Orthodox Tradition and Family Life
by Sister Magadalen of Essex
‘Every step in our Christian life is inseparably related to the fundamental dogmas of our faith.’ How can this statement, made by Archimandrite Sophrony, be applied to family life? Christian life is lived in a community of one sort or another.1 A monastic family, because of its greater degree of separation from the world, is freer to define its daily life in accordance with its aim of prayer and spiritual endeavour. Monasteries exist for this very reason. However, in the world, the situation may not be so straightforward.
Orthodox Christians in every country are a minority group, living in cultures whose values and consequent activities are not all compatible with following Jesus Christ. This means that in their family life there is an element of challenge from differing outlooks as they strive to live out their faith from day to day. Everyone, in fact, lives by what he or she believes about ultimate realities. Those who do not believe that the commandments of Jesus Christ are a reflection of divine and absolute reality will have other goals than those of the Christian. For many of them, earthly and even material aims will provide life's purpose, or else leave life empty and purposeless. Those who try to live as Orthodox Christians find themselves steering a path which aims to avoid two pitfalls: that of proudly disdaining the surrounding culture, and that of being seduced into ways that are alien to the Gospel.
Each family is unique, and each person has his or her own measure. I cannot thus describe a ‘typical’ family. Rather, I hope to show how the ways of the Orthodox Church can be applied in the family today. It is not unusual in the Orthodox Tradition to find monks or nuns writing about family life. As well as the personal experience of family life that someone called to monasticism has had, there is also the fact that monasteries are often centres of pastoral care for families. This is natural because all of us are trying to live the same Christian life. Our situations differ, but there is one spiritual ideal.
It is not an easy task to raise a Christian family nowadays, but no one should despair that it has become impossible. Christianity has always, in every epoch and place, posed a challenge for fallen man; St Silouan says that if the world can no longer produce saints, it will be brought to an end.
The Foundations of Family Life
The fundamental ontological category of Orthodox Christian theology is the person or hypostasis. This implies that it is the personal aspect, in God and in humankind, which defines our being and our life: the absolute and eternal life of God himself, and the life of man who is made in God’s image. Archimandrite Sophrony says that ‘differences in theological interpretation of the principle of the person-hypostasis in the divine being constitute a watershed, a demarcation line, not only between the various religions but between Christian confessions too.’
Theological accuracy on this issue has been seen by holy men and women to be vital, not simply so as to produce a ‘correct’ theology manual, but because, being such a basic issue, any distortion of it may have drastic consequences. If we imagine a circle with a wide diameter, we can visualize how a minute turn at the centre results in a significant movement at the circumference. If God himself, or humankind, are not envisaged as they really are, then human ideals become mirages, leading eventually to death. This does not mean that in order to ‘obey the truth’ (Galatians 5.7) everyone must be an expert dogmatic theologian - that would exclude most of us - but it does mean that we use as guides for our life the saints who have known God as he is. As the first model of true humanity we have Jesus Christ the God-man, as he is described by those who have lived in Christ.
The Church, as the Body of Christ, of which the baptized are members, is thus the foremost experience of true human life, because true human life means to live in the image of God-in-Trinity, in loving communion with each other and with God. This is the basis of family life, whether or not anyone in the family is able to articulate it theologically. A baby cannot discourse on maternal love, but a baby knows, even better than any discourse could explain, whether or not he or she is receiving sincere maternal love. At baptism, the Orthodox Christian, or in the case of infants, the godparent, proclaims the traditional Nicaeno-Constantinopolitan Creed as his or her own vision (‘I believe in...’). For this belief, which is initially based on trust, to become experientially confirmed, theological diplomas are not a prerequisite. What is necessary is to follow, in as full a measure as we can, the way of life taught and practised by those who could say ‘I believe', because they knew, having lived in the Holy Spirit of truth.
Living in our turn as members of the Church, in the time and place given to us by God, we benefit from the teaching and experience of holy men and women, past and contemporary, just as one who is making a hazardous journey would benefit from clear maps and trusted guides. Christ is the unique way, as well as the destination. Living in this certainty should not lead Christians to any pride - it is Christ himself who instructs us to learn humility from him - but to gratitude to God who has revealed himself and shown a sure pathway to the kingdom. Christians believe that there is no time or place in which this ceases to be true. How, then, can today’s Orthodox Christian families reflect these beliefs in their lives?
In practice, what I have been speaking of means that family life includes a dimension that might be termed liturgical. Yesterday and tomorrow become ever-present in this time scale. It is, for example, not irrelevant to see how a sixth-century saint recommends us to keep the fast, or to include the hope of the kingdom of heaven as an element when weighing up a painful moral decision. When a Church feast is celebrated, those attending are brought into the event itself, to experience now its eternal value. They are given the chance to be actually present as a contemporary; they are not simply reflecting on the past. For example, at Christmas, the choir sings: Today the Virgin gives birth to him who is above all being". Orthodox Christians are known to have long services, which some people consider impractical in contemporary Western society. But liturgical life and everyday life are not in separate compartments in the life of a faithful Orthodox Christian. Liturgy is life and all of life is liturgical.
