The Useless God

The statement, “God is useless,” is, undoubtedly, sure to strike someone as an insult, not a statement of a faithful believing Christian (much less, a priest). That reaction tells me much about how we feel about the word, “useless,” rather than how we feel about God. In current American parlance, “useless,” is mostly a term of abuse. Who wants to be seen as useless?

Consider this excerpt from a letter of the author and playwriter, Oscar Wilde:

A work of art is useless as a flower is useless. A flower blossoms for its own joy. We gain a moment of joy by looking at it. That is all that is to be said about our relations to flowers. Of course man may sell the flower, and so make it useful to him, but this has nothing to do with the flower. It is not part of its essence. It is accidental. It is a misuse. All this is I fear very obscure. But the subject is a long one.

That the absence of utility is a term of abuse is a profound comment on our time. Stressed, anxious, and sick from the fatigue of life, we find ourselves required to give justification for our leisure. I am “charging my batteries,” we say, giving work the ultimate priority. We only rest in order to work harder.

There are many useless things that mark our lives: beauty, rest, joy. Indeed, it would seem that many of the things that we value most are, for the greater part, quite useless. What is it, to be useful?

The useful thing (or person) gains its value from something other than itself. It is a tool. I value the tool because it allows me to do something else. In many cases, when the usefulness of the tool is expired, it is simply thrown away. In a throw-away society we slowly drown in a sea of obsolescence, surrounded by things for which we no longer have any use.

From a National Geographic article:

Imagine 15 grocery bags filled with plastic trash piled up on every single yard of shoreline in the world. That’s how much land-based plastic trash ended up in the world’s oceans in just one year. The world generates at least 3.5 million tons of plastic and other solid waste a day…. The U.S. is the king of trash, producing a world-leading 250 million tons a year—roughly 4.4 pounds of trash per person per day.

Our sea of trash is a testament to the ethic of utility.

“You only want to use me.” This statement, on the lips of a lover or a friend, is a fearful indictment. We want to be loved for ourselves, not for what we can do, much less as an end to something else. We want to be loved as useless beings.

It is worth noting that among God’s first commandments is one of uselessness:

Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore, the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.

The one day out of the seven that is described as “holy” is the day on which we are commanded to be useless. It is, in Christian terms, part of God’s work within us to make us like Himself – forming and shaping us into the image of Christ.

Utility – usefulness – is a strong value within the world of modernity – that philosophical, cultural agglomeration that came about a little over 200 years ago. Inventing better ploughs and threshing machines, figuring out ways to make everything faster, cheaper, and “better,” indeed, making things that no one had ever dreamed of, is an outstanding way to grow an economy. If you couple it with global trade, the standard of living increases, and some people get quite rich.

An aside: the genius of modernity was not its love for technology, or even for what technology can do. Modernity has become super-proficient in technology simply because it learned how to make it profitable. We do not make better phones because we need better phones: we make them so we can sell them. A large amount of medical research goes into finding ways to extend patents rather than curing diseases. Modernity is not the age of technology: it is the age of profit.

If you do this sort of thing for a good number of decades, and couple it with newly-coined ideas of human individuality and freedom, you can, before long, begin to think that you’re building better humans along with better ploughs, threshing machines and iPhones. Of course, many of the humans endure difficult times as they experience a nagging sense of uselessness that will not seem to go away.

The uselessness bound up with the Sabbath Day had a much deeper meaning as well as a more far-reaching application. The Sabbath Day itself was but a token of an entire way of life. Strangely, uselessness was deeply bound up with the question of justice, and, in a manner of speaking, becomes the foundation for understanding the Kingdom of God itself.

The Sabbath Day of ancient Israel was only a small part of a larger understanding of time and the stewardship of creation. One day in the week was set aside and no work was to be done. One year out of each seven was also to be set aside, and no work in the fields was to be done for the entire year – the land was to lie fallow – unplowed. After seven seven-year cycles, a fiftieth year was to be set aside.

Each seventh year, not only did the land lie fallow, but all debts (except those of foreigners) were to be cancelled. In the fiftieth year, these same things apply, but the land reverted to its original ownership. This fiftieth year began on the Day of Atonement and was known as the “Jubilee Year.”

In the preaching of the prophets, particularly Isaiah, this image of the management of debts and the land is given a cosmic interpretation in addition to its place in the annual cycle of Israel. The Jubilee Year becomes the “Acceptable Year of the Lord,” a coming day when the whole of creation will be set free – a coming Jubilee for everyone and everything.

When Jesus stands to read the Scriptures in the synagogue in Nazareth, he reads from the scroll of Isaiah. It is the passage which speaks of this coming cosmic act of remittance and freedom:

“And he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up. And as was his custom, he went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day, and he stood up to read. And the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

And he rolled up the scroll and gave it back to the attendant and sat down. And the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. And he began to say to them, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” (Luke 4:16–21)

This passage from Isaiah is chosen by Christ to describe what He is about to do. He will preach saying, “The Kingdom of God is at hand.” This Scripture describes what that looks like. The poor hear good news, captives are set free; the blind receive their sight; the oppressed are given liberty – there is a cosmic loosing that happens day by day in His ministry. Indeed, it is not for nothing that He seems to prefer the Sabbath Day above all others for doing this work. He is revealing the true meaning and purpose of the Sabbath.

And this will bring me back to uselessness.

Today, we would look at land lying fallow for a year as a primitive substitute for “crop rotation,” a useful way of promoting responsible agriculture. This is not its actual purpose. It is a deliberate interruption of the cycle of productivity, and the maximizing of profit. It says, “No. There’s something more important.”

The Law within ancient Israel was not an entirely unknown Mideastern practice. Other kingdoms in the area practiced an occasional forgiveness of debt, primarily to secure the position of a ruler. Israel seems to be the first instance in which the forgiveness of debt and the practice of Sabbatarian rest – for people, land, and animals, came to be written into the very fabric of life and given divine sanction. And, even in the non-Sabbath years, there was a prohibition against harvesting an entire field. A portion had to be left standing so that the poor could “glean” the fields for their needs. Maximum efficiency was forbidden. This way of life was not an effort to solidify earthly power, but to undermine it with a radical understanding of the purpose of human existence.

There was nothing new in Christ’s attitude towards the poor and the oppressed. What was new was His willingness to practice it without pulling a punch and His extension of its principles towards everything and everyone.

He drew the imagery of debt and its abolition (with extreme examples) into His teaching on the Kingdom of God itself. What we learn is that this Law of uselessness – the refusal to maximize our own power and efficiency – goes to the very heart of what it means to exist in the image and likeness of God.

That we are loved in our uselessness points to the fact that we are loved for ourselves. We have value and worth in and of ourselves regardless of what we might do. The proclamation of the Kingdom of God is the declaration of what God Himself values.

“…Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin;and yet I say to you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Now if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will He not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?(Matt 6:28–30)

The lilies are useless, doing no work, neither toiling nor spinning. And yet, they are clothed. Our work ethic has become a cultural ethic. We take vacations so that we can return as better workers. Few things are done for their own sake. Why would God set aside so much time for uselessness? Apparently, when life becomes driven by utility, we neglect and ignore the things that have the most value and are all too easily deemed useless.

The Prophet Amos made this observation:

“Hear this, you who trample on the needy and bring the poor of the land to an end, saying, “When will the new moon be over, that we may sell grain? And the Sabbath, that we may offer wheat for sale, that we may make the ephah small and the shekel great and deal deceitfully with false balances, that we may buy the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of shoes and sell the chaff of the wheat?” Amos 8:4-6

Very little has changed, it seems. We fail to honor the useless God, and in doing so, have forgotten how and why we live.

_______________

Revised from an earlier version. The photo is of the author in a state of jubilant uselessness.

 

About Fr. Stephen Freeman

Fr. Stephen is a retired Archpriest of the Orthodox Church in America. He is also author of Everywhere Present: Christianity in a One-Storey Universe, and Face to Face: Knowing God Beyond Our Shame, as well as the Glory to God podcast series on Ancient Faith Radio.



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86 responses to “The Useless God”

  1. Laurie Avatar
    Laurie

    Thank you for this, Fr. Stephen. It cuts to the heart of many if my struggles. Do you have thoughts on how we can engender true life and God’s design in place of usefulness?

  2. Fr. Stephen Avatar

    Laurie,
    I think we can take a cue from the Scriptures. The practice of the Sabbath was given by God to teach this important thing about ourselves and the world. So, build a bit of Sabbath time into your life: just being useless (on purpose). Even if it’s not a whole day but just a few hours. Also, cultivating more and more thanksgiving into our lives. The giving of thanks is at the very heart of this holy uselessness. It’s our true “job.”

  3. Laurie Avatar
    Laurie

    Thank you so much, Fr. I have a jaunt to France coming up and I’ve been fighting feelings of guilt over spending the time and money. But life has been intense lately, and with your article and response I feel a bit better about this break. Thank you and glory to God!

  4. Helen Avatar
    Helen

    It’s such a battle. Even the weekend must be made the most effective use of time. I have a rebel streak in me and your article makes me realize some of the reasons why.

  5. Goldfinch Avatar
    Goldfinch

    As a society most people get their identities from what they “do”. The loss of a career can really destabilize a person. I’ve seen it happen. Upon meeting a person often the first piece of small talk exchanged is asking what job a person performs (What do you do?) and permanent value judgements are formed regarding the worth and status of the person based on the answer given.

    As a person with multiple disabilities that have hindered my ability to live up to the expectations of the world I am acutely aware of these things. Most people see me as useless, lazy, or selfish because my disabilities aren’t overtly apparent and I don’t openly share them. The world isn’t a safe place to do so. I think because I acutely feel these things I find it hard to understand that God would love me just for me and not be angry with me because I am not performing up to par for to Him. That I am the wicked servant who did not multiply the talents given to them.

    While material things, and shallow frivolity have very little worth to me, and I much prefer the natural world and deeper things, I still live in a world where there is a daily onslaught of shame for not meeting the standard.

    Thank you for this. I really needed to hear it today. I was deeply feeling these things just last night.

  6. hellie Avatar
    hellie

    Thank you, Father, for another wonderful piece. It brought to mind a video I recently watched on YouTube, about the “value” of things. It’s from a channel called Campfire Stories, and the video is called Radical Neighbouring.

    Link: https://youtu.be/dynQV-oKM0E?si=cu2ASFrTOyjaoOAO

  7. David Avatar
    David

    I think this is one perspective. Any time we speak about God we are speaking out our ideas about God. It is metacogntive theology–thinking about what we think about God.

    The article raises a challenging idea: God is useless. I heard a similarly challenging some time ago: God does not exist. Both are highly nuanced claims.

