Such a great, evocative and poetic essay. As I read it the words that kept coming to me were "Thy will, not my will". And what does that mean? How do I do Thy will? As you ponder your forest platform and move your stones to their right.place what is it that moves you? Moving from the mind into the heart? You wrote "Something more than a common political cause binding us together is needed—something that transforms the depths of the human heart, aligning it with the Creator's great cosmic dance, in ways that the mind can never fully understand—while also ushering the cosmos itself closer and closer to our own hearts, in the reciprocal movement of love." Is this forest liturgy the cosmic love heart vessal of Thy will? Was there a great sense of surrender in the hearts of the archimandrites, bishops, monks in the gulags? And they were grateful for their enprisonment! Creating the forest liturgy to open the heart more and more to surrender? I thank you for this and for telling the story of Father Pavel. I looked him up and am amazed by the stories of him, and this lead to more and more stories of saints in the gulags. Are we on the throbbing edge of Thy will when we are banished like Nebuchadnezzar to crawl on our hands and knees through the dewy grasses and forced to surrender?
In-breath, out-breath...."God is love" -- it will take billions of years for us to awaken to this...or a half second, suddenly!
We were in our little forest chapel today, as it happened -- another liturgy, then a small agape meal, table fellowship as the bees hummed in the meadow...we were reflecting together on how, perhaps to "normal" people, what we spent our time doing today -- singing in the forest hymns like ""We, who mystically represent the Cherubim / And chant the thrice-holy hymn to the Life-giving Trinity / Let us set aside the cares of life / That we may receive the King of all / Who comes invisibly escorted by the Divine Hosts" (set to this georgian tune: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LK4v3mJ3GOU -- we did our best, anyway) -- "normal" people might look at that and think we were totally bonkers.
But to us, we felt we were finally and simply immersed in reality today -- everything felt normal, truly normal. not "spiritual" but very normal, very fully alive.
Because, maybe, yes -- Someone did create all this green! And us! And yes, maybe that Someone is love!!
My head has been banished down into the dirt and I can't lift it up! I just listened to Thou Art a Vineyard and collapsed into a heap of tears on this blessed land. Is the song from Georgia as it's key notes are the same as the Georgian Kriste Aghdga - Christ is Risen? I picture your liturgy and agape meal in the forest. I smile and smile. Yes, we are bonkers. Reading your words about the forest temple, the blue sky walls, the birdsong, singing the forest hymns I am made more aware of the wayward life I too am living. I live in the mountains of Bali on the farm of my dearest friend who is a virgin high priestess since the age of 9, in the Balinese religion which is a synthesis of Hindu, Holy water, ancestor reverence. And Jesus has moved into the forest temples, open air temples, the lava temples near the volcanoes, into the bamboo shrines on the land here. During ceremonies all the parishioners participate, singing, dancing, praying, no sitting listening to sermons, kids running around everywhere. They feel their gods and deified ancestors and I feel Jesus. I have lived kind of like a monk for at least the last 20 years. Jesus has always been deep in my cells but I am a newbie to Orthodoxy. And after feeling alone with it here in Bali I realize I am not at all alone. It is just taking a different shape. So instead of What is Missing I am loving immersion in this "normal, very alive reality" as you say, with its sacred rites, song, gamelan, everyday reverence and offerings. And God is Love! And I will learn your hymn and follow along from here. Thank you Graham. Wonderful to have your writings as a connection to a parallel reality. Big smile.
A biome tilted toward the delight of wild donkeys...That is an order I could apprentice into. Lovely longing here, Graham. Even your taste in holy fathers, threadbare and grubby yet starlit, can subvert my normal aversions. Peace and salut this looking-for.
I hear you, Graham. But consider that our reality has no intrinsic properties. Reality exists, but existence is not a property. Human beings - and all life, really, have evolved by imposing properties on reality that are relevant to their survival as individuals and as a species. We notice things like taste, smell, heat, length, colour, texture, etc, but these properties are generated by our brain and do not exist outside of it.
So reality exists, but what it is is a mystery. We are evolved to survive and not to see the truth. I find Don Hoffman's book 'The case against reality' really helpful in my attempts to understand some of this conditioning.
So for me agonising about the downfall of Babylon and the Capitalist Patriarchy is strictly a product of this mind-construct and has nothing to do with finding out the Truth about reality. For that we need to go inwards, not outside.
I wish I can find a way back to the wordless wonder at what is; the colour blue or a spring flower.
I sense that wild joy in your tales of the barefoot tree dwelling Fathers of Siberia and I wish you would write more about them? It seems to me that worship, poetry and joy are the clearest pointers towards God.
