Category Archives: St. Isaac

Faith and Reason

07 Sunday Jun 2020

Posted by in Bible, Faith, St. Isaac, Trinity

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St. Augustine famously wrote: “seek not to understand that you may believe, but believe so that you may understand.” His comment is applicable to Trinity Sunday. If we say we understand the Trinity then we probably don’t, because the relationship between Father, Son and Holy Spirit is at the heart of our faith, and the finite cannot, by definition, grasp the Infinite. At best we see “through a glass darkly.”

That is not to surrender reason. God gave it to us so that we might come to a better understanding of Him, but He gave us other senses to make up for what reason alone cannot do. The Trinity is no more, or less amenable to reason than the other cornerstones of our Faith: that God became man in Jesus; and that Jesus rose from the dead on the third day. If, as our secular culture demands, we have to give a scientific justification for our beliefs, Christians have tended to go in two directions: a fundamentalist insistence on the literal truth of Scripture and its inerrancy (or on the authority of the Church and its inerrancy) or a gradual yielding of ground to allow one method of perceiving the world primacy, as though Reason and Imagination are somehow opposed to each other, rather then being complementary ways of seeing the world.

If we yield to the view that “science” can make no “sense” of concepts such as the Resurrection and the Trinity, we are going down the wrong road.. That would be to give “science” a say in how we exercise our reason which leaves no place for Imagination, Experience and Emotion; it also attributes to “science” a place it does not claim for itself, that of the final arbiter over what life is for and what it means to be human.

In retreat, the Church has tended, in public, to emphasise morality. This is not to say that is a bad thing, and, at least while morality bore the marks of its origin in Christian belief, it was an easy place for the Church to proclaim its utility. But as Society withdraws from that inheritance, it gets more difficult, which is why the Church has such trouble in areas such as LGBT rights; those areas where Society is furthest away from the shared inheritance, create a problem which many in the Church think is solvable only by yeilding further ground.

But our faith is not “applied morality”. Its purpose is not to control us and make us behave. That is another secularist fantasy made real by those who fail to enter into an imaginative understanding of Faith. Our Faith has nothing to do with being good and everything to do with hope and love directed toward the Creator who made us because He loves us. The Trinity is Love. As St Isaac wrote:

In love did He bring the world into existence; in love does He guide it during this its temporal existence; in love is He going to bring it to that wondrous transformed state, and in love will the world be swallowed up in the great mystery of Him who has performed all these things; in love will the whole course of the governance of creation be finally comprised.

That is the point being missed. Moral goodness is the product of loving God and of trying to be with Him as He is with us. As Martyn Percy writes in the Church Times:

God chose to abide with us in our temporality and frailty, so that we might abide with God in eternity. This is the heart of revelation: God is “with” us. Indeed, that small word “with” may be one of the most underrated in the scriptures. God always chooses to stay with us: we do not walk alone. We are never abandoned or orphaned: we are loved and adopted.

The Resurrection speaks to us of hope and God’s promise that death is not the end. The Trinity is the source of all love and life. As Malcolm Guite puts it in a wonderful poem which I commend to you all:

The Triune Poet makes us for His glory,

And makes us each the other’s inspiration.

He calls us out of darkness, chaos, chance,

To improvise a music of our own,

To sing the chord that calls us to the dance,

Three notes resounding from a single tone,

To sing the End in whom we all begin;

Our God beyond, beside us and within.

None of this is to deny the place of reason, but it is to put it in its place as one of the ways we engage with the world. But it is to remind us of what the atheist poet, Philip Larkin divined in his “An Arundel Tomb:”

Our almost-instinct almost true:   
What will survive of us is love

 

And as we were created in love, so will we survive in it. Science has nothing to say here where the poets, musicians and artists alone can help our understanding.

 

The importance of love

26 Sunday Apr 2020

Posted by in Bible, Faith, St. Isaac

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To some, even the use of the word “love” induces a visceral reaction, such, perhaps, has been its over-use. But as the Beloved Disciple reminds us:

7 Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God.

8 He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.

In Christ, God reveals His purpose to us. He did not write a manifesto or send us a list of things we must and must not do, He spoke to us in the only language we can understand – that is through another human life. Jesus tells us what God wants for us, but more, much more than that, He shows us what love means. We can understand love only through relationships, and that is what Jesus shows us – the true meaning of love.

That love is a manifestation of the eternal love that is the Holy Trinity. The sanctifying love of the Spirit and of the Son are poured forth for our salvation. it is through Jesus that we receive the gift of eternal life, not because we first love God, but because He first loves us.

If we love others, and He loves us, then, as the Catechism tells us, in this way the Trinitarian love is reflected here on earth as it is in Heaven. Human love is not the cause of our love, it is a manifestation of God’s love. It follows, as St John tells us, that those who claim to know God but do not manifest love speak under the influence of a false spirit. And yet how very hard it is for us to show love for one another.

