Cycles

Sometimes I can look inward with a little bit of clarity and get small insights. Then, every once in a while I can see a little deeper; the insights are bigger, and the consequent changes in my life greater from what I learn.

Cycles and Insight

Literally

Is it really the case that literal events in scripture are “simpler” or somehow more accessible than a figurative understanding of them. Sometimes the figurative is considered more lofty and the literal is seen as the “poor man’s theology” but as I attempt to understand the mysteries of the faith I find this to be reversed.

As a spiritually poor man, as in “For he shall stand at the right hand of the poor, to save him from those that condemn his soul.” (Ps 109), my door to faith seems to be made of types and figures. I strain toward the Real light behind them but it is the types and figures that are within reach.

At Nativity the Lord is born in our hearts.  On Tabor He gives us a foretaste of the blessed eternal future state of going from glory to glory and seeing Him as He Is.  He opens our eyes as He opened the eyes of the blind, and He heals our spiritual diseases as He healed the lepers.

On Holy Saturday He descends into Hades, breaking down the gates of hell and freeing us from darkness.  On Pascha He rises, bringing us up into the light to share in sonship and glory.  

And as the Nativity hymn says…

“The angels offer Thee a hymn; the heavens a star; the Magi, gifts; the shepherds, their wonder; the earth, its cave; the wilderness, the manger: and we offer Thee a Virgin Mother” - Synaxis of the Mother of God

The Theotokos, humanity raised up to the highest possible level of piety, purity and obedience is the gate through which Grace flows.

The list goes on and on with these figurative understandings which one may straightforwardly apply, like salve, to one’s heart.  As analogies they can be both powerful, and general enough to apply to ourselves.

But all of these things actually happened, and if we ignore that fact we immediately cut off their power for us.  If we were to reduce them to a pretty story, a teaching tale to be applied therapeutically (and this is exactly the swamp into which modernism has wandered) we fall from the level of actual truth to subjective truth.  By reducing them from truths to fables they are cast from the clearly visible altar, seen by all, down into a sort of labyrinthine library, an infinite, downward sloping puzzle castle with no exit.

The literal must be remembered to be true in order to illumine the figurative.  But the literal truth, in addition to being the power source, as it were, of the more easily digestible ‘milk’ of metaphor, also represents a higher understanding.  This distinction is comparable to the difference between reading the words of Jesus in scripture and hearing Him speak them in person.

So, in addition to experiencing Christ being born in our hearts at Nativity, we ought to powerfully recall that He did actually take birth, that God did actually become Man.  One can only go so far in this recollection before encountering challenging slopes; after all, God’s nature is unplumbable.  But we may take heart, and increase our faith, because God has literally, not figuratively come to us, offering not figurative but literal sonship.  Even though the full ramifications disappear far beyond the horizon, like a ladder ascending to heaven it is a narrow but navigable path, not a chasm.

At a figurative level I understand and experience His immanence ‘through a glass darkly’, and even if I can’t make a full step past this rather fleeting, tantalizing and often frustrating degree of faith, I can certainly aspire and strive toward that ideal of ‘literalism’, that lofty plateau of theosis in which I know, or rather am filled to overflowing with the knowledge, that He is Incarnate.

None of us, I hope, only seek to metaphorically gaze upon the Face of God.

In ‘materialistic theology’, one often hears the word “literalism” interpreted as magical thinking in which a fairy tale is superimposed onto mundane events.  But what really “literally” happened is so far from mundane, so far beyond our comprehension that we will be working well nigh unto eternity to sort it all out and properly internalize our understanding of it.

Cast off the shackles of popular impiety and the recent centuries of malfeasant speculation!  The truth ‘which has been believed everywhere, always, by all’ is unchanged!  Ours is a living God, into Whose True Analogies we have been adopted.

Nativity, 2021

Where did I come from?

 

Real Choice

Choices are such an everyday thing that it's easy to forget how significant they are.  The situation is made blurry by the fact that the majority of choices feel autonomic, and one might have to sail quite a ways before coming to a choice that rises above the waterline of habit and pragmatism.  But we always do find ourselves facing difficult decisions.  Sometimes the difficulty lies in the uncertainty of our knowledge, the limits of our reasoning power, or in the number of apparently equivalent options.  And sometimes the difficulty cuts through something more substantial and meaningful to us.