I'm totally with you, Anna, as long as when you say "we need to go inwards, not outside" that "going inwards" includes opening our eyes, opening our ears, our sense of smell, our taste, our touch, to the living world around us -- on which, yes, our minds tend to impose properties that don't exist, because we need to survive the world -- but which draw us out of our equally natural tendency to live inside nonreal worlds inside our heads. To go deep within is also extending outward to embrace the world -- and both going deep within, and embracing the world, can only happen way, way, way beyond thoughts (according to the spiritual fathers and mothers of the Christian East). I'm with you -- I'm on my way back to the "wordless wonder at what is; the colour blue or a spring flower." There are fleeting glimpses. There is definitely a way, even now -- many people have burst through to the other side, and they've shared how to get there. Saying the Jesus Prayer in harmony with the breath is a big part of it. But asking forgiveness of everyone and everything is, too. I don't know what to say; the more I talk, the more I don't want to talk. But there is definitely a way now -- even in spite of everything. I will keep going back -- and need to keep going back, for myself, for others -- to the barefoot tree-dwelling fathers, so hang in there, but "blessed are those who mourn" -- I feel the need to acknowledge the pain of collapsing Babylon, too -- not to explain it, but just to acknowledge it. So there are dark moments here, too. If you hate most of the next essay coming out, hang in there till the end...and then especially part 2 thereafter... :)
Thank you, Graham, I agree about the need to very much use our senses to explore the world 'way way way beyond thoughts'. We cannot find the truth by creating stories about Heaven or God in our heads ( if heaven is in the sky, then the birds would get there first - to paraphrase the Gospel of Thomas). I appreciate your reminder to use the breath to get in deep and I am comforted when you write that 'many people have burst through to the other side' . I guess the sadness and grief about the state of the world and the anger and darkness in my own heart has sidetracked me for many years and I now feel the need to burst through to the other side regardless. My mind's litany of endless sorrow is so very paralysing. I want to find the courage to just...leap into bliss.
May you know straight up Spirit through Jesus like a fine sipping tequila - for the Kingdom of God is rightwiseness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit” Roman 14:17 “rightwiseness” is an older English version of righteousness, you know you are “rightwise” with God.
I hear you, Anna! YES. For now, can I share this long quote from Archimandrite Vasileios about Abba Isaac the Syrian? (It made me think of you). Here it is: "He does not say anything that has not passed through him, and has not caused him pain, like the mother who, when her time comes, gives birth to the fruit she has received in her womb, in pain and in completion of a process....With him, you are at a total loss. And you find yourself in a different climate, another logic, another world, where all things are united in fellowship....[His thought] goes right through the prison of systems. It pushes aside the false disguise of ideologies and finds the complete human being where he actually is...The Elder Ieronymos of Aegina (†1966) recommends anyone who has no money to go out into the streets and beg in order to collect money for basic needs and get a copy of Abba Isaac...He knows you. He understands you. He leaves you free to move, to get to know your being and your endurance, the nature of things and their beauty...With him you settle and quiet down. Everything that he does, he does with complete assurance. He is loving and implacable. He puts balm on your wound. And he drives the lancet in deep, if need be...He is a violent iconoclastic whirlwind and a gentle breeze in which God is present....He has crossed great chasms. He has set foot in the new age. He has breathed the still air of the freedom of the Spirit. He has seen that there is a possibility for man to live, and he returns to give us good news, glad tidings of peacefulness..."
"Yeshua came bearing another world in his heart—deeply rooted in Eden, the world his Father made in the beginning—which he planted in our fallen world like a seed, by living and dying for us in our world, with eyes and arms open to all its brutality and ugliness. His “work” in our world was rest—Sabbath rest, childlike trust in the Father, to the point of death—and now this new world of his grows like flowers from the concrete of the old one (to borrow an image from Tupac Shakur's poetry) and will never stop growing, no matter how bad things get (cf. Lk 13:18-20)."
This is beautiful and excellent. For all the cogitating and philosophizing about the world and its manifold crises what gets lost is the deep poetry of things. Even for good Plato's profound dialectic--which inspires in me love--it is the likes of the Parable of Cave that hits the deepest. We forget that at our own peril. Actually, we obviously already have. We need to get the poetry right, or the rest is kind of moot.
For the record, if you were to be inclined to do a version of the Gospels and the Psalms, I would definitely purchase it. Just saying.
Yes! It takes a heart of a poet to see the Real/the Beauty beneath the banality and beyond the actual. Your style reminds me a lot of Rubem Alves. His little book „The Poet, the Warrior, the Prophet” ,which I read and reread for more than twenty years, is astonishing insightful (if you did not already read it, which you maybe should). Anyway, your approach convinced me once more about the fact that, in the words of the Romanian Hieromonk Rafail Noica (a spiritual son of blessed Sophrony of Essex) „Orthodoxy is the very nature of the Man.”
