And Who is My Neighbor?

“And he, being willing to justify himself, asked him ‘And who is my neighbor?’” (from Luke 10:25-37 the Gospel Reading for the 8^th Sunday of Luke).

Our Gospel today questions the motive of the lawyer who approached Christ and asked him, “And who is my neighbor?” The Gospel passage indicates that he was “desiring to justify himself” when he asked this question. In other words, the question was not authentic. His agenda could not be found in the literal meaning of his question. There was something else going on. His real motive was to be found elsewhere. He was not simply confused about who was his neighbor and who was not. Rather, the Gospel is pointing out that he was concerned to justify his own correctness. He desired to show himself before the group assembled there with Jesus as an astute interpreter of the Law. His question, then, had really nothing to do with his neighbor and everything to do with himself. In fact, the very moment that he posed the question concerning his neighbor, he was actually evading his neighbor.

What do I mean? How could he be evading his neighbor by asking a question about him?

The lawyer was evading the Lord, the Lord’s teaching and his actual neighbor by turning the Lord’s teaching into a theological discussion. Perhaps you’ve met people who seem to have a boundless capacity for theological discussions. As a Priest I certainly do meet people who are willing to go on and on and on discussing religious questions with very little interest in actually doing the Lord’s will. Perhaps this is what our lawyer was up to. He wanted to turn the issue of loving one’s neighbor into a theological question – “Who is my neighbor?” He wanted to indulge in an academic exercise: “And so, Jesus, let’s explore the concept of neighborliness. What is the meaning of ‘love’ as we hear it in your words? Let us discuss the essence of community. What are the limits of diversity and tolerance?” Of course, all these are very deep, very profound questions that can be discussed in an academic sense.

In C.S. Lewis’ book The Great Divorce, about a bus trip from hell to heaven, there is a theologian in what C.S. Lewis calls the “grey city” and he is not able to find the time to make it to the bus stop because he is very busy with his theological society and the papers that he is working on to present on deep theological issues. What he seems to miss is that he is preoccupation with theology not only did not save him but is actually damning him.

I think it is easy for us to agree that this is not Christ’s approach. In the Gospels, Jesus is never interested in indulging in idle theoretical or theological discussions. You can’t find it. Neither is it the approach of the Orthodox Church. Do you want to know who your neighbor is? It’s almost like the saying, “if you have to ask how much it costs, you can’t afford it.” If you have to ask who your neighbor is, do you really want to know?

If you want to know who your neighbor is, Orthodoxy teaches, first find your closest neighbor. That is God. He is closer to you than anyone at any time. Find him through prayer. Secondly, learn from the Son of Man. Open the Gospel and hear the word of Christ. And third, open your eyes to the need around you. Then you will know who your neighbor is. You won’t need to become a theologian to figure it out. You won’t need to put a person through a certification process to determine that he, indeed, is your neighbor and, therefore, deserving of your attention. You’ll start by simply showing kindness to those whom God has placed in your path, just as he placed that wounded man in the path of the priest, of the Levite and of the Samaritan.

Self-Accusation Game Plan

The Gospel for this coming Sunday begins, ”And he, being willing to justify himself, asked him ‘And who is my neighbor?’” (from Luke 10:25-37).

One of the most obvious and most difficult things the break free from is a “me and everyone else” approach to judgment. We almost never question our own motives and the part we play in difficulties / controversies. Someone troubles us and we may look at it from only our perspective and say “I have done nothing wrong.” “I am completely innocent.” But Dorotheos of Gaza says that if a man really examines himself, in the fear of God, he will usually find that he has given cause for offense, either by deed, word or bearing.

It is pretty rare that we could say, “I am an innocent victim.”  We have to be careful to not throw the blame on everyone else. We don’t keep the commandments, we are negligent and yet we demand, in return, that our neighbor be perfect. MAKE NOTE: I am not saying that victims of crimes, domestic abuse, etc. are at fault. What we are saying is that the lawyer in today’s Gospel asked a question of Jesus in order to justify himself we don’t want to be walking around justifying ourselves. We want to be practicing what the church encourages, “Self-accusation.”

