What My Church Means To Me

 Word Magazine  October 1964  Page 13

 

 

  

WHAT MY CHURCH MEANS TO
ME

 

 By
Beverly Maloof — age l5

Church of St. John of Damascus, Boston, Massachusetts

First Prize Winning Oratorical — New England Region of SOYO

 

 

 

In answering this question, I first must express what I consider the church to
be. I feel that the church is something we cannot define, for it has many
meanings. One may say that he goes to church to pray and to be with God. Another
may say that he attends church since society expects it of him. But no matter
how you try to define church, it always refers to the people of God.

 

One important way in gaining God’s true love is to walk in His path, love Him,
and serve Him from the bottom of your heart. St. Cyprian said, “He cannot have
God for a Father who has not the Church for his Mother.” Those who love God and
go to church to worship Him will gain His true love.

 

We all know that churches are temples of worship. But there are many forms and
they all have their own symbolic meaning. A church constructed in the form of a
cross is dedicated to the Savior and represents Christ’s Crucifixion to redeem
sinners. A church built in an oblong shape to resemble a ship denotes that it is
through the church that we are saved. A church constructed in the form of a
circle signifies that the church, like a circle, is endless. In all of these
cases, the church is the main path to the Kingdom of God.

 

I feel that the contents of the church are just as important as the church
itself. Church symbolism dates back to the very beginning of Christianity. The
anchor symbolizes a belief and hope in God. The Gospel is significant of the
Word of God. The censor denotes the warmth of prayer, symbolized by incense.
There are many more wonderful significant contents placed in our church, but the
one closest to me is the cross. The cross symbolizes the Crucifixion of our
Lord, through whom we receive our salvation. Whenever I hold the cross or wear
it around my neck, I feel that the Lord is with me and will continue to be with
me until I die. During the terrible hour of our Lord’s Crucifixion, love was
there — His undying love for us.

 

Love is the key to happiness. Without love and love of your religion, there is
not much to live for. Love is found everywhere throughout the church. St.
John said, “If a man say I love God and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he
that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen cannot love God whom he hath not
seen.” Love was first emphasized by Jesus at the inauguration of the Last
Supper. He loved everyone and asked no reward other than the spiritual
satisfaction of knowing that His action was Godlike. To me, one should feel
nearly the same as Christ did Himself. We attend church not only for the
satisfaction of being there, but knowing that God is with us and we are honored
to be with Him. My way of feeling this satisfaction is through Holy Confession
and Holy Communion.

 

Before I receive Holy Confession, I ask myself many questions, but the most
important one is: am I loyal to God and my church? Before answering this
question, I first must answer other questions. I ask myself if I am an active
member of the church school, abide by the Ten Commandments and respect the Seven
Sacraments. Most of all, do I love my church? If all of these answer yes, I feel
that I am prepared to receive Holy Confession. I feel that Holy Communion has a
deeper meaning than receiving the body and blood of Christ. When the priest
places the substance into my mouth, I feel that Christ is within me and that I
am a new person. I receive a great feeling of hope and love. All of this would
not be possible without my church.

 

The church has another very specific meaning to me. We all know that the church
is the Lord’s house, but to me the church is the body of Christ, with each
member having a specific function and obligation — all working together unto the
same spirit and all characterized by humility and love. If we all live
remembering that the church helps to bring us together as the children of God,
we will live the life of true Orthodox Christians.

 

In conclusion, my Orthodox faith has helped me to discover Christ, to know him,
and to love him. I pray I may be worthy of His love.

 

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What We Should Learn From The School Of Life

 

Word Magazine  October 1964  Page 6-7

 

 WHAT
WE SHOULD LEARN FROM THE SCHOOL OF LIFE

 (A Sermon Addressed To
Orthodox Youth)

 

 

  By Very Rev. Father
Michael Baroudy, Pastor Emeritus

St. George Orthodox Church, Vicksburg, Mississippi

 

 

Life is the greatest institution of learning. And the most important training we
get is not how to make a successful living, but how to make the most of our
lives in friendship, love, service, happiness, and worthy experience. So,
whether in war or peace, prosperity or poverty, the quicker we learn some of the
great lessons life tries to teach us, the closer we will come to being able to
say that our lives have been really worth the living. Whether we can pass the
test in the school of life and finish our record with flying colors, depends on
whether or not we are able to grasp these great lessons life teaches, and
practice them day by day.

 

The first lesson life teaches all of us is to be grateful. It teaches all to
appreciate what others have done for us. Most of the fine blessings we enjoy in
life were made possible to us by others who sacrificed, suffered, and died that
we might enjoy these privileges. There is a question in St. Paul’s letter to the
Corinthians, which I wish every growing Orthodox youth should remember. It asks,
“What is it that you have that was not given to you?” Think of it! Others have
built the churches in which we worship; others have built the schools in which
we study; others have written the books, composed the music, created the arts,
which are ours to have to enjoy. Others have built the roads upon which we
travel; others have made the scientific discoveries which make modern living so
much more comfortable. Others have died and are dying even now that you and I
might live and be free. Not a single step in human progress without someone
sacrificing for it! Others have paid the price that you and I might enjoy life.

 

The second lesson life teaches all of us is that it is a real game. If you want
to play the game and win it, you must learn the rules and obey them. You can
ignore the rules only to your own hurt. We all want something good out of life —
health, happiness, success, freedom, friends, a good home, a true love
experience, some thrills and adventures. Those are all normal desires for every
healthy soul. No one ever really makes a bad wish for himself or herself. Of all
the inmates in our prisons not one ever started his life deliberately planning
to end in prison. They got there because they used wrong and evil methods to get
what they wanted out of life. You can’t get something permanently good out of
life by doing something definitely wrong.

 

This is a very important matter for the young people. It is natural for youth to
go after thrills, adventures, self-expression. But the things many of them do to
get their hearts desire are often tragic. They ruin their lives and spoil their
dreams by ignoring the rules of the game, or by breaking them outright. A large
percentage of our prison population is made up of young people. The things they
did to get thrills and adventures led them to prison.

 

The third lesson life teaches us is that some of the finest things in life have
no price tags on them. Money can’t buy them. Your money may buy you a fine
house, but it can never buy you a real home. Money may buy all the luxuries of a
house, but not true love. It takes a lifetime of living and loving, sacrifices
and devotion to turn a house into a home.

 

That is true everywhere else. Your money may buy a high-powered automobile, but
it can’t buy happiness for you. You have got to earn that. Money may buy you a
political office, but never the faith and respect of your fellow citizens. You
have got to earn that. No amount of money can buy a man a good name that is
better than all the gold in the world, nor a clear conscience, nor yet a passage
to heaven and the most important truth about this matter is this —   the things
that money cannot buy are far more essential for the happiness and welfare of
our souls than the things it can buy.

 

The fourth great lesson life teaches us is that a man seldom gets what he wants
out of life, but if he is wise, he will learn to make the most of what life
hands out to him. Never be discouraged or disappointed just because you do not
get your heart’s desire. Life seldom hands out to a man his first choice. Some
of you are planning to become physicians, but will be forced to accept
something else. Some will want to take up law, but may end up as clerks and
laborers. Some young woman may be dreaming of becoming a great actress, but she
may become an ordinary housewife. Life is always like that. Someone said, “When
life hands you a lemon, add some sugar and make lemonade.” The truth is that
life may hand many of you a lemon. Will you be wise and brave enough to turn it
into lemonade?

 

The last and great lesson life tries to teach those of us who are willing to
learn is that a man’s real value is not so much in what he gets as in what he
gives.  You young people ought to get out of life all you can — education,
technical training, advancement, and success. But in the long run the true
measure of your life is not in what you have and keep for yourself, but in what
you give away. If you would have all the world’s wealth and the best education,
but kept it to yourself, it would be like burying your talents in the ground.
The more you use your talent and ability in some worthy cause, the more you will
get out of life.

 

So let us live for something worthwhile. Always try to fill your records with
kindness, honesty, love and service. And you will have your greatest rewards in
the loving hearts of your fellowmen.

 

What we have said so far would be incomplete and inadequate unless we take into
consideration the directives revealed by God in Jesus Christ our Lord. While God
revealed Himself to men in all the stages of history, yet the revelation of
Himself in His Son Jesus Christ excels and transcends all previous
manifestations, for it was the unfolding and unveiling of God in a particular
and peculiar way. In John 1:18 we read, “No man has seen God at any time; the
only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he has declared Him” and
in St. Paul’s letter to the Colossians, Paul affirms, “For in Him (Jesus)
dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead bodily.”

 

Jesus was a comparatively young man when He initiated the Christian movement,
being thirty years of age. He chose twelve young men to assist Him in the
promotion of the Kingdom of God. These men accompanied Him on all of His
missionary journeys, heard Him preach to thousands of people, witnessed His
power in healing people of all kinds of diseases, even raising the dead. Jesus
founded His Kingdom, not upon fear but upon love, not upon fanaticism, but upon
faith, not upon superstition but upon the truth. Jesus revealed God as Love,
Spirit and Light. The mark of genuine discipleship was love. Said he, “By
this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one for
another.”

 

It was from this nucleus of twelve men — modest insofar as numbers go, modest in
terms of educational, financial, political or social attainment, that it has
grown to be the most sacred, the most powerful instrument for righteousness this
world has ever known. It deals in matters that have to do with the salvation of
human souls, and in life’s higher values. Ours is a faith revealed by Jesus
Christ as to what should be a person’s attitude toward God, toward men and
toward himself.

 

With the permission and the blessings of our great leader, Metropolitan Antony,
I hereby appeal to all Orthodox everywhere to do no less than their best
in promoting peace, unity, and creative good will. Much depends on youth and how
to evaluate their heritage and their religious faith.

 

Today much is said about the high standard of living, but what about the high
standard of thinking for as the Good Book affirms, “As a man thinketh in his
heart, so is he.”

 

Upon the shoulders of all, both clergy and laity, falls the responsibility of
lending a helping hand in guiding the ship of the church, whose Pilot is the
Lord Jesus Christ. The church needs the support of every progressive,
forward-looking, God-honoring and God-fearing Orthodox.

 

I hope and pray that we won’t fail, neither the Lord nor our church leaders in
this hour of sinister, divisive, secularism and infidelity, and stand together
and fight off all sinister influences contrary to sound doctrine and faith.

 

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What Women Can Do For The Church

 

Word Magazine  May 1981  Page 14

 

 

 

“WHAT WOMEN CAN DO FOR

THE CHURCH”

  

 

Some fifty men and women of all Orthodox jurisdictions met recently at St.
Vladimir’s Seminary for a conference on “Women in the Life of the Orthodox
Church.” According to Sophie Koloumzin, the Orthodox religious educator who gave
a summary talk, “If there is any problem which was addressed in all the
workshops and all the speeches of the conference, it is the problem of what
women can do for the church.”

 

The theme was introduced by Bishop Maximos of Pittsburgh, whose keynote address,
“The Orthodox Concept of Personhood and the Particular Charismata that Women
Bring to the Church,” introduced the Orthodox definition of “personhood” as the
human being created by God in the image of God. There is only one image of God,
which each person in his or her call to holiness strives to imitate. Yet each
person is unique, offering unique gifts to the church, which is the society of
persons under God. Bishop Maximos itemized the special gifts that women have to
offer the church. These gifts fall under the category of a great spiritual
sensitivity or “Spiritual Motherhood,” with the highest expression of this gift
being love, and the characteristics being a propensity to perfect, protect, and
nurture all things.

 

Vickie Trbuhovich spoke on “Orthodox Women in American Society.” She listed the
challenges facing “not just women, but men also” as challenges of morality,
lifestyle, commitment, security. “The highest-value that secularism has to offer
is relativity, in which there is no place for a total commitment to anything.”
Her proposed response to the challenge of secularism is “to be aggressive and
tireless in seeking the kingdom of God, to make Christ the center of one’s life,
to spend time in church, and not to be blown away by the quest for financial and
emotional stability.’’

 

Vasiliki Eckley, in her discussion of “New Possibilities of Leadership for Women
in the Orthodox Church,” gave an Orthodox definition of the leader, both female
and male, as “one whose acts through submission and service to God become
examples for others.” The new possibility that comes to humanity through
Christ’s incarnation is an invitation by God to act with God through willful
submission. This new possibility is especially significant in our present-day
“post modern” period, a time characterized by organized struggles to liberate
people in various situations, because of the tremendous need for people to
willingly become instruments of grace in a world “which seems to be coming apart
at the seams.” “If we hope to offer our lives humbly to God, we must face
the challenge of relating to each other in true humility, true service.”

 

The abstract discussion of the speakers was put into more practical terms by the
workshops. Participants attended one of five workshops and presented position
papers on each of the topics during the last day of the conference.

 

The Purification workshop, led by Jean Sam and Father Paul Tarazi, discussed the
Orthodox rite of “churching” a woman forty days after she has given birth,
studied the Old Testament view and laws of purification in their relation to the
natural flow of blood, and in this light tried to understand the New Testament
continuity and transformation of the meaning of this purification rite for both
the woman and the child. The workshop reported, “We find that a lack of
education in the teachings of the Church is pervasive among Orthodox men and
women. This leads to a misunderstanding and incorrect practice of the liturgical
rites of the Church. We recommend that people be educated in the essential
meaning of the rite of churching a woman, which seems to be especially
misunderstood.”

 

The workshop on Church Service and the Diaconate, led by Kyriaki FitzGerald and
Deacon Michael Roshak, discussed the resurgence of lay leadership in the Church,
and recommended exploring the possibility of reinstituting the Diaconate for
women and revitalizing the role of male deacons, in light of the tremendous need
for certain work to be done in the church, specifically teaching, social work,
and spiritual counseling.

 

Women’s participation in the ecumenical movement was lauded in the workshop on
Ecumenism, because of the special message that women who are educated in their
own Orthodox faith can bring to the movement. This workshop, led by Father
Thomas Hopko and Vivian Hampers, concluded that ecumenism is an area in which
women should even more actively serve the Church.

 

“Monasticism is the Christian life in its purest form; it is a clarification of
the Christian life.” The workshop on Monasticism, led by Sister Natalie Garland
of the Monastery of the Veil of our Lady in Bussy-En-Othe, France, Archimandrite
Nicholas Smisko, and Father Gregory Gula, named the qualities of the monastic
life as sacrifice, obedience, and trust in God. Monasticism is a basic, ancient
life, but it is new in North America. The workshop reported, “Although the quest
for spiritual life is not necessarily a call to monasticism, at this time in
North America we need not only monastics who are called by God to a life of
prayer, but also lay people who understand monasticism.”

 

The fact that there is no part of the church body that suffers as much as the
family suffers today was stressed by the workshop on Orthodox Women in the
Family, led by Father Joseph Allen and Elizabeth Vinogradov. “Parents take a
load on their shoulders that they do not have the strength to bear. They don’t
know what to do with the children.” The workshop suggested that women, with
their special gift of “spiritual motherhood,” could counsel and advise families
and family members, thus fulfilling the need for motherhood in the church body.

 

In all the workshops and lectures, participants and leaders found that the
question of what women can do for the church could not be isolated from the
broader context of how lay people can find a place in the Church
where they can serve the Church body with increased spiritual vitality. Because
the conference was the first of its kind in the U.S., discussion of topics
related specifically to women’s participation and influence in Church
life was preliminary and inconclusive, except in isolating issues for further
discussion. The conference mandated that similar conferences be organized on a
local level, for the purpose of incorporating more Orthodox lay people and
broaching issues that were introduced by the national conference.

 

 

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What is Unity by Fr. Christopher Holwey

This
article first appeared in the Adbook for the

1996 Midwest Region Parish Life Conference hosted by

St. Elias Orthodox Church in Sylvania, OH

What
Is Unity?

by Father Christopher Holwey

  

    
The theme of our Parish Life Conference this year is: 
"Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell
together in unity" (Psalm 133:1).  As
we contemplate the meaning of this verse, it is obvious to us that one of the
key words in this passage is unity.  What,
then, does it mean for us to dwell together in unity?

    
The dictionary defines unity as the state of being one; the state,
quality, or condition of accord or agreement; singleness or constancy of purpose
or action; the combination or arrangement of parts into a whole. 
After reading this, and keeping our focus within the life of the Orthodox
Church, it seems to me that the real origin or prototype of our understanding or
definition of unity, of being of one accord, purpose or action, or combination
of parts into a whole, is found within the nature of the Godhead, the Trinity: 
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

    
We know from Holy Scripture that "The Lord our God is one Lord"
(Deut. 6:4), and that there is "one God and Father of us all, who is above
all and through all and in all" (Eph. 4:6). 
It is the teaching of the Orthodox Church, therefore, that there is only
one God of us all because there is only one Father of us all.  We also know from these verses and many others that when the
name of God is used in Scripture, it refers mainly to the Father Himself, which
means that the Son is referred to as the Son of God, and the Holy Spirit as the
Spirit of God, each coming from the Father in their own unique way. 
When the Jews claimed to have "one Father, even God," Jesus
said to them, "If God were your Father, you would love me, for I proceeded
and came forth from God; I came not of my own accord, but he sent me" (John
8:42).  Later, Jesus told of the
coming of the Counselor, "...whom I shall send to you from the Father, even
the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father..." (John 15:26). 
The point, then, is that from the beginning, before time, the Son and the
Holy Spirit are forever one with the Father, perfectly united with Him in their
divine and uncreated essence and being, yet distinct in their personhood: 
three Persons, yet one divine Godhead.

     
Furthermore, throughout the Gospel according to St. John alone, we see
many instances of the harmony that exists in the Godhead, where the Son and the
Spirit are in perfect accord or agreement with the Father, with singleness of
purpose or action according to the will of the Father: 
"My food is to do the will of him who sent me, and to accomplish his
work" (4:34); "I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will,
but the will of him who sent me" (6:38); "I do as the Father has
commanded me, so that the world may know that I love the Father" (14:31);
"No longer do I call you servants,...but I have called you friends, for all
that I have heard from the Father I have made known to you" (15:15);
"If you love me, you will keep my commandments. 
And I will pray the Father, and he will give you another Counselor, to be
with you for ever, even the Spirit of truth" (14:15-16).

    
What does this mean for us?  It
means that we must now follow their example as well, and manifest this unity and
harmony of the Godhead in our world today. 
Under the spiritual guidance and direction of our bishops and priests, we
must all - clergy and laity alike - seek to know God personally as our Father
and Lord, and strive to be one with Him.  Every
time we gather together as the Church, to hear the word of God, to offer our
thanks, prayers, and love to God, and to receive the body and blood of Christ in
holy communion, we "become partakers of the divine nature" (2 Peter
1:4), and manifest our oneness and common union with God and with one another. 
This oneness must then translate into common action by our working
together for a common purpose, according to the will of God, in order to
accomplish the work that He calls us to do.

     
So, then, what is unity?  It
is beholding how truly good and pleasant it is for us all to dwell and be
together in God: living and working each day here and now in His being, in His
love, in agreement with His purpose and according to His will. 

When The Preacher Loses God

 

Word Magazine  September 1961  Page 7-8

 

  

WHEN THE PREACHER LOSES GOD

  

 

By Howard W. King

  

An Invitation to Soul-Searching 

 

To mediate God to folk is the lofty privilege of the minister of Christ. It is a
challenging and rewarding service, and to perform it the preacher keeps in touch
with God and men.

 

Peter Ainslie, who served one church in Baltimore for more than forty years,
wrote in Working with God, “As the physician goes on his rounds,
believing that he has the cure for most of the ills of the human body, I go on
my rounds with no less confidence, believing that the gospel of Jesus Christ is
the one cure for all the ills of the soul, . . . and bearing to all the
consciousness of God.”

 

The preacher is deeply interested in guiding men, women and youth into the
knowledge of God; but there are times when it seems that God fades out of our
consciousness. We may become less and less aware of His infinite nearness. We
may not even realize that the glory of the Lord has departed from us. If we lose
God, how can we help others to find Him?

 

In That the Ministry Be Not Blamed, John A. Hutton declared, “The whole
Bible is the record of man’s agony to find God, and having found Him, not to
lose Him.” Since there is the possibility of losing Him, what are some of the
experiences that indicate such loss is imminent?

 

WE MAY LOSE GOD WHEN WE ARE OBSESSED WITH OUR BUSYNESS. The preacher is
so busy responding to the ever increasing calls for his help that he may be
uncertain as to what he shall put first on his schedule, and what he shall leave
undone until another day. But every day becomes hectic, and it seems that he is
never able to do many things he had planned to do.

 

We may neglect thorough systematic study of the Bible. We may postpone a course
of reading which we had hoped to pursue. We may fail to take the necessary time
for private devotions; or, we may hurry through them and thus rob them of their
potential salutary effect on our ministry as a whole. The preacher must decide
what are the most urgent matters to which he will give himself.

 

Thomas Chalmers, the noted Scotch theologian, believed that most failures in the
ministry are due, not to lack of study or visiting or church activities, but to
lack of prayer.

 

What James S. Stewart suggested in Heralds of God is a wise and
profitable procedure, namely,     “. . . whether your congregation be large or
small a great part of your task on its behalf lies in the realm of intercession
. . . I mean praying for every family, each separate soul, by name.” He
advocated praying for about three families a day. Visualize their circumstances,
think of their work, difficulties, temptations. This consumes time, but the
effect on the people and the minister himself would be most helpful.

 

Are we too busy to think about the members of our flock daily, and to pray for
them according to their several needs?

 

WE MAY LOSE GOD WHEN WE ARE OBSESSED WITH BEING A VIP. The preacher’s
self-importance seems justified by his busyness. Why is he so popular? Why are
his services sought by so many? Why is so much praise lavished upon him?
The inference is that he is a very important person. But the preacher’s
seeming greatness may dim his vision of God and dull his sensitiveness to God’s
presence.  As Stewart affirmed, “Nowhere surely are pride and self-importance
more incongruous and unpardonable than in the servant of the cross.”

 

The humble man thanks God that he is being used to help others, and thinks of
himself as Roy Pearson put it in The Ministry of Preaching, “He is more
interested in becoming an instrument than an idol. He is more eager to be
used to the glory of God than to use the glory of God as the means of his own
adulation.”

 

WE MAY LOSE GOD WHEN WE ARE OBSESSED WITH THE PRAISE OF MEN. An
overweening desire for complimentary remarks indicates that we may love the
praise of men more than the praise of God. We may be more interested in
expressions of commendation from the hearers than in discerning the
manifestation of God’s power, and thinking, “This is the Lord’s doing, and it is
marvelous in our eyes.”

 

Inordinate desire for praise makes manifest that the preacher thinks more highly
of himself than he ought to think. He may forget God’s part in the work of
preaching and magnify himself instead of the Lord.

 

David Smith has reminded us in The Art of Preaching that the Greek
rhetoricians were so desirous of praise that they would ask for it after the
deliverance of their orations, saying, “What was your opinion of me?” Another
would boast that his audience was becoming larger. A friend would agree, stating
that there were about five hundred the last time. Whereupon the man would
counter that there were at least a thousand.

 

Christian preachers of that era imitated the Greek rhetoricians, even going
beyond them in their eagerness for praise. Chrysostom stated that if they won
the praise of the assemblage they were as happy as if they had gotten a kingdom;
but if their discourse ended in silence their despondency was unbearable. Some
went so far as to have hirelings in the audience to begin the applause!

 

To us this seems disgusting, profane. Yet it may be that we are often “greedy of
popularity” without making it so plain to others.

 

The words of Wilfred T. Grenfell in his little book, What Life Means to Me,
set forth the ideal toward which we might strive, “Amidst such shifting
scenes the highest reward of life to me would be to be like Jesus.”

 

WE MAY LOSE GOD WHEN WE ARE OBSESSED WITH SERMON MAKING. It is possible
that we may be so fascinated with the task of preparing sermons that they become
an end instead of a means to an end. We may overlook the fact that we are only
instruments in the hands of God. “We are laborers together with God.”

 

It is profoundly significant that many of those who have written books on the
sublime but difficult art of preaching have stressed the supreme importance of
nourishing the preacher’s inner life.

 

“I have seen so many men lose God in sermon making, as the scientist loses Him
in his search of nature,” avowed Ainslie, “that from my earliest preaching I
have sought to guard myself and made preparing my heart more important than
preparing my mind.”

 

James Black advised in The Mystery of Preaching, “Preach what you
believe. It is the one type of preaching . . . with magic in it . . . Only what
is real to you can be real to anybody else. The one sure note of power is
sincerity . . . Without the grace of God and a passion for others, the most
finished discourse is a tinkling cymbal!”

 

“The minister’s own religious experience is the in­comparable source of
preaching” averred Halford E. Luccock in In the Minister’s Workshop. “The
minister’s first equipment for preaching, beside which all else is trivial, is
replenished resources in his own life, and fresh first-hand experience of the
riches of the grace of God.”

 

When we are burdened with busyness and fail to renew our spiritual resources, we
are losing God. When we are afflicted with a serious case of “swellheadedness,”
thinking more highly of ourselves than we ought to think, we are losing God.
When we are so enamored of praise that we long for it as a hungry man longs for
food, we are losing God. When the thrill of sermon making supplants the joy of
fellowship with the Eternal, we are losing God.

 

But we can find Him again if we heed the voice of the Lord, “Take my yoke upon
you and learn of me,” the yoke of humility, the yoke of obedience, the yoke of
self-denial.

 

The self protrudes so persistently that the view of the Son of God is
obstructed. We should get out of the way and let the people see the Christ.

 

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Where Have All The Grandmas Gone?

 Again
Magazine, September, 1994, Page 28,29,31 

Where Have All the
GRANDMAS Gone? 

THE
LOST INFLUENCE OF OLDER WOMEN

 IN
THE LIFE OF THE CHURCH

By Father John Weldon Hardenbrook

The
godless communist dictator Joseph Stalin inadvertently touched upon one of the
most formidable, yet unheralded sources of power known to the Orthodox Church
when he made the now-famous prophecy, “When the old women of Russia die, the
Church will die.” This statement was recently noted by an American news
anchorman. Speaking of the emerging strength of the Russian Church and the
collapse of communism, he said, “The truth of the matter is that the old women
of Russia never did die.”

 

Stalin knew he could not kill the soul of
the Orthodox Church in Russia without exterminating every pious old woman in the
land. Even Stalin knew he couldn’t get away with doing a thing like that. Most
of those women had lost their husbands to World War II or to the evil and cruel
persecutions suffered at the hands of Soviet butchers. However, no oppressor
could win the war against these grandmothers, the “babushkas.” Like the
Myrrhbearing Women, who, after the burial of Christ, were left to go to the tomb
with their costly spices in their hands, these women were left to anoint the
persecuted Church of Russia with their courage and faith. They guarded the small
eternal flame of life in the Church against the ever-pressing gates of hell.

Countless stories concerning the women of
Russia and their faith and courage have spread around the world over the last
seventy years—stories such as that of the nuns of Shamordino. They were sent
to the Solovki Prison and were taken up to a windy, freezing hilltop in the
Arctic winter to kneel bareheaded with no gloves, for eight hours each day for
three days, in temperatures below freezing, because they would not do hard labor
for “the regime of Antichrist.”

Of course these nuns were prepared, both
spiritually and physically, to face such persecution. Their endurance didn’t
just happen. Their spiritual disciplines of prayer, fasting, obedience, and
working with their hands had formed them into the women who were found faithful,
unwavering at their time of testing.

The young women of pre-revolutionary
Russia had godly nuns as their examples. Whether they saw nuns being formed in
the spiritual rhythm of life at the nearby convents or the novice nuns who
performed their sacred duties in the local parishes, the younger women of Russia
saw what it meant to be holy. Not only the nuns, but the older laywomen as well,
provided a living image of holiness for the younger women to follow. From this
heritage came in later years a constant flow of strong, selfless, and pious old
women—the old women who “never died” because their faith has never died to
this day.

Russia is not the only land that is graced
with the presence of such saintly and righteous old women. In fact, these
stories are typical of the old women of Greece, Lebanon, Syria, Romania, Serbia,
Egypt, and other countries where Orthodox Christians have had to suffer for
their faith. All the Christian immigrants who have come to America have stories
to tell about the old women “at home”—the women who overcame difficult
circumstances such as war and poverty with such selfless and courageous acts. In
fact, all these stories together make up the history of Christian women. 

WHERE
IS GRANDMA NOW?

My
question is—where are the faithful grandmothers in North America? Did these
women somehow fail to immigrate to our land? Did their daughters and
granddaughters get lost in “the land of plenty” and fail to pass on the
spiritual life and holy traditions of the Church? Why aren’t our women today
maturing into the role that is so needed in our lives? In many Orthodox parishes
throughout North America, Grandma is gone. And I believe we the Church will not
come to the fullness of healthy faith until we get her back. For God has given
such women an incredible gift of strength to overcome the most severe and cruel
obstacles of life when it comes to the need for faith and courage to survive.
The fabric of their lives was formed from the warp and woof of personal hardship
and endurance— including factors such as: 

I)
A life of suffering. Women become strong when they have to, not when they are
given the option to be weak. 

2)
An acceptance of suffering as not only inevitable, but beneficial to the
spiritual life. This is not the same as resignation: rather it is an active
decision to accept suffering as coming from God for the purpose of one’s
salvation, and to cooperate with Him in order to derive the greatest possible
spiritual benefit from it.

     
3) A belief that self-sacrifice is
an integral and beautiful part of the Christian life. For self-sacrifice to be
worthwhile, it must be voluntary, not forced: and it must be undertaken in love,
not with an attitude of false martyrdom.

     
4) A godly order of priorities. One
must, according to Scripture, put love for God first: love for neighbor second;
and love for self third (Matthew 22:37-39).

 CONTEMPORARY
COP-OUTS

 It
is not difficult to see how all these factors have been nearly eliminated
from the lives of modern middle-class American women. Physical suffering has
been reduced to a minimum through prolonged peace (at least within our borders),
advanced medicine, and the highest standard of living the world has ever known.
Mental and emotional suffering are combated through psychology and the self-help
movement. 

What suffering remains—for we can never
eliminate it all—is regarded as an almost unforgivable intrusion into our
lives. Our immediate response is to try to avoid it or overcome it in some way.
If this proves to be impossible, we respond with bitterness and self-pity and
try to find someone to blame. If no human scapegoat is handy, we can always
blame God. 

Given these conditions, self-sacrifice has
naturally acquired a bad name. The feminist movement strives to convince women
that self-sacrifice is forced upon them by male-dominated society, and that the
only way to assert their full personhood is to reject the concept of
self-sacrifice completely and pursue self-fulfillment instead. While fulfillment
is a gift which God longs to bestow on His servants, it is not something we can
achieve by striving for it directly. (“For whoever desires to save his life
will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake and the gospel’s will
save it” [Mark 8:35].) Self-fulfillment is just another name for self-love.

Self-love, of course, is the most abused
concept of all. Misinterpreting the second great commandment of Christ, “love
your neighbor as yourself,” modern pop psychology has decreed that in order to
be able to love others one must first love oneself—in fact, one must put
oneself first in everything. If there’s anything left over when the self has
been gratified, then we can think about giving to others. In this scenario, God
often ends up in last place. Rather than seeking to serve Him, we try to make
Him serve us. We demand abundant earthly blessings in exchange for the great
sacrifice we make in simply acknowledging His existence. 

This cultural context naturally af­fects
us all, men and women alike. However, because there are more real victims
(of physical and sexual abuse, abandonment, etc.) among women than among men,
women in general have been more encouraged to take up the attitude of
victims—an attitude of weakness, self-pity, and self-absorption rather than
the godly response of strength, perseverance, and forgiveness. Ironically, it
seems that the greater the real suffering a woman experiences, the more likely
she is to respond to her suffering with faith and strength. Women whose lives
are truly tragic have to be strong to survive.

GRANDMA,
COME HOME!

The Church
in America may not be facing overt physical persecution, but she is facing
something potentially much more harmful—the slow attrition in numbers and zeal
brought about by constant contact with a godless society. The Church in North
America is in desperate peril. She is losing her young people at an alarming
rate. Without strong, spiritual older women who are willing to give of
themselves to teach the younger women and to keep the traditions of the Church
alive, the Church will not survive.

We need
desperately the return of pious, fearless, courageous, and godly women to help
protect the interior life of the Church and home. Saint Paul wrote, “Older
women . . . [are to  be reverent in behavior . . . teachers of good things— that
they admonish the young women” (Titus 2:3, 4). No one has more experience and
wisdom to pass on to a younger woman than an older woman. It is always tragic to
come upon a young mother who has gone through needless agony because she failed
to understand this divine order—or could not find an older woman willing to
teach her.

Women are to take the responsibility for
helping to make the Faith come alive in the home. The man should set the course
for the home, but the woman has the gift from God to see that the Faith really
gets “fleshed out” as it applies to each unique situation. It is the woman
who can better ensure that her family keeps the spiritual calendar that sets us
apart from this world, rather than the calendar of this world which leads to
separation from God. Worship, feasts, fasts, prayers, pilgrimages, and festivals
should shape our lives more than sports, restaurants, television, and
movies—the pleasure and entertainment calendar of American culture.

Each Christian home is a “domestic
church.” A wedding is an ordination for service in the domestic church, where
husband and wife are called to a unique sharing in Christ’s priesthood by
their holy crowning. Their home is their church with a small ‘c’. If we have
that view of our homes, they will become the spiritual extension of the Church
which can fill our lives with the things of God. Our children will not survive
in this present culture unless we bring the calendar and the rich traditions of
the Faith into our homes.

A Christian home should look and act like
a Christian home. Family icons, votive lamps, altars, collected sacred objects
(oil, water, palm branches), incense, censer, candles, Bibles, a rule of
prayer— all help proclaim that this home is committed to the life of the
heavenly realm.

Having watched men and women for many
years—as a man, a husband, a father, a grandfather, and a priest—I would say
this to the men: Encourage the women and cooperate with them in their efforts to
nurture the holy traditions of the Church and home.

GUARDIANS
OF THE FAITH

The
faithful older women also are called to help beautify and guard the House of the
Lord. The pious old women of Russia and other Orthodox lands unabashedly take it
upon themselves to correct anyone—even a priest—whom they see behaving
improperly toward the things of God. It is the proper place of older women to
admonish the younger women concerning the proper dress and behavior in church.
You won’t catch a young Russian woman entering a church without a headcovering,
or wearing shorts in a holy place, or venerating an icon with lipstick on. The
“babushkas” would never let them get away with it!

These
women have earned the right to correct others’ behavior not by their age
alone, but by their lifetime of selfless and devoted service to the Church. They
are a living testimony to the words of the psalm: “Those who are planted in
the house of the Lord shall flourish in the courts of our God. They shall still
bear fruit in old age; they shall be fresh and flourishing, to declare
that the Lord is upright” (Psalm 92:13-15, emphasis added).

Let me exhort the older women of the
Church to make every effort to model themselves after the godly women of
Orthodox lands. Educate yourself in the traditions of the Church. Cultivate your
own spiritual life so that you will have good fruit to share with others. Be
willing to give of yourself to help younger women (beginning with your own
daughters and daughters-in-law, if you have them) to live out the Faith in their
homes and with their children. Spend time with your grandchildren, teaching them
the traditions of the Church and their meaning. (See the article “Building the
Domestic Church” for some specific suggestions.) Serve the Church in whatever
way you can, not disdaining the lowlier tasks, such as scrubbing floors, nor
shrinking in false humility from more difficult tasks which you may be called
and gifted to do. Finally, don’t be too intimidated to speak out (in love and
humility, not in self-righteousness) if you see others in your parish failing to
give proper reverence to the things of God.

To the
younger women, I would say, try to find older women to model yourselves after,
and receive their advice and correction with humility and respect. If you cannot
find any such women in the flesh, read the lives of women saints and the
writings and biographies of modern godly women. Do all you can to make your home
a domestic church, and strive to grow into the sort of older woman you would
want to emulate.

ONE
WOMAN’S BOLDNESS

As an example of what one valiant woman
can accomplish, I would like to conclude with a story from modern Serbia.
Monasteries everywhere had been laid waste by the communists. Piles of rubble
were all that remained of the once-thriving communities of monastics. The monks
had been driven away, but the nuns could move about with a certain amount of
freedom as long as they did not try to evangelize or to reconstruct any of the
buildings. But one Mother was determined to rebuild. She began by standing on
the streets of towns and villages with an old shoe box in which she stored any
alms given to aid her endeavors.

Forty years passed and she continued to
add to the meager amounts that were given by compassionate villagers, pilgrims,
or foreign tourists. Finally the time appeared to be right to begin the daring
task. Instead of rebuilding the chapel first, which was the normal procedure.
Mother began by rebuilding the living quarters. Villagers came and labored along
with the few nuns dedicated to the awesome task of reconstruction. Soon
communist officials heard rumors in the village of building going on at the
former monastery and sent agents to investigate.

Searching out the Mother in charge, they
demanded to know what she was constructing. “A home,” was her simple reply.
“For whom?” she was further ques­tioned. “A family,” was the answer
given. “What family?” they asked. She replied, “You do not know this
family.” The officials continued to question and remind her that she did not
have permits to build, but to no avail; so they departed for a time.

Throughout
the following months the building site was regularly inspected and the nuns
questioned and threatened, but this harassment had no visible effect upon their
activity. Finally one day, after enduring a barrage of harassment and
interrogation, Mother confessed to the communist agents, “I am rebuilding
God’s house. This is a monastery.”

The officials screamed in her face,
“There is no way you can do such a thing! You know this activity is totally
illegal! We will return and this must all be torn down immediately!”

With flaming eyes and set mouth. Mother
turned on her heel and stormed into the brick building in which the workers
lived. Just as quickly she returned and in her hand was a revolver, pointed
directly at the spokesman of the interrogators. “I am rebuilding God’s house
and you will not stop this work of God. Get out of here!” she cried.

The officials cursed and screamed. “Are
you crazy, old woman?” She replied, “Shall I show you just how crazy I
am?” She extended the gun with a deadly calm and slowly began to squeeze the
trigger. Cursing, the communist officials began to back away, then turned and
hurried to their car and drove away. That was in 1987, and they never returned.
The nuns continued their work until the entire monastery was rebuilt, and it is
now a thriving community of believers in Serbia.