But even an apparently meaningless choice can feel vividly real.  It may not matter at all which shape pasta I cook for dinner, but I can reach a great, open space where I feel no powerful forces pushing me in one direction or the other, I'm not in a hurry and I can watch the process of decision taking place.  I can feel a visceral feeling of uncompelled freedom as my hand wavers between the tagliatelle and the spaghetti.  This feels very much like my choice: I am free to listen to every possible witness who might come forward to make a case for one or the other.  One says that I should use the spaghetti because it is only half full and I could avoid having two opened packages.  Another brings up the fact that a few weeks ago one of the children expressed mild delight in having tagliatelle.  Others come forward but none have a strong case, and there I am, left to make this universe-shaping decision.  The full impact of one choice or another in the course of eternal time may be hidden from me, but there can be no doubt in my mind that the well from which this choice is made goes very deep indeed.

The reality of our choices has a ripple effect, so to speak, in terms of implications.  If my choices are real, then I am really responsible for their consequences.  If my choices are real, then that deep well of "I"-ness from which they proceed must also contain something real.  The realness in both cases is at least as real as my experience is vivid.

But there is something much more profound than a hazily grasped notion of something casually labeled "reality".  A choice, to the extent it is real, proceeds all the way from Being, from deep in that mysterious well within us, from the realm of ideals, good, evil and consciousness, and it goes all the way out, into that shared, objective world of concrete, static objects.  And not only does it connect the inner world to the outer world, it extends along the axis of time, participating in eternity.  The pasta I cook tonight will always be the pasta I cooked tonight, and however obscure this detail, it will be eternally recorded in the annals of time, becoming a fixed and immutable aspect of my family's experience.

Given my first-hand experience of the reality of my choices, I can take a look at that ancient explanation for why there is evil: "because free will".  That is, for will to be free we can't be denied the option of choosing evil instead of good.  And if our will isn't free our being isn't real.  There is no possibility of moral choice without free (and real) will.  If a person is watching an eternal movie with no say in the matter, then nothing whatsoever could be said about their character, or even of their personality.  There would be no 'there' there, with respect to the identity of an absolutely passive observer.  A person who does not make real choices is not a person.  This leads to the terrifying truth that good and evil are also real.  That is, we make real choices which are or are not aligned in a real way with real goodness.

It's likely that a good many decisions, like my looming pasta decision, are morally neutral.  But the outcome of a decision depends almost entirely on how it is made, and the small decisions are my practice for making the big decisions.  Through small, low risk decisions I have the opportunity to explore that deep well from which all my decisions emerge.  I might choose spaghetti over tagliatelle merely because I prefer it, ignoring what my family likes, and through numerous such decisions establish a pattern of basing decisions on a very questionable set of perspectives, empowering them over others.  Or I might favor a pattern of decision making that adds up neutral factors like an accountant, lulling me to sleep with an increasingly automated and streamlined process, and end up thereby blinded to other perspectives, less able to perceive my own inward being.

This might be a lot of pressure to put on a decision about pasta, but the buck has to stop somewhere.  If not pasta, when?  When will I examine myself and dig down to the roots of my impulses and assert real ideals over autonomous preferences?  When will I establish a solid allegiance to goodness, and train myself to choose that in every situation?

If I was completely on my own in this matter I would be quite lost.  I would aspire to find good ideals, but my basis for measuring them would be fuzzy and the clarity of my perceptions would be limited to my own cognitive faculties, thereby leaving me more or less blind.  If goodness existed only in that arid, individualistic, relative form, that would be as far as I could go.  But goodness, being real, has a profoundly mysterious, yet real point of origin.  Rather than grasping at straws in a vast field of amorphous uncertainty, I can turn in that direction.

Let's look at the reality of goodness just a little more deeply.  First of all, goodness can't be objectified, it can only be understood from the perspective of being.  It is part of our inward experience.  It isn't a mere 'direction', we know this because it is absolutely not static or inert.  It is no mere 'principle', and we know this because we cannot isolate goodness from that deep well of our own being.

