Archive 2008
September
Toxic or Tonic?
by Fr. Gregory
There has undoubtedly been much suffering caused by the recent credit crisis in which the bubble of "funny money" has burst ... or more dramatically, the toxic debt of unwise lending has poisoned and crippled the financial system. Doubtless there will be recovery in due time, but have we learned the lessons of this unhappy episode, Might this toxic incident become a tonic cure?
kes the waiting out of wanting." Those of us who are old
enough to remember may have been shocked at the time but we all got used
to credit cards and started using them for just about anything.
This development became even more embedded in our spending behaviour
when these cards became the only ones with a money back guarantee for
shoddy goods. Welcome to the era of funny money, of toxic debt.Of course more was involved here than the ubiquity of credit cards. It changed how we thought about money and debt. Acquiring credit, borrowing money, became so much easier and attractive. Add to this the deluge of junk mail pushing credit and credit cards all the time through the letter boxes of vulnerable spendaholics and it became increasingly difficult to justify living within one's means. After all, excess was what everyone practised. It became the "done thing."
Soon, even the economy became mired in this toxicity. With the gradual erosion of our manufacturing base in the UK, home consumer spending, fuelled by credit, became a crucial support of economic buoyancy ... but the termites were already burrowing into the woodpiles.
Then somebody had the "bright idea" that they would re-package mortgage debts into unidentifiable bundles and sell them between banks the further to inflate liquidity. When these debts turned bad suddenly the whole financial system got riddled with Gruyere holes and the rest is history.
In this context, the collapse of major elements of the financial system, whilst causing suffering, and certainly needing to be managed prudently, might be no bad thing. It might just prove to be the tonic that we need. So let us, the public, stop shifting the blame onto banks (who have been stupid) and politicians (who have been wilfully blind) and think more clearly about how we have allowed ourselves to be seduced by "funny money" and have lived beyond our means for quite a long time. It's just not just the macro-economics of nations that needs to learn the art of sustainability but also households. There is here an intimate connection between living more simply and frugally and the future of our species and the planet. Will we learn this lesson in time though? I wonder.
August
Intruding into Private Grief
Reflections on the current Crisis in Anglicanism
by Fr. Chrysostom MacDonnell
There is an idea that God cannot possibly have a sense of humour. Being
omniscient, he knows everything, anyway and therefore must know the end
of any joke before it is told. Well, be that as it may, if you want to
make God laugh, tell him your plans! No doubt, we have all had the
experience of long-held hopes and dreams being finally dashed; of
crushing disappointments in our aims and ambitions. The team that makes
it to the final, only to lose; the long-coveted position that is awarded
to another; the carefully worked out plan which is eventually rejected -
all are common human experiences and if they come upon us too often, we
start to become morose and despondent.
When such bitter disappointments afflict us in our spiritual lives,
there is an obvious opening for the devil. The temptation to doubt the
providence of God or even to doubt God himself is not far away and at
the very least, we have questions naturally arising in our hearts: why
was this prayer not answered; why did this friend not recover from the
illness; why did this disaster befall these people? The condition is
caled spiritual languor, epitomised in the biblical tradition by the
story of the long-suffering Job. In all his tribulations and losses Job
is genuinely puzzled at what God has brought upon him. His vexations
bring him to that crucial point in personal experience, asking that
question which must be universal for the human condition: why me?
"How long will you neither let me alone.
Nor let me go until I swallow my saliva in grief?
I have sinned what can I do to you,
O you, who understand the heart of man?
Why have you set me as your accuser?
