(Search & Sitemap)
(Search & Sitemap)
> Writing >
Socratic Dialogue >
Spirit
Previous
1
2
3
4
5
6
Next
Printer-Friendly Version
Links: Where did you get "plant a tree" from?
Dexios: Martin Luther. When he was asked what he would do if he knew the Lord were returning tomorrow, instead of talking about praying long prayers or wailing about his sins, he simply said what he was planning on doing, which was to plant a tree. If it was really OK for him to plan to plant a tree, as he did, then there's no particular reason that if the Lord were returning the next day he should be suddenly embarassed about legitimate, spiritual activity and try to be super-spiritual.
Contemplation seems to include a lot of planting a tree. It can mean entering a monastery, but it can also mean working a job, making friendships, shooting hoops, and playing with the neighbor's children. If we go to church, or try to cultivate a discipline of quiet, that means quite a lot of "secular" things, a "secular" body for spirit to be manifest in. And people who give up on doing big things for God often end up doing tremendous things for God as part of their contemplation.
Links: Huh? How does that work? Or are you just being down on activists?
Dexios: Ever hear about a Wesley boy trying to do serious work for God?
Links: No.
Dexios: One of the Wesley brothers believed that missionaries were the biggest super-Christians, and so got everything arranged to be a big missionary for God.
And then he hit rock bottom. He failed as a missionary, returned a failure, and then fell lower than rock bottom when, on the ship, there was a terrible storm, and he was afraid for his life and puzzled about why there were men on deck singing. When he asked them if they were afraid, they said that no, they were not afraid, because they believed in Jesus. That finished him.
Only after that happened did he become one of the biggest forces in American Christianity.
Links: You make God sound cruel.
Dexios: If you expect God to share an activist mentality then God looks very cruel, but God isn't a secular activist. This wasn't even a social justice issue; Wesley said "God, I'll be a really good hammer and do really impressive work," and if anything, God said, "I don't want a hammer. I want a son." People who try to be activists sometimes make the best sons after they fail as activists, but the reason God didn't endorse Wesley's plan about how he was going to make a difference was that God makes a difference through people, and however big and important the work is that needs to be done, God makes sons first and foremost, and never circumvents sonship to "cut to the chase" and get to the important part, because to him sonship is the important part, and he can equip people to do results once they fail as hammers if need be.
There's a big difference between "I'll do the best I can" and "I'll lay myself before God and work as he is at work." The difference is whether your power is a matter of spirit. There was a visiting African pastor who came to the U.S. and said, "It's amazing what you can do without the Holy Spirit;" that stinging compliment is one God's sons need not hear. The Sermon on the Mount says more about where our power should come from than what we should achieve; the Gospel is about trusting God, not just about the fate of our souls but getting things done here on earth. It's challenging and it becomes all the more challenging when you realize how broken of a world we live in.
And perhaps God also does things through people who think they know how mountains are moved here on earth and try to short-circuit God's call to become a son like his Son. God could still work with them if they more fully spirit. Spirit has its own power in God.
Links: Let me change the subject, or maybe I'm not changing the subject. Where do the seven sacraments fit into this?
Dexios: Baptism, Holy Communion, Holy Matrimony, the Sign of the Cross, reverently Bowing, the Holy Kiss, and the Blessing of Fruit--
Links: --that's a rather strange list of seven sacraments!
Dexios: It seems perfectly natural to me. If it seems strange to you, then perhaps there's something you don't understand about the usual list. Holy Communion, Baptism, Confirmation, Confession, Ordination, Marriage, and Unction for Healing are not the Seven Exceptions. They may be the biggest seven--but you don't understand them until you realize that there's either one sacrament or a thousand, and that a thousand little things in our piety are the same sort of thing as The Big Seven. Like blessing fruit to celebrate the Feast of the Holy Transfiguration!
Links: But why bless fruit then? Do you also bless candles to celebrate the Annunciation?
