Orthodox Lifestyle

St. Maximus the Confessor - The deified state of man

To describe the deified state of man, St. Maximus turns to Pauline texts : " The admirable Paul denied his own existence and did not know whether he possesed a life of his own :I live no more, for Christ lives in me...( Gal.2.20)...( Man), the image of God, becomes God by deification; he rejoices to the full in abandoning all that is his by nature... because the grace of the Spirit triumphs in him and because manifestly God alone is acting in him; thus God and those worthy of God possess in all things one and the same energy, or rather, this common energy is the energy of God alone, since he communicates himself wholly to those who are wholly worthy."

Romanian dimensions of life in the Church of Christ

As we know, the Church, the Bride of Christ is one in the whole cosmos. It is a new world wich has Christ as its sun. We can say, too, that in this community of believers all races, nations and peoples are called through the work of restoration of Jesus our Savior to a new existence in the life of the Holly Spirit.
I will try in a few words to outline the spiritual image of the Romanian people growing out of tradition, history and the whole of nature.

The first and fundamental characteristic is this feeling of solidarity with the cosmos, of one great solidarity. Every act resounds through the whole community. Each gesture propagates the music of all. His existence cannot be isolated, closed off in an individuality broken off from the community. The Romanian people have suffered from centuries of war and oppression. Pounded by historical circumstances the genius of our people found itself joined with a living reality whose history cannot be destroyed : the cosmos and the cosmic order. This Romanian sympathy with the cosmos does not present itself as a pagan feeling but as a form of Christian liturgy. For as a nations Romenia was called into being as a Christian country. The Romanian is Christian from his birth.

This is so because the original belief of Christianity has been preserved, retaining a balance between the awareness of the God of creation and His presence in creation. ( In the West this balance was often lost since God was thought to be more separate from the world, wich gave rise to a pantheistic reaction where His presence was confused with the dark essence of the world ( Ekhart and Bohme) or with a sentimentality towards a God crucified in the past ( as in catholic feminist mysticism ) but not living in His works present in us).

This Romanian liturgical spirit belongs in fact to the first Christian century in wich nature is not excluded from the Christian process of resurrection, ( St. Paul said :" The whole creation longs for the future restoration". Rom.8.18-22). In this way of growing union with God man does not reject creation, but, in his love gathers together the whole cosmos wich was ripped apart by sin and is to be transformed by grace. The whole universe is called to enter in the Church, to become the Church of Christ and to be transformed at the end into the kingdom of God. Its fulfilment is found only in the Church. This understanding is set forth not only by Romanian tradition and church hymnography. Nature participates in the christological mystery of the crucifiction, death and resurrection of our Saviour. We can observe the spiritual solidarity of the Romanian people with the cosmic liturgy when we analyze the conception of dead in two great masterpieces of Romanian oral poetry - the Miorita ( the Ewe lamb )

and the Ballad of the Master Manole.
Bothof these present the event of death as of supreme value, as the most noble fulfilment wich can provide a hope for the Romanian existence. The Ballad of Master Manole concentrates on the mystery of sacrifice. When Master Manole was engaged on building the famous Arghes monastery he found it needed the sacrifice of a human being to make it truly strong. Thus he sacrificed his own wife, walling her into the fondations of the monastery. ( This is evidently a legend without historical correspondence. It is interesting for its symbolism with the act of creation and for the way in wich it understands death not as destruction but as a passing into another existential dimension.)The building took " life" and "breath" through a mystery which made possible the translation of the life of Manole's wife into a new body- the building of the new monastery. In this way a supreme sense of life is joined with an earthly reality which man feels the need to overcome and to transcend.

In another tale - the Balada Miorita - we see the significance of the creative sacrifice in the transcendent spiritual world. Here a shepherd speaks with a ewe lamb ( this is a world where men and animals communicate ) , which tells him that his fellow shepherds want to kill him. He accepts death as a willing sacrifice of self but he gives it the appearance of a cosmic wedding. He tells the lamb:

" Tell my mother that I have married a beautiful bride, a princess. The sun and the moon gave me a crown. The great mountains were the priests. The birds were the choir and fiddlers - thousands of birds - and the stars were my candles."

That is he gives a supreme value to the acceptance of destiny and to his own reintegration into a nature which is no longer a pagan nature but a sacred cosmic liturgy. In this way we discover the meaning of death which is seen as a new existence transposed to a level nearer God. Death is not the end of existence but as the Church Fathers say, it is a passover from death into life, through the earth to the heaven, with Christ with whom we have been clothed through taking part in the sacramental ministry of the Church.

The second essential characteristic, related to the first, is the idea that everything has a meaning; that the whole world is a book of signs. The world is not neutral without meaning, without connections, but one full of blessed power and evil power; a world of calling and silence, of the seen and the hidden. So, all the things of this world have being and so have something to tell those who know to listen. It is an image which has been lost by the "modern" world which is deprived of religious sensibility. So the cosmos becomes opaque, silent, dumb. It cannot pass on the message, or be a bearer of mystery. But Romanian popular spirituality sees in the living world a great procession of stars, an ascent which cannot be stopped.