This liturgical pattern of life involves all family members, including the youngest children. In the Orthodox Church, there are no particular services for children, any more than there would be for, say, adults of differing intellectual ability. The services touch the whole of man and are not merely intellectual experiences. Sight, smell, touch, taste, hearing, emotions, are all blessed. The living presence of God can be sensed by a child even while it lies within the womb, as the case of John the Baptist shows. Thus, babies are baptized and brought for Holy Communion as full members of the Body of Christ.
The services, and even in many cases the rubrics, are handed down from the saints over the centuries, with little variation from generation to generation or from country to country. Even those who are illiterate can become familiar with them. Children, too, can grow into an intellectual understanding of what is taking place in church - as far as each one’s natural abilities allow - by living in the presence of the Holy Spirit. The degree of participation, of course, varies with the spiritual state of each person; but that is a matter of human freedom.
Rather than actually changing the services, contemporary communities make allowances for particular circumstances. For example, parish services are often shorter than those in monasteries; often small children are not brought from the beginning, or they are taken out for a while if they are too fidgety. Sometimes young people are known to complain that the language of the services is an ancient form that is too hard to follow, and some communities have re-translated texts accordingly. However, youngsters who are spiritually hungry often make the effort to learn some uncommon words (which takes less time to learn than, for instance, computer terminology), or they attend where the services are in a language they know. Often, the uniformity in services means that even in a completely foreign language people can follow prayerfully.
Liturgical life spills over into the home, or rather, as St John Chrysostom puts it, members of the Church can make the home into a ‘micro-Church’. On the visible level, the same icons which adorn the church building bring the events and saints portrayed in them into the home. There is an icon comer where prayers are said. Families pray all together, parents pray with small children, and each person needs time alone with God every day. The verbal prayers used are of two kinds: those of the saints, so that one learns to pray as they did, and each one’s own prayers, which are not necessarily in the ‘best style’. Prayer may also be without words. At any age, prayer can be experienced as a person-to-person meeting.
Any and every activity can be blessed by prayer: cooking, washing, speaking with children, setting out on a journey, deciding financial questions... anything. As St Silouan said, ‘Every act which cannot be preceded by prayer without our feeling troubled, is better avoided.’2 In a home filled with prayer, God is ‘tasted’, prayer is as natural as breathing, and Holy Tradition is passed to the next generation less by preaching than by life and example, which is the most enduring lesson.3 Prayerful love is the keynote of the Christian home.
Loving as Christ commands us is not always easy. Everyone needs help and the opportunity to repent of any failures and continually begin again. One way in which the Orthodox Church can help its members is through the sacrament of confession. Again, there is no age limit for this sacrament; I have known three-year olds who confess sincerely. The norm is usually that from about seven years old people go regularly, that is, a few times each year, often during the fasts before the major feasts.
Confession is not anonymous, but, as with all sacraments, it is participated in by name, that is, with growing personal consciousness. The priest hears confessions as a representative both of God and of the whole Church community.4 The relationship which each one can have with a spiritual father furthers the feeling of belonging in the wider community of the Church. For example, it often safeguards the relationships of teenagers with God even in cases where there is animosity between parents and children.
Sin is a reality of our daily life; but the positive application of our freedom is also a fundamental reality, whose true meaning we can learn day by day. In this quest, a spiritual father is a link between the Tradition of the saints and each one’s life in today’s world. Following well-trodden paths does not imply merely a mechanical repetition of the past, because people’s circumstances vary, and more importantly, because each one of us is a unique being, called by God’s personal love into personal existence.
It is the spiritual fathers - as well as the parents, where children are concerned - who decide how, and in what measure, to apply the Church’s practice in particular cases. The person is more important than the rule. The rule provides a standard which we may not simply dismiss because it dates from long ago, or because it is difficult to apply, or because it involves discomfort or ascetic struggle. A failure to reach the standard can be healed by repentance. An example of this is that since the first millennium, the Orthodox Church has allowed for divorce - as a last resort, of course, and not lightly - and second, or occasionally even third marriages, whose rites are penitential in character.
Spiritual life is not considered to be the prerogative of monasteries. Indeed, parish services and home prayers use the same service books as the monasteries, and monastic books, such as the famous anthology on prayer, the Philokalia, are read by lay people. The family, no less than the monastery, is a school where one can learn life’s great lesson: how to love God with all our being, and our neighbour as ourselves. ‘On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets’ (Matthew 22.40). In other words, they are, quite literally, what life is all about.
Christ enjoins perfection on all of us (Matthew 5.48). Those who hear his call before they are married will try, not least by prayer, to seek out a partner who shares the aims of the gospel. They can choose to mark their daily life with prayer, hospitality, Christian forbearance, help for the less fortunate, care for the environment, and by avoiding greed and the other passions. Their whole relationship will be guided by the spirit manifested in the teachings of Christ and his apostles. They can, to give a concrete example, organize their holidays so that they are free in Holy Week. (In a practising Orthodox family, the feasts of the Church year are events around which life is scheduled, as far as work and school timetables permit.)
