"Then they cried to the Lord in their afflictions,
And He saved them from their distresses;
He sent His Word, and healed them,
And delivered them from their corruptions."
--Psalm 106:19-20
As I have hoped to indicate throughout these sequential blogs -- though surely you must have suspected this business already -- our lives are riddled with death.
The good news -- which, presumably, you also already have gathered -- is that even this death is potentially infused with life. In fact, awareness of infusion is surely the difference between those of us who are fully awake and those who remain, more or less, slow-witted sleepwalkers; this is the substantive difference between, say, the quick and the dead.
For a good while now, this has informed my developing sense regarding that moment in the Nicene Creed when we collectively confess our faith, saying, "He will come again to judge the living and the dead." I no longer think of that creedal proposition as asserting that the Christ is coming to mete out life or death, but rather asserting that His coming will discern and announce which of those conditions each of us has already chosen, already owned. He does not condemn us to death, but He informs us if we are dead already.
It may be fair to say, moreover, that while all of humankind continues by grace to derive its very life from God, only some of our dim crew happen to notice, and only they are in position to benefit fully from the fact. "For to live carnally minded," Saint Paul writes, "is death, but to be spiritually minded is life and peace."
Life, no less, with peace in the bargain.
Over the years since my leaving home for college (more precisely, since my belated discovery of the fathers and mothers of the Church first nudged me to the East), salvation itself has come to mean something larger to me, something fuller, both more substantial and more immediate.
For the monks on Mount Athos, salvation -- or, better, "being saved" -- does not have to do with a discrete and isolated instant of conversion; nor is it a matter of our cinching a done deal. The more traditional understanding of salvation indicates our continual moving toward and into a continuously thickening reality. Those of you who remember C.S. Lewis's beautiful little book The Great Divorce will have a likely image to accompany this vertiginous prospect of a thickening reality and of the human person shifting from airy shadow to illuminated substance.
Salvation is the ongoing process of our being redeemed; it is our recovery from our chronic separation from God, both now and ever, and it includes our becoming increasingly aware of Who our God is. Our miraculous salvation has very little to do with the popular notion of "dying and going to heaven," and has far more to do with finally living, and with entering the kingdom of God, here and now, partaking of His endless life, here and now.
Here again, Archimandrite Sophrony of the Holy Mountain comes to us with keen insight: "The essence of sin consists not in the infringement of ethical standards, but in a falling away from the eternal Divine life for which man was created and to which, by his very nature, he is called." Conversely, the essence of salvation lies in our leaning into that eternal Divine life, and our thereby being in position to derive endless life from our mystical, but nonetheless palpable, connection with the God Who Is.
The monks and their Orthodox traditions have insisted, from the earliest writings on the matter, that this calling and this salvation belongs to all of humankind, not just to those relatively few who acknowledge membership in the Church. Of course, the Orthodox fathers and mothers would be quick to insist that the most trustworthy and most satisfying road to full participation in the saving life of Christ is revealed in the traditional teaching of and participation in that One, Holy, Orthodox, Catholic, and Apostolic Church; they are also fairly unshakable in the conviction that the One Body -- that is to say, Christ's Body -- is synonymous with that self-same Church. We acquire our salvation through our partaking of that Body, regardless of our meager apprehension of the matter.
Bishop Kallistos Ware famously parses this mystery when he writes, "We can say where the Church is; we cannot say where she is not." As our Lord Jesus Christ tells the earnest and anxious Nicodemus, like the wind, the Spirit blows where it wills.
As I now see it, salvation has come to mean deliverance, and deliverance right now, from the death-in-life routine that we often settle for, the sleepwalking life for which I, and maybe you, have often settled in the past. My beloved Saint Isaak of Syria offers firm support to this vertiginous phenomenon:
The man who has found love eats and drinks Christ every day and hour, and hereby is made immortal. "He that eateth of this bread," [Christ] says, "which I will give to him, shall not see death unto eternity." Blessed is he who consumes the bread of love, which is Jesus! He who eats of love eats Christ, the God over all. ... Wherefore, the man who lives in love reaps the fruit of life from God, and while yet in this world, he even now breathes the air of the resurrection.
Moreover, while salvation necessarily happens to persons, it is not to be understood as a merely personal matter.
