The Healing Silence

Sunday, November 30, 2008: 24th SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST (10th of Luke)—Holy and All-praised Apostle Andrew the First-called (62 A.D.). St. Frumentius, Archbishop of Abyssinia (Ethiopia—ca. 380).

Now He was teaching in one of the synagogues on the Sabbath. And behold, there was a woman who had a spirit of infirmity eighteen years, and was bent over and could in no way raise herself up. But when Jesus saw her, He called her to Him and said to her, “Woman, you are loosed from your infirmity.” And He laid His hands on her, and immediately she was made straight, and glorified God. But the ruler of the synagogue answered with indignation, because Jesus had healed on the Sabbath; and he said to the crowd, “There are six days on which men ought to work; therefore come and be healed on them, and not on the Sabbath day.” The Lord then answered him and said, “Hypocrite! Does not each one of you on the Sabbath loose his ox or donkey from the stall, and lead it away to water it? So ought not this woman, being a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan has bound-think of it-for eighteen years, be loosed from this bond on the Sabbath? And when He said these things, all His adversaries were put to shame; and all the multitude rejoiced for all the glorious things that were done by Him.

(Luke 13:10-17)

St Augustine sees in the woman with “a spirit of infirmity,” the woman that Jesus heals in this morning’s Gospel, a figure of the whole human race. We, each of us, like her, us “bent over and bowed down” Augustine says. But where this is literally the case for the woman, our own infirmity is somewhat different. In the case of humanity the “devil and his angels have bowed down the souls of men and women” causing them “to be intent on temporary and earthly things” stopping us “from seeking the things that are above.”

With Augustine’s observation in the back of our mind, we might want to ask, what is it that has us bent over? What is it that has caused me to neglect my own spiritual life, my own relationship with Jesus Christ and His Body the Church? Where is it that I have turned inward and away from God and my neighbor?

While the answer for each of us will be, I suspect, a bit different, we nevertheless can speak in a general way of the sign or the symptom of our own personal infirmity. We get a clue as to this in the words of St Cyril of Alexandria. Reflecting on the response of the ruler of the synagogue, the saint says that he is “not angry because of the Sabbath.” Turning in his sermon to speak to the ruler of the synagogue St Cyril tells him: “Since you see Christ honored and worshipped as God, you are frantic, choked with rage” and so you “waste away with envy.”

And then the saint comes offers his diagnosis: “You have one thing concealed in your heart and profess and make pretext of another.” The angry heart is a heart held in the grip of “vain reasoning.” Though the context is different for each of us, we are all of us at different points in our lives doubled over in anger, “choked with rage” in Cyril’s words. If I am honest with myself, how can I deny that, like the ruler of the synagogue, there are times in my life when Christ can justly call me a “hypocrite, pretender, and insincere”?

And like the ruler of the synagogue, I often make use of the things of God—of the Gospel, of Holy Tradition, and the teachings of the saints to name only three—to justify my anger, my lack of concern for the “things that are above.” And more often than not my anger takes the form of my criticism of others, forgetting as I seem to do quite frequently that I am bent over myself.

Looking then into the angry heart, what might be the way out? How can we, like the woman in the Gospel, come to stand upright and be healed of what has bound us? How might we lay aside what St Ambrose calls our own “earthly burdens” and our burdensome lusts and so learn again to stand upright and experience in this life a foretaste of Eternity?

For the first several years as a priest I would encourage people to fast and pray. But what Id didn’t realize is that for many the Church’s counsel that they fast and pray is just one more burden, another thing on an ever growing to do list. Before any of us can find profit from prayer and fasting, we must first simplify our lives. I don’t mean here that we should begin by selling all our possessions and giving to the poor, though God love you if you can do so freely and cheerfully. No what I mean is something different.

Our first step to being restored by grace to spiritual health is to cultivate in our life silence. As I said a moment ago, I would encourage people to pray whose lives were filled with noise and activity. TV, radio, music, internet—all of these constantly going, making noise, distract the person from thing Eternal and enslaving them to things temporal.

So we need first and foremost to cultivate in our lives. Silence is not merely the absence of sound but is, as the philosopher Max Picard writes, the space between sounds that make words meaningful.

Our lives are so filled with noise that it masks the sound of anger and rage in our hearts. Worse, the noises deafen us to the pain and lose to which anger and rage are the typical human responses. Underneath your anger is sorrow, lose and pain. There is in each our lives real suffering that Jesus longs to heal.

