Chapter 6: Trampling Down Death By Death

                                                      Icon of the Resurrection

Humanity lives in a death denying society. When one walks into a funeral home it almost seems like every effort is given to show that the presence of death is not even present within the room. I was recently at a viewing and it felt like a celebration with food and drinks being offered. Society is confused about death and that it has forgotten what to do with it. Where does Christianity fit into the equation regarding death? There can be no doubt that within the Christian message lies the essence of our faith that announces Christ’s victory over death, and Christianity has its source in that victory. Many Christian clergy today preach on death as either being the valley of suffering and vanity or as liberation. However, as a true minister of Christ the minister should feel that something is missing from this “equation”. If someone is preaching that Christianity is life affirming-and does this without referring to the death of Christ; one must come to realize that death should not represent the end but indeed the very reality of this world and the age to come. To conform to the present reality and comforting people about death does greater damage because it falsifies the true essence of the Christian message. Christianity declares that Christ died for the life of the world. The institution narrative in the St. Basil Liturgy of the Coptic rite proclaims this when it says “He instituted for us this great Mystery of godliness, for, being determined to give Himself up to death for the life of the world”.

Unfortunately, throughout our modern times people conform to the comfort of the individual. It’s about preaching comfortably and not challenging the individual. This has very profound implications because as Fr. Alexander would say “the world does not want religion and religion does not want Christianity” page 96. This frustration will continue as long as Christians continue to understand Christianity as a “religion” whose purpose is to help, as long as they keep the “utilitarian” self-consciousness typical of the old religion (page 97). Religions main function was to help people die. Religion has always been an attempt to explain death and by explaining it reconciling man with it. Christianity because it is a “religion” had to accept this and in doing so had to justify death. The doctrines of the immorality of the soul, or death as liberation, or death as punishment are in fact not Christian doctrines. There integration then tainted rather clarify Christian theology and piety. These theories worked to the people because Christianity exists around a death centered society. Secularism then becomes a phenomenon within the Christian world, a phenomenon impossible without Christianity. It would be a mistake if one were to think of secularism as simply an absence of religion. Secularism then becomes a religion in as far as how one can understand the world. Secularism is an explanation of death in terms of life. The only thing we know is this world and this life that we have. Life then becomes how to make it as happy and rich as possible. Life then ends with death. If death is natural then one must accept it as something natural. As long as one exists then no one should think about death as it does not exist the secularist would come to think. The funeral home alluded to earlier becomes then the home of the secularist. It is indeed the symbol of the secularist religion because it expresses the quietness of death as something natural and the denial of deaths presence in life. Secularism then becomes the greatest “help” to man and in this many people abandon the old religion and seek out comfort within the secularist world. Christianity sees itself as being the place where help can be given to all. However, the heart of the matter is reached. Help is not the criterion but rather truth is. The truth of Christianity is not to “help” people by reconciling then with death, but to show the Truth about life and death in order that people may be saved by this Truth. If the purpose of Christianity is to take away the fear of death then there would be no need for Christianity because other religions have done it better than Christianity.

Christianity then is the revelation of death and death is revealed because it is the revelation of Life. Christ is this Life. If Christ is Life death is what Christianity proclaims it to be which is the enemy that will be destroyed and not a mystery that needs to be explained. By explaining death it is given a status making it “normal”. Christianity however proclaims death as being “abnormal” meaning truly horrible. As Lazarus died Jesus wept and as time grew closer to his own passions he was in deep prayer in the garden. In Christ however, the fullness of life is revealed, and death becomes the very fall from life making it the enemy. It is in this world that we are given to be a sacrament of the divine presence given as communion with God, and it is only through this world, by transforming them into communion with God that man was to be (page 100). Death then cannot be understood as being an end with this understanding in mind. Death cannot glorify God and it is a separation from God. Death then become the source of life when Christ own death trampled down death have bestowed eternal life.

