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Category Archives: Death

Healing by Fire

26 Wednesday Apr 2023

Posted by CurateMike in All, Death, Healing, Journey

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God, Healing, Holy spirit, Jesus, Journey, Love, salvation

April 2023

 Assuredly, I say to you, inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me.
—Jesus (Matthew 25:40) 

A few months ago I was walking toward a store in a downtown area.  About a block from my destination was a homeless young man.  He was very much the stereotypical: ragged, dirty, worldly possessions in a shopping cart, and holding a cardboard sign asking for any help.  I stopped and asked him his name.  He gave it and the manner of his reply led me to think that mentally he was not quite “all there.”  I told him I’d be praying for him and gave him $20.  As I did, I told him my name and asked that he pray for me.  He assured me he would.

When Jesus’ mother and step-father presented Him in the Temple shortly after His birth, as was the Jewish custom of the day, a man, Simeon, was there waiting.  God had promised Simeon he would see the One who would be the salvation of all humankind.  Upon seeing Jesus, Simeon said:

Behold, this Child is destined for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and…[through Him] the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed. (Luke 2:34-35)

The judgment of God is a mysterious thing.  He doesn’t pronounce judgement like a human magistrate based on some Book of Regulations and sentencing guidelines; rather, God’s judgement is as Simeon says it is: God revealing our hearts to ourselves in the light of His reality.  This is what Jesus did during His so-called earthly ministry.  In the words of Fr Stephen Freeman:

As [Jesus] is increasingly revealed, everything around Him is revealed as well. Things are shown to be more clearly what they are. Those who hate Him, begin to be revealed as plotters and murderers. What was once only thoughts and feelings of envy become plots and perjury. The power of Rome is unmasked for its injustice, mere people-pleasing. The High Priest is revealed to believe that the destruction of God is good for his nation. The weakness of the disciples and the empty boasting of Peter and the rest are shown for their true emptiness. The sin of the world is revealed in the death of God…But the righteous are revealed as well. The steadfast love of the Mother of God never wavered before the Cross. Her faithfulness is revealed. The kindness of Joseph of Arimathea is forever marked by an empty tomb. The tears of a harlot reveal the nature of love, even hidden beneath the deeds of her life.  In the judgment of God, all things are simply shown to be what they truly are. Sin is seen to be sin. Love is seen to be love. There is clarity. And in the judgment of God, His own love is shown to be what it truly is—self-sacrificing, forgiving, relentless in its mercy.

In the quote at opening of this post, Jesus tells us that what I do, or fail to do, for my neighbor reveals my heart’s attitude toward Jesus.  By loving and responding to the needs of the poor, the downtrodden, those in prison, the widows, the orphans, and, yes, even my enemies, my love of God is revealed for what it truly is.  As one saint said, “If I do not love my neighbor and my enemy, I do not love God.”  Sometimes, God is even more direct with us by giving us the opportunity to be hospitable, or not, to an angel without our knowing. (Hebrews 13:2).

I have often wondered what it will be like when I stand before God under His judgment.  I am certain God will reveal that my heart contains both sheep—my meager love of God and my neighbor and goat—my self-centered love of me.  How can I be so certain?  Because my encounter with this homeless man was such a moment of God’s judgment in my life.

When I first approached the young man, my mind was filled with rapid-fire throughs like: It’s my money…The kid might use this cash for drugs, alcohol, etc…He should get himself together and make something of himself as I did…Lord, have mercy on Your child…How good a guy am I for helping out this poor fellow…I’ll show him my humility by asking for his prayers, too….He needs to know someone sees him as a person.

These warring thoughts were a mixture of genuine compassion for this human, made in the image of God, along with my love of money, my judgmentalism, and my pride.  I could clearly recognize bleating of sheep and goats coexisting in my heart.