The ruler of the synagogue was no doubt an important man in his community, a busy man, a man with great responsibilities. If he is an unsympathetic figure in the Gospel it isn’t simply because of his hypocrisy. It isn’t simply because they would deny grace to the woman in affliction. No, what makes him such a pitiful figure (to borrow again from St Cyril) is that the ruler stood there in the presence of Him Who by the “glory and the splendor of His works solved all inquiry and doubt in those who sought Him without ill will” and missed the opportunity for healing himself.

Because the ruler of the synagogue would not, could not, still even for a moment his own angry thoughts, his own raging heart, “Shame fell” on him for his “corrupt opinions.” Rather than be lifted up, he “stumbled against” Christ “the chief cornerstone” and so was himself “broken” rather than healed.

My brothers and sisters in Christ, amidst all the activity that quite rightly goes along with our preparations to welcome the Birth according to the Flesh of our Lord, God and Savior Jesus Christ, let us cultivate in our lives moments of silence. Still, if not the anger at least the irritation, so that, unlike the ruler of the synagogue we will not be covered in shame but rather in the glory of the Divine Light.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

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

What Type of Blog Is This Blog?

I ran my blog through Typealyzer, an online analyzer that determines the blog’s Myers-Briggs Personality type.  Here’s what came back for this blog:

INTP – The Thinkers
The logical and analytical type. They are especialy attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications.


They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what the

I don’t know about the blog, but the results are a close enough match for me at least!

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

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

In Memory of the Trampled Wal-Mart Worker: A Contemplative Rant

From Anamachara:The Website of Unknowning:

Here’s some unhappy post-Thanksgiving news: Wal-Mart Store Employee Trampled to Death by Black Friday Shoppers. It’s a grim story. Not only did frenzied shoppers trample an employee, but they just kept on stepping over his body once he fell. They pushed fellow employees who were trying to help him out of the way. And then they got angry when the store closed, in the wake of the poor man’s death.

Do we need any more proof that the American Dream has collapsed into a commercial nightmare?

My friends, we who believe that life ought to be organized around contemplation rather then consumption have a large and difficult task ahead of us. First of all, I think we must be clear that traditional forms of religion, or even currently popular forms of spirituality, appear to be powerless to fight against the forces of mammon. I’m afraid that we can expect little or no help from the various institutional churches, since the liberal churches appear to be stuck in a quagmire of declining membership while the conservative churches come across as ignoring pretty much all issues except those involving the regulation of middle-class sexuality. And we most assuredly cannot expect any help from the panoply of new age or post-religious spiritualities, since they are so mesmerized by the ‘law of attraction’ and so forth that they are more part of the problem than part of the needed cure.

If you’re a conservative Christian and you’re worried about sex, then do something about human trafficking. If you’re a liberal Christian and you’re worried about the ongoing relevance of your faith, then take a stand against excessive consumerism. If you’re a non-Christian but interested in Christian contemplation, then at least recognize that contemplative spirituality demands that people come before either things or money or ideology. Regardless of your political or theological persuasion, we all need to address the question of how our faith should inform our relationship to the earth, to natural resources, and to sustainable living. And in any case, I believe this kind of activism will only make a difference if it begins with a life of deep, sustained, daily prayer.

The Rolling Stones once sang, “I shouted out, ‘Who killed the Kennedys?’ When after all, it was you and me.” LIkewise, my friends, it was you and me who trampled to death that Wal-Mart employee in the midst of a Black Friday rush. We must avoid the temptation of seeing our culture as divided into consumerist goats and non-consumerist sheep. That just introduces another dualism into our lives, and solves nothing. We are all mad shoppers, we are all air and water polluters, we are all eagerly hypnotized by our baubles and trinkets while the world around us gasps in a fever.

The question is, what are we going to do about it? And I think the answer must begin in silence, sustained silence. From there, we must remove the beams in our own eyes. And I’m not sure what comes next, because I’m still working on those first two steps for myself. But I believe the Spirit will lead us. We just have to snap out of the reverie long about to be lead-able.

What I do believe is that the Spirit’s leading must involve a combination of contemplation and action. We who hear the call to silence do not have the luxury to recite our Jesus Prayer ad nauseum while everyone else goes to hell. At that point, our contemplation becomes infernal. No, we bask in the silence in order to be empowered to live Christlike lives. We must be prepared to cast the money-changers out of the temple. And we must begin by dealing with the money-changers who are our own selves.