It turns out that reality and personhood are inextricably intertwined.  All of our experience points toward this: that realness and personhood are the same thing.  That for there to be a 'there' there, there has to be someone there.  All reality traces its origins back to being, and all being is personally experienced.  Further, our experience of being is never multiple, it is always singular.  It is irreducible.  Personhood is irreducible and singular.  Goodness is therefore no mere sign pointing toward something we will invent in the future.  It always points, with a living finger, toward the better decision, toward the better circumstance, the better path, and toward something which--right now, not later--is better.  It is not a pointer into a virtual realm where nebulous ideas explore themselves, it is clearly and blatantly a pointer beyond ourselves, far far beyond our awareness of our personal wells of being, far deeper than the ideal of our "heart's heart", toward a genuine and full Well.  Real goodness fills us and guides us.  It holds us like children, and gives us unexpected strength, carrying us through difficulty.

Yes, fortunately goodness has a real, personal source.  Not just a direction I could turn to face a lonely road, but a Person toward Whom I can turn, and fully expect to be guided.

Disclaimer: the fact that I might turn in this direction in my negligent and half-hearted way should not lead anyone to use me as any kind of measure for the Grace that ensues from doing this properly.  My very limited experience of turning 'somewhat genuinely' in the more or less right direction, while still greedily holding on to my passions, has blown me away but it is unlikely that the results could be construed as objectively impressive.

All of this is not to say that the answer is solely to turn to God in helplessness with my pasta-related decision.  Unless I turn the whole well of my being over to the well Maker, the well will not be repaired.  What is not assumed is not healed, after all.  The pasta decision is a mere wart on the surface of the misshapen beast of my fallen will.

Through small things, like decisions about pasta, I hope to gradually become illumined by Grace such that God's light may shine on more fundamental aspects of my being.  But surely I can reach deeper into my faculty of will and bring that to the altar, instead of a box of pasta.

A voice in the wilderness

"John replied in the words of Isaiah the prophet: “I am the voice of one calling in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord.’” - John 1:23

St John the Baptist is, himself, a path leading up to the Lord, in that he gathered up many people with the message of repentance, than pointed out Christ, saying "Behold, the Lamb of God".  But more subtly, what is the "way of the Lord" which needs to be straightened for us, and why is the voice calling in the wilderness rather than the marketplace?

The terms "wilderness" and "desert" are somewhat interchangeable, both referring to a range of experiences, all of which involve separating oneself from worldly priorities and becoming able to hear the "still, small voice".  They imply ascesis and self-discipline, denial of self will, and placing oneself far away from the noise of the city of the passions.

"For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse" - Rom 1:20

It is in the wilderness that we can see God in His Works, in creation, most clearly.  In the city, both literally and metaphorically, we surround ourselves with our own works.  When we step outside the city, and particularly when we distance ourselves from these things with a "broken and contrite heart", and our sight can return to us.

It is through repentance and humility, through a clean heart, that the way of the Lord is made straight.

All of this is still true now.  Though St John made the way of the Lord straight in an immediate, literal way all those years ago, he still points this way to us today, and this way is still the Way.  By going into the wilderness of a contrite and humbled heart, by stepping outside the city of the passions and worldly interests, by following the "immaterial" way of life of St John, of ascesis and simplicity--that is, through repentance--we make the way straight so that we can bow down and say with sincerity, "Thy will be done in me, Lord".  That is, we make straight the way into the Way.

Fine Tuning

I just read "A Fortunate Universe", which, in a nutshell, explains in great detail how utterly improbable our universe is, and then proceeds to cover the 'what it means' angle surprisingly well.  In particularly, I was very pleased to hear one of the better arguments for the existence of God presented and defended rather well.  One seldom hears the more mature arguments these days, only straw men, so having the "ultimate cause" argument explained and held up as valid was fantastic.  It was even better that it was held up against naturalism, and to see naturalisms flaccid and avoidant nature exposed.

The case for the theism was made strongly, but despite this, the authors drifted off toward the required nebulous conclusion for a book in this genre.  I imagine this is how most of us lose track of God: by drifting away into distraction without ever disproving or refuting the solid, rational arguments we have found, and without denying the powerful feelings of certainty we have encountered.  Rather, we blithely wander off onto some other train of thought and are carried far away from the memory of such things.  After enough stops, we forget that the proofs were convincing or the feelings urgent.