St John outlines four ways in which God lives is us: if we love one another; if we have been given His Spirit: if we can confess that Jesus is the Son of God; and finally, if we abide in the love of God. If this is so, then keeping God’s commandments isno more burdensome than love itself. Love is not, as we know, without its difficulties. It is far from saccharine and always sweetness and light; but what we suffer when we love we do because we know that in this fallen world it must be so.

St Anselm of Canterbury prayed:

Lord, let me seek you in desiring you:

and desire you in seeking you.

Let me find you by loving you,

and love you in finding you.

As so often when it comes to love, let us leave St Isaac the Syrian to have the final word:

In love did God bring the world into existence;

in love is God going to bring it to that wondrous transformed state,

and in love will the world be swallowed up in the great mystery of the One who has performed all these things;

in love will the whole course of the governance of creation be finally comprised.

Fr Aiden Kimel has some wiser and deeper reflections on this theme here.

 

 

Four Years, with Love

15 Sunday May 2016

Posted by in Blogging, Faith, St. Isaac

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Desert_Monast-SM-682400381Three years ago, today, Jessica said this.

Across this year my life has changed beyond all recognition, but what has remained constant and grown are the good things, and the bad ones have been burned away, not without some pain, but decisively. Amongst the good things is this place and your companionship. So thank you, all of you.

But since then we’ve found she was just getting warmed up. Across that time she has had a number of jobs, a divorce, an engagement, a serious illness and has moved to Scotland – oh, and kept writing here when she could. Jess and I continue dearest friends, but some days, I wake up wondering what she got up to while I slept. But through all that she remains the same fine, helpful, Christian girl, who mostly desires to be useful, that I met almost 4 years ago, and fell in love with on the road to Walsingham. And Walsingham has continued to provide breakpoints in our friendship, and indeed on Jess’ journey.

When Jess came down with that cancer I mentioned above, it fell on Chalcedon to take over this blog, which he did in an exemplary manner, not only providing continuity of operation, in a very difficult time (on several fronts) but maintaining Jessica’s mission, as well. A very good man, who has worked supremely well for us, and the blog, and his faith. I outlined the history last year, no need to repeat, it is here. I quoted post No. 2 last year to illustrate it.

Polemicists will be polemicists, but the enquirer should not log off the Internet, which has a wealth of resources of interest to those whose minds are open. Like many in the CofE my own catechesis did not exist. I never got round to an Alpha course, and sermons apart, my religious education took place via books and the Web. Sites such as those of Tom Wright, BJ Stockman and Fr. Hunwicke and Fr. Longenecker have been invaluable- and you can always avoid the com-boxes.

There’s an Anglican irenic quality there – an Anglican bishop, an Evangelical Protestant, a high Church (now convert) Anglican and a Catholic convert from Anglicanism. My debt is repaid in part by trying to take an attitude free from confessional bias in what I write. That brings some scorn (rightly from their point of view) from those in all denominations who insist dogma and doctrine matter; I don’t disagree entirely, and I understand where they are coming from. Doctrine and dogma-free Christianity is no Christianity at all. But the Church Fathers hammered all this out a long time ago, and perhaps we’d be wise to settle, as they did, on the Nicene Creed as our benchmark for orthodox belief?

Our Lord Jesus Christ (OLJC) told the Apostles that men would know His followers by their love for each other, and He counselled them to be united; knowing us as He does, He can’t have been all that surprised that we’ve fallen away from those ideals. Perhaps if we were better at them there would be less for the polemicists to reproach us with? Great crimes have been committed in the name of Christianity, that is true, as it is of any great cause entrusted to fallen mankind. It is in our fallen nature to pervert whatever good things we have from God. In our folly we use the consequences of our own sinful state to reject the opportunity to reach out for God’s love; and in our pride erect a superstructure of Pharisaism on OLJC’s words, before proceeding to live in it rather than the love of Christ.

It is foolish to think we can prove or disprove the existence of God. If He exists He is Infinite, we are not; He is the Creator, we the created; if we think we have grasped the fullness of the Infinite then, by that mark, we have not grasped God. OLJC reveals what we need to know, and unless we read the Old Testament through the lessons of the New, we shall go astray. God is love. He came to redeem the world not in the expected form of a Messiah who would bring fire and sword to the heathen, but in the form of a slave, a suffering servant. OLJC redeems us through love and through suffering, not through smiting His enemies. A thought to bear in mind when blogging on religion.

The mission undertaken then, it the one pursued to this day. AATW has become a reasonably large and influential blog (although many are bigger) but on that day, she could have had no idea of what the future would hold. She was willing to share her vision with us. Blogs come and blogs go and sometimes return, but few manage to make it to four years.

And now we’ve made it to that anniversary, with the same mission, and with Jessica herself back in fine voice and full of fire. What the future will bring, we can’t know, but I think, she has rejuvenated the mission that she set for us all.

Perhaps Geoffrey said it best for us all, here.

