Archbishop Lazar Puhalo's Persepctive on Marriage and Monasticism

Archbishop Lazar Puhalo's Perspective on Marriage and Monasticism
By Dr. Andrew J. Sopko, on the The Theo-Anthropology of Archbishop Lazar Puhalo

On Motherhood

"Motherhood is what makes us the carriers of what life was intended to be in the garden of Eden. It was betrayed by Adam and Eve and then redeemed by the Virgin Mary when she gave birth to Life, when she accepted, as everyone should, and must and can except the will of God to give life. she is the ultimate actually, life-giver, she is she created life in a fallen world that is so often just coping with existence. The difference is quite clear and quite obvious between between a person who exudes an aura of living faith living allegiance, living belonging, living acceptance and the person whom forgets this calling. It is a calling, it is a mission, it is a duty and just exists. So motherhood is giving life to everything, to everything you touch." 

+ Matushka Juliana Schmemann, On Motherhood

"Women who have or have had the privilege of giving life, and women who did not, all have this potential virtue, this talent of giving life." 

+ Matushka Juliana Schmemann, On Motherhood

On Motherhood by Matushka Juliana Schmemann

http://youtu.be/DEX8TiYFRmg

Also see: "THE JOY TO SERVE" by Matushka Juliana Schmemann which offers a fresh perspective concerning the role of women in the Church and, more germane, in the context of our modern world. Available from Alexander Press http://www.alexanderpress.com/downloads/APB_Dialogue-6_Schmemann_Joy.pdf

Healing the Unspeakable: The Life of Saint Mary of Egypt

Healing the Unspeakable: The Life of Saint Mary of Egypt
by Presbytera Kyriaki Karidoyanes FitzGerald
(FitzGerald, Kyriaki Karidoyanes. "Healing the Unspeakable: The Life of Saint Mary of Egypt" in "Encountering Women of Faith: The St. Catherine's Vision Collection, Volume 2" Edited by Kyriaki Karidoyanes FitzGerald (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2011) 173-194.)


"The power of Your Cross, O Christ, has worked wonders,
for even the woman who was once a harlot 
chose to follow the ascetic way.
Casting aside her weakness, bravely she opposed the devil; 
and having gained the prize of victory, 
she now intercedes for our souls."

+ Adapted slightly from the “Canon of St. Mary of Egypt,” in The Lenten Triodion, 

trans. Mother Mary and Kallistos Ware (London: Faber and Faber, 1978), 448.

The Pro-Life Cause, Orthodoxy, and Hope

The Pro-Life Cause, Orthodoxy, and Hope
by Kh. Frederica Mathewes-Green http://www.frederica.com/writings/the-pro-life-cause-orthodoxy-and-hope.html


[a talk for an Orthodox Christian Pro-Life Event; January 22, 2012]

Today is the 39th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion—through all 50 states, for any reason whatsoever. When I was a college student, back in the 70’s, I was in favor of legalizing abortion. I wasn’t a Christian then, but I was a feminist, the first feminist in my dorm, and I was loudly in favor of social revolution and women’s rights. I took it for granted that abortion was necessary, if women were ever going to be equal to men.

Abortion: Ignoring the Facts

Abortion: Ignoring the Facts
by Kh. Frederica Mathewes-Green http://ancientfaith.com/podcasts/frederica/abortion_ignoring_the_facts


I’m recording this on January 22nd, 2008, the 35th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion all through America—through all 50 states, through all nine months of pregnancy. People question that sometimes, because the Roe decision says that abortion should be available to a woman under any circumstances, until the point of viability. It said that, after that, states can begin to have some laws protecting the unborn child, after viability. But there’s a companion decision to Roe v. Wade, called Doe v. Bolton. It came down the same day, and it governs how that proposed post-viability period can be legislated in the states. It says that states may do nothing to restrict a woman’s access to abortion if she wants the abortion for some aspect of her health. Well, the result is that you can have a legal abortion at almost any point in pregnancy if you are willing to travel for it. There are specialists who go into these post-viability late-term abortions, that’s what they specialize in offering.