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

Tradition: A Personal Mode of Seeing

One of the more interesting insights offered by Metropolitan John (Zizioulas) of Pergamon in his book Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church, is his argument that tradition exists “enhypostatically.” As near as I can tell what he means by this is that tradition—any tradition—does not exist in an abstract or pure sense, but only insofar as it is embodied in the life of concrete persons and communities.

While Zizioulas discusses the enhypostatic expression in terms of asceticism and liturgy, I want to reflect here, somewhat overly briefly I admit, on how tradition—and specifically the Christian Tradition—shapes how we see ourselves and the world of persons, events and things that constitute our lives.

Last Sunday (11/23) I sat with the catechumens in the parish I serve. We are reading together Clark Carlton’s book The Way: What Every Protestant Should Know About the Orthodox Church. Carlton mentions that the NIV translates 2 Thessalonians 2.15 (“So then, brothers, stand firm and hold to the teachings [traditions in the KJV] we passed on to you, whether by word of mouth or by letter.”) in a way that does violence to the text, but which supports the Evangelical dismissal of tradition in the life of the Church.

This isn’t necessarily to fault the translators of the NIV, after all we never read Scripture in a vacuum, but always in light of certain (often unexamined) presuppositions. In a word, our reading of Scripture is always based on tradition, always.

As the discussion continued, we began wrestle with the place of the Tradition of the Orthodox Church in our own lives. For many, and especially many converts, Holy Tradition is a goal to be fulfilled. But over the course of 2,000 years, the tradition has been embodied in many ways by myriad people and communities in a variety of historical and social settings. This means that the Tradition of the Church is not only, old but deep and (within limits at least) varied.

No one can hope to do everything that was ever done and so, if I’m not careful, I will pick and choose the part of Church history that I prefer and confuse that with the whole of the tradition. One of the examples I used with the catechumens was monastic hairstyles. The “modern” practice is for monks to have long hair and untrimmed beards. But if we look at icons of early bishops—I used St John Chrysostom—we see that an earlier practice was for monks in the East to cut their hair in much the same way that one sees in traditional Western monastic life. Look sometime at the icon of Chrysostom and then look at picture of Frair Tuck. The hair styles are more than a little similar.

So if we are not to imitate the past, what value do we find in Holy Tradition?

Guided and guarded by the Church’s dogmatic and moral teaching, our life of prayer (personal and liturgical) and asceticism (especially fasting and care for the poor), we become ever more sensitive to what is Good, True, Beautiful and Justice. We see these first in the Scriptures and the lives of the saints, especially as they are communicated to us in the Church’s liturgical life. And then, building on this foundation, we become ever more aware of the presence of the Good, the True, the Beautiful and the Just in ourselves and in the world of persons, events and things that constitute our everyday life.

This discovery that these are not simply abstract notions but embodied realities is not the end of the adventure. As I come to recognize for example the Good, the force of that recognition confronts me with the presence of wickedness, falsehood, ugliness and injustice first of all in my own heart and then in the world around me. As I never tire of reminding my own spiritual children, I do not learn from my mistakes, I learn what is true and then come to see I am mistaken.

Goodness, Truthfulness, Beauty and Justice, as with the Tradition that sensitize us to them, are not abstract philosophical constructs or historical curiosities. They are rather embodied realities. If because of Adam’s sin these they are only more or less embodied in me, if my life is still disordered, or if Beauty (for example) is marred, this in no way detracts from the reality that it is the Church, the Body of Christ, that most fully (though not exhaustively) embodies these in human history.

Where we have gone wrong, I think, is we have rarified Holy Tradition. We have made it a thing, an objective standard to be imitated. In doing so we have lost sight of Holy Tradition as, to borrow from Vladimir Lossky, the Presence of the Holy Spirit in the Church as it leads and guides the faithful throughout history.

And it is this same Spirit which inspired not only the writers of Sacred Scriptures, but those who preached the Word. It is this same Spirit Who inspires the Church at prayer in the Liturgy and in the secret places of the human heart. And it is this same Spirit Who sustains and guides the saints who have struggled to remain faithful to the Word.

When we see Holy Tradition as something external to the person, to the traces of grace in the human and community, we miss all this and the Christian life, the life of the Church, becomes (to borrow from Christos Yannaras) yet one more source of division in the human heart and family, albeit now a religious division.

