Preview Event – Upcoming

I’m experimenting with different ways of reaching out especially to Orthodox Christian college students and young adults who want to deepen their faith lives. One thing that has shown some promise is a weekly discussion group that focuses on helping come to know and practice the gifts that God has given each of us at Baptism.

The website at left is Upcoming is hosted by Yahoo.com is one way I thought I might try to get the word out. Clink the link below and please let me know what you think.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

Preview Event – Upcoming

Unless noted otherwise, everything posted here is © 2009 Gregory R Jensen.

"Mindless" folksy Orthodoxy….

“Mindless” folksy Orthodoxy is “a breeding ground for all kinds of sects,” says Metropolitan Kirill (Gundyaev)

The Moscow Patriarchate believes that the faithful’s desire to only observe Orthodox customs is a mistake, states Interfax-Religion, referring to the TV program “The Pastor’s Word”.

“Many Orthodox people today, by inertia, believe that the main task in their religious ‘podvig’ (feat) is fidelity to external religious traditions and customs”, said the head of the Department of External Affairs, Metropolitan Kyrill of Smolensk during the broadcast of “The Pastor’s Word” shown last Saturday on Channel 1.

“This mindless”, folksy Orthodoxy is “a breeding ground for all kinds of sects,” he stressed.

The bishop said that the goal of the Church today is to help people understand the essence of the Christian message, “that Orthodoxy is not folklore, not customs, not a museum – it is life.”

“If these people would learn the Christian message, they will be well protected from the devastating effects of various sects and pseudo-religious phenomena”, believes Metropolitan Kyrill.

He added that the more we know about our faith, the closer we are go God’s teachings in daily life, that the more we rely on Christian motivation in our actions, “we will be stronger and stronger when faced with pseudo-religious propaganda, whose ultimate aim is to destroy the faith in our people.”

Unless noted otherwise, everything posted here is © 2009 Gregory R Jensen.

Too cool for school…

With a hat tip to Fr. John Zuhlsdorf of “What Does the Prayer Really Say” and apologizes for any I may have offended, but being a fan of all things Cistercian and Trappist (I was educated by priests from both Cistercian and Trappist monastic communities), this was to cool to pass up.In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

Unless noted otherwise, everything posted here is © 2009 Gregory R Jensen.

Yup, I Like to Listen to John Denver

Recently, I came across some compilation CD’s of John Denver’s music. Yup, that John Denver, the guy who sang “Thank God, I’m A Country Boy,” “Leaving On a Jet Plane,” “Take Me Home Country Road,” “Calypso,” “Rocky Mountain Him,” and “Annie’s Song.” I guess I should be, but honestly I am not in the least bit embarrassed to admit that I have always loved John Denver’s music. Right now, as I’m writing this, I’m listen to Denver singing “Fly Away” as duet with Olivia Newton John, another favorite singer from when I was a mere lad.

Every once and again in our spiritual life I need to reconnect with the gentler side of life. Too much gentleness and leisure, like too much toughness and discipline, leads to a lopsided spiritual life. Likewise, if I spend so much time focusing on spiritual matters that I lose sight of the common human experiences that God uses to slowly lead us to Himself. John Denver’s music does a think a good job of reminding me of the beauty of creation, friendship, and the ordinary, though by no means insignificant, love between a man and a woman. He also speaks of the darker aspects of human life, grief, loneliness, fear, and disappointment that I am too willing to overlook or minimize.

I have to always be careful that we not underestimate, much less hold in contempt, these ordinary human experiences. All of these can, and are, taken up by Christ into the life of the Most Holy Trinity and transfigured—deified as the Greek fathers were fond of saying. It is above all in the celebration of the Eucharist, when, in the Name of Jesus Christ, and by the power of the Holy Spirit, I offer my life to God the Father and, miracle of miracles—He accepts that offering with all of my shortcomings and sins. And not only that: the Father transforms what is earthly and created in my offering into something Heavenly and Uncreated and returns the offering of my life to me in Holy Communion.