    On the one hand, it is thought provoking. We see everything as a means to an end, its latent utility. Creation, however, doesn’t exist for the sake of human utility. It is what it is in and of itself. On the other hand, a father is only a father if he acts like a father. A father that claims he is being treated as a utility, a means to an end, because his children ask him to feed them seems absurd. Are the children wrong to expect their father to act like a father?

    The article makes good points. But I wonder about expectations. Do humans have a right to pose expectations for God? If we believe that God is Love, then doesn’t that claim create expectations? If we claim that God is Father, doesn’t that claim create an expectation?

    What about an article that claims God is not Love? Or, God is not a father?

    Language comes to us with a topology of meaning and values layered onto it. Language creates expectations based on the layered topologies of meaning. We can engage in metacognitive theology to sterilize language, remove sociocultural influences, when thinking about ideas about God. We can do that.

    I have been reading the Cambridge Companion to Heidegger. His ideas about intellectual dilemmas stemming from the effort move about in a world of abstraction is worth considering. His idea of learning ontology from everyday experience seems obviously true. He is, or so he seems to me, challenging the view from nowhere. It is worth thinking about.

  8. Margaret Avatar
    Margaret

    Thanks so much for this Fr Stephen! I agree with all you say here! And I am allowed to practice it, thanks be to Our Lord Who loves us! However, I often struggle with self-loathing. I’ve been praying and confessing this “feeling” and have received some comfort, relief and direction. I believe your book about Shame addresses this but I need to re-read it

  9. Mallory Avatar
    Mallory

    This is wonderful! The closest being to me is my 11 year old dog and we’ve always called him “useless joy bringer” — always meant as the highest compliment, can’t walk anywhere without people’s faces lighting up when they see him.

    This also reminds me of why Proust means so much to me, not only his writing, but his life. I remember a teacher telling us that Proust often spent days in bed drinking coffee and eating a croissant or two, and when his father told him to find a profession, he volunteered at the local library and barely showed up. There was something about hearing these stories about a genius that lifted my spirits and made me relax inside. They were a welcome contrast to all the other stories of heroic work ethic and basically telling people if they worked hard enough they could achieve anything, which is an obvious lie.

    Blessing to all!

  10. Ursula Avatar
    Ursula

    The Lord’s timing for you sharing these thoughts and me finding them is, of course, perfect.
    I have been helping my 95 year-old father who has been successfully living on his own. Those short-term memory is quickly becoming toast. There have been a ton of things to do with paperwork, phone calls, financial companies, doctor visits, etc., etc., etc.
    Wednesday he fell out of his wheeled office chair.
    EMT’s evaluated him and took him to hospital where he remains. At Hospital, it was determined he had a mild brain bleed or stroke and he was pretty well dehydrated. Dad is doing quite well, though. He has tested positive for Covid. Likely a false positive. This actually has been a blessing.
    This morning, Saturday, I’m struggling with panicky feelings, I can’t determine where to begin the day. I want to hide or run away.
    Your reflection greatly spoke to me that perhaps I need to be a bit useless today in the good way put forth in your reflection.
    Thank you, Father Stephen. I’m so glad that I got to meet you at Saint Athanasius Parish in Nicholasville, Kentucky.

  11. Robert Avatar
    Robert

    David,

    I submit we may have no expectations of God and must trust Him instead. The servant is not greater than the master.

    Father, thank you for clarifying a thought I have had for many years regarding utility. In my previous life as a math need I observed that the students most concerned about when they were going to use “this”, the math, were almost uniformly doomed to struggle with learning it. I can’t think of one out of hundreds, if not more, who truly achieved mastery of the material and was concerned with utility.

  12. Fr. Stephen Avatar

    Robert,
    In your experience, would you say that those who did best in learning the math, had an appreciation for its beauty? Just curious. My own experience is that beauty is a path to deeper understanding in almost anything.

  13. Aidan Avatar
    Aidan

    Father, thank you for this. I am wondering if you have read or are familiar with the works of Jacques Ellul. Both of his theological and sociological work deal a lot with this aspect of modernity. His book “Presence in the Modern World” was critical in lifting me out my youthful atheism. God bless you and your readers.

  14. Robert Avatar
    Robert

    Father,
    My experience is that the people who learned best saw meaning in learning it. Beauty certainly could provide meaning, but often only after learning does one start to appreciate the beauty of math. It’s rather abstract. I suppose also how one defines beauty is important. Sometimes after some hammer and tongs messy calculation and finding a very simple result, a student would say “That’s cool!”. That student will go farther than the one commenting on the utility of the result, other things being equal.

  15. Chris Avatar
    Chris

    Related but different perspective, I had a light bulb moment just a few years ago with a statement about the Theotokos from our priest. As Protestants we craved to be “used” by God, and our priest was simply noting that many modern traditions think this way about a girl in Israel He “used” for the birth of Christ. But he said, “God doesn’t use people. Satan uses people.” It’s

  16. Dee of St Herman Avatar
    Dee of St Herman

    Father,
    I’m another of your readers expressing gratitude for your words today. I’ve been under pressure to “achieve” lately. So, I’ve been pushing things along. But nothing in such activity lately feels good. Instead, it feels like slavery. There is a constant resistance in my heart pushing back. From time to time, I mentally externalize the pushback, saying to myself, I’m against the usual societal incentives to succeed. However, what is truly lacking in the entire enterprise (specifically in my heart as much as in the environment I’m in) is love and a human pace. I’m pushed as if I’m a machine, “being useful”, and I push others similarly. But the truth, I believe, is in your words, the undertow that pulls me down, the heart-crushing reality, is that it’s all for money.

    I pray that I might be Our Lord’s faithful servant. But within these prayers, I believe I’m begging God that I might do things right. I weep for my uselessness and ineffectiveness, my constant failures. Then the weekend comes, and any opportunity to do nothing at all, I do exactly that, but have a cup of coffee and stare out the window watching robins. I haven’t yet given myself permission to feel that this is ok. I tell myself I’m lazy, and this behavior is going to end badly. But your words have certainly helped to question the critical voice in my head.

    Glory to God for His Sabbath. May He heal my broken heart and head, even on this day.

  17. Fr. Stephen Avatar

    Chris,
    Excellent word.

  18. David Avatar
    David

    I think the idea that we have no expectations of God is mythologizing our own virtue. We do expect that God will be Good. If we don’t expect that, then what is it we really believe about God? My son has expectations of me. When I act outside of those expectations he will show concern, alarm, or even indignation. But, I teach him what to expect by consistent fatherly concern and action. I am glad that my son says things to me like “Best dada ever” or “Best daddy in the world.” It melts my heart. I wear it like a badge of honor. But, maybe I wouldn’t deserve to hear those things if I became indifferent or negligent of his welfare.

    At the end of the day I am wondering if an article like “God is not beautiful” would be illuminating. I am not trying to be a party-pooper. What I am trying to do is reconcile my anguish for my son’s well-being and the motivation that gives me to act in his behalf, and my experience of God as my father and his father.

    I have had the privilege to speak with a number of holocaust survivors when I lived in the St. Louis area. One of my dear friends at the time was Sara Moses. She recently passed in April. But the way she and others came to talk about God outside of their experience of the camps and maybe equally trying experiences living as a displace person in the camp for several years. That faith remains intact for some is undeniable. That it is destroyed in others is equally undeniable. What is the difference? Are those who leave the camps with a stronger faith just better people? Or did they cling to their faith more and more and more just to get through it? And later, as survivors, the story they tell is “I drew closer to God in the camps in a way that I would not have otherwise.” Great. What does that mean? We can interpret it. We can think about in terms of a matrix of personality traits. We can discuss temperaments, susceptibility to uncertainty, or traits of religiosity. I am genuinely at a loss to understand it.

  19. Ook Avatar
    Ook

    The focus of this blog is on spiritual aspects, but I would emphasize that aphesis (ἄφεσις) in Luke 4:18 translates deror (דְּרוֹר) from Isaiah 61, which draws on the Jubilee’s deror in Leviticus 25, signaling Jesus’ mission to restore economic justice through debt forgiveness and land redistribution, not just spiritual liberation.
    And this stance likely upset the creditor landowner elites.

    Unfortunately, in our society, the creditor class is winning, to the point that this can be framed as a “radical understanding of the purpose of human existence,” even though this discussion has been ongoing for several thousand years.

  20. Matthew Avatar
    Matthew

    Fr. Stephen wrote:

    “If you do this sort of thing for a good number of decades, and couple it with newly-coined ideas of human individuality and freedom, you can, before long, begin to think that you’re building better humans along with better ploughs, threshing machines and iPhones.”

    Not only the building of better humans … historian and intellectual Yuval Noah Harari wrote that advances in technology (like AI) will replace God! Boy have I got news for him …

  21. Fr. Stephen Avatar

    Ook,
    That the earliest community of Christians in Jerusalem held all things in common was certainly a response to the teaching of Christ. That pattern seemed to have happened elsewhere (in the Church) as well. That it is no longer a hallmark of Christian practice is, I think, a comment on how far we have moved away from these aspects of Christ’s preaching. I do not think it is required of us to hold all things in common – but distributing our wealth in a substantial manner would seem to be pretty fundamental. Of course, in the modern period, all of these questions become politicized, changing the nature of the conversation.

  22. Fr. Stephen Avatar

    I can only speak of God as I know Him in Christ crucified. Apart from that, the conversation becomes an abstraction. I think that those who, despite terrible suffering, continue to have a deep relationship with God, have within themselves some perception of a suffering God rather than the philosopher’s God.

    When I say “good” or “beautiful” etc., those terms are as they are made known in the Crucified Christ. At least, that is how I think of them and perceive them. An article that said “God is not beautiful” would, for me, be agreeing to let something other than the Cross define the language. That would be a different conversation. So, for me, the point is to speak of the Cross and Christ Crucified. This is also a way to speak of love.

    The present article is a small effort to rescue our conversation(s), and hence our lives, from utility as a tyranny.

  23. Anna Avatar
    Anna

    Fr. Stephen, this is such a beautiful post, thank you! I don’t think I’ve ever commented before, but have been a faithful reader for many, many years. I love everything about this post.

    @Goldfinch–I had similar thoughts when I read this post. I work in family homes with parents, infants and toddlers with developmental delays and have a child with Autism. The idea of a person’s “usefulness” is on my mind a lot–our society measures a person’s worth by what they can produce. Perhaps this is a symptom of modernism, or, likely not, considering how people with disabilities and mental health issues were treated in past centuries…at least in the western world. Our society often fails to see the intrinsic value of the human person, not for what one can do for society, but because each human being is created in the image of God. Christ’s commandments are boiled down to love God and love our neighbors. Loving our neighbors can feel particularly fraught when those neighbors seemingly “serve no purpose” to us or society, or, worse, when people view those neighbors as actually creating more work for us or costing us money (ie: disabled people, poor people, elderly people, children). Many in our society strongly reject the idea of social programs for people who don’t work for the benefits (food assistance programs, public health insurance, free child care, etc). I don’t say this to stir up a political discussion but to share my beliefs based on Christ’s teachings, my faith and very personal experiences of working in the public health and special education systems. As you wrote in your reply to Ook, Father: “I do not think it is required of us to hold all things in common – but distributing our wealth in a substantial manner would seem to be pretty fundamental.” How can we claim to love God, whom we do not see, when we fail to love and care for our fellow human beings–each with exquisite value–whom we do see (based on 1 John 4:20)?