May God raise up for us a generation of
courageous and truly pious women with this kind of conviction and fortitude—
women who refuse to compromise and who keep us connected with the daily life of
the Church. May the women of God help us all to live set apart from this fallen
world. 

 

Who Are You?

 

Word Magazine  October 1968  Page 14

 

  

WHO ARE YOU?

 

  

Father Vladimir Berzonsky

Holy
Trinity Church, Parma, Ohio

  

 

“Judge not,
that you be not judged. For with the judgment you pronounce you will be
judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get.”   
(MATTHEW7:1)

  

It’s interesting the way a person is evaluated; the method changes from one
generation to another. Notice, for example, when you are introduced to somebody,
how your new acquaintance goes about learning more about you.

 

The older generation, those more than sixty years of age, always ask about your
origin. Where were you born? Where did your parents and grandparents come from?
Apparently from learning what city or village in Europe your ancestors
originated, they feel able to know you better and to understand your behavior,
personality, likes and dislikes.

 

To anyone less than sixty, origin and nationality are not so important. ‘They
ask, “What do you do?” They evaluate a person by his occupation. To simplify,
they judge the status of a man by his income bracket. We hear, “He’s a $7,000 a
year man.”

 

To assist that type of character analysis, maybe we should leave the price tags
on the sleeves of our suits and dresses, and on the left rear window of our
automobiles. What really does this say about a person? After all nothing
essentially changes in the man who moves from 137th Street to “Worstershire
Regal Estates.”

 

Nevertheless, we continue the hypocrisy of judging a man by his market value in
our society, even if this has nothing to do at all with his real self. He may be
a “big man” in the business world, yet a tyrant and a bully in his home. Another
man, working at the same machine for forty years, can be more full of the wisdom
of the world, concern for humanity, love for his family, his faith and his world
than any tycoon listed on the benefactor plaque at the public museum.

 

Christ warns us not to form judgments about others, not because it’s “not nice,”
to evaluate them, but because it’s impossible. We who don’t really even know
ourselves, can only make broad guesses at the personalities of others on the
basis of what they like, what they wear, how they act and where they “come
from.” How can a boy on the sidewalk with his nose pressed to the window know
what the cake inside tastes like? He can only judge by what he sees. We know
people only by the way they look and act. Their souls remain a secret, silent
mystery. It is much more profitable for us to try and fathom our own souls,
putting aright what is wrong with ourselves, before we begin straightening
others.

 

Depression, alcoholism and despair result when a man believes he is only worth
the price our society puts on him.

 

We in the Church must reach these men and convince them that we are not part of
the “Establishment;” that in the Holy Name of our Lord every person’s soul,
every human being has a value far greater than his “trade-in” value he has to
sell in our society.

 

Just as Jesus, so we too must not judge a person by the values of society, but
by the virtues of his heart. Those who are blessed: the poor in spirit, the
humble, the pure, the charitable, are known to God alone.

 

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Who Cares? The Relationship Of Clergy And Laity

Word Magazine  June
1998  Page 8-9 

 

 

WHO
CARES?

 

THE
RELATIONSHIP

OF
CLERGY AND LAITY

 

 

By Father Joseph Allen

 

 

Whether
one is priest or parishioner in the “symphony” of the Orthodox Christian
parish, the question which strikes at the fundamental nature of our life together
is, “Who cares?” If we are serious about our parish life being a reflection
of the perfect Community, the Trinitarian Community of Father, Son and Holy
Spirit, then this question becomes that much more critical to the Church.

 

When the
Prophet Micah asked that same question, “Who cares?” he quickly answered it
by telling us how to care with this formula:

 

And
what does the Lord require of thee? To do justice, to love mercy, and to walk
humbly with your God (Micah 6:8).

 

Such are
the components of what St. Basil the Great called an “atmosphere” in which a
true caring community grows: to do justice, to love mercy, to walk humbly with
your God. And when God became human in the flesh of Jesus Christ, “when he
pitched his tent among us” (John 1:14), this atmosphere of care received its
ultimate affirmation: it is God who cares first (1 John 4:19). And so
today we speak not only of a community, but a veritable Christian community.

 

But does
all this mean that the atmosphere can exist today without our own efforts? Can
the proper symphony of clergy and laity function so that this atmosphere prevails,
without our own work? Of course, we already know the answer.

 

Depending
on our individual experiences, however, each person will probably be able to
note when he or she saw that Christian atmosphere break down. In turn, this
breakdown in atmosphere can occur between clergy and laity or simply among the
laity. And when it does occur, the question will again be raised: “Who
cares?” The atmosphere rapidly degenerates.

 

Allow me
two examples, one which is contemporary and specific, and a second, ancient and
universal.

 

The first
example is specific to the clergy-laity breakdown, one in which the atmosphere
was not Christian but pharisaic: The young priest was sent to his first assignment
as pastor of a long-established community. He knew “what the Lord required: to
do justice, to love mercy and to walk humbly with God.”  His intention was to create just such an atmosphere where the
Holy Spirit could take root.  But
the parish council in that community told the Bishop that they would “put him
to the test.” The Bishop knew the young man and had every confidence that he
could stand any test put to him. After Liturgy during his first month there, the
parish picnic was scheduled, and they all went out to the local lake as was
their custom. They normally would all gather on the boat with all their supplies
and cross over to the island. And so they did. However, this time as they were
halfway over, a member of the parish council suddenly said, “Oh no, we forgot
the hot dogs!” Someone would have to swim ashore to get them.

 

The new
pastor realized that this was one of those tests, and recalled that the Bishop
did warn him that they would indeed test him. Finally, he closed his eyes like
St. Peter, when at the raging of the sea he asked Our Lord to “call him.”
That young pastor then opened his eyes, got out of the boat and walked on the
water to the shore, where he retrieved the hot dogs. The parishioners were
stunned, forgetting Our Lord’s words:

 

“These
things will you do, and greater things will you do!” They stood amazed and in
silence, until, that is, the leader of the pharisees among them, still seeking
to find some fault, said, “See, I told you the Bishop would send us
someone who could not swim!”

 

The
atmosphere needed in our parish is one in which each of us will see the good
intent of the person who, when asked “Who cares?” will respond “I care!”
We simply will need “eyes to see, ears to hear and a heart to perceive”
(Isaiah 6:10, Mark 8:18), rather than a cynical pre-judgment which is the
hallmark of the pharisee’s attitude.

 

The
second example is an ancient one which has a universal meaning, that is, for all
of us, clergy and laity alike. It is a story which we have all heard, but which
I should like now to frame in our present context regarding that atmosphere
which answers the question “Who cares?” It is found in the Gospel of St.
Luke, Chapter Ten, and the scriptural scholars claim that in their encounter we
probably get the clearest example of the interactions in which Our Lord
participated.

 

“A
certain lawyer came to Jesus and asked, ‘What do I have to do to inherit
eternal life?’ “ The scholars say this is the trickiest question in the
Mosaic law. But Our Lord, being a good Middle Eastern man, answers the question with
a question: “Well, you know the law: what does it say?”

 

The
lawyer: “The law says, you shall love the Lord your God with all that you are:
your mind, heart, soul, etc., and your neighbor as yourself.”

 

Jesus
says: “Fine.” That’s all he says: “Fine! You’ve got it right.”

 

But this
is a shrewd lawyer, and he is trying to “justify himself,” trying to
“entrap” Jesus: “But who is my neighbor?”

 

And we
all know what Our Lord does in response: He tells the story of the Good
Samaritan. The Levite passes by. The Priest passes by. The Samaritan crosses
over. And Jesus ends the story with another question: “Now, who proved to be
the neighbor?” “The one who showed mercy.” “Good, go and do likewise!”

 

It is the
Samaritan, the least likely one, who answers “Who cares?” with “I care.”
He is the one who shows the lawyer — and all of us — what the atmosphere
must be like in our parishes. At each point in the story, there is a movement
from the abstract to the concrete, and this is critical because our faith is no
longer Christian Faith until it becomes concretized.

 

When this
lawyer asks “Who is my neighbor?” he would love to get Jesus up in that
beautiful web of the mind. “Well, let’s see: my neighbor is the one who is
within shouting distance, or that I can reach within sixty steps, or who comes
to the same synagogue.” Those kind of “law” questions, those kind of
“mind” questions. But he can’t get away with that: Jesus will not stay up
there in the ice of the mind. He tells the story of the Good Samaritan, what is
called perhaps the most concrete of stories in the entire New Testament.

 

Pay close
attention: with each step of the story into the concrete, we are taken ourselves
into the concrete: the Samaritan picks up the man, rubs oil on his wounds, puts
him on the donkey, takes him to the inn, pays — pays again for that day, pays
for the next day — and will pay for whatever that room and board will
cost when he returns. All very concrete factors. And slowly the lawyer is forced
out of the abstract ice of the mind into the concrete reality of living —
there, where he cannot “play with it” like philosophy. And we learn,
do we not, the real message of ministry, whether of clergy or laity: ministry is
as time-consuming, as expensive, and as “messy” as this process is! That is
the message which is pushed into the lawyer’s mind and into our minds.

 

And so,
both examples, the contemporary one of the young pastor and the ancient one from
Luke’s Gospel, are reminders that if the clergy-laity symphony is to work at
all in our parishes, then we will have to do what the Lord requires of us: “to
do justice, to love mercy and to walk humbly with our God.”

 

In this
way we create that atmosphere in which the question “Who cares?” can be
properly answered, “I care!”

 

 

 

Father
Joseph, Director of Theological and Pastoral Education in our
Archdiocese, is North American Chaplain of The Order of St. Ignatius and Pastor
of St. Anthony’s of Bergenfield, NJ.

 

 

Who Gave Us The New Testament?

WHO GAVE US THE NEW TESTAMENT?

By Fr. A. James Bernstein

“The history of early
Christianity clearly reveals that God used His Church, composed of
flesh-and-blood Christians, as active participants in the process of selecting
and establishing the New Testament canon, just as He used real people —with
feelings, emotions, unique backgrounds and perspectives—to write the
twenty-seven separate books.”

Sometimes it is
easy to overlook the obvious.  Take,
for instance, the New Testament.  Even
though  every Christian 
really knows better, it is easy to forget that the New Testament was not
written as one continuous book. Rather, it is a collection of twenty-seven
shorter writings which were penned by a variety of authors at differing times
and geographical locations and compiled much later. Nowhere in the New Testament
do we find a list of what books belong in the New Testament. The “canon” of
Scripture is, of course, not “scriptural.” 

This
brings up anther important question which may not be so obvious. Who, then,
decided which books should be included in the New Testament canon and which ones
left out?

As a
Jewish convert to Christianity via evangelical Protestantism, I once refused to
acknowledge that the Church had anything to do with compiling the
New Testament. I wanted to believe God chose and collected these books without
human involvement. The books, I assumed, somehow validated themselves beyond all
reasonable doubt, and early Christians merely recognized their obvious
scriptural status. 

Though
there is some degree of truth in this position, it is by itself naive and
unbalanced. The history of early Christianity clearly reveals that God used His
Church, composed of flesh-and-blood Christians, as active participants in the
process of selecting and establishing the New Testament canon, just as He used
real people—with feelings, emotions, unique backgrounds and perspectives—to
write the twenty-seven separate books. 

WHAT
BIBLE DID THE APOSTLES USE?

“All
Scripture is given by inspiration of God” (II Timothy 3:16). I had always
assumed that the “Scripture” spoken of in this passage included both the Old
and New Testament. In reality, there was no official “New” Testament
when this statement was made. Even the Old Testament was still in the
process of formulation, for the Jews did not decide upon a definitive list or
canon of Old Testament books until after the rise of Christianity.

As I
studied further I discovered that early Christians used a Greek translation of
the Old Testament called the Septuagint. *  This translation, which was begun in Alexandria, Egypt, in the
third century B.C., contained an expanded canon which included a number of the
so-called “deutero-canonical” books. Although there was some initial debate
over these books, they were eventually received by Christians into the Old
Testament canon.

In reaction to the
rise of Christianity the Jews narrowed their canons and eventually excluded the
deutero-canonical books—although they still regarded them as sacred. The
modern Jewish canon was not rigidly fixed until the third century A.D.
Interestingly, it is this later version of the Jewish canon of the Old
Testament, rather than the canon of early Christianity, which is followed by
most of the Protestant Church today.

HISTORY
IN THE MAKING

The
history of the New Testament canon and  
its development is a fascinating subject — and 
crucial to the understanding of both the Bible and the Church. For
over two hundred years a number of books we now take for granted as being part
of the New Testament were disputed by the Church before being included. Many
other books were considered for inclusion, but eventually excluded. I was
shocked when I first discovered that the earliest complete listing of all
twenty-seven books of the New Testament was not given until A.D. 367, by
Athanasius, a bishop in Egypt.

This
means that the first complete listing of New Testament books as we have them
today didn’t appear until over 300 years after the death and Resurrection of
Christ. Imagine it! If the New Testament were begun at the same time as the U.S.
Constitution, we wouldn’t see a final product until the year 2087!

During
the first four centuries there was substantial disagreement over which books
should be included in the canon of Scripture. The first person we know of who
tried to establish a New Testament canon was the second-century heretic,
Marcion. He wanted the Church to reject its Jewish heritage, and in so
doing dispense with the Old Testament entirely. Marcion’s canon included only
one Gospel, which he himself edited, and ten of Paul’s epistles. That’s it!

Many
believe that it was partly in reaction to this distorted canon of Marcion that
the early Church determined to have a clearly defined canon of its own.
The destruction of Jerusalem in A.D.70, the breakup of the Jewish-Christian
community of Jerusalem, and the threatened loss of continuity in the oral
tradition probably also contributed to the sense of urgency to standardize the
list of books Christians could rely on.

THE
GOSPEL ACCORDING TO WHOM?

The four
Gospels were written from thirty to seventy years after Jesus’ death and
Resurrection. In the interim, the Church relied on oral tradition—the accounts
of eye-witnesses—as well as scattered documents and written tradition. I was
very surprised to discover as I first studied the early Church that many
“Gospels” besides those of the New Testament canon were circulating in the
first and second centuries.

These
include the Gospel according to the Hebrews, the Gospel according to the
Egyptians, and the Gospel according to Peter, just to name a few.

The New
Testament itself speaks of the existence of such accounts. Saint Luke’s Gospel
begins by saying, “Inasmuch as many have taken in hand to set in order
a narrative of those things which are most surely believed among us. . . it
seemed good to me also, having had perfect understanding of all things
from the very first, to write to you an orderly account. . .“ In time, all but
four Gospels were excluded from the New Testament canon.

In the
early years of Christianity there was even a controversy over which of
the four Gospels to use. The Christians of Asia Minor used the Gospel of
John rather than the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Based upon the Passion
account contained in John, Christians in Asia Minor celebrated Easter on a
different day than those in Rome, which resisted the Gospel of John and instead
used the other Gospels. The Western Church for a time hesitated to use the
Gospel of John because the Gnostic heretics also made use of it in addition to
their own “secret Gospels.”

Another
controversy arose over the issue of whether there should be separate Gospels or
one single composite Gospel account. In the second century, Tatian, who was
Justin Martyr’s student, published a single composite “harmonized” Gospel
called the Diatessaron. The Syrian Church used this composite Gospel in
the second, third, and fourth centuries. This is the very Church to which “the
Nazares” (Jewish ­Christians of Jerusalem) eventually migrated after the fall
of Jerusalem to the Romans in A.D. 70. The Syrian Church did not accept all four
Gospels until the fifth century. They also ignored for a time the three epistles
of John, and Second Peter.

OTHER
CONTROVERSIAL BOOKS

My
favorite New Testament book, the Epistle to the Hebrews, was clearly excluded in
the Western Church in a number of listings of the second, third, and fourth
centuries. Prominent among reasons for excluding this book were concerns over
its authorship. Primarily due to Augustine and his influence upon certain North
African councils, the Epistle to the Hebrews was finally accepted in the West by
the end of the fourth century.

On the
other hand, the book of Revelation, also known as the Apocalypse, written by the
Apostle John, was not accepted in the Eastern Church for several centuries. Once
again, questions concerning authorship of the book were at the source of the
controversy. Among Eastern authorities who rejected this book were Dionysius of
Alexandria (third century), Eusebius (third century), Cyril of Jerusalem (fourth
century), the Council of Laodicea (fourth century), John Chrysostom (fourth
century), Theodore of Mopsuesta (fourth century), and Theodoret (fifth century).
In addition, the original Syriac and Armenian versions of the New Testament
omitted this book. Many Greek New Testament manuscripts written before the ninth
century do not contain the Apocalypse, and it is not used in the liturgical
cycle of the Eastern Church to this day.

Athanasius
supported the inclusion of the Apocalypse, and it is due primarily to his
influence that it was eventually received into the New Testament canon in the
East. The early Church actually seems to have made an internal compromise
on the Apocalypse and Hebrews. The East would have excluded the Apocalypse from
the canon, while the West would have done without Hebrews. Simply put, each side
agreed to accept the disputed books of the other.

WHO
DECIDED?

With the
passage of time the Church discerned which writings were truly Apostolic and
which were not. It was a prolonged struggle taking place over several centuries
in which the Church decided what books were her own. As part of the process of
discerning, the Church met together in council. These various Church councils
met to deal with many varied issues, among which was the canon of Scripture.

These
councils met to discern and for­mally confirm what was already generally
accepted within the Church at large. They did not legislate Scripture as much as
they set forth what had become self-evident truth and practice within the
Churches of God. The councils sought to proclaim the common mind of the Church
and reflect the unanimity of faith, practice, and tradition of the local
Churches represented.

The
Church Councils provide us with specific records in which the Church spoke
clearly and in unison as to what constitutes Scripture. Among the many councils
that met during the first four centuries, two particularly stand out:

1. The Council of
Laodicea, which met in Asia Minor, around A.D. 363. This council stated that
only canonical books of the Old and New Testaments should be used in the Church.
It forbade reading other books in Church. It enumerated the canonical books of
our present Old and New Testaments, with the exception of the Apocalypse of
Saint John. This is the first council which clearly listed the canonical books.
Its decisions were widely accepted in the Eastern Church.

2.
The Third Council of Carthage, which met in North Africa, around A.D.
397.This Council, attended by Augustine, provided a full list of the
canonical books of both Old and New Testaments. The 27 books of the present day
New Testament were accepted as canonical. It also held that these books should
be read in the Church as Divine Scripture to the exclusion of all others. This
Council was widely accepted as authoritative in the West.

A QUESTION OF AUTHORITY

As I
said at the beginning of this article, the history of the New Testament canon
and its development is crucial to a proper understanding of both the Bible and
the Church. The implications are indeed profound, and they call for some serious
heart-searching on the part of all Christians. I would like to conclude on a
personal note by showing you exactly how profound these implications can
be. For they brought about some radical changes in my life—not only in how I
came to approach Scripture and its interpretation, but in how I now relate to
Christ’s holy Church in its historical expression. 

Soon
after my own conversion to Christianity I found myself getting swept up
in the tide of Christian sectarianism which is so pervasive in the Protestant
world. In fact, I eventually became so sectarian that I came to believe that all
Churches were non-biblical. To become a member of any Church was to
compromise the Faith. A close friend of mine even wrote a book called The
Bible Versus the Churches, in which he argued that the Bible was true, and
in conflict with Churches, all of which were false. 

For me,
Church became “the Bible, God, and me.” My attitude towards others was,
“Tell me what you believe and I’ll tell you where you’re wrong!” Even my
Christian friends became suspect. And my friend who wrote The Bible Versus
the Churches came to believe that the Bible was in conflict with me
as well! We parted ways.

This
hostility towards Churches fit in well with my being a Jew. I naturally
distrusted Churches because I felt they had betrayed the teachings of Christ in
having persecuted or passively ignored the persecution of the Jews
throughout history. As I became increasingly sectarian, indeed even obnoxious
and anti-social, I slowly began to realize that something was seriously wrong
with my approach to Christianity. I also realized that many of my
Jewish-Christian brethren had also fallen into an elitist and sectarian
“super-Christian” mold, believing that they were on a mission to clean
up “Gentile Christianity.”

This
realization led me to a sincere study of the history of the early Church,
where I discovered four centuries of discussion and debate over which books
should be included and excluded from the New Testament canon. It soon became
clear to me that I was dealing with a larger issue— the issue of Church
authority.

Biblical
scholarship had given me four criteria to determine if a book was to be included
as canonical.

1. It
must be written by Apostles or disciples of the Apostles.

2. It
must be considered inspired of God.

3. It
must be accepted by the Church.

4. It
must conform to the oral tradition and rule of faith taught by the Church.

I had no
difficulty accepting the first two criteria. I wrestled mightily, however, with
the thought that the Church had been given the authority to judge what books
composed Scripture. Ultimately, it came down to a single issue. I already
believed that God spoke authoritatively through His written Word. Could I now
accept the fact that He spoke authoritatively through His Church as well—the
very Church which had protected, preserved, and actively produced the Scriptures
I held so dear?

THE CHURCH OF THE NEW
TESTAMENT 

For the
earliest Christians, God spoke His Word not only to but through His
Body, the Church, and it was within His Body, the Church, that the Word
was confirmed and established. Without question the Scriptures were looked upon
by early Christians as God’s active revelation of Himself to the world. At the
same time, the Church was looked upon as the household of God, “having been
built on the foundation of the Apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being
the chief cornerstone, in whom the whole building, being joined together, grows
into a holy temple in the Lord” (Ephesians 2:20-21).

There
was no organic separation between Bible and Church as we find so often today.
The Body without the Word is without message, but the Word without the Body is
without foundation. As Paul says in I Timothy 3:15, “The church of the
living God, the pillar and ground of the truth.” The Church is the living body
of the incarnate Lord. She is an integral part of the Gospel message and it is
within the context of the Church that the New Testament was conceived and
preserved.

This
study was instrumental in my eventual conversion to the Orthodox Faith.
If the Church was not just a tangent or a sidelight to the Scripture, but rather
an active participant in its development and preservation, then it was time to
reconcile my differences and abandon my prejudices. Rather than try to judge the
Church by my modern understanding of what the Bible was saying, I needed to come
into union with the Church that produced the New Testament, and let her guide me
into a proper understanding.

To make
a long story short, I am now an Orthodox priest serving in Seattle, Washington,
and am striving to witness to the power of God’s Holy Church. To those
who, like I once did, stand dogmatically on “Sola Scriptura,” in the process
rejecting the Church of God which not only produced the New Testament, but also
selected through the guidance of the Holy Spirit those books which compose the
New Testament, I would say only this:

Study
the history of the early Church and the development of the New Testament canon.
Use source documents where possible. (It is amazing how some of the most
“conservative” Bible scholars of the evangelical community turn into cynical
and rationalistic liberals when discussing Church history.) Examine for yourself
what happened to God’s people after the 28th chapter of the book of Acts.

If you
examine the data and look with objectivity at what occurred in those
early days, I think you will discover what I discovered. The history of God’s
Church didn’t stop with the first century. If it had, we would not possess the
New Testament books which are so dear to every Christian believer. The
phenomena of separating Church and Bible which we see so prevalent in much of
today’s Christian world is a modern phenomena. Early Christians made no such
artificial distinctions.

Once you
have examined this data, I would encourage you to find out more about the
historic Church which produced the New Testament, preserved it, and selected
those books which would be part of its canon. Every Christian owes it to himself
or herself to find out more about this Church and to understand its vital role
in proclaiming God’s Word to our own generation.

Fr.
A. James Bernstein is the pastor of Saint Paul Orthodox Church in Lynnwood,
Washington.

 

* THE PSALTER
ACCORDING TO THE SEVENTY

The Use of the
Septuagint by the Early Church

What Old
Testament text did early Christians use when they prayed the Psalms? 
Many are surprised to learn that the official text was not the
Hebrew or Masoretic text which forms the basis of most modern English
translations today.  In order to
understand why, it is necessary to know something of the background of the text
of the Old Testament. 

At the
time of Christ, the Apostles, and the early Church, Hebrew had long since ceased
to be the commonly spoken language, even among the Jews.  Although Jesus understood Hebrew, He would have spoken
Aramaic – the common language of Palestine – with His disciples. ; Jesus and
His disciples were probably familiar, at least to a certain extent, with Greek,
the common language of the Roman Empire. 

Because
Greek was the most widely spoken and read language of the empire at large, a
translation of the Hebrew Old Testament into Greek had been accomplished,
according to tradition, by seventy translators, in the city of Alexandria,
during the third century before Christ.  The
name Septuagint means “according to the seventy.” 
The Septuagint, or LXX, was without question the most common text of the
Scriptures at the time of Jesus and the Apostles. 
It was the Old Testament of the early Church.

The
other text used at that period was the Hebrew text that had been preserved by
the rabbis and scribes of Israel.  Those
who read today about scriptural manuscripts will have undoubtedly run across
references made to the “masoretic” texts, which means the texts of the
scribes (who were known as “masoretes”).

In the
first century, after the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, and
the end of the Jewish priesthood, the authority of the rabbis in Israel became
absolute.  Before that time the
rabbis occupied a position secondary to the priests. 
The rabbis and scribes distrusted anything that was not written in the
traditional Hebrew language, and consequently they rejected the Septuagint text. 
But for the early Church the Septuagint was always used. 
When the New Testament quotes the Old, which it frequently does, and when
it quotes the Psalms, which it very frequently does, it quotes the Septuagint
text exclusively.  That is one of
the reasons why the Orthodox Church today still continues to use the Septuagint
text.

From
what Hebrew text was the Septuagint translated? 
The actual Hebrew manuscripts which formed the basis of this translation,
centuries before Christ, have been lost.  The Orthodox Church believes that the Hebrew text upon which
the Septuagint is based is actually older and more venerable than the Hebrew
text of the scribes.

Though
both texts, the Masoretic text and the Septuagint, are quite similar in many
ways, there are significant differences.  These
differences can primarily be summed up by saying that the messianic prophecies
found throughout the Psalms and the prophetic writings are far more explicit in
the Septuagint text than in the Masoretic text.

A
careful study of the Psalms reveals how crucially different the Septuagint text
is in these messianic portions.  Orthodoxy
regards the intensification of messianic prophecy that occurred in the
Septuagint text to be the inspiration of the Holy Spirit preparing Israel for
the coming of the Savior.  As the
time of the Messiah drew nearer and nearer, the prophecies of His coming became
more and more explicit.

For the
most part, translators during and after the Reformation, in an attempt to get
back to what they thought were the roots of the Old Testament text, chose
to use the Hebrew texts of the scribes and rejected the traditional use of the
Septuagint.  Therefore the Bibles
most commonly available in English, whether they be NKJV or RSV or another
English translation, are translations of the Hebrew text of the scribes, not
translations of the Septuagint.  The
traditional text of the Orthodox Church, however, whether it be in her singing
of the Psalms in worship, or her study of the Old Testament, is still the text
of the early Church:  the
Septuagint.

Who Is The New Israel

Again
Magazine Volume 12  Number 4  December 1989  Page 25-28 

WHO IS
THE NEW ISRAEL

By
John W. Morris, PH.D 

On
May 14, 1948, thirty-eight people gathered in Tel Aviv to establish the modern
state of Israel. The establishment of this state provided a cause of great
rejoicing for the Jews who had waited and prayed for an opportunity to return to
a land they believed rightfully belonged to them. For the Palestinian residents
already living in this land as they had for centuries, the news was the
beginning of yet a new chapter in a history filled with tragedy, oppression, and
struggle. Even before that fateful day, war and bloodshed had already begun to
curse the Middle East as two peoples fought for control of the same land. 
 

 

Both the Jews
and the Palestinians claim the Holy Land as their ancient ancestral home. As a
result, Israel has fought a series of wars with its Arab neighbors, invaded
Lebanon, and carried on raids against Palestinians throughout the Middle East.
The Palestinians have responded with terrorist attacks against Israeli targets
both within and outside of Israel. More recently, the native Palestinian
population of the East Bank of the Jordan and the Gaza, occupied by the Jewish
State following the war of 1967, has revolted against their conquerors,
unleashing yet another series of clashes as the Israelis frequently use brutal
tactics to halt the uprising. 
 

 

Throughout the
bloody recent history of the Middle East, the United States has been a steadfast
ally of the Jewish State, sending billions of dollars in military and other
assistance. Much of this unconditional support has come from a surprising sector
of middle class America: conservative and evangelical Christians. The reason for
this support has been the adamant conviction among these Christians that the
establishment of modern Israel is the direct fulfillment of Biblical prophecy. 
 

 

Is such unconditional support warranted? Do the
Scriptures in fact teach that the establishment of modern Israel constitutes a
direct fulfillment of Biblical prophecy? Is the only appropriate Christian 
response to the violent events of the Middle East one of unconditional
support for the Jewish cause and unilateral resistance to the plight of the
homeless Palestinians? 
 

 

A TIME FOR REFLECTION 
 

 

Never
in the recent history of the violent Middle Eastern powder keg has there been
more reason for neutrality and objectivity on the part of the United States. The
events of the past few years have revealed to many that the Palestinians on the
West Bank and the Gaza have legitimate claims to land and self-government. At
the same time, moderate Arab leaders like Hosni Mubarek of Egypt, and even
Yassir Arafat of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, have realized that the
Palestinian people will never regain complete control of all of Palestine. Thus,
they have expressed a willingness to recognize Israel in return for Jewish
recognition of a Palestinian State in those areas with a Palestinian majority. 
 

 

Many Israelis, including
Shimon Peres and Yitshak Rabin of the Labor Party, are now realizing the
futility of continued struggle with the Palestinians and have expressed a
willingness to trade land for peace. Thus, after over 40 years of bloody
fighting, a real possibility for peace in the Middle East exists on the basis of
a compromise between the warring parties, provided that the moderate voices in
Israel are able to win the support of the majority or persuade the members of
the hard-liners to moderate their position. 
 

 

It might
seem that such occurrences would and should persuade most Christians to abandon
unconditional support for Zionist [see inset] expansion and to enter
wholeheartedly into the process of reconciliation. However, a group of largely
conservative Protestant leaders continue to steadfastly support the Zionist
cause in its most extreme form. The Rev. Jerry Fallwell, a leading
Fundamentalist, once wrote: “If this nation wants her fields to remain white
with grain, her scientific achievements to remain notable, and her freedom to
remain intact, America must continue to stand with Israel”  
(Listen America; New York, 1980, p. 98). 
 

 

A CHART FOR ALL SEASONS 
 

 

Fallwell and the
others who demand unconditional support for Israel consider the modern Jewish
State a fulfillment of Biblical prophecy. They are heavily influenced by
dispensationalism, a method of Bible interpretation which became popular through
the writings of John Nelson Darby (died 1882). Darby, a one time cleric of the
Church of England, joined the Plymouth Brethren in 1831 and developed a
complicated system of Biblical interpretation that divides God’s saving action
into individual eras or dispensations. This scheme influenced thousands of
American Protestants through the Niagara Bible Conference of 1895 and the
publication of the Scofield Reference Bible by Cyrus Ingerson Scofield the next
year. 

 

Dispensationalism
makes a strong distinction between the promises made to the Jews before Christ
and the reality of the Church after Pentecost. Thus dispensationalists teach
that God’s promises to the Jews were not fulfilled through the Church but
remained unfulfilled during the Church age. They consider the Church a new and
separate creation by God with its own separate agenda, not the heir to the
promises made by God to ancient Israel. Therefore, it is natural that the
dispensationalists should see the founding of the modern state of Israel as a
fulfillment of Biblical prophecy. 
 

 

NOT MY TYPE 
 

 

Dispensationalists
interpret the words, phrases, and sentences of the Bible in a very literalistic
manner. Thus they reject or fail to see the importance of an ancient and almost
universal principle of Biblical interpretation known as typology. Typology is
the method of Biblical understanding which seeks the spiritual meaning of the
historical events described in the Old Testament.

 
 

Fundamental to the
typological method of Biblical interpretation as practiced by the early and
later Fathers is the belief that Jesus Christ is the fulfillment and completion
of the Law and the Prophets of the Old Testament. For example, the near
sacrifice of Isaac points towards the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross. The ark
that saved Noah and his family from the Flood is a type of the Church which
saves the faithful from sin and death. The burning bush is seen as a type of the
Blessed Virgin Mary, who bore God in the flesh, yet was not consumed by the
presence of the divinity within her womb. 
 

 

The typological method is not
just the invention of the Fathers, but is based firmly on the New Testament. Our
Lord Himself used the example of Jonah as a type of the three days that He would
spend in the tomb (Matthew 12:40). He also compared the lifting up of the
serpent by Moses to his own ascent of the cross (John 3:14). Saint Paul
considered the passing through the Red Sea as a type for baptism (I Corinthians
10:1-2). Saint Peter even uses the term “antitype” to compare the ark with
baptism (I Peter 3:20-21). Thus the typological method of interpretation is
firmly grounded in the Holy Scriptures. 
 

 

TYPOLOGY AND THE NEW ISRAEL 
 

 

According to the typological
method, God’s promises to Abraham and his descendents were fulfilled through
Christ and His Church. One Orthodox scholar has written: “In Christ, then, the
covenant with Israel was fulfilled, transformed, and transcended. After the
coming of the Messiah—the Incarnation of God the Son—only those who are
‘built into Christ’ are counted among the people of God. In Christ, the old
Israel is superseded by the Christian Church, the new Israel, the body of
Christ; the old covenant is completed in the new covenant in and through Jesus
Christ” (George Cronk, The Message of the Bible; St. Vladimir Seminary
Press; 1982, p. 80). 
 

 

This interpretation
of the covenant with Abraham and his descendents as fulfilled through Christ and
His Church is firmly grounded in the witness of the New Testament. In the
parable of the Vineyard Owner, our Lord uses the unfaithful tenants of a
vineyard to illustrate this point. The owner, representing God, sent his
servants, representing the prophets, and finally his son and heir, representing
Christ, to collect his rent. The tenants, who represent the Jews, ignored the
request for the rent and killed both the servants and the son of the owner of
the vineyard. At the end of the parable our Lord said, “Therefore what will
the owner of the vineyard do? He will come and destroy the vinedressers, and
give the vineyard to others” (Mark 12:1-9). In other words, those who
faithfully believe in Him will inherit the status that Israel had before it
rejected the Messiah. 
 

 

Saint Paul wrote, “Therefore
know that only those who are of faith are sons of Abraham . . . if you are
Christ’s then you are of Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the
promise” (Galatians 3:7-9). Indeed, Saint Paul called the body of believers
“the Israel of God” (Galatians 6:16). Saint Peter illustrated this point by
applying terms used to describe Israel in the Old Testament when he wrote,
“But you are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, His own
special people” (I Peter 2:9).

 

Thus, according to the New
Testament, the standard against which all doctrine and Biblical interpretations
must be tested, God’s covenant with Abraham and his descendents has been
fulfilled through Christ and His followers, not through a secular state, for
Christ said, “My Kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36). 
 

 

It is true that there are some
Old Testament prophecies that speak of a restoration of Israel following the
destruction of Israel by Assyria and of Judah by Babylon. For example, Isaiah
wrote, “It shall come to pass that the Lord shall set His hand again the
second time to recover the remnant of His people who are left” (Isaiah 11:11).
Jeremiah prophesied, “For I will bring them back into their land which I gave
to their fathers” (Jeremiah 16:15). Micah said, “I will surely gather
the remnant of Israel” (Micah 12:12). 
 

 

Indeed, God did restore Israel. The book of Ezra tells
how Cyrus, the King of Persia who had conquered Babylon, allowed the Jews to
return from exile and to rebuild their temple in Jerusalem. Significantly the
beginning of Ezra states that the events recorded are in fulfillment of the
prophecy of Jeremiah (Ezra 1:1). Thus the Old Testament prophecies cited in
support of the modern state of Israel were fulfilled long ago when the Jews
returned from the Babylonian captivity. 

 

SONS OF ABRAHAM 
 

 

The time has come for Christians
to carefully reevaluate an attitude towards modern Israel which is based
on faulty premises. Both Church history and the Holy Scriptures teach clearly
that Christ and His Church are the fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets.
Saint Paul tells us that those who follow Christ in faith are the true children
of Abraham and heirs to the promises made by God to the Old Testament patriarch.
The prophecies concerning the restoration of Israel have already been fulfilled
and should not be applied carte-blanche to the modern state of Israel. 

 

The Zionist State
was born in conflict between the claims of Jews to a homeland and the rights of
the native Palestinian inhabitants of the Holy Land. Christians should,
therefore, judge Israel on the same basis as other nations, and not accord to
the Jewish State a special status above reproach. Indeed, it is clear that while
both sides have committed atrocities, the Zionists have disregarded the rights
of the Palestinian people to national self-determination. Christians owe no
special allegiance to Israel, but should expect the Jewish State to adhere to
the same principles of justice and decency demanded of other nations. Indeed,
Christians should call the people of Israel to recognize the legitimate right of
all people to the same national self­determination that they claim for
themselves. 

 

[INSET] 
 

 

Although the current leaders of
Israel claim Palestine as their homeland, it was not their home for a period of
almost 2000 years. In 63 B.C. Pompey conquered Israel and placed the Hebrew
people under Roman rule, After two abortive Jewish revolts in A.D. 70 and 130,
the Romans expelled all but a handful of the Hebrew people from Palestine. Thus
the Jewish people lived for centuries in Europe and other parts of the world as
an often persecuted minority in countries dominated by others.

 

Even before the horrifying
murder of millions of Jews by the Nazis in this century, many Jews had begun
looking toward the possibility of re-establishing a nation of their own. In
1895, Theodor Herzl, a Hungarian Jew, published an influential case for a Jewish
homeland. In The Jewish State, Herzl called for the Jews to leave Tsarist
Russia and the other countries where they lived to organize a Jewish State.
Herzl’s arguments persuaded Jews from all over Europe to gather in Basil,
Switzerland, for the First Zionist Congress in August, 1897. This Congress
launched the campaign for the establishment of a Hebrew State in Palestine. 
 

 

Zionism, the movement for the
foundation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, received a new stimulus with the
outbreak of the First World War. Hoping to win the sympathy of Jews living in
the lands of their enemies, the British issued the Balfour Declaration on
November 2, 1917. In this declaration, the English government pledged to
“favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish
people.” 
 