And I think that the outcome has been not at all what I expected, when I was a college student back at the time of Roe v. Wade, when I was not a Christian and was very much in favor of abortion law repeal. I thought that abortion should be available to anyone who wanted it under any circumstances; and at the time my friends and I thought that it would be used only in the most extreme and most terrible circumstances. I thought that abortion would be very rare because clearly it’s so horrible; who would want to go through this? And we thought we would make it legal just for those few cases where it truly seemed to be the only alternative.

And something very different happened. It seems that once abortion becomes available, it begins to look like the most convenient solution, if not to the woman who’s pregnant, to the people around her. To her boss, it looks like it would be better for her to go ahead and have an abortion, then you wouldn’t have her leaving on maternity leave and coming back again. If she has a scholarship, an athletic scholarship to college, again, how crazy would she have to be not to have an abortion in that circumstance?

When I wrote my book Real Choices, 14 years ago, I interviewed women who had had abortions, and most of the time they told me that the reason they had an abortion was because somebody that they cared about, usually the father of the child, but in many cases her own mother, really pressured her to have the abortion. They kept telling her, “This is the right thing to do, this is what you ought to do.” That kind of pressure really is influential to a pregnant woman. It’s an open question whether abortion really is what women choose, or whether it’s what they feel they have to choose, because the alternatives look so bleak.

Well, far from being rare, there have now been over 48 million abortions in America since the Roe v. Wade decision. And at present about one in every four pregnant women has an abortion. About one out of every four pregnancies is aborted.

This is nothing like what we imagined. One in four pregnancies: it’s astounding. And so it just goes to show you that there are unintended consequences, and that people’s behavior is not always something that you can predict.

In retrospect, though, I can see how the availability of abortion, the fact that it’s in the yellow pages—you know, if you haven’t done this, look in your local yellow pages under “A” and see. How do abortion providers advertise? What kind of little pictures do they put in their ads? How do they phrase things? It’s chilling to think that this is actually a business, a multi-million dollar business that can advertise in the yellow pages.

Well, one of the things I had been looking at recently was the attitude of the early Church toward abortion. Rodney Stark wrote a wonderful book a couple of years ago called The Rise of Christianity. And one of the points he made was that the early Christians opposed abortion, and that was one of the reasons that Christianity was attractive to women. Because in the Greco-Roman culture, it was not the woman’s choice whether her pregnancy continued or her newborn child was allowed to live, but rather the choice of the father of the child. And he could wait until the child was born and then decide whether or not he wanted it. Is it a boy or a girl, does it have any deformity that would be unsightly? Sometimes these children were strangled after birth; other people, who considered themselves pious, would instead practice exposure of the child, that is that they would take the newborn baby and just put it outside somewhere, telling themselves, comforting themselves with the thought that surely some compassionate person will pass by and take up this child and raise it as his own. And sometimes that did happen, sometimes these babies were picked up, taken home and raised, and then put into service as prostitutes in their early adolescence. Not a very happy outcome for them.

And that’s perhaps still all little bit better than what happened most of the time, which is that nobody would take up that child, and the first to find it would be dogs or other wild animals or birds, and the child would be killed and eaten. So this was a pretty horrible thing for young women and mothers to endure in that society, to know that the child which they nurtured under their heart could be taken away and fed to dogs, and they had no say about it. Well, the fact that Christians forbade abortion made Christianity very attractive to women; that was the kind of faith that they wanted to be part of.

As I was saying, Christians stood very strongly in opposition to the accepted cultural norms of the time, when it came to abortion and infanticide. It goes right back to the beginning, to the Didache, which is one of the earliest Christian documents. Some scholars think maybe it was written about 70 or 80 AD, so it was about the same time as the Gospels. And in the list of things describing what Christians do and don’t do, one of the sentences in the Didache is,

You shall not murder a child by abortion.

