All who exalt themselves will be humbled…

I’ve been messed up for the past couple of months, drinking coffee, kava, and seltzer like I’m a week out from my last drink, unable to get out of bed some days, dealing with the consequences of my addict brain making poor choices based on old thought patterns that I did not see until far too late to do anything about it except to walk away from a situation entirely. Perhaps, that was what I was supposed to do originally.

If the basis of addiction is control, then it has been with total negation of Step One and Two that I have been walking for quite some time.

Spiraling into oblivion because it is just so much more familiar than taking steps toward a life devoted to land above the chaotic waters, the Tohu wa-Bohu.

 “Those who try to make their life secure will lose it, but those who lose their life will keep it” (Luke 17:33). I must confess that even in my journey to follow Christ I have slipped on the Way by clinging to my life before Christ while still trying to touch His cloak like the woman “saying to herself, ‘If I only touch his cloak, I will be made well’” (Matthew 9:21). 

What this woman was demonstrating for us is the healing power of μετάνοια (metanoia) wherein we put our faith solely in the Divine Christ. It is not enough for us to simply say the prayers or even that we believe in Christ, “What good is it if someone claims to have faith but does not have works” (James 2:14). What good is it if someone claims to walk the twelve steps, but skips the first three when its convenient?

I’ve been treating this path without the full comprehension of what it takes to walk as a Christian in this world—some of this is growing pains, but in light of my baptism there is something else at work.

The sacrament of baptism is one of the seven mysteries of the Holy Church and perhaps, second to the pinnacle of the Christian faith: the Eucharist, is the most important rites of the tradition. Personally, I hold that it is not simply an outward expression of what has been developing internally while it has elements of that, but baptism is an act of supernatural transformation in which our sins have been remitted and our being is united to Christ.

This is how we are established in the faith, though there is open communion in some churches baptism is our way of experiencing the fullness of the salvific Eucharist, the sacraments, and being one with His Body. 

When I was discerning last year, I fully accepted the reality that, by entering into the Orthodox Church via baptism, my life would change forever. I would be closing a lot of doors, losing a lot of friends, and truly entrusting myself to the Church and Christ… The thing is—and I realize how ignorant I might sound—entering into the Episcopal Church has produced the exact same result. I did not enter the Episcopal Church as a way of avoiding the consequences I thought were inevitable with Orthodoxy, but I did not understand that by choosing Christ we are choosing Christ.

This means that there are things that we cannot bring with us through the narrow gate. The Orthodox priest I spoke with during my discernment informed me that there are things that the Church does not allow, there are things that we must deal with to walk with Christ. I didn’t really know what he meant, and I didn’t want to ask because I was afraid that having questions would exclude me from entrance into the Church (old religious trauma), but now I understand.

What he meant is exactly what I’m experiencing now—death to the old life and sanctification in the new, “His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire” (Matthew 3:12). This is the burning of the dross that never feels as mystical as I want. True mysticism, in my experience, is much more grounded than metaphysical, honestly it fucking hurts. 

The pain is coming from being confronted with my own patterns of behavior that run deep. The thing I have done my whole life, living out childhood cycles, is taking responsibility for other people’s feelings, their actions, carrying their cross… carrying their sins. I’ve done this my whole life because 1) it’s all I know how to do as it was how I operated as a child and 2) it’s a really good way of not taking responsibility for our own lives, by running away from that at every opportunity.   

When we take responsibility for other peoples’ actions and feelings, we are not only wrestling agency away from them, but we are also expressing a deep-seated desire for someone to tell us that we are good enough, that we are worth loving, that we are… here. 

Some people do not realize this and inadvertently take advantage while others recognize other’s brokenness and use it against them.  

People who are willing to give up responsibility for their own lives and thrust it upon another are more than happy to see someone like me show up in their lives. And I’m more than happy to stumble upon them in mine. 

It’s an addiction. On both sides it’s an addiction. Two users getting high off each other into oblivion. One is addicted to the false hope that one day they might be enough, living in a memory so assured that if they do it right this time, both their present and past will be fixed. They will fix themselves by getting it right this time and this time they’ll be loved. The other is addicted to never feeling alone, again, to getting what they never got in their memories of lonely childhoods and unloving families. These two junkies meet and, like experiencing euphoria from a new, better drug, the world melts away and the two become intertwined in a beautiful, tragic, explosive rapture consuming them both like being torn to shreds by a hydra of their own conjuration. 

Until there is nothing left in either of them. 

In relationships I have been on both sides, being the fantasy and the fantasizer, making someone else the key to our salvation. What is painful to admit is that when we are the fantasy, we feel really good. It’s like having someone inject us with Xanax, ecstasy, and pre-workout just by their words and their touch. You mean something to them, you have value. There is someone in the mirror that looks back at you!

But you’ll mess up, you’ll slip and then the fantasy starts to develop cracks and this person who pinned all their hope on you starts looking at you as if you took their hope away from them just like everyone else. Then all of a sudden you are not their fantasy; just like that you’re back to being nothing… worse than nothing, because you’re also a disappointment. Not only does the reflection in the mirror loses its texture. Then you start trying to do everything you can to reclaim your position as a fantasy, to reclaim that smile in the mirror, but it’ll never be the same. 