 

At the end of the war, Palestine
was placed under a British mandate, giving Britain the opportunity to fulfill
her earlier commitment. As a result, Jews began moving to Palestine in large
numbers. By 1939 the Jewish population of Palestine had risen from about 85,000
before the war to 445,000. Palestine, the proposed Jewish homeland, was not,
however, an uninhabited land open to foreign colonization. Instead it was
occupied by about 650,000 Arabs, many of whom could trace their ancestry back to
Biblical times. After centuries of domination by the Ottoman Turks, these
Palestinian people now hoped for national self-determination as a part of Syria
or as an independent state following the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire at
the end of the First World War. 
 

 

Instead of respecting the wishes
of the Palestinians, the victors placed them under another foreign government by
establishing the British mandate. The Palestinians had no desire to trade
British domination for Jewish domination through the establishment of a Jewish
State in their homeland. Thus the Palestinians, who numbered 1,056,000 at the
beginning of the Second World War, resisted the efforts of the Zionists through
a series of riots, attacks on Jewish settlements, general strikes, and refusal
to pay taxes to the English.

 

The Zionists, however, were
better organized and financed than the native Palestinians, who were mostly poor
tenant farmers on land owned by Lebanese or Syrian landlords. As a result, the
Jews were able to buy large tracks of land and to dispossess the Palestinian
tenant farmers. They also organized a secret army, the Haganah, in 1919. The
Haganah fought both the Arabs and the British, who attempted to find a
compromise between the conflicting sides. In 1937 an even more militant group of
Zionists formed the Irgun to fight the British and Palestinians. The result was
a series of bloody clashes between the various parties in the dispute. 
 

 

The Nazi tyranny and the Second
World War created a large number of Jewish refugees and radically intensified
the struggle. In an effort to prevent further conflict between Jew and Arab, the
British attempted to limit Jewish immigration to Palestine. The Zionists
responded with a campaign of terror against both the Arabs and the British
authorities. Jewish terrorists assassinated Lord Moyne, the British minister in
the Middle East in 1944, and carried on other attacks against the English. In
1946, Zionist extremists blew up the British headquarters at the King David
Hotel in Jerusalem killing almost 100 people. 
 

 

Finally, the British grew tired
of trying to find a solution that would pacify both the Palestinians and the
Zionists and turned the matter over to the newly formed United Nations. After
much discussion, the United Nations voted on November 29, 1947, to partition
Palestine into two states, a Jewish State and a Palestinian State. The
Palestinians rejected the plan because it would place an Arab minority of 45% in
the proposed Jewish State. Thus the Palestinians resorted to violence to oppose
the partitioning of their homeland with the support of neighboring Arab States. 

 

The Jews, however, accepted the
UN resolution and gathered forces to respond to the Palestinian attacks. The
violence reached a climax on April 9, 1948, when extremists massacred the entire
population of Dier Yassin, an Arab village near Jerusalem. Although the Haganah
and the Jewish Agency condemned the murder of 250 men, women, and children, many
Palestinians panicked lest they too fall victim to Zionist atrocities. As a
result thousands of Arabs fled to neighboring countries, vacating most of the
Arab villages in the proposed Jewish State, and creating the Palestinian refugee
problem. By the end of 1949, there were almost 750,000 Palestinian refugees in
Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and the Gaza Strip. 
 

 

Meanwhile the Zionists accepted
the UN partition and proclaimed the state of Israel on May 14, 1948, the day the
British left Palestine. The next day, Egypt, Jordan, and Iraq came to the aid of
the Palestinians. However, the Jews were victorious and the war ended in a truce
in early 1949. The new Zionist State was even larger than the Jewish State
proposed by the UN resolution. This only intensified the Palestinian refugee
problem and resulted in the destruction of 374 Arab villages. Throughout the
next twenty years, Israel successfully defended its territory during a series of
wars with its Arab neighbors. Finally, the Jewish State conquered the West Bank
and Gaza in 1967, bringing over 1,000,000 Palestinians under Zionist domination. 
 

 

The Rev. Fr. John Morris is pastor of Saint John
Chrysostom Orthodox Church in Fort Wayne, Indiana. 

 

Who Is The Practical Man??

Word Magazine 
February 1967  Page 12

 

  

 

WHO
IS THE PRACTICAL 

 

MAN??

 

  

 

“Lay
not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt and
where thieves break through and steal: but lay up for yourselves treasures in
Heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt. and where thieves do not break
through and steal,” (MATTHEW 6:19-20).

 

 

  

A man
said to me recently. “I don’t take much interest in the church or in
religion. It’s all too intangible and indefinite. I want something solid that
I can see and feel and use like my Cadillac, my home, my country club and my
investments. I can sell the latter anytime I choose and the money is very real
and useful. These are the things that interest me. You see, I am a practical man
and haven’t much use for religion.”

 

Before
the scientists exploded the first atom bomb at the proving ground in New Mexico,
they made exhaustive experiments to make sure that they were not touching off a
chain reaction that might possibly destroy all the atoms in the world and put an
end to the existence of everything.  

 

It
appears that tangible, material things are not so permanent and indestructible
after all. Man might destroy his world at any time. What then would be the
practical value of the cars, homes, country clubs and investments?

 

It may
well be that the really permanent things in this universe are the spiritual
values of beauty, goodness, truthfulness, kindness, generosity and love. These
are the building blocks for the house not made with hands eternal in the heavens
of which Paul spoke so eloquently. That is why Paul admonished us:

 

“Whatsoever
things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, 
whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever
things are of good report if there be any virtue and if there be any praise,
think on these things.” (PHIL. 4:8).

 

These are
the permanent elements of God’s world and He continually invites us to
center our affections in and build our lives around them.

 

It is
difficult to think of beauty in the abstract. He gives us the rose, the sunset,
the mountains, the rainbow, great masterpieces of art and music and many
beautiful things to attract our attention and point to Him.

 

We cannot
imagine love in the abstract but we can see it and feel it in our close family
relationships. Generosity, kindness and truthfulness are hardly imaginable other
than as human actions.

 

Because
these qualities require personality to make them clear to us, God sent his Son,
Jesus Christ, into the world to give us a supreme, personal manifestation of
them. Looking at His life and feeling the power of it, we have no difficulty in
identifying and appreciating them. When we see them in Him, we have no doubt
that they are the most real and permanent entities in all of God’s creation.

 

By
contrast, property and material things seem fleeting and of little value. I
would not underestimate them for they are useful and necessary but in the long,
eternal view, they are not the building blocks with which we develop our sonship
to God. They are not the qualities that caused our Creator to say that we are
created in His own image.

 

Christ
was the embodiment of eternal, spiritual values that will rule and reign after
the earth shall pass away and the heavens be rolled up as a scroll.

 

We can
appreciate this contrast the more, I think, if we will try to imagine a
personality coming into the world who represented purely physical values as
distinguished from Christ who was the embodiment of spiritual values. Such a
person would be interested only in food, drink, sex, luxurious living, power and
pomp. All these perish with the using and when one’s physical powers decline,
leave nothing but ashes and regrets. If one is without spiritual qualities and
values, he knows that as his powers decline with every passing year, his
appetites grow weaker and the thrills which he enjoys, less frequent and less
satisfying. By middle age, at the latest, he foresees a bitter end of weakening
powers and the gradual decline to uselessness and nothingness. He soon begins to
realize that those who sow to the flesh, reap nothing but extinction.

 

What
satisfaction is there in a life like that? On the other hand, one who devotes
his time to the accumulation of treasures in Heaven may look forward to
everlasting growth and the enjoyment of satisfaction beyond his present powers
to imagine.

 

“Eye
hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the
things which God hath prepared for them that love Him.” (I COR. 2:9).

 

Who then
is the practical man? The one who gives his life to fleeting material values,
sensations that will endure for a few years at most leaving him nothing but the
ashes of a burned out and useless life? Or one who sets his heart upon spiritual
values which continue to grow as the eternal purpose of God, in which he shares,
rolls on and on forever?

 

 

 

 

? 
?

Who Says I Must Fast?

Word Magazine  March 1980  Page 15

  

 

WHO SAYS I MUST FAST?

 

Homily by Father James C. Meena

 

 

 “Who says I must fast? Just because the Fathers of the Church say that alms giving is a good thing, must I give alms? And just because the Fathers of the Church specify that on Cheese Fare Sunday, the last day before the beginning of Lent, we are supposed to make an extra effort to forgive one another our trespasses, does that mean that I’m supposed to do that?”

 

Well, let me clarify something for you. It is not the Fathers of the Church who teach us these things and it is not the Church that requires these disciplines of us. Rather it is Christ Himself who has laid down these criteria for us to follow. Those of you who were in Church on Cheese Fare Saturday heard the Gospel lesson from St. Matthew (6:1-15). If you are familiar with that gospel you would realize that Sunday’s Gospel lesson is a continuation of it. (6:14-21) Now, let me give you an idea of what Jesus lays down for us. First of all He says, in Saturday’s Gospel, “When you give Alms, do not have it trumpeted before you. This is what the hypocrites do in the Synagogues and in the streets to win men’s admiration. Your alms giving must be in secret and your Father who sees all that is done in secret will reward you.” (6:2)

 

There are some people who, when they give alms, want to ring the bells of the Church and Jesus warns us that our almsgiving should be in secret especially when we give for the help of the poor. It is not NAC-SOYO that has started the alms boxes for the Food for Hungry People. It is Christ who urges us to do these things. He urges more. In the fifth chapter of this gospel, the fifth verse, He says, “When you pray, do not imitate the hypocrites. They love to say their prayers standing up in synagogues and on street corners for people to see them. I tell you solemnly they have their reward; but when you pray, go to your private room, and when you have shut your door pray to your Father who is in that secret place and your Father who sees all that is done in secret will reward you.” Now you notice that He’s talking in this instance about private prayer, not corporate prayer and He didn’t say “if ” you pray or “when you get around to praying.” He simply took it for granted that He was talking to people who prayed and that it was His function only to correct their attitudes about prayer.

 

Now had He been addressing a community of people that were not in the habit of praying, I think He might have said “if” you pray, or “you had better get around to praying,” but He simply said, “when you pray,” assuming that prayer was a natural part of the lifestyle of the people to whom He was speaking. And so the Church assumes when She speaks to you, because we assume that you are a prayerful people, that in addition to this corporate worship of ours which makes us the Family of God, each of us enters figuratively into that private place, that secret closet where we offer up our prayers in secret so that God will reward openly. (6:9-13) Now He comes to the statement that sets this day apart from all other days because Cheese Fare Sunday is our day of atonement, our day of forgiveness, not that every day isn’t but on this day we especially mark the importance of forgiving. The beginning of the Gospel lesson for Cheese Fare Sunday is a conditional statement by Jesus who says, “If you forgive you will be forgiven.” So we have alms giving, prayer and forgiveness and finally He sums it all up when He says, “Do not store up treasures for yourselves on earth but store up treasures for yourself in heaven . . . Where your treasure is there your heart will be also.” (v. 19-21)

 

Now I hope that settles in your thinking the source of authority that the Church has for laying down the spiritual disciplines of the Fast. It comes from the word of Christ Himself and no Archbishop, Patriarch, Priest, Deacon, Pope has the right to change that which was laid down by Jesus. He says alms giving! He says prayer! He says fasting! These things lay up for us treasures in heaven but if we are so concerned about our houses, our TV sets and our cars and our monetary future that we forget that the only real treasure is that which is stored up in heaven then we’re in trouble because all these things are corruptible, all these things turn to dust. All these things can be lost in an instant. But our good deeds, our prayers, our acts of love and mercy and the spiritual disciplines that we impose upon ourselves in order to affect a spiritual growth, those are incorruptible. Those can never be lost.

 

Where will the Church bells ring for us, in our pocketbooks or in the kingdom of heaven? That’s a question that can be answered affirmatively by you in the style in which you live. So as we begin this Great Lent, let us remember that it all rests with us. We pray for God’s help and that help is always forthcoming. We pray that He will strengthen us and that strength is always forthcoming. We pray that He will make us better than we are and somehow or other when we come out the other end of Lent, if we have obeyed the conditions of Christ, we do come out better than we were when we started.

Who We Are To Become - Who We Can Be

Word Magazine  June
1999  Page 38 

 

 

 

 

WHO
WE ARE TO BECOME

WHO
WE CAN BE

 

By
Archpriest Steven Rogers

 

 

 

There
are perhaps no two men more greatly revered yet so seemingly different than
Saints Peter and Paul.

 

Commemorated
by the Orthodox Church on June 29, Saints Peter and Paul, “the heads of the
Apostles” as described throughout the hymnody of the feast, are especially
loved by the Church of Antioch, where Peter served as its first bishop and Paul
set forth on his great missionary travels. Peter, who preached on the day of
Pentecost when 3,000 were converted to the faith, and Paul, the greatest
missionary the world has ever known and author of over half of the New
Testament, were two of the most powerful instruments ever raised up by God to
spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ and to found This holy Church. Their preaching
and the power of God within them literally transformed the world. Both lived
completely for Christ and both died a martyr’s death in Rome by order of the
evil Roman emperor Nero.

 

Their
power and end were the same, and yet when we first meet them in scripture, they
are so seemingly different. There is Peter, the fisherman, simple and
uneducated. There is Paul (then Saul), the Pharisee, brilliant and educated,
learned in Jewish, Greek and Roman thought. There is Peter, emotional and
impulsive, often speaking and acting hastily but always remorseful. There is
Paul, seemingly cold and calculating, a powerful and even ruthless intellect,
able to persecute and kill without remorse.

 

No two
men could be more different than Peter and Paul — one driven by fire and
emotion, the other by coldness and intellect.

 

Yes,
these men were vastly different. But they had one thing in common — one thing
that transcended their differences and made them one. That one thing was a
personal encounter with the Son of God.

 

Peter
encountered Christ and was raised up from his humble beginnings to a man of
power. Paul encountered Christ and was lowered from his lofty position to a man
of godly humility. Both gave up what they were, to become what God desired them
to be. And through them the whole world was changed.

 

Oftentimes,
we look at ourselves with our limitations and inadequacies and feel we have
nothing to offer to God. We shy away from serving His Church because we feel we
have no skills or gifts to offer. We see others with all their gifts, and we
back away thinking there is nothing within us that God can use.

 

Often
times, in our pride and arrogance, we feel we are above many of the simple tasks
and labors that are so much a part of the ongoing life of God’s Church.

 

Seen
together, Saints Peter and Paul teach us a great lesson — that no matter who
we are — no matter our backgrounds, our talents, our station in life — if we
offer who we are completely to God, He will make us who we are supposed to be.
If we offer ourselves completely to God — both our abilities and our
limitations — He can and will use us to the glory of His kingdom. If we offer
ourselves completely, whether we are a simple fisherman or a towering
intellectual, the world will see God within us.

 

God
created us who we are and He came into the world to make us all we can be. Peter
continued to be Peter and Paul continued to be Paul, but it was Christ
within them that made them into all that God desired them to be.

 

And so it
is with us. If we offer ourselves to God with all our strengths and
weaknesses, He will use us to the glory of his Kingdom. As we, the Church
of Antioch, gather together to celebrate the feast of our beloved Apostles Peter
and Paul, those “luminaries to those in darkness, two rays of the sun,” let
us commit ourselves to give all that we are to God as they did, so that like
them, we may radiate the love of God into a cold and unbelieving world.

Who is Man?

 Again Magazine 
Volume 20  Number 4
- Winter 1997/1998   
Page 27-31

 

 By
Bishop Kallistos Ware

What
kind of an animal is man?  What is
it that, without separating us from the other
animals, yet serves to distinguish us from them?

 

 I
say “without separating,” because several of the characteristics that we
commonly choose to designate as uniquely human turn out to be present, at any
rate in a less developed form, in many of the other animals. For example, many
animals think, in the sense that, when confronted with an obstacle, they puzzle
over it until they work out a solution.

 

Many
animals have a memory, recalling the past with fear or joy: a horse, separated
from its human owners for weeks or years, on meeting them again will show alarm
or happiness, depending on the treatment it has once received. Some animals form
lifelong monogamous unions, and show grief—or something very similar to
it—when they lose their partner; and so on. Yet, despite all this, can we not
identify a specifically human vocation set before us?

 

Five
[characteristics] of the human animal, each expressing part of the truth, will
help us in our enquiry.

 

1) The ability to laugh and weep.

The
human animal is an animal that laughs and weeps. Essential to our humanity is a
sense of humor, and also a sense of tragedy. If so, we may well weep over what
we are doing to the other animals and to the earth which feeds both them and us!

 

2) The ability to reason.

The
human animal, according to the Stoic philosopher Chrysippus (+207 B.C.), is a
logical or rational animal, logikon zôon,1
an animal endowed with self-awareness, an animal
that speaks and thinks in an articulate and sequential manner. This is certainly
a significant element in the truth about our humanness, but it is far from being
the whole truth. I am more than my reasoning brain, very much more. Indeed, the
narrow concentration upon rational self-awareness that has dominated the Western
philosophical tradition from Descartes onwards—Cogito,
ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am”—is one of the factors that has di­rectly
contributed to the present ecological crisis.

 

3) The ability to relate.

The
human animal, states Aristotle (+322 B.C.), is a political animal, politikon
zoon.2 This comes closer to the heart of the matter, provided
that the word “political” is understood—as it is by Aristotle himself—in
its original and wider sense: the human animal, that is to say, is by nature
communal, created for interpersonal relationship, and so uniquely suited to live
in a polis, in a city, in an ordered
and organized society.

 

Made
as we are in the image of the Trinity—in the image of a God who is reciprocal
love—we express our humanness through mutual coinherence, “dying in each
other’s life, living each other’s death,” to quote Charles Williams.3
The basic principle of the city, as Williams reminds us, is “the
doctrine that no man lives to himself or indeed from himself’; its life is
“unexclusive” and its proper and typical features are “substitution” and
“the exchange of pardon.”4 “What is the characteristic of any
City? Exchange between citizens.”5

 

How
disastrously has the symbolism of the city altered in the past half-century!
What in so much Eu­ropean literature is an image of protection, reassurance,
and glory—”I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven
from God. ... the city is pure gold, clear as glass” (Rev. 21:2, 18)—has now
become an image of selfishness, danger, and corruption. One of the gravest
aspects of the present degradation of the environment is precisely urban
pollution, in all its varying forms. Yet at the same time we are conscious as
never before of our interdependence as “political” animals. The slogan
“One world or none” is not the less true for having become a common­place.

 

4)
The ability to look upward.

To
speak of the human animal as political is to emphasize the horizontal dimension:
our relationship, that is to say, as humans with the other members of our own
kind. But, complementing the horizontal dimension, there is also the vertical
axis: our relationship with God. It is this fourth characteristic of human
personhood to which Saint Gregory of Nazianzus (+c.390) draws attention when he
describes the human being not as politikon
zôon but as zóon theoumenon, “an
animal that is being deified.”6 Made in God’s image, as humans we
are capable of sharing in the divine life, of becoming “partakers of the
divine nature” (2 Pet. 1:4).

 

In
the Orthodox Christian understand­ing of human personhood, the line of demarcation
between creature and Creator is never abolished; yet, as humans fashioned in the
divine image, as living icons of the transcendent God, we have the possibility
of becoming like God, of attaining theôsis,
“deification” or “divinization.” In this context Christ quotes the
words of Psalm 81 [82]:6: “Is it not written in your law, ‘I said, you are
gods’?. . . Those to whom the word of God came were called ‘gods’; and the
scripture cannot be annulled” (John 10:34, 35).

 

As
“an animal that is being deified,” then, our human vocation is self-transcendence
and unification. We are called by God’s grace to reach out beyond space into
infinity, beyond time into eternity. It is our task to mediate between the
created world and the Uncreated. As icons of God, we have the capacity to unite
earth and heaven, and thus “to make of the earth something heavenly,” in the
words of the Hasidic teacher Rabbi Hanokh.7

 

This
unifying role is exactly illustrated in the etymology of the words for the hu­man
person in Greek and Latin. The Greek word anthrôpos
is connected with the verb anarthrein,
meaning “to look up”; unlike most of the other animals, humans stand
upright, with their eyes towards heaven and their gaze directed towards the
stars. In Latin, on the other hand, the words homo
and humanus are linked to the noun
humus, “earth.”8 Such,
then, is the human being: an animal that looks up to heaven, an animal endowed
with a conscience, with a sense of the numinous, an animal capable of mystical
union with the Divine; but at the same time an animal with its feet set firmly
on the ground, an animal with a physical body, an animal that eats and drinks,
that expresses interpersonal love through sexual union in “one flesh” (Gen.
2:24; Matt. 19:5).

 

Heavenly
yet earthly, spiritual yet material, we human persons are each a microcosm; and,
as microcosm, it is our high privilege to act as mediator. Our hu­man task, as
Saint John Chrysostom (+407) expresses it, is to be syndesmos
and gephyra, the “bond” and
“bridge” of God’s creation.9 Uniting earth and heaven, mak­ing
earth heavenly and heaven earthly, we reveal the spirit-bearing potentialities
of all material things, and we disclose and render manifest the divine presence
at the heart of all creation. Such was the task as­signed to the First Adam in
Paradise, and such—after the Fall of the First Adam—is the task eventually
fulfilled by the Second Adam, Christ, through His Incarnation, Transfiguration,
Crucifixion, and Resurrection.

 

5)
The ability to give thanks.

How
precisely do we human animals exercise this unifying and mediatorial role? The
answer is: through thankfulness, doxology, Eucharist, offering. This brings us
to a fifth characteristic of the human animal: it is a eucharistic animal, an
animal capable of gratitude, endowed with the power to bless God for the
creation, an ani­mal that can offer the world back to the Creator in
thanksgiving.

 

Father
Alexander Schmemann (1921— 1983) illustrates this aspect of human personhood
by referring to the opening part of the evening service of Vespers. In the
Orthodox Christian understanding of time, as in that of Judaism, the new day
begins, not at midnight or at dawn, but at sunset. “There was evening and
there was morn­ing, the first day” (Gen. 1:5): the evening comes before the
morning. By the same token, the Church year in Orthodox Chris­tianity begins,
not in midwinter on Janu­ary 1, nor in spring on March 25,
but at the start of autumn on September 1; once more, there is a parallel
with Judaism. Thus Vespers is not an epilogue or conclusion, but it is the first
act of prayer in the new day.

 

How,
then, do we commence our daily cycle of prayer? Vespers starts with the reading
or singing of Psalm 103 [104], which is a hymn of cosmic praise:

 

Bless
the Lord, 0 my soul. Blessed art Thou, O God.

O
Lord, my God, Thou art exceeding glorious:

Thou
art clothed with majesty and honor.

O
Lord, how manifold are Thy works: in wisdom hast Thou made them all.

The
earth is full of Thy riches: so is the great and wide
sea also...

I
will sing unto the Lord as long as I live:

I
will praise my God while I have my being.

 

In
this way, writes Father Alexander, the daily vesperal service “begins at the
be­ginning”:

 

It
begins at the beginning, and this means in the “rediscovery,” in adoration
and thanksgiving, of the world as God’s creation. The Church takes us, as it
were, to that first evening on which man, called by God to life, opened his eyes
and saw what God in His love was giv­ing to him, saw all the beauty, all the
glory of the temple in which he was standing, and rendered thanks to God. And in
this thanksgiving he became himself. .. . If the Church is in Christ, its
initial act is always this act of thanksgiving, of return­ing the world to
God.’ 10

 

Here,
then, is a fifth aspect of our human personhood. In thanksgiving we become
ourselves. Without gratitude we are not human but subhuman, or rather antihuman.
Only in the attitude of offering and blessing do we attain authentic personhood.

 

Using
this fivefold delineation of the human animal, we can now attempt to specify our
responsibility as humans towards the world around us. Our human vocation,
briefly expressed, is to be priest of the creation. As logical animals, pos­sessing
self-awareness and free choice— and at the same time as eucharistic animals
who are being deified—it is our supreme privilege, consciously and gratefully,
to offer the created world back to God the Creator. This distinctively human
function is precisely indicated just before the Epiclesis or Invocation of the
Holy Spirit in the Divine Liturgy, when the cel­ebrant elevates the gifts of
bread and wine, saying: “Thine own from Thine own we offer to Thee, in all
things and for all things.”

 

Priest
and Offerer

“Priest
of the creation” and “offerer”: what do these two terms signify?

 

First,
we say in the Lit­urgy, “Thine own from Thine own.” That which we offer to
God is nothing else than what He Himself has given to us. Unless God had first
conferred the world upon us as a free gift, we could make no offering at all.
The offering is His rather than ours; without Him our hands would be empty.
Indeed, in the Divine Liturgy it is Christ Himself who is the true Offerer, the
unique High Priest; we, the ordained ministers and the people present at the
Eucharist, can only act as priests by virtue of our unity with Him. He alone is
Celebrant in the true sense; we are no more than concelebrants with him. Indeed,
not only is this true of the primary act of offering that is made in what
Charles Williams called “the Operation of the Mass,” but it applies to every
act of offering throughout the whole of human life.

 

Secondly,
in the Divine Liturgy we say not “I offer” but “we offer.” As offerers,
whether in the Eucharist or in other ways, we do not act alone but in union with
our fellow humans. As political animals, our thanksgiving is social and
corporate. Whenever we offer, we are acting as persons in relationship: in John
Donne’s words, “No man is an Island, entire of itself.” This corporate
character of our humanness, as we have already emphasized, is more important
today than ever before. Unless we can learn to share the world, we shall destroy
the world, and ourselves in it. “One world or none.”

 

Thirdly,
when we offer, we are our­selves part of that which we offer. 
As cosmic priests, we stand within nature, not above it.  In Kathleen Raine’s words:

                                    
Seas, trees and voices cry,

                                    
“Nature is your nature.”

 

Fourthly,
we are offerers rather than rulers or even stewards. The language of ruling, and
also sometimes of stewardship, can easily be misinterpreted to signify ar­bitrary
control and exploitation, as if the creation were our exclusive property rather
than a gift that we hold in trust for the Cre­ator.”11
All too often we Christians have tragically misapplied God’s words to the
newly created Adam, “Fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion. . . over
every living thing” (Gen. 1:28). Let us remember that “dominion” does not
signify “domination.” And let us remember also that this dominion is given
to us specifically because we are made in the divine image. It is therefore a
dominion that we exercise in obedience to Christ and in imi­tation of His own
example. Since He said, “My power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor.
12:9), since He exercised His power by “emptying” Himself and accepting
death on the Cross (Phil. 2:7, 8), it follows that our dominion within the realm
of nature is essentially kenotic, after the divine example, a dominion of humble
love, com­passion, and self-sacrifice.

 

Our
human vocation, briefly expressed, is to be priest of the creation. It is our
supreme privilege, consciously and gratefully, to offer the created world back
to God.

 

Yet,
even though we humans are called to co-operate with nature rather than to
control it, at the same time God has given us the ability to alter and refashion
the world. This brings us to a fifth point. As rational or “logical” animals
endowed with self-awareness, we humans do not offer the world back to God simply
in the form in which we received it, but through the work of our hands we
transform that which we offer. At the Eucharist we offer to God the fruits of
the earth, not in their initial state, but reshaped through our human skills; we
bring to the altar not grains of wheat but bread, not bunches of grapes but
wine. And so it is throughout all human life.

 

It
is true that, here as elsewhere, there is no absolute line of division between
us humans and the other animals. Beavers build dams, bees construct honeycombs.

 

But
on the whole the other animals sim­ply live in the world, glorifying God
through their instinctive actions, whereas we humans consciously reshape our
envi­ronment, glorifying God through art and technology.

 

As
humans, then, we modify and re­fashion the creation. The world is not only a
gift but a task. In the words of the Ro­manian theologian Dumitru Staniloae
(1903—93), “Man puts the seal of his un­derstanding and of his intelligent
work onto creation, thereby humanizing it and giving it humanized back to God.
He actualizes the world’s potentialities.”12 Formed in the image
of God the Creator, we are in J.R.R. Tolkien’s phrase “sub-creators,”
appointed not only to preserve but to transfigure.

 

Through
our power of self-awareness, and through this ability to alter and restructure
the world, we humans are able to give creation a tongue, rendering it eloquent
in praise of God. As the Dalai Lama said at the inter-faith meeting in Assisi,
“The universe has no voice, and the universe needs to speak. We are the voice
of the universe.” It is through us humans that the heavens declare the glory
of God (cf. Ps. 18 [19]: 1), through us that the moon and the stars, the rocks,
trees, flowers and animals, give Him praise and worship. 13
In his book Byzan­tine Aesthetics, Father Gervase Matthew develops this point
with particular reference to liturgical worship and iconography, but what he
says can be applied more widely to all forms of craftsmanship and agriculture:

 

Because
Man is body he shares in the material world around him, which passes within him
through his sense perceptions. Because Man is Mind he belongs to the world of
higher reality and pure spirit. Because he is both, he is in Cyril of
Alexandria’s phrase “God’s crowned image”; he can mold and manipulate
the material and render it articulate. The sound in a Byzantine hymn, the
gestures in a liturgy, the bricks in a church, the cubes in a mosaic are matter
made articulate in the Divine praise. 14

 

Bishop
Kallistos Ware is the author of the two classic
books, The Orthodox Church and The
Orthodox Way.

 

The
preceding article was excerpted from Through the
Creation to the Creator, a talk delivered
by Bishop Kallistos in 1995 for the third Marco Pallis Memorial Lecture series
(U.K.). Copies of the complete text in booklet form may be obtained in North
America through Mr. Vincent Rossi at Rose Hill College, P0. Box 3126, Aiken, SC
29802. $8.00 individually (plus $1.50 P&H) or when purchasing 10 or more,
$5.50 each (plus 10% P&H).

 

Notes:

1.   
H. von Arnim. “Stoicorum Veterum Frag­menta,” vol. iii (Leipzig
1903), p. 95, § 390.

2.   
Polities 1. i, 9 (1253a).

3.   
“The Founding of the Company,” in The
Re­gion of the Summer Stars (London, 1950), p. 38. Williams puts the phrase
in quotation marks, but I do not know whom he is citing here.

4.   
“The Redeemed City.” in Charles Williams, The
Image of the City and Other Essays, ed. Anne Ridler (London. 1958). pp. 104,
107, 109.

5.   
“Anthropotokos.” in Williams. op. cit., p. 112.

6.   
Oration xxxviii, 11.

7.   
Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim:
The Later Masters (Schocken Books: New York, 1966). p. 317.

8.   
See Kallistos Ware, “The Unity of the Human Person According to the
Greek Fathers,” in Arthur Peacocke and Grant Gillett (eds.), Persons and Per­sonality: A Contemporary Inquiry (Oxford. 1987), p.
202.

9.   
SeeWare,op.cit..p.201.

10. 
For the Life of the World:
Sacraments and Or­thodoxy (New York, 1973). pp. 60-61.

11. 
This point is well made by Metropolitan Paulos Mar Gregorios. The Human Presence: Ecological Spirituality and the Age of the Spirit (New
York, 1987), chapter 7. “Mastery and Mystery.” This book was originally
published by the World Council of Churches under the title The Human Presence: An Orthodox View of Nature (Geneva, 1978).

12. 
“The World as Gift and Sacrament of God’s Love,” Sobornost,
The Journal of the Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius, 5:9 (1969). p.
669.

13. 
Compare St. Leontius of Cyprus, “In Defense of the Icons of the
Saints” (PG 93: 1604AB), cited in Kallistos Ware, The
Orthodox Way (revised edi­tion, New York. 1995), pp. 54-55.

14. 
Byzantine Aesthetics (London.
1963), pp. 23-24.

 

Why Do Icons Weep?

 The Word Magazine, September 1994, Page 13-15

WHY
DO ICONS WEEP?

By
Archpriest Paul O’Callaghan

IT
CERTAINLY SEEMS THAT there has been an explosion recently in the frequency of
icons “weeping” in North America.
Several years ago, an icon began weeping in an Albanian Orthodox Church in
Chicago, and the phenomenon received national attention. Pilgrims came from all
over North America, and many miraculous healings were reported. The weeping
icon. “She Who is Quick to Hear,” from the monastery of the Glorious
Ascension in Resaca, Georgia, has been brought in pilgrimage to many North
American Orthodox parishes. Weeping icons have also been reported in Texas and
other states, and one from Russia recently completed a tour of the U.S. One of
the latest and most dramatic cases has been “Our Lady of Cicero,”
(Illinois), an icon on the iconostasis of St. George Antiochian parish in
Chicago.

 

THE
PHENOMENON

 

What
happens when icons “weep?” In most cases, a moist dew-like substance begins
to form on the icon and then begins to stream down it. On many weeping icons,
the moisture develops in the eyes only, and then wells up like tears do in a
persons eyes, before flowing down the icon in distinct streams. The substance
itself is of an oil-like consistency, and at times has a
distinctly fragrant odor to it.  It
is akin to

the
— myrrh that has flowed from the incorrupt bodies of certain deceased saints.
(i.e.. St. Demetrios the Myrrhstreaming, and others). In the case of the weeping
statues, however, that have oc­curred in the Roman Catholic tradition, it has
been reported that the “tears” are of a watery consistency like natural
tears.

 

THE
ICONS

 

Weeping
icons are of every conceivable type and origin. Some have been painted icons on
iconstases, i.e., the Albanian and Antiochian
icons in Chicago. Others have been reproductions. Some have been inexpensive
paper prints mounted on wood. Some have
been painted by accomplished icon­ographers, while others are in the
non-Byzantine “Western” style. In fact, the Resaca icon is a common
reproduction of poor artistic quality marketed by a heterodox monastic group!
The fact of weeping statues in the Roman Catholic world adds to the diversity of
styles in which the phenomenon exhibits itself.

 

To
the best of my personal knowledge, all the recent weeping icons have been of the
Theotokos. I have not heard of any of Christ, or of any other saint. If they do
exist, it is certain that they are far less wide­spread than those of the
Theotokos.

 

How
are we to account for these facts? Assuming for the moment that the Phenomenon
is a manifestation of the grace of God, the diversity of styles and forms may
well be a reminder to us that God is not in the “art appreciation” business.
While it is important that we decorate our churches with icons written accord­ing
to the traditional canons of iconography, we know that God can and does use what
is humble, despised, and unworthy to commu­nicate His grace. This undercuts our
pride, stuffiness, and legalism, and our tendency to draw boundaries outside of
which we presume God cannot be at work.

 

If
such an answer must remain tentative, even more so is the one concerning the
question of why weeping icons of the Theotokos are predominant. Certainly, the
Theotokos is presented in the Church’s liturgy as the one who is our most
fervent intercessor in heaven, a well-spring of compassion for the human race,
our helper and aid. That her icons weep could be symbolic of her closeness and
concern for human affairs. However then the following question arises: Would
this not be true of her Son as well? Is He to be thought any less close and
concerned with our affairs?

 

Perhaps
it would be inappropriate to consider Christ as weeping now, since He has
completed His suffer­ings once and for all for the sins of the world, and has
entered into the Holy Place and is seated at the right hand of God. (See Hebrews
5:5-9, 10:12). In any case, we are dealing with a mystery, and all attempts at
explanation must be considered provisional at best, (and perhaps impious at
worst!)

 

 THE
SOURCE OF THE PHENOMENON

 

Above,
I mentioned the assumption that the weeping icons are a manifestation of Divine
Grace. Can this, however, be assumed?
There are skeptics who would have us believe that the whole thing is an exercise
in fakery and trickery. They wish to search for the hidden reservoirs, pumps,
and conduits that would prove it all to be a hoax. However, if such were true,
there would have to be a widespread conspiracy of deception that reaches back
for centuries shielding this arcane technology, as weeping icons have been known
for that long. Such a theory stretches credulity far beyond the weeping icons
themselves! And what would it all accomplish? Anyone who knows the life and
history of the Orthodox Church must know that this is entirely ludicrous.

 

Another
skeptical theory is that there is some natural process that explains it all.
However, how does one account for the great diversity in materials found in the
weeping icons (and statues). No one process could account for it all, when such
dissimilar materials are involved. And why would the subject be restricted to
the Theotokos? The constitution of her icons is no different than any other. And
of course, such naturalistic theories have even more difficulty in explaining
the healings, heavenly fragrances, and profound spiritual atmosphere many people
experi­ence in the presence of the weeping icons. And what natural theory
explains the myrrhbearing incorrupt bodies of many saints throughout the
centuries?

 

Another
explanation of the weep­ing icons is that they are a counterfeit spiritual
phenomenon produced by demonic spirits. We certainly know from Scripture and the
tradition of the Church that Satan is capable of producing spiritual
manifestations that appear to be holy and good for the purpose of deceiving
people. Could weeping icons be a spiritual deception? Those who would uphold
this theory would argue that the phenomenon itself produces enthusiasm for the
miraculous but few genuine conversions to Christ. They hold that weeping icons
distract people from the real concerns of the Gospel (repentance, faith in
Christ, growth in divine grace, the glorification of God) and amount to nothing
more than a spiritual “sideshow” that cannot be from God.

 

However,
some of these same objections could have been leveled against the ministry of
Jesus himself His earthly ministry had exactly the effect of generating much
enthusi­asm for the miraculous but very few actual conversions to God. Even his
eleven most devoted converts deserted Him when the going became rough! So even
if some people show an hysterical preoccu­pation with miracles coupled with a
lack of interest in the heart of the Gospel, it does not mean that a particular
spiritual manifestation is not from God.

 

Although
it is not impossible that a particular manifestation of weeping could be a
demonic counterfeit, such a suggestion must be weighed against the fact that the
tradition of the Church as a whole has accepted this phenomenon as a blessing
from God for centuries. This, together with the fact that the weeping icons have
been a source of spiritual and physical blessings and healings for many
believers, would seem to nullify the assertion that the phenome­non is
demonically orchestrated.

 

However,
it is important to recognize that belief in such manifesta­tions can never be
equated with divine faith (i.e., belief in the central articles of the faith,
trust in Jesus Christ, etc.). Christians may decide to leave aside or even
reject phenomena like weeping icons without imperiling their souls. In such a
case, one may simply miss out on a blessing that is offered by God.

