OrthoAnalytika

The Sunday before Theophany On Repentance and Its Relationship to Beauty and Love 2 Timothy 4: 5-8;  St. Mark 1: 1-8 “Behold, I will send my messenger before your face, who will prepare your way, the voice of one crying in the wilderness: ‘Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight;” After me comes he who is mightier than I, the strap of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie.  I have baptized you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.” Sandals – he knew humility (despite the many temptations he faced for pride!).  The problem is that we don’t: we must listen to and heed St. John’s message (as found in St. Matthew 3:2); “Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand”.  This is not some prophecy of doom, but a revelation that God is among us – and the warning that we need to prepare if we are to meet Him well. “We need to repent?  We need to change?  Why?”  Some preachers might come at this by pointing out the many temptations that we succumb to, call us to account for the resulting sin, and explain the need for contrition,  confession, and absolution.  I want to come at it from a different direction: I want to focus on how this call for repentance flows naturally from one of the central components of our faith about the world and how it works.  Specifically, I want to explain how an appreciation for the existence of beauty should naturally lead us towards repentance (and from repentance to glory). Why come at it this way?  Because I am concerned about our faith.  There are strong attacks being made against Christianity, and I am not sure that people with a lukewarm and superficial faith can withstand them; people whose faith is not informed by deeper knowledge and experience will drift away.  There is a sense in which that might be useful – I am not sure how much good a superficial belief does a person, and we have all seen first hand the detrimental effect that nominal Christians have on the internal life of our parishes, not to mention their witness to the broader community.  God says of such people – through St. John the Theologian - that He will vomit such people out of His mouth (Revelation 3:15-17)!  No one wants to be vomited out of the mouth of God – and we do not want it to happen.  This is why we must evangelize the lukewarm Christians in our midst.  And it is not enough to give them a set of rules, describe how they have broken these rules, and then call them to repentance.  Nor is it enough to give them more words that describe what it is that the true Christian believes or what Orthodoxy is.  We must do everything we can so that they can personally experience the literal Truth of God’s grace.  Ideally, this would happen through our worship together, but without an appreciation for the deeper nature of the things that worship taps into (the “Old Magic” as Aslan puts it in the Narnia series), it does little more than provide sentimental entertainment.  People need to be taught so that they can enjoy the fruits of worship; they need to be taught so that they “may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand.” (Ephesians 6:13b)  I am not talking about the removal of doubt, but the answer to every thinking Christian’s prayer; “Lord I believe; help me in my unbelief!” (St. Mark 9:24; St. Luke 17:5).  I think that one of the best ways to strengthen our faith and counter these new attacks –  and especially the misleading reductionism of the militant atheists – is to focus on the fundamental existence of beauty, morality, and love and the implications of this ontology for us.  Today I will focus on the sacramental ontology of beauty. 1.  Beauty is basic, it is real, and it is eternal. When we say that something is “beautiful”, we do not mean that it interacts in a pleasurable way with the conglomeration of memories that culture and experience has put into our minds: we mean that it has a specific quality to it.  It is beautiful.  When we say that we like such a thing, what we really mean (or should mean, if we practice humility) is that it is actually likable.   Yes, our description of beauty is filtered through our culture and experience - how could it not be?  But there is a quality of beauty that flows into this world as a continual outpouring of the absolute Beauty of her creator.   Just as the warmth of the sun points to the heat of that great star, so to does beauty serve as a sure sign that there is more to this world than our personal enjoyment of it. 2. Beauty is NOT for passive entertainment.  It is interactive.  Enjoyed properly, it draws us outside of ourselves as we participate in this special quality.  We can be selfish in our encounter with it, simply appreciating how it makes us feel; but we get even more out of it when we release the tethers of selfishness and really lose ourselves in a good piece of art or music or, better yet, worship.  When this happens, we experience something right and true: we encounter and commune with something wonderful outside of ourselves.  And when the exhibition is over, the concert has ended, or we have come to the end of the book or movie or service; the memory of it awakens within us a longing for more.  Our hearts have been enlarged by the time we have spent in communion with greatness.  