  24. Fr. Stephen Avatar

    Anna,
    Thank you for your comment! It really is about love. Usefulness (utility) is certainly something that can be measured, and even have a price affixed, but none of us actually want to live like that – to be seen in that manner. Love is “gratuitous” – it is a free gift and cannot be earned – and yet it is the most valuable thing that there is.

    I thought the title of this piece, “the Useless God,” was something of a “hook,” a phrase that catches the attention, and I hope I’m forgiven for that. But none of us actually want to be loved for being useful – unless there is something quite broken. In Romans it says that the love of God is revealed in that “while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” He first loved us – and not because we’re useful.

    When you think about the most vulnerable parts of a society: children, handicapped, elderly – if they are not loved and valued in and of themselves, apart from utility, then they will finally be discarded. I believe that the gospel teaches otherwise.

    At 71, I’m not as useful as I once was, and I can daily see my “utility” waning. I am finding, however, in the mercies of God, that I continue to be loved and valued. This is as it should be.

  25. David Avatar
    David

    I can only start from where I am at. I can’t start from anywhere else. That is all anyone can do. We have to be honest about where we are at otherwise we become vulnerable to self-deception and virtue mythologizing. In everything I have ever pursued in all my effort…God has never revealed himself to me. EVER. You can blame me and say I lack faith, or whatever. But I get the feeling that faith is something that happens through a frontal lobectomy of some type. At some point you have to quit questioning your capacity for self-deception and give yourself permission to believe that fuzzy feeling you get in liturgy–that’s just you enamored with the candlelight and incense.

  26. Fr. Stephen Avatar

    David,
    I’ve offered no word of blame.

  27. David Avatar
    David

    I know you haven’t. I didn’t mean to imply that you did.

  28. Gisele Avatar
    Gisele

    Belated thanks, Father Stephen! More thanks to your words coming from the intelligence of the heart than because of my having ears to hear, your words struck a chord. The liturgical calendar – the rhythm that allows us to move and adapt gracefully – has, of course, been a gift that gives constantly. You’ve added another measure to its length and another dimension to my perspective!

    If I may add, in response to Laurie’s comment – A few months ago, I was literally stopped in my tracks by the Gospel example of the sisters, Mary and Martha. I felt that my busy-ness was completely artificial and that to continue “catering” to it would either be to live a lie or run deliberately into a wall. I remembered Christ’s words to Martha, that Mary, in listening to His words (instead of taking care of household responsibilities, as Martha reproached her), had the better part, which would not be taken from her. I listened, chose that part, and discovered what is so simply said in the Gospel.

  29. Dee of St Herman Avatar
    Dee of St Herman

    David,
    For what it’s worth, and with the little experience I have, it seems that God is revealed where and how we would not expect Him.

    Also once upon a time I have said what might seem to be a strange prayer to God. When I first considered the possibility that Christ might be real, I asked God whether He loved me. Given my history which I have never and will never reveal here in this blog, I sincerely believed the answer was “no.” This was yet 3 years before I stepped into a church. In such a realization I was crushed. But as strange as this might sound, I said to God that that was ok because there was love in my heart for Him, and perhaps this was enough for both of us.

    Admittedly my perceptions of God changed even before I first stepped into an Orthodox Church. I can’t say that I willed such changes in my perception. But in retrospect I see that my old perceptions and understandings have changed.

    Now it seems to me, and I see this in retrospect, that Christ will walk with us to Emmaus whether we see Him revealed or not.

  30. Fr. Stephen Avatar

    David,
    I have never had a experience of God that became the basis of faith. I’ve had a variety of experiences, many of which I wrote off as various aspects of my own making. Some, I’ve left on the shelf. But none of them have been the basis of believing. Indeed, it is something that I tend to counsel people not to do. There are some (Michael comes to mind) for whom their experience of God was overwhelming, etc. I consider that to be unusual.

    Where I have started, and return to over and over, is that I accept the witness of the Apostles to the resurrection of Christ. I “signed on” to that and follow that. I think about Christ. I think about what I have been taught. I see the fruit of Christ’s teaching. I “see” the work of God’s good will in creation (providence), and will quickly admit that it’s a “tutored subjectivity.” But when I say such a thing (“the work of God’s good will in creation”) I see that goodness in a cruciform manner. It is not without suffering, pain, etc. That carries me back to the witness of the Apostles to the death and resurrection of Christ.

    In my years within liberal Christianity, I learned that anything and everything can be doubted. It felt like someone sucking the life out of me. In contrast, moving towards (day by day) the crucified Christ gives life – makes love and forgiveness possible – and does and gives what I hear in Christ’s teaching.

    But, I don’t believe in the philosopher’s God. I don’t think we can force God’s hand and do some sort of practice or exercise that would cause Him to reveal Himself in a manner beyond doubt and questioning. It’s one of the reasons I come back and try to keep my focus on what was given to me – the Christ died and was raised from the dead and that is the beginning and ending of all things.

    I spent time within the charismatic movement – which majored in experience. I left it because I thought (and saw) that it was unreliable and tended to make me crazy. It’s just not the place where I would want to start (if I were having to start again).

    By the way, I’m not familiar with the phrase “virtue mythologizing.” I looked it up but didn’t quite understand the definition google gave. Be well!

  31. David Avatar
    David

    Fr. Stephen,

    I apologize. I am not really looking for answers per se. I respect your faith…more than that…I respect who you are, and how you have come to be who you are by the life you have lived, the hard choices you have made, and the endurance you have shown. That isn’t saying that you are just a “good man”. I am saying that the quality of your humanity–as far as I can tell–has been forged through a lifetime of faithfulness. I don’t know that kind of quality can be acquired any other way. I would never suggest it could be separated out.

    What I wonder is this: Why is it that grace never really penetrated my heart? I mean that? I am not asking for a diagnosis or even a response. I am just here voicing a kind of prayer and hoping that lightening strikes.

    I believe that if the ground of your beliefs isn’t your experience, then the ground of your belief will be someone else’s experiences, or their interpretation of their experience. This seems very suspect. One of the lessons I have tried to instill in Micah is that “having the right answer for the wrong reason is still a wrong answer.” I am trying to emphasize to him that method matters more than checking a box as a measure of mastery. If I cannot find God unequivocally in my experience, i won’t find him in your or anyone else’s.

    Virtue mythologizing is a phrase that I have started using to identify the ways in which my morality or ideas about faith and God get mythologized. For example, I may see myself and narrate stories about myself that are fantastical. I may come to think that my faith could never possibly be just belief or just a strong opinion or just psychological certainty: ‘No, no, no. Not my faith. My faith is authentically the real deal.’ And then here comes the mythologizing, exaggerated stories of answered prayers that had a 50/50 chance of happening anyway. Exaggerated feelings that can only be explained by the Virgin Mary. We can’t stand the thought that maybe God isn’t paying any attention to us.

    I think I am very close to accepting that there was a fourth person hanging from a cross on Gethsemane, but he was forgotten. I am okay with that…I think. I don’t doubt God’s existence. I just doubt that everyone gets an equal share of his attention. And it would be better to be honest than to pretend to be someone you’re not.

  32. Fr. Stephen Avatar

    David,
    Every human being’s story is complex – yours is more complex than most (in my experience). That said, I think to myself, “It ain’t over ’til it’s over.” In hindsight, I see grace at work in my own life and my heart – it could have turned out very differently. I believe grace has been and is at work in your life and in all.

    You wrote: “I believe that if the ground of your beliefs isn’t your experience, then the ground of your belief will be someone else’s experiences, or their interpretation of their experience.”

    Human beings are not born tabla rasa. We are connected human beings whose lives contain the experience of those who have gone before us. We don’t start over. It means that we’re always sifting through the experience of those who have gone before. “Tradition” in its highest sense, is a recognition of this. I can say that my experience confirms what I have received, though it is not an original foundation. You say of our reliance on the experience of others, “This is suspect.” I would say, “It can be questioned.” I would even say, “It should be questioned.” In many ways, it’s why I’m an Orthodox Christian rather than something else. I did not become Orthodox saying, “At last, this is perfect.” Rather, I said, “This is the original mess.” Orthodoxy doesn’t pretend (except for some nuts out there) to be perfect or faultless Christianity. It is simply the faithful continuation of what it’s always been. It strikes me as interesting that the texts of the NT are honest about this. There’s trouble in the Jerusalem Church, from near the beginning. There’s trouble in the Church’s to whom St. Paul writes. The gospels are honest that the disciples don’t get it, that they doubt, that they deny, etc. This is not the stuff of a cult. This is honest Christianity.

    I pray for you and Micah every day. May He preserve you – I hope to see you both “when it’s over.” Then the full story can be told.

  33. Dee of St Herman Avatar
    Dee of St Herman

    Father,
    Your life’s lessons are an important antidote and support to question to false religions and false beliefs.

    Metacognition is encouraged in certain societies’ spheres. Such approaches however rarely lifts us out of the waters we swim in without professional help and moreover the quality of such help.

  34. Fr. Stephen Avatar

    Dee,
    Metacognition=”thinking about thinking” – it can leave us stuck in a never-ending circle.

    I can see lots of things that intervened in my life that I recognize as interventions of grace (though I believe all things at all times to be sustained by grace). But, having had a very long story of conversion (when viewed through an Orthodox lens), there were plenty of twists and turns, blind alleys, and near-misses. I have been particularly graced in my life in my marriage – to a woman who is spiritually grounded and deeply good-hearted. We made our long journey to Orthodoxy together. That process helped me steer clear (mostly) of thinking too much about thinking. We talked and questioned each other. We still do!

    There are not many large questions remaining in our lives – though they will come. When Winnie-the-Pooh was asked what his first thought was each day upon waking he said: “What’s for breakfast?” Piglet responded by saying, “I wonder what’s going to happen exciting today?” Pooh replied, “It’s the same thing.” I cook breakfast for us. The first great question of the day is when I ask my wife, “One egg or two?” The exciting thing is that we have another day to be together, to give thanks. I am blessed.

  35. Matthew Avatar
    Matthew

    About experience:

    For me, I was also in charismatic evangelical spaces where people experienced a lot of things attributed to the Holy Spirit, though because I saw so little holy fruit after such experiences I often wondered what was truly experienced in those meetings.