The proof, for those curious enough to want to know but not curious enough to read the book, was simply that everything has a cause, and that the ultimate origin of a thing has to be of a different kind.  Something has to be self-originating, or you never reach bottom.  The example is of what holds us up.  The floor?  The earth's surface holds that up, what holds that up?  Eventually you reach the earth's core, which is a different kind of thing.  In the same way, physical laws are far too specific, too complex, too elaborate and creative to say, as does naturalism, "they just are that way".  To say this is a very ignorant thing to say, a short sighted thing to say.  To say instead that "they arose from other natural laws" leads to the problem of not reaching bottom, and turns out to be a very weak and flabby answer.  The attempt to reduce the cause of what we see, which is amazing, into something less, begins to sound disingenuous.

There is a famous argument which goes something like, you are wandering through the wilderness and you come upon a watch.  Intuitively you are not likely to imagine that it just grew there, but rather that it was made.

Overall, to sum up the proof, the laws of the universe are so elaborate and so perfectly attuned to life, and so utterly improbable, that it is much more likely that they were created.

But the point I wanted to make is a comparison between the fine tuning of physical laws and what I see as their spiritual counterpart.  If you change any physical constant very much at all you end up with a sterile universe in which life is not possible.  Everything is set up so that we can exist, and it is not a simple, or arbitrary thing.  If you increase gravity just a little you get only black holes, for instance.  Similarly, if we step outside of God's spiritual laws, thinking we can do just as well on our own we will quickly find ourselves in a sterile universe, or in other words, in outer darkness.  The light is, itself, infinite and accommodating, but it requires that we stick to what is true.  Varying from truth by even a small amount causes us to fall into the consequences of falsity.

The fundamental error of evil is to try to be gods without God.  This is, of course, the error that modern humanity is attempting to repeat.  Not all of humanity, of course, but enough that it is quite disturbing to watch.

Certainly, a very large part of the population is doing exactly what Lucifer tried to do in a completely overt way, casting aside God, and with Him, all possibility of a successful conclusion.  But we do this more subtly when we attempt to change any of these fine tuned universal constants which God has designed for us to follow: when we imagine that some part of God's laws are outdated and require us to redesign them.

Of course, on first sight, there are many commandments we are unlikely to understand.  In fact it is guaranteed that we will not understand any of them on first sight, or on second sight, or after years of study.  But this is what one might call an asymptotic approach to mystery.  As we strive toward truth we find ourselves growing closer to it, without ever having reached it, per se.  At some point, the truth reaches back in our direction and then we only need to keep moving closer, no longer needing to 'get there' ourselves.

Difficult commandments require that we keep trying to understand them.  We often have to leave incomplete and faulty placeholders in the places where we have failed to understand something, but we must remember we have put our own shoddy creations there as band-aids, and not pretend that these areas are healed.

If one does happen to find that one's stream of theology is muddy, the last thing one should do is attempt to filter the water with one's own unclean hands. 

We have, rather, to dig deeper into the Church, to recover the unsullied waters that flow directly from the source.  I am regularly emboldened in my certainty of this, each time I draw from its "2000 year reading list": there are indeed clear flowing streams which accurately represent the universal laws and commandments which are suitable for our spiritual consumption.  It is still possible to drink from the streams that flow from the rock not carved by human hands.

The Problem of Evil, Redux

"Out of the depths have I cried unto you, O Lord. Lord, hear my voice: let your ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications. If you, Lord, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who shall stand? But there is forgiveness with you, that you may be feared." - Psalm 130:1-4

In order to love us God has to be extremely tolerant of evil. Thus the extent and degree of evil and suffering in the world is no surprise in light of a loving God.

Without goodness we would not be able to see evil. The very fact that we can see it indicates that we have the capacity to choose goodness. Therefore the evil that we see is also a choice. Our choice. It is not God's fault.

But what about the evil others experience: the suffering of the innocent?

How could goodness or evil exist if there were no possibility of doing good or harm to others? A universe without such choices, or rather, Being without the free choice of good, closes the door to the experience of goodness.

What if the suffering of the innocent could be accommodated? Then all that would be left would be the choice of good or evil and temporary pain. Imagine a way in which suffering could be experienced as growth, learning and rising upward.

This is what Jesus shows us. He demonstrates that when innocent and crucified we forgive, we love. We pray, we reach inward, we reach toward God and we are lifted. Sadness and pain do not damage our soul when we have this living water.

"And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me." - 2 Cor 12:9