An icy horizon

The fast is over. I completed my homework. I experienced my misery, my fears, my pains, and my needs. And I experienced the Cross of Christ. The three longest or deepest legs of the journey were Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday, during which I experienced the distinct but related revelations about my self these days. Tuesday was the raw pain and emptiness night; Wednesday was utter lack of self-confidence night; and Friday was the fear of life in general night. Aside from that, I don’t feel comfortable sharing too many details about my inner pilgrimage (not the least because I daren’t alienate or smother you). Suffice it to say, I never knew how weak I was until now. My usual (trademark?) chipper resilience has taken a hit, a big hit. I tread the earth a lot more heavily these days. Not more sadly, just more consciously. Not more gravely, just more humbly.

Fr. Ramon asked me today to (try to) summarize last week. I managed to condense it into four main ideas: refreshing (since I can finally walk in HONESTY with my self, God and key other persons), peaceful (since I have no strength BUT to lean on God), humbling (since I have no STRENGTH apart from God), and scary (since I’m not sure how I got this far without seeing inside me what I’ve seen – and since I’m not sure what else “what lies beneath”).

I’ve always known at a theological, and even basically spiritual, level that all my strengths, all my virtues, are but ash compared to God’s splendor. But I have finally reached a zero point, an icy horizon, at which I can no longer deny, in the depths of my very being, how weak I am. I hesitate to say any of this, since I fear most believers, and certainly any non-believers, reading this will find it sheer (albeit well meaning) melodrama. But I speak the truth. I can no loner front. I am but a VESSEL for God. All the fullness I once (thought I) possessed is now gone. As late as last Thursday or Friday I was pondering how this could (or should) effect my activity in various ministries and activities, but have decided to let any changes or declarations ride for a while.

Fr. Ramon hit the nail on the head today when he described me as a man wearing a lot of armor. I have, in much of my life, been expected, by myself or others, to be strong, to be wise, to lead. I do not renounce any such ability; it is the gift of God. But what I can no longer do is pretend I am able, right now, to wield that armor. It’s all simply too heavy for me these days. For better or for worse, I have needed armor, I have learned to use it, and I have used it well. The problem is that I have not yet learned how to remove it – in a sustained, unguarded way – and be a man of flesh and blood. As he said, “The same armor that protects you from an arrow, also prevents you from being loved.”

This is a bold statement. But he’s right, especially when you consider the image he proposed this evening. Imagine a two-day old baby boy. He cannot speak, walk, understand human speech, contribute anything of material worth to the family, and, in fact, can barely even see. But imagine how deeply, how passionately, how – if need be – *self-sacrificially* that baby’s mother loves it. If you didn’t catch it, I am the baby and God is my mother. (Yes, His love is so deep and wide that it encompasses *and in fact surpasses* conventional anthropocentric images of strictly paternal love.)

This was an invaluable metaphor for me because I am stuck between my armor and God’s love. I admit my emptiness and hunger for true love, but I am as yet unwilling to let my self sink into that divine love. For reasons I can't begin to fathom, I am actually aware of my *fear* of God's love. Maybe it's part of my Adamic heritage of shameful nakedness before God and man. Maybe it's a more primally chauvinistic contempt for having to change in ways and rhythms I can't dictate. Whatever the cause, I am, as Fr. Ramon said, the man who knows he is empty inside his armor, but must still take it off to be embraced. I know I am naked but I am afraid of being naked. I know I am hungry but I am afraid of eating. I know I am cold but I am afraid of the hearth. Quite simply, I am *embarrassed* to approach God with so little to offer Him.

As you may or may not know, I often feel restless in the company of other people to say something, to contribute something to the emptiness of otherwise wasted time, to break any and all awkward silence. As with humans, so with God. I have become deeply uncomfortable resting before God, not because I don’t enjoy His presence and consolations, but because I am squeamish before His unblinking gaze. Precisely because I know He sees me and my paltry wares, precisely because He loves me, precisely because He *wants* to see my brokenness in order to restore me – precisely because I know I cannot evade His tender sovereignty, I try to do so. I pray, but I quickly shuffle off (mentally or bodily) to something else, something that lets me be less starkly transparent. As long as I can keep my mind on something or someone else, I can keep my mind off the fact that His mind is fixed imperturbably on me. And His gaze is fixed on me precisely in my medicocrity. I have no wise words to speak in prayer. I have no great insights to put forward in prayer. I have no wisdom – but the wisdom of my need – to offer anyone. I have very little strength to support anyone else right now. I know I must move on from my pain to God’s love, but I am terrified to do so. Pride will do that to you.

