The Minister and Inner Events: Discovering our Humanity

Henri Nouwen was a Roman Catholic priest and probably one of the greatest spiritual writers of the 20th century. In this hope-filled and profoundly simple book, Henri Nouwen offers a radically fresh interpretation of how we can best serve others. Here he inspires devoted men and women who want to be of service in their church or community, but who have found some traditional practices of outreach alienating an ineffective. Weaving keen cultural analysis  with his psychological and religious insights, Nouwen has come up with a balanced and creative theology of service that begins with the realization of fundamental woundedness in human nature.

According to Nouwen, ministers are called to identify the suffering in their own hearts and make that recognition the starting point of their service. For Nouwen, ministers must be willing to go beyond their professional, somewhat aloof, roles and leave themselves open as fellow human beings with the same wounds and suffering as those whom they serve. In other words, we heal from our wounds. Nouwen describes wounded healers as individuals who "must look after their won wounds but at the same time be prepared to heal the wounds of others". The minister is the one who wants to serve others however, the minister is a wounded person.

I hope to present a few passages from the book in the next few entries that will help anyone who serves guide them on their journey.    

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This might sound highly theoretical, but the concrete consequences are obvious. In practically all priestly functions, such as pastoral conversation, preaching, teaching, and liturgy, the minister tries to help people to recognize the work of god in themselves. The Christian leader, minister or priest, is not one who reveals God to the people-who gives something to those who have nothing-but one who helps those who are searching to discover reality as the source of their existence. In this sense we can say that the Christian leader leads humans to confession, in the classic sense of the word: to the basic affirmation that humans are human and God is God, and that without God, humans cannot be called human.

In this context, pastoral conversation is not merely a skillful use of conversational techniques to manipulate people into the Kingdom of God, but a deep human encounter in which people are willing to put their own faith and doubt, their own hope and despair, their own light and darkness at the disposal of others who want to find a way through their confusion and touch the solid core of life.

In this context, preaching means more than handing over a tradition; it is, rather, the careful and sensitive articulation of what is happening in the community so that those who listen can say: "You say what I only suspected, you clearly express what I vaguely felt, you bring to the fore what I fearfully kept in the back of my mind. Yes, yes-you say who we are, you recognize our condition."

When someone who listens is able to say this, then the ground is broken for others to receive the Word of God. And no minister need doubt that the Word will be received! The young especially do not have to run away from their fears and hopes but can see themselves in the face of the one who leads them; the minister will make them understand the words of salvation which in the past often sounded to them like words from a strange and unfamiliar world.

Teaching in this context does not mean telling the old story over and over again, but the offering of channels through which people can discover themselves, clarify their own experiences, and find the niches in which the Word of God can take firm hold. And finally, in this context liturgy is much more than ritual. It can become a true celebration when the liturgical leader is able to name the space where joy and sorrow touch each other as the place in which it is possible to celebrate both life and death.

So the first and most basic task of contemporary Christian leaders is to lead people out of the land of confusion into the land of hope. Therefore, they must first have the courage to be explorers of the new territory within themselves and to articulate their discoveries as a service to the inward generations.


Henri Nouwen, The Wounded Healer: Ministry for a Rootless Generations, 43-44.

The Liturgy of the Faithful

The Liturgy is the everlasting interaction of the gathered community being united in the body of Christ. The liturgy can be understood as an ontological interaction with Christ as the community is constantly being molded in the image and likeness of Christ (cf. Gen 1.26-27). That is why a presbyter can never celebrate a liturgy without the gathering of the community because the community represents the living body of Christ in the world. The presbyter recites during the institution narrative "for He gave his life up for the world". The He, being Christ, is what is being offered on behalf of all and for all. If Christ is being offered for all and we represent His image and likeness then we to are also asked to give up our lives for the life of this world. When we gathered together to celebrate the liturgy it is a joyful occasion because after the death of Christ we live in the joy of the resurrection. It was through death that we received life. The following are passages taken from  Archimandrite Robert Taft, who is the world's leading figure on liturgy. The passages sum up what the liturgy should represent and not what we make liturgy ought to be.

"No prayer is "private" in the sense of being done alone..our prayer is always done in company with "the communion of saints" to which we belong by baptism." + Archimandrite Fr. Robert Taft

 

"When asked directly how to pray, Jesus teaches his disciples the Our Father as the ideal model (Mk 6:9-15; Lk 11:2-4). He also instructs them to pray without making a show of it, but quietly, humbly, and in the spirit; not with "long prayers in public" like the Pharisees (Mk 12:40; Lk 20:47), but in solitude, using few words (Mt 6:1, 5-8), humbly asking forgiveness like the publican (Lk 18:9-14)." + Archimandrite Fr. Robert Taft

 

"Liturgy is at the very center of the redemptive work Christ exercises through the ministry of the Church. Anyone who does not celebrate and live the liturgy of the Church according to the mind of the Church, cannot pretend to be either a Christian or an apostle, true to the Church of Christ." + Archimandrite Fr. Robert Taft