In some cases, one of the spouses does not belong to the Orthodox Church.5 In others, the partners do not share the same degree of commitment to the ways of the Church. From apostolic times, married Christians have been in such situations (1 Corinthians 7.12ff., 1 Peter 3.1f.). There is no way that a Christian should wish to impose faith on other members of a family. Differences in outlook arise where there are non-believing (or less practising) adults in the family, and also in the context of the upbringing of children, to which we now turn once again our attention. What does the Orthodox Tradition have to say to contemporary parents?
The Upbringing of Children
The gospel calls us to feed the hungry and clothe the naked. Apart from the obvious meaning, itself an important element in Christian service, there is also a spiritual meaning. We are to share spiritual nourishment and clothing. This reminds us of St Paul’s description of the baptized as those who have 'put on Christ’, or who are clothed in Christ (Galatians 3.27). This aspect of caring for children is the most vital part of their upbringing, even more vital than overseeing their physical and psychological development. Again, I stress that the spiritual dimension includes every aspect of the person, down to the question of how they dress and what they eat.
It is the order of priorities that is important for a Christian family. The commandment to love God is the first; thus the first concern is each child's personal relationship with the Absolute, Personal Truth. The Church’s pedagogy is based on this foundation. For example, when mother and child are churched forty days after the birth of a baby, the child is dedicated to God in his or her own name.6 The mother receives back the child, picking it up from the floor of the church. The message of the service is clear: this child is first of all called to be a child of God and co-heir with Christ, the Son of the Father (Romans 8.17). The parents’ task is to bring the child up 'in the discipline and instruction of the Lord’ (Ephesians 6.4), and to teach him or her how to know God personally.
Knowledge of God is personal. God is personal love, and we can only know him by loving him, which cannot be brought about by constraint. The Eastern Church’s doctrine of synergy, which describes how man can freely co-operate with uncreated grace, and how this is what saves man, applies directly to the role of parents. We might use the analogy of fishing, and say with the old proverb: ‘Give your son a fish and he will eat well today. Teach him how to use a fishing rod and he will eat well all his life.’ Or to take another analogy, from horticulture: those who teach children are not so much occupied with counting flowers on the plants, as with watering their roots.
Freedom does not, of course, mean ‘being allowed to do what you feel like’. This misunderstanding of freedom prevails in Western culture, and leads, visibly, to slavery to selfish passions, to the idea that I have a right to something if I desire it. Freedom really means our human capacity to determine, by the use of our own will, our destiny. In our daily life, this implies our potential to discern right from wrong and to fulfil what is right. In this God-given human attribute, man’s person, or hypostasis, is akin to God.
Those who are truly free are those who love. A primary task of parents is to teach love, and love is learned more easily by those who have the experience of being loved. ‘Nothing so furthers teaching as this: loving and being loved’, said that wonderful pedagogical guide, St John Chrysostom (Homily 6). To do the best one can for one’s children means to foster as well as one is able their growth in likeness to God. This is not simply a pious duty; Christian parents are called to be fellow-workers with God in the creation and formation of new persons, new sons and daughters of God. Personhood in the fullest sense belongs to the saints; they are the most truly human beings. A lesser aim for the children in a Christian family would ignore the most vital elements of reality both human and divine.
In daily life, this means that each child is to be treated as unique. The child’s real worth stems from his or her personal existence, and not from any particular talents or personality traits. Indeed, it may be harmful to confuse personhood and personality, because the latter often includes characteristics that are negative and ‘passionate’ - that is, a destructive distortion of human energies. The true person, as God wills and calls him or her by name (Revelation 2.17 and Philippians 4.3), is the ‘I’ which loves God and other people, not the ‘I’ which demands the gratification of sinful desires. A strong personality may be one full of egoism. Christian parents, above all by example, will try to encourage humility, service, unselfishness and obedience, as well as courage and self-discipline.
St John of Kronstadt, along with other ecclesiastical writers, urges great attentiveness so that children learn to distinguish between right and wrong from a young age.
Parents are recommended to pray every morning in words such as these: ‘O Lord our God, thou knowest this thy child, his heart, his needs, his future. Guide me at all times, and do not let me harm him by any error in my dealings with him today.’
If a faithful Christian parent has to impose his will on a child, it will be for the sake of the child - for example, to avert danger or to ensure that the child learns obedience. Authority in parents is one of the factors providing security for a child; Scripture itself teaches honour and obedience to parents. But authority should not mean ‘power’, or the suppression of a child’s individuality; it is for guidance, not for tyranny. Obedience, itself an expression of love, develops with maturity. At the beginning it has to mean: ‘do as you are told’; by adulthood it means: ‘prefer the will of another out of love’.
St John Chrysostom, writing in the fourth century, suggests mealtimes as a good occasion to speak with children and to introduce stories and examples from Scripture and the lives of godly people into their lives. A Christian family will make occasions to be together, to eat together, to speak together.