A little bit later, around 125 or so, a text called the “Letter to Diognetus” describes what Christians are like and what Christians do. And one of the points it wants to make is that Christians aren’t totally weird, they act a lot like normal people do, no matter what the culture or country that they live in. The letter to Diognetus says,

They marry, as do all others. They beget children, but they do not cast away fetuses.

That is, they do not cast the unborn child out of the womb; they do not practice abortion.

On the other hand, what are the pagans like? Clement of Alexandria, writing around 200, says that pagans keep parrots and curlews, pagans keep these exotic birds,

Although keeping parrots and curlews, pagans do not adopt an orphan child. Rather, they expose children who are born at home. And yet they take up the young of birds. So they prefer irrational creatures to rational ones.

Clement also pointed out that some of these children that do survive are raised only to be put into prostitution. Clement says,

Fathers, forgetting about their children that have been exposed, unknowingly have intercourse with a son who has debauched himself or with daughters who are prostitutes.

That’s a particularly horrible twist there.

Basil the Great, who is of course the author of the Divine Liturgy of St. Basil, one of the heroes of our Orthodox Church, Basil the Great wrote,

The woman who purposely destroys her unborn child is guilty of murder. The hair-splitting difference between formed and unformed makes no difference to us.

Now let me say something about that. It was Aristotle’s theory, and in fact the best scientific knowledge of the time, that as far as they could tell from women who had miscarriages, that up to a certain point the fetus looks unformed; you don’t really see a baby there. But after a certain point, you start seeing a baby. Aristotle’s theory was that it’s not really human and alive until it was formed. There couldn’t be a human soul, in it until it had a human shape to retain that soul.

And this, in fact, became the general opinion in the Roman Catholic Church for many centuries, that up until 40 days - this was Aristotle’s thesis - 40 days for a male child, 80 days for a female child, that it did not yet possess a human soul. And so to lose a child before that time would not be an abortion, and would not be the death of a human being. Of course, there was no way to tell whether it was male or female, so there was no way to apply this practically, if you wanted to have an abortion. And it was not an excuse for abortion, which was never approved by the Church, East or West.

But we do see that the Eastern fathers disagreed with the Western perspective that it is not really a human being before the 40 or 80 days. As Basil says, “The hair-splitting difference between formed and unformed makes no difference to us.”

So you look at all these things together, and you see that we in Christian Orthodoxy have had an unbroken tradition of recognizing that the being in the womb is completely human, from the very beginning. It is completely alive, fully alive. And it is unique. It is a precious, unique individual from the very moment of conception.

And one of the signs that you can see that this has always been our belief is in feasts like the feast of the Annunciation. That’s March 25th , the feast when the angel Gabriel announced to the Virgin Mary that she would conceive a son. From March 25th count exactly nine months and there you are at December 25th. Early Christians believed that life, that a new human being begins at the very beginning of that nine months. It doesn’t begin some later time when the mother first feels the baby moving, or when the body of the fetus is fully formed.

We see this, too, in the feast of the Conception of the Theotokos on December 9th. The Theotokos is conceived on December 9th and she is born on September 8th, again, practically down to the wire, nine months. And the icon of the Conception of the Theotokos shows St. Joachim and St. Anna, embracing in their bedroom in front of their bed. I mean, there is no confusion among our fathers in the faith about where new life comes from, or how it is achieved. So there wasn’t this fuzzy idea of some 40 or 80 day span where it wasn’t really human yet. We’ve always been clear about when life begins.

The kind of arguments that people make in favor of abortion, it’s hard for me to believe people living in a scientific age can actually believe that the life in the womb is not a living human being. Because we know so much more than medical people of early centuries did. We know that at the moment that sperm dissolves in the ovum, that that is a being that is alive. When life begins, there’s no debate about this, scientists know when life begins. Life begins when the sperm dissolves in the egg, and it is alive from then on. If it was not alive, you wouldn’t need to have an abortion to kill it. You know? If it was not alive, then a natural miscarriage would set in. It’s definitely alive. For people who are in favor of abortion, that’s the whole problem, is that it is alive. It is alive and it continues to grow. It’s alive and it has a heartbeat from 21 days.