Abba Poemen, one of the great desert fathers said, “If a man accuses himself, he is protected on all sides.” (Abba Poemen 95 from The Sayings of the Desert Fathers)

We have to impress on our minds to not put the blame on someone else. We have to look at ourselves. Saint Paul left a great example when he refers to himself as “the chief of sinners.” Even our tradition of the Jesus Prayer ends with a punch line; “Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

We excuse ourselves and all the while grind others down. We may not say it but we to often think it and act like we believe it, “Everyone else is malicious. We are honorable and good. Everyone else distorts but, I tell the truth.”

We sometimes overreact and deepen division by going after our neighbor who has wronged us instead of blaming ourselves and casting our sinfulness to the feet of the Lord. One note of warning: we don’t want to completely flip to other side and enter into some kind of super-spiritual self-hating. Elder Sophrony of Essex said that we don’t want to fall prey to the illusion of deep self-analysis and introspection. He said, “You know, we pick and poke away, hunting for every little mistake or thought, and we make ourselves crazy, all for nothing. It becomes an obsession, and really makes a wall between us and God, leaving no room for grace to act. Yes, we must know our sins, and that we are sinful and deluded beings, but we must never lose sight of the fact that we come to God in prayer, not to be obsessed with our sins, but to find His mercy. Otherwise the devil takes everything away from us… joy, hope, peace, love… and leaves us nothing but this obsession with our mistakes. That is not repentance. That is neurosis…”

Self-Accusation done right recognizes that we not guilt free and brings us back to Christ who can relieve us of the burden. Here’s the plan:

• Cut off dark thoughts as soon as they appear by saying the Jesus Prayer
• Read the Gospel everyday
• Prepare for confession without brooding, victimization and blaming
• Confess your sins between now and Nativity

Spiritual Heart Disease

Whereas we have become concerned with the external sin and the details of who, what, where and when. It has not always been so. The patristic writings of the Church are concerned, almost exclusively, with asking the question, “why?” Surgeons get paid the big bucks to remove the cause of our physical symptoms. We want to imitate them and move, as best we can, to investigate the root causes of our sin. The hope is to get to where disease can be caught early and eradicated.

Most of us go to confession prepared to recite all the symptoms of our disease. It is true that the symptoms can help us discover the nature of the disease. But confessing the symptoms does not always seem to bring the healing freedom we hope for from Christ. We are after full and radical healing so we need to find what works. Freedom in Christ sometimes requires finding the triggers, the dis-ease of the soul and the unhealed emotional wounds that act out in destructive repetitive behaviors.

The Holy Fathers of the Orthodox Church have identified several steps a temptation takes to captivate and ensnare us. It is the process of the will where we move from freedom to slavery. The list that follows is from the book “The Acquisition of the Holy Spirit” and is a helpful example how temptation moves from a simple suggestion that can be easily pushed aside to a full-blown addiction where we are trapped. Here is the list. Let me know what you think.

1. Provocation: the suggestion that first emerges that can incline either to virtue or vice. This is the spot to recognize and cut it off.
2. Conjunction: responding with feelings which can either reject the sinful idea or entertain the idea
3. Joining: when we haven’t rejected the sinful idea we move from entertaining it be an inclination to act upon the thought
4. Struggle: the moments between willfully entertaining the sin and the decision to commit the sin.
5. Habit: responding to the evil until it becomes a more constant feature of character. At this step the mind is preoccupied with the passionate urge
6. Captivity: man gladly and violently rushes to satisfy this passion.

Soul Vacation

 

Saint Paisius Monastery Church Safford, AZ

Most of us would like to hit the pause button in life and take a deeper breath. Vacation is not really what we are after. Vacations are great but they are often as busy if not busier than our regular life. Our souls may be crying out for a vacation from the noise and the distraction and the pace. We need a soul vacation. We are uneasy and may sense the need to immerse ourselves in extended worship services, silence, solitude, prayer, confession and spiritual direction.