Before death happens there is dying which is the growth of death in us by physical decay. The problem today with Christians is that they accept two approaches that cause more confusion to the mind. The consideration of disease rather than health to be a normal state of man is one aspect. Health care then must be supplied as a religious duty. The idea of health and medicine then becomes an act of God. The other side of the coin goes back to the funeral home in that medicine and modern medicine preserves the life of the individual because it is needed to preserve life. However, if the individual were to die he or she does so in a quite manner. This causes confusion because many Christians accept both factors as being true. The problem is solved of a secular hospital by establishing a chaplaincy. What then becomes of this approach? Of course we must discover the unchanging, yet always contemporary, sacramental vision of man’s life. The church sees healing as a sacrament. There is a misunderstanding with this view where Christianity understood itself as another religion. This then turned the sacrament of the oil as the sacrament of death being one of the “last rites” someone goes through almost equivalent to a rite. A sacrament, as previously written on, is always and must be a passage and a transformation. It is naturally a passage into the kingdom of God the life restored and redeemed by Christ. Healing then is understood as being sacramental because it not a restoration of physical health but the entrance of man into the life of the kingdom. In Christ suffering is not removed, but rather is transformed into victory. This is the only true healing a Christian can come encounter. Through Christ own suffering we must have good cheer because Christ overcame the world. The defeat of man and his very dying has become now a way of Life.

The beginning of this victory is understood in Christ’s own death. As Father Alexander says “The whole life of the Church is in a way the sacrament of Our death, because all of it is the proclamation of the Lord’s death, the confession of His resurrection. Page 104”. It is only in the life of Christ, the joy and peace in his communion, can the proclamation of his death have meaning through his resurrection.

By way of conclusion Father Alexander says “The Church is the entrance into the risen life of Christ; it is communion in life eternal, "joy and peace in the Holy Spirit.” And it is the expectation of the "day without evening” of the Kingdom; not of any "other world,” but of the fulfillment of all things and all life in Christ. In Him death itself has become an act of life, for He has filled it with Himself, with His love and light. In Him "all things are yours; whether . . . the world, or life, or death, or things present, or things to come; all are yours; and ye are Christ’s; and Christ is God’s” (1 Cor. 3:21—23). Page 106”.                            

A few quotes from chapter six: 

For it falsifies the Christian message to present and to preach Christianity as essentially life-affirming—without referring this affirmation to the death of Christ and therefore to the very fact of death; to pass over in silence the fact that for Christianity death is not only the end, but indeed the very reality of this world. Page 96.

For this was, indeed, one of the main functions of religions: to help, and especially to help people to die. For this reason religion has always been an attempt to explain death, and by explaining it, to reconcile man with it. What pains Plato took in his Phaedo to make death desirable and even good, and how often he has since been echoed in the history of human belief when confronted with the prospect of release from this world of change and suffering! Page 97.

The purpose of Christianity is not to help people by reconciling them with death, but to reveal the Truth about life and death in order that people may be saved by this Truth. Salvation, however, is not only not identical with help, but is, in fact, opposed to it. Christianity quarrels with religion and secularism not because they offer "insufficient help,” but precisely because they "suffice,” because they "satisfy” the needs of men. Page 99.

To accept God’s world as a cosmic cemetery which is to be abolished and replaced by an "other world” which looks like a cemetery ("eternal rest” ) and to call this religion, to live in a cosmic cemetery and to "dispose” every day of thousands of corpses and to get excited about a "just society” and to be happy!—this is the fall of man. Page 100.

A sacrament therefore is not a "miracle” by which God breaks, so to speak, the "laws of nature,” but the manifestation of the ultimate Truth about the world and life, man and nature, the Truth which is Christ. Page 102. 

                           Father Alexander Schmemann posing for a picture in Paris in 1946.