And when I receive back that offering transformed by the grace of the Holy Spirit, I receive not only my own life, but also the life of Christ. And in Christ I receive into myself, even as I am received, the whole Church, His Body. And in receiving Christ, Who in the Incarnation has freely united Himself to the whole human family when He took on our nature, I also receive humanity. And even this is not enough; since humanity is both microcosm and a macrocosm of the whole creation, in Holy Communion, creation itself becomes a part of me, even as I am a part of creation.

The challenge of the Christian life is living out the reality that in Christ nothing is really alien to me. Sympathy or pity for my neighbor, creation, and even myself, is easy since sympathy allows me to stand outside of all of these. But communion in Christ demands of me empathy—the willingness to actually suffer along with others. This means that I have to be able to find another person’s pain, and another person’s sin, in my heart—I need to allow their pain to be my pain and to understand that their sin is really mine as well.

On the Cross Christ accepts on Himself the pain of our, my, sinfulness. God in Jesus Christ does not simply pity fallen humanity; He doesn’t stand outside of the human family. No, it is on the Cross that God identifies with us, He makes our sinfulness, our shame, His own even at the cost of His own life.

To come back for a moment to John Denver, I think for me the delight of much pop music, whatever might be its artistic merits, is that it gives expression to the common elements of human life. Granted this is not often done with any great depth, but that is its charm and value.

When I was younger I was quite taken with being serious, I wanted to have serious conversations about important matters. That was (and is) all well and good, but it also reflected my own self-importance and lack of charity. I was zealous. But zeal, says St Isaac the Syrian, “is a lack of compassion for our neighbor in his weakness.” I was so zealous, that—after she actually convinced me of its importance—my wife had to teach me to make “small talk.” Far from being unimportant, small talk, like flirting, is the willingness to demonstrate to another human being that he or she is worthy of our attention, that they are interesting or beautiful. And this is without a doubt one of the most precious gift we can give one another human being.

St Maximus reminds us that we ought not to prefer one person to another based on their character. That is to say the significance and value of human life is objective—the thoughts of a philosopher, the struggles of a great saint, don’t make them f any greater significance in the eyes of God then the thoughts of a simple and illiterate man or the struggles of an ordinary husband or wife make them of less value to God. It is worthy noting that for most of His earthly life, Jesus was rather an ordinary carpenter. And it precisely because He was so ordinary, so “dead common” as our British friends might say, that Jesus was such a cause of agitation of the religious and secular authorities of His time.

If I can’t, or won’t, find God in the midst of the ordinary circumstances of life, I’ll never find Him anywhere else either. And what can I offer Him if I can’t, or won’t, offer to God my life as it is really is with all its ordinariness?

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

Unless noted otherwise, everything posted here is © 2009 Gregory R Jensen.

Radical Apologetics: the Dialectic of Opposition

Benedict Seraphim has an interesting post on his blog regarding the “dialectic of opposition” which he sees as the foundation of Evangelical Protestant theology. Let me let Benedict speak for himself:

One of the dominant concepts, if not the dominant concept, in the worldview and doctrines of Protestants is that of what is called the “dialectic of opposition.” (Some might argue that this concept dominates most or all of Western Christianity as a whole, but that’s for another debate at another time.) This concept, in Protestantism, posits an essential dichotomy, an either/or if you will, into the most fundamental of doctrines, resulting in the bifurcation of such things as Law/Gospel, grace/works, human libertarian free will/God’s complete sovereignty and so forth. For Protestants, this “dialectic of opposition” is functionally absolute in these pairings. This is not simply a matter of distinction between essentially different things. After all, men and women are sexually distinct, but that distinction reveals an essential complementarity, not an essential opposition. So, for the dialectic of opposition, it is not the distinction that is the issue, but rather it is the reification of the distinction, a necessitating of a relationship of opposition between the things paired, and thus necessitating a disjuncture between the concepts/realities paired. If humans have libertarian free will then God is not completely sovereign. If it is of the Law then it is not of the Gospel. And so it goes down the list, pairing two concepts in opposition to one another, such that one is forced to make a radical choice between one or the other.