Here, thanks to you all, I have found a home where I can have my own views challenged, my own knowledge increased, and where there is much food for spiritual nourishment. For all that, I am grateful. I have also found, as I always will, those who want to argue for the sectarian narrowness with which II was brought up, and, rescued from it myself by the Grace of God, I shall ever take my sword and strike it down; a combative Yorkshireman I was born, and I daresay I shall go to meet my Maker as one. I am glad He is all-knowing, because to know all is to understand all. At that last I can only hope that He won’t be altogether displeased with what I’ve done with the talents he gave me.

I also note that today is Pentecost, which is consonant with the mission of this blog. In the Revised Common Lectionary, the Gospel for today is Acts 2:1-21, and seems appropriate to our mission today

But Peter, standing up with the eleven, lifted up his voice, and said unto them, Ye men of Judaea, and all ye that dwell at Jerusalem, be this known unto you, and hearken to my words:

15 For these are not drunken, as ye suppose, seeing it is but the third hour of the day.

16 But this is that which was spoken by the prophet Joel;

17 And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh: and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams:

18 And on my servants and on my handmaidens I will pour out in those days of my Spirit; and they shall prophesy:

19 And I will shew wonders in heaven above, and signs in the earth beneath; blood, and fire, and vapour of smoke:

20 The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and notable day of the Lord come:

21 And it shall come to pass, that whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be saved.

Last year, I ended with a quote from St. Isaac the Syrian, that Jess used on day one. I still think it summarizes the Chatelaine, and the mission of All along the Watchtower better than anything else I could say.

In love did God bring the world into existence; in love is God going to bring it to that wondrous transformed state, and in love will the world be swallowed up in the great mystery of the One who has performed all these things; in love will the whole course of the governance of creation be finally comprised.

Hell: a synopsis of Catholic teaching

01 Friday Jan 2016

Posted by in Bible, Blogging, Catholic Tradition, Faith, St. Isaac

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St John Paul II’s ‘Crossing the threshold of hope’ informs much of this post.

The subject of hell has somewhat dominated our blog of late, and it might be time to outline what the Catholic Church has to say on the subject. As so often, it is necessary to draw a distinction between what the pious believe in a general way, and what the Church teaches officially. To give one example, many ordinary Catholics (and non-Catholics) would, if asked about hell, respond in terms of pitchforks, devils and real fire burning people, and if asked why they believe that would say ‘it is in the Bible’. But as our friend Bosco here so often shows, it is not enough to read everything in Scripture literally. The Church teaches from Scripture and Tradition, and does not neglect reason either. It knows that much of what will happen after death is a mystery, and, contrary to the charges of some of its critics, it does not try to make cut and dried what is mysterious. Those caveats entered, let me offer a synopsis of what I understand Catholic teaching in this area to be saying.

At death the soul is judged – this is known as the particular judgment. There are, the Church teaches, three outcomes to this judgment immediately after death: immediate unification with Christ; conditional unification, which is commonly called Purgatory; and immediate rejection which is eternal damnation – as the catechism puts it:

To die in mortal sin without repenting and accepting God’s merciful love means remaining separated from him for ever by our own free choice. This state of definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed is called “hell.”

The chief punishment of hell is separation from God. The careful reader of the link will see that the Church puts inverted commas around ‘eternal fire’, and this is because it is not pronouncing on the literal presence of fire. St Thomas Aquinas says it is a real fire, but with all respect to the Angelic doctor, that is his opinion, one we should take seriously, but not an article of faith. But it must be emphasised that in its official teaching the Church relies, as it always does, on the words of Jesus, who, according to St Matthew, said that at death people would be separated into two groups – everlasting punishment or eternal life. I can quite understand the Apologetics which then queries the existence of Purgatory on the ground this does not fit with the twofold division here (although, since the Church teaches that eternally there are only two destinations for us, there is no contradiction); what I find more puzzling is the notion that the idea of everlasting hell is not to be derived from this.

I quite understand the impatience of some thinkers with the assumption that, for example, when Paul speaks of people being unworthy of eternal life, that means they are going to hell, or that when he says the wages of sin are death that means sinners go to hell. If you do not believe in hell, or you do not believe in the Catholic teaching, you could not extrapolate it from such passages. However, we read Scripture as a whole, and once you take the sense of the Matthean passage just quoted, then it is natural to talk of hell in relation to the Pauline passages. I would entirely take Jessica’s point that Paul does not major on this theme, and would add to it that the Catholic Church follows suit – in a catechism of 2865 paragraphs only 5 of them deal with hell. As ever, the Church follows in the path of the first evangelists. This has the huge advantage that it can be secure in its teaching; it has the eternal disadvantage that there will be things it teaches which every age will find difficult. Our own age finds the idea of eternal torment one of those things. But let us examine the nature of that torment as far as we can.