    I tend to think now that my experience(s) of God comes through Christ revealing himself to me, most powerfully through the sacraments of the Church. That said, I really am beginning to think that God is about getting us to a place where what God is doing in us transcends what we term “experience”. It is beyond experience if that makes any sense.

    As such, I want to learn to base my faith on something that also is beyond experience — that being the apostolic witness of the Church and trusting that divine wisdom is being revealed to me through this. Thanks for the reminder, Fr. Stephen, about not falling into the trap of anchoring one´s faith in personal experience.

  36. Karin Avatar
    Karin

    What an interesting way of looking at uselessness. I greatly appreciate this. Thanks for posting it.

  37. Robert Avatar
    Robert

    David,

    There is a story I’ve heard, and likely you have too. A man was on a ship in the Pacific Ocean, and it went down. He managed to escape. After a night of treading water and grasping flotsom, praying intensely and continuously that the Almighty would work a miracle and save him, a boat drew near. The boats occupants hailed him and asked if he wanted to be saved to which he replied “Gawd alone is my salvation!” Later, when the man was nearly worn out with his labors, hungry, thirsty, sleepless, still praying just as fervently, a helicopter arrived. To their query he again replied “Gawd alone is my salvation!”. He refused their aid. That night he slipped beneath the waves and died. He awoke in heaven and asked the first soul he met, St. Peter, why Gawd had not performed a miracle and saved him. No sooner were the words out of his mouth than a great Voice boomed out “I saved you from the sinking ship. I sent a boat. Finally I sent a helicopter. What more did you expect?”

    Grace and Mercy surround us. Were it otherwise, we would not, could not, exist. Certainly bad things happen to us. We suffer. Worse, those we love suffer. We die. Worse, those we love die. My son died 28 years ago, for example. Before that, he lived! That did not have to happen. Absent God, that could not have happened. Never could have.

    Grace floods us, if we but open our eyes.

  38. David Avatar
    David

    Frankly, I don’t understand the idea of basing our faith on something else other than experience. Here is a question for the group: If your experience is so untrustworthy, then how can you trust your own judgement on anything? At some point you have to begin in confidence in something. And you might mythologize your confidence in saying, “My confidence is not in myself. No, no, no it is only in Christ.” I don’t believe that. I think that you are confident in your judgement and in your decision to have faith or confidence in Christ. But, that in itself is an experience.

    I don’t understand why the demand or expectation for experience is so easily dismissed.

    If someone creates radical doubt in human thinking, then how can you be confident about anything at all?

  39. Helen Avatar
    Helen

    Hi David,

    Maybe the word “experience” is being used differently by different people, based on their… “experience”.

    For what it’s worth, I am not dismissing experience. I have needed it and continue to need it, to overwrite some really bad theological experiences and to keep going when things get hard. (I grew up in an Orthodox family. Unfortunately, much of what I experienced as Orthodoxy was from, well-meaning people, sincere, but I think mis-informed and damaging. )
    I also see that as I’ve experienced some healthier theological things (thoughts, understandings, events, perspectives) I seem to be beginning to trust in the loving God that Christ revealed without the same need to have as many experiences. How can you make it your own sincere faith if you can’t trust in your own experience? Does the Holy Spirit not live in me as well? You can’t believe in someone or Someone loving you if you don’t experience that love.

    “It’s not over till it’s over” keeps me going sometimes.

  40. Fr. Stephen Avatar

    David,
    Obviously experience plays a role. But I think it’s not so black-and-white. My journey with Christ, at the time in which it became an “examined” question, began with an examination of the historical claims and evidence for the resurrection of Christ. So, in that process, I would say that I had already begun to have a sense of my own competence in making certain judgments of that sort. Experience (that of historical judgement) played a role.

    But it did not play the role of “origination” – as in “I won’t believe until I thrust my hand into His side and place my fingers in the prints of the nails,” or some such thing (deep mystical or yet something else). I did not need to invent Christianity.

    I contrast this with an experience I had at 18 or so with a couple of Mormon missionaries. They gave their spiel – at the end of which they suggested that I should pray about whether it was true. That’s just silly advice. Their claims were/are demonstrably false, based on claims that can be clearly demonstrated to be a hoax – not even remotely close. Their only hope is for the delusion of pure subjectivity.

    So, I have little trust in pure subjectivity. I have a greater regard for what can reasonably be demonstrated as true. As unusual as the claim of Christ’s resurrection might be – I believe it holds up under scrutiny. It has endured, for example, at least 200 years of unrelenting attack from liberal Christian scholarship, and is seen, I think, as yet more trustworthy as the evidence has been stacked up.

    But, that’s a beginning point. It comes with baggage. For me (for all of us) that baggage is the Church. Jesus comes with a Church. That Church even comes (more or less) with civilizations built on it. It’s a mixed bag (all bags in this world are mixed), but I’ll take it in its Orthodox form. Nothing else comes close when it comes to proclaiming and preserve Christianity as it was handed down.

    Add to that the life experience of living in the consequences of believing that Christ has been raised from the dead.

    So, yes to experience, but not in a pure subjective manner. We almost never get anything like that. Everything comes to us already laden with language, culture, etc. As I’ve said, purely subjective experience is pretty much the least trustworthy thing I know. Religiously, it’s the breeding ground of delusion.

    I would say that there’s “enough” experience that is “reliable enough” and “reasonable” to begin the journey as a Christian. For myself, I would add to that, over the years, I have a strong inner sense of who Jesus is and what He is like. I “know” Him. But I readily admit that I do not yet know Him as I will (or as He knows me). So there is living with some gray – enough to require humility and patience.

    So, we likely are agreeing.

  41. Fr. Stephen Avatar

    Helen,
    I think that the experience of being unconditionally loved by Christ has been a constant in my life. I have had plenty of handicaps and problems to deal with, but I have never experienced condemnation or insane expectations from Christ. I will say, thank God, that my experience with confessors in the Church has been wonderfully helpful, expressing the love of God to such an extent that it surprises me. I have found it impossible to raise the eyebrows of a priest when I am confessing. I also know that this need not have been the case.

  42. Helen Avatar
    Helen

    And mine has been the opposite Father. For awhile, even the phrase God loves me left me feeling defensive, and at the same time shamed.
    But I somehow recognize within myself when something is healthy and true and I hold on to each as it comes along … this blog has many times provided that life preserver.

  43. David Avatar
    David

    Helen,

    These questions are at the core of what I am thinking: How can you make it your own sincere faith if you can’t trust in your own experience? Does the Holy Spirit not live in me as well? You can’t believe in someone or Someone loving you if you don’t experience that love.

    When I was taking cognitive neuroscience classes at university there was a consistent use of the term “value systems” to describe emotions. I really liked that language. Emotions are value systems they provide differential weights for environmental features. If I am alone in the woods and I come across a Tabby cat and Bengalese tiger my value systems will be engaged. One of those environmental factors better receive much more attention based on the differential feature weighting. If not, I could be in big trouble. One of the interesting things about the Tiger is that it is compelling. To ignore the danger is troublesome because it puts you into conflict with real world consequences–it constitutes a break with reality. The same goes for jumping off a really tall building because your value systems aren’t engaged and you believe that you can fly.

    Confidence in our own judgement and the consistency of that judgement with reality comes from experience.

    Experience is fundamental>

    So, I agree with you Helen: How can you make it your own sincere faith if you can’t trust in your own experience? I would go one step farther: How can you make it your own faith if you don’t have any experience of it? How can you believe God loves you–the individual, singularly unique you (not the general you)–if you didn’t experience that love?

    Someone may think well God’s love make existence itself possible and without that love all things would cease to exist in a blink of an eye. Existence is certainly a precondition for the experience of anything at all. I wonder, though, what kind of love does a person believe he is advocating for by such an overarching statement? Is it really saying enough to say that? It’s sounds like the kind of thing parents say to kids, “Daddy do you love me?” “What the hell kind of question is that, boy? I feed you don’t I? I buy you clothes don’t I? You eat my food, you sleep in my house, and then you ask me some foolish question like ‘Do you love me? What the hell more do you want from me?’”

    God might love creation, but shouldn’t sentient creation “feel” that love? Shouldn’t it be an experience beyond, what the hell more do you want from me?

  44. Byron Avatar
    Byron

    David, an aside. I’m not sure why you label experience as “untrustworthy” if people here do not completely base their faith upon it? That seems a bit extreme to me.

    I have read that Orthodoxy is somewhat mellow when it comes to miraculous claims. If a priest (or someone else) claims a great miracle, they may receive a reply or reaction of “Glory to God” and then people move on. It is not that any miracle is “untrustworthy” (although some may be) but that they are not the foundation of the Church or Christ’s revelation. I think you may, unintentionally, be creating a dichotomy where one does not exist.

  45. Fr. Stephen Avatar

    David,
    FWIW, in my pastoral experience, I’ve seen people be all over the map when it comes to what they feel. One reason I start with the question of the death and resurrection of Christ is that “Christ died for me” is indeed His love. I suppose you might call that “what the hell more do you want from me?” but I think that elevates how you feel about it over the very fact of it. Forgive me, but you’ve been run-over a lot in your life when it comes to feeling (many of us have). I have had depressive episodes off and on for most of my life. I don’t take them very seriously now – more like having a cold. Like a cold, it passes. But, “feeling” the love of God is not unlike that. Sometimes I “feel” it, sometimes I don’t. That’s not a way to live. I come back to the crucified Jesus – when I don’t “feel” it – I see it. The icons help. The same is true of regular communion (which I know can be problematic).

    I have a sense that you want a miracle. That grace will over-ride any interior wounds and make you feel and know that you are loved. I’m not sure how to respond to that. I certainly pray that such grace will be given to you.

    I am grateful that, in this life, I had important conversations with each of my parents that “healed” some early wounds. We said important things to each other. That, I believe, was grace-at-work.

  46. Helen Avatar
    Helen

    Don’t give up David. My questions are part of my path. My questioning is part of my path. The fact that I question tells me my inner self believes there’s more… better… I’ve gotten some glimpses, some experiences that keep me going, hoping.
    I know that much of this for me is about regular common emotional abuse by my parents using God as the ultimate punisher and withholder of love. I believe deep down that God is working “as fast as I can”.

  47. Fr. Stephen Avatar

    Helen, et al
    I grew up in a nominal Baptist home. I never saw my parents pray (except the rare grace at meals) and the Bible was not read or quoted. We were about as secular as a non-believing home. I rejected the PSA angry-God stuff when I was around 13. I thought it was stupid and made little sense. I began to practice Christianity at age 15, in an Anglican setting, where there wasn’t even a hint of PSA, and where beauty was rampant. In later life, it became a problematic place to be for different reasons.