And yet, thankfully, Fr. Ramon’s metaphor makes the transition a lot easier. I was truly touched, deeper than I could express at the time, by that image of a “worthless” two-day old squib of humanity basking unawares in the love of his mother – God, it really is me. For perhaps only the second or third time in my life, I can truly and without any pious affectation say I have nothing to offer God. I cannot even understand Him or engage Him, but I know He loves me! I have nothing to offer Him but my erratic, myopic eyes, my incoherent, drooling mouth, my absurd gyrations, and even my shamelessly plump soiled diaper! I am worthless and God loves me! I am weak and God loves me! I am close to God “not in spite my weakness,” as Fr. Ramon kept insisting, but *because* of it. For perhaps the first time in my life, the Beatitudes actually make vital irrefutable sense. I have nowhere to run or hide; I can finally be honest: I am a small, laughable, incompetent baby – and I am God’s! Hallelu Yah!

I mentioned above early last week I experienced the Cross of Christ. I mean this. In an indescribable but undeniable *mystical* sense, I felt in my soul as if I were superimposed on Christ at Calvary. I hesitate, again, to reveal this (for the same reasons as above, plus the suspicion of madness), but our hearts beat as one. He knew my pain and I knew His. And because I have tasted of the Cross, I am now tasting of the Resurrection. There is not then latter without the former. I have tread in the valley of mortal darkness and I am now enjoying the hills divine light. Obviously, I don’t delude myself in thinking I have “made it,” that I have had all the Cross and valley I’ll ever experience, and that I am completely on the up-and-up. God is carrying me higher – into His glory, known fully in Heaven – *in order to* draw me deeper – into His heart, fully opened for the world as it was at the Cross. The future is the future. For the present, all I know is that I had to stop floating on the hollow balloon of image last week; and now I am floating on the unbreakable wings of love.

In keeping with my new, and renewed, spirit, my homework this week is exactly the opposite as lat week. I must *stop* looking at myself and must turn all my devotion to God. Last week I had to remember my pain, even at the expense of God’s easiest comforts; this week I must forget my pain and give myself to God, poopy diapers and all.

As Fr. Ramon said, “He will use even your weakness, not just your ‘strength,’ if you will let Him.” That hit me, hard, like an adrenaline rush to the soul. God doesn’t want my strength; He doesn’t want my weakness; He wants *me*. His grace has weakened me, and thus strengthened me. I accept the Good Doctor’s diagnosis. Now I must face enter His office. More than that, I must lie down, let Him knock me out, and open every inch of me to His knife. It’s the scariest thing of my life. Like birth, I guess.

Any (ostensible) spiritual high-handedness aside, all of this makes me smirk more than a little wryly. This is just what I could expect Gos to “pull.” I’ve got my engine revved to the red to plunge into the catechetical depths as a blazing martyr of Truth – and I end up spending almost a month on “my feelings.” A sly trick, that. But it’s the trick of salvation. The Truth does not just set us free from intellectual errors. Rather, just as sin enslaves and erodes us on eveyr level, the truth liberates us on every level of our person. Where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more (Romans 5:20-21).

31To the Jews who had believed him, Jesus said, "If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples.[1] 32Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free."

33They answered him, "We are Abraham's descendants and have never been slaves of anyone. How can you say that we shall be set free?"

34Jesus replied, "I tell you the truth, everyone who sins is a slave to sin. 35Now a slave has no permanent place in the family, but a son belongs to it forever. 36So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed. (John 8:31-36)

I cannot embrace the fullness of God’s truth in the Catholic Church without Him also embracing the fullness of me “in the nest of [His] Church” (cf. St. Augustine of Hippo, _Confessions_, IV.31). This week is all about accepting that embrace. I will not be blog-fasting as such, but I most definitely will be online less.