 

"Our basic identity is Christian, and to be Christian is to be another Christ. That is what the liturgy makes us in baptism, nourishes in the eucharist and the proclamation and preaching of the Word, restores in confession and anointing of the sick. Liturgy, then, is a locus of our spiritual lives because in the liturgy it is Christ himself who forms us into other Christs by conforming us to himself."  + Archimandrite Fr. Robert Taft

 

"...if the Bible is the Word of God in the words of men, the liturgy is the saving deeds of God in the actions of those men and women who would live in him. Its purpose... is to turn you and me into the same reality. The purpose of baptism is to make us cleansing waters and healing and strengthening oil; the purpose of Eucharist is not to change bread and wine, but to change you and me. Through baptism and Eucharist it is we who are to become Christ for one another, and a sign to the world that is yet to hear his name.

Our true Christian liturgy, therefore, is just the life of Christ in us that we both live and celebrate. That life is none other than what we call the Holy Spirit. This is salvation, our final goal. The only difference between this and what we hope to enjoy at the final fulfillment is that the mirror spoken of in 1 Cor 13:12 will no longer be needed: as Adrien Nocent put it, the veil shall be removed." + Archimandrite Fr. Robert Taft

"Liturgy teaches us balanced, objective, traditional, ecclesial prayer. As the prayer of the Church, the liturgy is the prayer of Christ himself, the full Christ, head and members. This alone gives a transforming value to our prayer that it cannot have when done alone. Liturgy is traditional ecclesial prayer in that it has stood the test of time, and has been with the Church from its origins. Liturgy is balanced, objective prayer because it is not something that depends on our tastes and sentiments, but is the Church's efficacious encounter with God in the worship of the Father through Jesus in his ever-forming Spirit. So liturgy is the Church's ancient school and model of prayer, in which she teaches her age-old ways of how to glorify God in Christ as Church, together as one Body, in union with and after the example of Jesus her head. Through this constant diet of Sacred Scripture, not only does God speak his Word to us, not only do we contemplate over and over again the central mysteries of salvation, but our own lives are gradually attuned to this saving rhythm, and we meditate again and again on the mystery of Israel, recapitulated in Jesus, which is also the saga of our own spiritual odyssey. The march of Israel across the horizon of Sacred History is a metaphor for the spiritual pilgrimage of us all.

This gives liturgical prayer a concentration on the essential rather than the peripheral; it gives our prayer equilibrium insofar as its rhythms are set by the Church and not by our own private subjectivity and sentiment. How much penance, how much contrition, how much praise, how much petition, how much thanksgiving should our prayer-life contain? It is all right there in the pedagogy of the Church's liturgy. How much devotion to the Holy Trinity, how much attention to the Mysteries of Christ's life, how much to his Passion, how much to the Mother of God, how much to the saints? How much fasting, how much feasting? Our liturgical calendar with its seasonal and festive rhythms has it all. This gives a balanced and objective comprehensiveness to the Church's prayer that is a sure remedy for the one-sided excesses and exaggerations of a subjective devotionalism that emphasizes only those aspects of prayer that have personal appeal to some particular culture or individual at any given moment, often for less than ideal reasons." + Archimandrite Fr. Robert Taft

 

Presenting the Liturgy to our Children

I came across a blog entry that I thought had to be blogged again because it presents how we can present the liturgy to our children. The following is the link to the original blog: 

http://orthodoxyisorthodoxy.blogspot.com/2013/04/presenting-church-to-our-children.html#more  

"Making the Liturgy more "relatable" is the opposite direction one should take in presenting the Church to your child. Holiness speaks to a separation from the things of this world that distract us from God. Using cultural distractions to encourage participation in the services of the Church muddles this reality. If what we should be seeking after is packaged in a secular pop-culture medium a false equality and connection is made in the minds of our children that life in the Church is just another way to pass the time. Making the Way into a video game, a music video, or any other trivial entertainment serves to undermine and not reinforce your child's faith. The hard lesson that evangelical efforts to grow the Church through making it more "relevant" have been learned over and over at the expense of tradition and with little to show for it beyond empty coffers, infrequent attendance, and a "spiritual but not religious" ethos.

