. It is all too often true of Eastern Orthodoxy.”(LeMasters, 2015) This can be said of most liturgical Christian experiences.

Philanthropia is what St Basil was preaching in his homilies on social justice, the work of the people to see and care for the poor. The English word philanthropy is derived from this word and its understanding is clear to the modern reader. This Philanthropia is the strong social ethic that we as Christians must have for each other. This is the merging point of Christian ethics with that of liturgical theology.

Christian ethics is an ethics of the Great Supper because it is in eucharistic assembly, not in private prayer or study, that judgment, repentance, reconciliation, and God’s love are experienced in their full Kingdom signification.(LeMasters, 2015)

Beside St Basil, St John Chrysostom also spoke in terms of Philanthropia in his homily on Matthew 25:31-46, the last judgment, and in his homily on Second Corinthians, “The Hungry”.

It is a social order of simple living and care for one’s fellow man that St Basil envisioned in the Basiliad, his monasteries. Basil incorporated these themes into his anaphora, Petitions and prayers are not meant to be rhetorical exclamations poetic romanticisms, or supplications for God alone to hear; they are meant to penetrate man’s heart and mind and become impetus for agape in diakonia – love in practice. An invitation to the metamorphosis of the congregation as well as society.(LeMasters, 2015)

In the liturgy of St Basil he “unites thanksgiving and supplication throughout the liturgy in a way that proclaims God as supreme benefactor of the human race.”(Cabasilas et al., 2010)

From the very start of the anaphora we hear that we will “recount all your (God’s) mighty deeds in every age”(Catholic, Byzantine Liturgical, & Intereparchial Commission for Sacred, 2006) Basil in the anaphora elaborates God’s philanthropy to mankind in a recounting of those things He has done for us. Here is but a small list that St Basil gives us: the gift of filial adoption, the pledge of our future inheritance, and the First-fruits of eternal blessings given to us.

We are told that taking man from the earth formed him and honored him with your own image and placed him in paradise with the promise of immortal life and eternal blessings. God showed us the ultimate mercy after our own transgression of disobedience, and His banishing us from paradise and returning us to the earth from which we came. He provided us with salvation and rebirth in His Christ, not forsaking the work of his hands.

St Basil goes on to tell us God gave us the Law as an aid, and sent us servants and prophets to tell us of the salvation of which was to come.

(To be continued)

Learning Our Faith From the Greek Fathers of the Church — 20170723

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Although I realize that this article, which deals with the “mystery and wonder of the Trinity” as expressed by the debates of the Fathers of the Church, may be difficult to follow and understand, I think it is valuable. What I think it does is document the thinking of the Church as she came to understand God as Three-In-One – as a Trinity of Persons. In order to come to this understanding, there were many very important issues that had to be dealt with. As you probably know, the Trinity is not overtly dealt with in the New Testament. The early Church did not have a clear understanding of the belief in the Trinity. It took more than 300 years and, obviously, the challenge of heresy to make the Church deal with Who God Is, based on Who she believes Jesus is. Truly, the development of the idea of God as Three-In-One came about as the Church attempted to understand Who Jesus Is. If He truly is God incarnate, somehow, in order to preserve the understanding of God as One and beyond nature, there must be a second Person, the Son. Then to believe that God, in the Person of the Son became human, there must be a Person that represents the Power of God who brought that all about. Thus, the Fathers began to develop the idea of the Trinity.

In doing this, however, they had to deal with a number of questions. First, if there are three Persons in the One God, have they all been in existence for all eternity? Second, what is the relationship between the Three Persons?

Gregory rebukes the tendency in all of us to reject that which we cannot understand or comprehend. Gregory’s theological opponents insist, for instance, that the Son could not be “begotten,” because such a generation fits no reasonable categories. Part of the problem, Gregory responds, is that the model these various theologians use to picture the divine generation is itself faulty.

First, Gregory advises, “cast away your notions of flow and divisions and sections, and your conceptions of immaterial as if it were material birth, and then you may perhaps worthily conceive of the divine generation.”

So what Gregory says is that we should not impose on the idea of God those things that we know as humans. God is different. Divine generation is different from human generation.

Reflections on the Scripture Readings for this Weekend — 20170716

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Fathers of the first Six Ecumenical Councils

The readings assigned for this sixth weekend after Pentecost are interesting indeed. On the one hand we hear the words of Paul which exhort us to “fraternal charity,” and one the other we hear of a cure for “paralysis”, that inability to truly function in any positive way to our brothers and sisters. This stark contrast, I believe, is the message I received.

Paul exhorts us saying:
Your love must be sincere…. Love one another with the affection of brothers. Anticipate each other in showing respect…. Bless your persecutors; bless and do not curse them…. Do not be conquered by evil but conquer evil with good.

In contrast to Paul’s exhortation, we hear the story of Christ curing paralysis. In this story we hear that the scribes believed that Jesus had blasphemed because He told the man that his sins were forgiven. They harbored evil thoughts about Jesus and His thoughtfulness toward the paralyzed man.

As I listened to these readings, I thought of the fact that it often is extremely difficult for us humans to be “loving” toward others. It seems that we are paralyzed in our efforts to unconditionally love others because we need others to positively respond to us before we can love them unconditionally. We seem paralyzed to respond in an unconditional manner. We seem to base our response to others based on how they respond to us. This, of course, negates any efforts we make to actualize the potential we have to be like Christ.