So it is very much a living human being.

It is human, too. If you would look at a cell from the growing unborn child under a microscope, you would say, “Yes, that’s human. That’s not chimpanzee, it’s not watermelon. It is human.” This is a human. A living human in there.

And the third point to make is it is a *unique* living human. That if you could take a cell from the mother, a cell from the father, and a cell from the unborn child, that if you could look at all three of those and analyze the DNA, you would say, “There are three individuals here.” This unborn child may be dependant on its mother for sustenance at this point in its life; after it’s born it will still be dependent on her for milk. It will dependent on the father and the mother to provide shelter and food and care. It will be dependent for a long time. But it is not a part of the mother because it does not have her DNA. It is a separate human being.
So we know that from the very beginning this unborn being is alive. It is human. It is unique. And that has been the basis of the Orthodox belief that abortion is wrong from the very beginning.

Now having said all that, I always need to say that a lot of women who’ve had abortions didn’t want to have them. Or they wanted to at the time because they were terrified, and in the years afterward they regret it, they wonder if they did the right thing, they may feel very miserable. And there is quite a conspiracy of silence, that if you’ve been through this harrowing experience, there’s really no opportunity to talk about it.

When I was writing my book Real Choices, I remember one woman who, at the time of her abortion she was pro-choice. And then afterward she felt terribly sad, and she felt ambivalent about being sad. She said to me, “I couldn’t tell anybody how I felt. I couldn’t tell people that I felt distressed after this abortion, though I didn’t really know why.” She said, “If I’d told my pro-choice friends that I felt so depressed, I feel so miserable, I’m not sure I did the right thing, they would say to me, ‘Are you a traitor? It was your choice. You had your choice; now you should be happy with it. Having your choice is the only important thing.’”

She said that she knew they would not recognize that you could choose something and then be in despair about it afterwards, sometimes for many years afterwards. She said, “So I couldn’t tell my pro-choice friends that I had grief after my abortion. I couldn’t tell my pro-life friends because if they found out that I had had an abortion, they would say, ‘Well, you’re a murderer. We won’t have anything to do with you.’”
So there are many, many, many millions of women in our country, and certainly some must be Orthodox Christian women, who have this in their past and it’s a burden or grief for them, and they feel like they’re not free to talk about it. I would urge you please to talk to your priest about it. Believe me, there’s nothing you can say to a priest that he hasn’t heard somewhere before. He’s never going to be shocked. And as priests often say when they hear a confession it makes them admire the people more, who love God so much that they’re willing to share so intimately. So please don’t keep this in. If you hide this grief inside it feels even bigger and more overwhelming than it is.

So please go to your priest. Schedule a talk or schedule a confession, if that’s what you’d like to do. And begin to find that support that can help you be freed from this guilt, because God has forgiven you. You know, you weren’t able to erase that child’s existence. It may not have had much of an earthly life, maybe only a few weeks within your womb, but its eternal life will go on forever. One of the Psalms says,

Though my mother and my father reject me, you will take me up.

And God the Father has taken that child up. And if you persevere on the path of theosis, on the path of holiness, one day you’ll be reunited with that child in the place where all sorrow and sighing has fled away, and the tears have been wiped from every eye.

I know at this year for women who have had abortions, all the messages they hear about how terrible abortion is can wound very deeply. And so that’s why I wanted to conclude my podcast by urging you to seek the healing that you deserve. To lay this burden down. Go to your priest. Go to your spiritual father or your spiritual mother.

And even when you look in the yellow pages, look below the abortion clinics, look at abortion alternatives. And you will find there pregnancy care centers, which are not there just help to pregnant women, but to help women who have had abortions. Nearly all of them offer some kind of abortion grief counseling, so that they can help you work your way through this and resolve it and move on in joy.

