Entries in Life

So, last night we pulled into Louisiana. We knew Katrina had been here and the first unexpected sign were the hotel parking lots filled with work trucks. A bit unusual for Christmas Eve. Morbid curiosity compelled us to drive through our old Carrollton neighborhood. Never very clean, we were reminded by the roads that we were in Louisiana. The city streets are some of the worst I’ve ever driven on. As we drove by our old house, we saw three FEMA trailers crowded into the front yard. Evidently, our old neighbor who bought the house had family staying. I knew the neighborhood had only minimal damage, but I was impressed to see neighborhood coffee shop open and doing a brisk business at 11pm on Christmas Eve. And despite the destruction that Katrina had brought, we noticed more than a couple of new buildings had been built (and still looked fresh) in the two years since we left. We dragged into my brother-in-law’s place at 11:30 after a day of driving and soon fell asleep. The next day was Christmas, and like a child ready to open his presents, I wanted to tour the city. As soon as I could manage to drag her away, Alexis and I drove down to the lake-front — an area I had heard horror stories about. On the way there, we were able to see firsthand Oakwood Mall. We had heard news stories that made it sound like a Katrina-enraged mob had looted and torched the place, but it was still standing. Evidently, the stories had been a little exaggerated. We drove by the convention center. Again, we had heard stories of the filth and mob mentality that had been in action there. But, again, the only evidence we saw was the temporary Red Cross hospital at the up-river end of theconvention center and a couple of 40-yard dumpsters. We toured a little of the downtown area, but found it relatively active, even for Christmas day. It had an eerie similarity to Ash Wednesday, the day after Mardi Gras – no rowdy crowds, lots of trash, and plenty of cops. Except that many stores along Canal Street were boarded up and the trash, while stacked at the curb, hadn’t been picked up for some time. We stopped by our old house and talked to the current owner. We talked to old friends and old neighbors. Each one seemed to say the same things. “It’s quiet.” “It’s slow.” “Insurance companies aren’t paying quickly” My brother-in-law told about his insurance company that sent an assessor four times and wanted to send them a fifth before they finally gave in and sent him a check. With all this in mind, we made our way to the lake-front. I had heard that it was a war zone. I had seen flyover pictures that showed the flooding. But I’d also heard that many of the very wealthiest neighborhoods along the lake-front had made it through the storm ok. For the next few miles towards the lake along Canal Boulevard, signs of life became more and more scarce. We saw the occasional police officer, a few FEMA trailers, and the rare resident, but, for the most part, there was no one. No businesses open. No schools open. No houses lived in. Because even when there was a resident, they were living in a FEMA trailer. The houses are completely wasted. The water line is at least six to eight feet on most houses. And these are middle class houses. Doctors, lawyers, engineers, business owners. All of them had their homes destroyed. Sure, there are a few brave souls who are sticking it out, possibly fixing up their home after taking it down to the studs. While the older, drier parts of New Orleans continue on, the lake-front, much of it inhabited by professionals and working middle class people, will take thousands of extreme makeovers to return to any sort of semblance of the life that was here before. Especially poignient was the trip we made by the house of some old friends of ours. He was a urologist and she was a young mother and working artist. We stayed with them for a couple of brief weeks after they renovated their house in the late 90s. It was a beautiful cottage. Though they’ve long since moved, we couldn’t help but mourn a bit when we saw a dingy grey shack standing where the perky yellow house once was. We drove along Lakeshore Drive back towards UNO. Katrina sped up the erosion that the lake’s relentless pounding had been causing for the past ten years. I had seen dirt disappear gradually, but, now, when I came back after Katrina, whole sections of grass had been completely swept away along with six inches of shelly topsoil. But the reports I had heard turned out to be right. Many of these, the wealthiest homes along the lake, were relatively unscathed. Protected from the lake on the north by a levee and on land recovered from the swamp during the middle of the 20th century, the builders of these homes had purchased a little extra flood protection by adding extra dirt and shoring up the foundations just a little bit more. There was life and relatively unscathed housing. No where was the difference in planning more apparent than along Leon C. Simon, the boulevard that runs along the south side of UNO. UNO’s dormitories and buildings weren’t touched by the flooding — the campus was an old Navy base in the 60s — but just across the street (and significantly lower) houses and apartments sported the familiar six-foot high water-line stain. We escaped from the lake-front along Elysian Fields and found our way back to life and the French Quarter. Amazingly, we saw tourists and signs of life — even on the first Christmas Day after Katrina — and signs of business reopening. Cafe du Monde, usually open 24hours a day all year long, was closed, but a sign announced that “Beignets are Back!” After all that New Orleans has been through, this is almost like a giant purging has taken place. Violent crime and murder have plagued New Orleans for years, but since Katrina no murders have been reported in the city. And, while she’s struggled to hold onto any Fortune 500 company and seemed to scare away any business suitors, the city’s residents — those that remain — seem to have an idea that they will live here and, somehow, continue to eek out a living in this port city that care forgot. Tomorrow, I hope to check out parts of Chalmette and St Benard parish — places that got the brunt of the storm — and I expect to see even more devastating scenes than the ones I saw today. But I’m encouraged because I’ve seen life here. And while life isn’t the same, can’t be the same, as it was last year, I’m encouraged by each street corner on the West Bank, Uptown, and in Metarie where businesses put out signs: “Now Open!”; “We’re Back!”; “We’re Hiring!”

