How do we live Orthodoxy in the world?
First I think by acquiring the life of Christ. Which we do in the Holy Spirit. We acquire that life first when we are baptized, it is a true and a real beginning. We receive Christ's life, we receive the gift of the Holy Spirit, not simply the gifts of the Holy Spirit, but the gift of Chrismation is the Holy Spirit Himself. Simply put. So we receive Christ's life when we are incorporated into Him in baptism and when also we receive the Holy Spirit because we always Christ's life in the Holy Spirit. It is a real beginning but it requires development, it points to fulfillment. There is something more that we need to do with our baptism. St Symeon the New Theologian spent alot of time and effort emphasizing this point that baptism in of itself for adults is, I'll paraphrase what he writes, "not sufficient for salvation because it is in the beginning pointing to fulfillment." Eucharist is its sacramental fulfillment, Holy Communion, to quote Fr Alexander Schmemann who put it very simply and beautifully, "we are baptized so that we can receive the Holy Spirit, and we receive the Holy Spirit so that we can receive the Body and Blood of Christ." Put very simply, but it certainly exposes the truth of these three sacraments and their importance relationship.
Eucharist is the fulfillment, but asceticism, Christian discipline in the spiritual life, represents our choice and our cooperation with both Baptism and Eucharist. This is why we a preparation in the Orthodox Church for receiving Holy Communion, but I might add that the fathers of the Church talk also about the ascetical discipline that is required after Holy Communion. And the after we often forget. Some people seem, as it were, to celebrate the end of the ascetical preparation with the Eucharist, with receiving the Eucharist, and forget that there is an ascetical work after we receive in order to guard the grace which has been given. St Gregory Palamas speaks alot about this. And then finally, with regard to acquiring the life of Christ in the Holy Spirit, we have prayer, it fits in here as well. There is no contradiction between prayer and the sacraments, the Holy Mysteries, in fact they are inadvertently in a very vital relationship with each other. And we see prayer as an ongoing, a continuing communion with God. And it is the first way in which we can live Orthodoxy, because if we do not acquire Christ's life there's no point to really talking about living Orthodoxy, since Orthodoxy as we have already said, is not a philosophy, not a club, not an ethic, but the Divine Human Person of Jesus Christ. If that is true then in order to live Orthodoxy we have to receive His Life, if we don't, we aren't living Orthodoxy.
Secondly, after receiving the Life of Christ in the Holy Spirit, we live Orthodoxy in the world by allowing the gracious character of Christ to be revealed to be made manifest in us. This is where ascetiscm is so important, and prayer. Yes we receive the grace of God, yes the Lord wants to manifest His life through us, but He won't do it against our will, and He won't choose for us, frustrating as we might find it, it's part of God's love for us that He never forces our hand. That He never pushes us, He doesn't even make us feel guilty, He doesn't co-opt us, He doesn't manipulate us, He loves us unconditionally which is precisely why people do not know what to do with Him.
His love is so other, so different, it doesn't correspond to anything in our experience and so sometimes we expect and indeed in the spiritual life demand that He become manipulative. That He force us just a little after all or that he co-opt us at least somewhat and then we will do the rest. But that's not Him, that's not Him. He doesn't work that way. So when we ask Him to do that, it's not a prayer He's about to answer, thankfully...thankfully.
So it's up to us to cooperate and to allow His gracious life to to be revealed in us and it is to manifest the Church to the world and in the world. This is indeed how the world comes to know the Church, through people, not primarily through architechture, but through people or through some other means. We're very very proud of our beautiful architechture and iconography in the Orthodox Church and there's a reason why we build Churches the way we do and we canons in iconography and the Lord works through them. Nevertheless, primarily the Lord's life is demonstrated through His Body, through people, through Christians and in order to do this you and I have to make all of life liturgical.
Now how do we do that? Does that mean that we need to take Petar and have him at every place of our employment directing the Choir? Does that mean that we have to have all of the clergy vested with inscense ready at school? How do we make everything that we do ligurgical? By taking the deepest part of our worship, its most basic rhythm and continuing it, living in a way which is 100% consistent with it in everything that we do.
