Troll The Ancient Yuletide Carol!

Benedicamus Domino!

Well, today is as near as makes no matter to the date of the Winter Solstice, when the sun is the farthest away from the earth, causing both the shortest day and the longest night of the year. I have celebrated it in my time as the ancient fire-festival of Yule. The yule-log was burned at this time during the longest night to keep vigil and to wait for the new day's dawning, for if the sun returned after this longest of nights, then people knew that spring would indeed come again. Of course, when I celebrated it, we had no fears for the longest night as often did the ancient Germanic peoples, for instance, but we still met in fellowship and in good cheer and toasted the new birth of the sun. We spoke our hopes and cast our fears and past sorrows into the fire. We looked forward to the lengthening of the days and the coming of the new spring. It was wonderful!

It is often said that the feast of Christmas was instituted at a similar time of year in order to eclipse Solstice festivals like Yule and to stamp out idolatry and demonic worship. I do not doubt that the timing of Christmas was not a mere coincidence, but was it truly an attempt to stamp out idolatry? First, I'm not completely certain of this, but I believe that when Christmas was established as a feast in the Christian calendar, no Christian could ever have moved the Roman state to do anything in favour of Christ and against its own religion. Christians were being killed at this time and were also being relieved of their careers and ranks and such if they were openly Christian. The Roman religion too at this time was little more than a public observance, and denying it would have meant that you were in revolt against the state. It was a citizen's civic duty to attend the various ceremonies.

And what about the Germanic and Celtic and other people for whom their worship was more than public formalism? Well, Christians did go among them, it's true, but except in very rare cases (St. Boniface cutting down sacred trees comes to mind,) they tended not to simply uproot the peoples' beliefs and plant their own in their place. Anyone who's done that has ended up with a pretty dead religion and very little faith among those they have tried to convert whole-cloth. Instead, a slow process went on, where Christianity and the indigenous faiths were sort of adapted to each other. I don't exactly mean syncretism, but it was amazing how so much of Christianity seemed to be the fulfilment of the beliefs of these people, and I only say this because I myself have experienced this firsthand! The problems come when everything that is not Christ is ipso facto demonized and made to be evil! How can an honouring of the seasons be evil? It isn't Christian, perhaps, but it is people trying to make sense of their world. I have come to the belief that Christ's birth is the fulfilment of the dawn after the longest night of the year, but does that mean that I demand that others believe this too? No! That sort of belief can only come by experience. I will say that it came to me almost against my will, though. It just came and washed over me and that was that, but that was God's doing and did not come at my or any other's asking. For me, though Christ is the baby in the manger, He is also the uncontainable and uncircumscribable God come in the form of man to bring new light to our darkened world. Surely other Pagan people had this same experience! Surely they were not simply herded into churches and made to abandon their bonfires and evergreen boughs! Surely not! Surely they themselves brought their boughs to be blessed and to honour the infant Christ, having sensed Him as the Truth even as I did.

I know that it is difficult for those of other faiths to deal with this season called Christmas. I've heard people describe a "war on Christmas" going on. They cite Christian privelege in the face of their own beliefs, but at least they live in a land where they aren't being killed or taken from their families and imprisoned for what they believe. This must be remembered! As for me, I think that much of Christmas has become about family and gifts and not about Christ, but do I think that all this should be banished? No. It is what it is, and though I wish the consumerism was less, it isn't likely to change any time soon. It is our new public religion, after all, and Santa Claus is our new Sol Invictus! Ah well! So goes the world, I suppose.

However, the light still burns in many forms. There is still hope left. So, on this night of Yule and for this season of many holy days, may all have the best things in life and truly experience hope and joy!

Deo Gratias!

Unexpected Joys!

Benedicamus Domino!

