Kevin Basil

The first week of Lent (called “the Great Fast” in the Byzantine rite) always reminds me of the doctrine of creation and the various discussions that spring from it, because our scripture readings are from the beginning of Genesis (along with the opening of the Prophet Isaiah and the Proverbs of Solomon). I was thinking about writing about my reflections this year, and as it turns out, Archpriest John Breck has beaten me to it with a wonderful reflection on the stories of creation in Genesis.

He begins with the most important point, that of our contingency — our complete dependence on God, without whom we would be nothing:

The concept of “nothingness” is impossible for us to grasp. “Nothingness” suggests a void, an emptiness, bounded by something. Yet nothing existed to circumscribe that void or provide contrast to that emptiness. Nothingness is not just the absence of being; it is its denial, its rejection. It is an absolute negation, immeasurable and incomprehensible. It is non-existence, non-being, a negative power that by its very nature is devoid of all meaning , purpose or hope. As such, nothingness finds its closest human analogy in despair.

Then suddenly, “in the beginning” there was something. In that timeless moment, from a locus that transcends every notion of space or dimension, God created ex nihilo. He fashioned being from non-being, space-time from non-existence. Out of that beginning, God – who is Himself the arche or ultimate beginning, principle and source of all that is – brought forth the heavens and the earth.

The idea of non-being as a “power” seems a little strong, as if something existed outside the holy Trinity which was negating being. If “nothingness is not just the absence of being; it is its denial, its rejection,” then an agent must be denying and rejecting.

The agent here, though, is not pre-existing but created along with the cosmos: It is I. I am the agent who rejects God’s life-giving existence and denies my own being. I fear death and so I choose death over life, because that is the ultimate meaning of our freedom. We are free to choose life, the life that is communion with God, or we are free to choose death, to embrace the nothingness from which we are created. This is the death that the first man chose first, passing on mortality to us all. We are born to die, and so we act in fear of that death.

That is why, in the Eastern tradition, death is the enemy that is overthrown. Satan? Sure, he’s a major player in the drama. But death is the power that kept us bound, the power that keeps us from hitting the mark (hamartia, miss the mark, usually translated as “sin”) and keeps persuading us to live in death’s dominion rather than die to ourselves and live in God’s resplendent new creation.

That is why the Christian faith can be summed up in these words: Christ is risen from the dead, trampling death by death, and on those in the grave bestowing life.

It is as an aside that Fr. John mentions the “tedious” arguments between “‘creationists’ and ‘evolutionists’”:

These opening verses are not meant to describe historical process or provide a scientific explanation for the appearance and development of the world and human life. The passage says nothing that can be exploited one way or another in the tedious debate between “creationists” and “evolutionists.” Its concern is not with historiography or paleontology, and its curious chronology (water existed before heaven or earth, living things appeared on earth before creation of the sun and moon) should not trouble the minds of any but those who insist on reading the narrative as a description of cosmological or biological development. The Genesis creation story is not concerned with scientifically determinable events. A we shall stress in the next column, it is concerned with salvation history, the creating and redeeming work of God, from the first creation to the last.

As the polarization intensifies in our schools and legislatures between “believers” and “Darwinists,” it is important for us to remember this point. Increasingly, Christian scientists are coming to see that this is a false choice, that on the question of the origin and development of species there is no necessary conflict between the biblical witness on the one hand and the findings of geologists, paleontologists and molecular biologists on the other. [See in this regard Francis Collins’ recent work, The Language of God (Free Press, 2006).] “Young earth” theorists and fundamentalists of various stripes will reject this point, as will those who insist on the total “randomness” of mutations in the process of natural selection. Evolutionary process (if not Darwinian theory in all its details) has been confirmed by recent studies of DNA, the genetic code of living organisms. Yet this need not call into question the basic conviction that the Creator of all things is God, that God created ex nihilo, that He infuses all things with ultimate meaning and purpose, and that apparent randomness conforms wholly, if for us imperceptibly, to His divine will.

Read all of Fr. John’s article: OCA - “Life in Christ” Articles

Remember the destruction by the Taliban of irreplaceable Buddhist statues? Raising an outcry about that (which I did, because it was the right thing to do) was hip. Raising an outcry about the destruction of churches hundreds of years old is apparently not as hip.

There is little that we can do to stop the spread of hate that springs up like a prolific weed from the bloody soil of our planet. However, surely we can elect officials who will stop interfering in the affairs of others as if we were omniscient. We are not. In fact, we are often quite ignorant and belligerently so. If you wish to call the libertarian and classic American position isolationism, so be it. Perhaps it would be a welcome respite from nosy interference in the affairs of others.