 

THE WEEPING

One
of the most frequently discussed aspects of this topic has been the question of
what the weeping means. One common opin­ion
is that the Virgin is weeping because of the increase in the sins of the world.
However, the concept that the sins of the world have greatly increased in modern
times is questionable. Is the Theotokos sad­der now than when thousands of
Christians were being martyred by the pagan Romans? Do the sins of modern
America eclipse the murder­ous persecutions of Stalin and Hitler’s genocide
of the 1930’s and 40’s? Is there currently more cause for the Theotokos to
weep than when millions of Orthodox Christ­ians were oppressed by hostile
Islamic rulers for centuries? Or by Communism in recent years? Or to focus again
on the American scene, are our modern sins greater than when millions of African
Americans were forcibly enslaved in our land, or when genocide was being waged
against Native Americans?

 

Certainly
sexual immorality (with the resultant AIDS epidemic) has become increasingly
acceptable in recent decades, but the other sins mentioned above were no less
vicious. Perhaps the only other phenomenon that one could argue has uniquely
grieved the heart of God and the Holy Theotokos in our time is the wholesale
apostasy in many of the churches. This indeed should cause anyone who loves
Christ to weep.

 

The
immediate association con­nected with tears of course is sor­row. However, the
fact that what comes from the eyes of the Theo­tokos is not a watery, tear-like
substance is worthy of note. As mentioned above, the tears are of an oily type
and consistency generally referred to as “myrrh” in the tradition of the
Church. This myrrh is considered a healing balm: the fact that the Virgin weeps
myrrh would then mean she is pouring out mercy and compassion for the human race
in need of healing and grace. So, in this line of interpretation, the weeping is
not so much a statement that the world is in a uniquely evil condition, but a
reminder that the mercy, grace, and healing power of the Holy Spirit are still
with us in the Church, by the intercessions of the Theotokos.

 

There
are those who feel that the weeping should be seen in this con­text as a
manifestation of grace to call those outside to return to the fold of the Orthodox
Church. In the present American scene, the exclusive location of this phenomenon
within the Orthodox Church may be a call to other Christians to recognize that
Orthodoxy has remained grace-hearing, while other commu­nions have been anxious
to rapidly jettison as much of the Christian faith and tradition as they can.

 

Tears
are piv­otally associated in the tradition of the Church with the grace of the
Holy Spirit. Those who strive for perfect prayer recognize genuine tears of com­punction
(not emotional tears) as a great gift of the Spirit. In this connection, the
weeping icons are a call for all of us to reawaken to the Spirit-filled and
grace-bearing nature of the Orthodox Church.

 

 :    
CONCLUSION

A
general examination of the phenomenon of weeping icons leads to the conclusion
that it is a manifestation of grace within the Church. The acceptance of weeping
icons, (and, one must add, many other miraculous phenomena associated with
icons), by the tradition of the Church indicates this is a divine activity and
should generally be received as such. However, this is not to endorse every
absurd and superstitious opinion that may be offered concerning each particular
instance of the phenomenon. The Scriptures warn us to “test all things and to
hold fast to what is good” (1 Thess. 5:21).

 

Ultimately,
the significance of weeping icons must be measured from within the perspective
of the entire tradition of the Church. An unusual preoccupation with such things
cannot be a sign of spiritual health. While huge crowds will flock to view a
weeping icon, many of the same people will be missing from the regular Sunday
celebration of the Eucharist, and will have little or no interest in hearing the
Word of God. Yet in every Liturgy, a greater miracle occurs as the Lord comes to
us as our food and drink in the Eucharist. Moreover, the lives of many are
miracu­lously transformed every day by the power of the Gospel. Yes these
miracles, although far more significant, re­ceive few head­lines and no fan­fare.
The weeping icons may indeed be a sign that the grace of God is with us and the
Holy Theotokos cares for us, but if our interest in them eclipses the essentials
of Christian faith, we have strayed into spiritual delusion.

 

 

Fr.
Paul O‘Callaghan is pastor and dean of St. George Cathedral in Wichita,
Kansas. He presently authors “Dialogue” for THE WORD.

 

The
Miraculous Lady of Cicero, Illinois

September
1994

Why Do We Fast So Often?

Word Magazine  March 2000 Page 14 

 

 

 

WHY DO WE FAST SO OFTEN?

 

 

 

By Fr. Stephen Ziton 

 

 

 

Let’s begin by taking a look at what happens when we do not keep the fast. In Genesis 3 we learn of the fall of Adam and Eve, and how their failure to keep the fast when they ate the forbidden fruit was a sin (i.e., love of their own will more than the will of God) which caused mankind to be expelled from paradise and perfect union with the Creator. Why would we want to mimic the original sin?

 

Our bodies and our souls are connected in such a way that the actions of our bodies articulate the attitudes of our souls. Prayer is not just a function of the soul alone. We see this phenomenon often in the Scriptures. In Luke, when the Samaritan leper gave thanks for his healing, he did more than just say words, he “fell down on his face at [Jesus’] feet” (9:16). Later, in chapter 18, the Publican praying in the temple was so full of sorrow, he would not even look in the direction of the heavens, but cast his eyes down and smote his breast while praying for mercy. And it is more than mere coincidence that we prostrate when we say the prayer of St. Ephraim during Great Lent, “O Lord and Master of my life, take from me the spirit of sloth, despair, lust of power, and idle talk. . . .”

 

All of the Holy Fathers of the Church, as well as many of the saints from both the Old and New Testament, practiced fasting, including Christ Himself. In fact, Jesus also taught that certain forms of evil could not be conquered without it (Matt 17:21).

 

Father Thomas Hopko reminds us that man does not fast because it pleases God if His servants do not eat, for, as the Lenten hymns of the Church tell us, “the devil also never eats.” Neither do we fast in order to afflict ourselves with suffering and pain, for God takes no pleasure in the discomfort of His people. But we fast only to gain mastery over ourselves and to conquer the passions of the flesh.

 

If I may insert a personal note here, fasting helps me on several levels. First, when I cannot have any amount of meat or dairy, my body reminds me. My lack of contentment with what I eat is something of which I am continually aware. But this helps me become more focused in prayer because my sensitivities have not been dulled by foods that satisfy. Also, it gives my spirituality a realistic barometer that lets me know where I am with my faith. It’s easy to use the verbiage of an addict (“I can begin the fast anytime I want to”) because we are all addicted to food to various degrees. But it is a very practical dilemma with which we have to come to grips meal after meal. For example, do I love the Big Mac more than I love the Lord and doing his will? Is there any real harm to that cup of cappuccino? After all, God is going to have to forgive me of much bigger sins than eating a cheese sandwich. Excuses are never very far away.

 

It can be easy to justify not participating in the fast to your greatest ability if that is your desire. If you’ve never done it, it’s hard to describe what you’re missing. But it’s a great first step to growing as a Christian. Fasting can be a lot easier when it is viewed not as an end in itself, but as something which aids in our repentance. So, ask your Spiritual Father to give guidance if you’ve never fasted before. Avoiding the foods from which the Church asks us to abstain is easier if you replace them by increasing worthy activities like self-examination, works of love, giving to the poor, prayer, reading the Scriptures and the Fathers, and refraining from gossip. If you are only avoiding certain foods and aren’t doing those things which edify, then you are not really fasting; you’re just on some kind of weird diet. The bottom line is Christ fasted (Matt 4) and taught His disciples to fast (Matt 6, Mk 2). Are you participating as best as you can ...? Are you one of His disciples?

 

 

 

Fr. Stephen is pastor of St. Mary Antiochian Orthodox Church, Wichita, KS.

 

 

 

Why Do We Say "Lord Have Mercy" So Often?

The Word Magazine, December, 1983 Page 5-6

by Rick A. Michaels

Most people in the Church are troubled by all the repetition in the worship services of the Church. In a time when everything is quick, neat, and gratifying the ponderous length of our services, the heavy themes and images that tie the services together and make them to flow, like some eternal river moving through space as time moves, unaffected by human ambitions and beyond the coming and going of generations, irritate us. And so more often than not we endure them rather than enter them. We as much as decide that “one Lord Have Mercy is enough,” for “God hears us the first time.” We notice in the service books that line the pews in the church tedious instructions like, “Lord Have Mercy is to be repeated 40 times.” We look for the meaning of that instruction. Perhaps we think that such a thing must have been meant for those odd persons who are monks or nuns or something like that. But let us try to understand why the Church feels as she does about the “Lord Have mercy” for example.

One is hit by the fact that throughout the Bible God is always in intimate relations with man. God tells Moses that He is the “God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” a Person who is related to other persons. God is always speaking with, debating with, suffering with, rejoicing with, delivering, punishing, defending, feeding, and in­spiring man. God is jealous, like a loving husband for his wife. God is a father who gives bread to his son when he asks for it. Isaiah calls God, “My beloved,” (Is. 5:1). The psalmist calls God the “God of my salvation,” (Ps. 18:46). God is the “mother bird,” (Ps. 91:4). Isaiah says: “Like birds hovering, so the Lord of hosts will protect Jerusalem; he will protect Jerusalem; he will protect and deliver it, he will spare and rescue it:’ (Is. 31:5). God is called the rock, the shepherd, the shield and stronghold, the light, the strength, the refuge, the sun, the help, the shade, the portion, the song, the warrior, the potter, the fountain, the dew, the lion, the leopard, and the bear. All these names and characterizations point to the fact that God is all around man embracing, filling, consuming him with His presence. God loves man with a divine, a supernatural, an absorbing love which has no human correlate.

But we often do not experience that we are loved by God today. We do not often talk to God and, like Isaiah, say “my beloved” to God. The tragedy of our lives seems to be not that God has forgotten us but that we have forgotten God. And in this forgetting we do not feel our sin, we do not think that we hurt God by sinning. We surely lack a comprehension that we disappoint God. We do not feel the warm breath of God on our flesh, or hear the weeping of our souls and the gentle Holy Spirit’s weeping too. We do not see His countenance fall, the divine expression of loss, when we betray Him.

Only when one has forgotten God does religion become a something one goes to instead of a someone who belongs to, someone who loves you and frets about you. In our relations with each other we are conscious that we offend and hurt each other. And when we become sensitive to the fact that we have hurt someone we love we are apt to be seriously upset with ourselves. We are likely to be found before the feet of the person we have hurt, crying and asking forgiveness. And we are apt to be very emotional, very personal, very sober, and say over and over, “Please forgive me!” and “I am sorry.” We try to make up to the one we have hurt. We buy that person something he or she truly enjoys, something particularly symbolic of our love-relationship with that person. We turn our lives over to the task of mending the broken bond of love. We persist until we discern the hurt fade from the face of the person we love, until, in an embrace, we feel no tension, no apprehensive, fearful reluctance, until we feel, indeed, that wound we caused the loved one to have, the deep, spiritual wound, is healed. It is only at this point that we sigh a sigh of relief and go back to our normal lives.

We have been given wonderful gifts by God, our God. We have been given life, and the possibility of receiving fountains of living water, the fresh splash of joy and peace in fellowship with God. We have been given abilities, friends, all of the beautiful creation. We have been given divine sonship in God’s eternal Son, that even as He became one of us we might become one like Him, a God by grace, and sit down next to God in an ever­lasting life of blessings and bliss. But all this we have wasted. We have allowed ourselves to be swallowed up by the dark lakes of depression which flood us with feelings of sloth and bitterness. We have given our hearts to ponder the poison of self-love, of pride, and like spoiled fruit on the tree we sour away. We have failed to see the beauty and wonder God has surrounded us with. And so we have not been worthy of being made in the image and likeness of God. We have received the earth as a lush field, well watered and bearing a bounty that is ripe and sweet. We have received Eden, but we have made it a desert. We have been content with far less, with comfort and luxury, than God has been wanting to give us, a spiritual, boundless, endless rapture of luminous life and love, in fellowship with Him, in His very depths. We have given up a destiny of paradise, a paradise where the love of the Holy Trinity would be met by the priestly love of the adoring man, where the Creator and the creature would be as one, where all is in all.

If we should come to feel all this we would not be ir­ritated by the “Lord Have Mercy” repeated so many times. We would find that tears would be washing our faces, the balm of the Holy Spirit, the baptism into His marvelous light, that gives our hearts wings so that our souls might fly with the Seraphim and exchange the kiss of peace with the Mother of God and with all His saints, in whom He is pleased to dwell. We would want only to please God, to see His joy at our coming, to hear Him call out our names in a tone of affection and friendship, to hear Him testify before the Father and in the court of the New Jerusalem where all the hosts of the righteous stand in victory at the foot of the throne of glory, that we belong to Him, that our lives were to Him as a sweet smelling fragrance. We would hate our sin.

The Church is intimately in Love with her Lord. She forever yearns to be worthy of His Love. She is forever amazed at His steadfast love. And so she says over and over again, “Lord Have Mercy?’ To the extent that we enter into this consciousness and truly experience the fact that God loves us, then we will understand that nothing we say, do, think, or desire will ever be enough, that no prayer, praise, or petition directed to God is ever enough for the God that is too much!

Rick is a graduate of St. Vladimir’s Seminary and a member of St. Simon Church in Iron Mountain, Michigan.

Why I Became An Orthodox Christian

 

Word Magazine  June 1960  Page 8/18

  

 

WHY I BECAME AN
ORTHODOX

CHRISTIAN

 

 

By Athanasius Yoo, M.D., B.D.

  

 

My long pilgrimage to the Mother Church has been completed. As I think back over
the long road of this pilgrimage, I become filled with deep emotion. For by the
grace of God, I, a stray sheep, have found the lovely bosom of the Good
Shepherd, the true body of Christ, - the One, Holy Catholic, and Apostolic
Church. Therefore, it is my conviction that my humble retrospections should in
nowise come to naught to those who are outside of the true Church of Christ.

 

I am a Korean and a medical doctor by profession.  My father was an Elder of the
Presbyterian Church in Korea and my mother a very devout deaconess of same. 
Consequently I was brought up in an unusually religious atmosphere.

 

My mother hoped that I would become a minister of the Presbyterian Church. But I
had no interest in that profession because the example of the Protestant
ministers at that time was much too superficial and did not impress me as being
Christian at all. And so I entered medicine instead, finished medical school and
began practicing in Seoul, Korea. I continued my medical practice until the
unconditional surrender of the Japanese Empire. The fall of Japanese
imperialism, and the subsequent independence of Korea, impressed me greatly with
the frailty of life and of the world.

 

After a period of sincere prayer and meditation, I decided to dedicate myself to
the ministry. I entered the Presbyterian Theological School in Seoul, Korea ...
with deep conviction and fervent faith for my newly chosen profession. Soon
after, however, I was confronted with the malignant teaching of higher biblical
criticism and of rationalistic modernistic doctrine. The evil shadow of Harnack
and Deissmann, the poisonous sabotage of the Tubingen School, the narcotic
abomination of Schleicher­macher and Rutschul dominated the School. The revival
of twentieth century Arianism and Nestorianism was promoted and the so-called
“social Gospel” emphasized. Moreover, the Second Coming of Christ and the
doctrine of everlasting life were counted as convictions of the ignorant. Had I
not entered this Theological School, I probably would have kept my peace of
mind. But once I had learned the false theology of this school, I lost my peace
of mind. Indeed, I found it impossible to accept these heretical Protestant
teachings without going against my conscience and good faith.

 

As a result, I began to look for more conservative Protestant teachings in order
to find consolation . . . but I could not find any. With deep unrest and
despair, I began reading some Roman Catholic theological books and my interest
in the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church concerning the Virginity of the
Virgin Mary, the Apostolic Succession, and Transubstantiation, was greatly
aroused. However, because of the lack of books, my reading in Roman Catholic
doctrine was limited. In the meantime, I continued my theological studies at the
Presbyterian seminary and after my graduation from there was advised to be
ordained. But I refused ordination because I now felt that the ministry of the
Protestant Church lacked Apostolic Succession and was therefore null and void.
After much thought and hesitation, I finally became a Roman Catholic in 1950. Up
until this time I had no contact whatsoever with the Orthodox Church.

 

Upon studying Roman Catholic doctrine, however, I found many false teachings in
it also. Those that bothered me especially were the following:

 

    1. The withdrawal of the cup from the laity during Communion.

    2. The Doctrine of the Infallibility of the Pope.

    3. The Doctrine of the Immaculate Conception.

    4. The Doctrine of Purgatory.

    5. The Doctrine of Indulgences.

    6. The universal jurisdiction of the Bishop of Rome.

    7. The exclusive Latinity in the Mass and in other services.

 

If I refused to accept the above doctrines, I would be under anathema.  And so I
remained in a state of confusion. In order to resolve the problems I had about
the Roman doctrine, I began studying the writings of the Church Fathers. These
along with scholastic theology, I read for a long time. My conclusion from all
these studies was that the Roman Catholic Church, too, had gone astray as had
the Protestant. In doubt, despair, and agony, I decided to go to the United
States in order to escape my doctrinal troubles. I arrived in the United States
in 1955.

 

In the United States, I studied advanced medical science and also continued my
theological studies. For the first time I was given the opportunity to read into
Eastern Orthodox theology. Up until this time I had had no contact with Orthodox
Christians or with any Orthodox Church. Thanks be to God, however, for He led me
by His Holy Spirit to the primitive, conservative, and most pure and virgin
faith of Christianity! For I discovered that in the Orthodox Church,
Christianity with all its richness and essence was to be found. In the bosom of
the Orthodox Church, my despaired soul found a resting place, a heavenly harbor!
With great joy and hope, I decided to become an Orthodox Christian about a year
ago. At first I hesitated to make a hasty decision for fear of disgracing myself
by frequent changes of denominations. But gradually I became convinced of the
validity of Orthodoxy.

 

By the Grace of God, I was convinced that I must serve Him through the
priesthood of the Orthodox Church. And so I began following the way of the
Cross, willing to sacrifice anything. Through the kindness of His Eminence,
Archbishop Michael and His Grace, Bishop Athenagoras of Elaia, I was given
permission to study Orthodox theology at the Holy Cross Orthodox Theological
School in Brookline, Massachusetts, in preparation for the priesthood. My desire
is to return to Korea as a medical-priest missionary after my ordination into
the Orthodox Church, and join the Orthodox mission which already exists in
Seoul, Korea.

 

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Why I Stayed In The Ministry

 

Word Magazine  June 1963  Page 8, 9/11

 

 

WHY I STAYED IN THE
MINISTRY

 

 

Don’t enter the ministry if you can possibly do anything else and be happy.”
Young men often hear this kind of advice from working preachers. I myself have
tried to quit a hundred times! During the sleepless gray hours after many a
Sunday I have worked countless letters of resignation to be read the following
week to what I hoped might be a stunned congregation. But the letters have never
been read, never even been written.

 

One day, perhaps, the gnawing sense of personal inadequacy and the mounting
pressure of humanly insoluble problems may be too much, and I will write and
deliver such a pronouncement.

 

I’ve been in the ministry twenty-seven years now. I started preaching my first
sermon while a sophomore in college. The vision began, however, at a Christian
youth camp when I was sixteen. Never have I forgotten the vigor and enthusiasm
of several voting ministers who at the time stimulated a burning and abiding
idealism.

 

My father died suddenly when I was eleven, and I was deeply impressed with what
I can only call a “God-consciousness.” My attitude toward church became less
casual. One summer the usual interests in sports and girls and the long hours of
after-school work in a grocery store were capped by a special climax. In those
depression days one week of camp in a rented fairgrounds was all either the
church or the church families could afford. During such a week came my crucial
decision. Standing alone under the stars on a warm, sweet summer night, I knew I
had to preach. Unsophisticated as it may sound, I was aflame with the desire to
spend my life in sharing with all whom I could reach the transforming power of
Christ that I had come to know.

 

My courageous widowed mother sold everything, and we moved to the state capital
college town so I could secure a good liberal arts education.  Ten dollars a
week from my paper route sustained us for months, until mother got work. Then at
nineteen I preached my first sermon. I hitchhiked to and from a small
open-country church, occasionally arriving just after the benediction! My
“salary” was the offering, usually about five dollars.

 

But I really got ever so much more. These saints were patient and encouraging,
long-suffering with my crude sermons and  pastoral ministrations.
Slowly in the course of several student pastorates my illusions took on more
realistic form. I learned that quarreling, hypocrisy, and sheer evil can
infiltrate any congregation.

 

After graduation I moved to the smallest county seat in our state, a town of
1,200 population. There a preacher’s daughter, who had said the parsonage was
not for her, gave up her teaching career and joined me in a ministry that has
continued in that small town for twenty-four years.

 

Ours is hardly a typical town or ministry in these days of crushing cities and
sprawling suburbs. Yet America still has thousands of towns like ours —
population now 1,300 — and countless congregations like the discouraged handful
that welcomed me in a damp dungeon of a building here twenty-four years ago.
From such churches people flow into distant colleges, factories, and offices.
Too often such churches have no relevance for daily living, too often are not
even respected. Too often, too, success-mad seminarians have abused and trodden
them under foot in their ambitious ministerial climb. Realizing this despicable
fact I vowed, by the grace of God, to bring relevancy and respect to at least
one such church.

 

This, I suppose, is one reason I have remained in the ministry, and for so many
years in a given pastorate. The adolescent dream of sweeping the world with the
love of Christ has admittedly grown dim at times. But the conviction has
remained, and grown stronger, that the small towns with their neglected churches
are a vital key to America’s overall religious, social, and moral condition.

 

We have seen changes in our small church. Three major building programs have
replaced the little crumbling concrete block structure with a striking edifice
of semi-modern design. The brilliant young architect was a boy in the Sunday
school when we came. We have seen the baker’s dozen of discouraged people
blossom into a strong congregation of over four hundred. The once ineffective
Sunday school has grown into an educational organism whose young superintendent
last year was selected “Superintendent of the Year” by a national Christian
education magazine.  We have seen young men and women go into medicine,
teaching, business, and the arts with a mature Christian faith. We have seen new
families firmly established, and older families reestablished. I say “we”
because these results came through the work of many God-empowered people who
found joy and vigor in their Christian faith.

 

One of my teachers used to say that “God made the country, man made the city,
but the Devil made the small town.” Wife-trading, alcoholism, secret dope
addiction, stone-cold indifference to even the simplest spiritual truth are no
strangers to the small town and to its churches. Small towns present unique
problems of survival, too. Our first baby died at nine months of age with spinal
meningitis; his strong little body, nearly ready to walk, was not equal to the
stove-heated, out-house-supplied, cold-water shack we rented for ten dollars a
month.

 

But when I faced the decision of moving to a better church, leaving the
ministry, or finding part-time employment to augment the seventeen dollars a
week from the church, I decided to apply for work in a steel foundry. Steel
foundries were busy in the early forties, and I went to work almost immediately;
there was no chance to consult with the men of the church. The next Sunday,
before I could call the board together, the church treasurer, who worked in the
payroll department of the foundry, handed me my weekly preacher’s check which he
had reduced to fourteen dollars. The board upheld his action, a gesture that
sorely threatened my loyalty to the ministry. For six months I divided my
energies between foundry and church. Now, nearly twenty-five years later, the
men on that board have grown in Christian spirit no less than the church and I
have grown.

 

Yes, the Church is full of human weakness, and spiritual progress is agonizingly
slow. Yet it is an important finger in the dike against the chaos that threatens
our very existence. Carl Jung has said. “Among all my patients in the second
half of life . . .  there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was
not that of finding a religious outlook on life.” And according to Rollo May,
the question “Who am I and what is the meaning of my existence?” most tersely
reveals the basic anxiety of our time. Who but Christ can be the answer for
mankind and for the Church?

 

How else except through Christ and his church can we adequately meet the problem
of race relations? Or take the matter of nuclear power: can a small congregation
in a small town somewhere do anything about this monstrous horror? It was
General MacArthur himself who said the world’s only hope lies in “spiritual
recrudescence.” The only power that can control man, any man who in turn
controls the released atom, is found in Jesus Christ, the Head of the Church.

 

I remember the successful salesman who hit my doorbell very late one winter
night and blurted out, “I don’t know what I’m living for!” Drinking, divorce,
debauchery were not his problems — just the stark meaninglessness of life
without God. He was a victim of today’s unbalanced emphasis upon scientific
progress. Even if we escape nuclear annihilation, we still face the concept that
life has no purpose, a theme which modern literature hurls at us from every
side. It is precisely here that the Church, despite its faults, alone can offer
healing and creative power. The young salesman, we ought to add, is now entering
the ministry, for all my warnings! God still works through the Church, still
changes people’s lives!

 

The Apostle Paul knew something about incest, drunkenness at the communion
service, and general debauchery in the church at Corinth. Yet his letters to the
Corinthians are an important reminder that to desert the Church because of its
moral weakness is to beg the question. God still changes human life through the
witness and influence of the Church.

 

Remaining in the same small church for twenty-four years lets one observe these
changes which occur only in God’s own time. Recently a handsome young basketball
coach met with his boys before a game for prayer. For these kids who live in the
moral jungle of a modern high school this coach, who twenty years ago was a
little thief and liar, is a moral guideline. I remember the time when we
seriously thought of banishing him from our Sunday school and youth meetings!
Slowly through the influence of the church youth program, summer camps, a good,
church supported liberal arts education, plus marriage to a fine Christian girl,
this onetime delinquent became an excellent coach and Christian leader.

 

Let me share only one more of countless experiences that have encouraged me to
stay in the ministry. Five years ago a baby was born to an older couple in our
town. The father, a retired state trooper, was slowly drinking himself to death.
The mother, a county official, active in politics, capable at her job, was
surprised at this late motherhood. The baby, as babies will, brought changes
into this home. Listen to the mother’s own words before the congregation just a
few Sundays ago: “I’m happy to tell you of my faith, and I would gladly shout it
to the world!

 

“A little over five years ago we received one of the greatest blessings of our
lives. The birth of our little girl was a near miracle, and I was sure she was a
gift from Heaven. I felt that I wanted to do something about it, but I didn’t
know what to do or where to go.

 

“I shall always be grateful to the young man from the church who came to our
home and gave us a warm and personal invitation to attend the services. Without
this, I might still be sitting at home wondering what to do.

 

“A year ago this Sunday my husband and I made our confessions of faith and were
buried with Christ in baptism, and it was a true rebirth to a new life! I
couldn’t have believed the difference it can make in one’s life. It has been a
wonderful year.

 

“I used to sleep late in the morning trying to put off having to face the
burdens, troubles, and worries of another day. I still have troubles . . . I
think we are supposed to, but I find that by getting up a little earlier and
having a period of quiet meditation and prayer before beginning each day, the
troubles are not nearly so big and, with God’s help, not nearly so hard to meet
. . .”

 

Her husband has lost the shakes, and is slowly conquering the drinking.

 

Teacher Annie Sullivan, after weeks of bleak failure in trying to reach the
imprisoned mind of Helen Keller, has been quoted as saying “It is my idea of
original sin, giving up!” Perhaps with something of the same conviction I have
remained in the ministry, often in spite of myself and often wanting to quit. I
remember once during my years as an army chaplain in World War II writing to
Harry Emerson Fosdick. Whatever our theological differences might be, I knew his
ministry had been far-reaching. Could he recommend a book, I asked, that would
help me solve some of the hundreds of counseling problems I faced in the
chaplaincy? His wry response said, in essence, “Son, if you find such a book,
please let me know. I need it too)!” I called him recently to indicate that the
fact of his long ministry and rich life had encouraged me to keep on in the
ministry, especially as I grew older. “How old are you, son?” he asked.
“Forty-five,” I answered. “Well I’m eighty-eight. But I must hang up now and get
back to a book I’m working on!” What book? A life of Saint Paul for teenagers!

 

In a recent biography of his artist father, Jean Renoir tells about one day when
the painter was confined to his room by a lung infection. The
seventy-six-year-old master needed someone to place the brushes in his
arthritis-stiffened hands while he worked on what was to be his last painting.
“I think,” said Auguste Renoir, looking at his work, “I am beginning to
understand something about it.” After these years of struggling with what is
always too big a job for any man without the grace of God, I am beginning to
understand what the old painter meant.

 

Let me close with a story that ex­presses the feelings of most of my friends who
have remained in the ministry. A veteran missionary to China was approached by
an American businessman to accept a position with his corporation. The firm
would pay him well for his knowledge of the country’s language and culture.
Salary offers grew to $25,000 as the missionary refused each successive
proposition. With some exasperation the corporation man finally asked, “Well,
just how much would it take to get you?” “Oh,” said the missionary, “your first
offer was more than enough. The salary is fine, but your job is too small.”

 

Perhaps a few more men like that in China might have changed the course of
history and of the Christian faith in that part of the world. Men with that kind
of faith might well turn the tide in the present terrifying crisis. To the young
men who may read this story of the old missionary, let me just say this: If his
words strike you with a peculiar force, if you cannot forget their challenge,
then do not enter the ministry if you can do something else and be happy.

 

 

Douglas A. Dickey

Minister, First Christian Church,

Williamsport, Indiana

 

(Reprinted from “Christianity Today”)

 

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Why I Wish I Were A Priest

 

Word Magazine  November 1964  Page 3-4/6

 

 

WHY I WISH

I WERE A PRIEST

 

By Andrew McDermott— Belleville, Mich.

 

 

 

Learning that a shortage of priests is a serious problem threatening the welfare
and future of our Orthodox Church undoubtedly has caused considerable concern in
many people. With me this alarming news immediately sparked some serious,
earnest, but generally ineffective thinking about what could be done. Soon my
reflections were only brief and occasional. Unexplainably most of them ended
picturing myself as a priest  —  something quickly dismissed with an inward
smile as humorous and a whimsical flight of the imagination. Eventually, without
conscious effort, my thoughts on this vital problem became frequent, lengthy
meditations on duty and reward, and the element of humor gave away to serious
self-examination of personal interests and qualifications. As a result, for some
time now, I wish I were a priest because the Church needs priests, the rewards
are so very great, the work interests me, and because of the perhaps immodest
opinion that I am reasonably well qualified, except for training.

 

The purpose here is to interest others in the priesthood by pointing out rewards
and duties that attract me so strongly to this highest of callings open to
married men. Of course interests are for the individual alone to evaluate, and
qualifications mainly will be left to those better able to list and explain them
completely and accurately. I do however plead that all pious, intelligent,
ambitious men curb their modesty enough to prevent their being too quick in
deciding they are not qualified. Like explaining qualifications, the final
judgment of them in each individual is the right and duty of others specially
charged with such responsibility.

 

The rewards of an Orthodox priest and his family are both spiritual and
material. It is important to realize that this statement can be made about very
few occupations, and none of the others offer even a fraction of the spiritual
rewards. Also, non-material (but invaluable and very real) benefits enriching
the lives of a whole family are infrequent and small (usually non-existent) in
most of the other vocations.

 

It is freely admitted that material rewards are greater in many of the other
vocations. However, even if you insist on being “practical,” happily more and
more Orthodox Americans and Canadians are facing up to their duty of providing
satisfactory material rewards for their clergy. (At least I believe this is
generally the case in and around Detroit, Mich.) As a result, today most rectory
families have comfortable homes and can afford to maintain a standard of living
that compares favorably with that of an average family. Compensation and
financial security in general continuously are improving too. Finally, a
pastor’s being almost entirely free of concern over the possibility of complete
privation for his family is a strong material inducement. Even in the severest
of business depressions it is inconceivable that his family would have to do
without at least a life sustaining amount of food, clothing and shelter. Such
dire hardship has been and could again be the lot of people in other, more
lucrative professions.

 

Most important — the spiritual rewards are very great. Even though they are far
more important than material rewards, I am at a loss to list and describe them
or to any way convey clearly my estimate of their immense value. I can and do
reflect on the awe, joy, and satisfaction of participating so fully in the
sacred services, administering the sacraments, teaching, counseling, and
comforting. However, much the same as the Holy Mysteries confessed by the
Church, I believe that the nature and worth of spiritual rewards defy being
accurately and fully explained to another. Because of implicit faith alone that
the spiritual rewards themselves would repay me and my family many times over
for any demands made on us, this bright promise is the foremost  reason I wish I
were a priest.

 

Although material compensation and security have been discussed first, these
actually rank third in importance as inducements for me. Depending on my frame
of mind, sometimes the spiritual rewards must compete with a sense of duty as
the most important reason I wish I were a priest. Whether it ranks first or
second, fortunately this matter of duty does not go so far beyond the limits of
language and human understanding, although it is possible to fall into faulty
thinking on the subject.

 

Duty can be summed up in general by stating that a man is doing his duty if he
is truly Christian to the fullest extent in every phase of his life. This
certainly implies a great deal, but rather in brief, I think we can agree this
to mean he regularly attends church and receives the sacraments; he supports
parish and other worthy groups financially and with active participation he is a
law-abiding citizen. If he is married, he is a kind, loving, faithful husband.
If also there are children, he is raising them Christian — happy, fair, and
well-adjusted; he will make a sincere effort to prepare them to be worthwhile
adult members of society. Much more — but finally, he provides the financial
means for all this doing some sort of honest, worthwhile work.

 

This last requirement is the one most closely related to the Church’s problem,
and in it is to be found a good explanation of why there is a shortage of
priests. Faulty thinking arises here if doing one’s duty means only that the
work is honest and worthwhile. I believe that this work (regardless of what it
is) also must make the best possible use of one’s interests, intelligence,
skills, and talents. In applying only some fraction these precious gifts of God,
particularly in earning a livelihood, I believe a person is guilty of neglecting
a most important duty.

 

The occupation that provides a man’s livelihood often accounts for more than
half of his waking hours. This is his career, his service to mankind for the
glory of God. This is what gives him a personal identity more than any other one
thing. In his vocational career above all is where he is obligated to — deserves
to use his God-given faculties as fully as possible — for love of his fellow
man, as an example for his children, and for the fullness of his own life.

 

The square peg in a round hole is a widespread and age-old affliction of
society, and I admit there are usually sound reasons that keep men out of
occupations better suited to them. However, some of these men should
be and almost as many could be the priests our Orthodox Church needs. With
enough interest, ambition, and courage most of them could find the means to set
aside now seemingly insurmountable obstacles.  A special few might need and
deserve some unusual extra assistance from others.

 

I doubt that any occupation is not a mixture of advantages amid disadvantages —
of pros and cons. However, even aspects of the priesthood that might appear
unattractive on the surface are really ones that can provide a man some of his
greatest satisfaction. Also, any man who aspires to the priesthood must be
realistic about these so-called “cons,” admit their existence, see in them vital
duty and intriguing challenge, and even be eager to deal with them, confident of
the fine rewards they offer.

 

A pastor’s becoming quite intimately involved with the sorrow, suffering,
depression, and difficult personal problems of others is an inescapable part of
his work — something usually not too tasteful to those not genuinely suited for
the priesthood. At one time or another almost all (if not all) of his
congregation will go through periods of considerable emotional stress, and in
most instances he will share their lot to the degree necessary for him to
furnish the comfort, counsel, and support it is his duty and desire to provide.
He must be able and willing to lay aside his own cares, become one with them in
their troubles, yet almost miraculously remain objective enough to provide the
wisdom and strength they need.

 

This is truly a noble duty, and having put forth sincere effort to do it well,
the satisfaction would have to be profound and lasting. It also follows that
such special duties as these require something special of the men discharging
them. Yet no man who is suited otherwise should disqualify himself because he
fears he might not be capable of enough sympathetic feeling and thus not be able
to involve himself enough emotionally to be effective and fully accepted as a
comforter, protector, counselor, peacemaker, or whatever is needed. At the other
extreme, a man should not consider himself unsuited to such duties on the basis
of believing himself to be too sensitive, too easily moved, or too
demonstrative.  I don’t believe either of these extremes in themselves
automatically disqualify men who for every other reason should be priests. It is
impossible for me to visualize a divinely gifted and called man being too
sensitive or too much the opposite; too objective or not able to be objective
enough. Rather, I am certain there are places in the ministry for many very
different types of men, even including these extremes.

 

What then is the source of the “something special” that is so necessary? Again I
fall back on my faith — faith in the sacraments here. I have faith that special
grace is added through Ordination and that a part of this additional grace is
that “something special” needed — an extra measure of wisdom and strength
mysteriously provided at those times when a priest must have them to be the Good
Shepherd his calling demands him to be.

 

Another “con” could be attributed to certain persons that probably are to be
found in every parish and the problems they create. These are the well-meaning
but too helpful and misguided, the non-reasoning critics, the reactionaries, the
lazy, etc. There are times when they menace a parish’s unity and progress to
some degree and can cause the waste of a considerable amount of time much better
spent in other ways. Here is challenge — to combine humility, tact, and
resourcefulness and then use them with the patience yet firmness of a wise and
loving father. The problems here are actually petty more often than not but
seldom seem so to the people involved. By the nature of the trouble they cause
there is a good indication they need the Church more than most people, so a most
rewarding sense of accomplishment certainly would come out of dealing
effectively with the problems they create.

 

No doubt most clergymen would like to be free of those details of parish
management that could and should be attended to by laymen.  Like me, probably
most prefer to be only a pastor in the strictest sense (certainly this is a
full-time job) and not have to be too concerned with any “non-priestly” details
except as a casual overseer and occasional advisor. However, I am realistic
enough to face the fact that for some years to come most pastors must expect to
be combination business executives, chief fund-raisers, treasurers, bookkeepers,
stenographers, publicity men, mail boys, assistant janitors and gardeners,
part-time repairman, etc.

 

For quite awhile this was another “con” as far as I was concerned.  However,
once again faith reassured me and provided me a different viewpoint. This new,
broader perspective showed this matter like all the others to be unattractive
only on the surface, and that the satisfaction of doing what must be done would
be enough to compensate for the extra time and effort. This faith even provides
confidence that again mysteriously I would be provided a surprisingly keen
interest in and the energy to do (within the limits of my skills) whatever had
to be done for the good of the parish.

 

Probably all of us at times have found or remembered  verses from Holy Scripture
that are particularly related to some special problem or event in our lives.
Sometimes passages that warn, comfort, inspire, or command make the startling
impression that they are addressed to us in an especially personal way. Any
qualified man who in any way senses as personal such words of Our Lord as “You
have not chosen me.  I have chosen you,” should give long, serious, constructive
thought to becoming a priest. Pious, intelligent, industrious men who find a
personal nature in the command “Follow me and I will make you fishers of men,”
should make a great effort to leave their nets (hammers and saws, drawing
boards, stethoscopes, law books, students, plows, etc.) and prepare for the
Orthodox ministry. Such men who are especially moved by the plea are especially
moved by the plea “Feed My Sheep” should become the priests our Church needs so
urgently.