    But, in hindsight, I think that the absence of religion (mostly) in my early life was far more salutary than the harmful stuff people have fed to them. My parents weren’t angry at God. They simply didn’t speak much about him. They eventually became Anglicans when I was in seminary. Later (at age 79) they became Orthodox – and loved it. Both of them were buried from the parish where I am now attached in my retirement (as of this March). I like the connection.

  48. Helen Avatar
    Helen

    Father, I am grateful for everything you experienced which formed who you are. I don’t often believe you when you talk about God’s love, because I’m finally being honest. But I want to and I hope you are right. And somehow I believe even if I don’t experience this consistently in this life, and I may not, I believe that this love is the only thing that makes any sense. The only thing right now that guides me.

  49. Mallory Avatar
    Mallory

    Fr. Stephen,

    How are we to think about those that seem to have a much easier life? I have a friend who has it very easy. It’s harder and harder to talk to her. It’s gotten to be painful, but I blame myself. She is a materialist, she goes about her life with a trust fund, no children, a “partner” and occasional trips. Her life seems to be just about pleasure, and no serious challenges come her way. Her parents love her, and were not perfect but there was no abuse and they’ve given her unlimited resources. When we were younger, I felt similarly protected and lucky, but I was just delusional. And many challenges have come in the last 5 years, storms I have still not recovered from, although I carry on fairly cheerfully. Because I’ve made meaning from caretaking I suppose.

    My question is, am I questioning my friendship with this person out of pure envy? Or is it, as I like to imagine, deeper and I just don’t have anything in common with her world view anymore? And is there any way of knowing why certain people have it so easy? She doesn’t even question what we’re here for! She just is a happy atheist and thinks when it’s over, it’s just over, no big deal. Meanwhile I stay awake at night wondering and praying and hoping I find the peace of God and the answers that I seek about why we’re here.

    My instinct is to think people who act like everything is great are liars but then I think wait—maybe there are people who just leisurely go about their days and aren’t in some kind of angst! I can’t even imagine. Your wisdom would be clarifying!

    Also, I want to thank David for such an enriching conversation. I’m consistently overflowing with gratitude for this place.

  50. David Avatar
    David

    Fr. Stephen,

    Your insistence or admonition that we return to the cross and start there is wise. But, what happens when you try and try and try and pray and pray…and its just you making noise to yourself. What I hear you saying is not “Start with the Cross and re-experience everything–life, the universe, and everything–from there” rather it’s “Start with the Cross and build your interpretive apparatus–your lens through which you look at life, the universe, and everything–from there.” Those are very different things.

    So, many times I would pray at the cross and when I was done I would say “My Lord and My God” and touch the side of Christ. So, many times before and after liturgy I would revere the Cross and do the same touching the side of Christ on the Cross. Never once did Christ reach across the divide and lift the vale of darkness over my heart.

    Someone could say, “Well, you must not have really wanted it.” Or, “What sins were you committing that you refused to give up?” I confessed everything to my priest–everything. So, many dirty, nasty, humiliating things. And if it wasn’t for his merciful friendship. I don’t think any other priest could have handled it.

    I love these stories of people’s magnificent revelations of God’s glory to them the very first time they walk into the Sanctuary. Amazing! And that moment gave them the memories they needed to anchor them over a lifetime of faith. I am not saying it didn’t happen, but, if I am being honest, it sounds an awful lot like mythologizing the virtue of their faith.

    You say God is useless. I just think that we are rationalizing some uncomfortable things for the sake of not coming to grips with the fact the the truth of our lives is uttered by Christ on the Cross, “My God, my God why have you forsaken me.” I am not the only one that feels this way. I hate the sterilized version of this moment in Christ’s life where he is somehow in a clear headed-manner fulfilling the last prophecy where he utters these words and makes a knowing wink to one of the disciples and then gives up the spirit. Why can’t we look at Christ on the Cross and hear those words and say “Yes, he speaks for all of us when he says these things!”?

    We all either feel that way deep down or have felt that way. Even the scripture says that “the whole creation groans and labors with birth pangs together until now.” TOGETHER…the whole of creation is groaning and laboring in pain and has been subjected to futility–TOGETHER.

    Why is it so far-fetched to think that to be one with Christ is to descend fully into this singular declaration of abandonment? Maybe as long as we insulate ourselves from that cry we will never be able to enter into the truth of who we are and therefore never able to enter into the truth of who God is.

    Or…I could be full of it.

  51. Fr. Stephen Avatar

    Helen,
    You wrote, “I don’t often believe you when you talk about God’s love…” I am glad that you hope I’m right. I believe that I am. I think there are frequently many things in our lives (which I often describe as “wounds”) that make it difficult to believe this. I have “bathed” in it for decades. I am more convinced of it now than ever before – not because of happiness – but because of Christ Himself.

  52. Fr. Stephen Avatar

    Mallory,
    I have no way to think about why some suffer and others do not. I have never found myself drawn to those who do not or have not suffered. It seems like less than a real existence to me. I pray for them and get on with my life.

  53. Fr. Stephen Avatar

    David,
    Christ saying on the Cross (“My God…why have you forsaken me?”) can certainly bear the reading that you give it – and if we don’t read it that way at his statement on the Cross, then it is surely true in the depths of hell. Orthodoxy emphasizes the descent into hell. There are great saints, both St. Silouan and St. Sophrony who knew about this and wrote about it.

    What I can’t say to someone is that they must experience it. They do or they don’t.

  54. Helen Avatar
    Helen

    Thank you Father. Yes, that is certainly true for me – it’s wounding that keeps me from knowing this love more. Being able to comment today in this blog and how you have received it and encouraged me and dare I say, loved me, has done my wounded heart a lot of good, especially and specifically because you are a priest in the Orthodox church.

  55. Fr. Stephen Avatar

    Helen,
    Love, I believe, is the most essential thing in the human life – it’s certainly true emotionally. There’s lots of things that interrupt it – wounds, etc. I wrote the book on shame – which has a powerful way of interrupting love – and that’s only one of many. The damage done when love is distorted or withheld (and the earlier in life makes it worse still) can be incalculable.

    I have seen this in my own life – though not at all to the depth that many have. But love is a balm to the soul. My marriage of 50 years has been a place of continual healing (and a lot of patience on the part of my wife). When Christ warns about causing “one of these little ones” to stumble – it is this failure to love that most comes to mind.

    God loves us.

  56. shannon Avatar
    shannon

    David:

    I don’t comment here often. And when I do, it is usually just to Fr. Stephen, not to fellow commentors (I leave that up to Fr. S.). But your last entry above struck me so much, and on two points, not one, that I must.
    I’ll do the second one first: I too have been “not fond at all” of some (Orthodox) interpretations/explanations of Christ’s words of abandonment. When they say “He was just quoting Psalm 22, which everyone present would have recognized. The Father did not actually abandon Him” [as some Protestants say was the case: when God laid on Him the sin of the world]. I will not venture to theologize over atonement, expiation, etc. (except maybe to offer that the whole concept of Personhood implies at least the potential for a separation – at least in duty). But this I know: That that moment on the cross was not a case of “Christ quoting David”. Rather, it was David who, centuries before, was quoting Christ. So, I appreciated finally reading someone who dislikes the “teaching” or “for our benefit” (you say “sterilized”) version.
    To the first now. Amazed at your paragraph about venerating the cross icon and touching His side. Arriving at the Liturgy, I and many others make the icon cycle, ending with the tall, Christ-crucified icon in the transept. I don’t know what others say/pray there, but I just touch his side and whisper, “wash me with the water from Thy side.” I can’t say I feel anything then or after. Indeed, as a convert, I often feel just self-consciousness before any icons.
    But as far as feeling your lack of reciprocation, only one vignette has returned to my memory over the years. In 2008 I was undergoing radiation therapy to my neck and upper chest. They would mold a mesh plastic hood to go over one’s face to affix to the table so that with each repeat treatment one would not move. It looked like something from a horror film. Anyway, during said treatments, flat on the table, I would pray and seek God’s consolation, not expecting audible words, visible light, or anything profound, rather just any sense at all of divine Presence. But treatment after treatment, I never felt anything. When it was all finished and over, I felt – not sure I recall fully – but I suppose “disappointment” would not be far off. I chalked it up to my being immature in my faith, and no doubt I was.
    But there was a major oversight and blindness on my part too. Why? Because of this. On most of my visits to that office, while waiting in the waiting room with many other patients, there was a woman who must have been a volunteer. She was neither patient nor employee. She would make her rounds among those waiting and just give them hugs, and probably words of encouragement. I no doubt got a hug or two or more, on sundry visits, and all BEFORE being taken back for the “therapy”. She was not self-conscious, and neither was anyone receiving her attentions. Everyone in that predicament was just so grateful for connecting with another soul. (She was like an angel, so much so, that much later, I considered trying to emulate her. But volunteerism had become more codified in that interval; and as a man, such attentions/affections could be so easily misconstrued.) Yet my point is this: I was looking for God in the back, and He had already hugged me out front. I was wanting Him to show up on my time, but He had already been there. I was indeed blind.
    David, I was going to type “I suspect you are closer to the Kingdom than you think”. But that would be off; for I suspect you are inside already.
    You have just been given the ‘dark night of the soul’ to bear. A burden or testing which most of us are just too weak to endure, so God spares us. Perhaps it was those like you He meant when He said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.”

  57. Mark Spurlock Avatar
    Mark Spurlock

    Coincidentally, shannon, my late wife was undergoing the same radiation treatment in the same year as you. She was extremely claustrophobic, and, although normally a model of compliant patient, I feared she would not be able to endure the mask. As I recall, when they molded the plastic to her face, it fit so snugly that she could not move her eyelids once it was on: they would tell her to close her eyes beforehand for this reason. Because the radiation is targeted so precisely when it involves the head and neck, the mask cannot allow *any* movement.

    She kept her faith throughout her ordeal, but I cannot say that mine was as unwavering.

    Previously, David and Father Stephen had this exchange:

    David: “I believe that if the ground of your beliefs isn’t your experience, then the ground of your belief will be someone else’s experiences, or their interpretation of their experience.”

    Father Stephen: “Human beings are not born tabla rasa. We are connected human beings whose lives contain the experience of those who have gone before us. We don’t start over. It means that we’re always sifting through the experience of those who have gone before.”

    I do not think Father Stephen’s point can be over-emphasized (and I would add the experiences of those around us). I find it a constant struggle but an essential part of Christianity to recognize that human experience does not begin and end with our individual perspective. We must always guard against solipsism because it is so natural to fall into.

    In the example of my wife, it is very easy for me to make my reaction be the primary experience, but (rather obviously and as my sister reminded me) my experience was secondary to my wife’s. Realizing that how I interpret it is most likely less significant than how she interpreted it is wisdom rather than a bad thing.

    We all are left guessing at what the experience of death is like until it is upon us, but we still try to observe and interpret from our dying companions in order to prepare for it.