As we look now with eyes that perceive our participation in the life of the cosmos we turn to our third characteristic of Romanian Orthodox life - celebration - and find it appears with a new dimension. Celebration is a communion with the transcendent, a communion with cosmic nature, a communion with society, a communion with the animal and vegetable world and a communion with ourselves, melting the contradiction within ourselves, our deceptions and our demands. In this way in celebration every object, every fragment has a meaning. Nothing is dark. What Romanian people realise through celebration cannot be measured. This can be seen if we look at the concept of time. It has been said that the main category of philosophical though is time rather than space. The passing of time excites questions in philosophical thought. Our people realised this through celebration. They have applied a method which proved valid in other circumstances - that when you want to conquer a reality , instead of fighting it, received it, but give it another value, deeper and more vital. In this way the Romanian peasants have accepted the passing of time, but mark it with celebrations wich are moments of absolute. A Romanian knows that everything is passing. He knows the wisdom of Ecclesiastes - that vanity of vanities, all is vanity - but he transfigures the dimension of time and space. His life is transformed; time itself becomes a bridge which helps him enter into eternity.

The urban man, by contrast, often seeks to forget time, to kill time and when he does he loses the meaning of celebration. He is isolated from the divine factor, from cosmic reality and from community of life. This leads to a loneliness where he finds he is abandoned by the universe and this universe itself appears a delusion, a thing without meaning.

In truth, we cannot speak of celebration in Romanian life and spirituality without seeing it as a part of the sacramental life of the liturgy.

In the special time of the Holy Liturgy human time and divine eternity come together; space and time itself is renewed ( " Behold I make all things new" - Rev.21.5). This means that everything becomes possible. Men and women are not trapped in a materialistic world order , or an historical order. They overcome it. History itself, through the Church, is restored to its true calling to restore time and space, sensible nature and intelligible nature in a new order, the order of the Kingdom of God. Now the miracle is possible because in the meeting of time and eternity in the celebrated moment, the Kingdom of God is present. Its fulfilment may be in the future but we already share in this life.

Thus, with its awareness of mankind as a part of the universe which God has created and is restoring, Orthodoxy sees the meaning which all things have in life and through its gift of celebration in life and in liturgy it provides a rich way through to the Kingdom of Heaven.

by Pr. Petru Munteanu

Endless events

However, if we look in the Old and New Testament, books inspired by God, we will find in the endless events that are beyond the earthly track; events that are impossible to be contained and interpreted by common sense. Without fail, ardend faith is needed in order for all wonderfull things to be comprehended. Only faith opens the heavenly curtains and by the grace of the Holly Spirit, man can see the supernatural mysteries that God, from time to time, reveals in order to support, strengthen, enlighten, bring into His senses, and guide to the course of His Holly Grace every weak soul.

Where are those Christians, young, old, children, men and women, kings and soldiers, who were running with ardend faith to martyrodom burning by divine eagerness? May we wish that God send again His Holly Spirit today, so that our Church will flourish once again and will elevate such passionate zealouts of our Holy Orthodox Faith.

Then the words of the prophet Joel will be realized. " I pour out my spirit on every flesh and our sons and daughters and our lads that will bear witness to the sighting and prophecy".May many souls be touched...

Epifany 2009

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EeqS9waXPLQ

Hesychast spirituality into a modern Western world

A number of Orthodox monasteries have come into being, both in western Europe and in America, where the hesychast way of life can be practiced more intensely.Thus, into a modern Western world dominated for centuries by an activist time - bound mentality that is antimetaphysical,anticontemplative, and antisymbolic, has been squarely placed the alternative of a contemplative knowledge of human destiny rooted in a way of life in wich theory and practice, wisdom and the method , are inextricably interlocked and whose fulfillment requires a surpasing of all worldly categories, social, political, economic - in short, of that whole realm of the temporal to wich the frenetic activity of modern humanity is confined. Assuredly , behind this antithesis lies another- namely, that between opposed theological and consequently between opposed anthropological orientations. For at the origin of the activist bias of the modern world lies a system of thought wich turns God into a transcendent and unknowable essence that, although responsible for setting the cosmic process in motion, does not interiorly penetrate creation in all its aspects, invisible and visible, incorporeal and corporeal, intelligible and material, but leaves it to follow its own course as though it were a self-subsistent autonomous reality. The corollary of such a conception is that the human mind, equated now with its purely rational function, is itself regarded as something sovereign, cut off from the divine and capable of resolving and determining human destiny on earth independently of revelation and grace.