The Liturgy is best presented as a constant walking towards the transcendant where His people gather in reverence and anticipation of His imminent return. A child that sees himself as someone in service to a thing not only much greater than he, but also something that can transform him into the man God would have him be through service to His Church, is a child that will grow in faith and love of the Lord. "

"You may, being teachers, be interested to know how we teach our faith. Well, I could put it in a nut-shell by saying, badly, because if what I have said in the beginning makes any sense to you, it is not by making children to learn doctrinal formularies or formal prayers or any such thing that you make a person into a Christian or an Orthodox. He must be introduced into an experience. And an experience can be caught as one catches the flu, it is an infection, it’s not something which can be conveyed in a sterile manner. So that what we expect is that in the family people should have a sense of worship. I do not mean, do special things. It’s not by praying before a meal or not praying before a meal that one conveys a sense of a sacredness of the event, but I remember one of our young theologians saying, “Everything in life is an act of love divine even the food, which we eat, is divine love that has become edible.” And if the food is prepared with love, if it is served with beauty, if it is shared with reverence, if it is treated as a gift of God, a miracle, and for people of my generation and that of my parents this attitude is easy because we have gone so often without any food and in hunger, that really a peace of bread or any form of food is an act of God or an act of human love. So that is an example. The same could be applied to everything which is the life of the home — the way parents treat children and children treat parents."

+ Metropolitan Anthony Bloom,  http://masarchive.org/Sites/texts/1900-00-00-0-E-E-T-EN05-023Othodoxy.html

Reflections on Fasting- Part 3

The following are reflections on fasting written by Father Matthew the Poor. In the book, Communion of Love, it has a chapter entitled "The Deep Meaning of Fasting" which these reflections are taken from. A recommended read for all during the Lenten period. The book is a complication of Father Matthew's smaller booklets put into one book:

-For whoever fails to offer his life totally, or is dismayed at the prospect of self-sacrifice, and so of death, finds that his intention retreats and that he rejects death. He becomes evasive and offers an outward sacrifice, such as an act of service or an offering of money, or uses some other stratagem to avoid sacrificing his own self. So he loses his portion in Christ the Redeemer, for Christ redeems from death those who have accepted death.

-Once more we repeat that Christ, blessed be His name, cannot become a ransom for the human soul unless man offers his soul on the altar of love, in death to the world, making a total offering with all his will, relinquishing himself forever, raising the knife with his own hand in determination and earnest resolve, proving that he has accepted death.

-The Lord crucified Himself for the world before the world crucified Him. He carried out the offering of His body, His self, as a sacrifice on behalf of the world immediately after He was baptized when He was led by the Spirit. He gladly obeyed and went to face the test of fasting. This is the volitional aspect of the cross. Thus it was that the Lord was careful to institute and celebrate the rite of the Eucharist prior to the cross, not after the resurrection, to show that the sacrifice and offering were a free act.

-That is the meaning of “Take, eat . . . Take, drink . . . this is my body . . . this is my blood.” This was said a whole day before the crucifixion, but He saw that the coming events were completely in accordance with His will. He saw the cross standing and on it the body being slain and the blood being shed; He saw Himself content with it all. And so He took bread and filled it with the mystery of the broken body, and wine and filled it with the mystery of the shed blood, and He fed His disciples. They ate from His hands the mystery of His will and drank the mystery of His love, the mystery of His sufferings, the mystery of salvation. Therefore, when we share in the mystery of the body and the blood in the Eucharist, we share not only in the cross, but also in a mystical life poured out and a body that has struggled with severe fasting, deprivation, want, and pain.

-When asked what, then, is our fasting? Father Matthew replies: We fast and offer our bodies as a sacrifice; the outward form of this is bearing fatigue, but its essence is the intentional acceptance of death, that we may be counted fit to be mystically united in the flesh and blood of Christ. It is then that we become, in Christ’s sacrifice, a pure sacrifice, capable of interceding and redeeming.

-Fasting, since it is an incomplete sacrifice because of sin, has to be consummated in Communion, partaking in the pure body and blood, to become a perfect sacrifice, efficacious in prayer and intercession. Every Holy Communion Has to be preceded by fasting, and every fast has to end with Holy Communion. When we receive Communion in this way it is right for us to intercede, for our offering and sacrifice are made perfect. "Pray to receive Communion worthily. Pray for us and for all Christians” (Coptic Liturgy).

In Lent we prepare ourselves for the Last Supper. We prepare for two like things coming together. How could those who do not sacrifice themselves be worthy of Him who sacrificed His life? If we eat of a sacrificed body and do not sacrifice our own selves, how can we claim that a union takes place? The Mystical Supper on Thursday, which is the intentional acceptance of a life of sacrifice, is but a preparation for accepting sufferings openly, even unto death.

Whenever we eat of the body and drink of the blood, we are mystically prepared for preaching the death of the Lord and confessing His resurrection. Every testimony to the death and resurrection of the Lord carries with it a readiness for martyrdom. And every martyrdom carries with it a resurrection.

Mary, Mysteries and Mission-Part1

At the annual Lenten Retreat (2013) for SVOTS Seminarians, Fr. Chad Hatfield, the Chancellor of St. Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary, discusses three assured paths to spiritual renewal as we participate in the Great Fast: Mary and the Incarnation, the Mysteries of Baptism and the Eucharist, and our vocation to Mission. This is part one of four forthcoming presentations.

Taken from Ancient Faith Radio. Here is the link to part one:

http://ancientfaith.com/podcasts/svsvoices/mary_mysteries_and_mission