A blessed and Happy Thanksgiving to my American readers.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

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

Pope Benedict XVI: On Signs of a Living Faith

From Pope Benedict XVI’s Wednesday General Audience in Rome we hear words worth considering.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

VATICAN CITY, NOV. 26, 2008 (Zenit.org): Often we tend to fall into the same misunderstandings that have characterized the community of Corinth: Those Christians thought that, having been gratuitously justified in Christ by faith, “everything was licit.” And they thought, and often it seems that the Christians of today think, that it is licit to create divisions in the Church, the body of Christ, to celebrate the Eucharist without concerning oneself with the brothers who are most needy, to aspire to the best charisms without realizing that they are members of each other, etc.

The consequences of a faith that is not incarnated in love are disastrous, because it is reduced to a most dangerous abuse and subjectivism for us and for our brothers. On the contrary, following St. Paul, we should renew our awareness of the fact that, precisely because we have been justified in Christ, we don’t belong to ourselves, but have been made into the temple of the Spirit and are called, therefore, to glorify God in our bodies and with the whole of our existence (cf. 1 Corinthians 6:19). It would be to scorn the inestimable value of justification if, having been bought at the high price of the blood of Christ, we didn’t glorify him with our body. In reality, this is precisely our “reasonable” and at the same time “spiritual” worship, for which Paul exhorts us to “offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God” (Romans 12:1).

To what would be reduced a liturgy directed only to the Lord but that doesn’t become, at the same time, service of the brethren, a faith that is not expressed in charity? And the Apostle often puts his communities before the Final Judgment, on which occasion “we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive recompense, according to what he did in the body, whether good or evil” (2 Corinthians 5:10; and cf. Romans 2:16).

If the ethics that St. Paul proposes to believers does not lapse into forms of moralism, and if it shows itself to be current for us, it is because, each time, it always recommences from the personal and communitarian relationship with Christ, to verify itself in life according to the Spirit. This is essential: Christian ethics is not born from a system of commandments, but rather is the consequence of our friendship with Christ. This friendship influences life: If it is true, it incarnates and fulfills itself in love for neighbor. Hence, any ethical decline is not limited to the individual sphere, but at the same time, devalues personal and communitarian faith: From this it is derived and on this, it has a determinant effect.

Let us, therefore, be overtaken by the reconciliation that God has given us in Christ, by God’s “crazy” love for us: No one and nothing could ever separate us from his love (cf. Romans 8:39). With this certainty we live. And this certainty gives us the strength to live concretely the faith that works in love.

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

Some Further Thoughts on the Called & Gifted Workshop

As I said in my last post, the “Called & Gifted” Workshop my parish hosted this past weekend went quite well.

The content of the workshop was very good. As I have mentioned before, I think that Orthodox Christians tend to emphasize the monastic vocation so much that we underplay the vocational implications of holy baptism. Sherry Weddell’s presentation I think did a very good job of helping people understand the importance–and priority–of our personal, baptismal vocations.

Specifically, she pointed out that in baptism we are both called to an apostolic and evangelistic work AND given gifts (charisms) that make it possible for us to fulfill that work. We are not, in other words, simply passive consumers of religious good, but have been sent out (Gk: apostolos, “someone sent out”, e.g. with a message or as a delegate) by Christ to announce (GK: euangelion, or “good news”) the Gospel or the Good News. The charisms/gifts we receive at baptism are what make it possible for us to do this. These charism, Sherry stressed, are not given to me for me alone, but for you, for your salvation.

Christians are called and gifted by Christ to be men and women for others–and this is true whether we are laypeople, monastics, clergy or hiearchs–we are all of us called to live for others.

Seeing ourselves this way means being willing to see the Church in a new way. The Church is not an end in itself. As Metropolitan JONAH said in Pittsburgh at the All-American Council, what happens at Liturgy is important, but is only about “5%” of what it means to be a Christian. The rest of our Christian life is about how we treat others. This is a very challenging notion for many of us.

My life as Orthodox Christians, my salvation, is not simply about me, but my willingness to serve others in their need.

As with the individual Christian, so too with the Church. The Church is a community for others in their need. We can’t withdraw into our parishes and claim to be faithful to Christ.

Very easily, this kind of message could become a mere harangue. One of things that was most effective in the workshop was Sherry’s very matter of fact presentation of the information. As one woman in my parish put it, “It was all very business like,” direct and to the point. The power of the message was its truthfulness, her words were their own confirmation.

Talking with one of the men in the parish and with my godson who came from Pittsburgh for the workshop, we were in agreement that other Orthodox Christians would also find this a profitable use of their time. In the coming months we hope to do two things.