Concerning the example you mentioned, of Father Pavel Gruzdev, there are some stories from Romanian gulags with prisoners performing the Holy Liturgy on the chest of the most pure, or the most hard convicted of them. Only with a grape seed bring by a bird in the cell and some dry crumbs of bread. With a filthy t-shirt hiding on the inner side a little piece of relics or a used handkerchief as Holy Antimision and an empty box of medicines scrounged from the sick ward, for the Holy Cup...
Actually, I was wanting to include something about prisoners lying down and becoming altar tables, the Liturgy served on their chests, but couldn't find any English texts to quote -- not that I tried super hard, but still, I wish I could have found something; have any ideas of where to look? Thanks for your recommendation of Alves -- I haven't read him yet -- and sounds like I need to!
Thanks for your reply, Graham. I will be looking for some books of testimonies from prison which I know, to see if there is any english translation. In the meantime l am sending to you on email something which I already found. I hope you will like. The author is one of the most renown Romanian author who, after the prison time, in which he converted to Orthodoxy, became a monk. Anyway, if there is no resource avaiable în English about the topic you are interested in, I will try to translate for you some snippets from Romanian concentrantionary literature. God bless!
Thanks for your thorough reply, Graham, I appreciate it!
That's a radical and beatiful vision! Do you have a word for this process of God making this world divine?
As for me, I'm not formally a Christian but a Gaudiya Vaishnava (Hare Krishna in common parlance). Hope this doesn't offend you or otherwise freak you out. I feel a lot of affinity with Orthodox Christianity, as many of my fellow Vaishnavas do also, and find value in learning about Orthodoxy and exploring common ground (as well as points of divergence). I come with folded hands, bowing down before your great tradition with love and respect.
Awesome, brother, I love it! Saint Paul of Tarsus said, that the Eternal One "gives to everyone life and breath and all things...They were to search for him, and perhaps grope around for him and find him. Yet he is not far from each one of us, for ‘In him we live and move and have our being.’" (Acts 17) ... so, we are all brothers and sisters, no matter what -- and I make a deep bow and touch the Earth before anyone who thirsts for God also, and is searching for him as I am -- we are wandering through the desert together, and need each other...
Oh -- and there are a couple common words in Orthodoxy for the process of God making the world divine, one Latin, the other Greek: transfiguration and theosis. As for me, I'd rather come up with a new word, one not so abstract -- stay tuned...
Oh, you have no idea how happy this makes me! I also share your deep intuition that we somehow need each other...
So that's what theosis means... And 'transfiguration' I had also come across, but only in the context of Jesus manifesting His divine glory before the eyes of the apostles. Thank you, brother!
Isn't what you are sketching here still a mundane achievement? Didn't our beloved Yeshua come to dispel precisely this type of mundane vision of the Kingdom of God when He said "My Kingdom is not of this world"? In my understanding, this is not a vision of a better life on Earth, even as a gift from God and not a human creation, but an altogether transcendental experience of the imperishable soul ("He gave them eternal life... ") beyond this world of matter and death.
I was also surprised to find an evolutionary account of the appearance of man on Earth. Don't you believe man was created by God in his own image?
Hi, Nanda, the only place in the New Testament where the term ‘kingdom of God’ is explicitly defined is Romans 14:17 where it says “the kingdom of God is rightwiseness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit” rightwiseness is an older English version of righteousness, in the Kingdom of God you feel and know you are rightwise with God as pure gift. “fear not little flock for the Father is pleased to give you the Kingdom” words of Jesus from the gospel of Luke.
Yes, awesome, good, Nanda -- I'm glad you're challenging me! I don't know where you stand in the spectrum of Christian belief, but in the Orthodox tradition, we believe the Earth is being transfigured and rescued, not annihilated and replaced. To say it another way -- and borrowing the French protestant anarchist theologian Jacques Ellul's phrasing -- religion is man's ascent to God, revelation is God's descent to man -- and we, over in the Christian East embrace that totally -- our only hope is God's descent to us. For us, the incarnation is everything; for us, everything -- all the matter here, the green trees, the white clouds, and so on -- is holy, and is being made holy, by the embodiment of God in matter -- THIS matter, OUR matter. With our guy Zach, who referred us to Saint John of Damascus, we salute all matter, in honor of the incarnation. Yeshua's kingdom is not OF this world -- it doesn't originate from the world system, doesn't follow naturally from the progression of history -- but definitely is IN this world -- like a seed. The Eternal, the Transcendent has reached out to us, taken firm grasp of our hands, the ephemeral earthborn...that's the surprisingly very very good Good News. As for evolution -- yeah, God sculpted us by hand in his own image, according to Genesis. Totally -- from the Earth, from the clay, the dust. He didn't respawn us video-game style on Earth from some totally different kind of matter that has nothing to do with the rest of animal and plant life that he created also...