St Paul says:

…each one’s work [love for neighbor and God] will become evident; for the day will show it because it is to be revealed with fire, and the fire itself will test the quality of each one’s work. If anyone’s work which he has built on it remains, he will receive a reward. If anyone’s work is burned up, he will suffer loss; but he himself will be saved, yet only so as through fire. (
1Corinthians 3:13-15
)

God’s love is fire.  It is experienced by sheep as a comforting, loving embrace and by goats as a consuming inferno.

A couple of hours later I was headed back toward my car.  The homeless young man was still sitting by the tree.  He saw me coming and his countenance brightened.  In his stilted speech, he said “Hey, Mr. Mike!  How are you doing!  I’ll be sure and pray for you.”

I had forgotten his name.

The embarrassment of the moment was God’s gift to me.  He gave me a brief, albeit painful glimpse into the smallness of my own heart as I was once again blistered by the fire of God’s transforming love for me as it burned away a bit of my broken self.

St John Chrysostom said, “The rich exist for the sake of the poor.  The poor exist for the salvation of the rich.”  I need people like this homeless man in my life; I need everyone in my life.  How I respond to those whose paths I cross affords God the opportunity to reveal to me my inner sheep and goat.  If I am willing for God to show me the state of my true heart, and if I will endure the resulting shame, repent for it, and accept God’s unfathomable forgiveness and love for me…well, this is the path to salvation, isn’t it: to descend with Jesus into the hell of my own heart where, I pray, He will raise me up to eternal life with Him.

—————————————–

The heart itself is but a small vessel, yet dragons are there, and there are also lions; there are poisonous beasts and all the treasures of evil. But there too is God, the angels, the life and the kingdom, the light and the apostles, the heavenly cities and the treasuries of grace—all things are there.
—St. Macarius

What If…

28 Monday Dec 2020

Posted by CurateMike in Church, Death, Healing, Life, Uncategorized

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Church, desert fathers, Father, God, Holy spirit, Jesus, Lord of the Rings, Narnia, orthodoxy, Son

In the beginning of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series (Fellowship of the Ring), we read of the Hobbits living their everyday lives in a way we would consider normal: there is juicy gossip, a party with fireworks, mischievous kids…the things of normal life we all would recognize.  However, we are soon introduced to an enchanted world with Elves and other beings, and the Dark Lord Sauron.  Tolkien opens our eyes to a larger reality: against the background of the normalcy of the Hobbit’s lives, there is a battle underway for all of Middle-earth.

What if this were true for us.  Like Hobbits, we go about our daily lives concerned about our families, our jobs, our personal finances, the stuff we own or desire to own, politics, sports, the weather, etc.  What if, as in Tolkien’s Middle-earth, our world is actually enchanted, good and sinister beings exist, and there is a battle, of which we are largely unaware, underway.

To switch stories, in C.S. Lewis’ book, The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, the wicked White Witch introduces Edmund to the addictive treat, Turkish Delight.  With it, she is able to distract Edmund from her true intentions to rule over Narnia as a cold and snowy land and to entice him to join with her.

What if this were true for us.  In the United States and the Western world we are easily distracted: our high standard of living, the internet, social media, the entertainment industry, sports, the never-ending news cycle, toys we have or want, computers, phones, tablets…it is a long list.  What if, as in Narnia,these things are given to us as Turkish Delight, used by an enemy to distract us and to entice us to acquiesce to or outright join the dark forces in the battle.

In the Bible’s New Testament, St Paul says this:
…we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.

There is a indeed a battle raging.  However, it is not a battle for a geographical kingdom, such as Middle-earth or Narnia.  Rather, it is a battle for the Kingdom of God that exists within us.  In this battle, we are both the battleground and the prize!  The battle is for our very being and the battleground is raging right now around us and within us.

In Tolkien’s and Lewis’ fictional fights beings suffer wounds or delusion as a result of the battle.  It is true for us in our battle.  But what if each of us is born into our enchanted world with a wound, an illness that darkens our soul and blinds us to our enchanted reality and the battle around us and within us.

