Benedicamus Domino!
I've been pondering what exactly I am trying to accomplish by keeping this blog. Every now and again, it's good to think about why we're doing a given project, and this appears to be my day for taking stock. So, here's what I've come up with.
I am writing this blog as a way both to realize in my own life and to define for anyone else who may be interested what 'living for joy' and 'living a eucharistic or sacramental life is all about. One thing I've discovered over the course of this blog is that it is very difficult to live this kind of life in the cultural milieu in which I find myself, and here's the reason why.
We are a culture, we here in the west, which is built on competition and individualistic belief. We talk about searching for meaning in our own lives, but if once we come up against something which could have repercussions for us that cut across our own assumptions and beliefs, we find it difficult to find these things palatable. I mean, when I was a Pagan, I really was free to believe anything I wanted, because dogma is not a huge part of that collection of beliefs, practices and traditions the way it is with faiths such as Christianity. However, when I realized that I needed to become a Christian again, a part of me was--well--almost disappointed in myself. A part of me felt that I was taking a step backward, was retreating into what I perceived then as my culture's expectations of me. In short, when I was a Pagan, this part of me felt that I was bucking certain cultural trends, but when I realized in a deep part of myself that I had to become a Christian again, this same part of me was afraid that I was simply bowing to some mass hegemony of will by leaving Paganism behind.
However, as I really looked at Christianity's place in our culture, I realized that the path I had moved to was just as much a kind of counterculture as Paganism can be perceived to be. While I concede that much of our culture owes a lot to the Judeo-Christian morality that we have inherited, I submit that this is about all that it gets from faiths such as Christianity. Whatever is left of Christianity as it is generally seen in our culture is not so much. A lot of our history and beliefs have slowly been eroded by secular thought, unless we're willing to learn about the fullness of our beliefs through the centuries and to begin to embrace them again, and you know? I'm not even talking about Orthodox Christianity here. I'm talking about any Christian confession. I think it's very important for us as Christians to know the roots of our beliefs, to acknowledge fully how our brand of Christianity seeks to shape us and what it has done over the years of its existence.
The two extremes that I see currently going on in popular Christianity both have to do with us trying to make it fit into this culture. One is that God becomes all warm and fuzzy, a non-descript entity whose sole purpose in life seems to be to give us whatever we pray for, or else He becomes the embodiment of our morality. God is a vending machine for healing, miracles, even money, or else He is nothing but a banner under which we march while we are helping to improve society! This doesn't cut it for me in the least. The other extreme is that God is unpredictable, quick to anger and to cast people into Hell, and that only by believing in Christ will we be able to dare to approach God without being killed. Somehow, belief in Christ is some sort of a password to allow God to forgo His default response of casting humanity body and soul into some eternal punishment.
The common thread in these extremes is a depersonalization of God, and in my opinion, this is more insidious than any kind of Deistic or Atheistic thought. God as a vending machine turns prayer into a very mechanical process, whereas God as a vengeful horror for whom belief in Christ is some sort of appeasement causes us to view ourselves as forever being in danger of His terrible wrath.
Now, the truly problematic thing with these two extremes is that they mix truth with exaggeration. God should not be thought of as a big mush-ball with only the power to be 'nice' all the time, because if God is a personal God, then He is actually a perceiving being who will react to events as He sees them. So, a default response is hard to predict, and in this sense, we can see God as unpredictable, but should this mean that we should see Him as being capricious and quick to anger? Well, this would make God little more than a fallen human being, and if we believe that He is omnipotent and omnipresent in some way, then it stands to reason that His modes of perception are much different than ours.
So, where does this leave me and the part of me which was reluctant, and sometimes still is reluctant, to fully embrace the type of Christianity which is mine? The fact is that I carry a bit of our current culture inside of me, and to fully embrace Orthodox Christianity does involve calling into question certain assumptions that our culture makes about life. The interesting thing is that once I do call those things into question, I realize that I really do believe and have always believed the things which my church teaches about human nature and the nature of life here on earth. Does this mean that I am at peace with all of it? No. I will likely always question, but if I'm going to live a Christian life, it has less to do with being 'good' or 'nice' than it does with confronting the parts of the self that are not so good and acknowledging them as ours and then trying to move away from them, while asking for God's help. Individualism is one of those parts. I mean, yes, we are unique people, but must we step on each other to get places in life? Christianity would say no, but our culture is fundamentally based on possession and competition. So, this means then that Christianity should, in fact, function as a kind of counterculture, and in fact, this is true of Christianity down through the centuries. Even in purportedly Christian countries, there have always been a few who have embraced their faith to such an extent that it worried the established culture. The tricky part, however, is to simply embrace Christianity for itself, and not for some perceived political agenda which we seem to find within it. As far as I can determine, Christianity is a faith which deals with political things in a very interesting way. For one thing, it is taught that authority is set over us as a way to prevent total chaos, so that even a tyrant can be said to be given his power by God's providence. This doesn't necessarily equal the Divine Right of Kings, but there is a notion that we should respect authority for its own sake. So, hierarchy still exists. However, we know that Christians have always practiced charity and kindness to those less fortunate than themselves, and that the faith itself cares not for class or gender or race. Christ was a little bit anti-establishment, or He was perceived to be that way by said establishment. However, if we look at what He did as it's presented in The Bible, we find that He generally upheld the Jewish law, while mixing it with common sense. Every culture has people like the Pharisees of Christ's time, those who will uphold every little point in a given law but are actually engendering fear, mistrust and hate by doing this. Christ was all about overturning some hierarchies, but He was not about anarchy. So, it's better for us to take Him for what He seems to be, rather than to slap a political framework onto him and to call him a socialist or an elitist or a capitalist.
I have more thoughts on this, but I think I'll wait until tomorrow to discuss them. Till then!
Deo Gratias!
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