Paschal Reflections

It’s Bright Week.

I celebrated Pascha, sung Greek to the world, slept for a few hours then drove three hours to a monastery. I slept for a few hours and drove back to town. I’m exhausted. I’m running on fumes, held together by cold brew, prayer, and slow-boiling anxiety.

It’s Bright Week.

Now that we have moved out of Creation, I want to take a second to admit that I am an idiot and mostly have no idea what I am talking about. I’m not a philosopher, I’m not a theologian, I’m just some dude who has spent more of my cognizant awareness choosing death over life. If I was at the well and Jesus told me He had life-giving waters or A/C coolant I would hesitate due to the fact that I can’t huff water.

So, starting during Bright Week it might be a good turn to look at the application of all these things as so established in the Creation narrative in our own lives. Pascha means passage, and in relation to Creation and the Gospels we see it as a moving from darkness to light, from ignorance to knowledge, and from death to life.

From huffing freon and smoking weird stuff out of lightbulbs to drinking water and going to bed at a decent hour.

I wonder how you might, regardless of your own worldview, apply this understanding to your own life. Considering that there are degrees to the transformative passage celebrated on Pascha.

For me, I was raised non-denominational (which really meant not religiously), so these themes never touched my life until they found me by my own passing from drunk, tosspot falling asleep in gutters (always at an indecent hour) to sobriety and life in recovery. God meets us where we are and at that intersection the Paschal message glimmers like the dawning of a Manhattan sunrise.

It shines forth through darkened glass and roughshod scaffolding, beaming across oil-stained streets drawing one to a higher reality than the Camel crushed pavement.

God meets us where we are and “makes the sun to rise on the evil and the good, and he sends rain on the just and the unjust” (Matthew 5:45). We have the choice to turn away from the ineffable brilliance that is God’s glory, which graces us even in the darkest pits of our passions. There is no amount of distance that we can put between us and Him that we cannot simply turn around, begin taking responsibility for our lives, and build.

There is a vast swath of spiritual systems that allow us to lay the foundation of what can become a better life and it is not my intention to cast doubt or shade on what works for others, so the reader might reflexively apply this in accordance with their own understanding of the world and self. However, I am an Orthodox Christian, so I see the purpose of all life directed toward the realization of self in Christ and the on-going salvific process of θέωσις (theosis).  

No matter who the sun shines on, whether righteous, unjust, or surrounded by poppers in a stranger’s home this is our purpose in life. Θέωσις is the reason we are here, and it is through this transformative process that we become united to God and attain likeness to Christ. A fundamental grounding to this process is that we understand ourselves as deprived of grace because of the Fall, not naturally sinful like other Christian theologies state.

We are made in the image of God, but the likeness has become distorted by living in a fallen world, where the tendency to lean toward sin is greater. The deprivation of grace makes it that much easier for us to have a self-willed orientation. We are not so naturally walking with God, because it is far more tempting to simply walk alone. Through the process of θέωσις we are, slowly, conforming our will to His thus re-likening to Christ.

This form of cooperation between man and Divinity is called synergy.  

Our belief is that human freedom lies in this synergy wherein our human nature is fully realized in Christ. It is for this reason that the Orthodox worldview begins at the Incarnation; Christ, by taking flesh, redeems our human nature, restoring it in God and by entering into death renders it void. The Incarnation bridged the chasm between God and man becoming the Way to eternal life which was lost in the Fall.

Θέωσις is the process in which we enter eternal life here on earth. In terms of addiction, θέωσις can be seen as a recovery program, and by participating in this transformative process one does move from the corrupted lens and bondage of addiction to freedom of sobriety and recovery in Christ. If living with addiction is a dark glass, then living with and in Christ is cleaning that glass and coming face to face with reality.  

This is why I am suspicious of far-Protestant theological leanings in which one is saved by faith alone because that, to me, is the beginning of a pretty apathetic relationship with Spirit. It is like going to an AA meeting and declaring that you’re cured instead of getting a sponsor.

So, the act of Creation and why I felt it necessary to relate to Pascha is to demonstrate a dynamism inherent in the movement of Creation, where one thing is created then another then another, all referencing their origin and helping set some kind of parameters in which we, too, are moving toward our teleological goal.

Union with God.

This is the meaning to me behind Pascha, why it is so important to me to celebrate that Christ is risen from the dead, defeating death by death. How we enter into this death and resurrection in Him by our own baptism where the Spirit of God hovers over the waters of the baptismal font recreating our every moment in a new creation in Christ.

I do not mean to suggest that my ne’er-do-well past influences this religious framework. I mean to exclaim that Jesus died and rose from the dead. It is really interesting to have to grapple with that, because to grapple with it deepens our relationship with the cosmic re-creation of life.