Dexios: I'd have to look up when we bless candles, but it does not seem strange to me to bless fruit. The Transfiguration is not just when the Son of God shone, but it is specifically when his body, the first of the material world to be drawn into spirit, shone. It was a first taste of the Transfiguration when the rest of his kingdom comes in force, and the Holy Transfiguration of Christ ultimately becomes the holy transfiguration of the whole Creation, and its fruits. Today people might pick something else to represent Creation's productivity, but grapes and fruit come from Creation and are a part of it, and in a sense by blessing fruit on the Feast of the Holy Transfiguration we know what it means, that it's not just something way back when that's only about Christ, but about something that is meant to expand through the whole Creation of which Christ is head. Just as Christ is to be the first of many sons and draw mankind into him, so his body is the first case of matter drawn into the divine, of body that is spirit, and his coming was the beginning of a shockwave that keeps reaching out.
Links: So is the Transfiguration a big enough deal that it's worth adorning with a sacrament, like many other holidays.
Dexios: That makes it sound like something external. The spirit of the Transfiguration is the spirit of sacrament, and of icons. I've said earlier that spirit transforms body, or should; now I'll go further and say that God makes us spirit through body. If you try to understand Holy Communion and ask the wrong questions, you're in danger of stopping at learning what happens after the priest has consecrated the elements, even though it's important that the bread and wine have become the body and blood of Christ they represent. That's only half the story. The rest of the story is when this bread and wine that have become the body and blood of Christ are partaken by the faithful, and the faithful are transformed. Our bodies are not a mere ornament as we partake of the divine nature; we partake of the Church and Creation, and the divine life, precisely when we receive what has been transformed that it may transform us. God makes us spirit through not only our bodies but his material creation: the Word became flesh, and the flesh became Word, and the Word keeps becoming flesh, and the flesh keeps becoming Word, and the shockwave ever reaches outward.
Links: And the Church has a lot of blessings, from a traveller's blessing to blessing Pascha baskets, doesn't it? And there are many sacred actions as we say our prayers, aren't there? I imagine if you counted all the sacramental rites and sacred actions you'd actually wind up with more than the figure of one thousand that you grabbed.
Dexios: But the nature of a sacrament doesn't really end up there. Ultimately the world is icon and sacrament. A man is the microcosm of the universe, but you have to understand that the "universe" is the spiritual as well as physical world, and that "microcosm" means that the spiritual and physical are all bound up in miniature. In a man who is spirit, they are more tightly bound together: you can look at most people's faces and if they're not masking then you can see into their spirit; spirit and body do not war against each other. And if you understand how our bodies are in fact the bodies of our spirits, and our spirits are the spirits of our bodies, then you understand that in "man writ large", the universe that is the opposite of man the microcosm, then matter is pregnant with spirit.
Perhaps the crowning jewel is the kind of rite over which a priest presides. It is a crowning jewel of the warp and woof of "mundane" life, if life is ever "mundane" properly understood. For one example, you may have heard of the clergy shortage in Alaska: something like a third of the state population is Orthodox but there are precious few priests. And a congregation asked the bishop what to do as they cannot often have a priest to worship. The bishop said only two things. One of them I will not mention. The other was to eat together.
Holy Communion casts a long shadow. Part of this means that a priest can bless fruit and anyone can partake of it, and maybe there's a blessing even if it's not a big deal as the Eucharist. But you're missing something if that's the only place you look.
A meal with other people is part of the Eucharist unfurling. It's not directly the Eucharist, but if you understand what the Eucharist is then a common meal stands in its luminous shadow. The bishop's advice was not simply a substitute for imperfect times; even when there is a priest it is good for the Eucharist to unfurl into a common meal, and however nice it is for the priest to bless the food that's not all that is going on. Table fellowship is common communion and "common" conceals a wealth of majesty. It's not a really different thing from the Eucharist.
Links: [pause] It seems like I want to learn it all. What else is there to learn?
Dexios: Not to learn everything. You can learn about the priest, whose role I haven't covered, but what I've said about us needing monks applies even more strongly to one person given over to be spirit in a way that helps others be spirit. There is spiritual discipline, which almost as many different shapes as sacrament--I haven't talked about fasting: the demons always fast but only someone like us with body and spirit can be transformed and have his body become spirit by fasting. I haven't talked about--
If you want to become more spirit, why don't you think of an act of spirit and do that?
(Search & Sitemap)
(Search & Sitemap)
> Writing >
Socratic Dialogue >
Spirit
Previous
1
2
3
4
5
6
Next
Printer-Friendly Version