Excellent as expected. I especially appreciated this passage:
"God's radical kingdom cannot be constructed following a blueprint; it cannot be assembled by semi-autonomous swarms of nanobots, no matter how intelligent. It cannot be mapped out as a political program; it cannot be encapsulated by lists of priorities and values; it cannot be consciously organized in any way. All that is human, all-too-human history in the usual sense—little more than building ziggurats, only to watch them vanish under the sands of time. No: As a living organism, it is and always will be beyond the human mind and its dreams of technological control."
The only thing I might have added would've been something along the lines of God's Kingdom also not being achieved *merely* through finding the "right kind" of ritual or spiritual action.
What I don't mean to do is denigrate all ritual/liturgy, because God clearly commanded to be worshipped in certain ways. Rather, this is a call-back to the actions of the ancient pagans, where to be successful in ritual magic or in appeasing their capricious gods through sacrifice and hospitality did not entail having the right interior disposition, but rather in merely getting the steps of the ritual correct: a proper execution of the spiritual algorithm. It was blatant spiritual technology, meant to get the spiritual forces/beings to give them what they wanted. Again, it was about, in this case communal, self-desire and how to achieve it; it was not about being properly ordered toward Love.
I mention this because there is a significant subset of people, properly disillusioned by our attempts at control -- be it from political policy or through or through technological applications of our Baconian science -- that stem from our reductionistic, mechanistic, disenchanted materialism, which they are also disillusioned with, that deliberately embrace ritual magic explicitly as a form of spiritual technology in their attempts to re-enchant their world. I also say it, because it shows that all that is unique to modernity is simply a different or more intense manifestation of this deeper human tendency that directly resulted in our Fall. (And you have talked about this last part, though focusing more on how people were used in ancient times.)
Hi, Zach, The kingdom of God is defined as “rightwiseness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit” Romans 14:17, the only place where it is explicitly defined, “rightwiseness” is an older English version of righteousness, in the Kingdom you feel and know you are “rightwise” with God as pure gift - “fear not little flock for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom” Luke 12:32, yes , the Kingdom is not of this world and may be Lund among us and in us.
Yeah, brilliant, Zach. Yeah, I see the strange story of Jacob's "dream-ziggurat" as not only a subversion of the spiritual aspirations driving ancient monumental civilization, but also a subversion of what you called "spiritual technology" itself. Jacob did not do some correct ritual before lying down to sleep; he did not perform a liturgy with the right words; he did not construct an altar in the correct fashion; etc. He simply trusted in the Eternal One as a person, the way his personal ancestors -- Isaac, Abraham, and way, way back, Noah -- had trusted. There is a strong undercurrent in the bible which is "anti-religious" in this sense -- even critical of Hebrew religion. I kind of get at this a little bit more in the first chapter of my Sunlilies, which is called The Sabbath of the Heart -- what I called in that chapter the "Orthodoxy of the birds and the flowers." Yeshua praises the lilies of the field for keeping Sabbath better than the Pharisees did, because they "understood" (in the silence of non-minds) that Sabbath is just about trust, not about ritual or rules...though, yes, ritual and rules can be the gateway by which we approach the Eternal, to begin to relate to him personally...
Ritual and rules matter. There is much wisdom in the saying, "The medium is the message." Though, I do believe it to be incomplete. It's really a synergistic feedback loop: what we believe shapes what we do, and what we do shapes what we believe. God knows this about us and so commanded right ritual.
But at the end of the day, it comes down to the right interior disposition, that of Love and trust.
This is beautiful, Graham, and I’m looking forward to reading where the “way of the forest” takes you.
I’m on a not so dissimilar path, on some acres in rural Montana, groping along, making the turn, something like a secular hesychasm or asceticism the intention if not yet the reality. I’m not one that thinks the horrifying persecutions that the believers in Soviet Russia and Eastern Europe suffered before disappearing into the catacombs and forests is coming to America. Not in a materially corresponding way. That said, I do recognize that capitalism such as it is practiced here, is as much a cult as bolshevism was, a fraud religion, a hoax salvation, and it is bearing down with wicked resolve now. The spiritual intention of each system however seems to me indistinguishable, the destruction of our reaching towards eternity with every portion and in every moment of our lives here in this world, making of it a part time pursuit (at best) rather than the breath of life. Thus, it is best to vanish as much as possible and set up camp somewhere away from capitalism’s centers, in the forests, the caves, the wildernesses (or what’s left of them, they are largely symbolic after the mad rush of the machine over the last hundred or so years). And there fashion our faith and our reaching towards eternity as intimately and profoundly as we can and as the grace of God allows.
"I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desart. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."
—Shelley, "Ozymandias"
Exactly.