Chapter 5: The Mystery of Love

Within the Orthodox Church matrimony is a sacrament. A sacrament, as mentioned in previous posts, shows the idea of a transformation, referring to the ultimate event of Christ’s death and resurrection, and is always the sacrament of the kingdom. If this is how we are to see the sacrament then the church can be given the term sacramental. It is always the manifestation in time of the “new time”. In a more specific way the church calls the sacraments those acts given to life in which the transforming grace is “confirmed as being given”, which the church through its liturgical life identifies itself with and it then becomes the very form of the gift which we are all a part of. How then is marriage related to the coming kingdom? How is marriage a sacrament, related to the cross, death and resurrection of Christ? These questions might be hard to answer in our modern world because of the inconsistencies that we are taught about marriage. Marriage today is covered up under labels such as, “she/he is the one”, “we are meant to be” and the list can go on. The truth about marriage is being covered up. It is forgotten as everything else in the world. We never see marriage as being a distorted marriage, and that it must be restored and united in the person of Christ. This restoration then carries marriage into His life, death, resurrection, and ascension into heaven. With this meaning being expanded on more one can see how this definition gives marriage a more cosmic and universal dimensions. The point then is if we continue to envision marriage as the concern of those who “only” are being married and as something that happens “only” to “them” and not to the church, therefore being “only” for the world, then we will never understand the sacramental meaning of marriage and won’t understand the mystery of marriage to which St. Paul writes about (cf. Eph 5.32). Marriage then in its truthfulness and power to give life must be seen not from “family” but rather love. Family has the power to distort the meaning of love as scripture points to this countless times (cf. Mt 10.36). In this sense the sacrament of holy matrimony is much wider than family. It is the sacrament of divine love. This is why it’s important to see how the church (the community) is involved within the sacrament because it is within the concept of community that we approach the world and this applies to the married couple who are wedded within the community.

The best way to understand the sacrament of matrimony is not by starting with matrimony as its commonly seen as being but rather looking at the individual who stood at the church as the purest expression of human love and response to God; Mary, the Mother of Jesus. It is significant that in the west Mary is primarily the Virgin, a being who is totally different from us in her purity and freedom from the pollution of sin, in the east she is referred to and glorified as Theotokos (the Mother of God), and all icons depict her with the Child in her arms. In other words, there exists two emphases on Mary, which they both do not exclude one another, lead to two different visions of Mary’s place in the Church. The differences in mind, if one is to understand the experience of veneration of Mary which has always been that of the Orthodox Church. This is not odd as something pertaining to the “cult of Mary” but instead a light, a joy, which is proper to the whole life of the church. An Orthodox hymn says about her “all creation rejoices”. In Mary and because of her example of love and obedience she was able to accept what all creation was meant to be created in; the temple of the Holy Spirit being the humanity of God. She accepted and gave her body and blood to be the in the fullest and deepest sense the mother of the world because she was able to be the mother of the Son of God. She accepted the nature of the creature and all creation by placing the meaning and the fulfillment of her life in God. By accepting this she fulfilled the womanhood of creation. This seems strange in our modern world because the “equality of the sexes” has become a dominate issue. However, through Mary we see how the one affirms in Christ that there is neither male nor female (cf. Gal 3.28). In Mary the boundary of humanity is not limited then to “male” and “female” but instead is the bringing together humanity in our brokenness in the body of Christ. The idea of love then is united back into Christ. The world finds its restoration and meaning in the church which is the bride of God and in sin this relationship has been broken, distorted. This is where the Theotokos in her response to God, the church has its living and personal beginning. This response is total obedience in love and not obedience and love, but the wholeness of the one as the totality of the other. True obedience is then true love for God which becomes the real response of creation to its creator. Humanity is fully humanity when it becomes a movement of total self-giving and obedience to Him. In the “natural” world the one who is the bearer of this obedient love is the woman. This acceptance gives life to the man, becoming the fulfillment of life which becomes fully love only when it is fully acceptance and response. This is why the Theotokos become the example for us all. The whole of creation-the church-and not only women find the expression of their response and obedience to God in Mary and rejoice in her. When we accept this love and obedience can creation transcend beyond the limitations of seeing “male” and “female”. With this in mind creation then fulfills its role as the males and females in the body of Christ. Fr. Alexander describes the roles of males in females in the following fashion: “For man can be truly man—that is, the king of creation, the priest and minister of God’s creativity and initiative—only when he does not posit himself as the "owner” of creation and submits himself—in obedience and love—to its nature as the bride of God, in response and acceptance. And woman ceases to be just a "female” when, totally and unconditionally accepting the life of the Other as her own life, giving herself totally to the Other, she becomes the very expression, the very fruit, the very joy, the very beauty, the very gift of our response to God, the one whom, in the words of the Song, the king will bring into his chambers, saying: "Thou art all fair, my love, there is no spot in thee” (Ct. 4:7). Page 85”. This explains why Mary is called the second Eve. Mary was able to do what Eve failed to do- to become a woman. She became a female, the instrument of creation, “ruled over” by man. “Behold the handmaid of the Lord, be it unto me according to your word” (Lk 1.38). It is at this instance that humanity recognizes the words that express our nature and being, our acceptance to the bride of God our unity to the one who from the beginning loved us. Mary’s virginity is the fullness of love itself. If virginity is then understood as completion of love we must not misunderstand this as the absence of sex. Of this fulfillment in “this world” sex is the paradoxical the tragic affirmation and denial. This explains the high standing the Virgin Mary has within the church not because she is “break” in a long and patient growth of love and expectation but rather she is the gift to the world to God. It is through God that this love and obedience is bestowed upon Mary (cf. 1 Lk. 35-37) and she is the one who brought to him the totality of human love. Mary then is the mother of us all. By giving herself that love gives life, becoming the source of all life. By giving life this is how love is then good. Mary through her virginity reveals the fullness of love in this great mystery.