Balthasar, whose Dare We Hope “That All Men Be Saved?” (1986) is more often criticised than read, did not teach universalism (indeed, it seems rather doubtful as to whether Origen did so either, but that’s another matter). He acknowledged that we all stand under judgment, and that, despite the distastefulness of the idea, eternal torment was not to be dismissed:

If we take our faith seriously and respect the words of Scripture, we must resign ourselves to admitting such an ultimate possibility, our feelings of revulsion notwithstanding. We may not simply ignore such a threat; we may not easily dismiss it, neither for ourselves nor for any of our brothers and sisters in Christ” (p. 237).

In this he was at one with St John Paul II, whose book, Crossing the Threshold of Hope (1994), also spoke of the hope that we might legitimately have that all men might yet be saved, but added (as Balthasar did) that sinful, prideful man might reject the love of God and choose not to be in his presence. To quote St John Paul directly:

“… yet the words of Christ are unequivocal. In Matthew’s Gospel he speaks clearly of those who will go to eternal punishment (cf. Matthew 25:46).”

Speaking in a General Audience on 28 July 1999, St John Paul said:

The images of hell that Sacred Scripture presents to us must be correctly interpreted. They show the complete frustration and emptiness of life without God. Rather than a place, hell indicates the state of those who freely and definitively separate themselves from God, the source of all life and joy.

God grants us free-will and we can reject him – in which case, as St John Paul II put it:

Damnation remains a real possibility, but it is not granted to us, without special divine revelation, to know which human beings are effectively involved in it. The thought of hell — and even less the improper use of biblical images — must not create anxiety or despair, but is a necessary and healthy reminder of freedom within the proclamation that the risen Jesus has conquered Satan, giving us the Spirit of God who makes us cry “Abba, Father!” (Rm 8:15; Gal 4:6).

The Church prays that all men may be saved (CCC 1821) and that no one will be lost (CCC 1058), and since Christ came to save all, again, and as usual, it does no more than its founder taught it. But Saint John Paul is right, it is not given to us to know who is in hell. Nor, in speaking of the latter, is it necessary to postulate literal flames. St Isaac the Syrian, in speaking of hell, expressed it best:

Those who are tormented in hell are tormented by the invasion of love. What is there more bitter and violent than the pains of love? Those who feel they have sinned against love bear in themselves a damnation much heavier than the most dreaded punishments. The suffering with which sinning against love afflicts the heart is more keenly felt than any other torment. It is absurd to assume that the sinners in hell are deprived of God’s love. Love is offered impartially. But by its very power it acts in two ways. It torments sinners, as happens here on earth when we are tormented by the presence of a friend to whom we have been unfaithful. And it gives joy to those who have been faithful. That is what the torment of hell is in my opinion: remorse.

This is very far away from pitchforks and devils and torture chambers. It is also, I would suggest, more accessible for us all. Which of us, having done something very wrong and come to repentance has not been tortured by the remembrance of our sin? As the old Anglican General Confession put it: ‘The remembrance of them is grievous unto us; The burden of them is intolerable.’ These are the things which drive us to confess and to repentance. They are healthy for us because they encourage us to turn aside from our sins.

None of this is to say that ‘fear’ in its common sense, is what drives us to God. If we love Him, we will feel remorse, and the remembrance of our sins is intolerable. If we do not, then hell is most likely the state of coming to that realisation too late. That is our choice. There is no eternal torture chamber created by God – just the one we construct for ourselves.

I hope that this helps set forth what the Church teaches in a form which is of assistance. The traditional caricatures are not, in my own view, very helpful, and, as we have seen here recently, can create confusion and anxiety. That is not what the Church wishes to do – it wishes as its founder wished, that all men might turn from their sins in repentance and come to Christ. Might we hope for that? Of course we can, the Church does; can we say it is so? No, for the Church has not said so. St Isaac said this life is for repentance, and, as the thief at the right hand of the Saviour found, whilst there is life there is hope – and whilst there is hope, then there is prayer we can all offer that all who have not yet repented and turned to Christ, might yet do so.

The difficulty of hell

13 Sunday Dec 2015

Posted by in Bible, Faith, Salvation, St. Isaac

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Hell is problematic. It is clear from Scripture that it exists. No one wants to go there. But if it exists there are people in it. That means that forever they are in some form of torment. It is easy to see why pastors used to major heavily on it – frightened people are more easily convinced to do what they might otherwise not do. Want to commit adultery? Is a few moment’s pleasure worth Eternity burning? It was not an accident that the mediaeval state used burning as a punishment – it was a very literal reminder of what awaited the heretic. I’m not getting into the argument about the Church not burning anyone, it encouraged the State to do so, and back then things were like that. All very scary. All very open to modern atheists arguing that God is a moral monster. God is our Father, God is a Father who is happy to see his child suffer for ever; and Christians ask atheists to believe God is love and wonder why they don’t? The arguments are familiar enough.

In my leisure time I have been reading a small book by Hans Urs von Balthasar, Dare We Hope that all men be saved? In it he makes a point which rings true but which I had not seen others make, which is compare the sayings about hell with post-resurrection sayings, and then point out that the former are mostly pre-resurrection, aimed, he thinks, at meeting his hearers where they were with concepts they would understand. He suggests that if we take all of them in the light of the post-resurrection experience, we get a different view, once in which it is men and their stiff-necks which confine them to hell, rather than it being God who condemns them.