 

Young men aspire to be physicians, teachers, counselors, social workers, and
business managers. Instead of taking all of their training at a college or
university, why not take the latter part of it at a theological seminary and
become a bit of all these instead of just one? Many different ambitions can be
redirected and guided toward being even more fully satisfied by a career in the
ministry. The welfare and future of the Orthodox Church here in America and
Canada depends on more young men awakening to the incomparable satisfaction to
be found in a priestly career and then redirecting their ambitions accordingly.
I pray for this, including the petition that some older, career-settled men also
will respond to the call of duty and find the desire and means to change their
occupations to that of priests.

 

I have long since found the desire but not yet the means. This is
disheartening, but my rather lengthy struggles to make priesthood training
possible has made me realize that there is much more involved than desire,
qualifications, and loyalty, even when these are combined with strong pious and
humanitarian motives. This is a calling to be approached with both courage and
fear —the courage to undertake that which is fearful, great and sacred
responsibility — something a few of each generation must do. Equally important,
I think there must be an uncommon need — a need to give in an uncommon way.

 

Perhaps my being unable to solve the problems that stand between me and seminary
training only proves that after all I am not really qualified for such fearful
responsibility or have no uncommon need. I beg of all men in similar
circumstances not to be hasty in coming to a like conclusion and then abandon
all hope and effort. I find it more comforting and cheering not to admit defeat
and being unsuited while continuing to trust that providence will intervene
before I am too old and further bless me with added wisdom and courage, a
different means to my goal, the special help of others, or whatever else might
be necessary to make this greatest of dreams a reality.

 

At one time, whenever pondering the sacred nature of the responsibilities, the
physical, mental, and emotional demands, and the time and energy required to
prepare for the priesthood, I often prayed as Our Lord did — “that this
cup pass from me.” Besides wishing for many other reasons that I were a priest,
a haunting sense of guilt that somehow I’m neglecting a great duty brings this
prayer to mind only when occasional doubts about my worthiness arise. “That this
cup pass from me is not what I really want. I don’t want to be like the servant
in the parable of the talents who buried what his master had entrusted to him.
Instead, like all of us, I want to earn that greatest of tributes — “Well done,
thou good and faithful servant.” How certainly a man (and his wife and children
too) would earn this tribute by serving God well through the ministry!

 

The men who answer the urgent plea of our Church will be fortunate and happy
that they did. So will their families. They will be able to “Rejoice and be
exceedingly glad” more fully and lastingly because of choosing the most
charitable and richest of all earthly lives. Surely, too, they could rightfully
expect greater eternal blessedness and joy for there would be special meaning
for them in God’s promise “great shall be your reward in heaven.”

 

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Why In The World Would An Episcopalian Become Orthodox?

Word Magazine  May
1993  Page 7-9

 

 

WHY
IN THE WORLD WOULD 

 

AN
EPISCOPALIAN BECOME 

 

ORTHODOX?

 

 by
Father Patrick McCauley

 

 

When I
first became an Episcopalian years ago, a friend facetiously told me that I had
joined the best church that money could buy.” 
In fact, another wag observed that the Episcopal Church is the Cadillac
of American Christianity’’ and the ‘‘Chevis Regal of
Protestantism.’’

 

These
attempts at humor, based on social and intellectual snobbery, have grown a bit
stale in the ensuing years, as the stately and venerable American version of the
Church of England has experienced wide-spread decline in numbers, theological
conviction, and social and political influence. 
The church that once was called “the Republican Party at prayer” has
now become little more than a coalition of special interests and would probably
be more accurately termed the “Democratic Convention in 1988 at prayer.”

 

With
bishops who declare the Bible to be little more than the prejudices of a group
of  misogynist,  homophobic
males, the Apostle Paul to have been nothing but a frustrated homosexual, and
the Resurrection of Jesus Christ to be nothing but the rattling of old bones, it
is little wonder that the Episcopal Church in the United States has lost over a
million members since 1970. As if these “profound theological insights” were
not enough, the American branch of Anglicanism now has liturgies for the marriage
of two persons of the same gender and refuses to expect clergy to live morally
pure lives.

 

This sad
state of affairs has prompted some Episcopalians to seek a safe harbor outside
the Anglican Communion in which to live out their faith. Not surprisingly, some
have elected to leave the denomination for other more conservative, Protestant
groups. Still others have ‘‘swam the Tiber’’ for membership in the Roman
Catholic Church. A few others have formed “independent Episcopal”
congregations, and yet more have formed new ‘‘Anglican Churches’’ that
are in communion with neither Canterbury or the Episcopal Church in the U.S.A.
Sadly, some have simply dropped their practice of the faith altogether.

 

Fortunately,
however, an increasing number of Episcopalians have looked to the historic
Church of Christ known as the Eastern Orthodox Church as a place of refuge. In
fact, many Episcopalians, especially those who come out of Anglo-Catholic
backgrounds, were taught that the church catholic exists in three historic
branches: Roman Catholicism, Anglicanism, and Eastern Orthodoxy.

 

Sharing a
Common Faith

 

Old
fashioned, high-church Episcopalians have long held a close affinity with
Eastern Orthodoxy. In fact, the late Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsay,
said as long ago as the sixties that Anglicans should be working toward union
with Orthodoxy because of the commonality of faith. Other Anglicans have said
that historic Anglicanism is simply a Western (meaning Western European)
expression of Orthodoxy.

 

Several
recent converts in my own parish have observed that Orthodoxy in no way is a
denial of what they have always believed as Catholics in the Anglican Church.
Rather, say these good folk, Orthodoxy is simply a fuller, richer expression of
the ancient faith of Jesus Christ.  The
same creeds, the same Scriptures, the same seven Sacraments, and the same understanding
of the apostolic ministry of Deacons, Priests, and Bishops are all valued and
affirmed as the foundations of the catholic faith in Orthodoxy as in the
traditional Episcopal Church of days gone by.

 

Forms of
Worship

 

Even more
fortuitous for Episcopalians who come out of the high church tradition are the
liturgical expressions found in Orthodoxy. While the great majority of Orthodox
Christians worship using the Eastern or Byzantine Rite, a growing percentage of
Orthodox Christians worship according to the Western Rite.

 

The
Western Rite is an approved adaptation of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. 
At least two Orthodox jurisdictions, the Romanians and the Antiochians,
have Western-Rite congregations in North America. The latter, in fact, has a
growing Western-Rite Vicariate, which has provided a safe haven for traditional
Episcopalians. Western-Rite congregations in the Antiochian Orthodox Christian
Archdiocese of North America exists in California, Illinois, Texas, Florida,
Nebraska, Colorado, Michigan and other states. 
As each year passes,  more
and more congregations of former Episcopalians are forming under the banner of
the Western-Rite Vicariate.

 

A Church
that Affirms the Gospel and is Willing to say “No”

 

The
Orthodox Church of God continues to proclaim the refreshing Good News that God
through His Incarnate Son Jesus Christ is reconciling sinful men and women to
Himself (II Corinthians 7).  In so
doing, she acknowledges that the new humanity created through Christ’s death
and Resurrection is the Bride of Christ or the Church. And, it is in the Church
that Christians are to work out their salvation by regularity of worship, living
lives of moral rectitude, sharing the Christian Gospel with nonbelievers,
building a Christian community, and extending a hand of help in the Name of
Christ to those in need.

 

All the
while, Orthodox Christians, unlike their counterparts in the Episcopal Church as
it now exists in many places in the United States, have the assurance of a
leadership of Bishops and Priests who acknowledge the centrality of Holy
Scripture, the divinely-given Tradition of the Church of the Apostles, and the
need of clearly defined teaching and instruction for the faithful.

 

Episcopalians, 
who have been received into the Orthodox Church, no longer have to wonder
what their Church believes or dread to see the morning newspaper to learn of the
latest scandal that, if not officially taught, is at least sanctioned by the
leadership of the national church’s Bishops.

 

Orthodox
Bishops, while not claiming for themselves individual infallibility, do indeed
act in presenting the Christian message in clear, 
understanding terms. Moreover,  Orthodox
clergy, with the support of the entire Orthodox Episcopate from the office of
the Ecumenical Patriarch through the Patriarchates of each jurisdiction to local
hierarchs, stand as one united witness to the faith of Jesus Christ.

 

In spite
of the anti-authoritarian age in which we all live, Orthodox Bishops, in other
words, can and do say “no” when necessary, to their people. This does not
mean that Orthodox Bishops are capricious, arbitrary, or not  pastoral. It does mean, on the other hand, that Orthodox
hierarchs love those in their pastoral care enough, as does any good parent, to
say “no” when a course of action, a lifestyle, or a pernicious belief would
be harmful to the faithful.

 

As one of
my own parishioners, an attorney  with
three sons, said, “I want my boys to have been reared in a church that has
some standards and gives them direction and guidance by which to live their
lives.  They can’t get that in the
Episcopal Church as it now exists.”

 

A Final
Word

 

Sociologist
Robert N. Bellah and several colleagues, in Habits of the Heart,   have
noted that contemporary American culture places such an enormous value on
individual freedom that many Americans find commitment to home, family, the
nation or even the church to be marginal at best. In fact, Bellah, who is an
Episcopal layman, says that most of us do a “cost-benefits analysis” of
nearly every situation we confront . So, if a marriage, citizenship, a
relationship with employees or employers or friends, or whatever costs more in
terms of effort, time, and commitment than it produces, then many of us feel
free to terminate the relationship.

 

This sort
of individualism-gone-to-seed is not only destructive on an individual basis but 
for the nation as well. Unlimited human freedom, without parameters, is
lethal.   As a nation, we are
not burying people, in fact, who declared that what they did in their bedrooms
in the 1960s  and 1970s was nobody
else’s business. Tragic as the result of that mindset is, Christian people
need to look anew at the concept of freedom in Christ.

 

For
Christians, whose bodies and lives were purchased with the body and life of
Jesus Christ, Christian freedom has limits and offers direction, guidance and
purpose to life.  Orthodox
Christianity offers reconciliation between God and man, between human fellow
beings, and direction and purpose for living beyond the thrill of the movement,
the vacuous chimera of materialism, hedonism, narcissism and individualism. 
One may indeed  be a thinking
woman or man and still be a faithful catholic Christian within the ancient
Church of Jesus Christ known as Eastern Orthodoxy.

 

 

 

Father
Patrick McCauley is pastor of the Orthodox Church of the Apostles in Ft. Worth,
Texas.

 

 

 

Why They Leave The Church

 

Word Magazine  August 1958  Page 7

 

WHY
THEY LEAVE THE CHURCH

 

 

 

By Archimandrite Basil Kazan

St. Elias Church, Toledo, Ohio

 

 

 

During my visits to my parishioners these past weeks, I met many people whose
faces I have never seen in Church since my arrival in Toledo. I asked them why
they do not come to Church.

 

Some of them told me they work on Sunday. Others explained the reason saying
that the wife is of a different faith, and each one goes his own way. And others
confessed that they are lazy. These are the reasons given for not attending
church.

 

Now, let us consider these reasons and see if we can find a solution which would
enable these people to participate in the Divine Liturgy.

 

1.  From those who work on Sunday, I do not accept any excuse. For, God
created man and gave him to work during six days, and to repose on the seventh
day, as our God Himself did in creating the whole world. On Sunday we have to
rest bodily and spiritually and this may be done only by attending the Divine
Liturgy one hour every week. The week consists of one hundred sixty-eight hours.
Would we not be able to sacrifice one hour, only one hour, to listen to
the Liturgy on the day which God fixed for this purpose?

 

It is reasonable to assume that a man who is employed can not take time off
without the consent of his employer. So, therefore, his excuse is a legitimate
one. But he who has his own business and he that stays home to work around the
house has no excuse whatsoever.

 

I explained my viewpoint and proved to these people that they were wrong to work
on Sunday, the day of God. And they promised me that they would try to come to
church.

 

2. As for the mixed marriage, I noticed in some families a miserable
spiritual situation. On Sunday the wife takes her children and goes to the
church of her faith, because she has been raised in the bosom of her church
while the husband goes to his Orthodox Church. Now I am going to speak frankly
about the question, especially to the Roman Catholic wife. We Orthodox do not
find any substantial difference between Orthodoxy and Catholicism for we believe
in the same God and recognize the same sacraments. Then why does she not follow
her Orthodox husband and prove that she has the same faith as him?

       

What do the children think of religion, when they see each one of their parents
go in an opposite way?

 

One of my parishioners told me, that, one day, his son asked him this question:
“Can you tell me, Daddy, why you and Mommy do not go to one church together?” 
“Does each one of you believe in a different God and a different religion?” “In
which God do we, my brothers and I, believe since our parents each go in a
different way?”

 

This parishioner added: “Believe me, Father Kazan, my son put me in a difficult
position so that I felt ashamed and unable to answer him.”

 

Does the wife believe that only her church has the power to lead its believers
straight to heaven? If she believes so, then why did she accept to unite herself
to an Orthodox husband?

 

It is a shame to meet such a fanatic spirit in the twentieth century, and
especially in America, the country of liberty, sciences, and the tower of
civilization.

 

With fervent heart we pray that the future generations of Orthodox youth will be
able to meet this challenge of mixed marriage and will stand staunchly in their
belief in the true Orthodox faith.

 

Here is the teaching of our Church upon this subject:

 

Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord, for the
husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the Church: and
he is the Saviour of the body. Therefore as the church is subject unto
Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in everything.” (St. Paul to
the Ephesians)

 

3. As for those who confessed that they are lazy, they need only a little
courage to think attentively and carefully in their life. God fixed to each one
of us a certain time to live upon this earth. He taught us how to spend our life
according to His will. He wants us to be with a pure heart and a clear soul.
For, in running constantly after the material things we lose our souls and
consequently our lives in this temporary life and in the future one.

 

In attending the Sunday Liturgy we feel that we approach heaven and
everlasting happiness.

 

Fathers, I want you every Sunday to hold your sons hand and to bring them to the
Divine Liturgy. Mothers, I want you also to hold your daughters’ hand and to
bring them for the same purpose. I want every one of you men and women of the
parish to bring your Orthodox neighbors to church. I will not accept any
excuse. I want the Church to be full of the parishioners and then we will be
able to be called the faithful Orthodox people, and the grace of God will
be upon us.

 

 

 

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Why We Teach In The Church

Word Magazine  January 1986 
Page 17

 

  

 

WHY WE TEACH IN THE CHURCH

 

 

by
Father Peter G. Rizos

 

 

 

The
following is the second of four articles. Father Rizos is an Adjunct
Instructor of Religious Education at Holy Cross Greek Orthodox Theological
School.

 

 

 

Orthodox
Christian education is the attempt by committed and trained Church members to
awaken others to God’s presence and claim so that teacher and students
together may be transformed into Christ-likeness. This definition of Orthodox
Christian education lies at the heart of everything that will be discussed in
the three articles to follow.

 

Three
main points are taken up in this second article: (1) Why do we teach? (2) What
is the aim of our teaching? (3) What is the meaning of our teaching in the
Church?

 

Why Do
We Teach?

 

The
foremost reason why we teach in the Church is that Jesus Christ, “the leader
and perfecter of our faith” (Hebrews 12:2), is the Teacher of us all. St. John
writes in his First General Letter that “he who says he abides in Him (i.e.
Jesus) ought to walk in the same way in which He walked” (I John 2:6). This
applies not only to keeping the Lord’s commandments, but also teaching them to
others.

 

One of
the names by which the Lord is known and commonly addressed in the Gospels is
“Teacher”. It seems that Jesus never lost the opportunity to teach others
the Word.

 

Seldom
have a teacher and his teachings been as closely connected as in the Person of
Jesus Christ. In His teachings to the disciples, Jesus imparted to them Himself
— His own life that He had in oneness with God: “Take ye, eat: This is My
Body . . . Drink of it ye all: This is My Blood . . . “ 
This means that by His words and actions the Lord offers His whole
Self to us in the communication of the faith. He wants to renew our oneness with
Him not only through the teaching of His Word, but also through His living
presence within us. The Lord gives Himself to us as He teaches.

 

People
who love one another naturally want to be with and to learn more about the one
they love. When we accept Jesus Christ as our personal Savior, He wants to live
in us and we in Him (John 15:4-11). By teaching the faith we show a willingness
to grow with others in the knowledge of the Lord and in the sense of His
presence. We do this because we love Him, knowing that He has loved us first.

 

What we
have said so far seems to suggest that Christian education is quite different
from other kinds of teaching and learning. Christian education is unique because
the content of our faith conveys God’s Self-revelation in Christ (John 6:68;
17:8; Acts 5:20; I Peter 1:25). When we speak of divine revelation, we do not
mean a series of ideas or concepts placed alongside others to make neat
theological formulas. Revelation means that God wants to make Himself known to
man in a dynamic relationship of faith and loving obedience.

 

When we
come to understand that the Lord wants to reveal Himself through our teaching,
we sense the urgency of His call to continue and to expand upon His work in our
time. The Great Commission given to the disciples before the Lord’s Ascension
resounds in our hearts with the power of the Risen Lord: “Go. . . and make
disciples of all nations . . . teaching them to observe all that I have
commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age” (Matthew
28:19, 20).

 

What
Is the Aim or Goal of Our Teaching?

 

Said
briefly, the aim of the Church School is to assist in the saving mission of the
Church by teaching the faith to believers. It is too easily forgotten, however,
that the Lord’s commission to teach was directed to all the members of
the Church (Matthew 28:19-20; Mark 16:15-16; Luke 24:47-48; Acts 1:8). Even
though only certain members take on specific teaching assignments, the
responsibility for teaching rests upon the whole Church. A parish that
neglects the teaching function loses something that is indispensable to its
nature as a church.

 

In very
broad terms, our Church School teaching should mainly be concerned with the
growth of eternal life within the students, with their development in the
likeness of God who gives this life. The religious knowledge we impart to our
pupils should contribute to their progressive transformation toward the
character, values, motives, attitudes, and understandings of God as revealed in
Christ (see Galatians 2:20). Our goal is growth in Christ-likeness through faith
development (II Corinthians 3:18). The purpose of the Church School then should
be to communicate and to nurture faith-as-life.

 

What
Does It Mean That We Teach in the Church?

 

We all
tend to think of Church School as a group of teachers, administrators, and
students joined together by the organizational structure of classes, graded
curricular materials, and role expectations. Taken up by our particular tasks on
Sunday mornings, we lose sight of the sacramental reality of Christ’s body
which unites us with the Lord and through Him with one another. The Body of
Christ was formed that we might minister in love to one another’s growth in
Christ (Ephesians 4:12-13). We grow in Christ’s life, individually and
corporately, precisely as we serve one another and thus build up the Church (see
I Thes­salonians 5:11; Ephesians 4:12, 16, 19, 29; I Corinthians 14:4, 5, 12,
17). Each member of the Church is equipped by God to make this ministry to
others possible.

 

As Church
School teachers we need to get back the outlook of the early Church regarding
the gifts or charismata of the Holy Spirit, of which teaching is one. St.
Paul says very clearly that, “To each (i.e., member of the Church) is given
the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good” (I Corinthians 12:7). And
in his letter to the Ephesians, the Apostle Paul writes, “Grace was given to
each of us according to the measure of Christ’s gift” (4:7). St. Paul puts
teachers high up in the list of workers whom God has chosen to labor in the
Church (see I Corinthians 12:27-31; Romans 12:6-8; Ephesians 4:11-12).

 

Orthodox
Christian education is guided growth in divine life. The teaching ministry is at
heart a relationship of love between the teacher and his students. This means
that in the design and teaching of curricular materials we must provide
guidelines for the communication of the faith in a person-to-person setting. We
have been taken up too long with the content of our lessons, with how much
information we want to transmit to our students, while ignoring the actual
dynamics of the teaching-learning process in the classroom.

 

Church
School is no substitute for the Divine Liturgy, just as informed worship “in
Spirit and truth” (John 4:24) means that careful religious instruction is
indispensable. We need to prepare our children to “pray with the spirit and
... pray with the mind also,” to “sing with the spirit and sing with the
mind also” (I Corinthians 14:15). Corporate worship, no less than religious
instruction, need to be understood as points in the rhythm of withdrawal from
the world for the purpose of ministry to the world. We need to help our students
and teachers alike to grow in the understanding of the Divine Liturgy as a
movement of God’s people to His Kingdom from which we bear the Light of Christ
back into the world.

 

 

 

 

What Does It Mean To Be A Good Christian?

Word Magazine  October
1964  Page 8-9 

 

 

WHAT
DOES IT MEAN TO

BE

A
GOOD CHRISTIAN?

By Father Theodore Ziton, Wichita, Kansas

 

Christ
came into the world to free men from their sins and from the power of evil. But
He also freed them from a lot of legalistic nonsense to which they had been
subjected by the “Traditions of Men”.

 

Take the
Sabbath law, for instance. The law of God was simple:

Abstain
from work on the Sabbath and don’t force anybody else to do work. But the
Scribes and Pharisees spent years arguing over the most trivial points, binding
men with a burden of minute regulations. The great schools of the Rabbis argued
over such important matters as whether an egg could be eaten that had been laid
on the Sabbath. They perverted the idea of the Sabbath rest to forbid men to
perform even an act of necessary charity for someone else. Christ had to remind
them sharply: “The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath.”
(Mark 2:27)

 

Christ
insisted on the spirit of the law that gives life, rather than the letter that
kills. Yet some have apparently missed the whole point of Christ’s message.
They look to the Bible merely as a series of cold rules. . . . 
to be rigorously applied in the sense that seems right to them. They
insist that any attempt to soften their literalness is an evasion, “explaining
away God’s law.”

 

Thus some
men are firmly convinced that they have no immortal souls . . . God alone has
immortality (I Tim. 6: 16) and not all the words in the world will convince them
that while God is immortal in His own right, He has made man’s soul after His
own image in this respect.

 

If we
want to, we can make our whole lives a rigid set of meaningless rules . . .
searching out various texts of Scripture and applying the words literally and
senselessly. We can even go to the ultimate in nonsense and ban from our speech
any reference to a man as “good.” We can not say, “Andrew Stevens is a
good man,” for our Lord very plainly tells us that “No one is good but God
alone.” (Luke 18:19).

 

In the
Gospels Christ’s words many times come as a climax to a denunciation of the
Scribes and Pharisees. He condemns the abuse not the proper use of anything. You
can’t please everybody. Sometimes you can’t please anybody. If we had to
respect every interpretation that some people fancy they can put on the
Scripture, it would be difficult to say how we might ever refer to anything and
try to explain away anything.

 

Common
sense is very necessary in our ordinary and particular everyday affairs. Without
the use of common sense everything would soon be in a most sorry state of
disorder. As a proof of this, we need only to consider the trouble we should
bring upon ourselves if we were so foolish to overdo anything of any essence of
which we ourselves are not capable of fully, completely and sincerely handling .
. . such as spending our money without regard to our income.

 

There are
many other matters in which the average man uses common sense. None of us, for
instance, really like paying income tax. Nevertheless, we do eventually pay
these dues. Our common sense tells us that it would merely bring trouble to
ourselves and our families if we tried to evade paying them. So we dip our hands
into our pockets, however reluctantly, because we know that it is common sense
to do so.

 

If we
have to earn our living, it is the same with our work and our dealings with our
employer. In all probability we find much that is irksome in our work. Often we
would much rather be spending our time in the garden, or taking slices out of
the turf on the nearest golf links. But don’t “kick over the traces” when
we feel like this. We know very well that it would not be common sense to do so.

 

We know
that we can’t afford to neglect our worldly duties and so we don’t shirk our
job or disregard our  employer’s
instructions. We know our livelihood, and the comfort and well-being of our
family, depend to a very large extent on the way we perform our duty to our
employer. We know that he has just claims on our time and energy in return for
the wages we receive every week.

 

It is
common sense, therefore, to weigh the possible consequences of any action our
mind proposes to us before that action is taken, and from the few examples
given, we know that common sense is a very valuable asset in our daily lives and
that we make continual use of it. The fact is that we realize that our material
well-being is so closely lined with our duty that we can’t enjoy the one
without doing the other—and we act accordingly.

 

We have
seen that we do use common sense with regard to material things—the affairs of
the body—and if we are wise, we shall also use common sense with regard to the
things concerning that part of us which never dies—the soul.

 

We give
the State and our employer their just dues for two reasons—from a sense of
duty, because we know that they have just claims on us—and because we realize
our dependence upon them. But if we stop to consider the matter we shall realize
that our Creator has even greater  claims
upon us and that we are much more dependent upon God than we are upon our
employers or the State. It is obviously common sense, therefore, to give God His
just dues also.

 

To God we
owe everything that we have—even life itself—and but for His supporting hand
we could not exist for one second. Everything owes its existence to God, and but
for Him we could neither live nor have anything.

 

God chose
us out before the foundation of the world to be His children. He chose us
because He loves us and He created the world and everything that is in it for
our use and pleasure. He has given us all these things so that, through them, we
might know Him, love Him with all our hearts and serve Him as His children in
this world, and so be happy with Him forever in the world to come.

 

God’s
love for us is like the love of a mother for her children. It asks nothing in
return but love—and willing obedience as a sign of that love. It is for this
reason that He has given us our free will. He doesn’t want us to be like alarm
clocks which give us their service because they must. He wants us to serve Him
because we love him, and that is why He never presses His claims upon us.

 

God owns
us entirely and He has a much greater claim to our service than any employer can
possibly have. Yet He does not insist upon His right or treat us as His
servants. God treats us always as His children and He never forces our love and
obedience. He is always ready to listen to us and sympathize with us, and He
never expects MORE FROM US THAN WE CAN DO. He does not even demand results. He
is satisfied as long as He sees that we are REALLY TRYING TO PLEASE HIM IN ALL
SINCERITY.

 

Where
will we find an employer who will treat us with such great indulgence as this
and never expect from us more than we can give? And yet many, whose
common sense tells them that they should give their employer an unstinted and
loyal service, refuse that service to God Who is so much more indulgent to them,
Who has given them such wonderful gifts, and Who loves them as His children!
This is as unjust as it is foolish.

 

God is
our greatest benefactor, and to refuse the love and service He wants from us is
to show the greatest ingratitude and a complete lack of common sense. If it is
foolish and unjust to neglect our duty to our employer, how much more foolish
and unjust it is to neglect our duty to God! But for God we should not have
anything at all—not even life.

 

The
Church has always taught that no man is condemned.. . EXCEPT THROUGH HIS OWN
FAULT. . . . that no one is held responsible by God for a duty that he can not
fulfill because of inability to do so or of ignorance which is no fault of his
own. As long as you sincerely love God and follow your conscience, and live and
die with the grace of Christ in your heart, you will save your soul, regardless.

 

It is
conscience as well as common sense which must be our supreme guide in all
things: so that when conscience becomes unsettled, when our convictions are
disturbed, when we are in doubt about how to act or what to believe—then and
only then are we bound before God to search again for that former peace of mind,
to restore that spiritual tranquility we once enjoyed or are unable to enjoy. We
must settle our conscience, regain clear convictions, resolve all doubts, and
clear up all questions of belief, so that we may ride once more through life
with common sense and right reason at the wheel. Thus, every one, then who is
true to himself can find salvation through the Church. And, in view of that, we
must pray and seek, ask and attempt to be “GOOD NEIGHBORS” not only in
heaven . . . but here on earth . . . first.

 

Tolerance
becomes for all mankind the noblest of virtues. 
No human being can with certainty say what is truth. And as the extreme
example of tolerance, we are reminded of Voltaire’s epigram... “I will fight
your opinions with my life, but I will fight to the death for your right to hold
them.”

 

Of all
the lovely words coined as currency for the English language and later debased
and abused until its meaning has become bankrupt, the most tragic of all is
tolerance.

 

When we
begin to really analyze tolerance, we begin to wonder. . . is it anything other
than a sign of mental confusion and personal cowardice? Is it something we ought
to cultivate or . . . root out of our minds?

 

The
virtue which we should all love and practice from our hearts is a deep tolerance
for all the sons and daughters of God. But unrestricted tolerance is quite
another thing. When there is a question of truth versus error, we cannot even
pretend to be tolerant. In the heart of each of us there must be an abounding
gentleness and love for our fellow man. We can never for a moment allow
ourselves to be tempted by the easy way of force towards anything. Christ is not
complimented nor is He pleased when we follow our own religious ideas instead of
those taught by His Church in regards to where the bounds of our love must begin
and end for the neighbor must be loved as we love ourselves.

 

But
tolerance of untruth is not expected or possible. We cannot be asked to believe
that two and two make seven. We cannot be asked to admit the possibility
of man’s being either an animal, or a soul without a body, or an accident in a
purposeless universe. We cannot be tolerant when people say that Christ was so
poor an organizer that the one Church He thought He was building turned out to
be a discordant babel of a thousand churches. We cannot be acquiescent when
Mohammed and Confucius and Buddha and the Saviour of the world are lumped
together in one antique shop of religious dust and cobwebs.

 

Truth is
truth. One cannot be tolerant of error. Right is right. One cannot hear
willingly the clamors and claims of evil. Christ and His truths of the Church,
the Ecumenical Councils, Tradition, and the Holy Scriptures are the Light of the
world. One cannot be asked to walk in darkness…where he knows by conviction
and common sense what is better and what is best.

 

We can be
gentle and kind and loving and merciful to all, but we cannot, where God’s
truths and man’s rights and dignities are concerned, be asked to be
intolerant. Such tolerance is treason to both God and Man. We can have not part
of it.

 

To
believe in God is as natural as to think. The Sacred Scriptures tell us that
only the fool says, “There is no God.” And Voltaire once remarked truly that
if there were no God, the human heart would have to invent one.  

 

The
important question is not, ‘‘Do you believe in God?” Instinctively we do.
But “How sincerely do we believe in God?” “How does believing affect
living?” There are the challenging questions of our time! And their answer
contains the key to earth’s happiness and heaven’s.  Some men say “I
believe in God” as casually as they might say, “How do you do,” or
“Lovely weather we’re having.” They mean most certainly that they believe
in God, but they imply just as certainly that they intend to do precious little
about it.

 

Faith
like beauty, though real, is sometimes only skin deep. And so that which should
make all the difference in the world becomes inconsequential. Because their
belief in God is static, or at best just smoldering, these men miss the joys,
the flaming greatness, the adventure which God intends them to have in the
earnest practice of true religion. And true religion is never dismal or shabby;
rather, it is of all things the most lightsome, dignified, and climactic.

 

There are
some people in the world who would, if they had the power, hang the heavens with
crepe: throw a shroud over the beautiful and life-giving bosom of the planet;
pick the bright stars out of the sky; veil the sun with clouds; pluck the silver
moon from her place in the heavens; close all gardens and fields and trample
upon all the flowers with which they are bedecked and doom the world to an
atmosphere of gloom. Such persons entirely miss the spirit of being a good
Orthodox Christian.

 

Some
people have the facility for touching the wrong key; from the finest instrument
they extract only discord. They sound the note of pessimism everywhere. All
their songs are in the minor key. They look down instead of up; their shadow
predominates their lives. There is nothing bright, cheerful about them. Their
outlook is always gloomy; times are always bad for them. Everything in their
lives seems to be contracting and nothing growing or expanding in their lives.

 

With
others it is just the reverse. They cast no shadows. They radiate sunshine.
Every bud they touch opens its petals and flings out its fragrance and beauty.
They never approach you but to cheer; they never speak to you but to inspire.
They see the best in people and say pleasant and helpful things about them.

 

The world
is very much like a looking glass; laugh at it, and it laughs back; frown at it,
and it will also frown. We ourselves hold the key to life’s happiness as good
Christians. This happiness is within our reach, within our souls, and it rests
with us either to ignore or to enjoy it.

 

Saint
Augustine said, “If any man wishes for happiness, let him raise himself above
the things perishable, let him seek that which will always last, and which
reverses of fortune will never take from him, God alone possesses this
character, and consequently, in God alone is true happiness to be found.”

 

God is
supreme Good. There is a tendency to seek that which seems good to us—glory,
fortune, pleasure, power, these are the goals of our dreams, and poor humanity
is given over to the unending chase after happiness, and after being a good
Christian, but what a deceitful mirage it is!

 

You seek
after the good, but where can it be found if not in God, the Sovereign Good, the
Ultimate End of all things? You say that you want glory, but what glory can
compare with that which heaven offers to you? You want treasures, but what
riches are equal to grace? You want love, but who offers you a tenderness like
that of God’s love? You wish to survive in the hearts and memory of mankind,
but what immortality is not vain beside the immortality of paradise? Gather up
all the glory and honors amid joys of the world, and tell me if the combined
happiness of earth can counterbalance the joy and happiness we can ever hope
to find in God!

 

 

What Orthodox Iconography Is

Word Magazine  September
1964  Page 5-6

  

 

 

WHAT
ORTHODOX

 ICONOGRAPHY
IS

 

by
Photios Kontoglu

 

 

The
religion of Christ is the revelation, by Him, of the truth. And this truth is
the knowledge of the true God and of the spiritual world. But the spiritual
world is not what men used to—and still do—call “spiritual.”

 

Christ
calls His religion “new wine” and “bread that cometh down from Heaven.”
The Apostle Paul says, “Therefore, if any man be in Christ, he is a new
creation. The old things have passed away: behold, all things have become
new.”

 

In a
religion like this, one that makes the believer into a “new man,” everything
is “new.” So, too, the art that gradually took form out of the spirit of
this religion, and which it invented to express its Mystery, is a “new” art,
one not like any other, just as the religion of Christ is not like any other, in
spite of what some may say who have eyes only for certain meaningless externals.

 

The
architecture of this religion, its music, its painting, its sacred poetry,
insofar as they make use of material media, nourish the souls of the faithful
with spirit. The works produced in these media are like steps that lead them
from earth up to heaven, from this earthly and temporary state to that which is
heavenly and eternal: This takes place so far as is possible with human nature.

 

For this
reason, the arts of the Church are anagogical, that is, they elevate
natural phenomena and submit them to “the beautiful transformation.” They
are also called “liturgical” arts, because through them man tastes the
essence of the liturgy by which God is worshipped and through which man becomes
like unto the Heavenly Hosts and perceives immortal life.

 

Ecclesiastical
liturgical painting, the painting of worship, took its form above all from
Byzantium, where it remained the mystical Ark of Christ’s religion and was
called

hagiographia
or sacred painting. As with the other arts of the Church, the purpose of hagiographia
is not to give pleasure to our carnal sense of sight, but to transform it
into a spiritual sense, so that in the visible things of this world we may see
what surpasses this world.

 

Hence
this art is not theatrically illusionistic. Illusionistic art came into being in
Italy during the so-called Renaissance, because this art was the expression of a
Christianity which, deformed by philosophy, had become a materialistic, worldly
form of knowledge, and of the Western Church, which had become a worldly system.
And just as theology followed along behind the philosophy of the ancients—so,
too, the painting which expressed this theology followed along behind the art of
the ancient idolators. The period is well named Renaissance, since, to tell the
truth, it was no more than a rebirth of the ancient carnal mode of thought that
had been the pagan world’s.

 

But just
as those theologians were wading around in the slimy swamp waters of philosophy,
and were in no position to taste and understand the clear fresh water of the
Gospel, “drawn up to life eternal,” so, too, the painters who brought about
the Renaissance were in no position to understand the mystical profundity of
Eastern liturgical iconography, the sacred art of Byzantium. And just as the
theologians thought that they could perfect Christ’s religion with philosophy,
since for them it seemed too simple, they being in no position to penetrate into
the depths of that divine simplicity: just so, the painters thought that they
were perfecting liturgical art, more simply called Byzantine, by making it
“more natural.”

 

So they
set to work, copying what was natural—faces, clothes, buildings, landscapes,
all as they appear naturally—making an iconography with the same rationalism
that the theologians wanted to make theology with. But the kind of theology you
can get out of rationalism is exactly the kind of religious iconography you can
get out of copying nature.

 

This is
why their works have no Mystery, nor any real spiritual character. You
understand that you have before you some men masquerading as saints—not real
saints. Look at the various pictures of the Mother of God. “Madonnas” who
pose hypocritically, and those in tears, weeping, which are even falser yet!
Corpses and idols for shallow men! Our people, who for centuries have received a
great and profound nurture from Christ’s religion, even though outwardly they
seem uneducated, call a woman who pretends to be respectable but who is really
not, a Frankopanayhia, a “Frankish Virgin,” thus making a clear
distinction between the “Frankish Virgin” and the true Virgin,
the Mother of Christ our God, the austere Odogitria, Her “more precious
than the Cherubim, and beyond compare more glorious than the Seraphim.’’ In
other words, in the simplest way possible they make a neat, sharp distinction
between the art of the world and the art belonging to worship.

 

Western
religious painters who wanted to depict the supernatural visions of religion
took as models certain natural phenomena—clouds, sunsets, the moon, the sun
with its beams. With these they tried to portray the heavenly glory and the
world of immortality, calling certain things ‘‘spiritual” which are merely
sentimental, emotional, not spiritual at all.

 

In vain,
however. Because the blessedness of the other life is not a continuation of the
emotional happiness of this world, neither does it have any relation to the
satisfaction the senses enjoy in this life. The Apostle Paul, talking about the
good things of the blessedness to come, says that they are such that “eye hath
not seen, and ear hath not heard, neither have entered into the heart of man.”

 

How,
then, can that world, which lies beyond everything a man can grasp with his
senses—how can that world be portrayed by an art that is “natural” and
that appeals to the senses? How can you paint “what surpasses nature and
surpasses sense”?

 

Certainly,
man will take elements from the perceptible world, “for the senses’ sake,”
but to be able to express “what surpasses sense” he must dematerialize these
elements, he must lift them to a higher plane, he must transmute them from what
is carnal into what is spiritual, just as faith transmutes man’s feelings,
making them, from carnal, into spiritual. “I saw,” says St. John of the
Ladder, “some men given over with passion to carnal love, and when they
received the Light and took the way of Christ, this fierce carnal passion was
changed inside them, with divine grace. into a great love for the Lord.”

 

Thus,
even the material elements which Byzantine iconography took from the world of
sense were supernaturally transmuted into spiritualities, and since they had
passed through the pure soul of a man who lived according to Christ, like gold
through a refiner’s fire, they express, as far as is possible for a man who
wears a material body, that which the Apostle Paul spoke of, “which eye hath
not seen, neither hath entered into the heart of man.”