Why am I a burden to you?" [Job 7:19-20 trans. OSB]
Job's greatest temptation is to give up his faith in God Himself, which,
of course, he does not do. Under the weight of suffering that cannot be
avoided, he waits, hoping on God in humility with patience:
"For I know He is everlasting,
He who is about to set me free on the earth
And to raise up my skin that endures these things;
For these have been accomplished for me by the Lord. [Job 19:25-26
trans. OSB]
What is true of our personal spiritual journey might also be seen in our
collective experience for, in reality, the corporate and private in man
are not areas cordoned off by invisible fences. Job himself, within the
exegetical tradition of the Church, is seen as prefiguring Christ who,
on behalf of the old Adam, undergoes the 'baptism' of utter dereliction
on behalf of all:
"My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" [Psalm 21/22; Matt.27:46]
Similarly, Christ's own vindication reconnects us all to God:
"For the death that he died, he died to sin once for all; but the life
the he lives, he lives to God. Likewise, you also, reckon yourselves to
be dead indeed to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
[Rom.6:10-11]
There is though, I think, a dangerous hinterland between our own,
private spiritual experience and the corporate sphere. Being able to
discern when, what we know within, effects or is relevant to the Church
as a collective body, is a fine art. Perhaps, those with prophetic gifts
of the Spirit are precisely the ones whose inner experience is relevant
to the rest of us. The problem is, this is fertile territory for the
mad, bad and dangerous to know! The fact is, many a madman has convinced
the gullible that their inner delusions and driving demons were the
voice of God to the eventual ruin of many a spiritual life.
A case in point is the Ecumenical Movement among Christians of the
western traditions. Here, there is a tangled web of inner and outward
experience and, at heart, a conviction that this must clearly be God's
will. At one level, of course, unity among Christians is what Christ
commanded and the very thing for which he prayed:
"…that they may be one…that the world may believe that You sent Me."
[Jn.17:21]
The point is, the Nicene Creed is quite specific: there is only one
(holy, catholic and apostolic) Church. It exists already and is not
something that has to be brought about. It is true, also, that our
Eastern Orthodox churches have been involved and the Roman Catholics (as
'observers') have been active in a variety of ways in ecumenism.
However, ecumenical discussions to bring about the visible union of all
who believe in Christ, are hampered by two things from the start:
different understandings - or paradigms - of the meaning of Christian
theological concepts, and also, different understandings of what the
term 'unity' itself involves. The overarching point to be made is that,
apart from some exceptions among Protestants, the major historic
breaches between Christians still exist and yet, from our Orthodox
perspective, the Church is still one. Though it appear from outside the
height of arrogance, we know of no other Church of Christ save our own -
beyond us there are only the schismatics, the heterodox and the
downright heretical. If, however, we were to peer across (as delicately
as we might) at the Protestant world, we should observe, I think, a
state of spiritual languor, not least among those who, for many of us,
were once our co-religionists.
I remember very well, from my Anglican days, the excitement at the
prospects of the establishing of inter-communion between our national
church and the Roman Church. The late 1970's and early 1980's seemed a
positive time for such hopes. These were, of course, to be sadly dashed
with the ascendancy of liberal theology within the Anglican corridors of
power and influence. The real problem for the Ecumenical Movement had
been all along that it was founded upon the completely Pelagian idea
that we can construct our own 'super church'. [Pelagius, you might
recall, was a British heretic of the 4th- 5th centuries who taught that
we saved ourselves by our own efforts alone, without the need of grace.]
This raises severe difficulties for Orthodox thinking, holding clearly,
as we do, that the Church already exists; we don't have to construct it.
What happened to that Church spoken of the New Testament, the one
founded by Christ on the Tradition of the Apostles? The answer is easy -
it is we, ourselves; it hasn't gone away and will abide till Christ
returns in glory. Holding, as we do, to a direct line of succession in
our ancient patriarchates, to churches founded by the apostles
themselves (- Antioch, being the second oldest after Jerusalem) it begs
the question as to what we would need ecumenism for?