First, continue the process of discerning our own personal gifts and our gifts as a community. Second, and following from this, we hope to work with Sherry and the Catherine of Siena Institute to adapt more specifically the “Called & Gifted” Workshop to the pastoral needs of the Church.

The lives and examples of the saints play large part of the “Called & Gifted” Workshop. During the weekend, Sherry and I illustrated the different charisms that God gives to His People by telling about the lives of different saints, East and West, Orthodox and Catholic. While the theological content of the workshop does not require much (if any) revision for an Orthodox audience, I think that it would be good for me to do addition research in the lives of the saints as their lives can help illustrate our baptismal vocation to be apostles and evangelists.

Finally, in addition to our time together, one of the best things that was done over the weekend was the “Catholic Spiritual Gifts Inventory.” This is a very simple self-scored paper and pencil test that gives the test taker a place to begin his or her own prayerful discernment of his/her personal vocation. While such a test can’t replace the insight that comes from our spiritual fathers, it does have great practical value in helping us understand the different gifts God may have given us.

Grounding our vocation not in our conformity to an external standard but to the prompting of grace in our hearts and confirmed by the Church is something both perfectly compatible with Holy Tradition and often sadly lacking in our work with people in the parish and the seminaries. St Anthony the Great says somewhere that if I would know God I must first know myself. The “Called & Gifted” Workshop is I think a valuable aid in helping Orthodox Christians fulfill the saint’s advice to us.

Again, thank you to all who made the “Called & Gifted” Workshop a success. After Thanksgiving, I hope to have photos for you.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

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

This Weekend’s “Called & Gifted” Workshop

This past weekend, Friday November 21-Saturday November 22, 2008, the parish I serve, Holy Assumption Orthodox Church (OCA), Canton, OH hosted a “Called & Gifted” Workshop presented by Sherry Anne Weddell, who together with Fr Michael Fones, O.P., is co-director of the Catherine of Siena Institute in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Unfortunately, Fr. Mike had to fly to Eugene unexpectedly early Wednesday morning (11/19) to be with his dear friend Pat Armstrong who was gravely ill. (Please remember Pat and her loving husband Rich, and their family (which includes Fr. Mike) in your prayers) and so was not able to attend the workshop.

As I mentioned in an earlier post (Lay Spiritual Formation: An Ecumenical Opportunity), the “Called & Gifted Workshop” is a project of the Catherine of Siena Institute. It is “a program of the Western Dominican Province dedicated to equipping parishes for the formation of lay Catholics for their mission in the world.” To do this, in their own words, they “provide innovative programs, resources, and leadership training that are faithful to Church teaching and will enable your parish to become a dynamic center of lay formation and mission.

The program itself was well attended with 50 participants (roughly equally divided between Orthodox Christians and Roman Catholics). Among other joys, the rector of St Innocent Orthodox Church (OCA) Fr Michael Butler (and my college roommate) came down from Olmsted Falls, OH with 5 of his parishioners. My godson Chris (“Chrys” who comments frequently and eloquently on this blog) also came from Pittsburgh for the workshop. Given the rather miserable weather (the snow squalls were so bad we had white out conditions at several points) I was grateful that ANYONE attended much less that we had visitors from northeastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania!

Sherry asked me to fill in for the absent Fr Mike and so I found myself in the interesting position of explaining to Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christians the renewal in Roman Catholic thinking that came about as a result of the Second Vatican Council. In addition to a more Eucharistic view of ecclesiology, the Vatican II also presented a renewed understood the vocation of Catholic laity in the modern world.

This renewal was in response was in response to challenges facing not only Catholics the Orthodox Church. This is especially the case for the Orthodox Church we move more and more into American culture.

This, I should add, is not a “covert” vs. “cradle” thing—but a natural part of our growth as the Church here in America. Precisely because, as Fr Alexander Schmemann would argue, Christian life is always “from above,” from Heaven and not simply from below (i.e., from history or culture) we are always being challenged to see ourselves, the Church and the world around us every more clearly in the Divine Light.

It amazes me, for example, that people can be so attached to their vision of how a parish is supposed to be, that they would rather see a community fail rather than change (forgetting for a moment as St Gregory of Nyssa reminds us, the ability to change–and change often–is what makes it possible for human beings to become like the God Who changes not).

Thus though the new grace we may obtain is greater than what we had before, it does not put a limit on our final goal; rather, for those who are rising in perfection, the limit of the good that is attained becomes the beginning of the discovery of higher goods. Thus they never stop rising, moving from one new beginning to the next, and the beginning of ever greater graces is never limited of itself For the desire of those who thus rise never rests in what they can already understand; but by an ever greater and greater desire, the soul keeps rising constantly to another that lies ahead, and thus it makes its way through ever higher regions towards the Transcendent.