After talking about the Theotokos we can now return to the sacrament of matrimony. If we can now see marriage as being a transforming process that is done within the community and church then one begs to ask how can we understand marriage as a whole? The meaning is then based on taking the natural marriage and transforming it into the great mystery of Christ and the Church. Not only is marriage transformed but the concept of human love is also transformed. How do we know that this is the “true” meaning of marriage? In the early church marriages were done within the context of the liturgy and the Eucharist. Marriages were part of the liturgical service (with some people still deciding to have their marriages performed during a liturgy) and it is then consummated with the partaking of the Eucharist. This is how the great mystery is understood within the context of church and community. It was only later that the church received the right to perform a marriage for “civil” purposes. This has brought great pains to the sacrament of marriage. The meaning has distorted what a marriage represents. Today you will find many marriages being performed outside of the context of community and liturgy. Marriage has become a private ceremony for a few who are invited destroying the concept of community. The Eucharist is partaken of either a day before or a day after the marriage celebration. As Father Alexander calls it this has caused a “desacramentalization”. The obvious sign of this is the divorce of matrimony from the Eucharist. When the bride and groom enter the church this shows the procession into the church. Just like the church and Christ are married so too is the bride and groom. They become married to the church and the community in the body of Christ. This procession merely represents the entrance of the world into the world to come, the procession of the people in Christ and into his kingdom. Each family now is indeed a kingdom, a little church, therefore becoming the sacrament of and a way to the kingdom. The way into the kingdom is the martyria-bearing witness to Christ-meaning suffering and dying in Christ. As Fr. Alexander says marriages today has stopped being for His glory but rather for selfish reasons and ambitions of the “I” and “ME”: “A marriage which does not constantly crucify its own selfishness and self-sufficiency, which does not "die to itself” that it may point beyond itself, is not a Christian marriage. The real sin of marriage today is not adultery or lack of "adjustment” or "mental cruelty.” It is the idolization of the family itself, the refusal to understand marriage as directed toward the Kingdom of God. This is expressed in the sentiment that one would "do anything” for his family, even steal. The family has here ceased to be for the glory of God; it has ceased to be a sacramental entrance into His presence. Page 90”. The crowns which are placed on the head finally represent the ultimate reality in which everything in the world becomes a sacramental sign and anticipation.