Well, in the first place, there is a legitimate Orthodox ecumenism. We,
the Orthodox must be one-in-Christ and, in fact, we know that we all
hold to the same theology and stand firmly on Holy Tradition. We have,
though, been accused from time to time of the heresy of Philetism - the
false idea of basing the unity of a church upon political, cultural or
racial principles. Indeed, there are no national churches in Orthodoxy,
only local ones. The aim of the Orthodox in the UK must, eventually, be
to have but one jurisdiction in a local British Orthodox Church, serving
all Orthodox believers in these lands. For the time being, we can be
glad that in our own Antiochian jurisdiction in this country, we have
believers of all nationalities, though the largest group might well be
English. (To be fair, this would largely be true of most jurisdictions
in Britain.) In my own congregation, for example, just under half our
people have English as a second language. So, if we are involved in
ecumenism (in the sense of the movement) at all, it can only be as
witnesses to what we already are as Orthodox, not as working to build
something different.
For myself as an ex-Anglican, I must confess to mixed feelings when I
look across to what has happened to the ecclesial body that first
brought me to faith in Christ. Both the Moscow Patriarchate and the
Vatican have made it clear that the recent decision of the Church of
England to proceed with the ordination of female bishops has placed yet
another barrier in the path of mutual understanding. Any faint hopes of
repairing eucharistic communion that might still remain, have now
clearly died. The current battle that is raging in world Anglicanism and
has so delighted the media, is, of course, a fight not between orthodox
and heterodox believers but between western liberals and conservatives -
at one level, it is not an argument that concerns us and I feel awkward
in many ways that I should be prying into private grief. But something
very important struck me the other day regarding the established church;
a change that was, in some ways, hidden there all the time. I recently
read an article on 'women bishops' in the Daily Telegraph [editorially,
the paper is in favour]. It was a one-sided article, (clearly, opinion
rather than reportage) involving interviews with some typical Anglicans,
both lay and ordained. What I noticed was that the interviewees in their
replies clearly thought that their faith must accommodate to the
changing mores of contemporary society and that it should concern itself
with solving the political problems of the planet. The Church - meaning
here, the Church of England, to their mind, should have come to terms
with accepting homosexuality as the rest of society has done and that
there were more pressing problems to be dealt with: world poverty and
global warming, to cite but two. In other words, the salient point about
these people was that they were not religious at all, they were
completely secularised. Their affiliation was to an institution whose
'usefulness' was to be judged entirely by human standards rather than
according to any idea of divinely revealed truth. Their paradigm of what
this ecclesial body was meant for, defined it as a socio-political
association of concerned citizens bound by a common purpose: the
improvement of the world. This all sounds dangerously like
millenarianism - a path that can surely lead only to self-inflicted
spiritual languor. Here, any sense that the Church should be what the
late Pope John Paul II called, 'the sign of contradiction,' had
evidently evaporated. The faith 'once delivered to the saints' has now
been adapted to fit comfortably with the post-modern age, lest it be
accused of being unfashionable and of no earthly use.
Sadly, it raises the question as to whether we have anything in common
with them at all. A few Anglicans, as with women priests in 1992-94,
will leave and perhaps find their way to the Roman Church. This will at
least take them back to the branch from which they were cut off but will
not join them once more to the root of the faith. When I left the Church
of England in 1994 it was not to continue Anglicanism elsewhere; it was
not conservative chagrin at changes being made: it was because I had
realised that there can be and, in fact is, only one Church and I had
discovered precisely where that was. Neither was this a sudden decision,
for this was also the result of nearly twenty years study and contact
with the Orthodox Faith and Orthodox people.
In one sense, however, what has befallen the national church does
concern us all, for it represents the further decline of religion in
these islands and the steady advance of the secularisation of Britain.
It could be, before too long, that religion itself will be merely a
sociological phenomenon among insular groups; in other words, something
that immigrants 'do'. With the Church of England dwindling to a mere
appendage of the political constitution brought out on state occasions,
it will be interesting to observe what happens in particular to the
respective sizes of a) the Roman church and b) the Muslim community.