While he (rightly) acknowledges the biblical foundations of such language, he rather rightly observes that as used by many this dialectic

[For the] Orthodox this either/or setup, this dialectic of opposition, starts from an essentially heretical Christology. We’re back to the wife-beating question. If Orthodox accept this framework, they either founder on the Scylla of Monophysitism or the Charibdis of Nestorianism. Orthodox must from the start deny the dialectic. The icon of Christ neither divides the human and divine natures in Christ, nor does it confuse them: it depicts the Person of Christ, in which are united the distinct human and divine natures, and which natures cannot be separated. But neither does the icon confuse the natures: What we see in the icon, is the Person, not the natures. Natures are not apprehensible by the senses. Persons are. (This is a very generalized summary of St. Theodore the Studite’s defense, which builds on St. John Damascene’s.)

I would certainly recommend Benedict’s thoughtful analysis especially his defense of the doctrine of theosis or deification.

What caught my attention in Benedict’s essay was an experience I had in my recent participation at the annual meeting of the International Society of Theoretical Psychology in Toronto. There were a number of paper presents that tried to position themselves as “transdisciplinary,” a goal with which I am in fundamental sympathy.

Where I am not in sympathy is with the implicit use in many papers of the same dialectic of opposition that Benedict criticizes. Such a dialectic encourages us, for example, to see life a a “zero sum” game. By that I mean the very common idea that “my” success comes at “your” expense. Or, at a minimum, that “my” success in some way limits or makes less likely “your” expense. In economic terms, the dialectic of opposition sees wealth as static where (for example) free market capitalism sees wealth as something we can create by our own talents and hard work.

At its foundation the dialectic of opposition fails to take seriously the analogy of being (analogia entis) that sees all of the cosmos as in some way in correspondence or analogous to God. Some Orthodox theologians (for example, Protopresbyter John S. Romanides) dismiss the analogy of being out of hand. Others (for example, David Bentley Hart in The Beauty of the Infinite) have a more sympathetic view.

In simplest terms, the analogia entis looks at creation as revealing God precisely by being not God, or other than God. In Hart’s language. creation is a gift of divine love and an invitation to enter freely into communion not only with God, and in God, with the whole creation, our neighbor and ourselves.

Often in our spiritual lives, or maybe I should say, in our everyday lives, we find ourselves thinking in oppositional terms. When I do this, I find myself wondering how am I going to “fit in.” And invariably to “fit in” I need to cut something off and/or tack something on. It is no wonder that for many, the Christian life feels like a mutilation.

What makes all of this talk of “fitting in” so attractive is that it sounds very much like the language of conversion. But conversion is not “fitting in.” Conversion is that change of heart that allows me to be who I am in obedience to who God has called me to be from all eternity, and this is a very different thing.

It is worth noting that the Orthodox service of baptism (like the Catholic and other Western Christian versions by the way) begins with prayers of exorcism. In these prayers, we ask God to reach down from heaven and take hold of the candidate, even as He took hold of the Hebrew children in Egypt, and redeem him from the father of lies. In and through baptism we are taken out the clutches of Satan and up into the life of the Holy Trinity–we are “made partakers of the divine nature” as St Peter reminds us (2 Peter 1.4).

St. Irenaeus says that those of us who are in Christ are like iron in fire; as iron takes on the characteristics of fire while remaining iron, we take on all the characteristics of the Uncreated God while ourselves remaining creatures. Our understanding of how we can be like God while remaining different from God is what the analogy of being serves.