    A happier example is the artistic process. Many creative geniuses describe a beginning called inspiration, whether they put it in divine terms or attribute it to something else. Be that as it may, we have as evidence of their assertions the works they produce. I may wish for a visitation from the Muse and make myself receptive, but if it does not come, that does not demonstrate that Mozart, for example, was mythologizing his creativity when he wrote, “Whence and how [my ideas] come, I do not know, nor can I force them….[The composition] does not come to me successively, with its various parts worked out in order…It is as though I am listening to it—already complete.”

    I have heard the same thing described by enough provable artists to believe it happens without experiencing it myself.

  58. Lisa K. Avatar
    Lisa K.

    It is easy to get a sense of uselessness in our lives as we grow older–perhaps we cannot do what we could easily do when we were young but it doesn’t mean we want to do nothing. It is easy to feel useless in a church little to no ministries for women other than motherhood. We are not the leaders, readers or chanters in many Orthodox churches. And what do we do when our children grow up and leave us? We get to offer our uselessness in the church to God as if we should somehow like it. I can tell you that many don’t like it. It is an ongoing struggle and sacrifice to remain……..and yet, where can we go? The Church alone has the source of everlasting life for us.

  59. David Avatar
    David

    I can’t see with another man’s eyes. Christ, according to the Gospels, restored sight to the blind so they could see for themselves. That we are not ‘blank slates’ is kind of beside the point, isn’t it?

    I want my children to know me from the tine that they have to spend with me. Does a child really want everything they know of their father to come from a book he wrote before they were even born? A child’s bond with his or her parents is in the immediacy of the relationship. That is an expectation that is created when we use the word “Father” and refer to Christians as those who are adopted as “children” and “sons.” I have two adopted children. I know what the love of adopted children looks like from the inside out.

    Being a father means being present in a way that makes a difference that is genuinely a difference in that child’s life. If that child is starving on the street who cares that the father declares his undying love for that child. And if that child comes to believe that his or her father doesn’t care about them, isn’t that understandable? Hasn’t that father become truly useless?

    I am having this type of conversation across several platforms. What I have yet to hear is this: “We are effectively abandoned by God to our own devices.” What would abandonment look like? No one is down here guiding us. There is no help from above saving us from ourselves. The worst things that can happen do happen and worse yet it happens to our kids. Yet people talk about how much God loves them. Why is it that? Why is it so hard for people to just admit that in their day to day lives they live on the precarious edge somewhere between order and chaos.

    Let me ask this, does it sound too much like atheism to say that at the level of day-to-day life our experience is one of God’s absence?

    Isn’t that really the punch line about the useless God? That a person’s life might be so plagued by tragedy it is as if God is not just unaware, but even hostile?

    Isn’t this what Job said? Right?

    Will you speak wickedly for God,
    And talk deceitfully for Him?
    Will you show partiality for Him?
    Will you contend for God?
    Will it be well when He searches you out?
    Or can you mock Him as one mocks a man?
    He will surely rebuke you
    If you secretly show partiality.
    Will not His excellence make you afraid,
    And the dread of Him fall upon you?
    Your platitudes are proverbs of ashes,
    Your defenses are defenses of clay.
    Hold your peace with me, and let me speak,
    Then let come on me what may!
    Why do I take my flesh in my teeth,
    And put my life in my hands?
    [He will slay me, I have no hope.]
    Even so, I will defend my own ways before Him.
    He also shall be my salvation,
    For a hypocrite could not come before Him.

    That is Job: Fierce, defiant, critical of those with weak platitudes who imagine they are gaining God’s favor by showing partiality to God. And then comes the the stunning theological brilliance of Eliphaz the Temanite:

    Should a wise man answer with empty knowledge,
    And fill himself with the east wind?
    Should he reason with unprofitable talk,
    Or by speeches with which he can do no good?
    Yes, you cast off fear,
    And restrain prayer before God.
    For your iniquity teaches your mouth,
    And you choose the tongue of the crafty.
    Your own mouth condemns you, and not I;
    Yes, your own lips testify against you.
    Are you the first man who was born?
    Or were you made before the hills?
    Have you heard the counsel of God?
    Do you limit wisdom to yourself?
    What do you know that we do not know?
    What do you understand that is not in us?
    Both the gray-haired and the aged are among us,
    Much older than your father.
    Are the consolations of God too small for you,
    And the word spoken gently with you?
    Why does your heart carry you away,
    And what do your eyes wink at,
    That you turn your spirit against God,
    And let such words go out of your mouth?

    Eliphaz had all the right answers didn’t he? These responses are like 3500 years old, but people who have never read this are making the same claims. Isn’t that interesting? It is amazing that there is nothing new in it. You know what is really amazing? It is what God said at the end of it all:

    “The Lord said to Eliphaz the Temanite, “My wrath is aroused against you and your two friends, for you have not spoken of Me what is right, as My servant Job has.”

    WHAT?? How is that possible? Maybe it is because Job says, “He also shall be my salvation, For a hypocrite could not come before Him.” I don’t know, but maybe we just need to be honest about where we are at and what that looks like to us from where we are actually standing. Job was a lot of things, but he refused to pretend to be something he wasn’t. He was true to where he was at.

    Job says of God:

    He tears me in His wrath, and hates me;
    He gnashes at me with His teeth;
    My adversary sharpens His gaze on me.
    They gape at me with their mouth,
    They strike me reproachfully on the cheek,
    They gather together against me.
    God has delivered me to the ungodly,
    And turned me over to the hands of the wicked.
    I was at ease, but He has shattered me;
    He also has taken me by my neck, and shaken me to pieces;
    He has set me up for His target,
    His archers surround me.
    He pierces my heart and does not pity;
    He pours out my gall on the ground.
    He breaks me with wound upon wound;
    He runs at me like a warrior.

    It’s also kind of funny that Job says all that inflammatory stuff and then the end God basically says “Well, he wasn’t wrong.”

  60. David Avatar
    David

    On a more positive note, I thought that this was interesting:

    Job’s Lament — A Mirror of Christ’s Passion
    “They strike me reproachfully on the cheek”
    → “Then they spat in His face and struck Him. Others slapped Him…” (Matt. 26:67)

    “They gather together against me”
    → “Then the whole crowd of them got up and led Him before Pilate.” (Luke 23:1)

    “God has delivered me to the ungodly… turned me over to the hands of the wicked”
    → “And Jesus said to them, ‘This is your hour, and the power of darkness.’” (Luke 22:53)

    “He has set me up for His target… pierces my heart… pours out my gall on the ground”
    → “One of the soldiers pierced His side with a spear… and at once blood and water came out.” (John 19:34)
    → “They gave Him sour wine mingled with gall to drink.” (Matt. 27:34)

    “He breaks me with wound upon wound; He runs at me like a warrior.”
    → “I gave My back to those who struck Me… I did not hide My face from shame and spitting.” (Isaiah 50:6)
    → “He was wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities…” (Isaiah 53:5)

  61. Dee of St Herman Avatar
    Dee of St Herman

    Mark,
    I appreciate the description of Mozart. The gift of insight of a whole composition. Seems to me a God-given gift that resists the moniker of mythologizing. It invokes in me the awe in the beauty of God and His creation.

    And interestingly I believe it ties in with what Byron mentioned about false dichotomies. There is indeed a rich spectrum of beauty in the humble and real human life experience, which may actually a quiet life of mythic proportions.

  62. Dee of St Herman Avatar
    Dee of St Herman

    Sorry about the typos—on my phone without reading glasses

  63. Fr. Stephen Avatar

    David,
    I think it is right to cite Job and acknowledge that this, too, is part of human experience. I could not say that it is “the” human experience, or even the quintessential human experience. I readily agree that it is Christ-like, profoundly so.

    I do not have advice of what would make a difference (if a difference was sought). You and I have had long conversations over the past number of years – so it’s not like we haven’t looked at this from dang near every angle. To a great extent, it is a deeply personalized version of the problem of evil – which is ever so much more poignant than the philosophical conundrum. It breaks my heart (and it should).

    The reason that I cannot say that it is “the” human experience is that it is not my experience. I have no explanation for why it is not, except that my life experiences have been different. What I do know is that you are not some glaring exception – people suffer – and those who suffer the most are those who experience abandonment (and it doesn’t really matter the cause of that experience).

    I can say that I believe Christ entered into the depths of that abandonment (surely to say that “He descended into hell” includes that), which is to say that God knows our abandonment experience and makes it His own. Of course, we easily ask, “Why allow this in the first place?” which simply goes back to the problem of evil itself. The only answer to that that has made any sense to me (though I don’t offer it as the answer) is that the whole of our existence and of the world is the process of being conformed to the image of Christ – of being made like Him. That answer has the small comfort of saying that it is not without purpose. But, the very nature of abandonment doesn’t really admit of answers, etc.

    I reflect on the fact that Christ singled out the poor, the sick, the naked, the hungry, the prisoner for the points of His unique union with us: they are Him and He is they. So, they are not things that He treats in an embarrassed fashion as if they were mistakes. I ponder that as well.

    I have never known the kind of abandonment that plagues you. I have known snatches. I know that the intensity of those experiences was not something I would have wanted to extend for a second longer. Something has always intervened. St. Silouan described 15 years of such abandonment – in the intensity of hell. It’s unimaginable.

    I said earlier that I could not say that such abandonment (shared by Christ) cannot be universalized (in an extreme sense) because it’s not experienced by everyone. It is pointed out to us by Christ that the poor, the sick, the naked, the hungry, the thirsty, the prisoner are among us and that we ourselves must not abandon them. To that, all I can say, is that I’m glad that you’re here and that I know you. I would that I knew better how to feed and clothe, how to give a drink of water and such. I am deeply grateful for the many times I have been helped by others – generally, that’s how abandonment has been lifted for me.

    I pray for your relief, but I have no techniques or wisdom that would make it so.

    When I was in college, I was hospitalized with a profound depression. Long story. But part of the process of coming out of hospital involved days/nights of intense inner pain. I can’t describe it. It was terrible. I remember one night was particularly bad. Beth was with me and we had gone to my parents for the night – I in my room, she in the guest bedroom. But the pain was intense. I couldn’t sleep. I just more or less writhed in agony. At a certain point that night I was aware that my father was sitting by my bed. No words passed between us. I can now imagine that he felt helpless. I’m sure he prayed. I don’t know how long he was there, but he probably didn’t get any more sleep than I did.

    We never discussed it later. The intensity of the night passed. Slowly, very slowly, those days became more rare. Somehow I finished college. I got married around 9 months after that night. There were off and on experiences of that torment over the next several years. Abandonment could have been part of it. The nature of that pain is that you can’t feel anything around you. You’re locked in it. But, I did have the deep comfort that my father sat there. Beth was always there. It mattered. They cared. They “visited” me.