What I fear is a continued fragmentation of our population, a
'Balkanisation' by group in certain regions of the country. Truth to
tell, the institution first nationalised by Henry VIII to resolve a
certain local difficulty, has now, for all intents and purposes, lost
contact with most people in Britain. As a teacher of Religious Studies
in secondary education, I am acutely aware of how secularised most
children are nowadays. Most of the indigenous white pupils I come across
may safely be assumed to have no religion, in terms of actual practice,
at all. They certainly have beliefs in the realms of the supernatural,
the irrational and superstitious but these are very confused and often
contradictory. They are certainly spiritual, in part, but that is
natural to humanity and it is a spirituality untamed or directed by
sound religion.
Another aspect of modern liberal Protestantism that I observed creeping
in during my own Anglican days, was a novel attitude towards the deposit
of faith. Alongside mainstream, conservative Anglicanism, there
appeared, probably from the 1960's onwards, (the time of Bishop
Robinson's Honest To God) the idea that the Christian faith was not
something to be defined by the Church and then accepted and believed
(i.e. a tradition past on) but rather, a kind of journey, a pilgrimage
during which your own experience suggested what was true in religion and
what was helpful to you, personally. The problem with this was that its
adherents had confused spirituality with religion. The two are connected
and they are interdependent but they are not the same thing, like the
soul and the body in man. Religion without spirituality is dead, mere
ritual endorsed by social formality; spirituality without religion is
uncontrolled, unguided and open to the demonic. The Christian religion
is not found in a process of journeying - it is a revelation, entrusted
to the Church according to Apostolic Tradition. What is a journey is our
spirituality, our own individual encounter with the Truth in Christ. It
is no wonder that in confusing the two, Anglicans for the last forty
years have thought it right to adapt their beliefs according to their
spiritual condition or even the social trends and changes that buffeted
them from without. The odd thing now, is that there is very little
difference in social attitudes between practising Anglicans and those
with no religion at all, (as in the Telegraph article) save for what it
might cost them in time on a Sunday morning.
Of Course, there have been epochs in Orthodox history when the mores of
the Church have allied neatly with those of the society at large. One
might cite mediaeval Constantinople, old Russia or even to this day,
parts of rural Romania. But this was precisely because those societies
had been Christianised and had absorbed the Orthodox ethos. The problem
for Anglicanism is that it has suffered the very reverse: it has been
secularised and has absorbed the current ways of the world. So instead
of a society that reflected and harmonised with the mind of Christ (the
Byzantine 'symphony' of Church and state), we have a slowly dwindling
ecclesial body chasing after the modes and tastes of a swiftly changing
society. If this were not bad enough, in its global form, Anglicanism is
also in a crisis of identity. This is far from being, as has recently
been suggested, a tension between an old colonial power and the denizens
of a one time empire - as if Canterbury as a see, were no longer of
relevance. It is between those who still cling to a faith founded on a
deposit of tradition, even if this be but a form of Protestant
fundamentalism - sola scriptura - and those who see religion as a
journey of discovery, the most obvious exponents being the Episcopal
Church of America. It is a clash of culture, it is north and south, it
is liberals and conservatives and it is an inner conflict within the
very heart of Anglicanism that must leave it stuck in a collective
spiritual languor.
What I hope has become clear is why, in God's providence, we as Orthodox
(whether we be British ourselves or immigrants) are here. It is because
the Orthodox Church in Britain, whatever jurisdiction it subsists under
locally, has to be, as it always must be, a missionary Church. From our
Orthodox perspective, glancing across like this at the established
church, one cannot help feeling like someone peeping out through the
window in the morning, observing a waning moon still just visible, a
fading filament, shedding less and less light upon the world, slowly
melting in the morning air as it blends in with the glaring sky around
it. We do not wish to pry into such private grief but as the process
continues, few disillusioned Anglicans, I suspect, will find their way
to the safe haven of Orthodoxy. The reason for this is our very
anonymity, as being, in the Pauline phrase, unknown and yet well known.