[1] I can never escape how peculiar this verse is, among many others, for Protestant theology in general, and Calvinist soteriology in particular. The Bible clearly states these people have faith in Christ (8:31); and yet He has the gall to add conditions of obedience and perserverance to their saving faith (cf. 8:24). According to Calvinism, Jesus should say, "Since you really are my disciples by unconditional election, you will, as a matter of ineluctable spiritual fact, hold to my teaching as proof of your election." But according to Christ, persistent obedience -- generated and sustained as it is by grace alone -- is a *requirement* not only for identifying *but actually for having* a faith of any merit.

On Icons, Providence and Pain

[This is a very long post, the whole of which may be of interest only to my family and close friends. Obviously you're all welcome to read it, but I do get into some personal stuff by the end of it. I recommend the first two-thirds of it, particularly my discussion of icons, for all readers.]

Dear family, friends and readers:

Today has been remarkable, truly unforgettable day. I’ll cut to the chase. I had my RCIA time with Father Ramon again today (Monday) after a hiatus for Teacher’s Day last Monday. It’s always a pleasure to see Fr. Ramon; he’s such a cheerful and peace-giving man. (Plus, I love his Spanish accent and only slightly broken English.) As at our first meeting, we began with a short time of prayer before an icon of the Crucified Christ. I’m no iconographer, but I think it is a Byzantine-style crucifix. It is about a little more than a foot tall, a few inches less in width, and virtually identical to this one:

Let me restate my impressions from this first meeting (Monday 21 Sept. 2004):

My first session of RCIA yesterday, with Fr. Ramon, turned out to be one of the most refreshing times I've had in weeks. In fact, it began with one of the most powerful encounters with the Risen Christ that I've ever experienced. No guff. I have been dry and tense for some time now. But yesterday I was filled with an indescribable peace like water rushing over an ancient bone-dry desert. In addition, I learned with almost mystical force the power of icons. It was a golden day, but I still need a lot of watering.

What about this “mystical force of icons”? First, some background. Probably about 8 or 9 years ago, not too long after I’d become a very serious, and very fundamentalist, Christian, I stumbled upon a small and apparently old icon. It was a simple wooden crucifix gilded** with shiny gold paint onto which was adhered the same image as the icon above on a slip of paper. Whose it was I still don’t know; but I suspect it flowed into my life along the tiny tributary of Greek Orthodoxy that once coursed through my grandmother’s earlier years and my dad’s childhood.

At the time, I was aesthetically and (especially) theologically light years away from appreciating icons, but, from some enigmatic reason, this little icon was magnetizing. Fighting a vague Protestant, iconoclastic guilt, I hung the icon over my bed on the curtain border, where it stayed for years, until I took it to college, gradually became a convinced Calvinist, left it in a box somewhere, and then failed to bring it here to Taiwan. (I’m sure, God willing, I can recover it from either my mom’s house or my dad’s stuff.) For whatever reason, that little icon was out of sight but never really out of mind.

And then I walked into that little chapel next to Fr. Ramon’s office at Providence University (靜宜大學) and was almost literally dragged to my knees. There, on a short little table against the wall, was the icon, bigger and thicker and clearer, but the same image! Providence took me out at the knees![1] I was taken aback, since I could feel my knees giving out, as if under the steady pressure of angels, and I didn’t want to bow.

Bowing, you see, especially in the presence of religious paraphernalia or personnel, is a very un-Protestant thing to do. I still have Sunday school images of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego refusing to bow to the idol of Nebuchadnezzer, and that image of iconophobic defiance became a sort of internal model for me. Now, I’m hardly defending old Neb’s idol as anything other than pagan blasphemy. I am simply telling you how humbling it was for me to bow before that icon. The irony is that I have bowed numerous times before God, only then based on man-made human musical notes or on my own mental images (visual of verbal) of God. We all bow; Catholics and Orthodox are just honest that we can do so based on the testimony of our ears, brains *and* eyes.