Such a great, evocative and poetic essay. As I read it the words that kept coming to me were "Thy will, not my will". And what does that mean? How do I do Thy will? As you ponder your forest platform and move your stones to their right.place what is it that moves you? Moving from the mind into the heart? You wrote "Something more than a common political cause binding us together is needed—something that transforms the depths of the human heart, aligning it with the Creator's great cosmic dance, in ways that the mind can never fully understand—while also ushering the cosmos itself closer and closer to our own hearts, in the reciprocal movement of love." Is this forest liturgy the cosmic love heart vessal of Thy will? Was there a great sense of surrender in the hearts of the archimandrites, bishops, monks in the gulags? And they were grateful for their enprisonment! Creating the forest liturgy to open the heart more and more to surrender? I thank you for this and for telling the story of Father Pavel. I looked him up and am amazed by the stories of him, and this lead to more and more stories of saints in the gulags. Are we on the throbbing edge of Thy will when we are banished like Nebuchadnezzar to crawl on our hands and knees through the dewy grasses and forced to surrender?
Wow, Wendyl -- wow, wow, wow.
The answer to all these questions is YES.
And WOW!
In-breath, out-breath...."God is love" -- it will take billions of years for us to awaken to this...or a half second, suddenly!
We were in our little forest chapel today, as it happened -- another liturgy, then a small agape meal, table fellowship as the bees hummed in the meadow...we were reflecting together on how, perhaps to "normal" people, what we spent our time doing today -- singing in the forest hymns like ""We, who mystically represent the Cherubim / And chant the thrice-holy hymn to the Life-giving Trinity / Let us set aside the cares of life / That we may receive the King of all / Who comes invisibly escorted by the Divine Hosts" (set to this georgian tune: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LK4v3mJ3GOU -- we did our best, anyway) -- "normal" people might look at that and think we were totally bonkers.
But to us, we felt we were finally and simply immersed in reality today -- everything felt normal, truly normal. not "spiritual" but very normal, very fully alive.
Because, maybe, yes -- Someone did create all this green! And us! And yes, maybe that Someone is love!!
My head has been banished down into the dirt and I can't lift it up! I just listened to Thou Art a Vineyard and collapsed into a heap of tears on this blessed land. Is the song from Georgia as it's key notes are the same as the Georgian Kriste Aghdga - Christ is Risen? I picture your liturgy and agape meal in the forest. I smile and smile. Yes, we are bonkers. Reading your words about the forest temple, the blue sky walls, the birdsong, singing the forest hymns I am made more aware of the wayward life I too am living. I live in the mountains of Bali on the farm of my dearest friend who is a virgin high priestess since the age of 9, in the Balinese religion which is a synthesis of Hindu, Holy water, ancestor reverence. And Jesus has moved into the forest temples, open air temples, the lava temples near the volcanoes, into the bamboo shrines on the land here. During ceremonies all the parishioners participate, singing, dancing, praying, no sitting listening to sermons, kids running around everywhere. They feel their gods and deified ancestors and I feel Jesus. I have lived kind of like a monk for at least the last 20 years. Jesus has always been deep in my cells but I am a newbie to Orthodoxy. And after feeling alone with it here in Bali I realize I am not at all alone. It is just taking a different shape. So instead of What is Missing I am loving immersion in this "normal, very alive reality" as you say, with its sacred rites, song, gamelan, everyday reverence and offerings. And God is Love! And I will learn your hymn and follow along from here. Thank you Graham. Wonderful to have your writings as a connection to a parallel reality. Big smile.
A biome tilted toward the delight of wild donkeys...That is an order I could apprentice into. Lovely longing here, Graham. Even your taste in holy fathers, threadbare and grubby yet starlit, can subvert my normal aversions. Peace and salut this looking-for.
I hear you, Graham. But consider that our reality has no intrinsic properties. Reality exists, but existence is not a property. Human beings - and all life, really, have evolved by imposing properties on reality that are relevant to their survival as individuals and as a species. We notice things like taste, smell, heat, length, colour, texture, etc, but these properties are generated by our brain and do not exist outside of it.
So reality exists, but what it is is a mystery. We are evolved to survive and not to see the truth. I find Don Hoffman's book 'The case against reality' really helpful in my attempts to understand some of this conditioning.
So for me agonising about the downfall of Babylon and the Capitalist Patriarchy is strictly a product of this mind-construct and has nothing to do with finding out the Truth about reality. For that we need to go inwards, not outside.
I wish I can find a way back to the wordless wonder at what is; the colour blue or a spring flower.
I sense that wild joy in your tales of the barefoot tree dwelling Fathers of Siberia and I wish you would write more about them? It seems to me that worship, poetry and joy are the clearest pointers towards God.