Abortion sure has torn up our nation for a long time. Like the argument that led to civil war 150 years ago over slavery, it’s a very similar thing because we’re arguing about the full right to life, the full personhood of a living human being. At that time there as a Supreme Court decision that said that African-Americans were not the equal of a regular white person. They only represented two-fifths of a person. And that was a Supreme Court decision; that was the law of the land. And it took awhile for that to be overturned. But this is the situation we are in with the abortion issue, that this Roe v. Wade decision declared that these living, unique human beings aren’t really persons.

And it sounds almost like a religious opinion to say they can be alive, they can be human, they can be genetically distinct - no other life ever seen on earth like that before - but somehow they’re not persons, whatever personhood means; it’s almost like a philosophical or theological concept. I don’t think that we can write laws based on private religious interpretations. Let us look just at what science tells us: it is alive, it is human, it is unique. As a result it deserves protection.

I hope that by the time the next Roe v. Wade anniversary rolls around, we will see the abortion numbers dropping and dropping further every year. Until finally we get to the point where we realize, we really don’t need this. We don’t need to kill our own children in order to be liberated. We can do better than that.

Pastoral Counselor Training Epistle

Dr. Stephen Muse's book on pastoral counselling "When Hearts Become Flame" (available from the Orthodox Research Institute Press) begins with an interesting Epistle for Counselors adapted from 1 Corinthians 13. The book appears to be a wonderful reference and resource for anyone engaged in social work, counselling and psychology.

BookTalk with Dr. Richard Long - Dr. Stephen Muse & Chaplain Michael Hart from CSU.TV on Vimeo.

Pastoral Counselor Training Epistle
(With thanks to the Apostle Paul)

A Witness to Radical Forgiveness

St. Barbara and the Martyrs of the Armenian Genocide: A Witness to Radical Forgiveness
by Barbara K. Harris

Throughout the ages there have been incredible acts of love and kindness demonstrated across religious groups, cultures, and ethnic populations. These actions reveal a selfless and sacrificial love for the other. Mother Maria Skobtsova, who is the focus of another chapter in this book*, was one individual who demonstrated such love. As a Russian emigre in Paris during the German occupation, she tirelessly worked to provide baptismal certificates for Jews. This led to her arrest and deportation to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. While there, it is believed that she selflessly and sacrificially took the place of another who was in line for the gas chamber.

Tragically, despite such loving acts, individuals and communities have also shown an astonishing ability to inflict evil upon each other in all its various manifestations, including humiliation through murder, slander, slavery, torture, and discrimination, to name just a few. Virtually all ethnic, cultural, and religious groups have been at times both perpetrators and/or victims of such acts of degradation and inhumanity; African Americans, Native Americans, Tutsis, Hutus, Jews, Christians, Hindus, Shintos, Sunnis, Shi’as, Baha’is, black South Africans, and the list goes on. This article examines forgiveness as an expression of divine love and the Christian response to evil and intolerance as experienced by St. Barbara, an early Christian martyr, and by the 1.3 million Armenian martyrs of the early twentieth century. Their examples as intentional and unintentional martyrs have transformed me and my response when encountering abuse.

The Meaning of Sex

The Meaning of Sex
by Khouria Frederica Mathewes-Green, at UC-Santa Barbara (sponsored by The Veritas Forum)
http://ancientfaith.com/podcasts/frederica/the_meaning_of_sex

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PW64sGQypjk

Transcript

Frederica: This is Frederica. Here and Now.

Speaker 1: Welcome to the Veritas Forum. Engaging university students and faculty in discussions about life’s hardest questions and the relevance of Jesus Christ to all of life.

The Two Extremes

In an early section of For Life of the World there's mention of two extremes, two seemingly opposite forces that are consequences of the modern desire to "secularize" the world and the Evangelical/Protestant ethos (one that can quite easily tempt Orthodox Parishes too) to conquer the world for "religion". In other parts of the book, Fr Alexander points out that as Christians attempt to continue to split the world into categories of "secular and religious" or "sacred and profane" they actually feed into the the presuppositions and forces that created the 'secular' world in the first place.