But bow I did. I cannot explain how or why I knew this, but when I saw that icon, I saw Christ. Not to bow to Him as He made Himself, His pain and power, clear to me would have been as insulting as not to bow to Him in the flesh. Because you see, the whole point of icons is that, in a mysterious way, they do indeed partake of Christ’s glory. Icons are visual lightning rods that act as signals for us that, in Christ, God became man. In Christ the Messiah, God literally entered our world, and icons are but enduring markers of that “eucatastrophe” (to palm a neologism from J.R.R. Tolkien). Icons are visual relics of the Incarnation, just as relics are tangible embers from the fire of the Holy One, as in the Transfiguration of Christ, burning in a believer. Relics, like Elijah’s skeleton and Peter’s shadow, quite are given by God as scars of divine glory. Relics are given by God the Holy Spirit to send reverberations of His immanent grace through time and space to others. Icons, in turn, are given to send similar reverberations of hope, faith and sanctification through the whole human person. As Vladimir Lossky says in _The Meaning of Icons_, "It is not the purpose of the icon to touch its contemplator. Neither is it its purpose to recall one or the other human experience of natural life; it is meant to lead every human sentiment as well as reason and all other qualities of human nature on the way to illumination."

As I bowed and prayed before that icon, I realized something elemental about icons. They are a litmus test for your devotion to a truly incarnated Christ. To cringe at kissing and touching and bowing before icons is to cringe, in an admittedly oblique way, at Christ the God-Man. Imagine you had the chance to live the Gospels; to walk and talk and eat and sleep with Christ. Now imagine the veneration of icons as a form of religious acting (in the tradition of method acting), or as a dress rehearsal for living (or performing) the Gospels. If I am unwilling to bow before a little crafted reminder of God’s love for me in Christ, how willing would I be to bow before Jesus, a human being? If I am unwilling to kiss the wooden feet of an icon, merely as a sign of honor to one shown in that icon, how willing would I be to kiss the dirty, knobbed feet of a first-century Jewish man?

To anticipate an assured (Protestant) objection, no, you can’t say meeting Jesus would “just be different”, that you “could just tell” who He really is and therefore would bow. If you had lived to see and hear and smell Jesus when He walked this earth, you would not be able (unless you a very keen Docetist) “just to tell” who this man, this *allzumenschlicher Mann* (all-too-human man), was according to the flesh. If you see nothing but eccentricity and religious excess in icons there is a very good chance you would see nothing but the same in Jesus the incarnate Christ. You may as well say you honor the state though you dishonor its traffic signs. Their authority devolves onto its authority; to scorn the former is to scorn the latter. Icons are the traffic signs of God’s Kingdom, only they read “STOP,” “REMEMBER,” “BOW,” “WEEP,” “KNEEL,” “SUBMIT,” “YIELD,” “KISS,” “EMBRACE,” and all the rest that it means to know Christ.

To anticipate a more fundamental objection, no, images are not blasphemous (against the first commandment) in the new covenant of incarnate grace. I can not and will not delve into a rigorous theological defense of icons – St. John Damascus did so far better centuries ago – but I will recall a few basic truths. First, God Himself, even in the Old Testament, ordained “graven images” when He ordained the construction of Temple paraphernalia. All of this, as the Book of Hebrews says plainly, was but an earthly, graven image of the true Temple in Heaven. The cleverest – and yet most absurd – reply to this fact is that those images were meant only for the Holy of Holies, not for the mass of Israelites to worship with. First of all, however, since when did the ten commandments apply to only various sectors of space (viz., outside the curtain)? Second, even if these Old Testament graven images were meant for the inner sanctum of the Temple, that barrier has been exploded with the death of Christ so that, you guessed it, all believers have access to the mystery and icons of worship. If anything, the inmost gravenness of Temple worship has, by Christ's atonement, been cast outside the Temple over the whole earth, which is, as a matter of fact, is the animus of icons.

