Following Christ's Example

Benedicamus Domino!

I've meant to write about this for a while now, but only at this point has there been a way into this topic that makes some sense for me.

What does it mean to follow the example of Christ? We're often exhorted as Christians to follow Christ's example in his merciful behaviour or in his adherence to the fundamental commandments that we should love God with all our heart, soul and mind and that we should love our neighbours as ourselves. This of course is what we ought to do, but is there more to Christ than a really exceptionally good man who taught with wise words? Was His sole bequest to us an example of charity and good works?

People often approach Christ's miracles as merely good works, as though restoring sight to the blind man was more of a merciful act than a mind-blowing restoration of that man's fallen condition to what God had intended it to be. The Bible is a little vague about this in the English translations at least. I can't attest to the original Greek of the New Testament. However, in holy tradition, we're taught in Orthodox Christianity that Christ actually molded new eyes for the blind man who had no eyes. He did this with the clay of the earth, creating life where there was no life and removing, in microcosm, the effects of the fall from him. This is what all His miracles were about: foreshadowings of the true and universal resurrection.

However, what did He also do? First, He was with The Father and spoke the universe into existence. As part of that universe and after the fall, He became like us, did his works and taught, died and rose again. This is another way in which we must follow His example. It's not enough to be blessed or baptized and then go on our way. We have to die to ourselves so we can rise in Christ. This idea of being baptized into Christ has always puzzled me, but I think I get it now. We are to do what He did at Gethsemane. We may think the medicine that will change our hearts tastes bitter, but we have to acknowledge our fears and then take the medicine anyway. God wants us to be like Him, after all. That's why Christ came to us, to make us like God.

I read a tweet recently that stated something to the effect that Christ has always been with us and is still with us, sticking up for us with God. This idea that Christ is "sticking up for us with God" is difficult for me. It makes it seem like God is some cold and distant figure and that Christ has to keep telling God not to smite us or something. That's certainly not a God I want to believe in! No. Christ is our doorway. He is our path. He shows us what transformation looks like. He quite literally is the ordering principle of the universe: what Plato called the Logos, and He is the living Logos, the incarnate Logos who has come into His own creation and has redeemed it and is redeeming it in each one of us and will redeem it at the Last Day.

So, if we are followers of the ordering principle of the universe, we have to take it that He knows how things should be better than we do. Let's take something that is not in the least controversial like equal marriage rites for people who are attracted to members of the same sex. Not controversial at all, right? Right. Well, I have always thought of myself as a free-thinking person, a person who knows her own mind and is willing to stick up for what she believes in, and I have come to the conclusion that my church's teachings on this subject are correct, and what my church teaches is that gay marriage is not marriage. We furthermore believe that this has come down to us from The Bible and from the very fact that God first made man and woman as one being and then took woman from the man and separated them.

We see marriage as a pathway to salvation. There are many such pathways, but marriage is the most common. It comes from the verse where God says that "for this cause (the woman) shall a man leave his father and his mother and shall cleave to his wife." A marriage between a man and a woman is viewed as the best and most orderly (though fallen) state for mutual salvation, mutual healing, mutual moving closer to God and further from their fallen and broken selves. We believe that the man and the woman have roles to fulfill: man may drive the metaphorical car but woman navigates it. Man may be called the head of the family, but woman is the counsellor to the king: Merlin to Arthur. The kind of love that we usually associate with marriage in our age really isn't all that it should be. It's a fallen love. It's a start, but should not be taken as lasting. Another kind of love has to happen, a real love based on the knowledge of and compassion for each other's brokenness and a willingness to admit to one another that brokenness and to grow from it.

The logical question then is why can't this kind of salvific thing exist in a marriage between two men or between two women? First of all, we would state that sexual attraction is not all that it's cracked up to be. We believe that due to the fall, all sexual attraction is now disproportionate as an instinct to what it was before the fall. All our instincts and emotions are turned on their heads as fallen people. So whether you are attracted to people of your own sex or gender or to people of the opposite one, this attraction impulse is rather too big for us to handle it safely. So while in our culture we still tend to marry for love, sexual identity shouldn't be seen as either normal or abnormal depending on one's preference. It's all a bit out of joint really, and no one is any more "normal" than anyone else. This is where some Christian teachers get a little mixed up. A straight marriage is defined by them as "the way God intended it" or as "normal" or as "natural," while a gay marriage is defined as "unnatural" or "wrong."