So an Orthodox Christian rejects a dichotomy between liturgical and non-liturgical , everything for us is liturgical, even if it is not expliciately so. And we don't accept that when we are here we are liturgical and when we pray at home we are not. Or that when we are at work we are not liturgical. Work admittedly or school likely doesn't operate on a liturgical structure, admittedly. But that doesn't mean that you and I cannot live as liturgical beings in a place which does not have that rhythm or structure. It's incumbent upon us to give it that rhythm or structure, lovingly and gently by taking the essence of liturgical worship and bringing it everywhere. By coming to the conclusion that there ought to be no part of your life or mine which is not in this sense, liturgical. And when of course we begin to think of our lives, especially as North American society would have us live them we can see that gently put and diplomatically there are large parts of our lives which do not correspond to this.
An Orthodox Christian therefore rejects the fundamental division between the sacred and the profane. And sees everything as outside of evil, which does not have an existence of its own anyway, as being capable of becoming sacred. And therefore does not say that I have my sacred life in the Church and my profane life when I am far enough away from the Church so that the priest cannot hear me or see me. It's rather cute when people think that way because it's not the priest you have to worry about in terms of seeing you...I thnk we all know that, we should have I think a slightly more nuanced understanding of God which might allow for the possibility that He could be even if the priest isn't, that He might be aware of what we are living and what we are doing.
So we are breaking apart or rejecting in love these artificial divisions. And finally I think very much to point for those of you who worship here, in a place that has a special call to minister among the poor, we allow the gracious character of Christ to be revealed in us when we unite two altars. The altar table that is behind me in the Church and what St. John Chyrsostom would call the Altar among or of the poor.
To the poor we may add I'm sure with St John's permission, the ill, the dying, the greiving, the lonely, the marginalized, the abused, so on and so forth. This also, St. John says, is an altar and a form of worship when it is done out, coming forth from the worship of the Church because not all social work is liturgical and not all social work is means an altar among the poor. Sadly some of the work that is done among the poor does not allow for such an altar. And it's precisely why Christians must lovingly demonstrate the sacrament of the poor by uniting the two altars, the liturgical altar in the Church, the altar of the Eucharist with the Altar among or of the poor. This is part of how the gracious character of Christ is revealed in us and to the world.
Thirdly, how do we live Orthodoxy in the world? By allowing ourselves to be transformed into micro-Churches, little Churches, each person as a little Church. You see the fathers of the Church connect the Church and the human person very much. St Maximos the Confessor writing his marvelous commentary on the Liturgy, the Mystogogy, says that the Holy Church is an icon of the human person, he also says that the Holy Church is an icon of the human soul, and he makes several other connections between the Church and things in our experience.
St Mark the Ascetic, sometimes called St Mark the Monk, talks about the Holy of Holies in the heart, talks about that place speaking poetically in the heart, behind the Iconostasis...read "in the Heart" where Jesus is. And talks about prayer in this sense. Several of the fathers of the Church talk about how the human being is in fact a little Church if he or she chooses to be in Christ and through the Holy Spirit.
We allow ourselves to be transfomed into little Churches through the constant memory of God which can only be achieved in prayer. So much in this world, so often we focus on memory as recall, the kind of memory that a computer has, more and more of course you know that computers don't posess a memory but is given a memory of course, but we think of memory more and more in these terms, recall, when memory in Holy Scriptures is something very very different.
When in the Old Testament we read that the Lord remembers Israel it doesn't mean that He recalls from His memory bank what Israel might be among all the other nations. It doesn't mean that He remembers how to spell Israel's name correctly, it doesn't mean that He has the appropriate dictionary definition of Israel. It means He loves Israel. It means He Loves Israel and that's why we want God to remember us, and that's why the Thief says, "remember me," to remember is therefore to to re-call, so that when we rembember God, and when we have a constant rememberance of God in prayer, we are in a constant relationship of love with the One Who first loved us.
The Jesus Prayer, so well know in Orthodoxy, in this sense becomes the Liturgy of the Heart, the Liturgy of the Heart, all of Liturgical life is to be internalized and by that I don't mean that we necessarily memorize all of Vespers or all of Liturgy, although memorizing part of it would not a bad idea at all. But we internalize it, we make it our own, we seek to immerse ourselves in it to the point we can discover its basic rhythm and allow that rhytym to be in our lives all of the time. Even the Church building in Orthodoxy is to be internalized. There is a reason for our architechture because the three basic sections of an Orthodox Church correspond in a very special way to different aspects of the human person. And so when we build a Church the way we build it, when we put an altar table, holy table where we put it, when we place an iconostasion where we place it, where we bring iconography into the Church according to a certain established canonical pattern, all of this points us to something, it points us of course to the Kingdom of God. But it also stikes us in a proper way, how to understand ourselves.
