Taking Back Death

There has been much discussion, in the latter part of the last century, of our ‘denial of death’. But it would seem to me that the problem is deeper and more difficult. If it is true that Christ shows us what it is to be God in the way that he dies as a human being, then, quite simply, if we no longer ‘see’ death, we no longer see the face of God.

John Behr, “The Christian Art of Dying” in Sobornost, 35:1-2, 2013. 137.

The last issue of Sobornost contains a compelling essay by Father John Behr on the importance of taking back the Christian art of dying. Our culture’s denial of death is something that has been widely commented on, and something that I have become more aware of in recent years. This is not only related to becoming Orthodox (or, perhaps more broadly, engaging more seriously with the Christian tradition), but it does have something to do with it. There is nothing like going to a family funeral when you really need to grieve and pray for the departed, and realising that something crucial is desperately missing. And, linked to this, I have also become aware of the contrast between how aging is viewed in the Christian tradition and how it is viewed by our contemporary western society – as well as the related and potentially huge question of cultural (and religious) shifts in how the body is viewed. So it was against this backdrop that I thought this essay well worth noting and sharing with others.

However, this article takes these generally acknowledged issues a step further, for in it Father Behr argues that the fact that contemporary western culture no longer lives with death and dying as an ever-present reality undermines our ability to see something that is at the heart of our Christian faith, for it is in death that Christ shows us what it is to be God. Indeed, “the way that he dies as a human being sums up the theological heart of the creeds and definitions of the early Councils.” (137)

Facing death is an unavoidable human reality, but it is an even more crucial task for Christians. And it is in fact, Father Behr argues, the coming of Christ that has made our facing of death so crucial. Prior to the coming of Christ, death was simply a natural reality, but with Christ’s victory over death, death itself has been revealed as “the last enemy.” (1 Cor. 15:26) For, in the light of Christ, we see that people die not simply from biological necessity, but as a result of having turned away from the Source of life. And this is not simply a once-off occurrence that happened with Adam, but is a constant temptation for us – the temptation to live our lives on our own terms and turned in on ourselves.

It is precisely in death that Christ has shown Himself to be God and in His conquering of death, He has, in the words of Saint Maximus the Confessor, “changed the use of death.”

Through his Passion, destroying death by death, Christ has enable us to use our death, the fact of our mortality, actively. Rather than being passive and frustrated victims of the givenness of our mortality, complaining that it is not fair, or doing all we can to secure ourselves, we now have a path open to us, through a voluntary death in baptism, to enter into the body and life of Christ. Whereas we were thrown into the mortal existence, without any choice on our part, we can now, freely, use our mortality, to be born into life, by dying with Christ in baptism, taking up our cross, and no longer living for ourselves, but for Christ and our neighbours. In doing this, our new existence is grounded in the free, self-sacrificial love that Christ has shown to be the life and very being of God himself, for as we have seen Christ has shown us what it means to be God in the way he dies as a human being. (141)

Christian life is about learning to die so that we may be born to new life – and it is our physical death that will reveal the extent to which we have done this, for it will reveal where our hearts truly lie.

One way or another, each and every one of us will die, we will become clay. The only real question is whether, through this life, we have learnt to become soft and pliable clay in the hands of God, breaking down our hearts of stone so that we may receive a heart of flesh, merciful and loving. Or whether, instead, we will have hardened ourselves, so that we are nothing but brittle and dried out clay that is good for nothing. (143)

Father Behr uses two examples of martyrdom – of Saint Ignatius of Antioch and Saint Blandina – to illustrate this understanding of death as revealing the deepest reality of being born into the new life of Christ. Such accounts have nourished the Church throughout the ages; they have changed our perception of “the use of death.” However, as the essay concludes:

If it is true, as I suggested earlier, that Christ shows us what it is to be God in the way that he dies as a human being, then, if we don’t see death (as I claimed that modern society doesn’t), then we will not see the face of God either. If we don’t know that life comes through death, then our horizons will become totally imminent, our life will be for ourselves, for our body, for our pleasure (even if we think we are being ‘religious’, growing in our ‘spiritual life’). And so, I would argue, we need to regain the martyric reality of what it means to bear Christian witness. Our task today is not just to proclaim our faith in an increasingly secular world; it is, rather, to take back death, by allowing death to be ‘seen’, by honouring those dying with the full liturgy of death, and by ourselves bearing witness to a life that comes through death, a life that can no longer be touched by death, a life that comes by taking up the cross. (147)

 

Acquire the Holy Spirit: An Orthodox understanding of Christian life: V

This seven(?)-part series of blog posts is based on a talk I gave earlier in the year to a group of Christians who wanted to know more about Orthodox spirituality. It is quite basic and possibly in need of further reworking, but I post it here in the hope that it may be of help to some. (Continued from here).