In my flutterby conversation, there are at least three different objections to Christianity. The first is that violence and evil are, in fact, promoted by Christianity itself — that you cannot claim they are somehow distortions of Christianity’s core message. I think I dealt with that adequately in my last entry. The second objection is that Christianity invites repression and induces guilt. The third objection is that Christianity calls us to be “super-human” in some way — that Christianity is not satisfied with mere humans. In Mountain of Silence, Kyriacos Markidas (a Cyprian sociologist) asks Fr. Maximos (an Athonite monk) about repression and the answer Fr. Maximos explains much better than I can that Christianity is about returning to our humanity and freedom from guilt:

“Can we say that the heart is what is commonly understood as the subconcious where people store their unfulfilled desirfes? Is the heart the depository where what Freud called ‘repression’ takes place?” Father Maximos shrugged. “The holy elders were not using such terms. So I cannot really say much about it. But as I understand it, the subconcious is a storage space into which human beings pile up, so to speak, those memories and experiences they don’t want to be aware of. You may call it whatever name you wish, but one thing is clear to me. From the point of view of the true spiritual life we must eradicate the subconcious.” “Eradicate the subconcious?” I exclaimed. […] “What you called ‘repression’ is totally unacceptable in real spiritual medicine,” Father Maximos replied. “In the spiritual arena of the logismoi, we aim at the transmutation or metamorposis of our passions, not the actual storing of them in the so-called subconcious. “Now let us take sexuality, for example,” Father Maximos continued. I was taken by surprise. I had assumed that sex was a sensitive if not taboo suubject with ascetics. “We monks do not try to repress our sexual passions by storing them in our subconcious. I remmember reading and interview given by a married priest who stated that the central problem of the monks is sexual. That, in order not to think aboout sex we work all day long in the fields, clean the yard, wash the floors, and so on.” Father Maximos scoffed and shook his head as the monks that surrounded us burst into laughter. “This is sheer nonsense. So what do we do at night? Continue to was the floors and dig ditches in the fields, or gobble up pills to overcome our insomnia? “Woe to those monks and nuns,” Father Maximos went on after we stopped laughing, “who shovel into their subconscious their sexual passions. In such a state they would tremble and sweat in the presence of the opposite sex. There is no spirituality in that. What happens, and what we aim at, is the transmutation of erotic energy from earthly attractions to God, the way human beings were in their primordial natural state.” (emphasis mine — hexmode) “Eros turns into agape,” I muttered. “Right. Such persons love all human beings without distinction to their sex. Such persons do not have much to do with what belongs to the after-the-Fall state of humanity. Do you understand? The love of God totally transforms human beings through Grace. Therefore, we monks as a rule, and ideally of course, do not repress our desires in our subconcious. What we attempt to do is force ourselves to bring everything out from the subconcious and clean it up.” […] “So,” I murmured, “if the work you do here led to repression of desires…” “We would all be psychopaths, neurotics, and schizophrenics, Kyriaco! For how long can you repress your passions? Lunacy, that’s what is going to be the inevitable outcome, and that’s why the saints are truly liberating in their very being. They are the freeest people on earth. […] You may go meet saints and tell them the most horrendous sins. They will not be touched in their innermost core. Persons who have repressed their passions will get angry, will get into the punishing mood. If you tell them that you committed some sinful act, they will become very upset and judgmental. They will become intolerant without a trace of compassion. Do you know why? Because they themselves are suffering. They ahve a lot of repressed emotions and anger inside them, a lot of repressed logismoi. Such persons are morallistic and pious, but they are no saints. Their hallmark is not utter humility.”