You understand yourself by understanding better the Church in which you pray.
It has something to tell you about who you are as a human being, who I am. This allows a Christian to have an intense spiritual life in the world even if he or she does not find himself or herself in a monastery. The monastic life is a very special calling and one which we treasure very much in Orthodoxy, but it is not a different spiritual life from the one are living right now. It is a more intense version of the same, perhaps we might say that it is a slightly different mode but it is not a different spiritual life, it couldn't be. The Lord didn't come to give two lives in Christ, or two lives in the Holy Spirit, He came to give one to all. And all of our life in the Church must give witness to the One Life in the One Christ in the One Spirit. So it gives us hope, it gives us hope, there is a way to have an intense and a real spiritual life even if you are not a monastic. There is a way to have an intense and real spiritual life even if you cannot be at Church every day, of course you read about those wonderful Orthodox communities such as the one in Eagle River Alaska or in other parts of the United States and Canada where there is daily worship and people are able to, because they live in the neighbourhood, attend Vespers or Matins everyday, or perhaps in rare occassions Liturgy every day outside of Great Lent. But most Orthodox in North America do not find themselves in such positions, they wake up, they go to work and wonder if they have time to pray before they go. They walk out of their houses and see an environment which put gently is not the most conducive to the Orthodox spiritual life or to prayer. That's the reality that you and I live in, and the good news is that in that reality not in another one we may have a real and genuine and an intense spiritual life.
Therefore it is not appropriate for us as Orthodox Christians to say "when something happens, when I become spiritual, when I go to mount Athos, when I visit Sinai, whenever, then I my spiritual life will begin." Hopefully such a visit will in fact have a profound influence on anyone. If they're open it always will. But we don't have to wait to do that, to have a real and intense spiritual life.
Finally, we live Orthodoxy in the world, by offering the world back to God. He gave it as a gift, He gave it as a workshop, "atelier," and the greatest thing we can possibly do is return it to Him with thanksgiving. And of course this particular theme of the human person as the priest of creation, I'm using the word priest in a broad sense, this theme comes especially from St Maximos the Confessor, and today in Orthodox literature it's all the rage. Everytime you find a new article, actually I sometimes review a new article I ask will this be yet another article which talks about man as the priest of creation, especially because connections have been made with ecology it has become very much in vogue.
But some comments need to be made about this: the human person as the priest of creation. It sounds great, it sounds fashionable, and of course it elicits no little interest, it brings Orthodoxy immediately to the forefront of dicussions, because we have said something, supposedly new and innovative, which is in fact very old. But something's missing. The missing dimension of alot of the discussion is asceticism, spiritual discipline. Of course when one talks about that, the general level of interest in the world drops immediately.
Why is asceticism important in this offering of the world back to God? Because we need to have the discernment, the Greek word diakrino, a discernment to know what exactly should we offer? Because we talk about offering the world and everyone is so excited about it, no one is quite sure what it means. Do we offer Toronto back to God? with its transit system, with everything that makes with its urban infrastructure? What are we offering to God? When we talk about the world, what are we talking about?
Are we talking about the first sense in Scripture? Surely we can't be talking about the second sense of alienation from God. But then again is it everything in the world that ought to be offered? Because while the world is redeemed in Christ, is it not also fallen?
So it is no easy task to offer the world back to God, it requires discipline, it requires patience and it requires a clear spiritual vision, Theoria, a spiritual vision of life.
To offer the world in the first sense, in the positive sense one must also know how to reject the world when we're talking about the second use of the word.
St Isaac the Syrian, when he uses the word "world," says it is the sum of all the passions, that's the world, this is not what we are offering back to God. We offer what is consistent with its final fulfillment. The world is a work in progress and therefore it must not become an idol. What God has created must not become an idol. So this priestly role of every Christian is very important, but discernment and asceticism must be present in this offering in order for it to be real.
A few final remarks. If we are living Orthodoxy in the world, we are referring everything to Christ, even if the world around us is not always aware of this fact, that we are referring everything to Christ. We are understanding life as profoundly liturgical, we are understanding the human person as a liturgical being. We understand Orthodoxy not as an esoteric pseudo-mystical Eastern tradition, not as a private retreat into Eastern Christian spirituality, not as a liturgical rite or ethos, because Orthodoxy is so much bigger than all of that, it is the Divine Human Person of Jesus Christ, and His Divine Human Body. It is about the Holy Trinity, it is about humanity, it is about the world and it is indeed the world's highest calling.
