When what we know must fade away

God has impressed on me a few things very recently - He is the master of my ship. This body, mind and will which we have are a gift from Him.

I used to studiously read spiritual books under the apprehension that it was wise to be spiritually informed so one would know what to do when the time came. I quickly realised that for all I knew, the devil was a smarter adversary than I could have imagined. For every book we may read on spiritual warfare the devil had a hundred more tricks left up his sleeve.

With this realisation of futility came a striking simple answer from the Gospel, God resists the wise and gives grace to the humble. Our spiritual life is enriched by knowledge but it is not dependant on it.

St Isaac the Syrian wrote a man needs knowledge as guide until he acquires faith but once he has achieved faith knowledge will no longer be required. Most of the quotes from St Isaac are striking and this is no different.

I wondered what this could mean...

St Philoxenus wrote in a way that made me think faith is like a sensory perception in the soul where we can sense God's presence. What is so special about faith, and how does it put an end to the need to acquire knowledge, to progress in ones journey towards God?

Abraham, the father of faith and believers, is a prime example of what faith can do when he was asked by God to sacrifice his only son. Many of us after waiting until such an old age before having our first child would be thinking "How can God be asking this of me"? Abraham somehow knew God never intended harm for his son and he said to companions before climbing the mountain "we will go and worship and we will return to you". Abraham secretly knew something that few of us know and only God can share it with us.

St Philoxenus writes in his first treatise on faith that the law of faith is so strong that even God obeys it.

With this in mind, my eyes open, the Holy Spirit impressed on me was that HE is necessary for my spiritual growth. The knowledge and direction I need will come from Him not me. In modern western life we put so much emphasis on having opinions and making decisions for ourselves from personal freedoms but the spiritual life is not like this. The selfish inner man must die if we are to allow the newness of Christ to be allowed within us. If the Holy Spirit is not my ultimate spiritual director - I will not be able to achieve growth in Christ.

God has a plan for all of us. We must ask like St Anthony "Lord, what must I do to be saved" each and day and be diligent obeying the response that comes.

Glory be to Him who lives forever and ever Amen!

A city built without human hands

In scripture it says that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, male nor female and that we also ought to consider ourselves sojourners on the earth who are awaiting a lasting city which is not built by human hands after Abraham who his whole life was promised a nation by God but lived as nomad who died believing that God would fulfill the promise.

The promises of God focus very heavily on the renunciation of our former identity in baptism where we exchange earthly citizenship for heavenly citizenship, this is the practical result of the mystery of baptism.  We are now sons to God by adoption and children of the kingdom of God.  To the Apostles these pronouncements weren't just some analogy or reminder, like they example of Abraham they genuinely believed themselves to be citizens of no earthly city but rather future citizens of the lasting heavenly city sealed by the spirit of promise.  The renunciations of male and female, slave and free, jew and gentile were things that they really lived out in hope.  St Paul at one point criticised St Peter because he believed that he was unfaithful in living these ideals when in the presence of Jewish and Gentile believers.

The Coptic Church is our identity from the perspective of the cultural clash which is lived out in our mother nation where there is a struggle for identity and expression in an unbelieving nation. The identity is a glowing lamp amidst great darkness and oppression but it shouldn't be considered to be the ultimate identity which we present before God at the judgement - that identity must be none other than Christ Himself who died for us before a single Egyptian martyr had shed blood.   I think that the most important reason we preserve Coptic identity is because it is a kind of rebellion against this non-Christian influence and any attempt to alter or deminish our true worship and traditions.  The specific cultural form of worship which we offer is Coptic as much as we're Egyptian and heirs of this rich spiritual legacy but its power and importance is ultimately because it is Orthodox, Apostolic, Scriptural and Christ's.

The Church also shouldn't be thought of as just some earthly entity; the church is now the unity of heaven and earth through the incarnated person of Jesus Christ in the Holy Spirit.  When Christ was incarnated this was not just a new form of outward expression on God's part in the sense that He could now walk and talk; He practically and in a real way joined heaven and earth together in His most heavenly Body.  This is why in some rites they say of the Virgin Mary; the heavens of heavens cannot contain the One who was contained in your womb.  So we ought to think of the church as not just a human or an earthly entity; it contains all creation, both heaven and earth in the One who has united us.