 

The
beauty of liturgical art is not a carnal beauty, but a spiritual beauty. That is
why whoever judges this art by worldly standards says that the figures in
Byzantine sacred painting are ugly and repellent, while for one of the faithful
they possess the beauty of the spirit, which is called “the beautiful
transformation.”

 

The
Apostle Paul says. “We (who preach the Gospel and live according to Christ )
are ... a sweet savour of Christ unto them that are saved and unto them that
perish. Unto them that have within them the small of death (of flesh), we smell
of death; and unto them that have within them the smell of life, we smell of
life.”

 

And the
blessed and hallowed St. John of the Ladder says, “There was an ascetic who,
whenever he happened to see a beautiful person, whether man or woman, would glorify
the Creator of that person with all his heart, and from a mere glance his love
for God would spring afresh and he would pour out on his account a fountain of
tears. And one marveled, seeing this happen, that for this man what would cause
the soul of another to stink had become a reason for crowns and an ascent above
nature. Whoever perceives beauty in this fashion is already incorruptible, even
before the dead shall rise in the common Resurrection,”

 

 

 

“Be
ye not conformed to this world, but be ye transformed by the renewing of your
mind . . .“ (Rom. xii. 2)

 

Where Is God?

Word Magazine 
May 1968  Page 7-8 

 

WHERE
IS GOD?

 by
the Rev. Fr. George A. Aswad

 

You are
seated in a church pew. You are seated in the House of God. This morning you
made a decision to visit God.—Why?

 

When you
visit a relative or friend, you go for a purpose—usually with love—to see
and to talk to them. Sometimes you call or make an appointment so you are sure
they are home and prepared to greet you.

 

This is
God’s House. He is always here. The appointment is for every Sunday, same
time, same place. This would be a most opportune time to discuss the question,
“Why are you here?”; to speak to you about being on time for your visit with
God; about showing respect; participating in the conversation with God which is
the Divine Liturgy; partaking of the refreshments, that which refreshes the
soul, Holy Communion. But these subjects are for other sermons. This morning let
us talk about the question that is on the lips of the oppressed; those in fear;
the people that are in need; on the lips of all who view the world in all its
misery;  the question—”Where is
God?”

 

Father
Michael Shahin tells of his visit to a hospital in Syracuse to visit a
parishioner. After a conversation, he asks her, “Where is God?” Her answer
is, “God is in Heaven.” Father Michael turns to a little old lady in the
next bed and asks, “Where is God?” Her answer is, “God is here in my
heart.” Dearly beloved, I ask you, which lady had the greatest faith?

 

A
minister in Louisville, Kentucky. explained the presence of God to his
parishioners this way: “God is right here. I can reach out and shake hands
with God.”

 

There is
the story of a famous English surgeon. Lord Moynihan; who was invited to operate
before a group of distinguished doctors. After the operation, one doctor asked
him, “How can you work so calmly and well, undisturbed by the onlookers?”
The surgeon’s answer was, “When I operate, there are just three people in
the room: the patient, myself, and God.”

 

The true
Christian must feel the very presence of God and the Lord. He must say, “God
is here in my heart!” It is when we lose sight of God that we become atheists,
alcoholics, adulterers, sinners, misguided and hypocritical followers of God—a
God we have lost in the dense fog of our spiritual blindness.

 

I saw a
war story on TV the other night—an exciting drama: soldiers shooting guns;
planes diving, spitting their pellets of death; trucks, tanks, and raging fires;
people dying. Why, they were even killing women and defenseless children! It was
a great “production,” except that—it was real, and those lying in the
streets were really dead! The looks of fear on the faces of the people were
real. I was watching a news report on the war in Saigon. TV was bringing into
our living room the awesome horror of war. Amid the noises of war and the
screams of death, we cry out: “Where is God?” “Has God left us?” “Is
He dead?” The answer is, “God is here—but the world has lost sight of
Him.”

 

Do you
want more proof, more evidence, about a Godless world? Read a newspaper or a
magazine:  War, Crime, Dope, Hate,
Sex! Why do we sit back and watch some misguided designers disrobe our young
women—our daughters? Why do we allow publishers to print obscene and lewd
pictures and risqué stories? Authors publish stories about the excitement of
committing adultery, and the movies draw crowds by simply advertising. “This
movie is recommended for adult and mature audiences.”

 

Those
responsible are getting rich, and why? Because the public, the people,
Christians, you and I, will buy these things—with our money and with our
minds; we accept them, body and soul, and we say to our children: “It is all
right when you are adult and mature.”

 

The
Church—the one force capable of fighting back—is not getting the full
support of the people. For some reason, the message is not as appealing as the
mighty forces that push God out of man’s life. We do not accept the Church
with our bodies and our souls, and by our actions we say to our children: “God
is some faint image in the pages of an ancient dusty Bible. He is a sleeping God
who watches the world commit suicide, physically and morally.”

 

Tolstoy,
when he was fifty years old, became very despondent. He could not write. He even
feared to be alone with himself, for he had the compulsion to commit suicide.
One day while walking in the woods, he found himself thinking about life and the
existence of God. He noticed that every time he really thought about the living
God, every time he said out loud, “Our Father in Heaven,” he felt a joy, a
new peace. He had once again found his God.

 

An active
Church is a living Church; a living Church is one in which God is alive because
the congregation has Him in focus. SOYO is an organization that was once very
strong, and a moving force in the Church. It was a living organization because
it had a living God. For some reason, SOYO died a little. The spirit was weak.
It was in need of revitalizing. New leaders like President Terence Jabour are
inspiring us and bringing God back into the Organization. Then God again becomes
the focus of SOYO’s function, when the identity of God replaces the names of
groups and individuals, then will SOYO live and once again become a moving force
in the Orthodox Church of America.

 

Our
church organizations bring us into contact with God and people. They make God
real for us because we are working for Him through the Church. Through our
organizations we become doers instead of viewers.

 

Finally,
our Church Services make God real for us. Prayers and fasting make God real for
us. Communion offers us a living God, for Christ said, “This is My Body, this
is My Blood.” This is the Living God. God is here on the Altar; He is here,
this morning, in our hearts.

 

 

A SOYO
sermon preached by the Rev. Fr. George A. Aswad at St. George’s Church,
Niagara Falls. N.Y., at the visit of the Regional President to the local CAN-AM
Chapter.

 

Why We Pray

Word Magazine May 1973  Page 3-5 WHY WE PRAY   By Father Alexander Turner     The Christian use of prayer seems inconsistent to the non-Christian. He may understand such a practice by primitive peoples, bedeviled by fears and superstitions, living under the shadow of name-forces. Entreaty would be needed to cope with a deity both amoral and capricious and appropriately susceptible to persuasion. But the Christian God is supposed to be different both in personality and morals. First of all, he knows everything so it is unnecessary to tell him of human need. And of course he knows how good he is, so flattery would be superfluous. Secondly, if he is good, as Christians claim, we should get everything from him without begging. The logic is convincing and many have followed it to various conclusions which agree only in condemning as untenable the Christian combination of an all-wise, all-loving God with a primitive concept of man’s relation to him.   One of these alternative conclusions is that everything is already perfect and that we need only recognize the fact to make them appear what they are. This presupposes, though it carefully avoids admitting, a congenital blindness in man. On no other basis could so many be so wrong so much of the time! And if such a congenital blindness exists, everything is far from perfect. Another escape from the dilemma is deism: a religious philosophy which had some vogue in the eighteenth century and which is now in a limited revival. Deism stated that God created the world and then left it completely on its own, being neither inmanent in it nor responsive to prayer. And a third attempt to escape the dilemma takes the form of an ingenious explanation that man is complete master of his destiny and that he only seems to pray to an external deity when he is actually praying to himself, or realizing his own innate powers. Still another modern religion makes God a sort of super-machine with much emphasis on forces and law and so on. In this scheme of things man’s salvation is a mechanical matter; he must achieve through knowledge and effort as he does in the physical world and. by implication, the best that this world has to offer is all there is. Prayer holds no place in such a philosophy.   There is also the tendency to look upon God as the sum total of things, or the ‘indwelling spirit’, and so on. What confused thinking this represents. The word ‘God’ means something other than you and me and the lamp post. If we begin to call all these things God, we are missing the point altogether, discarding the concept which the word ‘God’ represents, and substituting something entirely different: a fancied unity which cannot exist under the conditions we know to prevail in our world. If a unity of things exists, it exists in a spiritual state which must be quite different from the trees and sky which this philosophy would call God. Such a philosophy caters to human pride, exalts man, debases God, and ends in atheism.   The theories are many and they all present their own contradictions and troubles, shifting the basic difficulty from one place to another. That basic difficulty is the reconciliation of our concept of God with what we know by experience of the world which we believe God has made. It is not to be exorcised by false estimates of man or of God or by denying the evidence of our senses. Restless probing first in one direction and then another simply underscores the situation, and therein lies the first lesson one must learn if he is to grasp the nature of prayer. The world is on its own to a very large extent and we are left to do the best we can with it by our own efforts. But there are also many conditions which we cannot deal with alone. So much is self-evident.   Next, we have the conviction that God, who created the world, is all-knowing and all-powerful. Between the apparent condition of the world and the nature of God as we know him to be there is an unavoidable tension, and this tension is of the very essence of religion as a human experience. It is simply another face of the recurrent duality, science and theology; spirit and matter; mercy and justice; inspiration and technic.   This paradox is ubiquitous and we must accept it. But it is far more digestible than the alternatives contrived to escape it. For example, it is more plausible that the world is a haphazard state of affairs and that human fortunes are in a state of flux and flow than to believe that what we take for human misery and mischances are an optical illusion. It is easier to believe that one infinite first cause of all secondary causes exists eternally in and of himself, than to believe that John Doe is God in disguise. Less imagination is required to see that an all-merciful God can coexist with a world of individual human responsibilities and chances (and mis­steps!) than to conceive of a being who caused things but who is himself but a law. A law is the way we see things behave under certain conditions. What would you think of a friend who sought to pay you a compliment by saying that you were not a person at all but something like the force of gravity?   The Christian God is therefore a person. Or we may call him super-personal if we beware the pitfall of mechanics. He may not share our limitations but he must embrace the attributes and qualities and powers which we respect in humanity. He must be more than a law, for the world where we see laws operating is his creation. He must be more than a piece of machinery, for several reasons: he made the things which make machinery possible; he gave man the intellect to devise machinery; and machinery at its best will always be sub-human and ignoble by comparisons with beings who have made it. God is neither unconscious nor automatic.   The presently popular machine god results from the wave of awe which we feel at new scientific discoveries and mechanical developments. A savage would react as we do if he saw a telephone. The fact that a machine can do something which man cannot do without it is not at all remarkable. Otherwise even clocks would be terrifying. Can we not dispose once and for all of this recurrent tendency to be set off base by any new discovery? Atomic fission has no more solved the riddle of the universe, nor resolved basic human problems than did evolution. And it would even seem now that the more we learn, the deeper we are sinking in a psychological, cultural and social morass. We can expect the homely God of the Christians to go on doing business when robots have ceased to be objects of veneration and become household gadgets.   The miracle of personality, of consciousness, of free choice (which we know so directly from experience and which is so easily ‘disproved’ by behaviourism) — these promise a certain order of supernatural evidence in the ever-expanding mystery of subjective experience. Only if we are prepared to debase our concept of God to the shabbiest levels of claptrap pantheism can we deny personality, consciousness, intelligence to God, and hence, deny the validity of converse with him which is called prayer.   This brings the matter more clearly into focus. We know certain things to begin with. God is a being who is conscious and powerful and possessed of self-determination. We can infer that from the world he has made, which could only develop as it has by virtue of a creative, intelligent guidance. We know enough of ourselves to realize that God cannot be deficient in those capacities and attributes which we enjoy to a limited degree. Finally, the fact that we can recognize the defects and limitations of these attributes in ourselves attests to their unlimited and perfect state in the supreme being.   We are creatures, God is creator. ‘It is he who has made us and not we ourselves.’ As sons of God we have a relationship to him which is subordinate, filial, reverent, suppliant. If we accept this common sense view of things and it has been the ideological substratum of Judaism and Christianity from the beginning — if we accept it, then we have no alternative but to accept prayer as the normal converse between creature and creator. That is the natural child-parent relationship, and any other would be unnatural and unhealthy. Christians will not be surprised that psychology in now moving to cure psychic complaints through a restored religious orientation. The Church has been doing so through the sacrament of penance for many centuries. It can teach us that lesson which some are trying so hard to forget: that man is and must know himself to be a subordinate being; that his destiny is not realized in mere selfish satisfaction; that he is summoned to a higher service than that of his physical nature; that the unregulated, self-indulgent life can lead to mental and moral collapse.   Christianity is humiliating to man. It is primitive. Small wonder that every variety of neo-paganism has striven so energetically against it! But it is realistic in a way which is impossible to gnosticism and pantheism. When these speak of salvation by knowledge they are really denying the existence of anything beyond the world of knowledge. And the whole point of religion is to reach out beyond the sweep of human experience into the regions beyond. It is there that man’s salvation resides and not in any creation of his own, or in any rational discoveries or contrivances.   The best of men are but unfinished versions of what they should be. Yet they will be the first to profess their own unworthiness and need of supernatural help. The need of those less reach to acknowledge their limitations is more apparent.  That suggests why the greatest are least and the least, greatest, why the meek shall inherit the earth, and why what we do to the least of men is done to God himself. It takes a peculiar order of sophistication to replace self—love with love of God; to find fulfillment in the ends of human destiny rather than in the beguiling means which should serve those ends.   We instinctively practice this principle in our daily affairs by placing the interests of others before our own. That is why we reach for the check and stand aside to let another pass before us. At this point the critical reader will rush to object that our good impulses are often a mere subconscious way of asserting ourselves to obtain the esteem of others. There are several reasons why this does not affect the argument. One genuine unselfish impulse is not obliterated by a thousand counterfeits. There are too many who do their good works in secret for us to think that each kindness is nothing but an effort to appear big. It may be deplorably neglected, but there is, buried in the soul, that divine capacity for putting oneself last.   How can we behave toward the presiding intelligence of the universe with less dignity, less decorum, than we show our neighbors? It is true that man is predisposed to approach other beings in a certain way unless they are sub-human. What would we think of someone who snatched things from us without asking on the pretext that a request would imply our ignorance (of our friend’s need) or our selfishness (because we might refuse?) Yet this is the end to which both pantheism and anosticism lead us by denying any effectual personality to the Almighty and by bidding us to wrest what we need from environment, with no romantic digressions life worship. How could one worship a God who was unconscious, automatic or oneself? In this all orders of neo-paganism agree: they remove from religion the very civilized element which raises human nature above the brute level and most vividly prefigures man’s ultimate communion with his creator. In this they have missed the very purpose of religion. While it may be true that God needs no consideration from man, it is also true that man needs the exercise of his filial nature, constituted as it is, with instincts almost as powerful as sex and hunger. We would have to be pretty naive to think that these were nothing but a psychological red herring!   Thus, in each of these attempts at escape, we are brought right back to the dilemma with which we started. It is one which will always be with us as long as man exists and commits himself to that better estate beyond the veil of the flesh. We must learn to accept this dilemma as part of the world we inhabit. Any theory which claims to resolve it must pay the price of common sense or of a real understanding of the problem itself.   The Christian practice of prayer is therefore realistic in its acknowledgement of things as they are. It is idealistic in its estimate of God. It is practical in uniting these two according to the needs we feel and the world we inhabit and the indicated attributes of God. It keeps mystery where we know it to be —   beyond the scope of the senses —and it does no tricks with mirrors. Christian prayer is civilized because it expresses toward the supreme being in a superlative degree the attitude which we should exhibit toward each other in a lesser degree.   So much for the human aspect of prayer. We cannot know as much of its supernatural aspect, of how it works and why it  should be answered or not. God’s dispositions are closed to reason and open, if at all, only to the pure and loving soul which can penetrate where love and justice are mysteriously conjoined, whence both physical laws and divine mercy have their origin. It must be sufficient to realize that God and the world are in a reciprocal relationship and trust that as our homage and entreaty spring spontaneously from the hearts which he has made, so his grace and help will respond to prayer according to the best purposes he has in view for us. We do know that prayer without effort is dead, just as faith is, without works. But as we must make our own efforts in the physical world, so we must make a spiritual effort which is sincere and consistent. One would not ask a king to shine shoes. We must not insult God by asking Him to do what we have brains and hands to do for ourselves, or to pick up the stray ends we are too dumb or lazy to pick up for ourselves.   Perfect prayer is prayer united to labor in an integrated spirit-body relationship. It sanctifies the means of achievement, harmonizes the human will with the divine, and invokes help when we fail.     —ALEXANDER TURNER Basilian Tract No. 10, First Published in the Basilian V:4, Summer, 1950

Where Can You Hide?

Word Magazine  February 1985  Page 20

 

“WHERE CAN YOU HIDE?”

  Homily By Father James C. Meena

 

  

 

There was an announcement made not long ago, stating that the government has found that smoking marijuana is “less harmful than the use of alcohol and cigarettes”. There was a great sound and fury made by those who diametrically oppose the use of marijuana under any conditions. I’d like to present another point of view, a Pastoral one, I trust.

 

The indiscriminate use of any drugs, whether harmful or not, must be placed in the same category with all things having the capacity to alter the personality so that one loses control of behavior. Those who insist on using such methods to turn their minds off or on, to drop out of reality and into some misty existence, only fool themselves into thinking that escapism is going to solve their problem.

 

We choose various forms of escapism. Some people drink excessively thinking they can crawl into a bottle and pull the cork in after them. As soon as they are sober the problems from which they are trying to escape are still there and sometimes they are worse. The use of hallucinogenic drugs is no different, whether or not they are harmful to the body is not relevant in my point of view. The very fact that they are used to escape, that even one “Joint” has the potential to alter the personality and change the characteristics of the individual, means that they should be rejected out of hand as being totally inconsistent with the Christian way of life.

 

People have been using such escapist techniques for centuries. The excessive use of wine and distilled alcoholic beverages, even the use of herb drugs has been known to mankind for hundreds of years and is repeatedly condemned by Scripture. Noah discovered wine and innocently drank too much. He became drunk and fell into a stupor. His son, Ham, mocked him, because of his drunkenness but Shem and Japheth covered their Father’s nakedness. Even though Noah didn’t know that the excessive drinking of wine would so alter his personality that he would be derided by Ham, the consequences were unremitting, (Genesis, 9:20-28).

 

How can you run away from God? You cannot escape His wrath, His retribution, His law of averages. The only things from which you can run are His love and His mercy, and that by your free choice.

 

When Adam and Eve committed the first sin, they ran and hid thinking that they could somehow be inconspicuous when God walked through the garden in the cool of the day. Jonah first refused to obey God but he finally realized that he was God’s chosen one and he had to obey. David killed Uriah in order to hide his adultery but he could not hide from the face of God.

 

Judas Iscariot could not hide from the Face of God and you cannot, nor can I. No matter what opiates we may suck into our lungs or shove into our veins, we cannot escape from God nor from our responsibilities to one another as children of God.

 

Why do we seek approval from our Governments, with all of its corruption, to convince us that ‘pot smoking is less harmful than alcohol’? You will still damage yourself and risk changing that which God gave to you to make up the sum total of your personality; your talents are stultified when you drink excessively and when you take into your system any of these personality-changing drugs. You can’t run from the Face of God or from the realities of life. If you will turn and face the problems of life with faith, with devotion to Him and not look to artificial stimulants and depressants to solve your problems, you will find solutions for our problems.

 

Do this, and you will be like the Publican of Jesus’ Parable, (St. Luke 18:10-14). He had lived a life of corruption and exploitation, had taken advantage of his own people, and had given himself to the conquerors like a prostitute gives herself to anyone paying her price, stood before the altar of God, knew he could not hide from the Face of God and did not even dare to lift up his eyes. He didn’t run to a wine bottle. He didn’t go out and find some herb root to chew on that would sedate his feelings. But he faced up to the realities of his own sinfulness and he asked God to help him to overcome that sinfulness by His mercy. That’s precisely what we are called upon to do.

What A Priest Expects From His Parish Board

 

Word Magazine  January 1960  Page 7-8/12

 

  

 

WHAT A PRIEST EXPECTS

FROM

HIS PARISH BOARD

  

 

By Father David F. Abramtsov

  

 

The parochial boards of our churches are usually quite explicit about what they
expect in a priest: He must be not only a spiritual leader, a teacher, preacher
and steward of the Mysteries of God, but also an all-American sportsman and an
all-around ‘jolly good fellow!’ Rarely does the ordinary board member consider
the qualities a priest expects of him. This then will be our subject.

 

What does a priest expect of members of the parish board? Many things. Most of
all the priest expects that only the most pious and dedicated men in the parish
will be elected or appointed to the board. If a man feels that Christ’s Faith is
not foremost in his life, then the priest expects that man to decline the
nomination to the high office of board member. Frequently a man is elected to
assist the priest, by serving on the board, for whom Christ’s religion is the
most distant aspect of his life — it comes after his business, after his lodge,
after his golf, after his wife’s demands on his time. The most irritating thing
for a priest is to have a parish board made up of lukewarm Christians who put
their church in last place instead of in first place; who look upon their church
duties as sort of extra-curricular activities or hobbies to which attention is
given last. This sort of board members is easily spotted because he is the one
too busy elsewhere to show up at meetings; he is too attentive to civic,
political and lodge affairs to further and advance the parish program.

 

The priest desires religious men on his board. He expects his church board
members to be pious and to be an example to the rest of the parish in speech,
and conduct, in love, in faith and in purity (I Tim. 4:11). It goes without
saying that there ought to be no room on a parish board for foul-mouthed and
profane people who conduct themselves as unbecoming followers and disciples of
Christ, who frequent places of ill-repute, who lead lives of sin, who have
married outside the pale of Holy Church (or allowed their children to do so);
who have no understanding of the most basic doctrines of the Orthodox Church.
There is nothing more scandalous in a parish than to have board members who do
not receive the Sacraments frequently. The priest expects his assistants in the
parish to receive Holy Communion at least four times each year and even monthly
if possible. Those who cannot receive this often because of their lack of faith
ought not to have been elected in the first place.

 

It is often that a priest has board members who are wise as concerns earthly
vanities, who are experienced in the business world, but who are completely
ignorant of the things of God. He sees board members who make the precious Sign
of the Cross as if brushing specks of dust from their neckties; who do not know
how to make a good Confession, who do not even know the Creed halfway through
from memory — but yet know how to make a shrewd business deal and can recite
baseball averages for hours on end. The priest expects his assistants in
Christ’s vineyard to be exemplary Christians, to take a meaningful part in the
ritual of the Church, to know the important prayers of the Church from memory,
to have some comprehension of what the Church stands for, its doctrine and
dogmas, its mission in the world, and to have some concept of the Orthodox
Church’s world-outlook.

 

If a priest is expected to exhort older men as he would a father and treat
younger men like brothers (I Tim. 5:1), so does a priest expect to be treated by
his board members as a spiritual Father; to be looked up to and not down upon.
The priest is truly the father of his parish (and his board) because through
Baptism, and the other Sacraments and means of Grace, he has begotten and
nourished them in the spiritual life; they are his spiritual children (I Cor.
4:14-16). The parish is a spiritual family: the priest being the father, the
parishioners — the children, and no family will prosper where there is no mutual
understanding, loyalty and respect. The priest dedicates the whole of his life
to Christ’s work, the board members devote only some spare time and a few
dollars. The priest is truly a minister and servant of his people but he chose
to be this minister and servant voluntarily. Sometimes the board acts as if it
imposed the position of servant upon the priest. In other words it tries to make
a hireling of the priest. The board who sees the priest not as a builder and
steward of church life, with special Grace of God for his godly work, but only
as a hireling or “hired-man” — should recall the words of Christ who said that a
hireling is not a shepherd and cares nothing for the sheep (John 10:12-13). In
other words, if the priest is forced to be a hireling, he is lost as a shepherd
and his flock will be scattered and devoured by spiritual wolves.

 

The members of the parish board also are called to be servants of the people and
to assist the priest in every practical way. Too many of the board members think
of their position as one of honor alone. They think they were elected as a
reward for worldly success. The idea of service is far from their minds.
Unfortunately, there are still some parishes which elect men to the board
because of wealth or for some other equally unspiritual reason. According to the
words of Christ, a wealthy man will have more than enough work cut out for him
simply to save his own soul without burdening him with parochial work! When such
men of worldly wealth are placed on the parish board they sometimes assume
almost dictatorial powers and run the parish like a business corporation —
threatening to withdraw often much-needed financial support if their dictates
are not followed. Rich men often have a wrong idea of their wealth thinking that
the Lord has rewarded them personally. It sometimes does not occur to them that
they are merely stewards of the things of the Lord — that what the Lord gave He
can also take away. The Lord entrusted them with wealth to be used for doing
good and in order to be liberal and generous with those not so fortunate. The
riches were not given them in order to abuse the trust placed in them by the
priest and people. There is nothing more despicable than the wealthy parishioner
who uses his wealth to run a parish. The priest is directed by St. Paul to
charge the wealthy not to be haughty but rather to be rich in good deeds and in
the spiritual life (I Tim 6:17-19). The priest expects Christian humility from
all his board members not an overbearing superiority complex which destroys
mutual love and respect.

 

A priest was once respected because he was an ambassador for Christ, who
preached the Kingdom of God and the salvation of souls, but there is now a
tendency to honor him because of his business acumen and his ability to
put on successful extravaganzas. It is not infrequently that a church board
wants a worldly priest and is nervous with a pious and deeply religious pastor.
A certain priest once said that if Christ came to earth in these days, the
parish board would hasten Him off to some smart men’s shop, outfit Him with
stylish clothes, take Him to a barber shop for a shave and haircut, buy Him some
expensive cigars, and have Him join a prominent lodge! Some parochial board
members are engaged in a never-ceasing struggle to pull the priest down to their
level of worldliness and to resist the priest’s efforts to elevate them from the
love of the world to the love of God. Holy Write directs the priests of God to
avoid men who are lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive,
unholy, implacable, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers
of God, who hold the outward form of religion but inwardly deny its power (2
Tim. 3:1-5). St. John Chrysostom thunders against priests who are man-pleasers
and willing to give the Holy Mysteries into sinful hands to those who give
Christ a kiss as did Judas. Yet what is a priest to do with those who resist the
power of God, who prohibit the Holy Spirit from abiding in their souls — and yet
with whom he must work because they were placed on the parish board?

 

As Metropolitan Antony frequently says, such men are spiritually sick and the
priest must try to heal them with all the power of Christ’s love at his command.
As things stand in congregational America the priest has little left of even
moral and spiritual authority but he can exert the influence of his own personal
way of life, his own holiness which like the leaven of Christ’s parable can and
should leaven the whole parish including the parish board. The priest expects
his board to have an open mind and an open heart so that into their “itching
ears” he can preach, strive to convince, have the right to rebuke and exhort
with all the unfailing patience he ought to

possess (2 Tim. 4:1-3), and thus lead them along the narrow way. The priest
certainly has the right to expect his parish board from debauching his piety and
to cooperate with him in his attempts to elevate them from the mire of worldly
vanity.

 

The priest expects his board members to be well-informed about Archdiocesan
affairs as well as general Orthodox matters; to purchase and read literature to
that end, to subscribe to the Archdiocesan magazine The Word: to attend
Archdiocesan conventions; to assist the work of national and international
Orthodoxy as well as Orthodoxy’s efforts on the local level.

 

The priest expects cooperation from the parochial board in all things which
build the spiritual life of a parish; he expects full attendance at all meetings
and active participation in all parochial activities; interest in the progress
and welfare of the church school, the choir, the altar boys society, and other
such youth groups such as the SOYO. The priest expects the board members
to show a zealous willingness to underwrite the expenses of these groups: to see
to it that the church is lacking in nothing that is needed for the worship of
God. It is unbelievable but true that some church boards oppose the buying of
necessary vestments, church vessels and appurtenances of the Holy Altar such as
a Tabernacle, etc. These same boards who will spend countless dollars on
improving kitchen and toilet facilities, bingo supplies and brooms for the
janitor, hesitate to purchase those things necessary for carrying out Orthodox
Divine Service in all its fullness and beauty. If it may be put so crudely, a
parish is in the church business and not in the kitchen or diner business. In
every parish the Holy Sanctuary must come first, and the priest has the right to
expect his parish board to understand this and underwrite the expenses entailed.

 

The priest expects his board members to be exemplary workers and contributors of
time and energy as well as money. He expects them to receive Holy Communion
frequently as a body; to attend all church services, and what is more important
to arrive on time and stay until the end. He expects the board members to attend
evening devotions during Lent and Passion Week. He expects the board members to
put the church in first place in their lives.

 

The priest expects the members of the board to consult him before scheduling any
parochial affairs lest unseemly activities be held during Lenten periods, which
could ruin the good name of the parish and undermine the spiritual influence of
the parish within the community. There is nothing more reprehensible than the
board member who refuses to abide by the priest’s wishes in such matters and
such a member stands self-condemned by his own actions.

 

On Sunday morning the priest expects the president of the parish board, or
someone appointed by him, to be in church at least fifteen to thirty minutes
before the beginning of the Divine Liturgy to see that everything is in order,
to see whether the priest needs some last-minute assistance; to see that the
candles are prepared, that there is enough wine, and generally to see that the
sexton has done his job. The priest expects his board members to stay to the
very end of the Liturgy, to usher out the people and keep order. There is
probably nothing that upsets a priest more than the board member who walks out
of church during the sermon to count the Sunday offering or to take a
smoke. The money-counting can wait until after the Liturgy. Anyone willing to
serve on the board ought to be willing to stay fifteen minutes after services to
count the offerings! If the board member is anxious to eat lunch, let him
remember that the priest has not even eaten breakfast!

 

Sometimes at the end of the Liturgy, by the time the priest consumes the Holy
Gifts, makes his thanksgiving, unvests, and emerges from the Holy Sanctuary, he
finds the whole church deserted. It is as if everyone had fled the presence of
God. The priest is confronted with the job of blowing out the candles, closing
the windows, turning off the lights, turning down the thermostat, locking the
doors and generally doing what he expects the church board members to take care
of. After all, it is their church building, and it is not unreasonable for the
priest to expect them to care for it. In modern times the faithful hastily leave
the Eucharistic Christ behind for the swimming pool, the lunch table and the
golf links and, frequently, the church board leads the procession. How insulting
to Christ such a hasty departure is, not to mention its boorish, undignified and
plain bad-mannered aspects. The priest expects the board members to approach the
Altar of God at the conclusion of the Liturgy with everyone else; he expects
them to venerate the Holy Cross with piety and devotion, and to receive the
Antidoron from his hands and then, with everything in order, to go out
and count the offerings in a leisurely manner.

 

From the above it is obvious that the priest expects his board members to be
all-around, “all-American” Orthodox Christians who realize that their position
is of grave importance since they are in a position to influence all the other
parishioners for better or for worse. In his high place as assistant to the
pastor a board member is bound to be temperate, serious, sensible, sound in
faith, in love, and in steadfastness (Titus 2:2), to be in control of himself
(Titus 2:6), to be submissive to spiritual authorities, to be obedient, to be
ready for any honest work on behalf of the parish, to speak evil of none, to
avoid quarreling, to be gentle, and to show perfect courtesy toward all men
(Titus 3:1-2). If a church board member does these things he will be
well-pleasing to God, an inspiration to his fellow-layman, and a true and
fruitful servant of Christ the Lord.

 

 

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What Are The Commandments Of The Church?

 

Word Magazine  March 1960  Page 10

 

 

WHAT ARE THE

 

 COMMANDMENTS OF
THE

 

 CHURCH?

 

 

By Father John Newcombe

Beckley, WV

  

 

The
chief and principal Commandments of the Holy Church are nine in number:

 

1.         Every member of the Orthodox Church must pray to God every day with
contrition and compunction of heart; and he must join in the Divine Liturgy
every Sunday and Feast Day.

 

2.         The Orthodox Christian must yearly keep the appointed Fasts.

 

3.         The Spiritual Authorities must be held in due and scrupulous respect,
as Servants of God, and as Intercessors who intercede for us with God.
Especially, let those be honored who hear our Confessions, for they are our must
we have converse with them, nor have (spiritual) companionship with them.

 

4.         We must confess our sins four times a year before a Priest who has
been ordained lawfully and in the Orthodox manner.

 

5.         We must not read the books of Heretics; nor hear the teaching spoken
by those who are not trained in Holy Scripture and Orthodox Theological
Disciplines. Nor must we have converse with them, nor (spiritual) companionship
with them.

 

6.         We must pray to the All good God for men of every condition and
station: First, for the Clergy. Second, for the civil authorities;
especially for those who do good and take thought for magnifying and spreading
the Orthodox Catholic Faith. Furthermore, we must pray for all who have departed
this life in the Orthodox Faith; and also for heretics and schismatics, that
they may return to the Orthodox Faith before they leave this present life.

 

7.         All the Faithful in an Orthodox Province must keep those Fasts and
supplications which the Metropolitan or Bishop may particularly appoint for his
Province whenever necessary.

 

8.         The Lay people must not dare to take away forcibly the goods and
monies of the Church nor to use them for their own needs. Rather, it is the duty
of the Spiritual Authorities to provide from the goods of the Church the
Vestments and whatever other things are necessary for the Church, and
additionally for the food and clothing of those who serve the Church as well as
for the poor and the stranger.

 

9.         Marriages must not be celebrated on days forbidden by the Church.
Furthermore, Orthodox Christians must not be present at forbidden sports and
games; nor follow after heathenish and unchristian customs: rather, they must
abstain from such things with all their might.

   
                           — from the Orthodox Catechism

 

Nine Ways of Being A Credit to Your Church and Parish

 

1.         Find something to DO for the Church ... do not be content to sit in a
pew — Orthodox Christianity finds little expression in mere pew sitting. The
first thing the Church needs from you is active service. If you give it, you
will find yourself, not a bored passenger, but an alert, enthusiastic member of
the crew.

 

2.         If you claim to be Orthodox then attend the Holy Services, especially
the Divine Liturgy. The Holy Liturgy is the one really thrilling thing in all
the world and sea and sky. It is the bridge between man and God. It is the
privilege of the Orthodox Christian to be present at the Most Holy Sacrifice . .
. It is also his duty.

 

3.         Support your parish financially. Christ our Saviour did not care
about money for its own sake ... but He cared about money tremendously for the
sake of man’s spiritual welfare. It costs money to operate your parish and
diocese and every Christian is expected to give regularly and in proportion
as he has prospered. If what you give financially is a sacrifice so much the
better      . . . consider the price Christ paid for your salvation!

 

4.         Grow in Grace and Christian Knowledge by frequenting the Holy
Sacraments of Confession and Communion and by prayer, fasting and the study of
the Christian Doctrine.

 

5.         Draw others to the True Faith . . . our friends need the Church and
your parish needs your friends. Christ’s last command to the Apostles places
upon His Church and its members the obligation to make converts. Help
restore those who have wandered by your words and example.

 

6.         Promote the spirit of charity (love) within your parish . . . “By
this shall all men know that you are my disciples, If you love one to another .
. .”

 

7.         Stand by the Parish Priest . . . The parish should be “not the
priest’s field but his force.” Give your Priest your loyalty, respect and
assistance . . . he is your best friend.

 

8.         Be Loyal to the Church and you will be loyal to Christ. Do not
abandon your Church and God will not abandon you. St. Cyprian said, “He cannot
have God for a Father, who has not the Church for a Mother.”

 

9.         Give evidence of the Power of Christ by your Orthodox Christian Life.
Let the imitation of Christ be your guide.

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What Do Icons Mean?

Word
Magazine  December 2000 
Page 22-23 

 

 

 

WHAT
DO ICONS MEAN?

 

By Michael Goltz

 

 

 

The
iconography of our Orthodox Church, with all of its symbolism and spiritual
meaning, is central to the Church’s teaching. People are greatly influenced by
what they contemplate, and so the Church, in its love for its faithful, has
given us iconography in order to help us contemplate God. The Church has
elevated iconography to a place of prominence as a teaching tool. What the
Gospels proclaim with words, the icon proclaims visually.

 

The very
meaning of the icon has as its foundation the incarnation of Our Lord Jesus
Christ. “And the word was made flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). Christ
is “the icon of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15), and His transfiguration on
Mount Tabor offers support of this (Matt. 17:1-13). It is because Christ became
man and allowed man to glimpse the divine glory of heaven that we are able to
write icons and venerate images of Christ, the Theotokos and the saints. If
Christ had not become incarnate, and had not revealed to us his transfigured
glory on the Mount, it would be impossible to depict the spiritual realm
of Heaven in icons. Precisely because of the incarnation and transfiguration,
everything in the icon is represented in relation to Divinity. This impacts all
parts of the icon, from how the face is painted, to the robes, to even the
“scenery” of the festal icons. While the incarnation is the basis of
iconography, the icon itself, in its role as a window into Heaven, affirms the
incarnation and speaks of God’s great mysteries. The chief task of the icon is
to proclaim the wonder and mystery of Christ, the Theotokos and the saints,
while reminding us they were human like we are, and calling us to the same
spiritual perfection which Christ’s incarnation allows us to seek. All
naturalism, whether it is spacial, figural or proportional, is set aside
and man, landscape and architecture are shown in a transfigured state.

 

One of
the first things which I discovered about icons before converting to Orthodoxy
is that icons are initially not easy to see. At first they appear distorted and
unreal, almost impressionist, full of symbolism. In a society more familiar with
western art, we are concerned with the response of our external, empirical
senses. Yet the icon is not meant to excite our external senses. It is not
painted to depict the mundane everyday life, but rather the spiritual realm. It
is written as a “window into heaven,” a physical means which allows us to
gaze into the invisible spiritual reality. The simplicity of the icon is not
meant to stir our emotions but rather to quietly invite us to leave the world
for a moment and guide every emotion toward the contemplation of the Divine. To
achieve this level of spiritual communion, one must quietly, prayerfully and
patiently gaze on the image. It is the way to prayer, and the means of prayer
itself.