 

“Sneaking away” to a monastery can be the pause button we have been seeking. We drive out to a monastery and we step away from our modern lives and enter into the ancient custom of pilgrims. A retreat gives us time to live more fully the rhythm of liturgical prayer and personal reflection. Spending a day or two away can reawaken the contemplative heart within us that wants to hear the Lord. Without duties, deadlines, relationships, laptops, cell phones, customers, etc. we can take a deep breath.  Before we head home we can foster the renewal and bring it home.

Reasons to make a retreat:

1. Dedicated time to focus on Christ in a community and in solitude
2. Quiet to read and reflect on my relationship with God
3. Quiet to reflect on my life and how I am living it
4. Time to try and listen to God more attentively
5. Time to get away from the inner and outer noise and speed of life back home
6. Extended time in worship
7. Opportunities to repent and make a confession and receive spiritual direction
8. Unplug from the regular routine of life
9. Relax, celebrate and eat good food
10. Kill time-killing activities

We are Captivated by Voyeurism

Saint Paisius Monastery Church

I have just returned from a St. Paisius Monastery retreat weekend. It was so packed with prayer and spiritual direction that it is going to take a while to hang everything on the spiritual/mental hooks needed to access later.

One of the highlights was our group meeting with the resident monk. The last thing he said to us is the first thing I am reflecting on. He said, “Movies are a plague.” The problem he laid out was that we are a people captivated by voyeurism. Voyeurism can have a sexual connotation but our friendly neighborhood monk was defining it in the more general sense; to refer to someone who habitually observes others without their knowledge. He said we are captivated by the movie industry so that it is “normal” to hear people talk about watching videos everyday to relax, calm down, veg out and escape. Let me make sure to say that this is not a critique about the content of the movies we watch. The plaque that the monk spoke about was the serial movie watching bug that has bit so many people.

Essentially, we are becoming a people who constantly watch fictional characters live out scripted lives of love, triumphs, challenges, defeats and victories. They chase bad guys through Moroccan bazaars jumping from cranes to buildings. They fall in love. They have to be “wheels up in 10 minutes.” I used to say, “I never have to be wheels up in 10 minutes.” It was a statement that fictional CIA double agents were living more exciting lives than me. We watch fictional characters live better lives than us. And we are doing it all the time. We are voyeurs.

What are we doing wrong by watching movies everyday? We are avoiding living our own lives. We are avoiding divine providence. Something has got to change.

Do Our Pets Go To Heaven?

I think you need to know that I have done a lot of funerals, of humans. I have buried people who had been sick, most have been old but some have been young. Some have died after long battles with illness and some have suddenly died. I like doing funerals (I will save that for some future post). Due to all this experience I figured that I had reached, please forgive me for this, a certain level of professional pastoral expertise. I could say, “even though it is difficult I can handle it.” And because of all my experience I was completely caught off guard to find myself weeping when our beloved 2-year-old Australian Shepherd died this past January. One day he was fine and the next day he was dead of some rare blood disorder. When Rocket died I lost a friend. It was tough.

My friend, Rocket.

So when I was asked recently if our pets go to heaven, I knew the pain and the curiosity that leads one to ask the question.

Disclaimer: There does not appear to be an official Orthodoxy teaching regarding pets going to heaven. But while Christianity, in general, seems to be split on the topic, I am hopeful to present what I believe to be the Orthodox teaching. It is important to say this it is my theologumena (my theological opinion) and not the official teaching of the Church.

At the final resurrection, our world will pass away. A new heaven and a new earth (Rev. 21:1) will be created, in which man and all animals will again live in harmony and peace.

The Spirit of the Lord will prevail in Paradise. Wild animals will become peaceful and will eat herbs and fruits again.