St Isaac the Syrian reminds us that “There is no sin that cannot be forgiven except the one without repentance”. We are not God, we cannot judge as He does. But we can see what Christ says and we can try to follow His example. Even a convicted thief could be saved at the last – and why, because he repented of his sins, he confessed his belief in Christ and he did his best to witness to his Lord. As he goes on to say elsewhere:

Just because (the terms) wrath, anger, hatred, and the rest are used of the Creator, we should not imagine that He (actually) does anything in anger or hatred or zeal. Many figurative terms are employed in the Scriptures of God, terms which are far removed from His (true) nature. And just as (our) rational nature has (already) become gradually more illuminated and wise in a holy understanding of the mysteries which are hidden in (Scripture’s) discourse about God – that we should not understand everything (literally) as it is written, but rather that we should see, (concealed) inside the bodily exterior of the narratives, the hidden providence and eternal knowledge which guides all – so too we shall in the future come to know and be aware of many things for which our present understanding will be seen as contrary to what it will be then; and the whole ordering of things yonder will undo any precise opinion we possess now in (our) supposition about Truth. ’ [‘The Second Part’ XXXIX, 19]

We should recall what St Isaac wrote about God being love, and about his mercy:

“In love did God bring the world into existence; in love is God going to bring it to that wondrous transformed state, and in love will the world be swallowed up in the great mystery of the One who has performed all these things; in love will the whole course of the governance of creation be finally comprised.”

‘As a handful of sand thrown into the ocean, so are the sins of all flesh as compared with the mercy of God’.

Now I can see that from the pastoral point of view this might cause problems – what is the sanction for evil? But then, from the pastoral point of view, traditional concepts of hell-fire cause problems. Is anyone ever brought to love by fear? It is love which God offers. If we cannot access that, and if we cannot be good without fear of sanction, then have we really come to God at all?

God is love, and perfect love casts out fear, so why would we fear God? I an ashamed of myself when I do not not follow his ways, and conscious that my sins are often more omission – stuff I never did and should have done. I always feel better after confession, but that’s because I’ve said sorry to my Father, and I am sorry, not because I am scared of him, but because it hurts me to hurt him. That, I think is what true love does.

Saturday Jess

12 Saturday Dec 2015

Posted by in Faith, Julian of Norwich, St. Isaac

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20121115-180317.jpgJess has limited computer time, not least because of her scrupulosity in using her time at work for work, and so we will have to bear with her not always being prompt in answering our comments on her new posts. Thursday was an example when a comment went unanswered for that reason. Perhaps, she had already answered it.

Before her illness, she was privileged to attend a lecture by Lord Williams of Oystermouth, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, who was speaking on Dame Julian of Norwich. Mother Julian wrote the first book by a woman published in English, “Revelations of Divine Love”, and yes it is available, quite inexpensively, and yes, I have it, and it was one of my mainstays during Jess’ illness and the earlier part of her recovery. It is simply wonderful.

In the article for today, Jess compares what Lord Williams lectured on regarding Mother Julian and how it harks back to what her beloved St. Isaac the Syrian had to say about God’s love.

The anger of God

Why do we imagine God, the infinite and omniscient is angry with us? Is it because we are actually angry with ourselves and project that onto God? Do we really imagine God, who has created us to love Him, actually hates us? If He does/did, then the consequences for us would be much worse than we can imagine. Sin is the hard work we put in to avoid facing up to the fact that God loves us and His love is available to us if we conform ourselves to the pattern of His will for us. These are the main themes I took away from a lecture by the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Williams of Oystermouth, which I was fortunate enough to attend today.

He was speaking on Julian of Norwich, and one of his complaints was that some people have turned her into a ‘cuddly’ symbol of a God of easy Grace. That God loves us is not, he said, an easy option, because it requires something of us we find it hard to give; that, he explained, was why we are angry we with God. The key text from lady Julian’s revelation is this:

Then said our good Lord Jesus Christ to me: “Are you well satisfied with my suffering for you?” And I said: “Yes, good Lord, in your mercy. Yes, good Lord, may you be blessed for ever!” Then said Jesus, our kind Lord: “If you are satisfied, I am satisfied. It is a joy, a bliss and an endless delight to me that I suffered my passion for you. And if it were needful or possible that I should suffer more, I would suffer more.”

Christ rejoices in our happiness. He wants to know that we are made happy by His sufferings. He is human and he is divine. He suffers because we make him suffer, and yet as God he does it because of his love for us. He is not, Rowan Williams suggested, trying to settle some great legal debt which we owe him, he is trying to overcome our pride and the contrariness which makes us divide ourselves from Him. We cannot, he said, begin to imagine, or exhaust, God’s love.