If God and I are in some, fundamental, opposite to one another, then the more I become like God, the less I become like myself. But the patristic doctrine is just the opposite: The more I become like God, the more I become myself, and so (paradoxically) different from God. This difference is a real distinction, but it is not an opposition. Or, as Benedict puts it, but for many Christians (and as a psychological reality, I would include here Orthodox Christians), “it is not just simply that Creator and creature are essentially distinct, but that they are opposed: the divine nature is holy, the human nature is sinful.”

In this oppositional model, I simply cannot become, holy without ceasing to be human. And so, “because of the dialectic of opposition which sets human nature and divine nature at odds,” Benedict concludes, “either there is no unity between God and man or there is no unity between Christ and the rest of humanity.”

It is this search for unity through analogy that is an essential part of our spiritual lives as Orthodox (and orthodox) Christians. In paper after paper that I heard in Toronto, the search was less for unity through analogy, then it was a search for a shared agreement that left everyone with only half (or less than half) a pie.

In Jesus Christ, God the Father through the Holy Spirit offers us life in abundance. But this comes to us as a gift which must be both received and acted upon. We must develop our own gifts and work to help others develop their own. To repeat language I used in an earlier post, the former is the work of gratitude, the latter of justice, but neither exists apart from the other and the outpouring of God’s grace in Jesus Christ.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

Unless noted otherwise, everything posted here is © 2009 Gregory R Jensen.

The Challenge of Ethnicity in the Church: What St Paul Says

From today’s epistle read:

The Reading is from St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans 11:13-24

BRETHREN, I am speaking to you Gentiles. Inasmuch then as I am an apostle to
the Gentiles, I magnify my ministry in order to make my fellow Jews jealous,
and thus save some of them. For if their rejection means the reconciliation of
the world, what will their acceptance mean but life from the dead? If the dough
offered as first fruits is holy, so is the whole lump; and if the root is holy,
so are the branches. But if some of the branches were broken off, and you, a
wild olive shoot, were grafted in their place to share the richness of the
olive tree, do not boast over the branches. If you do boast, remember it is not
you that support the root, but the root that supports you. You will say,
“Branches were broken off so that I might be grafted in.” That is true. They
were broken off because of their unbelief, but you stand fast only through
faith. So do not become proud, but stand in awe. For if God did not spare the
natural branches, neither will he spare you. Note then the kindness and the
severity of God: severity toward those who have fallen, but God’s kindness to
you, provided you continue in his kindness; otherwise you too will be cut off.
And even the others, if they do not persist in their unbelief, will be grafted
in, for God has the power to graft them in again. For if you have been cut from
what is by nature a wild olive tree, and grafted, contrary to nature, into a
cultivated olive tree, how much more will these natural branches be grafted
back into their own olive tree.

For your consideration:

While I would be the first to admit there is much work to be done in making sure that those who are Orthodox Christians have actually been evangelized and discipline, Paul’s words remind me that I have been grafted on to the Church by baptism, even as the Gentiles have been grafted on to Israel.

As I said yesterday, in looking at the Church and prayerfully reflecting on the need for renewal, we should not allow our zeal to blind us to our debt to those who have gone before us in the faith–even if they have gone before us by only a few years.

St Issac the Syrian says somewhere that zeal is simply a lack of compassion for our neighbor in his weakness. And is Isaiah the prophet we read that the Messiah will quench the smoldering wick or break the bruised reed.

It is to allow zeal to disguise, even from myself,y own lack of compassion and love of self. Certainly, I should continue work to renew the Church–but gently always seeking ways to extend the circle of renewal to others so that they too can come to know their own gifts. Gifts, I should always remember, that were bestowed on each of us at baptism not only for the glory of God, but for our own glory and happiness. As St Irenaeus reminds us: “The glory of God is man fully alive.”

How can someone experience this new life if I, in zeal, kill him?

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

Unless noted otherwise, everything posted here is © 2009 Gregory R Jensen.