Beauty resonates within us and nourishes and increases our capacity for it.  Once this process has begun, things change.  After this, we find that when we are separated from Beauty, there is an ever larger empty space inside that needs to be filled.  We want to enjoy it more; we want to fill our nights and days with it.  We want it to become part of our lives – in, short, we want to become one with Beauty; to sacrifice everything for the sake of Goodness becomes our most earnest desire.  Were such a consummation not possible, the existence of such transcendent Beauty would be the cause of the greatest despondency.  But the Good News is that consummation is possible.   God desires it and has satisfied our mutual longing through the Gift and Grace of His Son.  This is the Gospel: that Beauty has become Incarnate not just so we can appreciate Beauty, but so that we can join Him in His Beauty.  Through Him we can be made beautiful. Which is simply another way to say that encounters with true beauty are sacramental (mysterious): something fundamental is revealed through them, and by participating in these encounters, the seed  of glory within us is nourished and we become more beautiful, perfect, and godly ourselves.  But this does not happen automatically. 3.  Becoming beauty.  There are many wrong ways to try this: we do not become beautiful through surgery or going to concerts or even just by coming to the Divine Liturgy (the greatest gift of beauty offered on this earth).  We do it by embracing the deeper virtue.  We do it by submitting ourselves to its logic and allowing it to transform our lives in its image.  Let me paraphrase an old saw (how Michelangelo created David out of stone): if we want to become beautiful; then we start with what is already there and remove all the bits that aren’t right.  If we want to participate in the experience of beauty, then we cannot do things that are ugly.  We cannot be ugly ourselves.  Which brings me to a critical point:  it isn’t enough to look in the mirror to tell the difference between good and bad (beauty and ugliness) within us – our pride and psychoses do not let much of the truth in there.  Our pride will either completely overlook many of our obvious warts and defects (perhaps even calling them “beauty marks” or, just as bad condemn things that are actually God-pleasing,  No, we do not have enough discernment to affect the necessary changes on our own.  We need help.  We need to turn our attention away from ourselves toward the source of beauty; the standard of perfection; the wellspring of everything that is good.  Christ is Goodness and Beauty Incarnate.  When we encounter Him, when we live our lives within the rays of the Sun of Righteousness, we will know the essence of beauty; we will desire more; and we will want to change our lives so that we can better bask in and reflect His glory. Which is simply another way of saying not just that “Beauty will save the world, but  “Repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand.”  

Matthew 2: 13-23 (The Slaughter of the Innocents) Herod (and us): from temptation to possession Five Steps of Sin The temptation (logismoi) occurs.  We are NOT accountable for this. Interaction with the thought – what are the options?  What would it look like?  In his summary of Orthodox Spirituality in Mountain of Silence,  Fr. Maximos (now Mp. Athanasios of Limassol) says that this is not sin, either.  I disagree – a symptom of the disease we have is that it is all but impossible for us to imagine possibilities objectively.   Consent to do the sin.  This is always a sin, even if we do not carry out the action. Defeat to the idea.  Not only is this sin, it weakens us to future temptations. Passion, obsession, or possession by the temptation.   Let’s look at Herod’s descent into madness. He had an idea to kill all of the male infants.  This was not the only choice he had; others would have been less wicked – some may have even softened his heart enough to meet the Christ with joy.  This was the temptation. What happened when he interacted with this idea?  Moreover, what happened when he considered all the possibilities?  Was it a simple cost-benefit calculation, comparing all the options about how to react to the birth of the prophesied Messiah?    When he did the math, was it purely objective, or was the scale weighted in a certain direction by his feelings, feelings that were driven by his pride and desire to rule?  Remember that, as the King of the Jews, the people of God, he could have brought the Christ child into his palace and raised Him there to rule.  But that option was not the one that drew his attention – it was drawn towards murder.  It was drawn towards regicide and the slaughter of as many lives as necessary to guarantee it.  This was not because it was the best solution – it probably wasn’t even the best way to keep himself in power.  But it felt right.  And so of all the ideas, or all the logismoi, both sinful and graceful, he focused on this one.  He imagined what it would look like, how it would work.  Which takes us to consent. He consented to the idea.  He entertained it, not just to imagine whether or not it could work or to figure out the best way to get it done – it was more than that.  He chewed on it.  