The second and more important basic truth about icons is that God Himself, in the New Testament, introduced a new “economy” of representation when He took on a human form in Christ. I repeat: God Himself made a graven image of God Himself. This was how God reached us; this was the signal that He did not reject the physical world; this was His sign that matter – whether a piece of wood or a human being – can and must be redeemed and transformed into His likeness. This was a new tactic but not a new strategy, for, as Fredrica Mathewes-Green says, “We are the original icons, since God was the first iconographer, making us in his image” (_At the Corner of East and Now_, New York: Tarcher/Putnam (2000), p. 178). Icons are nothing but humans’ more beautiful acts of cooperating with God in transforming all of Creation, from paintbrushes to families, into His likeness. As St. John Damascene says,

I adore one God, one Godhead but three Persons, God the Father, God the Son made flesh, and God the Holy Ghost, one God. … I worship Him clothed in the flesh, not as if it were a garment or He constituted a fourth person of the Trinity--God forbid. That flesh is divine, and endures after its assumption. Human nature was not lost in the Godhead, but just as the Word made flesh remained the Word, so flesh became the Word remaining flesh, becoming, rather, one with the Word through union.... Therefore I venture to draw an image of the invisible God, not as invisible, but as having become visible for our sakes through flesh and blood. I do not draw an image of the immortal Godhead. I paint the visible flesh of God....

At any rate, there I was, bowing for the first time before an icon, unable to stand, hardly able to pray. My soul was at a loss for words. Neither could I lift my eyes; I was before the Lord hanging on the Cross *for me*. I was first driven into a blizzard of shame knowing He hung there for *my sins*. But then the winds died and I stood on a plain of hope, looking to the mountain of Christ’s return. My shame melted into joy: He hung there not just for my sins but to *forgive* them. I knew Christ was not really on the Cross anymore, as he icon depicted; but I’m not sure I would have recalled He actually was on the Cross without that icon’s depiction. It was one of the deepest encounters with God I’ve ever had; God reached straight into my eyes to my soul.

Incredibly, this week with Fr. Ramon was only slightly less amazing. At our first meeting, rather than dive into the Catechism as I expected to do – “I know you lahv dat book,” as Fr. Ramon said – he asked me to tell him about myself, “about de leetle Ellyot.” This caught me off-guard, but it led to the very encounter I just “painted.” This week we continued with the tale of the little Elliot. We went into the chapel again and I knelt before the Lord, before that holy icon, only this time feeling more courage to look at His image, and then, feeling more encouragement as He looked back at me.

We returned to Fr. Ramon’s office and he asked me to fill hi in on the past two weeks. To spare you the details, this led to a very deep and quite painful discussion of my feelings these days. He asked me to illustrate my feelings with oil pastels on a sheet of paper. I ended up drawing a mountain (covered with faith, hope, joy and love) cut in two by an empty chasm of “pain,” “fear,” and “ego”. The sides of the mountain were two lives that were stopped short of becoming one. Fr. Ramon helped me see that this divide is at the center of my being, and (sure enough) steps from my childhood. It is one of the deepest desires of my heart to see unity in all things. Hence my interest in bridging cultural gaps with language. Hence my interest in integrating huge, otherwise disparate fields of learning. Hence my ecumenical and missiological bent as a Christian. Hence, most deeply of all, my inexpressible yearning for a unified family; and, in turn, my attraction to females that fulfill that yearning with their own families.

To put it bluntly, Fr. Ramon helped me see that despite my strong and adventurous spirit, I am a very needy man. He helped me see that I have for years denied my needs: connubial and filial affection. He helped me see that once I acknowledged these legitimate but frightening needs, I sprang at the chance to meet them. I was like an unconscious man that wakes up to remember he is starving. I saw my dreams in the flesh and I knew I had to strike fast, to possess them forever, or I would lose them forever. Seeing the thing I wanted most – to be one with someone, to be fully accepted by someone, forever – I grasped at it with all I had – and thus scared it away. Like sand in my palm, precisely because I gripped it so tightly, I crushed it out of my grip. And here I am, in a delightful but lonely valley, left only with my pain and regret and shame.