I had a very different entry planned for this evening's musing, but something small has just happened in the last few minutes which simply demands treatment in this blog. It all began with iTunes and a search for a long lost album which I once charished though I never owned it. This album was the original cast recording of Amahl and the Night Visitors, an operetta staged for television in the 1950s and composed by Gian Carlo Menotti. It tells the story of a young shepherd boy somewhere in the east who encounters three strange visitors at his door. They turn out to be kings bearing gifts to a mysterious child for whom they are looking. It is a rather simplistic tale, somewhat moralistic but also miraculous, and well, when I was ten and heard this music and those words, I began to know a little of the true nature of Christ and of His Incarnation!

To have this album is a true joy to me, though it seems but a small thing. It brings back a little of the wonder I always used to feel at this time of year, and though that wonder was tinged with expectation of presents under the tree, once I had heard Amahl, it forever broadened into a deeper kind of wonder: the wonder of a babe born in a manger who contained within his small body the vastness of the Creator of all things!

Joys do arise in very unexpected ways at times, and for this small fount and many larger springs which have arisen in my seemingly barren and thirsty heart of late, I say a fervent and heartfelt,

Deo, O Deo! Gratias!

Thoughts upon The Feast of St. Catherine!

Benedicamus Domino!

Today on the Julian Calendar is actually November 25, the feast-day of St. Catherine of Alexandria. She is one of the saints whom I take as a model, for though she was educated in the best Roman fashion, she was also a devout Christian and was able to outwit some of the finest philosophers in Alexandria with both her intellect and God's grace. Of course, one could say that her intellect was also a kind of grace which, when leavened by the Holy Spirit's wisdom, became a true force to be reckoned with. Our treasure is hidden in earthen vessels, as St. Paul says, but I think it is for us to make sure that this treasure does not remain hidden. Whatever talent we have should be nurtured and used for the betterment of our fellow-beings and should always be used, as far as possible, in truth and love.

For me, this was the day, seven years ago, when I made the decision to enter an Orthodox church as more than a casual observer for the first time. I began to make travel-plans for the following Sunday, and I can recall even now the joy which welled up inside me when I realized that things in my life were coming full circle in what could only be a God-inspired and blessed way. While I was contemplating my coming pilgrimage, (from Kitchener to Hamilton by bus on a Sunday morning really was a pilgrimage!) I also read the story of St. Catherine, and I realized then and there that I could be what I was: an educated woman of my own time, but also a pious Christian, and from then on, I worked very hard to achieve that goal. I've had a few setbacks over the years, and these were due to my own zeal occasionally pushing me to let go of things unnecessarily, but I think I am finally learning to be who I must be. I don't think I could outwit philosophers or anything, but I do hope that I have the courage to speak truth to power or even to another human soul when it is needed.

December has often been a time of realization for me. In December of 1999, I found myself a Pagan hardly knowing how I got there. In December of 2005, I literally fell in love with Orthodox Christianity. I recall walking around my university campus actually day-dreaming about what it would be like to be in an Orthodox church with all the music and the swinging of the censor and such. I had experienced Orthodox churches before though only in a limited way, and it's true that I didn't even really know what to expect at the church I was going to attend, but I still was captivated by the thought that something which had been on the edge of my life off and on for so many years was now coming closer to its centre. I've written before about this so I'll not go into it now, but suffice it to say that I have a really good friend who is Orthodox and it was really because of her that I found my way there too eventually, and on that long-ago Feast of St. Catherine, I remember being in sheer awe of how life had led me, little by little, to what I had always wanted but had never seen clearly.

Now, I am having a similar time of realization and I am again planning a trip, but this time, it is a trip not to a church, but to someone's house. I am going in a few days to see someone who has very rapidly become important in my life, and our connection seems equally God-inspired and circular. I have long held a belief about my life that there are things in it which conform to its true pattern and there are other things which are just not right. This doesn't always have to do with whether the events are positive or negative, for there have been some negative events which I cannot help but view as being right and proper for me to have experienced. Well, just as Orthodox Christianity showed up in a very right and proper way, so this man has done, and to whatever end our new connection will lead, I feel it necessary to explore it to its fullest potential. For me to say this takes a great deal of courage, especially since there is a long-distance aspect to things which can be a little problematic, but I do find that being online allows for a more ongoing contact than used to happen when one only had the phone.