 

The
communion with the Divine to which the icon calls us is achieved through a
symbolic language in which clothing styles, colors, gestures, architecture and
human form in the icon are fixed. The painting of iconography must not be based
on artistic speculation, emotion or abstract ideas but soundly on the teachings
of the Orthodox Church. To depict these teachings requires an understanding of
Orthodoxy, study, meditation and attention to detail, as well as artistic skill.
The iconographer must understand what parts of the icon he can adjust using his
best artistic skills and what parts of the icon he ought to leave intact.

 

In this
language of iconography, certain meanings are ascribed to the subjects of the
icon. People of importance in icons are often depicted as larger than other
people in the icon and are always indicated by name on the icon. In icons of single
saints, the saint is also usually depicted with the instrument of his or her
salvation. Bishops are usually depicted wearing episcopal robes, whether
monastic or Liturgical, holding the gospel and giving a blessing. The blessing
hand is formed in the monogram of the name of Christ, ICXC, just as an Orthodox
priest blesses. The evangelists are depicted holding the gospels, St. Paul the
epistles, and great spiritual writers a scroll. Martyrs are depicted holding the
crown of martyrdom, the cross or the instrument of their martyrdom. St. Andrei
Rublev, the great Russian iconographer of the fifteenth century, is depicted
holding the icon of the Trinity which he painted (and which some regard as the
standard for all other icons). The subject of the icon is usually depicted
looking straight ahead, or at a 3/4 angle. Icons gaze into eternity; yet while
focused on the divinity, the transfigured icon is not avoiding the earthly realm
but rather gently addressing it and calling it to be transfigured
in Christ as well.

 

The
physical features of the icon are also very important in conveying this symbolic
spiritual language. Because the subject of the icon is transfigured by the
love of Christ, the light of the icon is interior, not exterior as in other
forms of art. Thus, the areas of the robes and skin which protrude the most have
the brightest highlights. The forehead on the subject on many icons is often
high and convex, to express the power of the spirit and wisdom.; Ascetics, monks
and bishops are given deep wrinkles in their cheeks. The nose of the subject is
long and thin, which gives it a sense of gracefulness; it no longer
smells the odors of the world, but rather the sweet incense of Heaven. The lips
of the subject are closed, expressing true contemplation which requires total
silence. The eyes are large and pronounced, gazing into Heaven. While the
physical features of the face are spiritualized, they still retain a likeness to
the saint depicted. Thus the face of St. Peter is different from that of his
brother Andrew and from that of St. Paul. The hands are either holding the
instrument of the depicted saint’s salvation, raised in a work of mercy, or
giving a blessing. The feet, if depicted, walk in the way of God. The halo
symbolizes the Divine light which radiates from the person who lives in close
communion with God.

 

As
important as the physical features of the icon are the colors used to depict the
subject. Certain colors are generally used to depict certain ideas in icons.
However, iconography, while being a sacred art, is still art. Iconographers in
the past have painted certain icons in certain colors because it was
theologically correct to do so as well as visually appealing. The
iconographer’s job is to write an icon which is theologically correct, in good
artistic taste and visually pleasing; good artistic taste has a role to play in
what colors are used in the icon. Artistic harmony, for lack of a better phrase,
is as important to the icon as theological accuracy. A visually unpleasing icon
can be as disturbing as a theologically incorrect one because it draws attention
to what should not be important, namely the skills of the iconographer, and
draws attention away from what is most important, namely the message which the
icon should convey.

 

Having
said this about icon colors and artistic harmony let us now discuss the meanings
commonly associated with colors. Gold is used to depict divinity, as it is a
rare and precious metal; when light strikes gold it gives a radiance which most
closely reflects uncreated light. Gold leaf or a golden color of paint is used
for the halo. White, like gold, is used to depict uncreated light, as well as
physical and spiritual purity. Christ’s robes at the Transfiguration and
following His resurrection are painted white, or sometimes gold. The color blue
is used to depict transcendence, truth and humility. A famous icon of St.
Ignatius of Antioch depicts the saint wearing a deep blue robe with a blue background.
The color serves to remind us of the great spiritual truths which St. Ignatius
taught us. Red is the color of blood, martyrdom, youth and beauty, but also the
color of sin and war. Martyrs are often depicted wearing red, or, as is the case
a famous icon of St. George, with a deep red background. Christ’s outer
garments are blue and his under garments are red to symbolize that He is both
divine and human. The Theotokos’ outer garments are red, or a deep earthen
tone, while her under garments are blue, symbolizing that she is human who bore
the Divine. Green is the color of the plant world and thus is used to denote
spring time and revival. Finally, black is the color of death, and the
renunciation of earthly values. In the icon of the Last Judgment the damned are
painted black, as they have lost all hope of salvation. On the icon of the
Crucifixion, the cave under the cross is black, denoting death and despair.
Monks are depicted wearing black robes as the black symbolizes the monk’s
renunciation of all that is vain.

 

The
“scenery” in an icon has its meaning in the larger context of the icon.
Architecture and landscape serve only to tie the icon to a specific event in
time.

 

That our
churches are full of icons is no coincidence, no fluke of artistic taste. The
iconostasis does not serve aesthetic purposes only. While the iconostasis does
function to separate the altar from the faithful and the rest of the church, it
also acts as a bridge between the faithful and the eternal heaven. The saints
and angels depicted on the iconostasis are there to remind us that we are not
praying alone and in vain, but that we are surrounded by the saints and the
heavenly host when we worship together. They also call us to a deeper love and
commitment to God. They instruct us in our faith and remind us that we are not
the first to walk the sometimes hard, sometimes lonely road of faith. Icons are
given as gifts to the faithful at very important times in their lives —
baptisms, chrismations, weddings, for a person’s feast day. An icon of the
cross is placed in the tomb with the faithful when he/she leaves this world. The
icon clearly plays an integral role in the lives of the faithful.

 

Everything
in the icon points to the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ. It is indeed the
contemplation of the Divine which is the goal of the icon painter, as well as
that of the faithful praying in front of the icon. I have painted many icons,
prayed before many more, and in doing so have been brought to a much deeper love
of Christ while using my humble talents to manifest the incarnation to others.
The Orthodox Church, in its sincere love for its faithful, has for centuries provided
us with icons that we may come to a deeper understanding of God. To man, God is
a mystery, and the Church in its wisdom and love for man has given us the icon
to help us gain a glimpse of Heaven.

  

 

Michael
Goltz is a member of St. George Church, Pittsburgh, PA.

What Is A Bishop, Priest, Deacon

Word Magazine  October
1962  Page 11-12

 

  

         
WHAT IS A BISHOP, PRIEST, DEACON

 Fr.
Michael J. Buben

St. George —
Lawrence, Mass.

 

 

 

Having an
indispensable meaning in the life of the Church, the Sacrament of Holy Orders
has a foundation from God. “And no man taketh this honour unto himself, but he
that is called of God, as was Aaron.” (Her.
5:4). The first pastors of the Orthodox Church, the Holy Apostles,
did not of themselves obtain the right to teach, to serve the Mysteries and
Sacramentals, and to administer the Holy Church; but were inspired and granted
this right by Our Lord Jesus Christ. “And when it was day, He called unto Him
his disciples: and of them He chose twelve, whom also He named apostles.” (St.
Luke 6, l3).

 

From the
numerous disciples and followers, Christ chose only twelve of them to be pastors
of His Church. Why? That they
might constantly be at His side learning His teaching, and to witness miracles
and be thoroughly convinced that He is the Son of God who was incarnate for our
salvation, And being convinced they might teach others. (St.
Mark 3, 14-15).

 

With this
purpose, Our Lord instructed the Apostles collectively and individually. “What
I tell you in darkness, that speak ye in light: and what ye hear in the ear,
that preach ye upon the housetops.” (St.
Matthew 10, 27). Our Lord
lived among the Apostles for 40 days after His Resurrection and spoke to them
about the Kingdom of God. He revealed to the Apostles mysteries which were not
revealed to others: “it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom
of heaven, but to them it is not given.”

 

Later,
beside the twelve apostles Christ chose seventy disciples and told all of them:
“Ye have not chosen Me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, that ye
should go and bring forth fruit (St. John
15, 16). “As My Father hath sent Me, even so send I you. And when
He had said this, He breathed on them, and saith unto them, Receive ye the Holy
Ghost: Whosesoever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whosesoever
sins ye retain, they are retained. (St. John 20, 21-23).

 

Duties
of Pastors

 

Before
His Ascension, Our Lord came to His Apostles and said: “All power is given
unto Me in heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore, and teach all nations,
baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost:
teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I
am with you always, even unto the end of the world. Amen.” (St. Matthew 28,
18-20).

 

With
these words, Christ gave the Apostles the following powers in the Church: 1) to
teach the truths of the Faith to all nations on earth. That’s why Orthodoxy is
for all people. 2) to perform the Sacraments —
Baptism, Communion, etc. “Do this in remembrance of Me!” (Holy
Eucharist) (St. Luke 22,
19), or “Let a man so account of us, as of the ministers of Christ, stewards
of the mysteries of God.” (I Cor. 4,1), says the Apostle about himself and
other pastors of the Church: 3) to administer the Church, i.e. to govern the
faithful in the paths of Christian living. (Matt.
28, 20).

 

After
granting this power to the Apostles, we must notice that He promised them a
Comforter—Spirit of truth who would be with them even until the end of the
World. On the day of Pentecost the Holy Spirit did come upon them in the form of
fiery tongues and they went forth and began the work of the Church, and
thousands were baptised even in one day. Now, since Christ offered to be with
them until the end of the world, and they as mortal men were prone to death, it
follows that Our Lord had instructed the Apostles to ordain successors to
inherit apostolic powers even until the end of the world. The Apostles did this
everywhere they established churches by the laying on of hands. This power of
ordination is called—apostolic succession and can be traced to our day in an
unbroken line of succession in the Orthodox Church. This apostolic succession
will continue until the end of the world and in this light the words of Christ
become clear: “Lo, I am with you, even unto the end of the world. Amen”.
Apostolic Succession carries the living Church from generation to generation.

 

Deacons,
Priests, Bishops

 

In the
beginning the Apostles only needed assistants to perform minor duties. They
chose seven deacons. Seven persons of strong faith were ordained. The apostles
through prayer and by placing their hands on the seven persons transferred
graces of the Holy Spirit to a minor degree. (Acts
6, 6).

 

Later the
apostles established PRESBYTERS (Greek word meaning priest in English).
Presbyters or priests had more duties to perform than did the deacons. Finally
the Apostles ordained BISHOPS for the Church. As examples there was
ordained a bishop for the town of the Ephesians called Timothy (1 Tim.
1,3), and another at Crete called Titus. (Titus
1,5) . Only BISHOPS
received the full graces and became replacements of the Apostles. Only Bishops
could ordain Deacons, Priests, and other Bishops as the need arose. “For this
cause left I thee in Crete, that thou shouldest set in order the things that are
wanting, and ordain presbyters in every city, as I had appointed thee,” wrote
St. Paul to Bishop Titus (Titus 1,5).

 

In our
day, every priest is but an extension of his bishop. Every local parish priest
performs his duties and receives his authority only from his bishop. In larger
parishes, deacons are needed to perform lesser sacred duties than the priest by
authority of the priest.

 

Beside
the power to ordain, bishops also received power from the apostles to judge
deacons, priests: “Against a presbyter
receive not an accusation, but before two or three witnesses.” (1 Tim.
5,19) ; to rebuke
sinners: “Them that sin rebuke before all, that others also may fear.” (1
Tim. 5, 20); to honour the
worthy: “Let the presbyters that rule well be counted worthy of double honour,
especially they who labor in the word and doctrine.” (1 Tim.
5, 17); reject heretics: “A man that is an heretic after the first and
second admonition reject.” (Tit. 3, 10);

 

The
Apostles gave Bishops and priests the right to teach in the Church: “Preach
the word; be instant in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort with all
longsuffering and doctrine.” (2 Tim.
4, 2). From the Apostles the Bishops and priests received the power
and grace to perform the Sacraments, sacramentals and all other services: “Is
any sick among you let him call for the presbyters of the Church; and let them
pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord.” (James 5, 14) or “I exhort therefore, that, first
of all, supplications, prayers,
intercessions, and giving of thanks, be made for all men; for kings and
for all that are in authority; that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in
all godliness and honesty . . . For
this is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Savior.” (1 Tim.
2, 1-3).

 

The
apostles also gave Bishops and priests the right to administer and govern the
Holy Orthodox Church: “The presbyters among you I exhort, who am also a
presbyter, and a witness of the sufferings of Christ, and also a partaker of the
glory that shall be revealed; Feed the flock of God which is among you, taking
the oversight thereof, not by constraint, but willingly; not for filthy lucre,
but of a ready mind.” (1 Peter 5,
1-2).

 

No pastor
can be a shepherd who follows the sheep. The sheep must follow the pastor and
know his voice, and listen to it. Those falling from the truth must be lifted,
and those following ungodly ways must be rebuked. The pastor himself must
constantly be a good example to his flock: “These things speak and exhort, and
rebuke with all authority. Let no man despise thee.” (Tit. 2, 15).

 

OBEYING
PASTORS

 

After
establishing the hierarchal structure of the Sacrament of Holy Orders, the
Apostles commanded of the faithful obedience to the teaching and respect for the
office of the deacons, priests, and bishops. The individual shortcomings of any
pastor do not lessen the effects of any Sacraments performed by him. “Obey
them that have the rule over you, and submit yourselves: for they watch for your
souls, as they that must give account, that they may do it with joy, and not
with grief: for that is unprofitable for you.” (Heb.
13, 17). Or as St. Paul writes: “And we beseech you brethren, to
know them which labor among you, and are over you in the Lord, and admonish you;
and to esteem them very highly in love for their works sake. And be at peace
among yourselves.” (1 The. 5,
12-13). For those who constantly find fault with pastors let this text wake them
from their sleep: “Verily, verily I say unto you, he that receiveth whomsoever
I send receiveth Me” (John 13,
20), or “He that heareth you heareth Me; and he that despiseth you despiseth
Me; and he that despiseth Me despiseth
Him that sent Me.” (Luke 10,
16).

 

And so
deacons, priests, and bishops shall continue to be ordained and receive the
graces of Pentecost in an unbroken line from the Apostles even unto the end of
the world and wherever they are now or tomorrow, Christ will be there among
them.

 

 

 

 

 

What Is a Church Ministry?

 

WHAT
IS A CHURCH MINISTRY?

by Father Michael Lewis

Prior
to any discussion that elaborates upon "A Model for Church 'Ministry
Programs”, it would make sense to first understand - what is the definition of
a Church Ministry-Program?  As they
are being used in the following articles, the words "Church Ministry
Program", or simply "Church Ministry", refer to any person,
persons, program or organization of the Church, who or which, alone and
together, labors in love to accomplish the work of God's Holy Church here on
earth.

 

Concrete
examples of the various Church Ministry Programs that now exist here and at any
church may be as follows: the Priesthood, Parish Council, Choir, Church School,
Teen Gathering, Senior SOYO, and the Fellowship - ALL of which are expressions
of what St. Peter calls "the royal priesthood". 
Each of these persons, programs, and organizations fulfills a unique
ministry within the Church.  It is
very important to realize that these Church Ministry Programs are made up of
people - "the people of God" - who are actively functioning as
"the royal priesthood" by virtue of their dynamic participation in the
Church Ministry and/or Ministries of their choice. 
These persons try to cultivate their awareness of which they are called
to be as Orthodox Christians.  These
persons have also made the commitment to utilize their God-given talents,
whatever unique talents they may be,: in order to serve Christ and His Holy
Church through their energetic participation in a Church Ministry. 
These persons minister to the people of God AND are ministered to by the
people of God.  In short, these
persons are trying to actively be, and to more fully become "the people of
God".  In the words of St.
Peter:

 

"You
are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people; that you
may declare the wonderful deeds of him who called you out of darkness into his
marvelous light.  Once you were no
people, but now you are God's people; once you had not received mercy, but now
you have received mercy." (I Peter 2:9-10)

 

"The
end of all things is at hand; therefore keep sane and sober in your prayers. 
Above all hold unfailing your love for one another, since love covers a
multitude of sins.  Practice
hospitality ungrudgingly to one another.  As
each has received a gift, employ it for one another, as good stewards of God's
varied grace: whoever speaks as one who utters oracles of God; whoever renders
service, (ministry). as one who renders it by the strength which God supplies in
order that in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ. 
To him belongs glory and dominion forever and ever. 
Amen. (I Peter 4:7-11)

 

A
MODEL FOR CHURCH MINISTRY PROGRAMS

 

A
realistic Church Ministry should be a balanced program that offers and
encourages spiritual growth, moral guidance, witness, service activity, and
social gathering.  It should be a dynamic program in which the members both
minister AND are ministered to... in Christ!

 

In
distinct parish situations, a specific Church Ministry will take on its own
unique character, depending on the nature and the preferences of those involved. 
However, its focus should always be at the core of those areas that
constitute the Christian-life, namely: WORSHIP (Liturgia), WITNESS (Martyria),
SERVICE (Diakonia), and FELLOWSHIP (Koinonia). 
What follows is a definition and a model for a balanced Church Ministry
Program, whose foundation is securely anchored upon this core for Christian
living.

 

WORSHIP
(Liturgia): A SPIRITUAL RESURGENCE

 

WORSHIP
(Liturgia) refers to our relationship with God through prayer, worship and the
sacramental life.  It is through
Liturgia that we actually experience and get to personally know the personal
Godhead - who is the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, “the Trinity,
one in essence, and undivided".  How
and why each practicing Orthodox Christian worships God is an essential question
that each must resolve if he is to be a true member of Christ's Church.

 

The
Divine Liturgy and the Sacraments of the Orthodox Church provide basic spiritual
nourishment, but they must become a meaningful personal experience for the
worshipper, and not simply an empty form.  The
form must be filled with life-giving content. A living liturgical life is
important to our daily existence, for Christ said:

 

"He
that eats flesh and drinks my blood dwells in me, and I in him." (John
6:56)

 

And
yet, one of the major voids that are felt in the lives of Christians in America
is a meaningful liturgical life. If the Church is to fulfill her mission of
leading the faithful to salvation, that is - to union with God - then we must
make Liturgia an essential part of our personal, daily lifestyle.

 

To
a great degree, faith is a personal matter, yet we do not exist in isolation,
but in community. In the same way that the three Persons of the Holy Trinity are
unique persons and yet share in the  one
Godhead, we, too, are each unique persons and yet share in one humanity. When we
participate in Holy Communion  - the
Body and Blood of God the son we share in His humanity, which unites all mankind
and we share in His Divinity, which unites us with God. 
This is why our purpose is not simply to imitate Christ, but, to live in
Christ, and to realize a common holiness.

 

“As
he who called you is holy, be Yours elves holy in all Your conduct; since it is
written: ‘you shall be holy, for I am holy'." (I Peter 2:15-16)

 

Liturgia,
then, means encouraging and developing a penetrating program for spiritual
growth, both as individuals and as groups. 
All other dimensions of Christian life depend on this. Man does not live
by bread alone, but must seek and come to Christ, be nourished by Him and
confess Him as Lord.

 

WITNESS
(Martyria): MANIFESTING THE FAITH

 

Worship
is just the beginning.  Man is both
a spiritual and a physical being, and therefore the spiritual reality is
expressed. . through the physical world. we cannot only have faith, we must also
exemplify it in our life. WITNESS (martyria) is the living and witnessing
of Christianity to others within the faith, to those who may have left the
faith, and to those outside the faith, by sharing and actually living the Gospel
Of Jesus Christ.

 

“If
any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and
follow me-" (Matthew 16-24)

 

What
is the natural consequence of our Martrria? 
St. Paul answers this clearly in his Epistle to the Romans-

 

“I
appeal to YOU therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies
as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual
worship.  DO not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the
renewal Of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good,
acceptable and perfect." (Romans 12:1-2)

Witness
(Martyria) is the logical extension of worship (Liturgia). 
If we are united with God, we will certainly reflect Him in our daily
life.  In the same way that Christ
constantly reveals the Father "He who believes in me, believes not in me
but in Him who sent me; and he who sees me, sees Him who sent me" - so too
we must reveal that we are indeed "God's people".  We should naturally confess Him, labor for Him in love, and
witness to our faith in God through our example and our daily lifestyle
"according to the measure of faith, which God has assigned".

 

SERVICE
(Diakonia): MINISIMING THE FAITH

 

Christ
came not to be served, but to serve, and He urges us to do the same. 
We can live in the image of God by loving and serving mankind. 
Orthodox Christians, and especially young adults, adults, may use their
respective "charismata" (God-given grace/gifts/talents) to be kind and
merciful just as Christ was when He walked among the sick, the poor, and the
down-trodden... and extended His holy hand.

 

"Lord,
when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? 
And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit YOU? 
And the King will answer them, 'Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one
of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me'." (Matthew 25:37-40)
"I go the extra mile...." (Matthew 5:38-48)

 

We
relate well to Christ, who came to serve.  The
Peace Corps, for example, along with the many other volunteer services that
exist, all witness to the compassion some people have for their fellow man, and
to their willingness to be committed to a good cause.

 

St.
Peter refer-s to this SERVICE (Diakonia - Ministry) as the “royal
priesthood” (I Peter 2:9).  Some like to call it "the priesthood of all
believers".  We all share in
the mission of the Church, working side by side together with the ordained
priest.  SERVICE is lay ministry. 
The word "lay" comes from the Greek word "laos",
which means "the people".  We
are all, together ' "the people of God". 
This means the bishop, the priests, the deacons, and all of the people. 
Together we comprise The Church.  Each
person is blessed with unique God-given talents, and each person is called by
God to offer their very life, in love and thanksgiving, and to use their
talents, not to bury them in the sand.  Diakonia
is a call to each Orthodox Christian to energetically participate in the active
ministry of the Church.

 

As
each has received a gift employ it for One another. as 'Good stewards of God's
varied grace: whoever speaks, as one who utters oracles of God; whoever renders
service. (Ministry), as one who renders it by the strength which God supplies in
order that in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ. (I Peter
4:7-11)

 

"Every
man, according to the will in his heart, so let him give; not grudgingly, or of
necessity; for God loves a cheerful giver". (II Corinthians 9:7)

 

 

FELLOWSHIP
(Koinonia): COMMUNION IN THE FAITH

 

FELLOWSHIP
refers to the way in which the Orthodox Christian brings his faith into his
daily and social life.  There is
something holy about Orthodox Christians who gather together socially and who
remain conscious that they are people of God. 
The relationship of the three persons of the Holy Trinity is perfect love
as a community.  By gathering
together and showing love for one another, we emulate the Holy Trinity, gaining
strength, courage, and patience to develop a truly Christian lifestyle.

 

Whatever
we are doing, be it in the Church, social hall, home or gymnasium, we must
remember that we are Temples of the Holy Spirit. 
Activities work, recreation, and thoughts must all be consistent with the
reality that we are in constant fellowship with each other AND with God: The
Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

 

"You
shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and
with all your mind.  This is the
great and first commandment, and the second is like it, you shall love your
neighbor as yourself, on these two commandments depend all the law and the
prophets." (Matthew 22:37-40)

 

In
Fellowship (Koinonia) we are one.  We
gather together as the Body of Christ and work together in communion and in
fellowship.  We begin to realize and
become aware that Christ is the focal point of all our activities and
relationships with one another.  Our
love for Christ and our faith in the Holy Spirit begins to guide us as we center
our lives around loving one another the way Christ loves us, unconditionally,
unselfishly, and wholeheartedly.  The
presence of God is not only with us on Sundays: is always with us as we grow and
learn to love one another in the spirit of genuine fellowship.

 

SUGGESTIONS
FOR YOUR PERSONAL PROGRAM

 

This
list is certainly not exhaustive.  Feel
free to add to it and to please be creative.

 

WORSHIP
(Liturgia) includes anything having to do with worship, knowing God better, and
salvation - communion with God.

 

1. 
Participate in corporate prayer and the sacraments, such as the Divine
Liturgy and Holy Communion, as often as possible.  This includes the weekday services, feast days and vespers,
since you are striving to live an Orthodox life, and not to simply be a
once-a-week Christian.

 

2. 
Find a Father Confessor (either your parish priest or another Orthodox
priest) with whom you can intimately discuss personal and spiritual problems and
questions.  He will be your priest
for the Sacrament of Confession, having the training and the grace of God to
guide your spiritual life of reconciliation and union with God.

 

3. 
Learn the Church calendar and the cycle of spiritual life and prepare
properly for Feast Days and sacramental participation.

 

4. 
Fast according to the church calendar in order to develop spiritual depth
and strength.

 

5. 
Develop a private prayer life that is both meaningful and helpful to you
and those for whom you pray.

 

6. 
Give alms, with prayer and thanksgiving.

 

7. 
Read the Holy Bible.

 

8. 
Read about your Orthodox faith.

 

9. 
Seek to experience God through others who are seeking God, through
Orthodox discussion groups and religious retreats.

 

 

WITNESS
(Martyria) means commitment to Christ and His Church, exemplifying and spreading
your faith in your daily life.

 

1. 
Analyze what impact your growing commitment to Christ will have on your
values, goals, activities, friends and priorities in life. 
Compare your commitment to that of the saints and to the principles by
which they lived and for which they died.

 

2. 
Study and understand the views of your Church on moral issues and the
dignity of human life.  As you
internalize these views, consider how to defend them and live by them.

 

3. 
Examine the ways in which your moral sense should affect the decisions
you make in your student, professional, and daily life.

 

4. 
Stress your responsibility to God and His Church. 
Give of your time, talents and resources.

 

5. 
Seek out other Orthodox Christians and share yourself and your spiritual
concerns and experiences with them.

 

6. 
Witness to your faith through service to the Church School, the Choir,
Teen Gathering, Senior SOYO, and Fellowship, as a Chanter or as a Parish Council
Member.

 

7. 
Participate in discussion groups, retreats, and forums where you can
learn to develop your Orthodox identity, as well as testify to your faith.

 

8. 
Serve on a Welcome and Hospitality Committee for Orthodox Christians who
may have recently moved into the area or who are simply inactive. 
Help them feel that they belong.

 

9. 
Sponsor or assist philanthropic and humanitarian projects. 
Represent your parish in local organizations-. 
The Cancer Society, The Red Cross, etc. Let it be known that you
represent the local Orthodox Church, and that the Church's commitment to Christ
also means concern for the community at large.

 

10. 
Assist in familiarizing others with Archdiocese Institutions: The
Antiochian Village, St. Ignatius, etc.

 

11. 
Promote Public Relations for the Church.  Witness can be expressed by your participation and updates in
The Word Magazine, The Archdiocese Web Page and by your support of the ACORN
program (Antiochian Christian Orthodox Radio Network) to have it aired locally.

 

 

SERVICE
(Diakonia) refers to serving Christ and His Church
as lay ministers - "the royal priesthood" - in the fulfillment of the
Church's mission... both to its members and to the world.

 

1. 
Ministry to your parish:

 

a. 
Extend hospitality to visitors and new members.

b. 
Provide educational materials by helping to support the parish library
and a rack of religious tracts and pamphlets.

 

2. 
Ministry to shut-ins and senior citizens:

 

a. 
Obtain names from your priest.

b. 
Show concern and provide companionship by phoning or visiting these
people, who are often lonely.

c. 
Assist with shopping or delivering food and medications.

d. 
Provide transportation to church services and functions.

 

3. 
Ministry to other adults and to youth:

 

a. 
Assist in guiding young people to plan their careers and professions,
choose schools and find summer jobs.

b.  
Encourage creative involvement in the life of the Church by suggesting
what young people have both to gain and to offer.

 

4. 
Assist your parish in fund-raising activities.  Encourage and physically support projects which compliment
the Church's dignity and project its Christian identity.

 

5. 
Be a good steward.  Offer
your self to God in thanksgiving for His steadfast love and blessings on you. 
Support your church by giving of your time, talents and treasury. 
You, and all your God-given resources and talents - whatever they may be
are all valuable and vital "tools" in the hands of God.

 

 

FELLOWSHIP
(Koinonia) is the social side of Christian living,
where the Christian is aware of the presence of God in all of his activities,
even away from the Church.  It is
"to love one another, in word and in deed".

 

1. 
Educational development: attend seminars on social political, economic
and family life.

 

2. 
Cultural development: attend lectures on cultural heritage; share in
American and other cultural activities, such as dances, meals, concerts, plays
and other functions.

 

3. 
Recreational activities: go on outings, excursions, and field trips;
participate in recreation that is consistent with your Orthodox Christian
values.

 

4. 
Athletics: organize inter-church teams where possible. 
Keep in mind that the Church's purpose in sponsoring such activities is
to cultivate fellowship and Christian love among participants.

 

5. 
Share meals with a sense of Christian awareness and thankfulness; such as
at coffee hour, SOYO and Fellowship meetings, or a parish picnic. 
Remember that we can also fast together with one another.

 

 

SUGGESTIONS
FOR A GROUP "CHURCH MINISTRY" PROPGRAM

 

Many
group activities overlap with those suggested for the individual program, so,
each Church Ministry group should refer to that list, as well as the next, which
is, again, far from complete.

 

WORSHIP
(Liturgia).  Christ said, "For
where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them.
(Matt. 18:20)

 

1. 
Begin the year or any other appropriate occasions with a Divine Liturgy,
Vesper, or Thanksgiving Service, possibly followed by a party to help worship be
seen as a celebration.

 

2. 
Observe the calendar and Lenten periods.  Orthodox Christians must strive to be in complete harmony
with the liturgical life of the Church.  Often
we don't do this because we are ignorant of the ecclesiastical cycle and its
meaning.  Fellowship in this
learning effort will be edifying.

 

3. 
Attend church, including mid-week set-vices, as a group in order to learn
to live your faith on a daily basis.

 

4. 
Participate in corporate prayer as a family unit and receive Holy
Communion together.

 

5. 
Develop a basic Religious Education program to encourage spiritual
resurgence and train leaders in the Church. 
Among basics to be studied are:

 

a. 
The Holy Bible.  The Holy
Tradition.

b. 
The meaning of the Divine Liturgy.

c. 
Church History.  The Holy
Fathers.

d. 
Moral issues, scientific- social and political theories and events from
an Orthodox Christian perspective.

 

6. 
Organize spiritual retreats for your group on the local and/or the
regional level. Hence, the real need for our Midwest Region!

 

7. 
Bring guest speakers to the church in an adult lecture program.

 

 

WITNESS
(Martyria) must be accomplished with both tenacity
and restraint.  The first step in
bearing witness to your faith is to know your faith; the second is knowing
yourself in relation to God; both of which are accomplished through WORSHIP.  The third step is the daily manifestation of what you know
about your faith to others. Together in a group, this can be done through
discussion and action.

 

1. 
Determine the needs of your parish.,

 

2. 
Since most Western Christians know little about Orthodoxy, make its
presence known.  Represent your
Church in ecumenical programs and-project an Orthodox point of view.

 

3. 
Read Orthodox-Sources and recommend them to others.

 

4. 
Seek out young adults and young married couples and tell-them about the
local church programs.

 

5. 
Sponsor or assist in philanthropic projects as a group

 

6. 
Organize programs that will introduce the Archdiocese Church Ministry
Programs to the faithful, possibly by showing films.

 

7. 
Help your church and its activities get press/radio coverage.

 

 

SERVICE
(Diakonia) is the call to participate in a
collective ministry; it is in fact, lay ministry. Which is becoming increasingly
important in the life of the church, as parishioners find that the church cannot
survive without working members, not just an overworked priest. 
A group can often do more than individuals alone.

 

1. 
Assist the priest in the teaching function of the church.

 

a. 
Fund, organize and establish a church library.

b. 
Open a church bookstore with browsing hours after church.

c. 
Sponsor bringing a speaker or a film that is educational for a mixed
audience.

d. 
Sponsor a teen so they can attend the Antiochian Village.

 

2. 
Serve the faith by visiting and assisting the poor, bedridden, or aged.

 

a. 
Some elderly fear being alone.  Create
a list of those who reside alone.  Take a name ax)d telephone that person daily at approximately
the same time to ascertain that the person is alive and well.

 

3. 
Encourage others to be active in the life of the church.

 

4. 
Organize a "Parish Resource Center" of the particular talents
of all parishioners who want to help the church in some way.

 

5. 
Represent your parish in local organizations: Cancer Society, Heart Fund. 
Red Cross, Hospital Volunteers, etc.

 

6. 
Organize, sponsor, and assist in an honorable fund raising project for
the benefit of the Church's ministry.

 

 

FELLOWSHIP
(KOINONIA). Christ said, "You shall love your God with all your heart, and
with all your soul, and with all your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself.
(Matthew 22:37-40)

 

1. 
Host a monthly open house or the Sunday coffee hour where people can meet
each other.

 

2. 
Sponsor lectures on controversial topics, perhaps on social, political,
economic, family life or on cultural heritage.

 

3. 
Organize a "nature day" for children and all that are
interested.

 

4. 
Attend concerts, plays, and cultural functions as a group.

 

5. 
Organize a volleyball, basketball, or softball team. 
Invite other parishes to play.

 

6. 
Schedule weekly/monthly meeting around SOME program for social
interaction and good Christian fellowship.

 

What Is A Good Man?

Word Magazine  November
1959  Page 7

 

WHAT
IS A GOOD MAN?

 

 

By
Father Michael Azkoul, Spring Valley, Ill.

 

  

 

Too many
people just assume that they know what a “good man” is. Because a man or an
organization (composed of “good men”) builds hospitals, schools, an orphanage,
an old-folks home, gives to medical research, to needy relatives, to charities,
or because he is pleasant, honest, kind, loyal, refined, cheerful, honorable, or
possesses those qualities which endears him to his neighbor, he is called
“good,” a “good man.” I repeat, people assume that a “good
man” is defined in this manner, but rarely do people critically examine the
assumption to discover whether a “good man” may actually be what he is generally
accepted to be.

 

The
thinking on the “good man” has simply ignored Christianity and naturally
Orthodoxy which is true Christianity. Christian experience, dogma, doctrine,
canon law, are casually excluded as something personal and having little to do
with the essential character of a “good man.”  
The Church is “what you make it” and very few people would include in
their definition of a “good man” his religion. Surely, he is expected to
have one and must live up to it, but as such, it is secondary in the analysis.
Of course, he must believe in God (whatever that means), but “each in his own
way and each in his own words.”

 

Now, can
these ideas about the “good man” be reconciled with the Christian
Truth? Is a “good man” (in the Christian and only sense) to be identified
with the common conception of him? Is a “good man,” as is ordinarily
believed, a man who does “good,” “good” as we usually think of it? Is
the belief, any belief in God, sufficient to make a man “good?” What is the
source of our opinions concerning the “good man?” Are they from God or men?
Are the ideas that most of us hold on this matter given by our environment or
are they the revelation of God? In any case, let us see what the Church has to
say about the “good man.”

 

The
Church teaches that three things are required for a man to be “good”: 1)
conversion 2) grace 3) faith. Conversion means repentance (literally from
the Greek, “change of mind”). Conversion necessarily requires faith, the
right faith, the faith given, revealed, disclosed in Christ Jesus. A man must be
converted to be “good.” He must be changed from a son of Adam to a son of
God by grace. He must be “born again” (JOHN
iii, 3), renewed, made a “new
creature” in Christ. The result is a new mentality, a “change of mind,” a
new attitude and approach to all things. This is accomplished primarily by the
Sacraments, especially, the Holy Eucharist, which give grace. 
“But God, Who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which He
loved us, even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together
with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up with Him, and made
us sit with Him in heavenly places in Christ Jesus” (EPH. ii, 4-6). It is grace, an energy of God, a gift, an
undeserved favor, divine and activating, which converts us, which makes us
“good.”

 

With a
converted being a man receives “illumination,” “light,” “sight,” so
that his faith in God has truth, direction, substance. The life of grace gives
Christian faith. That faith is the faith of the Church, the Body of Christ, the
Bride with Whom Christ is “one flesh.” This communion of Bride and
Bridegroom, this common life of Head and Body, this mystical and Divine
intimacy, gives rise to the experience of incomprehensible beauty. From it
issues Truth, a Truth which is set in words, words which can hardly hold their
meaning; and these words are Creed and canon and certitude. This is all obtained
in sacred community with others in Christ, in the Church, not
alone. Certainly, it must become a personal possession, but the acquisition
comes through the common life in the Body of Christ. It is this experience, this
knowledge, through conversion, through grace, through love and unity in the
Beloved, Christ Jesus, that creates a “good man.” A “good man” is the
result of what the Blessed Trinity and the Church has done. In other words, it
is impossible to be a good man without Jesus Christ.

 

One may
build hospitals, donate to charity, etc., be characterized by all those
“moral” qualities which the world calls “good,” but they are meaningless
and illusory without the Christian experience: conversion, grace, faith. The
very definition of a “good man” relies upon his relation to Jesus Christ.
Thus, as anti-Christian is utterly wicked and a true Orthodox only is fully a
“good man.” Conversion, grace, faith, that without which a man cannot be
“good,” no matter what the world thinks. In other terms, the more fully a
man is integrated into the life of the Church, the better man he is, and without
Jesus Christ and His Bride, goodness would be impossible. “For we ourselves
were once foolish, disobedient, led astray, slaves to various passions and
pleasures, passing our days in malice and envy, hated by men and hating one
another; but when the goodness and loving kindness of God, our Savior, appeared,
He saved us, not because of deeds done by us in righteousness, but in virtue of
His own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal in the Holy Spirit,
which He poured out upon us richly through Jesus Christ, our Savior, so that we
might be justified by grace and become heirs of hope of eternal life. The saying
is “sure” (TIT. ii, 3-8).

 

What is an Orthodox Woman?

 

Again
Magazine, September, 1994, Page 4-7

 

 

 

WHAT
IS AN ORTHODOX WOMAN?

By
Katherine Hyde

 

Being
a woman has never been an easy task, ever since God said to Eve, “In
pain you shall bring forth children” (Genesis 3:16).  But up until this century, it was at least a fairly
straightforward one.  Every little
girl grew up knowing exactly what was required of her in life, and learned, if
not to like it, at least to accept it.