We would simply say this: a union between a man and a woman is a marriage in the Christian sense. A union between two men or two women is not a marriage in the Christian sense. If it's a marriage under the law, then it's a marriage under the law. We can't really say that it's not, but the church wouldn't recognize it or bless it with the sacrament of marriage. Is this condemnatory? I believe that any faith has the right to define how its ceremonies are performed.

I recently heard a really interesting talk about sexual addictions, marriage and the Orthodox Christian perspective on all this. It was very informative and very helpful to me personally, as I often feel woefully inferior when I hear all the reasons that I'm wrong and the rest of the "enlightened" world seems to be correct about issues like gay marriage. First, I don't believe that sexual identity should ever have become quite the civil rights issue that it has. Sexual identity is really something that we fashion for ourselves and it is, in my opinion, a mask. Don't get me wrong! I believe attractions exist within people, but it is ultimately up to us how we deal with these attractions. There are some people who have had same-sex attraction who have chosen (not because of social pressure but because their consciences told them they should) to be married to people of the opposite sex. Were they brain-washed into doing that? Most people can't be brain-washed into a decision like that, or if they are, it won't last long. The drives are very strong. The very fact that people can remain monogamous during marriage is a pretty big thing! The drives, as I said, are very very strong: any sexual drive or attraction or whatever.

The point I'm trying to make is that sexual identity can be a mask and usually is. We want to focus on the person, the joining of two persons in marriage, and again: one way follows Christ, who is the incarnation of the ordering principle of the entire universe, and another way does not follow that order. Is one moral and one immoral? I personally don't like those kinds of binaries. If morality equals following in line with the ordering of the universe, then alright, but I generally think of morality as a set of codes by which we all try to live.

So what about homosexuals in the church? Here we come again to following Christ's example. We certainly ought not to cast stones or to spread hate speech or hate literature. We always have to learn to look to the person first, to go behind the masks that everyone wears and find the truth of the human being, because God loves all human beings. The fall is the fall, and we're all a part of that fall. No one should judge another's sins. We all have to look to ourselves as the chiefest of sinners and then look out at the world. When we do that, less condemnation and more mercy and charity happens. As for homosexual attraction, we would deem that to be a passion or a sin but only amongst many other sins that we all commit every day. We're all in the church to be healed, but the healing may take months, years or perhaps our whole lives. We don't, or we shouldn't, believe that any one sin makes a person unlovable. However, we do believe that there is an order to the universe and that marriage between a man and a woman is a pathway to regaining that lost order within ourselves and within the family we create as well.

Again, however, I myself cannot see writing letters or shouting slogans asking that gay marriage rights be abolished in Canada. I believe very strongly in the separation of church and state, and while I do believe that a faith has the right to define what it means by marriage if marriage is sacred to it, I also believe that the state must do what it sees as being in the best interest of all its citizens, and if a large enough group makes a big enough noise, it is the democratic state's mandate to at least see why they're making the noise and to see what can be done about it. Our country's response has been to legalize (via the courts mind you and not via parliament) same-sex marriages. So be it. Do I think that anyone marrying each other in a same-sex context is automatically damned to hell? God forbid! I don't know their hearts or minds or lives! What I do know is what the church has taught me and what I, after many years of wrestling with it, have come to truly believe. Again though, no gay marriage in Orthodox Christianity does not equal burning people out of their homes or beating them up or defaming them or causing them to lose their livelihoods. We just believe that the sacrament of marriage exists between a man and a woman, and that any other kind of union just wouldn't be a Christian marriage. Would it be an evil marriage? Not to my way of thinking anyway. It's simply beyond the boundaries of a Christian marriage as we in the Orthodox church see it.

So, in order to follow the example of Christ, it is also necessary to look at the world and to see whether there might be an ordering of things which is more profitable than whatever our opinions of a given moment (I mean here age) might be. We humans are a changeable lot after all. One minute homosexuality is almost universally condemned and the next, it's becoming more and more accepted. But how can we trust even that? What if some cultural shift comes along and turns what we assume to be true on its head? As a Christian, my social and political views should never be about my emotions. They're changeable too, and many social and political persuaders like to use emotion to hook adherents. Another thing I've learned is that it's alright for me to be in conflict with a teaching of the church. However it's not necessarily the correct thing for me to spout off about my own opinion right away. It's often best to just be patient and let the faith deepen within you, and then one might begin to see the reasoning or truth behind a given tenet or teaching. The teachings are after all merely a road-map. I don't believe in teachings. I don't believe in anything. I try to follow Christ. I'm not a philosopher. I'm not religious. I'm simply a Christian woman trying to make sense of her world the best way she can. Take all these thoughts in that spirit therefore, and let them be as they must be.

Till next I write,

Deo Gratias!