Hat tip: tmatt @ GetReligion

Having chanted the Paschal hymn “Christ is risen” for the past forty days, today we recall his ascension in glory. In our common and personal worship, we have replaced the hymn to the Holy Spirit, “O heavenly king,” with “Christ is risen.” Now, we chant this hymn instead until the Conclusion of the Ascension, a week from tomorrow:

Troparion, Tone IV
You ascended in glory, O Christ, our God, * having gladdened your friends with your promise of the Holy Spirit. * And your blessing confirmed their belief that you are indeed God’s son, * the redeemer of the world.

See more of today’s hymns: O Great Mystery

Christ is risen!

As today is the Conclusion of Pascha (apodosis / αποδοσισ), most of us bid farewell to the favorite greeting of the season. I cannot help but note that Saint Seraphim of Sarov, among others, favored using this greeting year-round. Perhaps someday I will decide that I, too, like this greeting to much to say good-bye.

Χριστοσ ανεστι!
Христос воскресе!

Indeed, he is risen!

Sober Joy: THE DELUSION OF RELIGION

Barnabas recently looked at the relationship between religion and orthodox faith in Christ: Following Father Alexander Schmemann of blessed memory, he states that religion medicates man against the reality of death. Orthodoxy, he says, teaches that Christ has overcome death.

Dr. David Bentley Hart spoke on a similar subject when he addressed the Saint Vladimir’s Seminary Summer Institute last year. The lecture was based on his earlier book, The Doors of the Sea: Where was God in the tsunami?. According to the lecture, he never intended to write this book. It grew out of a series of columns he wrote. He found the various religious responses to the tsunami entirely inappropriate and not accurate as descriptions of Christian beliefs about death and suffering in this life.

He begins by noting an old anthropological study entitled The Primitive Mind which shows that indigenous peoples are nearly universal in seeing death as unnatural. (In my mind, this is exactly the opposite of what I expected.) In the various animist and spiritist cultures, death is always viewed as an interruption. Whether explained by spirits that come to take the soul or some other model, death is always a stranger, an interruption. It is a break, ending a story which could otherwise have continued indefinitely.

You should listen to the lecture; Dr. Hart is far more articulate in describing this than I.

Barnabas’ says that religion attempts to medicate us against the reality of death. My spiritual father frequently uses the image of medicating oneself against the various pains of this world. We use various pleasures to feel good and numb the pain, the bad feelings. We use good things that have been created by God as drugs to numb ourselves to the pain.

This pain is nothing other than death and the fear of death.

No one has to teach us to fear death. Before we even realize that the life of one we love can be ended, we learn that we die a little every time we are told no or something is taken from us. And we learn — are we taught by example or do we develop responses by instinct? — to protect ourselves from death. We learn to act motivated by the fear of death.

In the resurrection, Christ conquers death by his own death. He submits, of his own free will, to the punishment for sin, though he knew no sin. He fills death with the presence of God — the holy Trinity which gives life to the world and is the source of all life. Death is turned inside-out! It ceases to be the end and becomes the end of the beginning. Christ has conquered death; it has been down-trodden, trampled upon, and completely stripped of its power.

As a result, all the little deaths that we face are paths to new life. They prepare us for the last death, and so they prepare us ultimately to expect the resurrection. When we balk at the prospect of what we must do — whether living virtuously or merely praying a simple rule — and the same old voice says, in whatever manner, “If I do this, I shall surely die,” it is true. We will die just a little; yet be not afraid. Christ has conquered death. You will be raised from this little death, and you will be raised from the final death to an eternal, incorruptible life.

But these deaths must be faced without being numbed by religion or sex or television or food or alcohol or any other addiction that we use to numb the pain. The pain must be borne without medication; it must be faced in its full reality.

Only then, when we have learned to face reality, will we be raised to new life. We will be made real, to borrow an image from The Velveteen Rabbit. We will finally be real and alive.

Dogwood blossoms, a traditional symbol of the Pasch in the South. Photo courtesy cjd.

Christ is risen!

Every Orthodox blog in the world right now is posting their Paschal blog post.

“Christ is risen, and not one of the dead remains in the grave.” — Paschal homily of St. John Chrysostom

Not one of the dead remains in the grave. What a proclamation! What universality! On this day, we have hope unbounded by a dusty dogmatism: “You sober and you heedless, honour the day! / Rejoice today, both you that have fasted / And you that have disregarded the fast.” Save your moribund objections for a more mundane day, for on this day, death is despoiled, and all creation is invited to the feast, for Christ is truly risen!

Protopresbyter Thomas Hopko addresses the orthodox approach to scripture:

CC.com: Do you think things like that could ever be modified, in terms of church practise, when the church comes into cultures where people don’t, for example, kiss as frequently as people do in the Orient, for example?

Fr. Hopko: Yeah, it could, but I think what happens is you have a culture of the Church itself, that is not bound to any human culture. The Church itself is a cultural phenomenon — I mean, it’s basically christened Judaism.

