Sarx

Reposted from last year’s podcast. As I continue to repost these texts I see many roots for my current struggles and I see many lies - that I told myself or used to cover up my own doubt. It’s interesting to read this text from a year ago, written for an Orthodox education programme, and to follow the ways I covered up or tried to appear-to-be-really-Orthodox™ and yet at the same time was trying to be honest about what I wanted to toss out the window.

OFTEN ENOUGH I’ve written and spoken of my time at the Episcopal Church of St Gregory of Nyssa in San Francisco. One of the things that we did there, and rather well, was read the scriptures during Sunday services. Often times the preacher would coach whichever member of the congregation had volunteered to read. Thus the preacher could cause the right points to be pulled out in the reading in preparation for the sermon.

One Sunday I was called upon to read the passage that is assigned as to-day’s Gospel. The preacher, Donald, pointed out that St Mark wrote his Gospel for reading at a break-neck speed. Things happen “immediately” and “suddenly”. There are interruptions written into the text - block of plot are shot full stop by other events. The effect when doing a dramatic reading is as of running into a room and shouting the news to be heard, and then running out. One can seem to have great bravado.

And so it was as I read this passage. The father rushes in, the boy immediately thrown into a fit, the Apostles unable to do anything, and Our Lord steps in.

Suddenly the father cries out the keystone line of the story arc.

Lord I Believe! I cried out. And I sighed heavily and there on the solea, I seemed to decrease five fold, until I was very small. Help my unbelief. And there came a gasp of recognition around the church. This really is the cry of all of each of us at every turn - lest we are not honest each with himself.

The list of things which we are called to believe is great, but it starts first with this matter that we are sinners and must turn to God for salvation and that very first step, the first cry of “help my unbelief” must be made.

And this Gospel tells us plainly that such is as it should be: we are humans and God expects us not to cease being human - but rather to ask for help, to abandon our our all-too-human sense of self sufficiency and pride. The issue is not that we do not believe. But that we do not ask for help. That we relish our unbelief.

At another time in the same parish, I preached a sermon. I don’t remember the topic - perhaps it is best that way. But a women stood up after the sermon, during the “dialogue”, and said, “That’s all right for you - you believe in Jesus. What about for those of us who can not?” And the answer was then - as it is for each of us at every turn - “I believe; help my unbelief!” It’s is the Bible Verse quoted along side my blog (in Latin). It is my constant prayer.

Our Father Among the Saints, John of the Ladder, is commemorated today “because his book, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, is a sure guide to the ascetic life, written by a great man of prayer experienced in all forms of the monastic polity; it teaches the seeker after salvation how to lay a sound foundation for his struggles, how to detect and war against each of the passions, how to avoid the snares laid by the demons, and how to rise from the rudimental virtues to the heights of Godlike love and humility. It is held in such high esteem that it is universally read in its entirety in monasteries during the Great Fast.”
(Source)

The problem is, of course, that neither the parish church nor the house of married laity, is a monastery - as much as certain converts - and certain clergy - would like to make it so. The work of St John is illuminating regarding the snares of the demons, but it is not at all telling in regards to the mode of life lived by the laity - which is vastly different from that of monastics and clergy, especially in the area of obedience, for a lay man or woman is not under obedience to his parish priest or father confessor the same way that a monk is under obedience to his abbot. I have heard tales of people being told by their parish priest to avoid their families, or to stop reading “certain” books, of being told to vote a certain way on the parish council, of being bullied into divorcing a spouse. The laity comply out of obedience. It creates only delusion and abuse when we attempt to apply monastic rules in the layman’s life. At worst, the enemy can tempt us to prelest - spiritual pride - in the mistaken idea that under “obedience” to a man who is not properly so over us makes us better, or holy, or is our salvation. We can thus be led to our own damnation doing something that would be, for a monk, salvific - but for us is merely a game.

This Lent I have been reading “On Human Being” by Olivier Clement, a Lay Theologian from France (Short, Online Bio). I’m only in chapter 3 so I wouldn’t pretend to speak of the entire book but he writes - as does Dimitru Staniloe - of ways in which the layman may work our his salvation in fear and trembling. Drawing us - as a clear class of non-monastics - into that same path through working out our communion with those that God has placed in our lives: honouring the icon of God present in those we meet.

Clement also writes of the great critiques of Christianity in the 19th century. And speaking thus he comments on Freudianism and Marxism as well as Nietzche, noting that as these criticisms arose, what was called Christianity then had devolved into a mere legalistic morality. It is ironic that, in response to many of our modern criticism, we seek not a return to authentic Christian freedom, but to more Pharisaic legalism.

For all that we might find certainty in the abandonment of responsibility that comes from such, we will not find salvation in such artificial rules and such faux monasticism. We will find abuse, and anger, however. Salvation is only in the confessional honesty that is required by the father’s line, oft repeated. Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief. Put down the ladder, if you’re not a monk. Pick up some Clement.