It is worth every effort and sacrifice to give time to listen to children. How can parents give them the vital experience of being unconditionally loved and treasured if their own timetable allows perhaps ten minutes of ‘quality time’ per day? When a conflict of opinion arises, how can parents deal with it fairly if argument is the only form of dialogue they have had with the child for a fortnight? Such practical issues cannot be neatly solved by any recipe. But neither can they be ignored by parents for selfish reasons. Parenthood means giving children a lot of time over many years.
A good relationship with children makes real dialogue possible. In the case of older children, this is their anchor as they learn to use more and more freedom of choice, so that they can leave home ready to find and do the will of God in every situation. If parents feel something had better be forbidden to a teenager, they will be able to explain, and sometimes also to make compromises or set conditions, so as to develop the child’s sense of responsibility. Their opinions will only have weight if they have a real relationship with their children. Christian discernment about all that the world has to offer cannot be learnt in a straitjacket.
Parents of teenagers especially, will spend much time in prayer for their children, and they will struggle to emphasize essential matters, such as faith in Christ as God, or prayer, even at the risk of a period of relative negligence on ‘secondary’ issues.7 To give a concrete example, a parent may decide against insisting that an adolescent go without meat on a Friday, and may even avoid mentioning it at all, if that seems best in that particular case at that time. Nothing of eternal value is achieved by using force against another. God himself has this problem with all of us...
The venerable Elder Porphyrios used to say, when parents complained that their children would not listen to them: ‘It’s because you tried to tell your daughter before you’d told the Mother of God’, or, “if you can’t speak to your child about God, speak to God about your child’, or, ‘it’s because you yourself are not at peace and at prayer - put yourself right and everything will change in your house.’ Spouses who communicate well between each other will also set a healthy tone for communication between generations.
Practising Orthodox teenagers may differ from the average teenager today, but this is principally because, unlike the majority, they have a relationship with God. They have many tastes in common with their contemporaries. One mother once told me: 'The walls of my son’s room tell you all about him. On one side the football posters, on the other side the icons.’ St John Chrysostom wrote for parents, in his book, On the Education of Children: ‘Bring up an athlete for Christ, and teach [your son] to have, living in the world, fear of God from his youth.’
Externally viewed, there are many areas of overlap between Christian daily life and the life of our fellow-citizens. In the second century Letter to Diognetus, the writer says:
Often the children of a Christian family - and not only in the case of immigrants from another country - find themselves leading a kind of double life. In a sense, Christians in the world are doing just that - they belong to the earthly and the heavenly spheres - but children need help to hold all their experiences together under God.
Thus we return in thought to the Church’s services, which do precisely that. There are even prayer services for particular situations: for the sick, for the blessing of homes and cars and crops, for travellers, for times of distress, at the deathbed, for the beginning of a child’s schooling and so on. The Divine Liturgy itself includes petitions for many specific occasions and needs.
The services also make intercession for all the world, and there is, equally, a universal dimension in Christian family life. Followers of Christ are called to be the ‘salt of the earth'(Matthew 5.13). The ‘savour of Christ' (2 Corinthians 2.15) really can be an ingredient in contemporary family life. When it is, the family itself benefits, and those who come into contact with the family benefit; but also, because humans share one nature, all of humanity can benefit. Each family can contribute to the transfiguration of the world by abiding in the grace of God, which is living and active today and for ever.
Notes
by Sister Magadalen of Essex
‘Every step in our Christian life is inseparably related to the fundamental dogmas of our faith.’ How can this statement, made by Archimandrite Sophrony, be applied to family life? Christian life is lived in a community of one sort or another.1 A monastic family, because of its greater degree of separation from the world, is freer to define its daily life in accordance with its aim of prayer and spiritual endeavour. Monasteries exist for this very reason. However, in the world, the situation may not be so straightforward.
Orthodox Christians in every country are a minority group, living in cultures whose values and consequent activities are not all compatible with following Jesus Christ. This means that in their family life there is an element of challenge from differing outlooks as they strive to live out their faith from day to day. Everyone, in fact, lives by what he or she believes about ultimate realities. Those who do not believe that the commandments of Jesus Christ are a reflection of divine and absolute reality will have other goals than those of the Christian. For many of them, earthly and even material aims will provide life's purpose, or else leave life empty and purposeless. Those who try to live as Orthodox Christians find themselves steering a path which aims to avoid two pitfalls: that of proudly disdaining the surrounding culture, and that of being seduced into ways that are alien to the Gospel.
Each family is unique, and each person has his or her own measure. I cannot thus describe a ‘typical’ family. Rather, I hope to show how the ways of the Orthodox Church can be applied in the family today. It is not unusual in the Orthodox Tradition to find monks or nuns writing about family life. As well as the personal experience of family life that someone called to monasticism has had, there is also the fact that monasteries are often centres of pastoral care for families. This is natural because all of us are trying to live the same Christian life. Our situations differ, but there is one spiritual ideal.
It is not an easy task to raise a Christian family nowadays, but no one should despair that it has become impossible. Christianity has always, in every epoch and place, posed a challenge for fallen man; St Silouan says that if the world can no longer produce saints, it will be brought to an end.