I happened to be at McGill University once when they were having one of these discussions — they had an Orthodox priest, a Jew, an evangelical, a liberal Protestant, and a Roman Catholic, and they were talking and talking, and finally somebody in the audience raised a hand and said, “I’d like to ask that Orthodox priest a question. What religion are you closest to anyway?” And just, I guess, for the fun of it, the guy answered and said, “Judaism.”

And they said, “What do you mean, aren’t you Christian?” He said, “Yeah, but in our way of hearing the Bible, worshipping the way we do, you might say that we feel that sometimes we are closer to the Jews than we are to other Christians because of the way they approach the Bible, the way they approach authority, the way they approach worship,” and I think there is a certain truth there.

But the Church itself has a culture. It has songs and icons and hymns and sounds. I think there is a kind of ethos, a culture of the Church itself, that is not just reducible to Slavic or Hellenic or Semitic, that people can relate to. And so a thing like giving a kiss, or making a bow, or lighting a candle — that’s kind of Church culture, it’s not just human culture.

Read the rest: Interview: An Orthodox professor ponders the scriptures

Hat tip: Barnabas Powell

The confession of faith. For many, it is the most memorable part of reception into the Church, especially if it is accompanied by a renunciation of errors. Listen to this recollection by my godfather:

When our youngest, Clare, read the oath, “This true faith of the Orthodox Church, which I now voluntarily confess and truly hold, that same I will firmly maintain and confess, whole and unchanged, even until my last breath, God helping me. And I will teach and proclaim it, insofar as I am able. And I will strive to fulfill its obligations with zeal and joy, preserving my heart in good deeds and blamelessness. In witness of this, my true and pure-hearted confession, I kiss the Word and Cross of my Savior. Amen,” her voice rang clear and pure. She was a good reader and did not stumble in the least - either over the difficulty of some words, much less the boldness of what she was saying. You could hear the echo of the many child martyrs the Church has known through the ages. Somehow all of us felt embarrassed by the purity and sincerity of her words - purity that older men and women rarely have any longer.

Read the rest: A Last Minute Word to Catechumens « Glory to God for All Things

I do not recall making a profession of faith. Shocking? I wish I had, to be honest. I would speculate that perhaps the fact that we had already been Orthodox in theology and liturgy provoked an economical decision, but later catechumens in our parish were likewise not required to make this confession. I do not know why, really. We certainly were not asked to make so sacramental an act as kissing the cross and the Bible as a seal of our pledge to confess and hold and firmly maintain the Orthodox faith until our death.

I wish I had. I am having no thoughts of apostasy, mind you. But I have been thinking about my place in this vast, Byzantine symphony we call the Church. I think all converts spring back eventually from their initial zeal and fervency. And I have been missing some things about my past. Call it nostalgia. I have no intention of leaving the Church, but it would be nice to point back to such a profession, to a kiss and a vow, and remind myself, “I promised.”

From the Dynamis daily meditation:

Do I justify being cross, curt, or mean when I fast?

How have I increased or decreased quarreling during the Fast?

What are the ways that I make my fasting visible to others rather than hiding my devotion to the Lord as He commands (Mt. 6:16-18)?

What efforts have I made to remove circumstances or conditions that lead others to sin? How have I made life more difficult for others? How have I eased the pain of others? What wrongs have I corrected to lighten the struggle of others?

What am I doing personally to relieve someone’s hunger, to provide shelter to any homeless persons, or to assure that others receive needed clothing?

To what extent have I asked God to enlighten me in practical ways so that I might provide aid, comfort, and / or assistance to some needy person or families?

Hat tip: Fr Joseph

Update: Fr. Joseph Huneycutt notes the mid-fast by quoting St. Theodore the Studite:

Lent is already galloping past and the soul rejoices at the imminence of Pascha, because by it it finds rest and is relieved of many toils.

…it is as if our whole life directs its reason contemplating the eternal Pascha. For this present Pascha, even though it is great and revered, is nevertheless, as our fathers explain, only a type of that Pascha to come. For this Pascha is for one day and it passes, while that Pascha has no successor. From it pain, grief and sighing have fled away; there everlasting joy, gladness and rejoicing; there the sound of those who feast, a choir of those who keep festival and contemplation of eternal light; where there is the blessed breakfast of Christ and the new drink of which Christ spoke, I shall not drink of the fruit of this vine, until I drink it with you new in the kingdom of my Father.

Although this past Sunday, the Sunday of the Holy Cross, is the half-way point for Great Lent (as noted by several priests), today is the half-way point for the whole thing, from Clean Monday to Holy Saturday.

Oh! We’re half-way there:
Oh-oh! Livin’ on a prayer!
Take my hand, and we’ll make it, I swear.
Oh-oh! Livin’ on a prayer!

Peace to all that are observing the fast as they are able.