This is not simply a creative exercise in which we come to terms with an archetypal event, which is meant to change our inner world, thereby changing our outer world. This really happened which makes the above change all the more profound, because of the reality of that change in Christ that we all go through being baptized into His Church.

Now, I do not want to put too fine a point on my very real belief in the Gospel. I only mean to illustrate how believing is the doorway into which we are entering into relationship with the divine energies of God which actually change us.

This change is slow-going, mostly, it has been for me. I’ll be running with the wind in my back for days, months, or years at a time and eventually I’ll have to face the fact that I have not made as much progress as previously thought. It’s kind of like reading all the books on sober living, the Big Book, and so on, but in the meantime becoming a recluse.

Yes, we have not had a drinking-incident in two weeks, but we also have not spoken to anyone in fifteen days.

This is not real sobriety, because sobriety is tested and on that sixteenth day when we emerge from our makeshift monk cell, we might just find that we’ve been flying high with a lead cape. This is good, though, because this is where true spirituality emerges from a fake, thunder-vest that we put on to make ourselves feel better in this expansive, uncertain universe.

This is perhaps why my suspicion of the faith alone crowd is double-edged sword, because there is a want to drape the finest prayers, icons, and necklaces on ourselves, masking our wounds with a false sense of piety.

As my therapist once said while we were talking monks, wizards, and beards, “It is not the beard of the man, but the man behind the beard…” So, admittedly it is a subtle legalism that I almost would rather be the case for this religion than what Christianity actually is.

Orthodox Christianity is not a rule-based system of propositional ethics or even the puritanical moralism that seems to be the common denominator of Calvinist-aligned Protestantism.

Orthodoxy is a call to holiness or perfection.

Which sounds a lot cooler, and harder, than it really is.

Whereas, in the systems of ethics and moralism that come from the Christian West one is effectively cutting themselves off from their humanity and by extension God Himself. There is an implicit appeasing framework wherein I do something, and God loves me; I don’t do something, and God’s wrath is made known to me. Granted, this is a very basic look at things, but as a system that emerged from Medieval Catholicism this is, unfortunately, a lot of people’s interactions with Christian thought.

There has been many a prayer uttered, and rosary recited from guilt.

That is not Christianity.

Furthermore, propositional ethics paves the way for the secular situational ethics, which makes it all relative. In these systems spirituality is… Well, it’s killed, but we see this destruction of spirit by way of taming it. Spirituality, especially in modern times, has become compartmentalized in daily life. Spirituality is at the church, not something we live; this is a dangerous modality considering its parallel to recovery programs, where sobriety is what I do on Tuesdays at my meeting… You see the issue.

True spirituality is embodied and lived with every moment, and from a Christian perspective it is in every moment that we choose to follow Christ and die with Him.

And while this may sound lofty, in application I am finding that we are our own crosses and being crucified with our Lord is much more related to taking the time to sit with our wounds that we may be resurrected by God Who sits with us. Instead of drinking to forget our pain, sleeping around to run from our hurt, or chasing money to avoid pursuing healing we sit together with God with our brokenness.

The Christian path is, characterized by death, a long road in which we are softened by the Spirit. The Spirit Who softens our hearts and allows us to be still, perceiving the very Word of God that surrounds. Again, that is why I thought Creation is such a good place to begin to talk about the Logos, because it is a profound demonstration of His Ever-Presence in the reality of our lives.

We plug up our ears, we talk incessantly, and we run from our problems and ourselves every chance we get. And to my surprise, we can even do it by running (from God) to our prayers.

St. Joseph the Hesychast wrote, “You will fatigue greatly until you realize that prayer without attention and watchfulness is a waste of time, work without pay. Without attention, both the nous (the eye of the soul) and the powers of the soul are diffused in vain and ordinary things, like useless water running down the streets.”

Of course, I should have recognized this as a temptation, but again there is something in me that much prefers legalism to “the mystical, eschatological, and, therefore, maximalistic character of this call to holiness” of the Orthodox Church as Fr. John Meyendorff writes. And because of this maximalistic quality of the faith, that means God’s reach is all-encompassing and to that point we, reflectively, must be all-encompassing, too.

This means that we must walk, or crawl, into the depths of our wounding and allow the light of God to shine on them.

This is why this is so difficult because this faith perspective is sort of a reversal of what we contemporarily understand as spiritual strength, and perhaps as a continued misunderstanding of the Messiah.

Ο ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ ΕΝ ΤΩ ΜΕΣΩ ΗΜΩΝ! ΚΑΙ ΗΝ ΚΑΙ ΕΣΤΙ ΚΑΙ ΕΣΤΑΙ