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!
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