One of the points that Sherry frequently returned to in her own presentations is that by virtue of our baptism, each of us in our uniqueness is an essential part of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. All of us, whether lay or ordained, are not called to proclaim the Gospel, but we are given unique gifts (charism) that our apostolic and evangelistic call both possible and fruitful

Thinking of Sherry’s presentation, I am reminded of the words of Metropolitan Jonah at the All-American Council. To the degree that the Church becomes is an end in itself, to the degree that it becomes “just for us’ and not “for the life of the world,” to that degree we lose a part of the joy that should be ours. Or, as His Beatitude put the matter,

Being Orthodox is not about what we do in church, that’s maybe 5%. Being an Orthodox Christian is how we live. It’s how we treat one another. It’s our self-denial and our self-giving. It’s our self-transcendence. And, ultimately, what does that lead to, but the complete fulfillment of our personhood in Christ, so that we become who God made us to be in a communion of love with one another. One of the most important things, so far as tasks go that I think it’s a vision that we can embrace as a community.

That 5% is important, critical, essential, but it is only the starting point. We need that 5%, but, we also need to keep our priorities in order. As Jesus says in the Gospel:

Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill and cummin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former. (Mt 23.23)

Metropolitan Jonah and Sherry were both touching on a theme near and dear to Schmemann’s heart: the temptation to “secularism.” When the Church becomes an end in itself, it becomes merely a part of life and not life itself and as a result, we live lives that seek always to Christ and the Gospel neatly in their places so that we are not disturbed and we can go about our lives.

Secularism, our neglect of our baptismal call and the gifts we have received in Holy Baptism is antithesis of what we mean when as Orthodox Christians we speak about theosis, of our coming to participate in divine life. As iron in the fire takes on all the qualities of fire and yet remains iron, so we take on all the qualities of God and remain human. This is what we mean when we say, as Catholic or Orthodox Christians, that Christ has redeemed us. He has redeemed all of human life or none of it. Again, as Schmemann says, “the term ‘sacramental’ means that for the world to be a means of worship and a means of grace is not accidental, but the revelation of its meaning, the restoration of its essence, the fulfillment of its destiny.” (For the Life of the World, p. 121)

There are many blessings that came out of this past weekend. One of the chief though is that it demonstrated, to me at least, that Catholic and Orthodox Christians can assist and sustain each other as we strive to be faithful to Christ and His call to us. Yes, certainly we disagree on some points. But there is much we share and that we can do together that does not betray our respective traditions.

Several of the Orthodox participants were so impressed that they asked if we might tailor the “Called & Gifted” Workshop for use in an Orthodox context. I spoke with Sherry about this and she is certainly open and supportive of such a project. My own view is that there is relatively little that would need to be done.

Hopefully, I’ll be able to post a link to photos of the weekend on the parish web page. Until then, I would encourage people to take a look at the Catherine of Siena web site and its blog, “Intentional Disciples.”

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

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

Igumen Gregory Woolfenden

In your prayers, please remember the soul of the newly departed servant of God, the ever-memorable Igumen (priest-monk) Gregory Woolfenden (Fr Gregory in the center of the picture). A liturgical scholar, a dedicated priest and my friends. When we spoke on the phone who ever called would identify himself by saying “Fr Gregory? It’s the other Fr Gregory.” Since the other Fr Gregory had an English accent, it was funnier when he said it.

May his memory be eternal!

In Christ,

(the other) +Fr Gregory


p.s., Below is the announcement of Fr Gregory’s repose from Bishop Daniel, of the Ukranian Orthodox Church.


+FrG

Dear brethren in Christ: Greetings in our Lord!

We were just prayerfully informed that the servant of God, Igumen Gregory (Woolfenden), pastor of the Nativity of the Most Holy Birth-Giver of God [St. Mary] Ukrainian Orthodox parish, New Britain, CT and professor of St. Sophia Ukrainian Orthodox Theological Seminary has reposed in Christ – born to eternal life – after the long and arduous struggle. Funeral services are scheduled as follows:

December 1 – 7PM Panakhyda at St. Mary Parish, New Britain, CT
December 2 – 10AM Liturgy at St. Mary Parish, New Britain Ct.
December 3 – 10AM Rite of the Monastic Funeral at St. Andrew Memorial Church, South Bound Brook, NJ.