The subject of this post is hyperbole. This entry is a response to that thread on Flutterby that I mentioned before. topspin, I’m not sure what you want to discuss, since it looks to me like you have a belief that religion is the cause of much evil and nothing I can say will dissuade you from that. As for Paul, you’ve taken a very extreme interpretation of him in order to prove your point. This isn’t that uncommon for people in fundamentalist churches, but I do try to shy away from individualistic interpretation. Sometimes it’s good, but just as often it’s very bad and you listed many of the bad interpretations. I’d ask you to consider those religious movements like the Anabaptists (including Quakers, Mennonites, Amish, etc) who’ve made non-violence one of their core beliefs. Is that religion causing evil? And I won’t claim that the Eastern churches are pure and spotless. One has only to look around the world at some of the politics the Orthodox and Coptic churches play. Orthodoxy is, for many people, very much an ethnic religion subject to the “us versus them” mentality that Larry mentioned. I’ve chosen to be Orthodox despite that. Instead, consider the truth of the statement “White people have cause a lot of slavery.” Its true, but it doesn’t go very far and it doesn’t mean I need to be ashamed of being white. Other races have been involved in slavery. White people have been the victims of slavery. In the same way, “Organized religion has caused a lot of evil” is true, but it doesn’t go very far. If you’re looking for people to be afraid of, you can fear religious people. But being wary of religion won’t protect you (or society) from harm. An exercise: Look over the anti-heros of the 20th century. How many of those people were religious? I’ve not done an exhaustive analysis, but the big names that pop into my head were specifically anti-religious.

danlyke recently paid me a high compliment by posting a very thoughtful response on Flutterby to the Fr Alexander quote in my bit on spiritual thirst. Belief is indisputibly subjective. But danlyke seems to claim that only objective truth has any merit because that is the only way to understand the world. Not surprisingly, Fr Alex has a response to this:

Science studies nature. But isn’t it true that the study of nature can also be approached quite differently, through poetry, music and art? And isn’t it true that they reveal something other about nature, something just as true and perhaps even much more necessary for us?

    About what are you wailing, wind of night?      What do you so frantically lament? …      In a language the heart can comprehend you speak…                                    (Fedor Tiutchev)  

Are these just mindless and absurd words absolutely unrelated to life, or does this poetry unmask the lies of the ideologues who deny something self-evident to all: that everything in the world and life both conceals and reveals some deeper meaning, witnesses to a kind of mysterious presence; everything holds out the promise and pledge of an “other” knowlege, an “other” understanding.

… Christianity understands revelation [not as] simply a strange and inexplicable manifestation of some sort, but is something which man’s own experience confirms.

To this I would only add that I don’t view my relationships through an objecive lens (it would be impossible for me, in any case, to be objective about my own relationships), but I find value in those relationships anyway … because of their subjective importance. Consider, then, that the core of both Fundamentalist and Orthodox Christianity is not objective truth, but a relationship with Christ.

More from Fr Alexander’s I Believe:

More than once in my life I have had to stand at the bedside of a dying child in terrible suffering. And what? Could I explain anything at all to those who stood around the bed? Could I vindicate or justify these sufferings and this death “religiously”, as they say? No, I was only able to say: God is here, God is. I could only confess how impossible it is to measure that presence with our sorrow-filled, earthly questions.

How starkly this contrasts with the work of apologists who can explain anything and don’t hesitate to tell us why there is suffering and death. At one point, I think I may have understood why people suffer and why there is death. I don’t think I do any more. Sure, I know the textbook answers, but they seem inadequate. I know that many people find them unsatisfactory. I do know that I AM. I have faith because I AM — God is so real that I cannot escape the reality of his presense. Fr Alex goes on:

No, of course faith is not the product of my need for explanations. But then where does it come from? Does it come from fear of suffering after death? Or does it come from being frightened of total annihilation, from that passionate and ultimately egotistical inner desire not to be annihilated? No, this is not why I believe, for it seems to me that speculations about life after death and immortality—even the most intellligent philosophical speculations—are just so much childish babbling. What do I know about all this? And what can I tell others?