 

In
the twentieth century, all this has changed. 
Not that being a woman has gotten any easier, in spite of multitudes of
“labor-saving” household devices and the rather dubious advantages of
“having it all.”  (What nobody
told my generation, the later baby-boomers, when we were embarking on our
careers and families was that “having it all” really only meant having twice
as much work!)  But while hard work
is still with us, modern women have lost their clear direction for life. 
We are confronted with a cacophony of voices and choices, each beckoning
us onto a different path that promises “fulfillment’”

 

The
world gives us many options, ranging from the ultra-conservative image of the
cowering, mouselike wife living in total subjection to her overbearing husband,
to the upwardly mobile business or professional woman who can’t be bothered
with annoying distractions such as children. 
On the farthest fringe, we hear the radical feminists calling every woman
to become a (preferably Lesbian) manifestation of the earth-goddess.

 

Although
the world offers these and countless other choices, it fails to provide any
satisfactory means of determining which of these paths (if any) is really the
right one.  Even the various
churches have not been able to present a united front or to give women any
clear, reliable direction as to how we ought to order our lives or what sort of
model we ought to follow.

 

Indeed,
most churches seem to be just as confused as individual women are as to how to
respond to rapidly changing social conditions and the demands of feminism.

 

So
where does all this leave us?  Must
we choose between equally  unacceptable
extremes, or is there another way?  Is
there a way that offers peace amidst chaos; that speaks of balance and right
proportion; that offers eternal rather than temporal regards; that promises true
fulfillment, not of passing earthly desires and ambitions, but of the deepest
longings of our souls?

 

There
is indeed such a way, and it is to be found within the Orthodox Church. 
The Orthodox model of womanhood is based upon the wisdom of the ages
rather than the shifting sands of philosophical fads. 
The Orthodox way sees woman as God sees her – as a creature of honor
and dignity, with gifts and responsibilities uniquely her own, with her own
essential role to play in the salvation of mankind.

 

To
flesh out that vision and see it more clearly, we must look first at the
historical development of the place of women within the community of faith.

 

IN
THE BEGINNING

 

To
understand the history of women in the Church, we have to go back to the very
beginning: to Eve. Church Fathers and scholars have expressed a variety of
opinions about Eve, about the nature of her relationship with Adam before the
Fall, and about the true significance of the “curse” laid on her after the
Fall. But beyond all the controversy, several things are clear:

 

I)
Eve was created in the image of God, just as was Adam. “So God created
man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He
created them” (Genesis 1:27). In their essence as created beings, men and
women stand with equal worth and honor before God.

 

2)
Eve was created to be Adam’s “helper” (Genesis 2:18). This does not
mean she was to be his servant, still less his slave. The Hebrew word used here (ezer)
is often used of God Himself as the Helper of His people. Clearly, the rela­tionship
intended is one of mutual coop­eration, not of domination. Adam, on the other
hand, was given the task of naming the animals before Eve was made from his rib:
so the work of “subduing the earth” was primarily his.

 

3)
Eve, as we all know, made a dread­ful mistake. She listened to the
seductive words of the serpent and, without consult­ing her husband, ate
the forbidden fruit, thus condemning herself and all her prog­eny to a life
outside Paradise. Some have speculated that Satan chose to tempt Eve rather than
Adam, not because she was weaker, but because he knew that Adam would follow her
in her sin (making him equally guilty). The righteousness of the world was
entrusted to Eve’s keeping, but she did not keep the trust.

 

4)
As a result of her sin, Eve was condemned to sorrow and pain in child­bearing,
and to a life of subordination to her husband (Genesis 3: 16). The wording of
this curse (“you shall have sorrow… he shall rule”) suggests that God was
sim­ply predicting what would happen to women living in a fallen world, rather
than deliberately laying a punishment upon them. Certainly the curse is an
accurate description of what happens to women when they are left at the mercy of
fallen men.

 

So
we have a picture of God’s intention for men and women—a relationship of
loving cooperation between two people equal in value and honor, but differing in
roles. And we have a picture of that rela­tionship perverted by sin: women
bound by their own desire and their need for children to men who wrongfully domi­nate
and belittle them. But in that very hour when God pronounced the fate of fallen
woman, he also pronounced her hope: the Seed that would bruise Satan’s head.

 

THE
SECOND MOTHER

 

The
next great epoch in the history of women is embodied by the one who has been
called the second Eve, as Christ is the second Adam: Mary, the Mother of God. As
it was given to a woman to exercise her free will to banish all humanity from
Paradise, so it was given to a woman to provide, by her own will, the means of
man’s restoration to his blessed state. Without Mary’s willing and complete
surrender to the will of God, there could have been no Incarnation, and thus no
crucifixion and no Resurrection—in other words, no Savior and no salvation for
mankind.

 

As
Eve was the mother of all man­kind, so it was through motherhood that Mary gave
this most precious gift to all humanity. Thus Mary became the Mother of all
those who would become the children of God. In Mary we see the epitome of all
that redeemed woman can become— a state even more glorious than that Eve held
before her Fall. Consider some of the qualities that make Mary, the Mother of
God, the ultimate model around which our lives, even in this modern, frenetic
day and age. can and must be molded:

 

1)
Mary willingly submitted to the will of God. Although she was
chosen, she was not forced: her obedience was voluntary and wholehearted. Later,
as Joseph’s wife, she also submitted willingly to her husband—she who had
known God more intimately than any other hu­man being as she carried Him within
her womb.

 

2) Mary responded to God in faith. What was asked of her must
have been frightening and was certainly dangerous; but Mary trusted the love of God for her
protection.

 

3) Mary risked everything for motherhood. In her society, for a
young woman to become pregnant outside of marriage was the ultimate degradation.
Had Joseph been a hardhearted man, Mary could have become a complete pariah,
ostracized by her neighbors, unable to marry, with no means of supporting her­self
and her child. How many women in our society have chosen abortion rather than
face circumstances less difficult than these? But Mary chose rather to risk her
own life to give life to another.

 

4)
Mary took on the role of interced­ing for men and of leading them to Christ.
At the wedding at Cana, she first made known the people’s need to her Son,
knowing in spite of His protests that He would fill that need; then she said to
the people, “Whatever He says to you, do it” (John 2:5). She thereby exhorts
us all, her spiritual children, to respond to Christ with the same loving,
trusting obedience she herself showed.

 

Paul
Evdokimov, in his book Woman and the Salvation of the World (St.
Vladimir’s Seminary Press. 1994), sums up the spiritual role (or “charism”)
of women, as exemplified by Mary, thus: to give birth to Christ in other people.
We may be called to physical motherhood, to pass on our faith to our children:
or we may be called to spiritual motherhood, to show forth the image of Christ
to all men and call them to Him.

 

WOMEN
IN THE CHURCH

 

Christ
showed, through His own behavior to women and through His teach­ing to His
disciples, that while the place for proper headship and divinely established
authority remained a constant both in the home and in the Church, a significant
shift had occurred in the old order of male/female relationships which had
prevailed since the Fall. Christ treated women with dignity, respect, and compassion.
In His teaching on marriage (Matthew 19:3-9), He restored their marital rights
to what they had been “in the beginning,” before allowances had to be made
for the hardness of men’s hearts. Through the redemption accomplished by His
death and Resurrection, Christ made it possible for men and women once again to
strive for the ideal established in Paradise: a loving cooperation between
equals with different, complementary roles.

 

This
ideal was largely upheld in the first few centuries of the Church. Women swelled
the ranks of the saints and martyrs, giving their lives to God in a variety of
roles, including those of prophetess, teacher, and deaconess as well as the more
traditional ones of wife, mother, and performer of charitable works. When men
began to seek the desert as a place to live out a more radical commitment to
God, women—beginning with Saint Mary of Egypt, to whose holiness even Saint
Anthony the Great deferred — were not far behind.

 

Within
the family, the position of women was better among Christians than it had ever
been before. While Saint Paul exhorted wives to submit to their husbands—which
was nothing new—he also, even more strongly, exhorted men to love their wives
“as Christ also loved the church” (Ephesians 5:25)—in other words, to the
point of giving their lives for them. This was something new. The ancient
curse was beginning to crumble.

 

At
the same time, however, there were teachers in the Church who held to a view of
women more in keeping with the views of their Jewish forebears (succinctly expressed
in the traditional male prayer, “Thank You, Lord, that You did not make me a
woman”). Some blamed women entirely for the Fall and claimed that they were
inherently evil, to be avoided by any man who would seek righteousness. Some
insisted that marriage and sexuality came into being only after the Fall and
were nothing but a necessary evil for the propagation of the species. One cannot
but sus­pect that these men—mostly celibates— were misplacing the blame for
their troublesome bodily passions, assigning that blame not to their own fallen
nature and the temptation of the devil, but to the unfortunate and inadvertent
object of those passions. woman.

 

As
the centuries went by, this dis­torted view began to exert a greater influence
over the Church’s attitude toward and treatment of women. Women gradually came
to be excluded from the diaconate and from other ministries in which they had
previously taken an equal part with men. Women who achieved sanctity were
praised as having “overcome” their weak and evil feminine nature and become
as righteous as men.

 

Women
never completely lost their champions, however. In the nineteenth century in
Russia, feminine spirituality began to come into its own again. Several notable
elders, including Saint Seraphim of Sarov and Saint Theophan the Recluse, made
it their business to encourage women, both in the world and in the mo­nastic
life. Both of these men founded and directed women’s monasteries, and offered
spiritual direction to countless lay­women, in person or through correspondence.
These godly men had the prophetic insight that it would be primarily through
women that the Faith would be preserved in Russia during the seventy years of
communist persecution, and they wanted women to be prepared.

 

ORTHODOX
WOMEN TODAY

 

Not
surprisingly, the position of women in the Orthodox Church today reflects both
sides of this history—that which would abase them along with that which
affirms their dignity.

 

On
the one hand, it cannot be denied that there are parishes in which women are
permitted to do only those tasks which the men consider “women’s work” and
therefore “beneath” them—cleaning the church, taking care of the children,
baking the prosphora. In fact, of course, these traditionally female
tasks are just as honorable and just as essential to the life of the Church as
any of the more public or glamorous tasks which these men reserve to themselves;
nevertheless, they do not exhaust the spectrum of women’s gifts and therefore
should not circumscribe their contribution.

 

On
the other hand, there are many parishes in which women serve in every capacity
except those of the ordained clergy—as chanters, readers, choir directors; as
teachers, administrators, parish council members; as helpers to the clergy in
all sorts of works of mercy.

 

While
Orthodox practice in some places reflects the overmasculinization of our culture
as a whole, the solution to this problem is not to be found in feminism, even of
the so-called “Christian” variety. The fundamental error of feminism is the
same as that of the male-dominated culture that feminism is reacting against:
the error of believing that masculine qualities, such as leadership, physical
strength, analytical thinking, and strict justice, are inherently superior to
feminine qualities, such as nurturing, gentleness, intuition, and mercy. Instead
of striving to win men’s respect for feminine qualities, feminists tried to
empower women by transforming them into imitation men.

 

“Christian”
feminism, while less vehement in some respects than the secular variety, still
attempts to raise the position of women in the Church by placing them in roles
traditionally reserved for men, such as the priesthood, instead of by exhorting
the Church to accept and honor women in the ministries for which they are
naturally and/or spiritually gifted. The masculinization of women which
inevitably results from this mistaken approach is one of many reasons that the
Orthodox Church has steadfastly maintained its traditional stance against the
female priesthood and the “feminization” of God.

 

In
spite of those weaknesses which characterize every human institution, the
Orthodox Church still provides, in her Tradition and very often in practice, the
strongest witness to be found in the mod­ern world to the godly model of woman­hood
that we have been trying to define. We as Orthodox women have the responsibility
to help restore our society to balance by living out those godly feminine
qualities which have often gotten short shrift, both in the world and in the
Church.

 

LIVING
OUT OUR CALLING

 

What,
then, are some of these godly feminine qualities we need to cultivate? It is
impossible to give an exhaustive list, but here are several that seem especially
important.

 

1)
The greatest of these is love. Of course, all Christians are called to
love; but women have a special gift for loving. We should love, first of all,
those closest to us—our families or those who are like a family to us. But we
should not stop there; our love should reach out to our neighborhood, our
parish, our commu­nity, our world. The love demanded of us is not just a
sentimental good feeling toward other people. We’re talking about sacrificial
love—love in action—love that puts our own interests second to those of
the beloved. It’s not an easy task.

 

2)
We should give ourselves in joyful service. Again, all Christians are
called to serve; but it seems to come more naturally to women. Our service
should follow our love, starting at home and spreading outward, always guided by
God’s will for our individual lives.

 

Our
service should also follow our individual gifts. If you can’t bake a fluffy
pastry to save your life, go ahead and say no when the festival committee asks
you to make baklava. But if, on the other hand, you have artistic talent,
perhaps you should study iconography or illustrate lives of saints for children.
Don’t let your gifts go to waste. If you don’t know what your gifts are, or
can’t think of a way to use them for God, talk to your husband or priest or to
an older, wiser woman you know. They may know you better than you know yourself.

 

3)
The essence of womanhood is motherhood. Not all women are called to be
physical mothers, but all are called to be spiritual mothers, guiding and nurturing
and teaching others to follow Christ. Those who work in the world should seek
vocations that allow these qualities their full expression, rather than trying
to com­pete in the dog-eat-dog business world of men.

Those
of us who are mothers in the physical sense must take this responsibility very
seriously. The world would have us believe that mothering is just one aspect of
life, that it can be done quite adequately in the few hours a day we have left
over from our careers or other activi­ties we have chosen to “fulfill
ourselves.” But we mothers really, in our heart of hearts, know better. We
know that children are a sacred trust; they need and deserve the very best we
have to give. If we cannot pass on our faith to them through our example of
devoted love and service, how can the Church survive? And how can we stand
before God and claim to have accomplished anything of any value in this
world?

 

4)
Women have a unique capacity to respond to God with all our hearts and
souls. This is the essence of spirituality, and it comes more easily to women
than to men, because responsiveness characterizes our human relationships as
well as our relationship to God. Men, being called to leadership in the human
realm, often find it more difficult to surrender that role and to meet their
Creator in humility. We women can set an example in simple, faithful piety that
is ultimately more influential in the life of the Church than the most inspired
teaching or the most glori­ous martyrdom.

 

5)
Our proper response to God is to strive for holiness. Only by pursuing
holiness will we become capable of all that is required of us. Only by deepening
our relationship with God can we come to understand, accept, and live the life
He has designed for us. Only through loving, trusting obedience to God can we
find our true calling, as women and as human beings. Only so can we begin to
fulfill the vocation bequeathed to us by Mary of giving birth to Christ in other
people. This is our proper contribution to the salvation of the world.

 

 

 

What Is God?

 

Word Magazine  May 1959  Page 11-12

 

 

 

WHAT
IS
GOD?

 

By Ronald Fadel Isaac

  

 

 

In the
present time of turmoil and unrest many of us are confronted with children of
bitterness, doubt and radicalism. These same individuals have been referred to
in studies by different names through the ages. Despite the passing time and the
difficult titles, these people are the same today as they were at the time of
Christ. The only difference lies in the fact that today there are greater
numbers of them and we are forced by the fabric of our society, to encounter and
diplomatically contend with relativists and agnostics.

 

In
spite of the fact that most of us have been taught, and rightly so, not to
discuss religion or faith in order to avoid unpleasantness among different
peoples, there are some questions which cannot be avoided; questions which must
be answered within ourselves and to other people.

 

I’m
certain most of us have at one time or another thought profoundly about God.
Young people especially, with a searching mind, have asked themselves “What is
God.’’ Surely this is a normal action of man and therefore the agnostic is as
justified in asking you this question as you are in asking yourself.

 

Being
good Orthodox Christians, we would immediately answer that God is the Creator of
the universe. Creator of man, Father of our Savior, Creator of moral law and
Giver of eternal life. Such an answer, however, would hardly satisfy a
non-believer and many times is not fully satisfying to ourselves, despite its
veracity. Therefore deeper searching is undertaken for self satisfaction and for
effectively showing others that we truly are not blind unthinking believers.

 

Each
man’s answer undoubtedly differs from another’s.  In the saint accord some of us
have answered the question to our own satisfaction and have proven to certain
people that we certainly have great cause for our faith. For these men and women
my words are not elucidating, but for those who have not found an answer,
possibly my explanation will provide a method of approach for solution. I doubt
whether my definition of God will become the reader’s: on the contrary, it will
undoubtedly show that each man’s explanation is as good as the other’s and that
it is possible for everyone to think about the mystery of God and by intelligent
consideration provide himself with a reassuring answer. Thus I offer my line of
thought and answer in hope that it will lead others to a consideration of the
question and eventually to an answer which will provide strength for every God
fearing man.

 

The
Bible says that God created man in His own image, yet He is not corporal, so how
are we to interpret this? Let us assume for the following discussion that these
words of the Bible mean in essence that God created man in His own manner in
order to see His image.  If we consider the latter, two questions arise and are
pertinent. The first being, “What is the manner of God?” and the second being,
“What does the image of God look like?”  The second question, naturally, is
unanswerable until after death but the first gives rise to an enlightening
discussion. The manner of God isn’t really difficult to describe since the Bible
has passage upon passage concerned with His actions. He created the universe,
the earth, man, heaven, evil, a moral code and justice. All these things are
nothing more than an issuing forth of truths. All phenomena for all time
are truths. With every creation God gave forth a new truth but all mysteries are
known unto Him only.

 

The
manner of God is also great in love. He loves all the world. He loved man that
He preserved his species from the flood waters. He so loved man that He gave His
only begotten Son that through Him we may find life everlasting. He loves the
devout and their love for each other. With these considerations of God let me
now turn to the nature and manner of man.

 

An
interesting correlation exists between man and God in that man; in his entire
lift time he is concerned with truths and love. The first tears he sheds at
birth are the truth of Adam’s original sin.  As man grows his mind constantly
seeks explanations. “Why is the grass green? Why is the sky blue? What makes the
stars shine? What is life? What is death? What is God?” Questions such as these
are an integral part of his daily development and man by the very nature of his
composition seeks truths with the same fervor as he would food with which to
survive.  If he didn’t search, his existence would be useless. Many of these
questions which are raised by man can be answered by himself, but others,
despite our longevity, can never be answered. Science has given us, for example,
the truth concerning the composition of life. We know that the smallest unit of
life, protoplasm, is composed of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen in
exacting quantities in relation to each other. Yet with this seemingly vast
knowledge no man can, or ever will, create life through science.  Moreover, man
knows a great deal about the universe. He knows how far the most distant visible
star is from our planet. But he cannot say what is beyond that star or if one
even exists. These are truths unknown to him.

 

As the
growing minds of men concern themselves with the discovery of truths so also is
man concerned daily with love. He grows to know the love of a mother, father,
brother, sister and others close to him. He experiences love of friendship, love
of God, love of the church and His wonders. Every man when admiring a flower,
tree or any pleasure of nature is experiencing a type of love. Early in life
some men discover love of a woman and love of a wife.  All mortals know the love
and desire of a goal or ambition at one time or another in their lives.

 

Thus
the reader with no great difficulty can readily see that man by his very nature
seeks truths and discovers love during the course of his life up until the
moment of death. In the end, every mortal discovers the truth of death and
thereafter heaven or hell according to his merits in life. If to heaven, then
the soul of man shall see God; and if to hell, he shall be denied this supreme
vision. If a man’s soul goes to heaven he will see God and having seen God he
shall know all the mysteries of the universe. Since man by his very nature seeks
truths and knows love in life; after death there
remains but to know the truth of God’s vision. The greatest agony would be the
inability to see the supreme vision, thus hell. There can never be peace,
comfort or satisfaction without knowing God which accounts for hell in my mind.
Those however who in life, follow His creed shall have their souls rewarded by
knowing God’s love and seeing His vision.

 

I have
theorized that once man has seen God he shall know all things for time, thereby
satisfying the quest of his soul in life and death. It logically follows in my
mind that the definition of God is as follows: God is the epitome of truth
and love. Once man, after death, knows all truths of the universe and
experiences the compassion and love of God; he shall have seen Him and shall
have climaxed the course which his mortal life typifies.

What Is Holy Chrismation?

Word Magazine  February 1962  Page 5

 

WHAT IS HOLY CHRISMATION?

 

Father Michael J. Buben

 

 

“Holy Chrismation is a Sacrament in which the baptized believer, being anointed with Holy Chrism on certain parts of the body, in the name of the Holy Spirit, receives the gifts of the Holy Spirit for growth and strength in spiritual life.” (Philaret’s Catechism)

 

This sacrament is administered immediately after baptism and like baptism cannot be administered twice to the same soul. Baptism cleans us from the pollution of original sin and makes us a member of the grace-giving living Orthodox Church of Christ. Chrismation nourishes and strengthens the baptised in the spiritual life. Just as a child needs the guidance of its parents, so a newly baptised soul receives the grace and guidance of the Holy Spirit. This is one of the reasons why Chrismation has never been performed separately in the Orthodox Church.

 

Our Lord and Savior instituted this Sacrament when at the Jerusalem Temple He said: “If any man thirst, let him come unto me and drink. He that believeth in me, as the Scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living waters etc., etc.” (John 7, 37-38). St. John explains this text as forecasting the Holy Spirit which believers would receive.

 

After the Apostles were strengthened with the “power from above”, they transferred gifts of this power to all who were baptized and “put on Christ.” As an example let us read the following texts from the book of Acts. “Now when the apostles which were at Jerusalem heard that Samaria had received the word of God, they sent unto them Peter and John: who when they were come down, prayed for them, that they might receive the Holy Ghost. (For as yet He was fallen upon none of them: only they were baptised in the Name of the Lord Jesus.) Then laid they their hands on them, and they received the Holy Ghost.” (8, 14-17)

 

When the Apostles could not be at all places to “lay hands” on the growing number of Christians as thousands began to accept Christianity, they instituted the use of Holy Chrism. Holy Chrism could easily be distributed to the bishops and priests in the settlements where they served. Only bishops received the power to make Chrism as it was needed, and priests used it only in the absence of the bishop, but always in the bishop’s name as centuries passed. “But ye have an unction from the Holy One, and ye know all things.” (I John 2, 20). St. John in his first epistle further explains the inward grace which anointing with Chrism brings; and the anointing which you have received of Him abideth in you, and ye need not that any man teach you; but as the same anointing teaches you of all things, and is truth, and is no lie: and event it hath taught you, abide therein.” (27)

 

St. Paul also wrote about Holy Chrismation when he said: “Now He which establisheth us with you in Christ, and hath anointed us, is God: Who hath also sealed us, and given the earnest of the Spirit in our hearts.” (2 Cor.1,21-22).

 

St. Paul in this text says anointing with Holy Chrism establishes us in Christ, and it is from here that the Church takes its formula for this Sacrament: The Seal of the Gift of the Holy Spirit.

 

The anointing of the forehead signifies the sanctification of the mind, or thoughts.

The anointing of the chest signifies the sanctification of the heart, or desires.

The anointing of the eyes, ears, lips signifies the sanctification of the senses.

The anointing of the hands and feet signifies their sanctification to good works and the walk in the way of His commandments.

 

Orthodox brothers and sisters Through the Sacrament of Holy Chrismation you were Confirmed in the Orthodox Faith. You received the Holy Spirit and grace-giving gifts, without which it would have been impossible for you to have spiritual growth.

 

Does the Sacrament glow in your heart or has it dimmed like the last ember in the fireplace? “Stir up the Gift of God!” Do not dim the gifts of the Holy Spirit nor contradict their influence by vain thoughts and desires. Help thy neighbor. Make use of prayer and fasting. Follow His commandments.

 

Specific parts of your body were sealed with Chrism, that all your strength and abilities might be given to the service of God. “For ye were bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God’s.” (1 Cor. 6, 20)

 

What Is Orthodoxy?

Word Magazine 
November 1957  Page 241-243

 

  

WHAT
IS ORTHODOXY?

  

by A. Woronen

  

 

A Discussion of the
Orthodox Church’s World Outlook . . .

  

An
Orthodox Christian senses and is filled with joy and hope of the Resurrection
not only during the holy Paschal night—he is never without it. Even during the
Great Fast, when an Orthodox Christian concentrates on the test of his deeds and
penitence, with his whole spiritual entity, with all his heart, soul and
thoughts—even then while prostrate before the Cross, he glorifies the Holy
Resurrection of Him Who was crucified thereupon: even on Good Friday morning, he
sings, “We bow down to Thy Passion, O Christ; show us Thy glorious
Resurrection” (ANTIPHON 15).

 

Christ’s
Resurrection is the triumphant fulfillment of the Lord’s descent to earth. The
victory of Christ over the power of the Devil indicates liberation from this
power for those who believe and follow Christ. His conquest over death in His
Resurrection is a guarantee of the future Resurrection and Eternal Life for
those who believe in Him. It is because of this reason that the Resurrection of
Christ occupies such an important place in the world-outlook of the Orthodox
Church. The Resurrection is the basis of our faith and hope, as well as the
source of the spiritual life of Orthodoxy.

 

We have
shown above that the coming of the Son of God upon earth opened the road to
salvation and eternal life for us. However, neither salvation, nor participation
in the higher, more beautiful life in Christ, nor the restoration and
transfiguration of a human being are given to a person automatically,
externally, or in a wholly objective manner without the participation of the
individual himself. In all truthfulness, the flow of a beautiful life came into
the world with the coming of the Saviour, and it permeates the world whether we
accept it or not. But the union of individual with the communal living in this
life comes into being only through a free and inner act on the part of the
individual himself. Similarly does the sun send down its life-giving rays upon
the earth, but it is our choice, as to whether we take advantage of its warmth
and light, or, whether we do not allow its rays to enter our home, in which we
hide ourselves after closing the windows and doors. First of all, we must have
the desire to stand upon the path of salvation, and secondly, we must
have the will to travel along this road. When these two suppositions are
deeply rooted in the inner convictions of an individual, then there will be no
doubt of receiving God’s help along the way toward acquiring all the results
of union with the beautiful life.

 

What is
the meaning of eternal life in Christ? In the Orthodox understanding, this ideal
state cannot present itself in the form of a subjective assurance in which
merely faith is lacking in the efforts for salvation, or which is attainable by
belonging to one or another denomination. The ideal also cannot be one of
exactness alone, e.g., the formal fulfillment of all decisions and laws of the
Church, etc. It was due to such an understanding of piety that Our Heavenly
Saviour bitterly rebuked the Pharisees. The ideal of true Christian life is a
road of sacrifice, the participation in Christ’s sufferings, the bearing of
His Cross, the constant battle against sin and the sinful nature of man, the
incessant striving for perfection—the highest ideal being the perfection of
the Father (MATT. 5: 48). In this life we observe the harmonious union of faith,
hope, love, good deeds, sincere prayer, and a deeply organic (but not externally
formal or rationalistic) Christian participation in the life of the Body of
Christ—His Church.

 

The
voluntary abasement of the Son of God, His maltreatment and suffering on the
Cross, and death, preceded Christ’s Resurrection. The radiant joy of Pascha is
preceded each year by the spiritual act of the Great Fast, when an Orthodox
Christian bows his head and bends his knees in humility and piety before the
Crucified One. Utilizing much self-control and with all humility, he renounces
many comforts of life and subdues his passions and cravings, crucifying within
himself his “old man.” that is, his sinful nature, making himself dead to
sin (Rom. 6:6) —for without being crucified with Him we are not able fully to
enter, accept and become participants in the joy of the Resurrection. This may
be applied to the entire life of an Orthodox Christian. The source of true
Christian joy, and the anticipative participation in His Life lies only in
Christ, in participation in His Sacrifice and in being crucified with Him (MATT.
16:24). All of the Church’s teachings cry out to the Orthodox Christian to
deny himself and voluntarily take up His Cross.

 

As he
travels along his thornlike path, man alone is powerless and impotent——being
unable to achieve anything through his own efforts in his battle against sin and
the evil doings of the Devil. We may be saved neither with the exertion of our
own efforts, nor with the help of others, but only through God’s Grace. We are
merely able to entreat God for His help and Grace. As a Christian travels upon
his road to perfection, he gains a better understanding of his deep inability
and insignificance, and becomes more conscious of God’s power.

 

God’s
love never leaves a Christian without sustenance and help. One of the greatest
gifts of God’s Grace is faith, which, even in the most trying times, gives
endless strength for life’s battle. We approach God through our deep and
sincere faith: we unite ourselves with Him in an indivisible union, becoming
filled thereby with His strength, against which no deed of evil intention may
prevail. Another virtue which is of no less importance in the life of a
Christian is hope, the basis of which is Our Lord Jesus Christ (1 TIM. 1:1). It
is this hope that fills us with the assurance that God is with us,” that He is
ever looking after us and our salvation, bestowing upon us all things which in
faith we ask of Him. (MATT. 21: 22; John 14: l3-14).

 

The
Church of Christ, founded by Our Heavenly Saviour for the attainment of our
salvation, is the crown of God’s love and the guide for His creation. It is
only through the Church, and by no other means, that one is able to attain the
fullness of a transfigured life. Our presence in the Church makes us members of
Christ’s Mystical Body. We are thereby in deep organic union with Jesus
Christ, the Church’s Supreme Head. This union is manifested with unusual power
in the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist which is the center of Church life.
Through the Church a Christian also unites himself with his brethren in Christ,
who are all members of the great ecclesiastical organism headed by the One
Eternal Head. They all acknowledge the same Faith, partake of the Life-giving
Body and the Precious Blood of Christ, and are animated by the very same Gifts
of the Holy Spirit through the Holy Sacraments. The aim of all Christians is
identical: It is the acquirement of eternal life. Through the Church a Christian
also binds himself with his brethren in communal prayer with those righteous
Orthodox— the Saints, and with the highest and most Orthodox of all Creation,
the exceedingly blessed Mother of God and Ever-virgin Mary. It is in the Church
and through the Church that a Christian is able to perceive the Eternal, which
unveils itself in the fullness of the Body of the Church and in which the Holy
Spirit abides and remains without change.

 

The
source of comprehension for the Church is the Holy Spirit. As the human spirit
gives man the possibility of comprehending himself, the Holy Spirit, Who is of
God, enables us to perceive God and Eternity (I C0R. 2: 11-12). The Holy Spirit
is infallible by nature, and for this reason the Church, which is animated and
blessed by the Holy Spirit, and in which the Holy Spirit resides as the basis of
the Church’s existence, is sinless and infallible. It must be stressed that it
is the Church in its entirety  that
is sinless—the whole of its Mystical Body bound with love, and not an
individual member or a group of members of the earthly Church, even though some
authority may have been bestowed upon them. Due to this very factor the Orthodox
Church will never accept the Roman Catholic doctrine of the infallibility of the
Pope of Rome in things concerning faith, as well as the Protestant view about
the subjective infallibility of the individual in comprehending the truth.

 

The
Orthodox Church regards unity with the ancient Tradition of the early Church as
of great importance. The present-day Church is governed by the doctrine which is
accepted and embodied within the unchangeable Tradition by the “undivided”
Church. Our Church has always retained the deep conviction that the possibility
of comprehending the truth is given only to the whole of the Church. When an
epistle of the Eastern Patriarchs was sent in reply to an epistle of Pope Pius
IX in 1849 it was formulated exactly in accordance with this conviction. Its
contents were as follows: Only the Church, as the living organism comprised of
all the faithful—both   laity
and ecclesiastical hierarchy—may maintain its infallibility, guard against the
changing of dogmas, and uphold the purity of the Liturgy. The Church lives by
the truth and has the truth within itself; a believer is not able to understand
it merely by learning or by the acceptance of a arbitrarily announced doctrine,
but by living in communion with the Body of the Church.

 

In order
that we may be able to understand Orthodoxy in general, we must first have a
proper understanding of the essence of the Church. It should be noted at this
point that Roman Catholic theology has greatly strayed from the teachings of the
Universal Church, as is also the case, in varied degrees, with the teachings of
Protestantism. For this reason let us consider the most important moments of the
essence and life of the Church as they are contained in the teachings of the
Orthodox Catholic Faith.

 

As was
mentioned above, the Church of Christ is the Mystical Body of Christ, the Head
and Chief Cornerstone of which is Our Savior Jesus Christ (EPH. 1:22; 2:20-22;
4:15, 5:23: COL. 1:18; 1 C0R. 3:11; MATT. 21:42). All who acknowledge their
faith in Him, and who through the Holy Sacrament of Baptism enter into the life
of re­birth in Christ, and are joined together in the Body of Christ’s
Church, are members of the Church (EPH. 1:23; 4:16; 1 COR. 12:27; C0L. 2:17,
19). The life of the Church is the continuation of the Incarnate Life of Christ
in His Faithful. After fulfilling the Mystery of our salvation, Our Saviour
ascended into Heaven, but He remains perpetually within the Mystical Body of His
Church in His Divine, Life-giving and all-regenerating Entity.

 

We may
then conclude that the Church of Christ cannot be considered as similar to an
organization or a union in the ordinary worldly understanding of these words. It
is a living organism in which God and man are united in profound inner spiritual
union. Within it the goal of our understanding, salvation, love, joy and
blessing is born, developed and achieved. The Church is a new life which we are
unable to comprehend unless we are born again of water and of the Spirit (JOHN
3:3, 5) into the life in the Church’s Mystical Body, and partake of the Holy
Sacraments which are so generously extended by the Church to all its Faithful.

 

How could
we comprehend the essence of human life if we were not humane ourselves? We
would only perceive the outward appearance of this life, i.e., the actions,
language, laughter, the various facial expressions, etc. But we know that these
are not the only things of which we are conscious. It is the same with the life
of the Church. Only when we have organically entered into the life of the
Church, can we understand the true essence of all the visible external
occurrences: The Divine Services, prayer, church ritual, and the full
significance of the invisible things they indicate.

 

Christ’s
Church is both visible and invisible. It is visible in its organic forms, which
are imperative for its activity upon the earth. It is also visible in its form
of worship, as well as in all the outward appearances of its activity. The
Church is invisible in the mystical existence of Our Saviour within it; in the
life of the Holy Spirit, and in the spiritual union of the Faithful with their
Creator.

 

There is
only one Church just as there is One Body of Christ. Therefore, no individuals
or groups of people, who are separated from the Church, may live in truth—for
the creation if new “churches” and other schisms, lacking unity with the
Church of Christ, contradict the teachings of Our Saviour (JOHN 15:4-7) and the
very nature of the Church. Unity and love are the basis and the essence of the
Church’s existence. We are able to take an active part in the Eternal Life of
the Church and develop toward perfection only in the love that binds us with God
and with all our brethren in Christ. Only within the Church by binding ourselves
to one another with the unconquerable power of prayer and love, may we
comprehend the Eternal which is revealed to us by the Holy Spirit. St. Paul
writes the following on the subject: “For this reason I bow my knees before
the Father . . . that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you,
being rooted and grounded in love, may have power to comprehend with all the
saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love
of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the
fullness of God” (EPH. 3:14, 17-19).

 

The
comprehension of the Eternal comes about by our inner, spiritual and organic
acceptance of it through our participation in the life of the Church, and not in
an external or formal manner. This may also be said about the nature of the
Church in general. The Church is not an external organization or union apart
from its members, nor an external authority or external legislative power—but
a profound inner life in which those united in the One Body of the Church live.
Thus, we may clearly understand why the Orthodox Church does not expand its
influence across the globe by forcing its ideals upon men’s minds and
consciences and by enforcing a formalistic law—but only through permeating
with its eternal teachings the souls of persons, who, having accepted these
teachings for their own, become indivisible parts of the Church. The idea of an
earthly empire, with a hierarchy playing the role of an absolute civil
authority, is foreign and unacceptable to Orthodoxy. It is the Roman Catholic
Church which has accepted to a great extent this form of organization, a form
very similar to the state governmental system with its legislature, formalism
and rationalism. This is one of the reasons that the Roman Church broke away
from the One Catholic Church—for the Church of Christ “is not of this
world” (JOHN 18:36: 17:14). Its Kingdom is the kingdom of the spirit; its
authority is that of love, and its only foundation is Our Saviour Jesus Christ.

 

The inner
spiritual life of the Church unveils itself with exceptional constancy in
Orthodox Divine Services and Sacraments. The Divine Liturgy is based not only
upon the idea that the Church commemorates the life of Christ, glorifying Him
and preaching His Word at the same time; the true essence and basic meaning of
the Liturgy is that the Mystery of our salvation, the inexpressible greatness of
Christ’s mission upon earth, definitely takes place in the Divine Services and
in the Christian life. During the Divine Liturgy a Christian actually
experiences the whole of the Mystery of the God-Man’s Incarnation—from the
Old Testament prophecies, the Annunciation to the Resurrection, the Ascension
and Pentecost. The union of Christ with His Church takes place not only in a
spiritual sense, but also in conscious form, through the immediate presence of
the Saviour’s Body and Blood in the Holy Sacrament, the Eucharist. The
mystical union of the Faithful with the invisible Eternal Life takes place at
the moment the Precious Gifts are given—and this reception serves to
strengthen the participants in the many difficult battles of life.

 

This
mystical union of the members of Christ’s Church with their Creator takes
place also in the other Sacraments of the Orthodox Church. These Sacraments are
the direct action of the Holy Spirit, Whose Grace is bestowed upon those of the
Faithful who wish to receive it. They are acts of the Holy Spirit’s force of
life-giving, invigoration, strengthening and blessing. These, are neither merely
symbols of Grace, nor only the confirmation of the subjective assurance of our
justification and salvation, nor a mark of faith in salvation, as is propagated
by the Protestants in their teaching concerning the Holy Eucharist (Communion)
— they are the actual presence of the Holy Spirit’s regenerating power in
the blessing of the Faithful through the Holy Sacrament. Neither may we conclude
that a Sacrament is merely an external act of ritual performed over a Christian
in accordance with the tradition of the Church, without bringing to light its
profound basic content.

 

Fellow
Christians! how many are the various sects in our day, which, speaking from
their own shallow wisdom, disregard the commands of Christ’s Apostles. They
maintain that there is no need for the Holy Tradition of the Christian Church.
They walk along false paths, being guided by their ego and making a laughing
stock of the words of St. Paul the Apostle: “One Lord, one Faith, one
Baptism” (EPH. 4:5). These sectarians do not recognize the Pastors instituted
by God, do not acknowledge the Saints, condemn Icons, ignore the Cross and
disregard the Fasts.

 

Dear
brethren in Christ! do not listen to these sectarians. Remember the instruction
of St. Paul the Apostle, who commanded us to “withdraw from every brother who
lives irregularly and not in accord with the tradition” of the Apostles (2
THESS. 3:6).