I'm totally with you, Anna, as long as when you say "we need to go inwards, not outside" that "going inwards" includes opening our eyes, opening our ears, our sense of smell, our taste, our touch, to the living world around us -- on which, yes, our minds tend to impose properties that don't exist, because we need to survive the world -- but which draw us out of our equally natural tendency to live inside nonreal worlds inside our heads. To go deep within is also extending outward to embrace the world -- and both going deep within, and embracing the world, can only happen way, way, way beyond thoughts (according to the spiritual fathers and mothers of the Christian East). I'm with you -- I'm on my way back to the "wordless wonder at what is; the colour blue or a spring flower." There are fleeting glimpses. There is definitely a way, even now -- many people have burst through to the other side, and they've shared how to get there. Saying the Jesus Prayer in harmony with the breath is a big part of it. But asking forgiveness of everyone and everything is, too. I don't know what to say; the more I talk, the more I don't want to talk. But there is definitely a way now -- even in spite of everything. I will keep going back -- and need to keep going back, for myself, for others -- to the barefoot tree-dwelling fathers, so hang in there, but "blessed are those who mourn" -- I feel the need to acknowledge the pain of collapsing Babylon, too -- not to explain it, but just to acknowledge it. So there are dark moments here, too. If you hate most of the next essay coming out, hang in there till the end...and then especially part 2 thereafter... :)
Thank you, Graham, I agree about the need to very much use our senses to explore the world 'way way way beyond thoughts'. We cannot find the truth by creating stories about Heaven or God in our heads ( if heaven is in the sky, then the birds would get there first - to paraphrase the Gospel of Thomas). I appreciate your reminder to use the breath to get in deep and I am comforted when you write that 'many people have burst through to the other side' . I guess the sadness and grief about the state of the world and the anger and darkness in my own heart has sidetracked me for many years and I now feel the need to burst through to the other side regardless. My mind's litany of endless sorrow is so very paralysing. I want to find the courage to just...leap into bliss.
May you know straight up Spirit through Jesus like a fine sipping tequila - for the Kingdom of God is rightwiseness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit” Roman 14:17 “rightwiseness” is an older English version of righteousness, you know you are “rightwise” with God.
I hear you, Anna! YES. For now, can I share this long quote from Archimandrite Vasileios about Abba Isaac the Syrian? (It made me think of you). Here it is: "He does not say anything that has not passed through him, and has not caused him pain, like the mother who, when her time comes, gives birth to the fruit she has received in her womb, in pain and in completion of a process....With him, you are at a total loss. And you find yourself in a different climate, another logic, another world, where all things are united in fellowship....[His thought] goes right through the prison of systems. It pushes aside the false disguise of ideologies and finds the complete human being where he actually is...The Elder Ieronymos of Aegina (†1966) recommends anyone who has no money to go out into the streets and beg in order to collect money for basic needs and get a copy of Abba Isaac...He knows you. He understands you. He leaves you free to move, to get to know your being and your endurance, the nature of things and their beauty...With him you settle and quiet down. Everything that he does, he does with complete assurance. He is loving and implacable. He puts balm on your wound. And he drives the lancet in deep, if need be...He is a violent iconoclastic whirlwind and a gentle breeze in which God is present....He has crossed great chasms. He has set foot in the new age. He has breathed the still air of the freedom of the Spirit. He has seen that there is a possibility for man to live, and he returns to give us good news, glad tidings of peacefulness..."
"Yeshua came bearing another world in his heart—deeply rooted in Eden, the world his Father made in the beginning—which he planted in our fallen world like a seed, by living and dying for us in our world, with eyes and arms open to all its brutality and ugliness. His “work” in our world was rest—Sabbath rest, childlike trust in the Father, to the point of death—and now this new world of his grows like flowers from the concrete of the old one (to borrow an image from Tupac Shakur's poetry) and will never stop growing, no matter how bad things get (cf. Lk 13:18-20)."
Amen.
Graham-
This is beautiful and excellent. For all the cogitating and philosophizing about the world and its manifold crises what gets lost is the deep poetry of things. Even for good Plato's profound dialectic--which inspires in me love--it is the likes of the Parable of Cave that hits the deepest. We forget that at our own peril. Actually, we obviously already have. We need to get the poetry right, or the rest is kind of moot.
For the record, if you were to be inclined to do a version of the Gospels and the Psalms, I would definitely purchase it. Just saying.
Anyway, I hope this finds you well. -Jack
It has been much too long since I laid on the ground to sleep. Oh Lord restore my trust in Your Goodness, Amen!
Yes! It takes a heart of a poet to see the Real/the Beauty beneath the banality and beyond the actual. Your style reminds me a lot of Rubem Alves. His little book „The Poet, the Warrior, the Prophet” ,which I read and reread for more than twenty years, is astonishing insightful (if you did not already read it, which you maybe should). Anyway, your approach convinced me once more about the fact that, in the words of the Romanian Hieromonk Rafail Noica (a spiritual son of blessed Sophrony of Essex) „Orthodoxy is the very nature of the Man.”
Concerning the example you mentioned, of Father Pavel Gruzdev, there are some stories from Romanian gulags with prisoners performing the Holy Liturgy on the chest of the most pure, or the most hard convicted of them. Only with a grape seed bring by a bird in the cell and some dry crumbs of bread. With a filthy t-shirt hiding on the inner side a little piece of relics or a used handkerchief as Holy Antimision and an empty box of medicines scrounged from the sick ward, for the Holy Cup...
