"A Work in Progress"
I am starting this Nativity Fast series, featuring Father Thomas Hopko's 55 Maxims for Christian Living, with a podcast I just finished writing (and which you can hear on Ancient Faith Radio later this week), entitled "Guide my thoughts and feelings." Be always with Christ, is the first maxim. Below is my own personal reflection on how the Church has enabled me to do just that, despite my doubts and presumptiousness.
From where I sat, perched Indian style on top of a picnic table, I could see the other youth group members scattered here and there throughout the campgrounds we gathered at annually for our summer mission trip. We were midway through a week long stint as Vacation Bible School teachers for a tiny Midwestern evangelical church in the middle of nowheresville and had been prescribed by our youth pastor a half hour of quiet time to study the scriptures and write in our prayer journals. Some sat with their backs against tree trunks, others brought sleeping bags to sprawl out on. Having finally spotted my crush at the time, deep in thought by the entrance of his pup tent, I did my best to reign in my wandering attention and get back down to the business at hand: renewing my devotion to Jesus. This particular trip had been pretty intense. Away from our usual routines and distractions, and after countless renditions of our favorite sweet and soulful praise songs, we’d let down our inhibitions and upped our tearful vows to stand up brazenly for our beliefs. Emboldened by the spiritual high coursing so pleasantly, addictively so, through my body, I’d repented publicly, as had most of my peers, of impure thoughts and behaviors. The phrase we clung to to define our new rapturous state of super-commitment was “on fire,” as in, “I am totally on fire for the Lord.”
Back at home, however, away from the fertile conditions we’d constructed for ourselves out of bonfires, late night sharing sessions and scripture laced pep talks, I struggled to conjure up that same degree of warmth and passion I’d come to link inexorably with God‘s presence, and acceptance of me. My potent promises to witness unashamedly and turn my back on dirty sins such as gossip, lust and vanity dissolved all too quickly within the decidedly non-euphoric atmosphere of my every day existence as a student and part-time employee of our local Bresslers ice cream shop. For the next decade and a half I would vacillate between guilt, resentment, doubt and zeal, depending on how successful I was or wasn’t at reproducing via prayer, Bible study, and worship a similar state of bliss to the one I’d experienced on that summer mission trip. As my feelings/emotions rose and fell, ebbed and flowed, swelled and shrank, so did my faith. Having a cold/dry heart was discouraging, frightening, unnerving. Where was God? Was there a God? Did He approve of me?
I can sympathize with those who, nauseated by emotional ups and downs, have chosen to exit, or never board in the first place, what would appear to be a feelings-based religious rollercoaster. Burnout would eventually get the better of many of my fellow youth group members and Bible college graduates. I, myself, was hanging on there by a thread fifteen years ago, but was saved by a radical decision to open myself up to the possibility that there may be more to Christianity than what I, up until that point, had been exposed to. I am compelled to testify on behalf of the conversion that liberated me from a destabilizing reliance on feelings for the gauging of my spiritual growth.
In modern practice, wrote Father Stephen Freeman on his blog, Glory to God for All Things, much of Christian worship and the Christian life, has been reduced to the mental level – whether of the will, intellectual assent, or the emotions (the emotions are a part of the mind – not the “heart” as it is classically used in the fathers). These are not wrong things to offer to God – but they can be quite misleading in their imbalance. Perhaps the most serious mistake that can be drawn from these mental offerings, is the effective reduction of God to an idea. God is not an idea, and virtually every idea we have of Him is either mistaken or idolatrous.
I am an over thinker, an over analyzer, and on any given day, depending on the weather, the amount of sleep I got the night before, my hormones, etc., my thoughts and feelings on faith and motherhood can vary dramatically. I still have to watch it because I can easily slip back into my old habit of interpreting God (my idea of God, anyway) and His will through the highly subjective and hazy lens of my loaded emotions, resulting in sweeping and stalemating statements such as, “I am a good Christian,” “I am a bad Christian,” or “I have sinned, therefore God is angry.“ Thankfully, however, my Orthodox Christian Tradition (the teachings and practices handed down from generation to generation throughout the life of the Church) always leads me back, like a map, to that same ancient path toward salvation and the Kingdom of Heaven trodden on by saints and martyrs and Church fathers for two thousands years - a path lined with tools and helps essential for continually restoring my stamina and correcting my thoughts.
In his article, O Happy Guilt, O Joyful Sorrow: An Orthodox Understanding, Father George Morelli, host of the popular Healing podcast on Ancient Faith Radio, wrote that:
In the Orthodox Christian tradition, The Philokalia ranks as the authoritative compilation of teaching about Christian life and discipline by the Fathers of the Church. In the reference work The Philokalia: Master Reference Guide,author B.S. Stapakis notes there is no reference to "guilt" in the first four volumes of The Philokalia. The reason for this absence is that the Western Christian concepts about how guilt factors into salvation differs markedly from the Christian East. The late Orthodox historian Fr. John Meyendorff wrote:
The development of penitential practice and theology in the Byzantine world was distinct from its Western counterpart in that it never knew the influence of legalistic interpretations of salvation.... Byzantine theologians never succumbed to the temptation of reducing sin to the notion of a legal crime, which is to be sentenced, punished or forgiven.
He goes on to say that the prevailing view sees penance as ‘liberation and healing rather than that of judgment.’
I do not participate in confession, fasting, rules of prayer in order to appease a disappointed deity. No, these Orthodox practices are vitally important to me for their unparalleled ability to provide healing by keeping me always in Christ, always thinking about Him, always seeking Him, always imitating him, and thus always growing. My relationship with Christ is no longer hindered by the incorrect assumption that He is only present when I “feel” Him. On my good days, my horrible days, my crabby days, my joyful days, sad days, mad as heck days, on top of the world days, God is good, and merciful, and unchanging. Just doggedly believing that, just keeping at it even when I’m tired and overwhelmed, is enough to transform me from within, one small act of obedience at a time. “In all my acts and deeds, guide my thoughts and feelings,” we implore God in the Morning Prayer attributed to Met. Philaret. Through the Eucharist, prayer, fasting, confession, almsgiving, supersede our naive presumptions about You, about our neighbor, about what is best for our souls.
The day when God is absent, wrote Metropolitan Anthony Bloom in Beginning to Pray, when He is silent - that is the beginning of prayer. Not when we have a lot to say, but when we say to God “I can’t live without You, why are You so cruel and silent?” This knowledge that we must find or die - makes us break through to the place where we are in the Presence. If we listen to what our hearts know of love and longing and are never afraid of despair, we find that victory is always there on the other side of it.
Peace and courage to you my friends, as together we embark on this season of preparation for the birth of our Savior, Jesus Christ. May we endure patiently whatever darkness and rejoice unreservedly in whatever light we encounter along the way to that manger containing all Light, all Hope, the very God in whom we live and move and have our being.