Each of us has a part of our being called a Nous.  Nous is an uncommon word to us modern people.  In classical philosophy, nous “is a term for the faculty of the human mind necessary for understanding what is true or real” (Wikipedia).  It is often believed to be the center of “reason.”  However, centuries ago, Orthodox Christianity re-purposed the word to mean “the eye of the soul, which some Church Fathers also call the heart, [it] is the center of man and is where true (spiritual) knowledge is validated” (Orthodoxwiki).  It is much more than “reason,” it is the faculty that allows us access to the immaterial world around us and to know things that are beyond our reason.  Most importantly, our nous allows us to know God.  (“The Limits of Human Reason” podcast)

Each and every one of us was born with and suffers from an illness of our nous.  This part of our being, originally given to us to know God, to “see” the enchanted reality all around us, and to recognize good and evil, has been darkened and blinded; we were born with this condition.  Consequently, we go through life focused on ourselves, we engage in survival of the fittest, just like all of the plants and animals of nature.

But God doesn’t leave us in this wounded state, He reaches out to each person to awaken us to the battle around us and within us.  And how He tries to awaken us is unique to each of us.  To one He speaks directly, to another He sends a messenger, to yet another He speaks through the circumstances of our lives.

Once awakened to the reality of the battle, we may choose to ignore it and try to live in a safe world of our own making, continuing to gather and feast on Turkish Delight.  Or perhaps we will choose to join the  rulers of darkness who are continually at work around us and within us to win us as their prize.  After all, joining the dark powers may bring us power, prosperity, and sensual pleasure, albeit only in this life on Earth; however, the price is the continued darkening of our nous.  

God longs for us to choose Him.  He longs to heal our wounded nous.  God has a hospital and a cure for us.  It is the Church.

You may strongly disagree.  Perhaps you have been to a church and found no help; rather, you have found only judgement because you don’t meet some standard of behavior.  That is like waking up one morning realizing you are very sick.  You go to the hospital only to be told you cannot enter until you are well.  That is not the true Church.

All too often a church focuses only on the “rules” for our spiritual life.  When the goal of a church is only on the “formulation” of man’s character, his ethical propriety, and his becoming a ‘good’ person and a ‘good’ citizen” then it is acting like a courtroom rather than a hospital.  In the Church-courtroom we experience only “empty moralism…a superficiality” rather than finding the love of God and His healing.  Sadly, many have experienced this Church-courtroom and revolted against God; but, who can blame them?  Why would anyone want to worship a God like that.

Sick people don’t need a courtroom.  Sick people don’t need to be told they aren’t acting like healed people.  Sick people need a hospital.  And, sick people need a cure.

The true Church has always been a hospital that exists to offer a cure for our illness, our woundedness, our spiritual blindness—our darkened nous.  The goal of Christianity has never been about making us into “good” people.  The world is full of “good” people who are still dead people.  The goal of Christianity has always been to make dead people alive!  The path to life is the path of the healing for our nous so that we can see God and join Him in His life.

In God’s Church-hospital, all are welcome.  The Church is filled with people who range from those who do not yet know the extent of their sickness and seriousness of their wounds to those who are well along the path to being healed.

What if you actually believed in the reality that an epic battle is raging, that your very being is both the battleground and the prize.  What if you believe that you can choose which side to be on in the battle.  What if you believe there is a hospital offering you both care and cure for your wounds.  And, most importantly, what if you believethis hospital’s Physician loves you more than you can ever imagine.

What if you believed all of these things…would it change your life?

Life, Luck, and God

29 Thursday Oct 2020

Posted by CurateMike in All, Culture, Death, Humankind

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Death, Father, God, Holy spirit, Life, salvation, Son, Tragedy, Trinity

I read a novel recently in which one of the characters, a man in his twenties, was rightly imprisoned for sexually abusing his thirteen year old sister.  Taking revenge, he used his prison connections and his wealth to have his sister kidnapped, drugged, and sold into sexual slavery where she died after a few years.