This lifelong process of repentance involves an active struggle or ascesis, in which we cooperate with God’s grace as we try to live according to His commandments. This is not simply a matter of outer observances, but rather of using the means that the Church gives to us to grow in purity of heart. For the commandments ultimately lead to a life according to the Beatitudes. (Matt 5:1-12) Metropolitan Hierotheos (Vlachos) of Nafpaktos writes:

“Blessed are the poor in spirit” is the Lord’s commandment that we should look for our spiritual poverty, that is, that we should experience our wretchedness. “Blessed are those who mourn” is the Lord’s commandment to weep over the passions which we have in us, over our desolation. “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness” is the Lord’s commandment to hunger and thirst after communion with God. “Blessed are the pure in heart” is Christ’s commandment to purify our hearts. When He says “blessed” it is as if He said: “Become poor, mournful, thirsting for righteousness”, and so forth.*

Rooted in the Scriptures and in the teaching of Christ, the Church has developed ascetic practices that help us to live according to the commandments of Christ and to bring our wills into conformity with His. These include vigils, study, prayer, self-control and hesychia. However, how we apply these will vary from person to person. We are all different and have different needs. Moreover, we are saved not as isolated individuals, but as members of the Church. Orthodox tradition therefore emphasises the importance of accountability and of seeking the guidance of a trusted spiritual father who can serve as a physician of souls, for on our own we are capable of great self-deception. It also emphasises – and the liturgical texts for the first week of Great Lent make this abundantly clear – that heroic acts of asceticism are of no use if they do not make us more loving towards our neighbours.

Asceticism is a difficult topic to address in some contemporary Christian circles and misconceptions abound. It may help to say what asceticism is not: it is not suffering for sufferings sake, as if that will somehow help us, or please God. It is not an attempt to win favours with God. It is not rooted in some dualistic hatred of the body. On the contrary, asceticism, which comes from the word for struggle, is rooted in the recognition of the importance of our bodies for our salvation. By curbing our appetites it enables us to break through the mental images we may have of ourselves and to face up to who we really are and to the things that matter to us. And it enables us to learn true freedom, for we may think that we are free but we do not realise the extent to which we are really controlled by our desires.

This recognition of the importance of the body is also found in the Orthodox approach to prayer. Prayer is not simply a mental activity, but one that involves all our senses. The traditional Christian posture for prayer is that of standing – the posture of the Resurrection –, although kneeling and prostrating have their appropriate times and places as well. This use of our bodies is expressed in other ways – gesture, icons, incense, music, colour, light and so on. These are not simply arbitrary or a form of decoration, but are conveyers of meaning although often at a very subtle level.

What we do in our bodies affects the whole of our lives. Many western converts to Orthodoxy find that we need to get over a certain threshold before we are able to do things like kissing icons and making prostrations. Yet in doing so a whole world opens up for us as we come to realise, not simply in theory but in reality, that Christianity is not simply about what we believe with our cerebral minds, but what we do. And through the “doing” we are gradually led to the place of the heart, the place where true transformation can occur.

To be continued…

* Metropolitan Hierotheos (Vlachos), Orthodox Psychotherapy, 48.

 

‘The instrument is the body, which serves as lute, harp and lyre’

It is possible to sing praises to the Lord without ceasing. ‘The soul is a consummate musician, an instrumentalist. The instrument is the body, which serves as lute, harp and lyre… Desiring to teach you that you should sing praise to Him and glorify Him always. God joined together instrument and player [that is, the body and the soul] in a permanent union.’ (1)

In the Orthodox Church, we do not use musical instruments in worship. Every believer is a musical instrument made by God, and at the same time a musician. If the musician (the soul) keeps the instrument (the body) pure and uses it properly, the two together raise to the Creator a hymn of praise that is pleasing to God. For the hymn that is sacred ‘is born of the soul’s piety, nourished by a good conscience, and accepted in heaven by God.’ (2)

(1) St John Chrysostom, Homily on Holy Week and on Psalm 145, 3, PG 55.522.
(2) St John Chrysostom, Homily on being ordained Priest, 1, PG 48.694.