    My parents are dead. I know that my father had his own private hell. I saw it more times than I can count. I also saw changes in him that lessened that pain. I pray for him and my mother all the time. I “sit” by them without words and ask for God’s goodness to them. I believe that God heard my father’s prayers for me.

    All of that probably means that my experience of abandonment is itself different from your own. “Abandonment with company” is perhaps a good description.

    I’ll do my best to keep company with you – with all of us – for everyone knows something of abandoment at some point. It is of interest to me, as a believer, that the Christ made known to us in the Scriptures seems to be more keenly interested in this reality than everyone around Him. And that His words on the Cross clearly must reflect that as well. How can we worship the One on the Cross and ignore agony when we see it around us?

    God be with us all.

  64. Fr. Stephen Avatar

    Dee, Mark,
    I’ve always had a fascination with “genius” – that strange giftedness in which the impossible seems to easy. Mozart – as a child – effortlessly playing, writing, etc. It’s rare. It is indeed beautiful. And, interestingly, most who have such take no credit for it. They’re as amazed as everyone else.

  65. Helen Avatar
    Helen

    David,
    Your pain somehow feels so familiar to me. You made me feel less alone by describing it. It is real. It really is hell. And I feel worse when people, especially at church have no clue. The love I have sought is big. It had to be big to fill the big wound. I didn’t know that for a long time. I just thought I was too needy, not faithful enough, not good enough. But I know that now that this is my wound, my need, and I somehow know that it is ok to be this way. It is who I am, with what I have been dealt with. Jesus didn’t rebuke the blind or the lame for having needs. It is ok to seek, to ask.

  66. Shannon Avatar
    Shannon

    David
    You are I think in error on one point. “The worst things that can happen do happen…”
    This is not true. God is constantly restraining evil. (Whether on His own or in response to the prayers of the faithful, living or asleep or both.). It is quite easy even for me, who has always avoided horror films, to imagine a much darker, more fearful world. The evil one is restrained. Indeed, unless he wanted to toy with us or torture, absent God, we would all be destroyed by him in a moment.
    Anyone correct me if I am wrong please.

  67. Dee of St Herman Avatar
    Dee of St Herman

    Hellen,
    I believe it is good to sit with someone in pain as Father described. But I believe it maybe presumptuous to assume that others might not have any clue. There is more to our lives than what we see on the surface. We are more connected than what our individualistic culture would have us believe.

  68. Helen Avatar
    Helen

    Dee, yes. I was referring to my experience of trying to talk about this with specific people who didn’t understand and how much worse I felt. It was meant in a personal way. I didn’t mean it generally and I appreciate your comment and my chance to make that distinction.

  69. Fr. Stephen Avatar

    Shannon,
    It’s a technical point. But, I agree that evil is restrained. We almost never bear the full consequences of our actions (thank God). But, at the same time I say that, the very things that I fear do indeed happen to some people, somewhere. So we pray, “Save us, have mercy on us, and keep us, O God, by Thy grace.”

    WC Fields, the comedian, once observed: “The world’s a dangerous place. A man’s lucky to get out of it alive…” Forgive me.

  70. Dee of St Herman Avatar
    Dee of St Herman

    Father,
    For various reasons, I’ve been suffering and grieving lately. I will not spill the beans about what is going on specifically. But I’ve been trying to focus on acquiring sufficient peace to read my bible and pray. But it isn’t happening at the moment.

    Instead, I reflect on a time in my youth after a car accident that not only killed my parents but also ripped their bodies to shreds, and miraculously left my brother and me alive, but also torn, burned, and broken. We were in a hospital, I just got out of the emergency room, and was placed in a hospital room where I would convalesce for a couple of weeks, across the hall was my brother’s hospital room.

    After I was settled in the room, a Roman Catholic priest came by. It was a Catholic hospital. In my suffering, there was a lot for my 17 year old mind to digest. Death was no abstract phenomenon; it had taste and smell. I had experiences in the throes of the accident that I was trying to comprehend, which, with whatever I had been exposed to of Christianity, demonstrated its falseness. Whatever the reality of God was, it was not babies with wings flying around.

    What impressed me most about the priest right off the bat is that he asked a couple of questions. First he asked me if I was Catholic, and I said no. Then he asked me whether I wanted him to pray for me. The Protestants I had been exposed to would have never asked such a question. To my surprise, in that moment, given that I was ready to ditch everything that I had been exposed to of Christianity, I said yes.

    Then he put his rosary on my broken chest as he began to pray aloud. I had never seen, let alone experienced, someone with a rosary pray, let alone use a rosary as a means to transport their prayer into my broken body. His was a humble prayer. No high and mighty stuff. I was deeply affected and appreciated his belief that God listened to his prayers. His prayers and his faith in those moments were pivotal in saving me. But in those moments, I wasn’t yet aware of this reality until many decades later. The memory stuck. Whether it was the extreme circumstances or the humble prayer of a priest, I don’t know. But it stuck, the memory would not let go of me.

  71. Jenny Avatar
    Jenny

    Father Stephen,

    I have been following along and praying. On the day you posted this, I was struggling, as is usual, with a feeling of uselessness that is only exacerbated by the grace given to me, which I often attempt to earn in retrospect, despite the fact that I did not earn it in the first place.

    It is true that one cannot base one’s discipleship of Christ on subjective experience. I tried doing that myself, at a certain point, and I was rebuked. Our faith rests in Christ. He is a solid rock and a peaceful place to stand.

    But it took me years to learn to stand there, and it is always possible to doubt. When the Lord ascended into Heaven, there were some standing right there who doubted. How was it possible to doubt in that moment? Yet it’s in Scripture.

    Central to being conformed to the image of Christ is to be crucified with Him. Crucifixion involves shame, helplessness, abandonment, apparent meaningless and failure.

    I wrote in a former comment that I experienced the Lord’s presence early in my life in such a way that I could not afterward doubt that the Lord Jesus lives and is God.

    That is true, but this experience did not occur within a group setting and my childhood church was not charismatic. I grew up in what Wikipedia calls an apocalyptic sect. Many have identified it as a cult.

    I was not yet in High School and it was during the summer. My father had been asked to be responsible for meals during the older girl’s summer camp in Maine.

    The whole family went with him. I was too young to join the girl’s camp. The campus in Maine was the site of the original church, founded by a man who had believed he was the prophet Elijah reincarnated to prepare people for the imminent and terrifying return of Christ.

    Part of that preparation was twenty four hour prayer. Much of the original buildings had been torn down years ago, but the women’s prayer tower remained- a small room seven stories up.

    That was where I was, all by myself, one summer afternoon. I was trying desperately to make myself love Jesus so I wouldn’t go to hell.

    Jesus was, I had been taught, the executor of His Father’s wrath. It was true that He had saved me on the cross, but I knew I was distasteful to Him and repugnant to His Father, who was a consuming fire.

    I couldn’t please Him unless I lived an absolutely perfect life in every way by constant, agonizing effort. If I kept this effort up my whole life, perhaps I could be counted one of the 144,000.

    But that goal was not on my mind as I went through my whole Bible, looking for a way to take away my deeply rooted fear and resentment of Jesus, and replace it with the appropriate level of love which was His due.

    What happened instead is that I suddenly knew that Jesus Himself was with me. He wasn’t an archetype or a myth or a picture. He wasn’t two dimensional. He was a living, specific Person and He knew me- He knew who I was. He knew me because He had created me, and because I was a person He had created, He loved me.

    I was so filled with unbearable joy that I rose from my seat and ran down six flights of stairs and into the summer dusk, where I went dancing and leaping over the lawns, with no one to see and no one to know.

    That experience was not obliterated by everything that occurred after it.

    Not by the collapse of the church in my teens, which equated to the loss of my world as I had known it, the emotional dysfunction and collapse of my parents as they came to terms with their history of abuse, or anxiety so intense I could not get a driver’s license or make phone calls without a script.

    It was not obliterated by my marriage at 19 to an emotionally abusive young man who attempted, systematically, to destroy my innocence in every way, and whose favorite song to sing to me was “Under My Thumb,” and the untreated clinical depression I endured at the time.

    It was not obliterated by my divorce at 21, made possible by my husband sleeping with a coworker, or my father’s affair with the male youth counselor of the church they attended at the time.

    My knowledge of the Person and love of Christ was not obliterated by at least three years of trauma therapy, including panic attacks and dissociative events, trying to heal from the abuse I’d endured as I child from my great uncle, a deacon in the church and my special friend.

    The love of Christ that I had known was not obliterated by the many negative pregnancy tests I held in my hopeful hands, after I had married my current husband, and the eventual diagnosis of infertility, and with it, the loss of the deepest longing I had ever had as a woman.

    It was the devastating conclusion of every other part of myself and my hopes and dreams that had, by then, been marred, blunted and destroyed.

    Because the other part of being crucified with Christ is being resurrected with Him, so that it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. I have come to know Christ and the fellowship of His suffering through my own, and that knowledge of Him is so precious to me that I would not now give up any part of my suffering.

    And there is nothing that can separate us from the love of Christ- not calamity and distress or hunger or destitution or peril. No powers above or powers below can separate us from the love of God for us in Christ Jesus.

    Beloved, we do not know yet what we are, though we are His children. But we know that when we see our Lord Jesus, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.

    We do not receive a token Jesus, a myth or a shadow at the conclusion of our life here. We receive the very One who stooped down and wrote in the dust. It’s the living hands nailed to the cross that will grasp ours in a warm clasp.

    So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.

    2 Corinthians 4:16-18, ESV

    This is the witness of St Paul. It’s been given to us to receive it.

  72. David Avatar
    David

    Jenny.

    You were a JW…?

  73. Fr. Stephen Avatar

    Dee,
    Thank you. I thank God for that priest and his humble prayer.

    I’ve been pondering this morning the question: “What is normative for the human experience of God?” I don’t actually have an answer for that. Orthodoxy certainly speaks of experiences, without much comment. It is also no stranger to the notion of absence and its pain. I know that modern American culture has been bathed in various forms of pietism, Protestant, Catholic, Pentecostal, etc., all of which have some sense of an abiding presence of God. In Evangelicalism (just a form of pietism) historically, the notion of a “born-again” experience became universalized as the sine qua non of salvation itself, even though such a notion was utterly new to Christian understanding. “Born again” had universally been seen as something that occurs in Holy Baptism. But the new pietism of conversion raised experience to a new level. I suspect that there’s a world of distortion built into that (or so my morning musings tell me).

    During the growth of those pietist movements, beginning in the 17th century, people began to make amazing claims based on an inner experience. Lots of the stuff they did was demonstrably delusional. It fed the Puritan movements and Quakers and others. It overthrew the government of England and cost a king his head. It’s still quite widespread in our culture and spills over into American politics all the time. Some of it still seems crazy to me. But I don’t write off our experience. I simply have lots of questions of it.