This was troubling to me because it caused me to think about the seemingly lucky or unlucky circumstances of our lives.  There are real-life children sold into sexual slavery.  Some people have lost family and homes to war.  Natural disasters disrupt lives and cause widespread death and destruction.  Children are born with mental and physical disabilities.  Random accidents maim and take lives.  Some people are born into poverty, others into great health and wealth.

Life certainly doesn’t seem fair.  So, I find myself wondering what should I, as a Christian, think about the role of luck and God in my life.

Luck, in its most common definition, is the description we use for the things that happen to us that seem to be beyond our control. Philosophers and ethicists speak about the concept of luck.  There is no agreement among them whether luck exists, and if it does, to what degree are we each accountable for the events of our lives.

Authors such as scholar C.S. Lewis and sociologist Max Weber have written about how the modern world has become “disenchanted.”   In the ancient world there was once room for “enchantment”: people believed in gods, spirits, demons, fairies, elves, dragons, and such.  When seemingly unexplainable things happened around people and to people, they created explanations for the mysteries they experienced.  For example, if you make one of the god’s mad and you may experience a fire or an earthquake.  Over the centuries, Christianity vanquished “the gods” and now modern scientism has vanquished the Christian God.  So, in our modern world there is now little room for an enchanted world in the minds of “serious” people; they exclude the possibility of mysterious things “beyond the veil” of the natural world, including God, angels, and miracles.

It seems to me, then, in a disenchanted world, luck is all we have to account for disparities and tragedies of life: Born into or encounter bad things in life? Bad luck.  Born as a “healthy, well adjusted, hard working” person and into a good life?  Good luck.  The examples of good and bad “luck” are manifold as there are lives.  

However, the Christian knows that all of reality is indeed enchanted: there is a God, angels, demons, and the souls of the departed.  So, what about the role of God, luck, and my own free will in my life?

Christians usually avoid reliance on luck.  To explain the events around us, we generally appeal to God’s plan (providence), that usually say that everything comes from God.  Tragedies can occur, we may say, as punishment for the wicked. Or, sometimes we offer that suffering is given to us because it is good for our soul.  We may appeal to God’s love by saying that God wanted a dead loved one more than the family did.  Other times we may appeal to God’s predestination, that these are the events God has for our lives.  We may claim to know the intent of God, that this world is the best He could do given our free will.  We may try to excuse God, claiming that, while He knows how it will end, He doesn’t know how we will get there, again, due to our free will.  Unfortunately, each of these explanations in some way holds God responsible for the tragedy.

God’s plan seems simple: He created humans to enter into a union with Him, for us to participate in His life.  Here is what is in store for those who chose God:

Eye has not seen, nor ear heard,
Nor have entered into the heart of man
The things which God has prepared for those who love Him.

—1Corinthians 2:9

It does seem that God’s plan requires that we have free will to choose Him, and His plan for us is so extraordinary that apparently He is willing to risk that we choose otherwise and bring about terrible tragedy and the fall of the cosmos itself.

The hard thing for us is the accepting the paradox that God does have a plan that will not be thwarted and that we do have free will to act.  The problem for us is that exactly how it works itself out in our lives is a mystery.  And herein is an important point: with our western mindset, we want to turn this into a problem we can solve.  We modern people do not like mysteries because they take away our control.  You see, a problem implies a solution that brings the problem under our control.  Mysteries, however, cannot be brought under our control; rather, they must simply be inhabited. Said differently, an enchanted world contains mystery.

While God’s plan mixed with our free will is a mystery, we can know some things about it.

First, God doesn’t need us at all.  Nor does He need evil and tragedy to bring about His plan.  Unfortunately, the first humans, Adam and Eve, exercised their free will poorly; we and all of creations now live in the aftermath of that first decision.  And, through our own actions, we each, too, often reaffirm that fateful decision by also choosing other than God and turning toward the Prince of this world.  The consequences of our choices is death: the continued sin perpetuated by humans and the natural disasters evident in the world.