To Know God

The always thoughtful, and thought provoking, Fr. Stephen at “Glory to God For All Things,” has another very good post that is worth reading. I have included some of it below.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

To Know God

I have had some correspondence recently on the subject of knowing God. The knowledge of God, generally spoken of in a very experiential manner, is an absolute foundation in Orthodox theology. Nothing replaces it – no dogmatic formula – no Creed – not even Scripture – though Orthodoxy would see none of these things as separate from the knowledge of God. But the questions I have received are very apt. In a culture that is awash in “experience” what do we Orthodox mean when we speak of such things and what do we mean by such knowledge of God?

There are two Scriptural passages in particular that come to mind when I think of this subject. The first from the Beatitudes: “Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God” (Matt. 5:8); the second, “Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is. And every man that hath this hope in him purifieth himself, even as He is pure (1 John 3:2-3).

Obviously I equate “seeing” and “knowing,” as does the Tradition. In both of these verses the knowledge of God (”seeing God”) is tied to purity of heart. We do not see or know God because our hearts are darkened by sin and ignorance. Thus any knowledge of God that we have in this life begins as gift and remains as gift. However, it is a gift that is more fully received as our hearts are purified.

The importance of speaking of knowledge of God in this manner is to prevent two equally devastating errors. One would be to have a knowledge which is based only on the data of revelation, and only known as we know other data (like the multiplication table). As an Orthodox Christian I accept the teaching of the Church precisely because I am not pure of heart and I am not competent in and of myself to judge these things. I trust the saints and hierarchs of the ages, under the Holy Spirit, to have spoken truly of what they know and of what they have received.

The Orthodox “experience” if I can use such a phrase, is the confirmation in the heart of the truth we have received as we grow in grace and in purity of heart. But the truth of the faith must be confirmed in such a living manner or it simply becomes an historical item and the Church would be a collection of antiquarians and not the living temple of God. For my knowledge of God is also my life in God. Life, light, truth, knowledge – all of these have something of a synomymous character.

Read the rest: To Know God

Unless noted otherwise, everything posted here is © 2009 Gregory R Jensen.

Sameh Khouzam granted stay of deportation!

I want to thank all of you who responded so quickly and signed our Petition to Save Sameh Khouzam!

Your voices have been heard!

In large part, thanks to your timely signatures and the efforts of the Institute on Religion and Public Policy, Sameh Khouzam has been granted an indefinite stay of deportation! He can now stay in the United States and no longer has to fear the torture and even possible death that certainly would have awaited him upon arrival in his native Egypt.

I believe that your overwhelming support of Khouzam, a Coptic Christian, calling for him not to be returned to a regime with a history of brutality toward minority religions, helped sway the Middle District Court of Pennsylvania make a just and right decision.

As I wrote to you before, Mr. Khouzam left Egypt in 1998 under intense pressure to change his religion. He was detained by the Egyptian government and forcefully “encouraged” to convert from his Coptic Christianity to Islam. He escaped Egypt and fled to America–fearing for his life. After his departure, the Egyptian government informed United States officials that Mr. Khouzam was wanted for completely unsubstantiated crimes against a Muslim family. The United States intended to deport him.

Read more: http://www.religionandpolicy.org/about/petition_thanks.php

Unless noted otherwise, everything posted here is © 2009 Gregory R Jensen.

Dateline: International Society of Theortical Psychology, Conference, York University, Toronto

Thanks to my very kind wife Mary who lent me her notebook computer, I am able to check email and update my blog while I’m here in Toronto at the ISTP 2007 Conference meeting at York University.

I usually enjoy attending academic conferences. As I have gotten older, however, I find I prefer interdisciplinary conferences like the one I am attending more than single discipline events in either religious studies or psychology. In large part it is because my own thinking tends to be interdisciplinary and synthetic (of course when I was a boy this resulted in my being told to pay attention and learn to finish this before I did that).