I continue to enjoy, and enjoy repeating, the surprising response that a monk at Simonopetra gave to a man who, thinking he had come to evangelize the Holy Mountain, interrupted us to ask the kind father if Jesus Christ was his "personal savior."
"No," the smiling monk said without hesitation, "I like to share him."
Thanks to the long-standing tradition that monk manifests, I have a developing sense that salvation finally must have to do with all of us, collectively, and that it must have to do with all else, as well -- all of creation, in fact.
It turns out that I am not alone in my thinking so.
My reading in the fathers and the mothers of the church -- assisted by my discovery of what I would call rabbinic, midrashic Bible-reading -- has me thinking that all of creation is implicated in this phenomenon we variously call salvation, redemption, reconciliation. Like the late theologian John Romanides, I suspect that our saving relationship with God is quite specifically "as the Body of Christ"; our salvation is not a discrete, individualized, private bargain struck, but comes by way of our continuing participation in Divine Life, as a member of a Holy Body that is at once both alive and life-giving.
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St. Paul told us to 'keep running the race' and 'to work out your salvation with fear and trembling.' St. James stated that "Faith without works is dead." Lastly, Christ is very specific in Matthew 25 about the duties His followers must abide by.
Ortega y Gasset, "man has to make his own existence at every single moment. He is given the abstract possibility of existing, but not the reality. This he has to conquer hour after hour. Man must earn his life, not only economically, but metaphysically.... Being a great financier has to be conceived of in an idea, "being' the project is different from holding the idea...like a boat drawn half up on the shore... an entity whose being consists not in what it is already, but in what it is not yet. Everything else in the world is (already) what it is.... To be free means to be lacking in constitutive identity, not to have subscribed to a (pre-)determined being, to be able to be other than what one was, to be unable to install oneself once and for all in any given being. The only attribute of the fixed, stable being in the free being is this constitutive instability... Man "goes on being' and “unbeingâ€--living. He goes on accumulating being—the past; he goes on making for himself a being through his dialectical series of experiments… man is on a pilgrimage of being… man has no nature; what he has is—history.
Nature is to things as
History is to man.â€
Even though we are determined by genes, memes, and environment, the acts in our past can be remade. A depressed person, after a ‘cure’ in therapy, suddenly remembers happy memories from his childhood. The animal is a ‘given’ while man must move from th e animal’s passive unconsciousness to questioning consciousness—the theme of the Book of Job--a man who puts his own Being into question, and thereby questions God, and God’s existence. Man, alone, determines the values by which he lives because he is not endowed with a ready-made self or nature. In a God-given universe, values and rights are absolute and clearly defined, and man daily kills himself in order that God may live.
See my permalink, today, for a refutation of the Kantian concept that there is a ‘God calling us’ as an priori ideal which forms human consciousness. Yes, I agree, our identity is “the very agency of our freedom, our potentially inexhaustible progress.†It is exactly this identity which is lost when a God with any sort of intrusive or miraculous powers is imagined (See my permalink from a few weeks ago). Job was free, in all its terror and uncertainty, the day he was ‘created’, the day he found he had an ego he could ‘watch’, at the onset of duality and the end of childlike emotional certainty, usually after age 9 in humans.
Look at it this way: The shepherds of megachurches tell their sheep they will gain not only eternal life, but wealth if they believe along with their masters i the hierarchy. Salvation in the afterlife is a pretty cheap ploy to start a worldly enterprise. Churches, as a rule, bear the same relation to spiritual advancement as the for profit colleges that accept students' money (and the big government subsidies from being termed "colleges" just as churches are tax free by being "churches") are related to education. Which is hardly ever.
S.
In Brooklyn, he was relieved of his duties when he asked only for his Volkswagen Van to be repaired to take kids on camping trips. In Denver, the flood of street people into the church scared the straights, so they asked him to leave. Only in prison was he finally accepted.
The mainline churches haven't a clue about how to follow Christ, or their clues are of the less variety. Still, many of them, and even fundamentalists, can lead great lives despite the warped dogma the church persists in foisting onto Christ's teachings.