(Emphasis mine.) Here we clearly see apophatic theology at work. Admitting that talk about the things like the afterlife; the “rapture”; “post-”, “pre-”, or “mid-trib”; etc. sounds like “so much childish babbling” is a start in the right direction of contextualizing theology.

True, there are those who try to prove to us that religion is a comforting escape, a refusal to struggle, man’s self-betrayal, dead and immovable dogmatism leading us away from hard questions and searching. However, those who make such claims invariably supress words which describe the very heart of religious experience and religious faith: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst…”; “Seek and you will find…”; “I came not to bring peace, but a sword…”. It is significant that those who hate religion always base their attack on this crude and elementary deception, for without this lie their assault on religion would be impossible to sustain for even a single day.

— Fr Alexander Schmemann, I Believe

This seems so true today. “Those who hate religion”, though, would be right to say that some purveyors of faith offer a simplistic view of faith with “immovable dogmatism leading us away from hard questions and searching”. I suspect this dogmatism is what is creating the latest Anabaptist Movement in the form of the Emerging Church.

I’m obsessed with sleep. Hrm… maybe that’s not it. I’m frustrated by sleep. I don’t want to do it most of the time. But I gotta. Anyway, it looks like I’m not the only one who thinks to much about sleep. A post on waking up feeling refreshed has gotten 100 comments (and counting) in the past two weeks.

After writing about C.S. Lewis, rats and sin, I got a couple of interesting responses. The first was an email from my mother:

I’m not sure what is the big difference in the sin issue, we all have sinned, we all continue to sin, we all are tempted to sin. (All of sinned and come short of God’s glory.” “There is none that doeth good…”) Yes, we can confess, and address the temptations to sin … but the tendency to sin is perpetual. If we get to the point of thinking we have it all made, then we begin to deal with false pride (sin). And the more subtle sins such as an ungrateful heart (hey! I have this sin thing licked)

There is a subtle, but vital, difference here. The temptation to sin is always with us. We can how we tend to respond. The Orthodox affirm Roman’s statement that “All have sinned” but they see it as more of a descriptive statement (“Look, everyone has sinned”) rather than a perscriptive one (“Man is so corrupt that it is completely impossible for him to avoid sin”). The Orthodox do not teach that you are born guilty of sin. Yes, “I was conceived in a sinful world” but, no, I did not bear the guilt of sin from my conception. This is even reflected in the Orthodox understanding of the Cross. Esther Lily’s baptism included the statement that Christ died to free her from Satan’s Tyranny. At Pascha, we sing “Christ has risen from the dead and trampled Death by death.” Salvation, in the Orthodox understanding, is the process of removing sin’s control over us. Of course, if we began to think that we were no longer threatened by temptation, we would be in danger again. This is why the Orthodox teach the need for a spiritual father: he helps us see the sin we can’t see. Is this a foolproof method? Of course not! Many Orthodox people don’t understand it and I’m a poor example of it. But understanding that we do not have an inherent tendency to sin is a helpful change in paradigm. The other response was from . Jim wrote:

The conundrum for me is this…we have to find a way to affirm the notion that God’s creation is good and that we have been endowed with an inherent goodness but at the same time we have to affirm the reality that the world groans for redemption and that humanity lives no where close to God’s created intention for it. The Reformed Tradition places an incredible amount of stress on the fallen nature of the world, the total depravity of humankind, and the absolute need for God to regenerate the degenerate. It focuses so much on that end of things that it seems to exclude any ability to see much inherent good in either the created world or in humankind. That is probably not the best approach. On the other hand, I seem to hear a lot of Christians affirming the goodness of humanity and the world to the point that they deny the reality of sin or evil. […] My question essentially boils down to this…where did it all go wrong and how does the Orthodox Tradition hold these two in balance???