I wish I there had been a recording available, and hope there will be, as Lord Williams’ thought is not easily captured, but so much of what he was saying chimed with my beloved St Isaac the Syrian. This God lady Julian encountered is the one St Isaac described thus:

“In love did God bring the world into existence; in love is God going to bring it to that wondrous transformed state, and in love will the world be swallowed up in the great mystery of the one who has preformed all these things; in love will the whole course of the governance of creation be finally comprised.”

The idea that love is in some sense ‘easy’, or the bringer of easy Grace, is part of how our sinful and fallen nature reacts to the immensity of His love; it must, says sin, be complicated and hard, and we must suffer much; that drives us away and closes our hearts; we might be saved, but few others. Our pride divides us from each other and from God’s love. As Julian of Norwich concludes:

I was taught that Love is our Lord’s meaning. And I saw very certainly in this and in everything that before God made us he loved us . . . which love was never abated and never will be. And in this love he has done all his works, and in this love he has made all things profitable to us, and in this love our life is everlasting. In our creation we had beginning, but the love in which he created us was in him from without beginning. In this love we have our beginning, and all this shall we see in God without end 

Those, like lady Julian and St Isaac who have experience of the Divine showing know this, know its awful simplicity; we might, Rowan Williams suggested, humble ourselves and cease from mental strife for a moment to glimpse this miracle.

Mercy

10 Thursday Dec 2015

Posted by in Church of the East, Early Church, Faith, St. Isaac

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‘Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner’ – so goes the Orthodox ‘Jesus Prayer’, which I, like many Orthodox, pray using a prayer-rope. It is shorter than the Rosary, but it serves a not dissimilar purpose – it quietens the mind and helps one meditate on God. I prayed it a lot on Monday evening, and one of the Sisters, interested in what I was doing, asked me why it was I prayed it as well as the Rosary – was the ‘Jesus prayer’ not ‘foreign’ to our tradition in the West?

I had to say that I’d no idea. Chalcedon introduced me to it many years ago, and it has long been part of my practice. During my illness, when I was too weak to pray the Rosary, I used to hold on to my prayer-rope and just chant the prayer. It seemed very appropriate to say it to mark the start of the ‘Year of Mercy’ proclaimed by Pope Francis.

As I am not a Roman Catholic, I don’t propose to enter into the whys and wherefores of Pope Francis. From outside the Church of Rome it seems to me that he’s a holy man who loves God and who wants us to talk more about love than about sin. I understand why some will be made uneasy by all of this – it isn’t, after all, as though our society exactly majors on ‘sin’, and I can share an unease about where the balance lies. That said, is there really a balance with God? As I understand what Geoffrey has been saying to us in his posts on Monday and yesterday, it is that God’s Mercy is quite unbalanced. In this he reflects something written by my beloved St Isaac the Syrian, which is quoted here by one of my all-time favourite bloggers, Fr Aidan Kimel

“Mercy is opposed to justice” …

Mercy and justice in one soul is like a man who worships God and the idols in one house. Mercy is opposed to justice. Justice is the equality of the even scale, for it gives to each as he deserves; and when it makes recompense, it does not incline to one side or show respect of persons. Mercy, on the other hand, is a sorrow and pity stirred up by goodness, and it compassionately inclines a man in the direction of all; it does not requite a man who is deserving of evil, and to him who is deserving of good it gives a double portion. If, therefore, it is evident that mercy belongs to the portion of righteousness, then justice belongs to the portion of wickedness. As grass and fire cannot co-exist in one place, so justice and mercy cannot abide in one soul. As a grain of sand cannot counterbalance a great quantity of gold, so in comparison God’s use of justice cannot counterbalance His mercy. (Ascetical Homilies I.51. p. 379)

Do read the whole of Fr Aidan’s post, which seems to me to be suffused with the love of God. He quotes what is probably the most provocative statement in the whole of the Patristic canon: “Do not call God just, for His justice is not manifest in the things concerning you” Hyperbole? Read what Fr Aidan writes and make your own mind up.

Justice would be for me to be condemned. I think even though I try to be good and to do as God tells me, I am not good all the time and I fail, not only in the things I do, but in those I fail to do. But God tells me I am saved because of the Resurrected Word Incarnate, who has taken away my sins – and my sin. I think I draw a distinction, but perhaps err? Any way, I thought I would share these thoughts with you for the ‘Year of Mercy’.

Spiritual hunger?

01 Thursday Oct 2015

Posted by in Faith, St. Isaac

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St Isaac sand

It is clear enough that in the West the tide of Christian faith is ebbing – and equally clear that in Africa and Asia it is rising. But that does not mean that people in the West are only interested in materialism – as a quick tour of any book shop will show you. There are growing sections dealing with ‘spirituality’, and it is not only in Hollywood that Buddhism is fashionable; the vogue for ‘eastern mysticism’ or ‘new age spirituality’ shows little sign of waning. But how many of those who slake their appetites here really know much about the true aastern mysticism which has been engrafted in the West these many millennia? Christianity did not originate in the West. As Betjeman’s poem, ‘Christmas’ reminds us, no earthy pleasures ‘Can with this single Truth compare / That God was man in Palestine / And lives today in Bread and Wine’. Yet how many of us read the Christian mystics which are part of our tradition?