    When I left the charismatic movement and returned to Anglicanism (back in 1975), it was an effort to leave the insanity (including my own) and return to something stable. Historic, sacramental union with God was what I had in mind. My “experience” was all over the map. Good days. Bad days. But the Cup of communion was always there, the historic continuity of the Church was there.

    It was a process over the years in which the Anglican expression became less and less historic or sacramental. It became its own form of insanity to me. In 1998 I was received into Orthodoxy along with my family. My “experience” was still all over the map – good days, bad days. There was lots of risk-taking and things that made me anxious in that process. In hindsight, it was not about the immediate experience (“how do I feel right now”). It was more about the historical and sacramental, the doctrine and stability, the union with the saints, etc.

    I don’t discount experience. I simply have never trusted the utter emphasis it receives in our pietist-shaped cultural history. I’m glad to have it when it’s good, miss it when it’s bad. But, my grounding remains in the factual reality of Christ – of the death and resurrection of Christ. I accept the Church’s teaching on what it means. But, I think I accept the reality that human beings are inconsistent in our inner experiences. I take them with a grain of salt (but don’t dismiss them).

    Just some musings.

  74. Fr. Stephen Avatar

    Jenny,
    Thank you for sharing this. May God keep us in His grace.

  75. Fr. Stephen Avatar

    To all,
    I want to express my gratitude for such conversations as the one at present. It’s not just worthwhile, but is a gift of the reading/commenting community to let the space be welcoming and generous (rather than arguing and trying to fix one another). It is a significant part of my life each day. I appreciate it and all of you.

  76. Dee of St Herman Avatar
    Dee of St Herman

    Dear Father,
    Thank you for your musings. Indeed, there is solidity in the reality of the sacraments that does not require ‘an experience’ to substantiate their reality or their efficacy. I appreciate your mentioning this. Having not had extensive exposure to the cults and phenomena you mentioned, but having experience of this culture, which retains the ethos of such movements, I realize we are ‘primed’ for disappointment if we hold expectations for heavenly effects.

    It seems we’re encouraged, whether by media or extensive advertisements, to expect instant gratification. This is what I look for now, almost whenever I grab my phone. This isn’t how I was brought up in my early years. I wish I weren’t so susceptible to it in my later years–it seems to be more like an addiction. I pray that I might not be so vulnerable.

  77. Mallory Avatar
    Mallory

    Is it true God is constantly restraining evil? How can we really know that? Perhaps the evil that is restrained in this world comes from the people who actually do the things that ameliorate the suffering in the world. I guess these conversations are challenging (although so worthwhile!) because ultimately it must come down to belief. My Buddhist friend believes in right action, following the eight-fold path–to him, a simple (not easy) practical example of how to exist in a world filled with suffering and, yes, evil. The way he describes his practice is that it requires no belief, no faith, just right action and being in the moment, and, as Fr. Stephen often says “doing the next right thing”–thus he has been relieved of decades of suffering and wondering where God is (he used to be Catholic). So perhaps there are many paths to peace. I wish everyone peace. Most of all, I wish to know Christ. Fr. Stephen, what is the difference between God and Christ? Is this a dumb question? It’s related to how I’ve previously expressed here how differently I feel when I read the OT verses the NT. I just can’t grasp it.

    I’m so grateful for everyone’s comments. I feel you’re all beautiful.

  78. Fr. Stephen Avatar

    Mallory,
    There’s a Scripture verse that describes God as restraining evil – though it is specifically referring to a cataclysmic evil at the end of all things. Thus, He holds it back until its time. But there’s a general teaching in Orthodoxy that God holds evil in check – not allowing to overwhelm everything utterly. But, I think this is a general observation rather than a close-up inspection. When you are personally being overwhelmed then it might make little difference that the whole world isn’t collapsing (or so it would seem). Nevertheless, despite the extreme evil of wicked rulers/people/civilizations, etc., we’re still here. Goodness has not and does not disappear. The Orthodox teaching would give the grace of God credit for sustaining us in His goodness. When you look at how vicious things are from time to time, it’s actually astounding that we’re still here!

    As to God and Christ. I was thinking about this this past Sunday. It is, particularly in Russian practice, known as “Trinity Sunday” (not just Pentecost). I personally focus on Christ as the lens through which I see the Father. The term “God” can and is used equally to speak of Father, Son, or Holy Spirit, or the Trinity itself, etc. I keep my focus on Christ as the lens – first off, because He came that we might know Him and the Father whom He reveals (by the Holy Spirit – to complete the sentence). It also keeps my mind from wandering to its own imaginations/fears, etc. in thinking about God.

    Keep on with the NT – with John, especially. It’s good to be beautiful. 🙂

  79. Alan Avatar
    Alan

    I just wanted to add my appreciation to you Father, and to the many who comment here often. In a crazy world, and in the often insane world of online “Orthodoxy”, this is a beautiful space. This post (and comments) in particular resonated deeply with me and I can see in the comments that it did so for many. Thank you all. Jenny and Dee, thank you specifically for sharing your very personal and moving accounts. As Father often says, may God give us all grace.

  80. Dirk Avatar
    Dirk

    Hello, I am another regular reader here who has’t previously commented.

    I am currently reading Anthony Bloom’s book Beginning to Pray and I find it is helping me to make sense of the “absence” of God and giving me a more realistic guidance on what an experience I might expect as I am staggering towards prayer.

    Here is a quote:

    Only if we stand completely open before the unknown, can the unknown reveal itself, Himself, as He chooses to reveal Himself to us as we are today. So, with this open-hearted­ ness and open-mindedness, we must stand before God without trying to give Him a shape or to imprison Him in concepts and images, and we must knock at a door.
    Where? The Gospel tells us that the kingdom of God is within us first of all. If we cannot find the kingdom of God within us, if we cannot meet God within, in the very depth of ourselves, our chances of meeting Him outside ourselves are very remote. When Gagarin came back from space and made his remarkable statement that he never saw God in Heaven, one of our priests in Moscow remarked ‘If you have not seen Him on earth, you will never see Him in Heaven.’ This is also true of what I am speaking about. If we cannot find a contact with God 46 BEGINNING To PRAY under our own skin, as it were, in this very small world which I am, then the chances are very slight that even if I meet Him face to face, I will recognise Him. St John Chrysostom said ‘Find the door of your heart, you will discover it is the door of the kingdom of God.’ So it is inward that we must turn, and not outward-but inward in a very special way. I am not saying that we must become introspective. I don’t mean that we must go inward in the way one does in psychoanalysis or psychol­ ogy. It is not a journey into my own inwardness, it is a journey through my own self, in order to emerge from the deepest level of self into the place where He is, the point at which God and I meet.

  81. Michael Bauman Avatar
    Michael Bauman

    We are each going to die at some point. Few know when. None of us should harber fear as to when.

  82. Fr. Stephen Avatar

    Dirk,
    That is such a sweet book (Beginning to Pray). I led a study group (as an Episcopalian) when I was around 21-22 using it. I had so much to learn – but it was very helpful to our group.

    I was struck at the time (as I recall) with his honesty about the “absence.” It’s also a topic that can be difficult to think and talk about – in that it is so “inward.” I cannot remember if it was Met. Anthony or someone else who wrote about an aware of absence as being as important as presence. The example I recall is an expected meeting of someone at a train (it’s so 1940’s!). You’ve been excited about the meeting and looking forward to it for days. On the day of the meeting, they don’t show up. Something has gone wrong. So you are at the station, and there are people all around you, but the only thing you’re aware of is the absence of the one you were to meet. Their absence overwhelms the presence of everything else.

    Met. Anthony’s story of his encounter with the presence of God is, as I recall, quite striking as well.

    My book, Face to Face: Knowing God beyond Our Shame, has a lot of thoughts on the role that shame plays when trying to “find the door of the heart.” Shame is a very powerful wound (in its toxic forms) and something that colors much of what we think and feel (or don’t feel). The process of prayer/meditation seems to me to contain a large dose of intentionally standing “naked” before God – which is not the same thing as standing with nothing before God – as it is standing with an awareness of the shame-stuff before God. A lot of that exercise provides material that I take to confession, fwiw. Many thanks for remembering that book to us. It’s a classic.

  83. Bonnie Avatar
    Bonnie

    Thanks to the two of you who shared about the stresses of radiation therapy while firmly held immovable. Me too. It took a very deliberate choice in those moments to trust God to help me overcome the built-in panic.
    Another necessary deliberate choice I must make is that of creating art. Just waiting for inspiration will result in…nothing. The pencil must be in the hand and start moving. One line at a time. Deliberate choice again.
    Reading scripture and prayer – similarly, I can’t expect results without doing the work. Yes, tried it both ways….found I must do my part first.

  84. Fr. Stephen Avatar

    Bonnie,
    I find writing to be similar –

  85. David Avatar
    David

    This conversation reminded me of something I remember reading years ago, when I was hanging out pretty regularly with Sara Moses. I was honored to have her as a friend. We would meet once a month at a Barnes and Noble bookstore with other “people of the book” to discuss philosophy, religion and the human condition. As a Holocaust survivor everything she said carried weight–like a lot. She spoke and people listened. At the time I read Night by Elie Wiesel and I came across my copy today, and as soon as I saw it I knew I had to post this.

    There is an episode where a young boy had stolen food to eat. The soldiers decided to hang him for his crime, but as a lesson to everyone else, they had to stand and watch. Because the boy was malnourished and wasn’t very heavy his death was not quick. Here is how Elie Wiesel remembers what he saw:

    “Where is God? Where is He?” someone behind me asked. ..
    For more than half an hour [the child in the noose] stayed there, struggling between life and death, dying in slow agony under our eyes. And we had to look him full in the face. He was still alive when I passed in front of him. His tongue was still red, his eyes were not yet glazed.
    Behind me, I heard the same man asking:
    “Where is God now?”
    And I heard a voice within me answer him:
    “Where is He? Here He is—He is hanging here on this gallows. . . .”

    I imagine this resonates with the Orthodox.

    Elie Wiesel intended no Christological meaning. Nonetheless, perhaps Elie Wiesel, like Job, spoke rightly about God in this moment. Maybe God would have said to many Christians at the time, “You have not spoken rightly about me as has my servant Elie.” Maybe he wasn’t “far from the kingdom of God.”

  86. Michael Bauman Avatar
    Michael Bauman

    David, all I can say is Joy is not far away if I allow it.
    Both my wife and I started really hurting last night
    We still are. It is not safe to attempt the 25 minute drive into worship. We watched the movie, “The Shack” about a man’s encounter with God despite killing his father because of persistent physical abuse and loosing his young daughter to a kidnapper when she was seven.

    He has quite an encounter with the Holy Trinity in the midst of his own “Where is God”? questions.

    The answer always seems to be “Not far from the Kingdom of God

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