You’re a low-rent Sisyphus pushing a boulder up a hill for diminishing returns, over and over again. 

This is a pattern of addiction, because there is a clear way out of this cycle, but instead of simply walking away from the boulder you insist on pushing it, you insist that you can do this—you can become a fantasy again. This is rock bottom. 

This is Hades. 

It’s like walking through a hall of mirrors and seeing yourself a little bit less with every step, willfully veiling ourselves to our own unwelcome states of consciousness and the actions that arise from them, “but when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another, for this comes for the Lord, the Spirit” (2 Corinthians 3:16-18).  

The addict in me reads, “but when one turns to the Lord,” there is no going back. Everything that I was I can never be again. Even if I wanted to.

“Remember Lot’s wife” (Luke 17:32). 

There is no going back, which necessitates living out our baptismal covenant to “persevere in resisting evil, and whenever we fall into sin, repenting and returning to the Lord […] seeking to serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbors as ourselves […] striving for justice and peace among all people, and respecting the dignity of every human being” (BCP 264).

Forgiveness is what I mean, because we cannot return to the Lord in repentance without first forgiving our neighbor, loving them as God love us which is how we ought to love ourselves, and respect our dignity by respecting others’. There is no walking with the Lord without forgiving who we’ve been and how others’ have treated us. There is no resisting evil, no μετάνοια, and neither is there capacity for truth without forgiveness,

Forgiveness is as much of a practice as anything else; it’s a practice of letting go that we become better at through contemplative practices, otherwise we’re still clinging to the past while trying to touch the hem of Christ’s cloak.

Transformation, recovery, is an all or nothing way of being… which might sound triggering to anyone like me who has used this all-or-nothing thinking to drive myself crazy from perfectionism to binge drinking. However, there is comfort in St. Paul’s epistle, that we are being “transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another,” therefore we’re talking about small steps in sobriety, recovery, and θέωσις—one day at a time. 

To live for God, one day at time: moving from one degree of glory to another… One day at a time. 

The Glory of God is Wisdom, “Sophia [is] the revelation of the Wisdom of God; and she is also Glory… the revelation of God’s Beauty and All-blessedness.” (Bulgakov 107). In and through glory we realize our true function, which is not to waste away in dive bars or in relationships that are destroying both parties. Our function is to become—to identify with something outside of ourselves that is also within, to realize ultimate reality. This ultimate reality “builds a bridge of ontological identification between the Creator and creation through the deification of the latter” (Bulgakov 112). 

Christianity through this lens is not a faith tradition built around theory and doctrines that one must believe in order to go to Heaven; it is a praxis, fully applicable in our lives, one day at a time. 

The Hagia Sophia of God is, through the school of Sophiology, identified with God’s essence and this Wisdom is expressed through creaturely wisdom in the world. The Divine relationship between God and humanity is found right here. This school of thought goes on to identify Sophia as the mooring rope between the heavenly and terrestrial worlds wherein the Theotokos is the embodiment of giving the Divine physical expression. 

Sophia is not God Himself, nor is Sophia a hypostatic Person of the Trinity—Sophia is not the Spirit, Sophia is not Christ. Sophia is the love God has expressed in the begetting of the Son and the procession of the Holy Spirit. The kenotic relationship between the Triune hypostatic union and the love that God has for Man is Sophia in the sense that this love is an ordering foundation of the divine world. Sophia is the connecting principle at work behind the universal attraction toward order. Sophia organizes the divine world; Sophia constitutes the love that connects the Trinity as One God. 

“Sophia is all-integral creation and not merely all creation. Sophia is the Great Root by which creation goes into the intra-Trinitarian life and through which it receives Life Eternal from the One Source of Life. Sophia is the original nature of creation, God’s creative love” (Florensky 237). 

Sophia is the revelation of God; Sophia is the self-revelation of God. God’s personal consciousness of self is understood through the guiding and loving principle that is Sophia and it is this love that yearns for reconciliation between Man and God.

It is Sophia that answers the call of God which establishes a loving, feminine principle behind surrendering to God, because this submission is done out of love—the kenotic love of Sonhood—and an attraction toward order in the divine world, “For this reason, the true I of a deified person, his ‘heart,’ is precisely God’s Love, just as the Essence of Divinity is intra-Trinitarian Love. For everything exists truly only insofar as it communes with the God of Love, the Source of being and truth” (Florensky 237).

Man’s spiritual nature is conditioned and relative to the world around it therefore it is correlatively becoming through contemplative practices. The spiritual essence inherent in Man, which is the breath of God, is revealed through this process of becoming spiritually conscious of the self “which is essentially consciousness of God” (Bulgakov 93). By extension, to be ignorant of the spiritual realities of self is to be not only ignorant of God, but also ourselves.

Ultimately, the only real way to know the self is to know God, becoming like Him, embodying Sophia: seeking through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.

In the next post we’ll take a step toward unveiling our hearts, our minds, and eyes by communing with Source of being and truth through Sophia and the Buddhist conception of Right View.

Si comprehendis, non est Deus

Sources:

Bulgakov, Sergius. The Lamb of God.

Florensky, Pavel. The Pillar and Ground of the Truth.

The Book of Common Prayer.