Hieromonk Gregorios, The Divine Liturgy: A Commentary in the Light of the Fathers, (Cell of St John the Theologian, Koutloumousiou Monastery), 139-140.

I was given this book when I became Orthodox, but have only recently got to reading through it seriously, as part of my preparation for a (very basic) series that I am doing on the Liturgy in Evangelion. But I was struck by these words, which are largely quotations from Saint John Chrysostom. In recent months, I have come across some discussions on Christian worship which have left me wondering about the criteria that people use for determining what is and is not appropriate in worship, or even whether there can be any criteria for what constitutes Christian worship. For many Christians worship seems to have simply become about entertainment or about “what works for me.”

I am raising this not to criticise others or to condemn all use of musical instruments – although I am very pleased that the tradition of the Church is as it is! – but rather to point out that, in the tradition of the Church, worship is not something subjective but is, among other things, a pedagogical activity that leads us to God and therefore has a real and objective content. Moreover, while this content has a clear textual and intellectual content – “The Church choir is the school of theology” in the words of Archimandrite Cyprian Kern – it also has a less immediately identifiable but no less real spiritual content which does its work on us through the bodily acts of singing and hearing, together with a host of other physical and sensory “texts”.

Being more or less musically illiterate, I dare not say anything much about music! But it has become increasingly apparent to me that, in large part, the point of Christian worship is to lead us into silence. Prayer consists of quietening the mind and the heart so that they can be purified in order to see, encounter and receive God. And the sacred music of the Church (and possibly also of other traditions) has been developed over centuries and in an era when people had a far better understanding of the relationship between the body and soul that we would appear to have today.

 

 

In favour of the extirpation of pues

Implied in the Orthodox liturgical tradition, and axiomatic as well in the modern Liturgical Movement, is the basic principle that what we do and what we say in corporate worship directly influences our beliefs, our attitudes and our daily behavior. That influence is indeed one of liturgical worship’s intended effects. Liturgy teaches. Liturgy is designed to affect life. Bad liturgy therefore has bad effects…

A Call for Liturgical Renewal. The Liturgical Effectiveness of Pews

A couple of months ago I thought of posting something that asked: What is it about Protestants and pews? By strange coincidence, in a fairly short course of time as I had been investigating some South African Christian blogs, I had come across three rather negative references to pews from Protestant Christians. And what struck me was that although they all used pews as a symbol for something negative, none of them seemed to question the inevitability of pews. From an evangelical-cum-conservative perspective pews seemed to symbolise routine and lack of commitment (those attending church were seen as simply “pew warmers”) while from a more liberal-cum-engaged in the world perspective, pews seemed to symbolise a “churchiness” that was separated from the world. And yet nobody seemed to see what to me would have been the obvious solution: if pews are such a problem, then why not get rid of them?

I thought of responding to this at the time but, as so often happens, I didn’t get to it. But I also realised that contemporary Orthodox praxis often doesn’t present that much of an alternative to the Protestant and Catholic reliance on pews. Moreover, this touches on so many issues, including the role of the body in worship, and the impact of modernity on us, and much of my own reaction is a gut level one rather than one of carefully thought out theory. I know from my own experience that worshipping in a church without pews or chairs affects me at a level that is deeper than just theory but which is not so easy to explain. And I also know that being expected to sit during prayers that one should stand for hits at something deep in my being.

Anyway, this week someone posted a link to the above article on Facebook that expresses this better than I could and that is definitely worth reading. And someone else posted link to this fascinating paper given by the Anglican John Mason Neale in 1841 in which he argued

For what is the HISTORY OF PUES, but the history of the intrusion of human pride, and selfishness, and indolence, into the worship of GOD? a painful tale of our downward progress from the reformation to the revolution: the view of a constant struggle to make Canterbury approximate to Geneva, to assimilate the church to the conventicle. In all this contest, the introduction of pues, as trifling a thing as it may seem, has exercised no small influence for ill; and an equally powerful effect for good would follow their extirpation.

 

“Let the lifting up of my hands be before thee as an evening sacrifice”

In this fourth chapter of Earthen Vessels: The Practice of Personal Prayer According to the Patristic Tradition, Father Gabriel (Bunge) continues by pointing out that, while standing was the characteristic prayer posture for the Fathers, they didn’t just stand there, but, at the same time, lifted up their hands to heaven. This position was so typical that the orantes position is seen in countless examples of Christian iconography. However, this position was not limited to Christianity and so one needs to look at the particular meaning the Christians gave it.