Christ’s message to us is: Base your way of living not on how others treat you BUT on how you want to be treated. This means that you love your neighbors as yourself, regardless of how they treat you. We do not spiritually grow if we base our way of living on how others treat us. I know that in our modern world this does not seem to be the approach. We base our treatment of others on how they treat us. Which, I would hazard to say, makes us no different than them.

Christ called us to a higher standard. He exhorts us to treat us in the manner that we want to be treated, regardless of how they treat us. Why? If we live this way, then we become children of God – we actualize our potential to be like Jesus, the Christ.

We cannot live this way, as you might guess, if we don’t believe in God’s coming into the world – His incarnation.

CALLED TO HOLINESS — 20170716

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The call to holiness is, as I have been trying to articulate, is call to real and true union with God. And, as I have tried to suggest, this must be an unending process since God is infinite. We believe that this union is realized by the working of the Holy Spirit, but until it is reached man is involved in a prolonged effort of purification – an effort of personal transformation.

This growing in our union with God is achieved by our efforts, which are reinforced and facilitated by the help of God’s Spirit, to bring our human powers of knowledge, love and behavior into ever greater unity with the knowledge, love and behavior that Jesus manifested.

Jesus is our model. The call to holiness is a call to genuinely try to imitate Him. This requires, as one might guess, an active effort to increase our knowledge of how Jesus thought and lived.

Knowing that human behavior is driven by human thinking, we discover how Jesus behaved by how He thought. His thinking is clearly expressed in His teachings. Perhaps the one summary teaching that best describes his thinking and, therefore, His behavior is that which has become known as the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have others do unto you! This simple statement sums up the way that Jesus lived. It states clearly that you don’t base how you treat others on how they treat you. It implies quite clearly that everything we do is UNCONDITIONAL. We love, forgive and treat others unconditionally, that is we don’t treat others on the basis of how they treat us. Living this way is truly transformational – it changes us in the deepest and profoundest manner.

So the call to holiness is the call to live in a manner that is based on our beliefs and not on how others treat us!

The Divine Liturgy and Our Worship of God — 20170716

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Over the course of the centuries, especially in the Western world, much theological debate has been focused on trying to answer the when and how of the Eucharist. The WHEN deals with at what moment are the bread and wine transformed into the Body and Blood of Christ. The HOW refers to the causality by which this transformation is accomplished? Literally hundreds of books have been written to answer these questions and even to this day they constitute the subject of intense disputes between East and West. But one need only to attempt to refer all these conjectures and theories to the immediate experience of the liturgy, to that service that is performed in church, and it become obvious to what degree these explanations turn out to be external to this experience, falling outside it and thus not only not really explaining anything but in the end simply unnecessary.

What, in fact, does the distinction of essence and accidents, which goes back to Aristotle and which the scholastics (i.e., Western theologians) made use of to answer the question of HOW the transubstantiation of the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ is accomplished, mean – not philosophically, not abstractly, but really – for our faith, our communion in the divine, our spiritual life, our salvation? Does transubstantiation consist, according to this experience, in the change of the “substance” of bread into the essence of the body of Christ, while the “accidents” of the body remain the accidents of the bread? To faith, which confesses every time we celebrate the Liturgy, in the fear of God and with love, that “this is truly Thine own most pure Body … this is truly Thine own precious Blood,” this explanation is unnecessary, and for the mind itself it remains an equally incomprehensible violence to those very “laws” on whose foundations the explanation is supposedly constructed.

When we participate in this wondrous and mysterious ritual which the Lord promised would make Him present in our midst, we don’t think about such things as “substance” or “accidents” of the gifts. We think about His presence and all that He did in order to make Himself present to us. We remember Him and His call to us to “change our hearts and minds for the Kingdom of God is at hand.” We remember how He worshipped God, our Father, and we join ourselves with Him in offering our own body and blood in thanksgiving for the gift of life. So when we truly worship, we don’t think about when and how!

The Spirituality of the Christian East — 20170716

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What does it mean to be created in the image of God? To be human is to be in the image, and being in the image, according to the image, entails a relationship to Christ, who is the image. Remember, the only image of God that we have is Jesus, the Christ. Certainly He is an image in virtue of being the Word of God, God’s self-manifestation; but this is something we can only fully understand through the Incarnation. Humankind is created according to an image – the Word of God – that we only truly know through the Incarnation. It is only through the Incarnation that we can truly understand what it is to be human. It is only in the light of Christ that we can grasp what is truly meant by being human.

What we know from our experience of being human is what it is to be “limited” in our understanding of humanity. To be in the image is, at the very least, to bear some trace of true humanity, unlimited humanity. We see the fullness of what humanity is in the Person of Jesus, the Christ. For the Word of God, in becoming man, became what we are meant to be! To be human is to have a nature with capacities, faculties, that are never properly realized in our present existence. We have a glimpse of these faculties in Christ.

There is an illustration of what this might mean in an essay on the Gospel miracles. In an essay the author argues quite convincingly that it is a mistake to see the miracles as simply evidence of Christ’s divinity (though that is the way in which they are taken by the Fathers, as a rule. They are evidence of the potentialities of the human, cooperating with divine grace. If we want to know what it means to be human, we look at Christ.