Have a blessed Sunday!
Beautiful, brother.
Actually, I was wanting to include something about prisoners lying down and becoming altar tables, the Liturgy served on their chests, but couldn't find any English texts to quote -- not that I tried super hard, but still, I wish I could have found something; have any ideas of where to look? Thanks for your recommendation of Alves -- I haven't read him yet -- and sounds like I need to!
Sorry, but I forgot to to ask for an email adress to send the pdf. Waiting for answer. Keep in touch.
Will email you! And THANK YOU!
Thanks for your reply, Graham. I will be looking for some books of testimonies from prison which I know, to see if there is any english translation. In the meantime l am sending to you on email something which I already found. I hope you will like. The author is one of the most renown Romanian author who, after the prison time, in which he converted to Orthodoxy, became a monk. Anyway, if there is no resource avaiable în English about the topic you are interested in, I will try to translate for you some snippets from Romanian concentrantionary literature. God bless!
Thanks for your thorough reply, Graham, I appreciate it!
That's a radical and beatiful vision! Do you have a word for this process of God making this world divine?
As for me, I'm not formally a Christian but a Gaudiya Vaishnava (Hare Krishna in common parlance). Hope this doesn't offend you or otherwise freak you out. I feel a lot of affinity with Orthodox Christianity, as many of my fellow Vaishnavas do also, and find value in learning about Orthodoxy and exploring common ground (as well as points of divergence). I come with folded hands, bowing down before your great tradition with love and respect.
Greetings from mother India!
Awesome, brother, I love it! Saint Paul of Tarsus said, that the Eternal One "gives to everyone life and breath and all things...They were to search for him, and perhaps grope around for him and find him. Yet he is not far from each one of us, for ‘In him we live and move and have our being.’" (Acts 17) ... so, we are all brothers and sisters, no matter what -- and I make a deep bow and touch the Earth before anyone who thirsts for God also, and is searching for him as I am -- we are wandering through the desert together, and need each other...
Oh -- and there are a couple common words in Orthodoxy for the process of God making the world divine, one Latin, the other Greek: transfiguration and theosis. As for me, I'd rather come up with a new word, one not so abstract -- stay tuned...
Oh, you have no idea how happy this makes me! I also share your deep intuition that we somehow need each other...
So that's what theosis means... And 'transfiguration' I had also come across, but only in the context of Jesus manifesting His divine glory before the eyes of the apostles. Thank you, brother!
Isn't what you are sketching here still a mundane achievement? Didn't our beloved Yeshua come to dispel precisely this type of mundane vision of the Kingdom of God when He said "My Kingdom is not of this world"? In my understanding, this is not a vision of a better life on Earth, even as a gift from God and not a human creation, but an altogether transcendental experience of the imperishable soul ("He gave them eternal life... ") beyond this world of matter and death.
I was also surprised to find an evolutionary account of the appearance of man on Earth. Don't you believe man was created by God in his own image?
Hi, Nanda, the only place in the New Testament where the term ‘kingdom of God’ is explicitly defined is Romans 14:17 where it says “the kingdom of God is rightwiseness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit” rightwiseness is an older English version of righteousness, in the Kingdom of God you feel and know you are rightwise with God as pure gift. “fear not little flock for the Father is pleased to give you the Kingdom” words of Jesus from the gospel of Luke.
Yes, awesome, good, Nanda -- I'm glad you're challenging me! I don't know where you stand in the spectrum of Christian belief, but in the Orthodox tradition, we believe the Earth is being transfigured and rescued, not annihilated and replaced. To say it another way -- and borrowing the French protestant anarchist theologian Jacques Ellul's phrasing -- religion is man's ascent to God, revelation is God's descent to man -- and we, over in the Christian East embrace that totally -- our only hope is God's descent to us. For us, the incarnation is everything; for us, everything -- all the matter here, the green trees, the white clouds, and so on -- is holy, and is being made holy, by the embodiment of God in matter -- THIS matter, OUR matter. With our guy Zach, who referred us to Saint John of Damascus, we salute all matter, in honor of the incarnation. Yeshua's kingdom is not OF this world -- it doesn't originate from the world system, doesn't follow naturally from the progression of history -- but definitely is IN this world -- like a seed. The Eternal, the Transcendent has reached out to us, taken firm grasp of our hands, the ephemeral earthborn...that's the surprisingly very very good Good News. As for evolution -- yeah, God sculpted us by hand in his own image, according to Genesis. Totally -- from the Earth, from the clay, the dust. He didn't respawn us video-game style on Earth from some totally different kind of matter that has nothing to do with the rest of animal and plant life that he created also...