Because of our free will, not all events in our lives is willed by God: we make choices and all of the cosmos is fallen, which include the weather, earthquakes, fires, etc.  While it may give us some comfort to believe that God wills all things, the cost of that belief is that we must then also believe God wills all of the tragedy around us from the death of a child to the slaughter of millions. 

So, while God does permit good and bad to occur as a result of our free will choices, this does not mean that He simply sits back and watches as history unfolds.  The Christian God is not the god of life and death we see in the natural world; rather, He is the God of love and life found only in true reality, the enchanted world of all of creation.  As such, God does not leave us alone to meaninglessly suffer and death in this natural world, He acts always for our salvation.  Jesus, the innocent God-man, died to defeat the death that enslaves us and to transform the otherwise meaningless suffering and death of those who choose to turn to Him.   Christ on the cross is the ultimate act of love and life: His death also was not a necessary part of God’s plan; rather, it was a completely free, self-less act of love to save us from our free will choice to bind ourselves and the world to someone other than God—to Satan.

In Jesus’ own words, He came—

To preach the gospel to the poor;
[God the Father] has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted,
To proclaim liberty to the captives
And recovery of sight to the blind,
To set at liberty those who are oppressed.

—Luke 4:18

Perhaps it comes down to this.  While we can argue about the role of God’s plan, our free will, and luck, God has created humankind and willed that we freely choose to be in a loving relationship with Him.  He permits us to choose poorly and Christ has given His life to redeem that choice.  God has something extraordinary in store for us that was worth the risk of the fall of all creation and the horrific tragedies around us.  That brings us to another choice: either we embrace that reality or we decide we cannot turn to that God because we believe that certainly there is a better way to run the universe.

Christians need not feel we must defend God or justify His actions in tragedy.  The radical good news of Christianity is that death is not something to be explained by religion; rather, it is an enemy that has been defeated by Christ.  So, when we look into the lifeless eyes of “the old, the young, the needy, the orphans and the widows, and on all that are in sickness and sorrow, in distress and affliction, in oppression and captivity, in prison and confinement,” or even the dead, we should not see “bad luck” or God’s hand; rather, we must see only the defeated enemy.  Then we must turn our minds and hearts toward God, the God of salvation Who has rescued us from death and Who redeems our suffering and, giving Him thanks, offer to others the love Christ has first shown us. 

I call heaven and earth as witnesses today against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing; therefore choose life, that both you and your descendants may live…

—Moses (Deuteronomy 30:19)

For more on this, I recommend The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? by David Bentley Hart.

Healing of Soul and Body

11 Monday Sep 2017

Posted by CurateMike in All, Church, Death, Healing, Journey

≈ 1 Comment

Remember me, O Lord, in Thy Kingdom not unto judgment or condemnation be my partaking of Thy holy mysteries, O Lord, but unto healing of soul and body.

From the Liturgy of St John Chrysostom

20130207-013139.jpgWe are a country at war.  We have been at war many years now, fighting terrorism overseas.   Before this war on terrorism, there was a war on communism, a war on fascism, a war over territory, a war over slavery, a war against “Indians,” and a war for independence.  These are just some of the “big” wars in the history of our country.  But is not a blog about war, you can find many of those elsewhere written by others much more qualified than I.

Rather, this is my thinking about moral injury: the mostly hidden wound of war on combatants and the similarity to our own moral injury as sinful humans.

Many of us old enough to remember Vietnam can recall the soldiers returning to a society hostile to them.  For some number of them, it was a devastating re-entry.  We are tempted to blame it on their participation in a “bad” war.

Compare Vietnam to today’s “good” war where recruits enlist with fanfare and return as heroes (“Thank you for your service”).  Nowadays, veterans (I was in the Air Force years ago) are asked to stand to applause on Veterans Day.