By way of conclusion Father Alexander sums it up beautifully when he says: “…some of us are married and some are not. Some of us are called to be priests and ministers and some are not. But the sacraments of matrimony and priesthood concern all of us, because they concern our life as vocation. The meaning, the essence and the end of all vocation is the mystery of Christ and the Church. It is through the Church that each one of us finds that the vocation of all vocations is to follow Christ in the fullness of His priesthood: in His love for man and the world, His love for their ultimate fulfillment in the abundant life of the Kingdom. Page 94”.

A few quotes from chapter five:

             

Here is the whole point. As long as we visualize marriage as the concern of those alone who are being married, as something that happens to them and not to the whole Church, and, therefore, to the world itself, we shall never understand the truly sacramental meaning of marriage: the great mystery to which St. Paul refers when he says, "But I speak concerning Christ and the Church.” Page 82.

She accepted to give her body and blood—that is, her whole life—to be the body and blood of the Son of God, to be mother in the fullest and deepest sense of this world, giving her life to the Other and fulfilling her life in Him. She accepted the only true nature of each creature and all creation: to place the meaning and, therefore, the fulfillment of her life in God. Page 83.

Yet is it not significant that the relation between God and the world, between God and Israel, His chosen people, and finally between God and the cosmos restored in the Church, is expressed in the Bible in terms of marital union and love? This is a double analogy. On the one hand we understand God’s love for the world and Christ’s love for the Church because we have the experience of marital love, but on the other hand marital love has its roots, its depth and real fulfillment in the great mystery of Christ and his Church. Page 84.

Humanity is fully humanity when it is this response to God, when it becomes the movement of total self-giving and obedience to Him. But in the "natural” world the bearer of this obedient love, of this love as response, is the woman. The man proposes, the woman accepts. This acceptance is not passivity, blind submission, because it is love, and love is always active. It gives life to the proposal of man, fulfills it as life, yet it becomes fully love and fully life only when it is fully acceptance and response. Page 85.

Mary is the Virgin. But this virginity is not a negation, not a mere absence; it is the fullness and the wholeness of love itself. It is the totality of her self-giving to God, and thus the very expression, the very quality of her love. For love is the thirst and hunger for wholeness, totality, fulfillment— for virginity, in the ultimate meaning of this word. At the end the Church will be presented to Christ as a "chaste virgin” (Cor. 11:2). Page 86.

For what we find in her and what constitutes the joy of the Church is precisely the fullness of our adoration of Christ, of acceptance and love for Him. Really, here is no "cult of Mary,” yet in Mary the "cult” of the Church becomes a movement of joy and thanksgiving, of acceptance and obedience—the wedding to the Holy Spirit, which makes it the only complete joy on earth. Page 87.

For the Christian, natural does not mean either self-sufficient—a "nice little family”—or merely insufficient, and to be, therefore, strengthened and completed by the addition of the supernatural.” The natural man thirsts and hungers for fulfillment and redemption. This thirst and hunger is the vestibule of the Kingdom: both beginning and exile. Page 89.

Hence the third and final meaning of the crowns: they are the crowns of the Kingdom, of that ultimate Reality of which everything in "this world”—whose fashion passeth away—everything has now become a sacramental sign and anticipation. "Receive their crowns in Thy Kingdom,” says the priest, as he removes them from the heads of the newlyweds, and this means: make this marriage a growth in that perfected love of which God alone is the end and fullness. Page 91.