The Foundations of Family Life
The fundamental ontological category of Orthodox Christian theology is the person or hypostasis. This implies that it is the personal aspect, in God and in humankind, which defines our being and our life: the absolute and eternal life of God himself, and the life of man who is made in God’s image. Archimandrite Sophrony says that ‘differences in theological interpretation of the principle of the person-hypostasis in the divine being constitute a watershed, a demarcation line, not only between the various religions but between Christian confessions too.’
Theological accuracy on this issue has been seen by holy men and women to be vital, not simply so as to produce a ‘correct’ theology manual, but because, being such a basic issue, any distortion of it may have drastic consequences. If we imagine a circle with a wide diameter, we can visualize how a minute turn at the centre results in a significant movement at the circumference. If God himself, or humankind, are not envisaged as they really are, then human ideals become mirages, leading eventually to death. This does not mean that in order to ‘obey the truth’ (Galatians 5.7) everyone must be an expert dogmatic theologian - that would exclude most of us - but it does mean that we use as guides for our life the saints who have known God as he is. As the first model of true humanity we have Jesus Christ the God-man, as he is described by those who have lived in Christ.
The Church, as the Body of Christ, of which the baptized are members, is thus the foremost experience of true human life, because true human life means to live in the image of God-in-Trinity, in loving communion with each other and with God. This is the basis of family life, whether or not anyone in the family is able to articulate it theologically. A baby cannot discourse on maternal love, but a baby knows, even better than any discourse could explain, whether or not he or she is receiving sincere maternal love. At baptism, the Orthodox Christian, or in the case of infants, the godparent, proclaims the traditional Nicaeno-Constantinopolitan Creed as his or her own vision (‘I believe in...’). For this belief, which is initially based on trust, to become experientially confirmed, theological diplomas are not a prerequisite. What is necessary is to follow, in as full a measure as we can, the way of life taught and practised by those who could say ‘I believe', because they knew, having lived in the Holy Spirit of truth.
Living in our turn as members of the Church, in the time and place given to us by God, we benefit from the teaching and experience of holy men and women, past and contemporary, just as one who is making a hazardous journey would benefit from clear maps and trusted guides. Christ is the unique way, as well as the destination. Living in this certainty should not lead Christians to any pride - it is Christ himself who instructs us to learn humility from him - but to gratitude to God who has revealed himself and shown a sure pathway to the kingdom. Christians believe that there is no time or place in which this ceases to be true. How, then, can today’s Orthodox Christian families reflect these beliefs in their lives?
In practice, what I have been speaking of means that family life includes a dimension that might be termed liturgical. Yesterday and tomorrow become ever-present in this time scale. It is, for example, not irrelevant to see how a sixth-century saint recommends us to keep the fast, or to include the hope of the kingdom of heaven as an element when weighing up a painful moral decision. When a Church feast is celebrated, those attending are brought into the event itself, to experience now its eternal value. They are given the chance to be actually present as a contemporary; they are not simply reflecting on the past. For example, at Christmas, the choir sings: Today the Virgin gives birth to him who is above all being". Orthodox Christians are known to have long services, which some people consider impractical in contemporary Western society. But liturgical life and everyday life are not in separate compartments in the life of a faithful Orthodox Christian. Liturgy is life and all of life is liturgical.
This liturgical pattern of life involves all family members, including the youngest children. In the Orthodox Church, there are no particular services for children, any more than there would be for, say, adults of differing intellectual ability. The services touch the whole of man and are not merely intellectual experiences. Sight, smell, touch, taste, hearing, emotions, are all blessed. The living presence of God can be sensed by a child even while it lies within the womb, as the case of John the Baptist shows. Thus, babies are baptized and brought for Holy Communion as full members of the Body of Christ.
The services, and even in many cases the rubrics, are handed down from the saints over the centuries, with little variation from generation to generation or from country to country. Even those who are illiterate can become familiar with them. Children, too, can grow into an intellectual understanding of what is taking place in church - as far as each one’s natural abilities allow - by living in the presence of the Holy Spirit. The degree of participation, of course, varies with the spiritual state of each person; but that is a matter of human freedom.
Rather than actually changing the services, contemporary communities make allowances for particular circumstances. For example, parish services are often shorter than those in monasteries; often small children are not brought from the beginning, or they are taken out for a while if they are too fidgety. Sometimes young people are known to complain that the language of the services is an ancient form that is too hard to follow, and some communities have re-translated texts accordingly. However, youngsters who are spiritually hungry often make the effort to learn some uncommon words (which takes less time to learn than, for instance, computer terminology), or they attend where the services are in a language they know. Often, the uniformity in services means that even in a completely foreign language people can follow prayerfully.
Liturgical life spills over into the home, or rather, as St John Chrysostom puts it, members of the Church can make the home into a ‘micro-Church’. On the visible level, the same icons which adorn the church building bring the events and saints portrayed in them into the home. There is an icon comer where prayers are said. Families pray all together, parents pray with small children, and each person needs time alone with God every day. The verbal prayers used are of two kinds: those of the saints, so that one learns to pray as they did, and each one’s own prayers, which are not necessarily in the ‘best style’. Prayer may also be without words. At any age, prayer can be experienced as a person-to-person meeting.