Culture and the liturgy

I remember that I was watching a televangelist speaking about Australia and asking the question - 'why did God arrange for the migration into Australia to occur?'  He ended up painting an image of his dream of seeing the MCG which is a famous Australian stadium full of people from different nations coming together to worship God.

I remember very fondly a time when a protestant friend invited me to his church - when I say church I mean a hall somewhere - but I was greatly attracted to the cultural diversity of the congregation.

Sometime later some friends and I decided to take the blessing of the diverse Oriental Orthodox brothers we have in Melbourne. I visited an Armenian Orthodox Church and I left feeling that there was a disconnection between myself and them which I never experienced in the protestant congregation.  The people in the Armenian Orthodox Church there were really old and no one seemed to make an effort to communicate with or acknowledge me.  I recalled that the number of young people in the congregation could be numbered on single hand.

I consider this a valid point of meditation because there is a challenge about how we assimilate people into Orthodox churches and exactly what this assimilation is and means.

I say assimilation because Orthodox Churches sometimes have a poor awareness of the challenges that their ritualistic, cultural and social structure has on their ultimate objective - to deliver the good news of Jesus Christ to the environment that they are established in something the early church community fervent followed – many of them to martyrdom.

This Church which evangelised the whole world needed to expand on the prevailing attitudes and expectations of it Judaic congregation base.  There are the famous accounts in Acts of both the Jerusalem council to resolve the matter of circumcision and the vision given to blessed Peter about Cornelius, a Roman centurion that God wished the good news to be spread to.  These revelations lead the Apostles to preach to gentiles of people of non-Judaic background and in doing so they made concession about how the Law of Moses was to be followed and with it the setting up of the Apostolic Sees in Alexandria, Antioch and Rome.

It seems that there are common recurring stories about how people have to at times brave adversity to fit into the Orthodox Church.  I recall the story about Bishop Kallistos's challenging conversion to the Eastern Orthodox Church and obstacles presented by the cultural and communal divide which took God given perseverance to overcome.

I believe that the main thing that makes the journey to the Orthodox Church challenging is that the devil work harder to keep people away from the Orthodox Church than anywhere else. 

In C.S. Lewis's screw tape letters he puts together for us a catalogue of letters from a junior devil in training to his superior demon instructing him in how to hinder Christians from finding the truth and applying themselves to it.  The letters very humorously detail of the devils tricks including making church seem very boring, making the parishioners seem like very boring and unfriendly or judgemental people.

I think that these sins and the lessons of the screw tape letters take on new significance when viewed through the eyes of the cultural context in the Orthodox Church where the devil amplifies cultural barriers to hinder people from approaching and partaking in the truth.

The devil would love to have us squabbling over the quantity of Coptic used in the mass, the overly Egyptian nature of some of the church hymns, chiding newcomers for not learning bohairic and a million and one distractions from the true objective of the Gospel; living and growing the Kingdom of God and celebrating it in the liturgy.

The most important vehicle in the Church for expressing and acting out citizenship in heaven, the liturgy is an eternal, encompassing experience climaxing in the Eucharist; we must be certain of what we've been called together to celebrate and partake in and the power that we’re sharing with the world.  We transform this heavenly expression into a cultural or ethnic form we dim its great power to those who are uninformed and cannot grasp elements which we have turned into cultural and historical expression.

The liturgy is a living, breathing, testament to both the apostolic and universal tradition passed down to us and the product of the collective experience of the knowledge of God as realised in the lives of the saints and fathers who compiled it and handed it down to us.

God has used miraculous callings to help converts see through the deep spiritual, cultural and historical mystique of the liturgy to feel His Presence in it, the question I have to wonder is mind is if this experience that new believers have is some kind of compensation for the lack of natural cognition outsiders would have for the symbols and language of the liturgy?  The second question is what role would we have in trying to correct this?