And yet…

In his book, Killing From the Inside Out, in which he effectively dismantles Augustine’s/Aquines’ Just War Doctrine, Meagher cites Pentagon statistics indicating a “runaway suicide rate in the military, averaging thirty-three suicides per month in 2012, roughly one every seventeen hours.”  One every seventeen hours.  This is not unique to our current war.  Grossmann (On Killing: The Psychology Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society) notes that there were periods during the “Good War,” (WWII) where US soldiers were being discharged (“shellshocked” was the old term) at a rate equal to that of incoming recruits.

But, aren’t these, WWII and the war on terrorism, the “good wars,” the Just Wars?  If so, why the devastating effect on so many soldiers?

In his interview in the magazine Road to Emmaus, (“The Opposite of War is Not Peace”), Dr Timothy Patitsas refers to post World War II research that indicated eighty-five percent (85%!!) of US combatants in combat would either not fire their weapons or they would aim to miss.  Similar, albeit limited, research conducted on our opposing armies yielded the same result.  After the release of these findings, the US Military devised a new way to train soldiers by having them shoot at human-like shapes.  Patitsas notes that after this change, “the post-traumatic stress in Vietnam skyrocketed and hasn’t stopped yet.”

I an not expert in treating combatants, but I’d like to bring out some important points by some who are.

Many of those specializing in the treatment of combat veterans have made some important discoveries.  It seems that despite our best theological and moral efforts to differentiate between murder and killing, a human being who takes a life makes no such distinction in the depths of their soul.  Taking a life of another kills something within many who take that life.  Meagher refers to this a “moral injury.”  Labeling a returning soldier as a “hero” only deepens the moral injury, causing the soldier to retreat within themselves and further from community.  It seems, according to these authors, that many, upon returning from war, view themselves as criminals unfit for society and undeserving of a hero’s welcome.

Here is the image in my mind that has sparked my thinking on this: the juxtaposition of a hero’s welcome parade thrown in honor of someone who views one’s self as a criminal, the one who feels they have committed the crime of killing another human being celebrated by society.  Imagine what must be going through this person’s mind, the energy it must take to play the role of the returning hero.  This is an image I’ll return to shortly.

Cognitive therapy, “talking it out” only seems to make the isolation worse for returning combatants.    Suicide can be a final escape from this hidden, moral injury, the dissonance between being society’s hero, yet feeling irredeemable.  Therapists are looking for another way to help.  Shay, in Achilles in Vietnam, believes that help for soldiers can be found in the ancient past.  His assertion, now widely accepted, is that Homer’s Iliad was written to help Greek soldiers, morally injured by war, cope with this hidden injury and to eventually re-enter society.  As I understand it, there is a new form of therapy, based on Shay’s work, emerging to help soldiers returning from combat.

As I said above, the point of my thinking here is not to focus on war.  I hope I’ve said enough to now turn to what is really on my mind.  And I hope you are still with me.

In reading some of the above material, the idea of a soldier feeling like a criminal and suffering moral injury due to his or her actions resonated deeply within me.  Not because I was in combat—I was enlisted during one of the short periods of time our country was not at war—rather, the idea of suffering moral injury, receiving a hero’s welcome, and the typical therapies that have been employed for healing brought to my mind my experience in the churches I have attended and the Christian books I have read as I battled my own sin.

Meagher notes that “moral injury,” doing something we know is wrong, has an older name, one with which we are much less familiar with in today’s society: sin.  Our modern society has tried to do away with sin by redefining right and wrong.  It seems almost everything can be justified.  If I cut off someone in traffic, they deserved it for driving like an idiot or because my needs exceed theirs. If I’m angry at another, they are keeping me from what I want and my worth is justified.  We now use nature, nurture, rights, genes, parenting, lineage…on and on it goes, to justify almost any action that fits the social norm (which is ever changing, but that’s a different blog).