I'm writing about this here because it was my intention when starting this journey toward joy to open up more and to connect with people, to allow people to impact on my life in a more meaningful way rather than closing myself off to all drama and all danger while at the same time closing myself off to happiness. I have lived a rather solitary life even among crowds, and I know that this is pretty much all my doing. The time has come to fix that, to venture beyond the narrow limits of my money-changing hole, as Marley's ghost would have it, and to make mankind and certain members of that strange and wonderful collection of personalities my business once again. While I hope I could never become so jaded and cynical as Scroodge, I certainly have been known to walk through the crowded paths of life with my eyes cast down, but that is not what I'm called to do as a Christian or even as a person living among people in this world. So, here goes nothing! I'm lifting my head and looking about me, and you know what? Even with all its sham and drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world, not least due to the fact that Mike wishes to see me just as much as I wish to see him and that we are both completely open to the possibilities that life may afford for a deeper and more lasting connection. For this and for so many things lately, I say:

Deo Gratias!

Surrendering to Divine Synurgy: The Art of Saying "Amen!"

Benedicamus Domino!

In Orthodox Christian thought, much is made of the word "synurgy." God's working in the world is called "synurgistic" by many of the great philosophers and thinkers of the church, by which they mean that He requires a response from us in order for His will to be accomplished in us and in the world. This word literally means "working together," and when compared with some of the more recent ideas posited about God, say in the last three or four hundred years for instance, it presents a radical paradigm-shift when encountered by the modern western mind, or at least it did when encountered by this modern western mind. There was a time when the notion of submitting to God's will was abhorrant to me. It seemed to mean that I had to lay all the most interesting parts of myself aside in favour of a very narrow and circumscribed existance. I was to be a good little child and do what I was told. I am uncertain as to the origin of this idea in my life, but it stood there, stark and unmoving, like a gaunt and terrible spectre which sought to cast its shadow over my dreams, hopes and imaginings in a manner which would render me nothing more than a simple and dutiful pawn in some game of cosmic Chess. Indeed, God was for me in those days something of a tyrant, a guardian of moral absolutes which seemed untenable in the world in which I found myself.

These thoughts were with me at the time when I was rediscovering my need for Christ while at the same time being repulsed by what seemed a necessary act of submition in which I must cut away parts of myself simply because they seemed not to fit the ideal model of Christianity that I saw around me. A part of the reason for this repulsion had to do with the fact that I was returning to a faith which I had abandoned out of a sense that I was unworthy of it. I had left Christianity in favour of earth-based spirituality because I felt that I was unable to conform to what God was asking of me. I felt that perfection of belief was imperative and that if I doubted too much, then I obviously was doing something wrong, and therefore I had to find another way to live in this world. I knew that God existed on some level, but I felt that He was too high and far away for me to reach. How I could do this given my belief in Christ is unimaginable to me now, but we shall come to why it is so unimaginable later. Suffice it to say that I am now a committed Christian and cannot--simply would not be able to--change this commitment for anything!

So, there I was, a woman caught between two seemingly opposing forces: myself and what I perceived as God's will. It is true that there are times when our selfish desires do oppose God's will. In fact, this is the story of fallen man and the reason why Christ was needed to help us find our way home. However, what I had failed to take into account was the notion of synurgy as expressed in the teachings and worship of the Orthodox Church. To reiterate that notion then, I will state that before God's will can truly be accomplished in us and in the world, there must be a willingness on our part to assist and to say "amen" to God's desire, because that is what His will is until we agree to allow it to prosper: a desire, a wish, a hope that we will go in the direction that He sees will be right for us. He, of course, is quite willing and capable of letting us have our own desires. He can bring good out of those as well, but what He seeks from us is an openness, an acceptance that He is wiser than we are and sees more of us than we can see at present. Of course, there is fear which comes with this kind of acceptance. What will He turn us into? Will we lose ourselves? Will be become unrecognizable to our family and friends? Should we not be cautious and careful, preserving ourselves whole and intact before the consuming fire of God's love and transforming power?