His Eminence Archbishop Antony, President of the Consistory of our Holy Church has requested that we include Fr. Gregory in our prayers and liturgical commemorations and participate in the funeral services.

May his memory be eternal!

With prayers in Christ from Genk (Belgium),

+Daniel,
By the Grace of God Bishop
_________________________________________
His Grace Bishop Daniel
Office of Public Relations
Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the USA
PO Box 495
South Bound Brook, NJ 08880
Tel: (732) 356-0090
Fax: (732) 356-5556
Web: http://www.uocofusa.org
E-mail: ConsistoryOPR@aol.com

Memory Eternal!
God Bless!

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

Thoughts on the New Metropolitan

My respect and affection for Metropolitan Jonah are both deep and sincere (we served together in northern CA for about 7 years–he was a frequent visitor to my home when I was in Redding and I a frequent visitor to St John’s Monastery).

That said, I think that–whatever his many gifts, Metropolitan Jonah can’t make things right in the OCA on his own. As I said at the beginning of the OCA mess, we are wrong to think the problems facing the Church are just the result of a few bad apples. Likewise, the road to spiritual, pastoral and financial health is one that requires we all take responsibility for the life of the Church and commit ourselves personally to Christ and the Gospel.

We run into problems when we forget that our calling, our vocation given to us in baptism, is to proclaim Christ and Him crucified–we are all of us apostles and evangelists of the Good News and not of Orthodoxy as such. The tradition of the Orthodox Church–Liturgy, theology, icons, and asceticism–is not an end in itself–rather it is the context out of which we proclaim the Gospel.

I think of late we have heard too much about Orthodoxy and too little of Christ and the Gospel. Kerygma and Dogma are not opposed, as St Basil the Great reminds us–but neither are they the same thing. For all the converts we’ve received and new churches and monasteries that we’ve built, our focus has been too inward–too much of dogma–and too little outward–preaching the kerygma:

“Go into all the world and proclaim the good news to the whole creation” (Mk. 16:15).

“God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation to save those who believe” (1 Cor. 1:21).

“We proclaim Christ crucified” (1 Cor. 1:23).

“For we do not proclaim ourselves; we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord” (2 Cor. 4:5).

We will undermine our own hope in His Beatitude, and worse we will betray Christ, if we fall back into our old habits of being focused on ourselves and our own needs. We should by all means root ourselves ever more firmly in the Tradition of the Church but only so we can move with boldness and proclaim the Gospel. Again, we have spent too much time preaching Orthodoxy and too little Christ and Him crucified.

We ought not to make the mistake of preaching Jonah and not Jesus.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

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

Love is First A Turning Away from Anger & Harshness

Sunday, November 23, 2008: 23rd SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST (9th of Luke): Afterfeast of the Entry Into the Temple. St. Amphilochius, Bishop of Iconium (394). St. Gregory, Bishop of Agrigentum (6th-7th c.). Repose of Rt. Blv. Great Prince Alexander Nevsky, in schema Aleksy (1263). St. Mitrophán, in schema Makáry, Bishop of Vorónezh (1703). Martyr Sisinius, Bishop of Cyzicus (3rd c.). Martyr Theodore of Antioch (4th c.).

(Above: Rembrandt’s, The Rich Fool)

Then He spoke a parable to them, saying: “The ground of a certain rich man yielded plentifully. And he thought within himself, saying, ‘What shall I do, since I have no room to store my crops?’ So he said, ‘I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build greater, and there I will store all my crops and my goods. ‘And I will say to my soul, “Soul, you have many goods laid up for many years; take your ease; eat, drink, and be merry.”‘ But God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul will be required of you; then whose will those things be which you have provided?’ So is he who lays up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God.

(Luke 12:16-21)

Glory to Jesus Christ!

There is, as I sometimes forget, a seeming harshness to the Gospel. We see that harshness in the parable that we hear in the parable of the rich fool from St Luke’s Gospel.

Look what happens in the parable, judgment is simply pronounced. There is no dialog, no discussion, or exploration of options. There is none of those little ways we have of avoiding, or at least softening, the truth of our situation. Jesus is brutally straightforward: The rich man is self-satisfied fool who has placed his faith in himself, in his own abilities and the wealth he has accrued. But when seen in the Divine Light, all these things are revealed as without substance. “There is no there, there,” as Gertrude Stein once said in a rather different context.