Any and every activity can be blessed by prayer: cooking, washing, speaking with children, setting out on a journey, deciding financial questions... anything. As St Silouan said, ‘Every act which cannot be preceded by prayer without our feeling troubled, is better avoided.’2 In a home filled with prayer, God is ‘tasted’, prayer is as natural as breathing, and Holy Tradition is passed to the next generation less by preaching than by life and example, which is the most enduring lesson.3 Prayerful love is the keynote of the Christian home.
Loving as Christ commands us is not always easy. Everyone needs help and the opportunity to repent of any failures and continually begin again. One way in which the Orthodox Church can help its members is through the sacrament of confession. Again, there is no age limit for this sacrament; I have known three-year olds who confess sincerely. The norm is usually that from about seven years old people go regularly, that is, a few times each year, often during the fasts before the major feasts.
Confession is not anonymous, but, as with all sacraments, it is participated in by name, that is, with growing personal consciousness. The priest hears confessions as a representative both of God and of the whole Church community.4 The relationship which each one can have with a spiritual father furthers the feeling of belonging in the wider community of the Church. For example, it often safeguards the relationships of teenagers with God even in cases where there is animosity between parents and children.
Sin is a reality of our daily life; but the positive application of our freedom is also a fundamental reality, whose true meaning we can learn day by day. In this quest, a spiritual father is a link between the Tradition of the saints and each one’s life in today’s world. Following well-trodden paths does not imply merely a mechanical repetition of the past, because people’s circumstances vary, and more importantly, because each one of us is a unique being, called by God’s personal love into personal existence.
It is the spiritual fathers - as well as the parents, where children are concerned - who decide how, and in what measure, to apply the Church’s practice in particular cases. The person is more important than the rule. The rule provides a standard which we may not simply dismiss because it dates from long ago, or because it is difficult to apply, or because it involves discomfort or ascetic struggle. A failure to reach the standard can be healed by repentance. An example of this is that since the first millennium, the Orthodox Church has allowed for divorce - as a last resort, of course, and not lightly - and second, or occasionally even third marriages, whose rites are penitential in character.
Spiritual life is not considered to be the prerogative of monasteries. Indeed, parish services and home prayers use the same service books as the monasteries, and monastic books, such as the famous anthology on prayer, the Philokalia, are read by lay people. The family, no less than the monastery, is a school where one can learn life’s great lesson: how to love God with all our being, and our neighbour as ourselves. ‘On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets’ (Matthew 22.40). In other words, they are, quite literally, what life is all about.
Christ enjoins perfection on all of us (Matthew 5.48). Those who hear his call before they are married will try, not least by prayer, to seek out a partner who shares the aims of the gospel. They can choose to mark their daily life with prayer, hospitality, Christian forbearance, help for the less fortunate, care for the environment, and by avoiding greed and the other passions. Their whole relationship will be guided by the spirit manifested in the teachings of Christ and his apostles. They can, to give a concrete example, organize their holidays so that they are free in Holy Week. (In a practising Orthodox family, the feasts of the Church year are events around which life is scheduled, as far as work and school timetables permit.)
In some cases, one of the spouses does not belong to the Orthodox Church.5 In others, the partners do not share the same degree of commitment to the ways of the Church. From apostolic times, married Christians have been in such situations (1 Corinthians 7.12ff., 1 Peter 3.1f.). There is no way that a Christian should wish to impose faith on other members of a family. Differences in outlook arise where there are non-believing (or less practising) adults in the family, and also in the context of the upbringing of children, to which we now turn once again our attention. What does the Orthodox Tradition have to say to contemporary parents?
The Upbringing of Children
The gospel calls us to feed the hungry and clothe the naked. Apart from the obvious meaning, itself an important element in Christian service, there is also a spiritual meaning. We are to share spiritual nourishment and clothing. This reminds us of St Paul’s description of the baptized as those who have 'put on Christ’, or who are clothed in Christ (Galatians 3.27). This aspect of caring for children is the most vital part of their upbringing, even more vital than overseeing their physical and psychological development. Again, I stress that the spiritual dimension includes every aspect of the person, down to the question of how they dress and what they eat.
It is the order of priorities that is important for a Christian family. The commandment to love God is the first; thus the first concern is each child's personal relationship with the Absolute, Personal Truth. The Church’s pedagogy is based on this foundation. For example, when mother and child are churched forty days after the birth of a baby, the child is dedicated to God in his or her own name.6 The mother receives back the child, picking it up from the floor of the church. The message of the service is clear: this child is first of all called to be a child of God and co-heir with Christ, the Son of the Father (Romans 8.17). The parents’ task is to bring the child up 'in the discipline and instruction of the Lord’ (Ephesians 6.4), and to teach him or her how to know God personally.
