How we see

Was thinking on how in our community we speak about God...and how we interpret events as aligned or contrary to God's will. I'm wonder how much of this behavior and interpretation has been influnced by our presuppositions and by non-Orthodox ethos/theology. What I'm refering to is not the understanding that God is ever present and Pantocrator, but rather our interpretation, our hermeneutic lens, so to speak, as Christians. Often the topic of God's will appears in talks and Christian discourse in North America, and at times we are presented with an ultra-spiritualist, sometimes dualist, fatalist or platonic, perpective from monasteries and the mission field. Perhaps I'm suggesting that as Orthodox, we be self-critical on how we see and interpret our life, our situation, the events and God's presence among us.

Recently read a post related to this topic entitled "Does God Have a Wonderful Plan for Your Life?" by Steve the Builder, in which he points out the self delusion of significance. In particular he points out the temptation of interpreting events in life through a hermenutical lens that "carries the baggage of defining my life by what I do, or constraining it in some significant way that means I forego something that could have been"better" in some significant way."

What I find intruiging is how much of his thought resonates with the thoughts of one Orthodox Priest I heard speak about the "will of God in our lives" where as long as union with the Holy Trinity is being worked out the choice of what vocation matters less (this does not preclude passivity, rather such an approach encourages participation).

I get a sense that the focus is on having "peace with God and with others" (another thought from another Priest), that the vocation, the calling, the work, the service, the mission, the career are in themselves not the goal or necessarily interchangable, but rather the place, the workshop of encountering the mystery of God with honesty and joy.

Steve's thought also touches on the excesses on activity that sometimes becomes a temptation, the need to do rather than to be. The activity to 'believe' (ie. think of Sola Fida, and objective creedal statements), the intellectualiztion of the Faith and it's subsequent reduction to religion. Often we might even define our Orthodoxy in terms of activity, our successes according to the numeric volumes or visible signs of our choosing. Is the Church's success defined by the number of converts? What about the retention rate of the cradle Orthodox? What about the attractiveness of our message? What about the amount of people who have a 'normal' job or have been made into functioning citizens because of our work? What about the number of people who attend an event? What about the size of the group that hears our preaching?

In all these functional manifestations there is an unconcious attempt to package the work of God. Indirectly we may point and say "see this...that's how I know God works." Of course there is a pattern that the Church is aware of, but Orthodoxy leans towards apophatic descriptions as well as cataphatic assertions. Or perhaps a cataphatic observation that is raised to an apophatic contemplation and encounter. What often happens in certain pietistic trends today is a desire to construct a personal or individualized understanding of God apart from the community (and by community I also mean the entire legacy of the Church, all her saints). This is something I would argue is foreign to Orthodox ethos, because it feeds the passions and constructs our own personal idol. It's something that I'm also concerned of embracing and pray that our Liturgical witness within Orthodoxy can help mitigate against.

Steve writes:

"...We can see "success" as blessings and "failure" as sin or delusion, but they could very well be the opposite...It is easy to see good times as "blessings".  And they just might be... or they could just be market forces and good financial planning that even Judas could pull off blindfolded without an abacus. There's whole heresies and denominations built around that notion.  There is another side of that coin that is equally potentially delusional:  I had a friend who used to say, "How come every time God works in a mysterious way, I get kicked in the ass?"  Sometimes God's servants get crucified, and it is His will. The trick is to not develop a "martyr complex" and see the hand of God in bad times when it is really a consequence of you being a total idiot...The fact of the matter is, providence is cumulative and consequences flow down for decades not just weeks or months.  We have no clue what is being "set up" or how things will work out in the long run.  I am VERY wary of interpreting recent events as "the hand of God" or seeing blessings or outcomes in them..." + Steve Robinson (ie. Steve the Builder), Does God Have a Wonderful Plan for Your Life?

Part of the temptation is to look at our missiology as one of imperitive activity, where our activity is the defining factor in the 'salvation of the lost,' and our encounter is not kenotic but didactic. The preach-and-go methodologies fit in this box, as does social gospel and the missionary 'hand-out.' God is identified with personal experience, or personal satisfaction, good feelings and comfort, or in the inverse, as the 'martyr-complex' that Steve has pointed out.

I don't know if there's necessarily a packagable answer and I think Steve's blog post points readers towards a more mature way of interpreting our Orthodoxy. His post asks for a critical self-reflection on our encounter with God and also how we speak about the Holy Trinity's work in our life. There's a oft used adage that Orthodox use "we know where the Church is; we do not know where it is not." Perhaps we are called to a similar view and paradox in our understanding of God's will in our life. HG Anba Angelos once said in a talk, "people always ask me what the will of God is in their life, I often says it's written for you in 1Thess4:3...the will of God is your santification."

So let us pray to avoid the temptation to package God, to reduce Him and our missiology or our Lex Orandi to the lowest common denominator or our passions, or to self-idolatry.  Let us be present and not just say we believe and do activity for activity's sake. Let us encounter the Holy of Holies.

Christ is in our midst, He is and ever shall be.

Be Holy as He is Holy.