I've had all these thoughts and continue to have them, but I have come to a realization, thanks to the concept of synurgy, that God does not want robots for His people. It is true that our initial response to Him is something like that of a servant, but He wants His servants to learn in their servitude to be more like Him and to eventually participate fully in His unique and boundless being. This does not mean being subsumed into a vast ocean of consciousness, but it does mean waking up to the cosmic reality that we are not separate and individual beings. "No man is an island, entire of itself," wrote the poet John Donne, and this would seem to be true from my experience, so that my journey toward God must necessarily affect others, even if it does so on a quantum level which I am incapable of perceiving. For an explanation of this, I turn to the example of Mary, the Mother of God. She was a simple girl who, according to traditional lore, spent much of her life secluded in the holy temple at Jerusalem and was betrothed to Joseph, a widower much older than herself and with children of his own. His thought, presumably, was that she would be an excellent wife to him and could bear him more children, but before this happened, an angel appeared to Mary and told her that God's will was for her to miraculously conceive and bear Christ, the incarnate Word of God. In a sense, we might say that Christ is the incarnate Will of God, since through God's word, His wil is enacted. Now, Mary had two options. She could have said no. She could have gone on her way and refused the angel's summons. However, being who she was and being open to God's presence in her life, she was able to say: "Behold the handmaid of the Lord. Be it unto me according to Thy Word!" She was, in fact, saying "amen," which in Hebrew simply means: "So be it." This set in motion a chain of events which led to Christ's death and resurrection, which in turn had a profound effect on the entire world, whether people see it or not.

I had often read the passage in Luke's gospel which recounts Mary's meeting with the angel Gabriel, and I had always simply looked at her action as a submissive and meek bowing to circumstances beyond her control. However, after I learned of the importance of synurgy, I reexamined this passage and realized that Mary had no idea what would be coming from this assent, whereas she knew quite well that if she had said no, her life would have proceeded presumably normally as most womens' lives did. God would have allowed her to have her desire, but it was only at her agreement and by her consent that the conception took place. She, therefore, was not a victim of spiritual rape, but a willing participant in something unknown and wonderful. In short, she was a very courageous woman who allowed herself to be the mortal mother of immortal Truth. She gave Christ the way to descend from His own mode of existance and to be with us. She is revered therefore in the Orthodox church as the uniter of earth with Heaven, the reconciler of humanity to God, the vessel containing the Creator. She, in essence, can be called in poetry the Holy Grail, because through her flesh and blood, Christ gained His flesh and blood and was able to show us the pathway to salvation.

This is another point on which I would like to touch. I spoke before of the perceived need to remain a whole and intact person in the face of God's demands upon us. I felt this very strongly at one time, but through the notion of synurgy, I realized that God's very purpose is to make me whole. It may take a lifetime and beyond to do it, but His ultimate plan is to mend me and to repare the broken and scattered bits of my soul, so that eventually this newly-healed soul may take its rightful place as sovereign over my brain and my body. The mind is a very wonderful thing, and it must be nurtured, but it can very easily be led astray and assume too much power over the whole person. This is also true of the body and its senses. I perhaps have less cause to fear my senses, since I lack the sense of sight and it seems to have the most immediate affect on one's moods and perceptions of all the senses, but my senses are still scattered and give me conflicting information, while the ideal is that all the senses should act in concert and under the direction of a soul in which God's will is freely flowing in synurgistic accord: a soul which perceives itself as a willing and glad handmaid of the Lord.