One of my own favourites, and I passed the taste on to Jessica is St. Isaac of Nineveh, (or the Syrian). A seventh century hermit who was briefly a bishop (and gave it up for the good reason he felt it took him further from God), his writings have survived and been translated by the great Syriac scholar, Sebastian Brock. But they are not readily available. The Russian Orthodox bishop and scholar, Hilarion Alfayev, has produced an excellent study, full of good quotations here:   There is a good website here:

St. Isaac understood, as perhaps few have, the depths of what St. John meant when he wrote that ‘God is love’ (1 John 4:8):

If zeal had been appropriate for putting humanity right, why did God the Word clothe Himself in the body in order to bring the world back to His Father using gentleness and humility? And why was He stretched out on the Cross for the sake of sinners, handing over His sacred body to suffering on behalf of the world? I myself say that God did all this for no other reason, except to make known to the world the love that He has, His aim being that we, as a result of our greater love arising from an awareness of this, might be captivated by His love when He provided the occasion of this manifestation of the kingdom of heaven’s mighty power – which consists in love – by means of the death of His Son. http://orthodoxeurope.org/page/11/1/16.aspx

It is our response to this love which God seeks to draw forth. We come to Him because He loved us first, not because we fear Hell. As Mar Isaac reminds us: ‘Among all God’s actions there is none which is not entirely a matter of mercy, love and compassion: this constitutes the beginning and the end of His dealings with us.’ [Part II, chapter xxxix, 22]

Mar Isaac come close to universalism, but stops short, simply saying that in the end we cannot be sure who will and who will not be saved, or, indeed, know that we will not all be in heaven, with the sinful experiencing it as hell – the burning that comes from being in God’s presence – and hating it because to them his perfect love is unbearable. They perceive all things in their image, and to their eyes, a God who is perfect love and mercy is not what they wanted from their God. It is an interesting speculation – and Mar Isaac claims no more for it than that. But he reminds us that there were all sorts of ways God could have redeemed us – but none which would have shown us how powerful his love was than by sacrificing his only Son for our sin. Love that immense should, and can, call from us a response of love.

Three Years of “Blogging on Religion”

15 Friday May 2015

Posted by in Blogging, Faith, St. Isaac

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Three years ago today, posts numbers 1, 2, 3, and 4 were made by Jessica on All along the Watchtower.

In the second of those posts, titled Blogging on Religion, Jessica said this:

Polemicists will be polemicists, but the enquirer should not log off the Internet, which has a wealth of resources of interest to those whose minds are open. Like many in the CofE my own catechesis did not exist. I never got round to an Alpha course, and sermons apart, my religious education took place via books and the Web. Sites such as those of Tom Wright, BJ Stockman and Fr. Hunwicke and Fr. Longenecker have been invaluable- and you can always avoid the com-boxes.

There’s an Anglican irenic quality there – an Anglican bishop, an Evangelical Protestant, a high Church (now convert) Anglican and a Catholic convert from Anglicanism. My debt is repaid in part by trying to take an attitude free from confessional bias in what I write. That brings some scorn (rightly from their point of view) from those in all denominations who insist dogma and doctrine matter; I don’t disagree entirely, and I understand where they are coming from. Doctrine and dogma-free Christianity is no Christianity at all. But the Church Fathers hammered all this out a long time ago, and perhaps we’d be wise to settle, as they did, on the Nicene Creed as our benchmark for orthodox belief?

Our Lord Jesus Christ (OLJC) told the Apostles that men would know His followers by their love for each other, and He counselled them to be united; knowing us as He does, He can’t have been all that surprised that we’ve fallen away from those ideals. Perhaps if we were better at them there would be less for the polemicists to reproach us with? Great crimes have been committed in the name of Christianity, that is true, as it is of any great cause entrusted to fallen mankind. It is in our fallen nature to pervert whatever good things we have from God. In our folly we use the consequences of our own sinful state to reject the opportunity to reach out for God’s love; and in our pride erect a superstructure of Pharisaism on OLJC’s words, before proceeding to live in it rather than the love of Christ.

It is foolish to think we can prove or disprove the existence of God. If He exists He is Infinite, we are not; He is the Creator, we the created; if we think we have grasped the fullness of the Infinite then, by that mark, we have not grasped God. OLJC reveals what we need to know, and unless we read the Old Testament through the lessons of the New, we shall go astray. God is love. He came to redeem the world not in the expected form of a Messiah who would bring fire and sword to the heathen, but in the form of a slave, a suffering servant. OLJC redeems us through love and through suffering, not through smiting His enemies. A thought to bear in mind when blogging on religion.