The Capacity to Love

"The fathers assert that perfect love is sinless. And it seems to me that in the same way a perfect sense of death is free from fear."

+ St. John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent

"...some of us are married and some are not. Some of us are called to be priests and ministers and some are not. But the sacraments of matrimony and priesthood concern all of us, because they concern our life as vocation. The meaning, the essence and the end of all vocation is the mystery of Christ and the Church. It is through the Church that each one of us finds that the vocation of all vocations is to follow Christ in the fullness of His priesthood: in His love for man and the world, His love for their ultimate fulfillment in the abundant life of the Kingdom."

+ Fr Alexander Schmemann, For Life of the World

"On Death & Bereavement" by Metropolitan Anthony Bloom

Death & Bereavement

Parish, talks by Metropolitan Anthony

From www.masrchive.org

I

12.4.1984

I was asked, last time to interrupt the normal flow of our talks which should have led us to speak now on the Eucharist and to speak on preparation for death, or perhaps on death and the way in which we can think of it and meet it. I would like to add to this in the last talk something about the various rites which are connected in the Orthodox Church with death, what happens afterwards to the body of the person who has died. How do we treat this body which has been instrumental in all that the soul has acquired, all that was done, achieved, or in all those things in which a person has failed. To begin with, I would like to dispel, if I can, the habitual attitude which modern man has developed concerning death - a feeling of fear, of rejection, a feeling that death is the worst that can occur to a person and that at all cost survival must be achieved, even if survival has little to do with living, with a quality of life or with life altogether.

A Pressing Concern for Orthodox

A Pressing Concern for Orthodox: Theology and Bioethics

"I ask your forgiveness for being so blunt, but we don't live in the fourth century. I worry about the lack of solid theology, and understanding of some very critical life issues of our times that seem to just be ignored by contemporary orthodox piety....

...I take this opportunity also to ask for your prayers during this season of fasting before the feasts of Nativity and Theophany and ask for your forgiveness."

+ Very Rev. Fr. Roberto Ubertino, Excerpt of Priest Musings, December 2012

Introduction to the Orthodox Faith Part 6

The Orthodox Understanding of the Human Person

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPuUF8k4yks

On Building Character of Children

Character
by Fr. Philip LeMasters

Fr. Philip LeMasters argues that if raising everyone's self-esteem by watering down substantive visions of the good life is our preferred mode of operation, then heaven help us if we want our kids to worship anything other than their own self-centered desires.

After the Election

After the Election

by Fr. Philip LeMasters

Fr. Philip LeMasters, Dean of the School of Social Sciences and Religion at McMurry University, argues that the primary political action of Orthodox Christians is not found in voting, carrying signs, spouting slogans, or putting bumper stickers on cars. Rather, our most fundamental political witness is to participate in the Divine Liturgy.

The Promise of the Image

Talk on Personhood by Fr John Behr:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqkIIis8Zgw

The 'Value' of a Person

With our 'modern' eyes we are often tempted to identify success and worth with a certain specificity to utility and usefulness. Personhood is measured according to a reduced 'normative' expectation of ones contribution to the society, the country, the economy, the family, the mission, the Church, to humanity, to the cultic desires of fallen nature.

Even Orthodox parishes can fall into this temptation, identifying success with numbers, functionality and 'rational' practicality of our Liturgical ethos, or a missiology focused on bringing 'the poor' to a level of social reintegration and usefulness.

The focus of liturgy risks becoming a reward for good behavior, the faith becomes a moral ideology, the mission becomes 'crusade' for souls, and Eucharist a sign of membership or personal blessing. In each of these reductions is an presupposition about the value and the function of the Church and of Personhood. A reduction that appeals to a divide of the sacred and profane, an appeal to pagan dualism instead of the recapitulation and restoration that Christianity witnesses and encounters as Orthodoxy. Orthodoxy as the Person of Christ, as the Church and as the hope of restoration to our authentic humanity which is realized, actualized, worked out and lived in union with the Holy Trinity.

