Sarx

I’m reprinting three essays as part of the “Fear/Faith/Love” Discussion started by Father Peter.

Then when you call upon me and come and pray to me, I will hear you. When you search for me, you will find me; if you seek me with all your heart, I will let you find me, says the Lord, and I will restore your fortunes and gather you from all the nations and all the places where I have driven you, says the Lord, and I will bring you back to the place from which I sent you into exile.
Jeremiah 29:12-14

Often, at the Rehab center where I work, there are clients who describe themselves as Christian. When I was Eastern Orthodox this posed a problem. It was a more-real problem when one of my coworkers was my priest. The problem is that hyper-pious or uber-frum Orthodox, while we are graciously willing to allow that God might be working in someone’s life, even outside of Orthodoxy, we’re quite certain that their practices are loopy at best, heretical mostly if not totally wrong. So we’d sit there, listening to debates about the rapture, etc… and just quietly role our eyes.

I need to be clear that this is no different from the way I act now: a woman was offering up a fundamentalist rant about how it never rained from (a literal 6 day) Creation until the flood. The earth had never seen rains until that time. I and a reasonably liberal Roman Catholic just looked at each other and quietly rolled our eyes.

I’m working on the not-judging part. I know.

From time to time we also get people in with mild forms of Dissociative Identity Disorder - colloquially called “split personalities” and our chart notes begin to reflect this reality as the same client may be addressed by three or four names in the process of one eight-hour shift.

And one time in three years of work (which is pretty amazing, given where I live) we had a client who was a snake handler. I say this is pretty amazing because these mountains where I live are where that tradition comes from. And this client was also a prophet.

And as I worked with this client, it became clear that I was experiencing no serious difference between the Prophet’s world view, and the clients with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). There were only one difference worth noting: The voices in the prophet’s head were called “God” and “Satan” where as the voices in the head of the Clients with DID had names like “Tom” or “Sandy” or “Vern”. To be certain, sometimes a client might become “Sandy” for a week or so, where as a prophet only seemed to hear God once or twice a day. But some persons with DID can slip in and out of their “Alters” as quickly as I can change a shirt.

And I began to wonder why we treated the Prophet any different from the clients with DID. The answer was clearly: simply because the Prophet was describing the experience in religious terms. If the clients with DID had ever said, “Well St Francis just said to me…” or “I’m going to channel Krishna now…” we’d have had a totally different experience.

All of these people - the priest and the addicts - had a more-firm faith than I in their world view: they were (and are) more certain than I about who God is and where God is and what God is about. But, and you can guess this from the way I lump them all together - I don’t want to be any of them. In addiction treatment, we even assume, partly, that in some cases that totality of blank-and-white thinking was what brought them to addiction in the first place. (It becomes easier to see the world in one’s own Black-and-White philosophy if one has “medicated” so as to make the real world seem a little more like putty in one’s hands.)

So what is an Adult Faith?

I started to realise last week I didn’t have one. But I think I need to know what it is, first. It’s not, I think, simply swallowing, hook line and sinker, an ancient world view which, if carried too far, leaves us with a stationary, flat Middle Earth - about 6,000 years old - with an Over Heaven and an Underworld. It leaves us with split personalities and addictive patterns of behaviour. This is not an Adult Faith - although it sometimes comes off as one. Really: it’s a childish faith held over into adulthood, just as “Split personalities” may start off as “imaginary friends.”

…[W]hen you call upon me and come and pray to me, I will hear you. When you search for me, you will find me; if you seek me with all your heart, I will let you find me…

What does it mean to call upon God, to search for God, to seek for God with all our heart? How do we get beyond our childish ideas of black and white, a god that fixes everything, a god that really is rather like a fascist Santa Claus, and find the God who really is?

While all three Abrahamic religions make a claim about scripture, they also make a claim about an “Oral Tradition” as well - Judaism has its “Oral Torah”, Christianity has “the Faith once delivered to the saints” and Islam has its Hadith, oral traditions relating to the words and deeds of Prophet Muhammad. Each of these religions has, also, a literal-fundamentalist movement that tries to stick to the text-of-scripture-only, but all of these are generally recognised as at-best fringe movements and at worst, heresies.