Not time at all, really, but space
like you don’t know, and knowledge there,
in general, finally admits
how meager a consolation
it has been all along. Once
you grow accustomed to the sprawl
and velocity your own mind
articulates (and that queasy
rocking tapers to a hum) you might
have pause to entertain a sense
of presence reaching suddenly,
and now, and deeply, ever so.
we cannot leave that that is even if we wanted to.
we do not have the free will to leave.
we must express we cannot opt out. expression is a necessity.
we cannot opt out even if we think we can.
free will is a fallacy in that sense.
if we had perfect total free will we could opt out of life.
we can opt our of earth life as a human but not the life of our unique soul.
as expressions we can and do make choices but in all those choices we are expressing that that is.
few in the world know that all is of the infinite, the good, the evil, and everything in between.
there is no need for salvation. there is no reason to even ask for it.
there is a need to become aware of our errors and missing the mark and then regret them and then change.
bliss awaits those that can see "god" in everything and everyone.
Jung's inner circle would always joke that, when one of them announced a great success, that it would soon be balanced by a setback. Jung used this example--that any personal expansion of consciousness is followed by a compensating ‘demand’ that an even greater field of the 'unconscious' (of humanity) must be consciously integrated. He advised against seeking too much the mystical or spiritual flight because of the tendency to dissociate as a means of refusing the 'darkness' which must necessarily be integrated, without theodicy.
Note that I just said all this, about a psychological work in the psyche/myth, without reference to Jesus as my personal savior. You could leave out a bunch of religious justifications in your article and you would have a state of consciousness you could be personally responsible for and proud of.
Note that you are literalizing a bit by confusing consciousness (a ‘nothing’) with energy (thickening, unless you mean ‘thorough a glass darkly’).
You are capable of ‘reconciliation’ because you mention the word DEATH (see my permalink from a month or so ago). Consciousness, because it is negation ('nihilation', Sartre) is death. Please continue your exposition.
thickening = hardening of the heart => burn somewhere for some undisclosed period of time
just a hint, nobody else seems to want to expose Lewis
New avatar, I see, are you a shapeshifter? :)
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THe "only" concern and stumbling block is the question of choice. Seems that even in trying and opening our heart to God we still cannot feel him and not feel we are saved. When do we actually get to experience him each hour and moment? as we experience our breath?as if we are in constant communion and prayer?is this available to eople not in a monastery or convent?
How hard do we have to try and if we don't have to try so hard and it is available then why is this grace being withheld? Or is the Grace simply learning to walk a line between suffering and joy?
...and thinking somehow doesn't get me closer to the answer.
But thank you again for a lovely post.
I think few people really achieve ceaseless prayer, but some do.
I think Muslims come close in their orthodox practice of call to prayer 5 times a day.
So by Orthodox you mean tthe Greek Orthodox church? is that like the Russian Orthodox church?
If works(being good) have anything to do with it, how good is good enough??
For people truly struggling with this question, I very highly recommend a book by Andy Stanley called, "How Good is Good Enough". Very very good read.
Don't let legalists rob you of the joy of living under grace.
Carter is a great man. Way beyond me, my life, my deeds, or my training, or IQ. But, I know one thing for sure, I worked in his campaign in the 1970's in the Florida primary, met him three times, and he one of my favorite humans to emulate. I don't think that Jesus saved him Mr. Carter from anything, I just think that Jimmy Carter is one of the most gifted humans of our generation.
You're right in the notion that Christ didn't save Mr. Carter from anything; his life, just like your's and mine was meant to be filled with suffering in one form or fashion. Yet despite that, he chose to rise above it and live a life filled with love and displayed that in his deeds.
To follow Christ and find salvation doesn't mean that you'll quit suffering from pain. But what it can mean is that when we are called to suffer or serve those around us that do, we can see that there is somehow a purpose there despite the fact we have no ability to truly understand the reasoning for it.
Christ tells us to overcome evil with good. There's no mention that suffering wouldn't be a part of that. I'm sure Mr. Carter could testify to that yet as any man or woman could. But that never stopped him....
One of my cousins, now dead, was a priest who described heaven as “knowing everythingâ€. Now I could live (and die) for that.
That being said, I firmly believe that if there is access to a heaven, then it is by individual application only. The fairly recent notion of collectively “being saved†and gathered up like the members of some celestial cruise party owes more, in my opinion, to the “one-upmanship, country club membership†yearnings of our culture than any great plan of the Creator whomsoever he, she or it may be.
A: Neither. Mainly wishful thinking.
C. Confusional distortions
D. Diffusional pretentions