For...

"...when God made you, He at once endowed your nature with this perfection: upon the structure of your nature He imprinted an imitation of the perfection of His own nature, just as one would impress upon wax the outline of an emblem...You must then wash away, by a life of virtue, the dirt that clings to your heart like plaster, and then your divine beauty will once again shine forth."

+ St. Gregory of Nyssa, On the Beatitudes, Sermon 6.

"Our value as a human person, therefore, is not determined by our accomplishments or lack thereof. Our value is not determined by our age, race, gender, nationality or economic status. Our value is not determined by our mental or physical abilities or disabilities. Indeed, it is not determined by our faith or our religious activities. In spite of all, even our sins, we forever remain daughters and sons of the Heavenly Father, who calls us to live in communion with Him. The person of Christ is for all the model and example of life lived in communion with the Father."

+ Presbytera Kyriaki Karidoyanes FitzGerald, "Persons in Communion: A Theology of Authentic Relationships" (Berkeley: InterOrthodox Press, 2006) 27.

Glory to the Holy Trinity.

Life, Beauty, Personhood and Identity: The Human Questions

I've been thinking about the issues concerning abortion (they appear to be complex and not easily split into neat categories of pro-life and pro-choice political camps) which has become a sort of 'rally-cry' for freedom, social justice and societal's norms of what makes a 'good' or 'successful' life. The questions raised by the whole issue are fundamentally linked to the very way that society regards human life and personhood.

Icon at St Anthony's Monastery
Red Sea, Egypt

For example, within the debate there are researchers who claim that "pain is not felt by the fetus." An argument that is linked to a definition of life that says human life is constituted by a functional nervous system or cognition in general. It's a presupposition which could also have implications on our perspective of suffering and of untility in the 'good life.' (Metropolitan Anthony Bloom mentions a similar concern on how our society is coping with pain in this interview by the CBC http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2OtD5OkHHo )

This presupposition concerning fetal pain raises questions on our views on those who are mentally impaired or mentally ill. Those questions then raise further questions on what we see as 'functional' or 'useless' in our world, or more alarming who we say are functional, able-bodied, important, acceptable, employable or worthy.

It's a question that seems to call for apophatic prayer and thought not only cataphatic approaches because the question of life appears to be linked to questions on personhood and on identity, on humanity and on what is beautiful.

Such questions are also linked to ecology: do we permit destruction of what we define as non-functional or incognitive matter? Do we say that there are no consequences to deforesting an area because it has no psychological impact on us?

Health Care and Theosis

Here is another really good article for Orthodox who are in the medical industry...

Health Care and Theosis
by Fr. Philip LeMasters

...Orthodox Christianity envisions the salvation of the whole person - body, soul, and spirit -in the Kingdom of God. No bit of human existence, or of the creation as a whole, is by nature isolated from our Lord’s salvation. The incarnation of Jesus Christ is Good News for every dimension of us, especially when we are sick and in need of physical healing.

Theology of the Body and Bioethics

David Bently Hart's article on John Paul II's Theology of the Body. The article touches on some deeper issues and raises the some questions that are relevant to an Orthodox answer to Bioethical issues. Hart writes:

"I must say that what I, as an Eastern Orthodox Christian, find most exhilarating about the Theology of the Body is not simply that it is perfectly consonant with the Orthodox understanding of the origins and ends of human nature (as indeed it is), but that from beginning to end it is a text awash in the clear bright light of uncompromising conviction...It simply restates the ancient Christian understanding of man...and invites the reader to enter into the world it describes. And at the heart of its anthropology is a complete rejection--or, one might almost say, ignorance--of any dualism between flesh and spirit."

It's an interesting read for any Christian involved in the medical industry.

+ + +

The Anti-Theology of the Body

David B. Hart

"The Pornography Culture" (Summer 2004)