The idea of feeling like a criminal, feeling separated from other humanity, and feeling unworthy of a hero’s accolade has also caught my attention.  It is more than feeling guilt over a wrong action, over sin, to use the old word.  As described, it is a realization of the kind of person I am: I am someone who can actually perform such sinful acts.  This realization also goes by another, old fashioned name: shame.  Like sin, shame is a concept mostly foreign to modern society (at least as attributed to one’s self; however, we have weaponized shame against others who disagree with us).  If sin is reasoned away in my own life, then there can be no shame; my actions are acceptable and I am acceptable.

Finally, I get to the point of this blog.

I have encountered Christian messages wherein I was encouraged to rejoice in God’s forgiveness of me, to be filled with the joy of being saved as the result of praying a certain prayer.  I was told I had victory over sin.  I was told that if I acted more morally or performed some philanthropic act, I should be happy that God was acting in me; I should be joy-filled.  After saying the “sinner’s prayer,” I was given something akin to a “hero’s welcome” given to the returning combatant.  When facing continued sin, I was told, “Just stop it.  You are a child of God.”  Perhaps you have had the same experience.

But this sense of victory never squared with my own inner certainty of my sinfulness and shame, that while I repented of my past sins and God did forgive me, I did not feel victorious, nor did I experience any sort of self-satisfaction from being saved.  Fr Alexander Schmemann gives voice to my sense of moral injury better than I:

Baptism is the forgiveness of sins, not their removal.  It introduces the sword of Christ into our life and makes it the real conflict, the inescapable pain and suffering of growth.  It is indeed after baptism and because of it, that the reality of sin can be recognized in all of its sadness…

So, back to the image I described above: the combat veteran returning to a hero’s welcome while feeling like a criminal.  All around me were Christians rejoicing and telling me my salvation was a certainty while inside I felt like a pretender.  I was (am) overwhelmed by the anguish of my own shame that I am the kind of person who still most often desires things other than God; I am filled with self love, not love for God and neighbor.  Consequently, rather than experiencing healing, I experienced a deepening separation from these other Christians.

But, the Church has, throughout her history, been a “hospital for the broken,” a place for healing.  How does this healing take place?  In very simplistic terms, the Enlightenment gave us a focus on intellectual truth.  Therapeutic healing, in the light of Enlightenment thinking, is that I learn Truth, and from there I find Goodness in me (or at least rationalize my behavior) and move past my moral injury.  Focus on the intellect, learn truth, and healing follows, I was told.  Like the soldier told that killing in war is okay, that the war is Just, this way of approaching healing did not work for me either.  It only deepened my sense of separation, of isolation.

But this way of using intellect first is a relatively new idea in Christianity; it forsakes Beauty, the third of the classical virtues and the one most neglected in Western thought.

The Eastern Church has always held that to be healed I should seek Beauty first: the Beauty of God.  By dwelling on God I dwell on Beauty; I fall in love with God. In time, loving the Beauty allows me to find the Goodness in the Cross of Christ, and thereby find the goodness in my own cross: my own moral injury.  Finally, the knowledge of the Truth of God, which is intertwined with Beauty and Goodness, begins to emerge.

Sin and the resulting shame (moral injury) drives us from beauty and toward ugliness.  It teaches us lies.  It separates us from others.  Beauty, on the other hand, heals by replacing the ugliness of our moral injury with Beauty.  Beauty brings us into re-entry with community.  Beauty allows us begin to see Goodness, to “embrace Goodness and to become good.”  Then Truth comes, the truth of the Cross; and we can see the humiliation of our being—our shame—in the Light of God and rejoice in His love of us.

Of course healing is not this neatly linear, but it must begin with contemplating Beauty.  Perhaps healing begins with someone who is filled with Christ (a friend, pastor, therapist, etc.) who crosses my path and “absorbs some of my moral injury,” and I see God’s beauty in them.  Eventually, I am able to begin to find the goodness in my shame, for my suffering marks me—they are the marks of the suffering of Christ upon my body.

Healing is a long process.

No one can put together what has crumbled into dust, but You can restore a conscience turned to ashes; You can restore to its former beauty a soul lost and without hope. With You, there is nothing that cannot be redeemed. You are Love; You are Creator and Redeemer. We praise You, singing: Alleluia!