As far as I know, it all began to go wrong with Augustine. The Orthodox still respect him and consider him a Saint, but reject his idea of Original Sin and such. Now, if you never held idea that we are, at our core, wholly sinful, the opposite problem doesn’t come into play. That is, if you haven’t been told you’re inherently worthless, then there is no need to play Pollyanna and ignore reality. So, of course God’s creation is good. Of course, we have the capability to do good: all common sense and our own experience tells us this. Why, sometimes I’ve managed to do the right thing without any sin whatsoever! So I know that I have the capablity. The problem is that we live in a fallen world. This is a world where temptation isn’t always obvious. The right choice isn’t always obvious, especially since most of us have not achieved theosis, or unity with God. However, unity with God is possible. With the Holy Spirit working in us to draw out the image of God with which each of us were created, we can live righteous lives. Make no mistake: the standard is set high. But that standard is heavily tempered with Love because that is who God is. We all know that we can live better, no one doubts that he is a long distance from perfection. But perfection is attainable and in this life. Evil things really happen. It is a perverse generation, but we can seek God and his righteousness. Death and sin are conquered! That is the good news of the cross. Their effects aren’t simply mitigated. We don’t just get a pass even though we continue to sin. No, sin is conquered and Death is destroyed. Satan, the illegitimate usurper, has been overthrown! So why does sin continue? Since we can no longer blame Satan (“the Devil made me do it”) and we are not completely degenerate at our core of our soul (which is in the image of God), we are completly to blame for own own sin. We choose, however unconciously at times, to sin. Orthodox spirituality provides a way to experience God and, through that experience, learn how to deal with the temptation to sin. In this way we acknowlege that we sin but also that sin is overcome by grace. Does this answer your question? Do any Orthodox want to comment on how wrong I am?

Even if they’re able to accomplish their goals, the EC will still be missing something. They’ll be missing a monastic tradition. They‘ll be missing the mystical tradition. Now, I know about groups like the Bruderhof, but even they do not fill the role of monasticism. A family living in community cannot dedicate itself solely to God. They must still care for each other. Further, most protestants I know (and even some Catholics and Orthodox) reject the idea of monasticism entirely. But why is the monasticism important to Christianity? Well, look at how monasteries started. When Christians were no longer persecuted in the 3rd century, martyrdom relatively disappeared. The monastics became the new spiritual heros for Christianity. Monastics help us to understand how to experience God. The provide a living example of theosis. It is very difficult for any person with worldly attachements, be they family, job, or property, to attain theosis. Thus, we need the monastics to draw us closer to the experience of God. Theosis or anything like it is almost compeletly absent from most of protestant Christian practice. We can understand the paucity of this experience when we see that the Protestant Reformation was the result of the embrace of objective truth. Empiricism and philosophy have so overwhelmed the protestant understanding of God that they’ve neglected the experience of God. Christ himself taught that we see God through our heart. We experience him and know him through the heart — thought and analysis of scripture doesn’t bring us closer to him. So, what does the EC offer? It offers to “reconstruct” Christianity in a way that is still focused on a result: getting (post-)modern people into Church. I have always struggled with this focus on the results of any effort. The EC feels, to me, as if it were yet-another attempt to market the message to an “unchurched” world. Yes, it is a good thing to separate Christianity from the Republicans. But, are you doing it just to reach people who wouldn’t otherwise listen? Sure, it’s good to have a more “narrative” approach to Scripture. But is that just the result of post-modern influence on Christians? Or is this the easiest way to reconcile scientific materialism with your faith?

Wow! This has been quite a weekend. It started Saturday morning with a Tiger Scout hike. Not too long, but afterwards dvfmama had some fun activities planned for everyone. Then we came home and did some hoeing in our small patch of garden. Today we went to church and got to eat some great Greek food — this weekend is the annual bazaar. Then we did some shopping at Home Depot, came home and hoed some more. We finished up planting our tulips, rye grass, and, new this year, some rose of sharon bushes. Alexis will transplant those in the spring. Workwise, I’ve fallen behind on some obligations and I still have to plan something for the Tiger scout meeting tomorrow. Oh, and the person working on the church website has had to leave so I’ll be taking that over (along with another busy family man). The work in the garden was great for body, soul, and mind, but now I feel behind. Eh, I’ll live. Yet, instead of doing anything else that was pressing, I took part of the evening and read the first bit of Mountain of Silence. It’s raining now. We did our planting just in time.