As God chose Mary to bear Christ, so He will cause to be born in us something wonderful and beyond telling if we are able to lay ourselves open to his guiding influence. As C. S. Lewis writes in The Screwtape Letters, "He (God) cannot ravish. He can only woo," and this is what God does. He whispers to us in a thousand little ways and in a million voices, and at every turn, we have the choice either to accept what He gives and what He wishes us to do, or to deny His will and to go our own way. But I believe that though parts of God's will for us may seem arduous and difficult and even incomprehensible, and though the imperfect world in which we live will continue to trip us up, God's will for us is that we experience the fullness of His boundless joy, a joy which cannot fade and which is not based on mere pleasure. Having tasted the tinyest bit of that joy, I know now that I cannot go back. I cannot view Christianity as something for the mind to wrestle with and to pin down in some logical framework. It is a thing which seems as lovely and as delicate as gossomer to the casual observer. It seems easily assaulted and brought to its knees, but to me, though it entered into me as beauty and wonder, it has stayed and grown into something strong, so that even if I fall, I know that God is there. Even if I doubt my faith, I know there will be a way out of that doubt. This is precisely because I know that I am unworthy of God's gifts to me. I cannot ever repay Him, but I know that He loves me, even as I am, and that His love demands that I scrape away the dust and debris of sin and self-satisfaction which clouds my soul from understanding Him. I know that my Redeemer liveth, but if asked how I know it, I cannot readily give an answer which would satisfy the human mind. I can't even satisfy my own mind as to how I know of God's presence, but I do know it. It is not a story I tell myself. It is a truth which I have come to see. It is not only the way that I make sense of a crazy world. It is not a mere sociological experiment or necessity. It is simply and solely true. God is God. I've seen nihilism. I've been through post-modernism, and that way lies madness and despair for me. Some say they find solace in the randomness and meaninglessness of events, stating that everyone's individual interpretation of what they see around them is always valid, simply because it is held by one person or group or culture. However, the world does not work like that. If it did, we wouldn't care that oppression went on. We would respect it as a valid way of living in the world and we would defend others' rights to practice it. Of course, most people don't defend what they perceive as injustice, and the moment they draw that line in the sand, they are imposing their sense of the world on another group of people, thereby defining what they think should be accepted and what they hope will become universal truth.

So, don't talk to me of post-modernity and the need to break the chains of some outmoded system or other, because in breaking those chains, we invariably create new ones. We are who we are. We have egos and are prone to passions which make it very difficult to truly accept each other as we are. Even those who talk about accepting homosexual people as they are and not trying to change them can at times be guilty of hypocrisy when a homosexual person or couple chooses to be less vocal and to simply live their lives without putting themselves on display to make a point. (I chose that example at random.) The point is that I have discovered that I need God in some fundamental way which has nothing to do with conforming to the standards of any societal norm. Indeed, my being the kind of Christian that I am makes me anathema to the prevailing culture, because while I do not believe that other faiths are simply evil for not being Christianity, I do believe that Christ is the fulfilment of all the truths I have learned during my life here. He is the clarification of everything that has gone before for me, though it would be impossible to convince anyone else of that simply by saying it. It is simply something that needs to be experienced, needs to be known as one might know the voice of a friend, and it can only be known by surrendering, by participating as wholly as possible in what God wants for us. Our lives must be a continual effort to say "amen" at every moment. That is what people we call holy do. They have developed an intimate relationship with God so that He is not now the angry and terrible moral guardian of the universe. Neither is He mushy and gushy, but they have learned to see Him as both mighty and power but also as a person, as a loving and just person who cares about the world which He has made and who weeps when injustices are done, and they have been able to put their trust in Him, to give their hearts to Him in a true and unreserved way. For the rest of us, there is a long way to go, but it can start with the simplest turning of the soul outward to help our neighbour, for if we cannot learn to see Christ in our fellow men, then we will never see Him truly as He is. Till next I write,

Deo Gratias!