Akathist to the Glory of God, Ode 10

Waiting

04 Tuesday Mar 2014

Posted by CurateMike in All, Death

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Big Bang, birth, Death, eternity, God, Jesus

Wait for the Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord    (Psalm 27:14)

Waiting is hard for most of us.  It takes patience.  The ticking of the clock (do clocks still tick?) can seem interminable.  And, perhaps it is increasingly hard because we are not used to waiting much anymore.  With our mobile devices it is easy to distract ourselves from its tedium.

I’ve recently had the opportunity to reflect on waiting…

If current science is correct, the universe was created somewhere around 13.8 billion years ago.  Ex nihilo is what some say: “out of nothing.”  Correct, in the way it is meant, but the will and Word and action of God are hardly “nothing.”

God spoke into the nothingness.  It sounded like a BANG!

And God began to wait.

Corridor of Time

Created matter cools ands clumps together.  Stars form, live, and die.   One day a mass of hydrogen ignites and an average yellow star appears—we call it “the Sun.”  Matter begins to orbit around this star.  Finally, some 9.3 billion years after The Beginning, there was Earth, “without form and void and darkness was over the face of the deep.”  9.3 billion years. Tick, tick, tick…  Write down the number 29.  Follow it with 16 zeros.  That many seconds ticked by between creation of the universe and the formation of Earth.  Tick, tick, tick…the waiting seems interminable; God’s patience, unimaginable.

Another 1 billion years of seconds pass; tick, tick, tick…a 3 with 16 zeros.  First life appears.  Still He waits…

Still another 3.3 billion years tick off; a 1 followed by 17 zeros.  Tick, tick, tick…the precursors to Adam and Eve walk Earth.  Still He waits…

Again, God speaks, and man and woman appear in the mist of antiquity.  Tick, tick, tick…a 4 followed by 17 zeros between BANG! and the appearance of mankind “created in His image and likeness.”  Still He waits…

God created us to share in His life and in His love, to “partake of His divine nature.”  Write a 4 followed by 17 zeros; that is how many seconds have ticked by since The Beginning.  The number is too big to comprehend.  Put it another way: only in the last 0.0007% of Time between The Beginning until today has mankind, as icon of God, existed.  Tick, tick, tick…  99.9993% of Time God has waited for us.  He is not in a hurry.

 ———————————

At 8:15 on the morning of April 16th, 1924, she entered the world.  Since The Beginning, each of her days was written in God’s book “when there were yet none of them.”  He had plans for her welfare and not for evil, to give her a future and a hope.  Then, for 13.8 billion years God awaited her conception.  He knew the exact time and place she would arrive into the world.  With each tick and tock He thought of her.

Ninety years ago she was conceived and it has been eighty-nine years since her birth.  She was intricately formed exactly as He had intended.  Eighty-nine years: write a 28 followed by 8 zeros.  Tick, tick, tick…each second of her life is precious to God.

The 89 years is drawing to a close.  God’s beautiful daughter lies unresponsive: one day, two days, three days, now four…345,600 seconds have ticked by since she last talked….it is we who now wait.  And we wonder, “Why do You continue to wait, God?”  We plead, “Take her now.”  God remains patient, unhurried.  He has waited 13.8 billion and 89 years to hold her.  When finally He draws her to Him, He will hold her for eternity, seconds without number.

BANG!, said God..it is now 13.8 billion and 89 years later and almost time for the Lover and His beloved to be united face-to-face.  For all of eternity.  God waits patiently for her; it is we who can’t wait.

 ———————————

Physical death came last night, just six weeks shy of ninety.  It has been 13.8 billion and 89 years since God first thought of His most beautiful daughter. Now she has come home to Him.

435,000,000,000,000,000 times the clock has ticked as He waited for her.  They are finally together; Lover and Beloved now united.  That is Love beyond measure.  She is more alive than ever.

 It is our turn to wait to see her.

Tick Tock

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