And somewhere along the way, he made it happen. Next, he was defeated by it.  Not just because he pulled the trigger, but because it came to define part of how he defined himself.  He was a man who did whatever was necessary to keep himself in power.  All other things were defined and valued in relationship to this identity, to this desire, to this obsession. And this is the final step – he was possessed by it.  And here is a difficult truth about his path to possession: this was not the first time he had united himself with this kind of sin.  He had assassinated rivals, to include his own wife, to consolidate his power.  Even before that, he had waged war against his own people in order to capture Jerusalem.  Not to free it from the Romans, but in cooperation with the Roman general Marc Antony in order to put himself in charge.  Do you see how, once he had given in to sin – in this case, violence - for personal gain, it made it easier to do so in the future?  All of his fallen psychology kicked in to make repentance more and more difficult.  For example, the devaluation of the lives of others, the web of justifications and lies that he had to convince himself of in order to keep himself going?  For someone like this, it takes a real wake-up call to get them to change.  He got the call when the wise men came, but he didn’t just hit the snooze button, he threw away the clock. “Send word so that I can go and worship Him myself.”  Doesn’t that just drip with evil?  How would Herod worship Him; with gifts?  With prostrations?  That is how the kings from the east did!  Not at all.  Quite the opposite. What about us?  The wide road to sin-full-ness Now here is the rub.  I’ve been describing Herod’s descent into madness, but that is the same wide road that beckons to us all.   What sins do we entertain?  What sins do we chew on?  Are we obsessed by?  What wickedness have we justified so fully that we feel its evil as good? And as if it wasn’t enough that each of us individually, thanks to ancestral sin, cannot imagine sin without engaging with it, we are surrounded by cultural systems that seek to deaden our instinct for the holy and replace it with other things, like hedonism and power and self-loathing and anything else that the marketers of the powers of the air can distract us with. It's easy to see this happening in others.  We know people who have fallen into all kinds of sin and justified it.  They immerse themselves in an internet subculture and the next thing you know they are defining themselves in new ways that separate themselves from the good, the true, and the beautiful.   But it’s so hard to see this in ourselves.  Herod had several baths of purification built into his temple.  He was so far gone that he didn’t see the irony of maintaining ritual purity while living such a debauched and self-aggrandizing life.  We should be very concerned lest we fall in the same way. What sins do our own personalities, conditions, and cultures lead us to accept as normal or even good?  How can we get around the unreliability of our feelings – what we like to call our consciences when it comes to seeking the good?   How do we deal with the fact that we are so far from being able to see things as they are and weight alternatives objectively? What then, can we do? The first step is to admit that we have a problem.  To admit that the “old man” we put to death during our baptism is not entirely dead. The second step is to cultivate an instinct of humility, including the willingness to admit that we rarely as right as our self-confidence would have us believe. The third is to build relationships of accountability and discernment.  How do you react when people correct you or offer a version that differs from your own?  Taking criticisms well is a sign of spiritual maturity.  It’s one that tyrants, narcissists, and sociopaths don’t have.  And it’s one that we are missing unless we work on it.  But we need it.  We need to have people in our lives that tell us the things that we miss, the things that we get wrong. Herod skipped all these steps, and he died in his sin. We have given our lives to Christ; we are called to something better than tyranny and the slaughter of innocents.   Let’s learn to live the kinds of lives – lives in communities of mutual love, trust, and support – that give no place for temptations to grow. Let’s live in Christ, together.  

Sunday before the Nativity Hebrews 11:9-10,17-23,32-40 St. Matthew 1:1-25 After giving a refresher on motivated reasoning, Fr. Anthony notes how much context affects what we think about our ancestors from the genealogy of Christ.  He then encourages us to tip the scales of our judgment so that we are more charitable towards people/things we are inclined to dislike, more skeptical towards people/things we are inclined to like, and generally more loving towards all.  Enjoy the show!

Today Fr. Anthony uses the simple theory of reading (word recognition x decoding -> reading comprehension) to talk about chanting and why it is so difficult for those new to Byzantine chant to learn it (because they do not have the equivalent of word recognition), especially if they cannot read music (because they have neither the equivalent of word recognition nor the ability to decode).  Enjoy the show!