For there shall be a new heaven and a new earth; and they shall not at all remember the former, neither shall they at all come to their mind. But be glad and rejoice for ever in that which I create; for behold, I create Jerusalem a rejoicing, and her people a joy. Isaiah 65:17-18

The enmity of man and the enmity of animals shall cease:

And the wolf shall feed with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the young calf and bull and lion shall feed together; and a little child shall lead them. And the ox and the bear shall feed together; and the lion shall eat straw like an ox. Isaiah 11:6-7.

The new earth will be in harmony by the Grace of God, as it was before sin entered the world. As creation fell into corruption because of man, so together with man it will be restored to incorruption at the end of the ages:

For the eager longing of creation awaits the revelation of the sons of God. For creation was made subject to vanity, not by it’s own will but by reason of him who made it subject, in hope. Because creation itself also will be delivered from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the sons of God. Romans 8:19-21

St. Symeon the New Theologian comments on this:

…when man again will be renewed and become spiritual, incorrupt and immortal, then also the whole creation, which had been subjected by God to man to serve him, will be delivered from this servitude, will be renewed together with him, and become incorrupt and as it were spiritual. All this the All-Merciful God foreordained before the creation of the world.

This would indicate that animals as a group will inhabit the transfigured new earth after the General Resurrection. However, we have no indication from Scripture or Patristic writings that individual souls of animals will survive death. For we know that, among the creatures of earth, only man has been given individual, immortal souls meant to dwell with God unto the ages. “Animals and Man: A State of Blessedness” by Joanne Stefantos D.V.M. is simply the best Orthodox resource on the topic and had a major influence on the above post.

Top 10 Most Viewed Posts on Scholé

Here are links to the top ten most viewed posts on Scholé:

1. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry for itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.

2. Why does Jesus Sometimes Wait Until the 4th Watch of the Night?

3. Saint Anthony’s Victory Over the Demon of Noonday Revealed!

4. Icon of Christ and His Friend

5. How the Orthodox Understand Salvation

6. The Jesus Prayer: Annotated Bibliography and Internet Resources

7. Is Bono Right?

8. The Jesus Prayer: What is it?

9. Introduction to the Transfiguration of our Lord Jesus Christ

10. Is the Incarnation of Jesus Based on Pre-Existing Gnostic Savior Myths?

All Creation is a Gigantic Burning Bush: The Essence/Energies Distinction in Orthodox Christianity

The Orthodox Church believes that we know God by what He does and we have believed this for a very long time. We believe that on the one hand God is approachable and knowable and on the other hand we believe that in is essence God is unknowable.

Gerald Manley Hopkins poem, “As Kingfishers Catch Fire” captures this truth that we know God by what He does. What He does is who He is.

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;

As tumbled over rim to roundy wells

Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s

Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:

Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;

Selves – goes its self; myself it speaks and spells,

Crying What I do is me: for that I came

I say more: the just man justices;

Keeps grace: that keeps all his going graces;

Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is –

Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places,

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his

To the Father through the feature of men’s faces.

Just as birds and insects in what they are, are drawn to fire. What they do is who they are. And just as stones fall down mountains and when they fall they crash. What they do is who they are. And just as bells ring when their strings are pulled and they cannot help but fling out their name – that is just what they do. And what they do is who they are. It is the same with Christ. What he does is who he is. He loves, redeems, saves and he is present and calling us to Himself. That is who he is! The Way, Truth and Life! He cannot not do who He is.