Our concern, however, is not just with those who flee the turmoil within
Anglicanism. We have a mission to those who know no god at all and this
we must undertake, like Job, hoping on God in humility with patience.
Furthermore, we must not be daunted by the magnitude of the task before
us, for mere Galilean fishermen once conquered the Roman world. To this
end, it is clear how important immigration from traditionally Orthodox
lands has been for Britain, for nothing else but Orthodoxy will
re-hallow this land in the faith its ancient faith. We also need to be
aware that the unity of all the Orthodox here is essential, if we are to
have any effect at all; national/cultural isolation and any trace of
Philetism can have no place among us. So having glanced sideways with
sadness, we are now called to turn our attention towards something
entirely different - a vision of one jurisdiction, an Orthodox Church of
the British Isles, indigenous and serving the needs of all and any who
would come and find salvation.
July
"By Any Other Name"
Some unenlightened Orthodox folks annoy me by
referring to the “English church.” They mean the Church of England and
however much this might delight a beleaguered Anglican bishop right now
the reference just isn't Orthodox.
There is no “English” Church ... just in as much as there is no “Greek”
Church or “Roman Church” either no matter how often these phrases are
carelessly used. The Church most definitely exists but the use of a
preceding adjective defines nothing at all other than location.
It is simply GPS pseudo-Orthodoxy.
Orthodox ecclesiology may rightly speak (as in New Testament terms) of
the Church IN or AT such and such a place or such and such a city. The
only admissible adjectives for the Church then are Catholic and
Orthodox, by which we also mean, One, Holy and Apostolic. These are
terms referring to the ecumenicity of the Church, (the old meaning of
the whole world), her unity, her mission, her universality and her
inclusiveness ... but not a mention of geography or culture as defining
the Church as a local denomination or branch. We have no such concept in
Orthodoxy.
So, I indeed beg to differ. The ORTHODOX Church is the “English” Church
and every other nation under the sun so let’s drop “English” shall we?
What we must say is that the Orthodox Church must express itself locally
in the language and culture of its indigenous people. The infusion of
its life SHOULD draw on the whole of humanity in God and not any one
part, but, most definitely in such a way as to embed the Church WHERE IT
IS respecting local traditions and whatever is good and true .... as
Pope St. Gregory once counselled St. Augustine of Canterbury.
So I pray and work for the day (however many decades distant) when the
Orthodox Church will once again become the Church IN England, (not OF
England!)
Fr. Gregory
St. Seraphim of Sarov
On Non-Judgment and the Forgiveness of Offenses
It is not right to judge anyone, even if you have seen someone sinning and wallowing in the violations of God’s laws with your own eyes, as is said in the word of God: "Judge not, that ye be not judged" (Mt. 7:1). "Who art thou that judgest another man’s servant? to his own master he standeth or falleth. Yea, he shall be holden up: for God is able to make him stand" (Rom. 14:4). It is much better always to bring to memory the words of the apostle: "Wherefore let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall" (1 Cor. 10:12).
One must not harbour anger or hatred towards a person that is hostile toward us. On the contrary, one must love him and do as much good as possible towards him, following the teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ: "Love your enemies, do good to them that hate you" (Mt. 5:44). If then we will try to fulfill all this to the extent of our power, we can hope that God’s light will begin to shine in our hearts, lighting our path to the heavenly Jerusalem.
Why do we judge our neighbours? Because we are not trying to get to know ourselves. Someone busy trying to understand himself has no time to notice the shortcomings of others. Judge yourself — and you will stop judging others. Judge a poor deed, but do not judge the doer. It is necessary to consider yourself the most sinful of all, and to forgive your neighbour every poor deed. One must hate only the devil, who tempted him. It can happen that someone might appear to be doing something bad to us, but in reality, because of the doer's good intentions, it is a good deed. Besides, the door of penitence is always open, and it is not known who will enter it sooner — you, "the judge," or the one judged by you.