One way to view these traditions is as isolated points of departure in the past. Some devout ultra-Orthodox Jews claim that the “Oral Torah” was given to Moses at the same time as the written text. But the reality is that Jews in the day of Jesus were able to eat Cheese Burgers. The prohibition against eating meat and dairy together, at the same time, is relatively late evolution of the written text in Leviticus, “You shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk.”

Many Orthodox Christians act as if Jesus, himself (or at least his brother, James) dictated the text of the Divine Liturgy, when, in fact, earliest liturgies were nearly verbatim, the simple Jewish prayers over bread and wine recited at every Sabbath. Today’s Divine Liturgy in the Orthodox Church, in fact, is a relatively late evolution: most recent modifications date from the 1930s and 40s, and were dictated by the Ecumenical Patriarch exactly so the Greek Orthodox in Europe and the US could have 1-hour services on Sunday like their Protestant and Catholic neighbours. The Russian service, on the other hand, has evolved the other way: what else is there to do in the midst of a long Russian winter besides standing in Church?

In his sermon for Yom Kippur this year, Rabbi Menachem Creditor said:

All words are human. We recite every Pesach that God’s outstretched arm brought us out of Egypt. Since it is a core Jewish belief that God has neither hands nor arms, such a description is an expression of God’s power – a metaphor – and not a conception of God in physical form. Metaphor is rampant in the Torah. God has a heart. God is pleased. God gets angry. The literal Hebrew idiom for God’s anger is that “God’s nose flared.” But these are metaphors, analogies to our human experience. God is always more than our language can contain, even biblical language. Words are human constructions, meant to convey meaning. But every word, and every human method of communication, is burdened by multiple meanings and by the limitations of the speaker. To say that God’s Will is contained in a text is to limit God’s Will. And to restrict God to words is to create an idol, perhaps no different than the Golden Calf.

Human beings gave God’s Self-revelation form. God’s Presence in revelation is not the question. The subjectivity of the words that result from this holy encounter is. What is the relationship between God’s Truth and the words of the Torah? And what command might be connected to this subjective human formula?

I took my first class in Theology during my first undergraduate year at the Jewish Theological Seminary. I entered with a faith in God’s Word as recorded in the Five Books of Moses. The new ideas and approaches to Torah I learned in with Rabbi Neil Gillman’s class shattered my faith, and left me deeply confused and doubtful.

This was my question: “If the Torah isn’t God’s Word, then what of the tradition I follow which is based upon the words of the Torah? “ The things that had made sense to me because they were based on God’s Will now had no foundation. If our entire tradition is human interpretation how is it Ultimately True?

It’s not.

And, for me, this is the beginning of faith.

Transfer the Rabbi’s words to our tradition only changing one word - “God’s Presence in revelation is not the question. The subjectivity of the words that result from this holy encounter is. What is the relationship between God’s Truth and the words of the tradition? And what command might be connected to this subjective human formula?” The Rabbi’s ultimate question stands: “If our entire tradition is human interpretation how is it Ultimately True?” As does the Rabbi’s answer: “It’s not.”

The Orthodox Traditions (Christian or Jewish) are part of an an-going dialogue, a searching in and reaching deep and pulling out of the faith. It’s a continual process of searching for God. Adult faith is open to that process. In today’s sermon at St Mary’s here in Asheville, Fr Brent made it clear that Catholic Christianity is not repeating the forms of an antique past, but rather a continual making-present of the Gospel. The Catholic Faith is not idolising ancient forms (pretending that what we did, in 1200 was what we always did and should always do). That’s a childish faith, a museum piece as quaint as Victorian decorations on a Christmas tree. It’s the beginning of the multiple personality disorder: finding God in the far distant past and forcing him to say the same things, over and over instead of letting him grow, learn and change.

With Rabbi Creditor, an adult faith affirms that “To say that God’s Will is contained in a text is to limit God’s Will. And to restrict God to words is to create an idol, perhaps no different than the Golden Calf.”

An adult faith must be participating in the conversation, participating in the search.

Tags: communion, essays, eucharist, faith, fear, love, open commuion