As it turns out, however, this valley is exactly where Fr. Ramon said I need to be. I admit quite frankly that I am in denial, and that I am actively trying to bury painful memories and my unshakable sense of loss. But, he insisted, I must feel my pain, I must embrace my misery, I must stare at my fears, and I must admit my needs. Not to change now means stumbling again and again into the same kind of relationships: scaring away the one I love precisely because of my insatiable, needy love. I must go through the wall; I cannot just go to it and then away from it in a perpetual circle of denial. I must go into the desert before I can go into the Promised Land. I must go to the Cross before I can leave the Tomb.

And so he gave me the following homework, in big bold letters:

EXPERIENCE UR OWN MiSERY, NEED, FEAR, BROKENESS
SPiRiTUAL LEVEL
AND GiVE iT TO CHRiST

Below these words, he drew a heart – my heart – in two opposing sections with the rudiments of thread trying to bind them together all my life. My homework entails me spending about an hour every day until next Monday walking in the valley with Christ, not evading my pain, and not anesthetizing myself with immediate recovery. Hope is for the last few days of this inner pilgrimage; the desert and the Cross are for tonight and the next few days.

This means I will be fasting from blogging (including the daily Christian and Augustine quotes) until I finish the pilgrimage. I ask for your prayers. Be of good cheer, I really am on the path of wholeness, of holiness. One of the last things Fr. Ramon said to me before we closed in prayer is that Jesus, the human person, truly knows my pain. Just as I have heart torn with the hope of unity between all those I know and love, Jesus walked with a heart torn with the hope unity between all humans and God. Like me, Jesus was the child of divorced parents: his human nature and his divine nature were drawn from lovers – humanity and divinity – too long estranged. I know Jesus’ pain and He knows mine. “Jesus loves you, Elliot,” Fr. Ramon said. “He loves *you*.”

In His love, I bid you adieu until next week.

[1] A skeptic would see this as hardly more providential than basic odds, since there are only so many icons in the world, and even fewer styles of them to conform to. You may as well try to deny artistic originality because there are only so many canvasses and tubes of paint in the world. Or, more concretely, you may as well deny Providence in human lives because there are only so many humans and only so much genetic diversity among them. Providence does not have a mean; it has a meaning. As Abp. Fulton J. Sheen said decades ago in his discussion of Islamic Mariology, “There is a fineness in the details of Providence.” The goodness of Providence does not consist in its manifold bizarreness, but rather in its phenomenological and mystical harmony in the Body of Christ in a real, sociohistorical, existential situation. God fits His miracles to the lives of His Church, and outside that fellowship, let’s be frank, His hand is mostly baffling.

Augustine Day by Day - October 3 - Silence

"Let us leave a little room for reflection, room too for silence. Enter into yourself, and leave behind all noise and confusion. Look within yourself. See whether there be some delightful hidden place in your consciousness, where you can be free of noise and argument, where you need not be carrying on your disputes and planning to have your own stubborn way. Hear the word in quietness, that you may understand it."

-- Sermon 52, 22

People don't turn from Christianity for "Eastern religions" to discover meditation; they turn away to avoid the hard doctrinal and moral truths of the Church. Traditionally, patristically and biblically, Christianity is an extremely meditative religion, as the witness of Mary (Lke 2:51) and Anna (Lke 2:36ff.) show us. Indeed, as Augustine prays,

Prayer. To those who love you, O Lord, according to your command, you show yourself, and it is enough for them. Thus they do not fall away from you nor back into themselves.

-- Sermon 261, 1

October 3

How apropos - como apropiado - wie passend - cuam aptus!

Just after posting last night about Orthodox missions and missiology, I settled in to bed with Fr. John Meyendorff's _Living Tradition_. I was fit to be tied when I saw the chapter title: "The Orthodox Church and Mission: Past and Present Perspectives". He makes the same point I referred to in my previous post, to wit,

[A] Church which ceases to be missionary ... ceases to be authentically 'the Church of Christ.' ... However, mission, in its ultimate theological meaning, is an expression of the Church itself. It cannot grow out of a divided Christendom [as the World Council of Churches was insisting it can and should], but only from the One Church; and it leads to conversion to this One Church.
(p. 153-54, italics in original)

Then, at the end of chapter 11, he makes this assertion:

[W]hile the [15th-century Byzantine] Church [under the Ottoman Empire] did not actually renounce its mission to society, this mission in practice became limited by the boundaries of a ghetto. This situation, enforced by the tragedy of history, was unfortunately to remain as a habit even when times again became more favorable to mission.
(p. 197)

As I say, I am left wondering why this habit should persist, if indeed it does.