That was the mission she embraced then, and it is the mission we embrace today. AATW has become a reasonably large and influential blog (although many are bigger) but on that day, she could have had no idea of what the future would hold. She was willing to share her vision with us. Blogs come and blogs go, and sometimes return, but few manage to make it to three years

Last summer on NEO’s third anniversary one of my commenters said this:

They say it takes a year or two to get traction in the blogging business and 90% won’t last that long. I have seen some popular ones come and go when the blogger begins to realize just what a commitment it is to keep one going. Three years puts you among the veterans. Keep up the good work.

And, for the most part, I think that is so, and most of us have changed direction several times in that time period. But not here, Jess set the standard on the very first day, and we are still trying to live up to it.

But Jess’ job began taking more of her time and energy, and her marriage was killed by her ex-husband’s betrayal and she began to flag a bit. But even as she was a refugee from the Telegraph blog, in one of its more stupid moves it banned most of its religious commenters, and suddenly we turned into a group blog with most of the contributors in the sidebar, including the indefatigable Geoffrey Sales, and they breathed new life into the blog. And so it went.

Then last summer in a horrendous one-two punch one of our contributors had his career threatened because of his contributions here, which caused Jess to take the blog private, where we were till the end of last year.

And then in what was a body blow to many of us Jess herself was diagnosed with what appeared to be terminal cancer. And so it would have been, save for the intervention of God Himself. And now she is recovering slowly but surely, at the convent in Walsingham, which has become very special to so many of us through her devotion to Our Lady.

That of course, left Chalcedon with grave responsibilities, both as the point of contact for Jessica’s doctors, and family and friends, but also for the blog, which has always been important to Jess but also to him and to many of the rest of us. He discharged all those duties admirably (as he still does) even though right in the middle of the crisis, he also had to deal with the start of a new term at work. A veritable iron man, and a worthy partner for Jessica.

And so this post marks the beginning of the fourth year of All along the Watchtower, and our mission remains unchanged. Also known from day one is Jess’ love for St Isaac the Syrian and on that first day she gave us a quote from him as well:

In love did God bring the world into existence; in love is God going to bring it to that wondrous transformed state, and in love will the world be swallowed up in the great mystery of the One who has performed all these things; in love will the whole course of the governance of creation be finally comprised.

But my dearest friend would also want us to remember the good times and all the fun we’ve had, so let’s do that in comments, after we raise a glass to the woman who made it all possible, after all, as she is wont to say, “It’s five o’clock somewhere!”

God’s love

11 Monday May 2015

Posted by in Faith, St. Isaac

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“In love did God bring the world into existence; in love is God going to bring it to that wondrous transformed state, and in love will the world be swallowed up in the great mystery of the One who has performed all these things; in love will the whole course of the governance of creation be finally comprised.”

So wrote St Isaac the Syrian, who, perhaps more than most, provides the profoundest fruits of meditating upon what it means to say ‘God is love’.He does not deny, as some try, the reality of hell, but rather offers us a reading of it which ought to make us stop and think:

As for me I say that those who are tormented in hell are tormented by the invasion of love. What is there more bitter and violent than the pains of love? Those who feel they have sinned against love bear in themselves a damnation much heavier than the most dreaded punishments. The suffering with which sinning against love afflicts the heart is more keenly felt than any other torment. It is absurd to assume that the sinners in hell are deprived of God’s love. Love is offered impartially. But by its very power it acts in two ways. It torments sinners, as happens here on earth when we are tormented by the presence of a friend to whom we have been unfaithful. And it gives joy to those who have been faithful.

That is what the torment of hell is in my opinion: remorse. 

St John tells us that: ‘ If we say that we have fellowship with Him, and walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth.’  Unlike some who claim that once you have received Christ you are ‘saved’, St John knew that it was still possible for us to sin.

My little children, these things I write to you, so that you may not sin. And if anyone sins, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. 2 And He Himself is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the whole world.

If we say we are without sin, then we lie – only to ourself; God knows the truth. If we lie to ourselves we do not walk in the light; if we do not love, then we walk in the darkness.

The Trinity, the Godhead, is love – and through the mutual love of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, everything that is has come into existence is the result of that love. But although we are created in the image of God, we have chosen to err and stray like lost sheep. Not even the first generation of Jesus’ followers were free from those who claimed inspiration as their excuse for dissent. Our greatest failing is wanting to be at the centre of things – like children, we can want everything to revolve around us. But we are already loved. If we do not feel that, we might try attributing that to a failure on our own part rather than blaming God.

We have been presented with the Good News. Never, in the history of mankind, has it been easier to know that news; but since it requires of us a humility foreign to our culture, it may be more difficult than ever to hear what God is saying to us. If we imagine it has to come in a blinding flash as a one-off event, we shall miss the other ways God works. We shall miss the still, small voice in the darkness, we shall miss the mustard seed which needs only watering to grow; we shall remain in the darkness because we do not recognise what light looks like.

Do we allow ourselves enough time and space to hear and respond to God’s love? If so, how do we pass that on to those who have not yet heard it?