In radically condemning such a system of thought, hesychasm affirms what one might call the bipolarity of the divine; for it is continues to mantain the idea of God's transcendence, it no less insists on his total and ineradicable presence in humanity and in every other form of created existence. In other words, it affirms that God breaks through the wall of his transcendence in order to make himself both the active source and the true existential subject of everything created, down to the least particle of matter itself: a source and subject who not only can be known by human beings but who must be known by human beings as a condition of humans themselves possesing anything more than a distorted knowledge of their own being and of the world in wich they live. Such distorted knowledge , of course, is quite inadequate to serve as a guide to any truly constructive action, whatever the goodwill or humanitarian feeling that may lie behind it.

In this respect hesychasm not only rejects the profane humanism wich divinizes the human being as an autonomous being, as well as all those concomitant ideological structures whose aim is is to establish the just society in terms of this-wordly categories alone; it also rejects the belief, now so common among Christians themselves, that the Christian life can be reduced to love and service to one's fellow beings, especially in some collective form. This is to say that of Christ's two commandments, love of God and love of neighbor, it gives priority to the first and affirms that the love or service of humanity, or indeed any desirable activity on the level of this world, can be effective, both as a means of salvation and as a truly constructive expression of charity and compassion, only if it springs from a prior love of God actualized in the most literal sense of the word. To act in ignorance of this love and apart from its existential actualization is to divorce what one tries to do from its empowering source and so to fall into a kind of idolatry - the idolatry that consists precisely in valuing things apart from God as if they were self-created and self-subsistent.

Hesychasm

One of the most significant events in the intellectual life of the modern Western world has been without doubt the discovery of the whole contemplative tradition of the Orthodox church that goes by the name hesychasm. This discovery itself has passed through two major stages. It may be said to have taken its starts in the rediscovery over the last century of the writings of the Greek fathers or of the Greek patristic tradition. More specifically it may be traced back to the publication and exploration in the first decades of this century of patristic texts relating more or less directly to hesychasm and the hesychast way of life.
Hesychasm by no means scorns or undervalues human love and service. It is emphatically not "otherworldly" as this term is usually understood. On the contrary it insists, as we have seen, that the whole of creation in impregnated with God's own life and being and that consequently there can be no true love of God that does not embrace every aspect of creation, however humble and limited. Its purpose is not to abandon the world to annihilation and self-destruction, but to redeem it.

It is to redeem it by transfiguring it. But for the hesychast this transfiguration presupposes the transformation of human consciousness itself, so that it becomes capable of perceiving the divinity that lies at the heart of every created form, giving each such form its divine purpose and determining its intrinsic vocation and beauty. In other words, hesychasts will consider that the way for them, as for any other person, best to serve, at least initially, fellow humans and all other created beings, will be to bring the love and knowledge of God to birth within themselves.

Now we will focus , on the Romanian world and the figure of a remarkable " elder", or staretz, Paisii Velichkovskii ( 1722-1794). St. Paisii was born in Ukraine and become a monk at the early age. After serving his spiritual apprenticeship in a hermitage situated on the borders of Moldavia, he departed for Athos, to deepen his knowledge and experience of the hesychast way of life. After sixteen years on the Holy Mountain he returned to Moldavia, first as Abbot of the monastery Dragomirna, then of that of Seculu and finaly of that of Neamtzu. It was at the last monastery that he accomplished the great work of his life, a work that in many ways parallels that of Nicodemus of the Holly Mountain (1749 - 1809). He reestabilished the monastic rule, corrected the church office, organized a printing press, and began to translate and publish the works of the Greek fathers. But above all it was while at Neamtzu that he translated a selection of the texts of the Greek Philokalia into Slavonic.

Staretz Paisii considered that the practice of the prayer of the heart could also be entrusted to lay people and that even the higher forms of contemplation were not incompatible with a live lived in the world and in the context of a certain degree of cultural activity. Yet perhaps the main feature of his teaching was his emphasis on the idea and practice of spiritual paternity. His purpose here was to safeguard the personalization of the spiritual life, to protect this life from the vagaries of individual interpretation and dispozition, and to prevent its dissociation from the liturgical life of the church.

By definition the hesychast lives the eschatological mystery of the church, something that presupposes a transcendence of the forms of civilization,and even of the time itself. As a hesychast aphorism puts it, his purpose is to circumscribe the incorporeal within the house of his body.

In Romania, the work of Paisii was continued by his disciples, in whom he had instilled a love of the ascetic fathers and a desire to see their writings made available in Romanian. Indeed, the first half of the nineteenth century saw the creation of a veritable patristic library on Romanian soil. It was as if Romania stood on the brink of an integral patristic and hesychast revival or, what amounts to the same thing, as if the Orthodox church in Romania was about to manifest the plenitude of its spiritual tradition. If it is possible to say that such a revival and the manifestation of the spiritual plenitude of the Orthodox church amount to the same thing, this is because a condition of the church's being what it is lies in its fidelity to the fathers, whose living heritage does indeed constitute the texture of this church, with all its strengths and weaknesses. In this sense the fathers are always contemporary to the life of the church, integrated to it above all through that magnificent instrument of creative contemplation, the Orthodox liturgy, as well as through its auxiliary forms, the iconography and the hymnography.