Excellent as expected. I especially appreciated this passage:
"God's radical kingdom cannot be constructed following a blueprint; it cannot be assembled by semi-autonomous swarms of nanobots, no matter how intelligent. It cannot be mapped out as a political program; it cannot be encapsulated by lists of priorities and values; it cannot be consciously organized in any way. All that is human, all-too-human history in the usual sense—little more than building ziggurats, only to watch them vanish under the sands of time. No: As a living organism, it is and always will be beyond the human mind and its dreams of technological control."
The only thing I might have added would've been something along the lines of God's Kingdom also not being achieved *merely* through finding the "right kind" of ritual or spiritual action.
What I don't mean to do is denigrate all ritual/liturgy, because God clearly commanded to be worshipped in certain ways. Rather, this is a call-back to the actions of the ancient pagans, where to be successful in ritual magic or in appeasing their capricious gods through sacrifice and hospitality did not entail having the right interior disposition, but rather in merely getting the steps of the ritual correct: a proper execution of the spiritual algorithm. It was blatant spiritual technology, meant to get the spiritual forces/beings to give them what they wanted. Again, it was about, in this case communal, self-desire and how to achieve it; it was not about being properly ordered toward Love.
I mention this because there is a significant subset of people, properly disillusioned by our attempts at control -- be it from political policy or through or through technological applications of our Baconian science -- that stem from our reductionistic, mechanistic, disenchanted materialism, which they are also disillusioned with, that deliberately embrace ritual magic explicitly as a form of spiritual technology in their attempts to re-enchant their world. I also say it, because it shows that all that is unique to modernity is simply a different or more intense manifestation of this deeper human tendency that directly resulted in our Fall. (And you have talked about this last part, though focusing more on how people were used in ancient times.)
Hi, Zach, The kingdom of God is defined as “rightwiseness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit” Romans 14:17, the only place where it is explicitly defined, “rightwiseness” is an older English version of righteousness, in the Kingdom you feel and know you are “rightwise” with God as pure gift - “fear not little flock for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom” Luke 12:32, yes , the Kingdom is not of this world and may be Lund among us and in us.
Yeah, brilliant, Zach. Yeah, I see the strange story of Jacob's "dream-ziggurat" as not only a subversion of the spiritual aspirations driving ancient monumental civilization, but also a subversion of what you called "spiritual technology" itself. Jacob did not do some correct ritual before lying down to sleep; he did not perform a liturgy with the right words; he did not construct an altar in the correct fashion; etc. He simply trusted in the Eternal One as a person, the way his personal ancestors -- Isaac, Abraham, and way, way back, Noah -- had trusted. There is a strong undercurrent in the bible which is "anti-religious" in this sense -- even critical of Hebrew religion. I kind of get at this a little bit more in the first chapter of my Sunlilies, which is called The Sabbath of the Heart -- what I called in that chapter the "Orthodoxy of the birds and the flowers." Yeshua praises the lilies of the field for keeping Sabbath better than the Pharisees did, because they "understood" (in the silence of non-minds) that Sabbath is just about trust, not about ritual or rules...though, yes, ritual and rules can be the gateway by which we approach the Eternal, to begin to relate to him personally...
I agree.
Ritual and rules matter. There is much wisdom in the saying, "The medium is the message." Though, I do believe it to be incomplete. It's really a synergistic feedback loop: what we believe shapes what we do, and what we do shapes what we believe. God knows this about us and so commanded right ritual.
But at the end of the day, it comes down to the right interior disposition, that of Love and trust.
Thank you Graham. Your essay makes me recall words from French writer, Gaston Bachelard:
"The world seeks to be admired by you.” Your essay serves the world well.
Thanks so much -- that means a lot coming from you!
This is beautiful, Graham, and I’m looking forward to reading where the “way of the forest” takes you.
I’m on a not so dissimilar path, on some acres in rural Montana, groping along, making the turn, something like a secular hesychasm or asceticism the intention if not yet the reality. I’m not one that thinks the horrifying persecutions that the believers in Soviet Russia and Eastern Europe suffered before disappearing into the catacombs and forests is coming to America. Not in a materially corresponding way. That said, I do recognize that capitalism such as it is practiced here, is as much a cult as bolshevism was, a fraud religion, a hoax salvation, and it is bearing down with wicked resolve now. The spiritual intention of each system however seems to me indistinguishable, the destruction of our reaching towards eternity with every portion and in every moment of our lives here in this world, making of it a part time pursuit (at best) rather than the breath of life. Thus, it is best to vanish as much as possible and set up camp somewhere away from capitalism’s centers, in the forests, the caves, the wildernesses (or what’s left of them, they are largely symbolic after the mad rush of the machine over the last hundred or so years). And there fashion our faith and our reaching towards eternity as intimately and profoundly as we can and as the grace of God allows.
So well said, Tim. God bless your struggles, brother! Let's help each other along this difficult path...