This sounds familiar, not because I was gay and now I’m notstruggled with same-sex attraction and now I’ve found a balance (I’ve always been straight), but because this is why I became Orthodox (I was Roman Catholic at the time). Of course, most Orthodox parishes would never have treated me the way I was treated at St. Athanasius, so I would still be Roman today if it weren’t for Fr. D. and Matushka R.

So, if this pricks you about how you treat those with same-sex attraction, excellent. But it may also prick you about how you treat anyone at all.

I care about this so much because I wouldn’t be Christ’s today if it were not for the friendship and love of the Christians in my first Anglican parish, people who knew I was a gay activist, didn’t agree with me about gay sex, and loved me anyway. They knew I had homosexual sex and that I believed it was fine – and they disagreed with me. But they nevertheless invited me to their cookouts, car washes, sporting events, school plays, pot lucks…the whole joyful, chaotic mess of parish and family life and as our friendships deepened they showed me they loved me.

And they told me their stories too. They told me about their own past drug use, their own previous abortions, their own prior womanizing, and their own previous struggles with the Faith and its demands. In short, they made it clear to me that the church universal is a hospital for sinners far more than it is a penthouse for saints.

This was crucial because prior to coming to Trinity, I used to believe that Christians would treat me…well, much as the New Oxford Review appears to believe they should have.

I had a little box of prejudices in which I put “Christians.” Christians, I believed, hated and feared me. Christians would not want to have anything to do with me. Christians believed I could not be trusted with their children.

Read the whole article: Sed Contra: What? Befriend Those People?!

Read the following title of a sermon given at an evangelical Protestant rally recently, then follow the link and get the context: How to Deal with the Guilt of Sexual Failure for the Glory of Christ and His Global Cause.

I count it as a measure of my distance from evangelical Protestantism that the words “sexual failure” meant something completely different to me than they did, apparently, to the pastor who titled his sermon thus. Perhaps he did this to get our attention; well, it certainly got mine. For two paragraphs, and now I’m done.

But only because I immediately knew what he was talking about. I dipped back into that vocabularly and realized that he wasn’t talking about guilt over male erectile dysfunction. I’m no linguist, but I think others might have more difficulty if they’re not hip to the clique’s jargon.

I do this not to point fingers, but to drive home a point. What, exactly, is a prokeimenon? Oh, I know what it is, of course. I know words like stavrotheotokion and coenobium. But do visitors to your church know basic Orthodox jargon? Probably not.

Just something to think about. Maybe I’ll help out with those thoughts a little later on.

After being given a light rebuke by my priest last year over my observance of the fast (or the lack thereof), I’m trying again to observe the fast with renewed zeal. This evening, I’m enjoying a bowl of vegetable soup with croutons, a pbj sandwich, and a glass of Gumdale 2005 Shiraz, an Australian vinter I’ve never heard of before. Oh, perhaps that last is not totally lenten. Anywho. I read it on the web.

You see from that Google search above that most everyone who had something to say about the Gumdale 2005 shiraz had something bad to say. Frankly, it does what I wanted: Provide a decent, inexpensive table wine. In reality I wanted a Rosemount Estates shiraz, but there were none that I could find. I really miss Liquor Barn.

Robert Taft S. J. - “The Evolution of the Byzantine ‘Divine Liturgy’”

I found this online version of an article in Orientalia Christiana Periodica, a scholarly journal dedicated to Eastern Christian studies. There is, of course, much more that can be said about the development of the liturgy. Fr. Robert himself has written several volumes on the Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom alone. But this has some fine nuggets and provides a good starting point for those interested.

Liturgical Studies

This page lists a basic bibliography for liturgical studies.

From my beloved godfather, Father Stephen Freeman, rector of St. Anne in Oak Ridge:

Our default position within modern America is some form of atheistic or agnostic materialism. On a bad day, we barely believe in God but remain utterly convinced of the power of the market and the engine of industry.

Lent comes to take on even greater importance in such a setting - for we are not only seeking to repent - we seek to believe. And Lent makes it clear that the two are not separate things but mutually interdependent. Without repentance, there can be no belief in the God Who Is. To know God - to actually know Him - repentance is indispensable. Only a broken and contrite heart can know God.

There are many things that break our hearts, and many others that bring us to the point of contrition. But often these very crushing blows drive us only deeper into ourselves and despair. Thus the need of Great Lent.

To be broken by grace and crushed by the hand of God is far kinder than the treatment we receive from the world. To take up the Church’s Way of Life during Lent, and to lean into it, will always put us on a path towards brokenness and contrition. But there is a world of difference between the brokenness and contrition that comes as the gift of grace and the brutality of the world’s humiliation.

Read it all: Lent in the South « Glory to God for All Things

If Father Stephen’s blog isn’t on your blogroll, fix yourself!