These thoughts have led me to flip back through Bp. Timothy (Kallistos) Ware's classic introduction to Orthodoxy, _The Orthodox Church_. Sadly though, Ware, as of the latest 1997 edition, says the following about Orthodox missions:

Orthodoxy has often been criticized for failing to be a missionary Church, and there is truth in the charge. ... A short-sighted nationalism is hindering the Church in its work, but there are sporadic attempts at cooperation. Missions are still on a very small scale, but Orthodoxy is showing a growing awareness of their importance.
(p. 187, 191)

That last sentence still almost makes me gasp. A "growing awareness"? Better late than never, I suppose. Of course, in fairness, Ware highlights the activity of Orthodox in Russia, Japan, China, Alaska, Africa, and the USA. Again, I do not mean to impugn Orthodoxy, but I am genuinely bothered by the missiological void I see in it currently. I would love to hear more of the brighter side of the Orthodox story of missions.

At any rate, Fr. Meyendorff's book was, on the whole, very enjoyable. It was a bit superficial, though, and read more as general comments at big meetings. This is forgivable though, since most of the chapters are in fact essays, cast upon general ecumenical waters at nig ecumenical meetings, discussing the basic approaches and assumptions Orthodoxy brings to global ecumenism. The book is clearly a bit dated (pub. 1978) with its constant references to social activism and political radicalism, but I appreciated Meyendorff's persistent witness to the inherently transcendent, eschatological and eucharistic dimensions of Christianity. Reading between the lines, I can sense how radical and secularized much of the ecumenical movement must have looked to Orthodox like Meyendorff.

The four most enjoyable aspects of the book were 1) his discussion of eucharistic ecclesiology for each truly catholic local church (as opposed to the West's more "universal" ecclesiology of a collective Church), 2) his discussion of the nature of man as essentially open upwards, as being-in-communion -with-God, 3) his discussion of the hypostatic union of Christ and its theopaschite implications, and 4) his brief discussion of the 15th-century Russian Orthodox dispute between the Possessors and Non-Possessors.

Onward!

Christian Heritage - October 3 - We Receive Faith as a Gift From God

"The relationship between our soul and body affords a good comparison with the working of God's grace. Just as by itself the body has no life, but receives life from the soul, so we cannot have faith unless we receive it as a gift from God. And just as the soul is the one thing the body needs to live, so also grace is the one thing we must have in order to believe. As the body can do nothing if the soul ceases to give it life, so our wills are incapable of choosing what is right if the help of grace is withdrawn from us. Thus the body relies upon the life-giving presence of the soul, enabling it to live and work, and we are continually assisted by life-giving grace, enabling us to want and do what is right. There is, however, a difference, for when our body is given life by the soul, it receives the power to do evil as well as good, but when grace gives us life, it enables us only to will and do what is right."

Fulgentius of Ruspe (AD 468-533), bishop of Ruspe in northern Africa, Rp. XVII episcoporum 46-47: CCL 91A, 599-600

I have to wonder about that last line. It sounds a bit too Jansenist, even for a stolid Augustinian like Fulgentius....

Augustine Day by Day - October 2 - Seek the Lord Within

"Note the Psalmist's words: 'I sought the Lord, and he answered me.' Where did the Lord hear? Within. Where does he reply? Within. There you pray, there you are heard, and there you are made happy.

"Therefore, enter your heart. Happy are those who delight to enter their hearts and find no evil."

-- Commentary on Psalm 33 (2), 8

Prayer. Lord, you strengthened me because I took refuge in you; and I took refuge because you freed me.

-- Commentary on Psalm 17, 3

October 2