Knowledge of God is personal. God is personal love, and we can only know him by loving him, which cannot be brought about by constraint. The Eastern Church’s doctrine of synergy, which describes how man can freely co-operate with uncreated grace, and how this is what saves man, applies directly to the role of parents. We might use the analogy of fishing, and say with the old proverb: ‘Give your son a fish and he will eat well today. Teach him how to use a fishing rod and he will eat well all his life.’ Or to take another analogy, from horticulture: those who teach children are not so much occupied with counting flowers on the plants, as with watering their roots.
Freedom does not, of course, mean ‘being allowed to do what you feel like’. This misunderstanding of freedom prevails in Western culture, and leads, visibly, to slavery to selfish passions, to the idea that I have a right to something if I desire it. Freedom really means our human capacity to determine, by the use of our own will, our destiny. In our daily life, this implies our potential to discern right from wrong and to fulfil what is right. In this God-given human attribute, man’s person, or hypostasis, is akin to God.
Those who are truly free are those who love. A primary task of parents is to teach love, and love is learned more easily by those who have the experience of being loved. ‘Nothing so furthers teaching as this: loving and being loved’, said that wonderful pedagogical guide, St John Chrysostom (Homily 6). To do the best one can for one’s children means to foster as well as one is able their growth in likeness to God. This is not simply a pious duty; Christian parents are called to be fellow-workers with God in the creation and formation of new persons, new sons and daughters of God. Personhood in the fullest sense belongs to the saints; they are the most truly human beings. A lesser aim for the children in a Christian family would ignore the most vital elements of reality both human and divine.
In daily life, this means that each child is to be treated as unique. The child’s real worth stems from his or her personal existence, and not from any particular talents or personality traits. Indeed, it may be harmful to confuse personhood and personality, because the latter often includes characteristics that are negative and ‘passionate’ - that is, a destructive distortion of human energies. The true person, as God wills and calls him or her by name (Revelation 2.17 and Philippians 4.3), is the ‘I’ which loves God and other people, not the ‘I’ which demands the gratification of sinful desires. A strong personality may be one full of egoism. Christian parents, above all by example, will try to encourage humility, service, unselfishness and obedience, as well as courage and self-discipline.
St John of Kronstadt, along with other ecclesiastical writers, urges great attentiveness so that children learn to distinguish between right and wrong from a young age.
Do not neglect to uproot from the hearts of children the tares of sins, impure, evil and blasphemous thoughts, sinful habits, inclinations and passions; the enemy and the sinful flesh do not spare even children; the seeds of all sins are to be found in children too. Show them all the danger of sin on the path of life; do not hide sins from them lest through ignorance and want of comprehension they should be confirmed in sinful habits and attachments, which grow stronger and stronger and bring forth corresponding fruits when the children grow up.In training their children, parents will try to be guided even in everyday decisions by prayer for enlightenment and discernment. Is the answer to be ‘yes’ or ‘no’? Is a lesson necessary now or should I wait until another time? Is this a moment to show indulgence, or to show anger? (Anger, not meant here as the passionate state of irritation or rage, but as a pedagogical tool when gentle words of explanation, warning or reproach have not sufficed.) ‘Lord, enlighten me!’
St John of Kronstadt, My Life in Christ (Holy Trinity Monastery, Jordanville, 1984).
Parents are recommended to pray every morning in words such as these: ‘O Lord our God, thou knowest this thy child, his heart, his needs, his future. Guide me at all times, and do not let me harm him by any error in my dealings with him today.’
If a faithful Christian parent has to impose his will on a child, it will be for the sake of the child - for example, to avert danger or to ensure that the child learns obedience. Authority in parents is one of the factors providing security for a child; Scripture itself teaches honour and obedience to parents. But authority should not mean ‘power’, or the suppression of a child’s individuality; it is for guidance, not for tyranny. Obedience, itself an expression of love, develops with maturity. At the beginning it has to mean: ‘do as you are told’; by adulthood it means: ‘prefer the will of another out of love’.
St John Chrysostom, writing in the fourth century, suggests mealtimes as a good occasion to speak with children and to introduce stories and examples from Scripture and the lives of godly people into their lives. A Christian family will make occasions to be together, to eat together, to speak together.
It is worth every effort and sacrifice to give time to listen to children. How can parents give them the vital experience of being unconditionally loved and treasured if their own timetable allows perhaps ten minutes of ‘quality time’ per day? When a conflict of opinion arises, how can parents deal with it fairly if argument is the only form of dialogue they have had with the child for a fortnight? Such practical issues cannot be neatly solved by any recipe. But neither can they be ignored by parents for selfish reasons. Parenthood means giving children a lot of time over many years.
A good relationship with children makes real dialogue possible. In the case of older children, this is their anchor as they learn to use more and more freedom of choice, so that they can leave home ready to find and do the will of God in every situation. If parents feel something had better be forbidden to a teenager, they will be able to explain, and sometimes also to make compromises or set conditions, so as to develop the child’s sense of responsibility. Their opinions will only have weight if they have a real relationship with their children. Christian discernment about all that the world has to offer cannot be learnt in a straitjacket.