“St. Gregory addressed this problem of knowing an unknowable God and answered: we know the energies of God, but not His essence. This distinction between God’s essence (ousia) and His energies goes back to the Cappadocian Fathers. “We know our God from His energies,’ wrote Saint Basil, ‘but we do not claim that we can draw near to His essence. For His energies come down to us, but His essence remains unapproachable” (Letter 234, 1). Gregory accepted this distinction. He affirmed, as emphatically as any exponent of negative theology, that God is in essence absolutely unknowable. “God is not a nature,” he wrote, “for He is above all nature; He is not a being, for He is above all beings…. No single thing of all that is created has or ever will have even the slightest communion with the supreme nature, or nearness to it” (P.G. cl, 1176c). But however remote from us in His essence, yet in His energies God has revealed Himself to men. These energies are not something that exists apart from God, not a gift, which God confers upon men: they are God Himself in His action and revelation to the world. God exists complete and entire in each of His divine energies. The world, as Gerard Manley Hopkins said, is charged with the grandeur of God; all creation is a gigantic Burning Bush, permeated but not consumed by the ineffable and wondrous fire of God’s energies. (Compare Maximus, Ambigua, P.G. xci, 1148d).

It is through these energies that God enters into a direct and immediate relationship with mankind. In relation to man, the divine energy is in fact nothing else than the grace of God; grace is not just a “gift” of God, not just an object which God bestows on men, but a direct manifestation of the living God Himself, a personal confrontation between creature and Creator. “Grace signifies all the abundance of the divine nature, in so far as it is communicated to men” (V. Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, p. 162). When we say that the saints have been transformed or “deified” by the grace of God, what we mean is that they have a direct experience of God Himself. They know God — that is to say, God in His energies, not in His essence.” Bishop Kallistos Ware,  The Orthodox Church.

Skiing and Prayer: Good Medicine

There is nothing better than good medical care.  For the first time in my life I have a GREAT physician. My first visit was a couple of years ago when I turned 40. He spent well over an hour gathering family information and hearing every concern. He, ahem, left no stone unturned. Throughout that and subsequent visits we have spoken in great theological depth. He is a very serious Roman Catholic. I quickly learned that my doctor appointments could just as easily conclude with him anointing me with oil as prescribing medicine. So far, they always conclude with him asking for my priestly blessing. There is something so right about medical care including not just the physical and emotional but also the state of the soul.

All of this is fresh because I just saw him again this past week. At the end of another great appointment (right before he asked for a blessing from me) I reminded him that I was concerned about my stress level. He said that I needed two things:

1. I needed a group of people praying for me.

2. I needed to make sure to ski this winter. YES!

Yesterday the Orthodox Church commemorated the holy and wonder-working Unmercenaries Cosmas and Damian.

These brothers were from Mesopotamia in Asia Minor. After the death of their pagan father, their Christ-loving mother Theodota reared them in piety and in all manner of virtue, and had them instructed in every science, especially that of medicine. This became their vocation, and they went about healing every illness and malady, bestowing healing for free on both men and beasts alike; because of this, Cosmas and Damian are called “Unmercenaries.” They fulfilled Christ’s command: “Freely have ye received; freely give” (Matthew 10:8). And thus, having completed the course of their life, they reposed in peace and are reported to continue working healing miracles.

If They Do Not Hear Moses and the Prophets…

5th Sunday of Luke, Poor Man and Lazarus, Luke 16:19-31

The parable today ends with the rich man begging Abraham to send someone back from the dead to his five brothers. Abraham said, “They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them.’ And he said, ‘No, father Abraham; but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent.’ He said to them, ‘If they do not hear Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead.’”

We are told 7 times in the Divine Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom to “attend.” Being attentive is the constant call of our Lord Jesus Christ. “He who has ears to hear let him hear!” It is the right time to open our ears.It is the right timeto listen.

I grew up in the church but somehow I missed hearing about the love of God for me in Christ Jesus our Lord.

It was at a Young Life camp that I heard that Christ loves us and died for us. And that His death reconnects us to the Father in order to restore and resurrect our relationship with God the Father. I wondered to myself on that July evening in 1983 why I had never heard this before. Why had I not heard about Jesus’ saving act of love. That He came not as a judge or to condemn but to save. Well, when I returned from camp, I went to church the next Sunday with open eyes and ears and guess what? He was everywhere present. This good news was there and I had not heard it!