But I digress . . . (something familiar to all who know me. See.)

As an undergraduate I was told that an academic discipline offers us a framework within which to see both the world around us and ourselves. All disciplines have their own strengths and weakness to be sure, but if we commit ourselves to a discipline it will shape our thought and our view of reality. For me the hard part was learning that I had to accept the discipline of an academic field of inquiry (in my case first psychology, then theology) before I could not only see the world through it, but go beyond it to make the various connections that enrich life.

We are none of us born in a vacuum. Rather we live within a web of relationships. These relationships are not only in the here and now, but reach backwards into our personal and shared history. They also reach forward into the as yet to be revealed future. A human being then is a nexus–point at which human history, the history of others and our own personal history converge. To out the same thing differently: I am not my own, I own a debt of gratitude to those who came before me and made my life possible. And I owe a debt, in justice, to those who will come after me and our vulnerable to the decisions, for good and ill, that I make.

To live between gratitude and justice is then a common human experience. And it is also I think the challenge that I am called to live as an Orthodox Christian. I did not create the faith–it comes to me from outside of me as God’s gift pasted down from generation to generation by faithful (and at times not so faithful) Orthodox Christians. And what they did for me, I must do for those who come after me–I must pass on the faith.

But stepping back for a moment I realize that gratitude and justice–or if one prefers grace and law–are not opposed to one another. Rather they interpenetrate.

Without a spirit of gratitude for those who have gone before me, I have no faith to past on in justice. But if I fail to pass on the faith or fail to pass it on accurately, I not only fail to fulfill the demands of justice to those who cannot protect themselves from my dereliction, I also show a decided lack of gratitude for the sacrifices of my ancestors according to the faith.

And now back to my conference (where I am chairing a session and presenting a paper in about an hour)…

Having learned my academic disciplines of psychology and theology, I now work to establish connections between them both. In doing so I need to be careful least I sin against gratitude and justice in what I do. We forget sometimes that our lives as Orthodox Christians are simply an ordinary human lived in Christ. We are not exempt from the struggles and failures of the human family. Our task is very much like doing interdisciplinary (or now the NEW word, TRANSDISCIPLINARY) in academia–how can I bring about communion not only in the human family, but in my own life with all the different challenges and demands that it brings?

This challenge is the challenge of living a virtuous life. The virtuous person is not the one who does this or that good thing at the expense of other, equally, lesser or greater, good things. No, the virtuous person is the one who can find the point of balance among ALL the good things in his or her life. As I pointed out above, I can be just without being grateful–I cannot practice one virtue at the expense of others. Again, I must find balance in my life.

And this point of balance, precarious though it might be, is where happiness is found, is where communion is found, and no where else.

While, it is time to re-read my paper for the last time before I present. I finished it last night about 11.30 and only got it printed off this morning.

Pray for me, for my fellow presenter (an Muslim man presenting on the different forms of anger in Islam–I am looking forward to his talk with great joy) and for my listeners who, sadly,will have to listen to me.

In Christ our True God Who heals all our wounds and makes up that which is lacking in us,

+Fr Gregory

Unless noted otherwise, everything posted here is © 2009 Gregory R Jensen.

Think Christian » Blog Archive » Christian education beyond Sunday School

Mark Galli in Christianity Today has an article on The Cost of Christian Education that questions the way we teach children about faith. Galli, drawing on an essay by Debra Dean Murphy, writes about how educational programs traditionally designed by the church are inadequate to fully teach children how to be Christians.

Murphy argues that in the industrialized West, education normally takes place within the structured environment of a classroom, where a teacher makes use of various tools and techniques to transfer content to pupils. Knowledge has been mostly considered a repository of neutral facts conveyed by an expert in teaching technique, and mastery of these facts is the goal of education.

Read more: Think Christian » Blog Archive » Christian education beyond Sunday School

Unless noted otherwise, everything posted here is © 2009 Gregory R Jensen.