Parents of teenagers especially, will spend much time in prayer for their children, and they will struggle to emphasize essential matters, such as faith in Christ as God, or prayer, even at the risk of a period of relative negligence on ‘secondary’ issues.7 To give a concrete example, a parent may decide against insisting that an adolescent go without meat on a Friday, and may even avoid mentioning it at all, if that seems best in that particular case at that time. Nothing of eternal value is achieved by using force against another. God himself has this problem with all of us...
The venerable Elder Porphyrios used to say, when parents complained that their children would not listen to them: ‘It’s because you tried to tell your daughter before you’d told the Mother of God’, or, “if you can’t speak to your child about God, speak to God about your child’, or, ‘it’s because you yourself are not at peace and at prayer - put yourself right and everything will change in your house.’ Spouses who communicate well between each other will also set a healthy tone for communication between generations.
Practising Orthodox teenagers may differ from the average teenager today, but this is principally because, unlike the majority, they have a relationship with God. They have many tastes in common with their contemporaries. One mother once told me: 'The walls of my son’s room tell you all about him. On one side the football posters, on the other side the icons.’ St John Chrysostom wrote for parents, in his book, On the Education of Children: ‘Bring up an athlete for Christ, and teach [your son] to have, living in the world, fear of God from his youth.’
Externally viewed, there are many areas of overlap between Christian daily life and the life of our fellow-citizens. In the second century Letter to Diognetus, the writer says:
The difference between Christians and the rest of mankind is not a matter of nationality, or language, or customs. Christians do not live apart in separate cities of their own, speak any special dialect, nor practise any eccentric way of life... They pass their lives in whatever township each man’s lot has determined; and conform to local usage in their clothing, diet, and other habits. Nonetheless... their community does exhibit some features that are remarkable, and even surprising... They obey the prescribed laws, but in their own private lives they transcend the laws.In families where there are school-age children, the main area of overlap is the school environment. However, the values the school tries to inculcate are not necessarily always in accordance with the Spirit of truth. Peer pressure can also create value-conflicts for the child. This is a domain where Christian parents need a lot of effort: to know the school, to attend the school functions, to ensure that any issues can be fearlessly discussed at home, to show appreciation for the school's positive contribution to the child’s development, to offer hospitality to the child’s school friends, and so on.
Letter to Diognetus (translated by M. Staniforth, Early Christian Writings, Penguin 1995).
Often the children of a Christian family - and not only in the case of immigrants from another country - find themselves leading a kind of double life. In a sense, Christians in the world are doing just that - they belong to the earthly and the heavenly spheres - but children need help to hold all their experiences together under God.
Thus we return in thought to the Church’s services, which do precisely that. There are even prayer services for particular situations: for the sick, for the blessing of homes and cars and crops, for travellers, for times of distress, at the deathbed, for the beginning of a child’s schooling and so on. The Divine Liturgy itself includes petitions for many specific occasions and needs.
The services also make intercession for all the world, and there is, equally, a universal dimension in Christian family life. Followers of Christ are called to be the ‘salt of the earth'(Matthew 5.13). The ‘savour of Christ' (2 Corinthians 2.15) really can be an ingredient in contemporary family life. When it is, the family itself benefits, and those who come into contact with the family benefit; but also, because humans share one nature, all of humanity can benefit. Each family can contribute to the transfiguration of the world by abiding in the grace of God, which is living and active today and for ever.
Notes
- 1. There are even today many Orthodox Christians living as hermits; but they have contact with communities, and they usually have lived many years in a community before becoming solitaries. There are also those who live ‘in the world’ (a traditional expression for non-monastic life) alone, by choice or against their wishes. For the purposes of this article I include them as members of a family.
- 2. See his conversation with a fellow-traveller recorded in the Russian edition of Saint Silouan the Athonite (Essex: Monastery of St John the Baptist, 1990), p. 223.
- 3. I have written in greater detail on the education of Orthodox children in Reflections on Children in the Orthodox Church Today (Essex: Monastery of St John the Baptist, 1995).
- 4. The Orthodox Church only returns to the ancient practice of public confessions in exceptional circumstances. A remarkable example occurs in the life of the celebrated priest, St John of Kronstadt. See Bishop Alexander’s biography, The Life of Father John of Kronstadt (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1979), Chapter 6.
- 5. A marriage may be celebrated in the Orthodox Church between an Orthodox Christian and a Christian baptized into another confession.
- 6. Babies are given their name in a service which takes place traditionally on the eighth day after birth, cf. Luke 1.59, 2.21.
- 7. ‘Secondary', in inverted commas, because details of daily life contribute to ‘primary’ issues. Christ said: ‘He who is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much; he who is unrighteous in a very little is unrighteous also in much’ (Luke 16.10). The point is that we should not ‘strain out gnats’ while forgetting mercy and justice and faith (Matthew 23.23-24); and we must have in consideration how each particular child is experiencing these fundamental realities at any time.
SOURCE: Sister Magadalen of Essex, "Orthodox Tradition and Family Life" in "Living Orthodoxy in the Modern World: Orthodox Christianity & Society" Edited by Andrew Walker & Costa Carras (Crestwood: St Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1996) 50-63.