At this point though we must exercise great caution; we ought not to think that the harshness we hear in the parable and in our Lord’s words reflect any anger in God. Speaking of how God calls the sinner to repentance, St Ephrem the Syrian says that

Our Lord gives most of his assistance with persuasion rather than with admonition. Gentle showers soften the earth and thoroughly penetrate it, but a beating rain hardens and compresses the surface of the earth so that it will not be absorbed. “A harsh statement evokes anger” [see, Prv 15.], and with it comes injury. Whenever a harsh word opens a door, anger enters in, and on the heel of anger, injury.

The harshness, the anger, we hear in the parable belongs not to God, but to the rich fool. Or, as St John Chrysostom has it, “All things depend on our decision, certainly also to raise anger or to soothe.”

Thinking about the parable, and how the fathers understand anger, I begin to ask myself what it is about the rich man, about his heart, that becomes a source of damnable anger?

I think that the answer is to be found in the rich man’s trust in himself. His self-confidence is a confidence that he purchases at the expense, as St Cyril of Alexandria reminds us, of charity. Let me be clear here, it is not wrong to have confidence in the talents and gifts God has given you. But this is not the situation of the rich man; (again from St Cyril) he

does not look to the future. He does not raise eyes to God. He does not count it worth his while to gain heaven. He does not cherish the poor or desire the esteem it gains. He does not sympathize with suffering. It gives him no pain nor awakens his pity. Still more irrational, he settles for himself the length of his life, as if he could reap this from the ground. . . . “O rich man,” one may say, “You have storehouses for your fruits, but where will you receive your many years? By the decree of God, your life is shortened.”

His self-confidence, his trust in himself, comes at the expense of trust in God and compassion for his neighbor. I suspect that, in the beginning, his lack of trust in God was, as it is for many of us, more passive than active, more a matter of a certain flaccid thoughtlessness rather than vigorous malice. So to with how we respond to our neighbor. Rarely do we hate our neighbor or wish him ill. My lack of pity typically reflects carelessness on my part than any hardness of heart.

But slowly my lack of trust in God, my lack of compassion for my neighbor can, and does, becomes an active distrust and even an open hostility toward others whether human or divine. More at first from carelessness than malice, I come to see God and neighbor as opponents, as obstacles to the expression of my will and the fulfillment of my desires. It is this carelessness, that the fathers of the desert called acedia, or (to use a more modern terms), a forgetful indifference to the spiritual life and a preference for my own will. In a word, the rich man’s folly is the fruit of the sin of sloth.

And what the desert fathers call acedia the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas calls “the natural atheism of the soul.” Or, to use another of Levinas’s images, acedia sees life as a “warm bath,” comfortable, without demands, but also without challenges and progress and which is lived in isolation from all others, be they God or neighbor.

But for all that it fosters in us a spirit of passivity and isolation acedia is also the well-spring of anger and harshness. I cannot live passively and in isolation. Eventually the ebb and flow of daily life will challenge my delusions. It is in that moment of challenge that the anger in my soul will flare to life and, even if I do not utter a harsh word, I will entertain harsh and horrible thoughts against my neighbor and even against God.

The rich man in the parable is a fool; he sees God and neighbor as opponents, as thieves and enemies. But, as it often is in the spiritual life, there is hidden within even the darkest sin a hint of grace and mercy. Try as he might the enemy of souls can never quite obscure the path back to God—and how could it be otherwise? Since he has always been a liar; he never creates, but only corrupts; he can never reveal the truth, but rather always works furiously, and purposelessly, to obscure what God has made manifest, in creation, in Christ and in each and every human heart.

And if this is true generally, it is especially true in the parable of the rich fool.

If my spiritual death is a dying by degrees, well, so too is our salvation something that is accomplished by grace and equally small changes. By divine grace and our own small acts of gratitude toward God and compassion for our neighbor in need we can be healed of the anger and harshness that grips our lives. And we can even in this way be healed of the passive indifference to the spiritual life we call acedia. And all of this can be done here and now, in even the most ordinary and humble circumstances of everyday life.

How are we to begin? Humbly, by small steps that we take right now.

“Love sinners,” St Isaac the Syrian to us, “and do not despise them for their faults. Remember that you partake in an earthly nature, and do good to all. Let your manner be always courteous and respectful to all. For love does not know anger or lose its temper or find fault with anyone out of passion.” He continues by telling us that we must “not reprove anyone,” that we must “avoid laying down the law,” and “shun impudence in speech,” and above all we must “Be subject to all in every good work, except to those who” like the rich fool in the parable, “love possessions or money.”

To God be the Glory!

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

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