Whereas the pagan – and also the apostate – throws himself down to worship before an idol and lifts up his hands to this “strange god” in vain, since this mute object fashioned by his own hands is less capable of helping than any other man would be, the believer lifts up his hands only “in the name of God”, who “created heaven and earth” and is able to do everything that he wills. He does this also “in the night” when he “cries aloud to God” in his distress. He not only “lifts up” his hands; he “stretches them out”, when his “soul, like a parched land,” thirsts for the living water of God. And because God has communicated himself to man completely in his word, in his commandments, the one who prays stretches his hands out figuratively – imploring, yearning – toward these manifestations of the divine will also, “which he loves”. (150-151)

This biblical gesture, which was taken over by Christ and the apostles, expresses an intimate and personal relationship between the creature and the Creator. It also gives prayer a direction.

For the one praying lifts up his hands “to heaven” as the symbolic “place” of God, or else to the temple as the place of his presence among his people in the course of salvation history. Christians go even one step further by turning, not only toward heaven, but also toward the “orient”, as we have seen. (151)

This symbolism involved and intimate connection between body and soul.

It is often said nowadays that one must also “pray with the body”, and therefore much importance is ascribed to the corresponding “techniques”. What the Fathers meant, though, was something different. The body does not stand, as it were, on its own beside the soul. Rather, the two make up a perfect unity. The whole man prays, body and soul, whereby the body, so to speak, provides the soul with a medium through which it can make visible its “special condition” – in this case its striving for God, which is invisible in and of itself. And this is no insignificant thing, as we shall see, because this “embodiment” keeps the inner disposition from evaporating into something insubstantial. (152)

 

“Rise and pray”

Father Gabriel (Bunge) begins this fourth chapter of  Earthen Vessels: The Practice of Personal Prayer According to the Patristic Tradition on “Prayer Gestures” by noting the common western complaint that Christianity is supposedly hostile to the body and gives too little attention to the role of the body in the spiritual life. Such a complaint is based partly on the assumption that Christian “methods” should be the same as those of non-Christian religions, and partly on ignorance. However, the wealth of bodily expressions in prayer have been gradually lost in the West since the beginning of the second millennium.

He then turns to the “original, unwritten tradition” of prayer gestures to probe “in what spirit the holy Fathers made use of them”.

Father Gabriel notes how contemporary people have become fundamentally sedentary creatures.

What a difference between that and the characteristic posture for prayer of men in biblical times, and also of the Fathers! Not sitting in comfort, but rather standing at the cost of some effort is the hallmark of the one who prays. He “stands in the house of the Lord, in the courts of the house of our God” and “in his holy place”, whether he is a self-righteous Pharisee or a remorseful tax collector who scarcely dares to stand at a distance. (141)

Thus Christ exhorts His disciples to “Rise and pray” (Lk 22:46) and the early Church continued this expectation that both public and private prayer were done standing. While Origen tells us one may also pray in other postures if one has a serious reason such as sickness or travel, such exceptions only prove the general rule.

The question arises as to why one should pray standing. For the Fathers, this was far from arbitrary. As Origen wrote:

Nor may anyone doubt that of the countless postures of the body, the posture with hands outstretched and eyes uplifted is to be preferred to all [the others], because one then carries in the body too, as it were, the image of that special condition which befits the soul during prayer. (145)

What is significant here is that there is a correspondence between the body and the soul during prayer.

Like sacramental actions, methods and gestures in prayer must also be meaningful that is to say, the body must reproduce visibly what is taking part in the soul. As it is understood in the Bible, standing to pray is the bodily expression of the profound reverence of the creature before the exalted majesty of its Creator, in whose presence even the angels stand. …

The outward posture, however, does not only give bodily expression to the interior attitude, it also has an immediate effect upon this disposition. Without the effort of standing – and of the other prayer gestures, which will be discussed later – our prayer will never attain the proper fervor, said Joseph Busnaya, but will remain “routine, cold and shallow”.

Thus there is a genuine reciprocity between one’s internal disposition and external posture. This is the “special property” of the soul, which in the body’s posture creates, so to speak, a suitable “icon” of itself, which therefore always precedes it, as Origen says in this connection. Once such a visible representation exists, though – once a suitable gesture has been formed and has become a “tradition” in the course of salvation history, then the individual cannot forgo it without harming his “interior condition”. By making it his own, on the other hand, and “practicing” it diligently, he forms and strengthens within himself that same interior disposition that once created the gesture… (145-146)