Man was created priest of the world, the one who offers the world to God in a sacrifice of love and praise and who, through this eternal Eucharist, bestows the divine love upon the world. Priesthood, in this sense, is the very essence of manhood, man’s creative relation to the "womanhood” of the created world. And Christ is the one true Priest because He is the one true and perfect man. He is the new Adam, the restoration of that which Adam failed to be. Adam failed to be the priest of the world, and because of this failure the world ceased to be the sacrament of the divine love and presence, and became "nature.” And in this "natural” world religion became an organized transaction with the supernatural, and the priest was set apart as the "transactor,” as the mediator between the natural and the supernatural. Page 92-93.

Beginning to Pray

I thought I would share this because of the beauty found within the words of St. Theophan the Recluse. The following are words spoken by St. Theophan on how to start a deep and rewarding prayer life. I invite all who are in the Toronto area to come out to the Logos Fellowship Center (33 Mallard Rd) on Friday January 11th at 9PM as my brother in Christ (Raymond) gives a talk reflecting on a practical prayer life based on the teachings of Matthew the Poor.

For those of you following the posts on the reflections of Fr. Alexander Schmemann's book For the Life of the World there are 3 more chapters left in the book and my next posts will be based on those final three chapters! Keep me in your prayers!

Fr. Matthew the Poor. To the bottom is his book Orthodox Prayer Life which I recommend everyone to read.

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Let me recall a wise custom of the ancient Holy Fathers: when greeting each other, they did not ask about health or anything else, but rather about prayer, saying "How is your prayer?" The activity of prayer was considered by them to a be a sign of the spiritual life, and they called it the breath of the spirit. If the body has breath, it lives; if breathing stops, life comes to an end. So it is with the spirit.
If there is prayer, the soul lives; without prayer, there is no spiritual life.

Prayer is so profound that an Orthodox theologian wrote, "When I pray I was new, but when I stopped praying I became old." Prayer then is understood as a way to renew the spiritual life, prayer is being alive in God, prayer gives strength and should be the ultimate joy we have in our lives. Prayer then should guide the way we live. Prayer lifts us from our isolation and depressed state to a loving communion with God in which everything we experience in brought forth in the light of God. Prayer then is a personal dialogue with God, which allows us to pour forth our hearts to God. Prayer will be true and faithful in form once we stop saying the same words from our mouth and start speaking the language of God which is pouring out our hearts in constant prayer.

Not every act of prayer is prayer. Standing at home before your icons, or here in the church, and venerating them is not yet prayer, but just the "equipment" of prayer. Reading prayers either by heart or from a book, or hearing someone else read them is not yet prayer, but only a tool or method for obtaining and awakening prayer.

Prayer itself is the piercing of our hearts by pious feelings towards God, one after another – feelings of humility, submission, gratitude, doxology, forgiveness, heart-felt prostration, brokenness, conformity to the will of God. All of our effort should be directed so that during our prayers, these feelings and feelings like them should fill our souls, so that the heart would not be empty when the lips are reading the prayers, or when the ears hear and the body bows in prostrations, but that there would be some qualitative feeling, some striving toward God. 

When these feelings are present, our praying is prayer, and when they are absent, it is not yet prayer.

The church has always taught that God does not ask of us to talk to him with words, but rather what we say emanates from a beautiful soul. The beauty of the church should express to us how important prayer is through the different lives and services the church gives to us. We have liturgy, personal prayer, the prayer of the hours, prayers with icons, the Jesus prayer. All these different aspect propel us forward in our prayers.

When these feelings are present, our praying is a true prayer, and when they are absent, it is not yet prayer.

It seems that nothing should be simpler and more natural for us than prayer in which the heart is turned toward God. But in fact it is not always like this for everyone. 

We must awaken and strengthen a prayerful spirit in our self, that is one must bring up a prayerful spirit. 

This means that we need to read or listen to prayers. Pray as you should, and you will certainly awaken and strengthen the ascent of your heart to God and you will come into a spirit of prayer.