Douglas Cramer: The Saint Is The Only True Revolutionary

The siren song of our culture is that we should devote our best energies to serve ourselves and see to our own needs before thinking of others. We should avoid entangling ourselves in commitments, relationships and groups that might make demands of us. The great invitation of the Church, which calls us to join with the visible Body of Christ in this world, is a radical invitation. It is a revolutionary alternative to the extreme individualism of our culture.

Sadly, this cult of individualism is not restricted only to unbelievers. Many people who consider themselves Christian have signed on as well. There is a book out by a well-known religious writer named George Barna, titled Revolution. Barna identifies a growing trend among Christians, a movement that centers on a rejection of community and an embrace of individualism. Many of our neighbors have come to believe that the best way to live a Christian life is in isolation from any parish or church, figuring out for themselves how they should pray, act, and understand their faith.

“There is a new breed of Christ-follower in America today,” Barna says, “These are people who are more interested in being the Church than in going to church.” His research has “discovered and described a growing national population of more than twenty million adults who are committed to living their faith and making God the top priority in their life. Some are doing so through the ministries of a local church, but many are not. The emphasis is upon allowing God to transform them in every aspect of their life.”

Now, what is wrong with this? Don’t we all believe that we should allow God to transform us in every aspect of our lives? Of course we do. The problem is that these Christ-followers, perhaps with the best of intentions, have asked a false question, set up a false choice. As Orthodox Christians, we understand that we cannot choose between “being the Church” and “going to church.” The Church is not only an invisible, mystical union. It is a physical body of believers, who are bound together as a holy community in communion with God and His saints.

While this trend saddens me, it does not surprise me. The temptation of individualism has a long history, and as we know it is supported in countless ways by our culture. But the true calling of Christ and His Church offers us a very different path.

There is a Greek word that contains the essence of this truth. That word is koinonia. Koinonia means community, in its most profound and mysterious sense, and it is in community that we find the truth of who we are and how we should live. It is in God’s community, in koinonia, that we find our life as persons.

Orthodox Christianity offers us an alternative to the isolation of individualism – it offers us true personhood. What does this mean? What is the difference between individualism and personhood? The great Orthodox teacher Bishop Kallistos Ware gives us an eloquent answer: “The human person is created for relationship.” True personhood is not found in individuals – it is found in community.

At the heart of this teaching is our affirmation that we are created in the image of God. And as Christians, we proclaim that when we say “God,” we mean the Holy Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We understand that God Himself is not in isolation. “God is love,” we read in 1 John 4:8. God is love because God Himself is community. Bishop Kallistos goes on to say, “God is not a unit, but a union. God is love in the sense of shared love, the mutual love of three Persons in one. God is shared love, not self-love. God is openness, exchange, solidarity, self-giving.”

Brothers and sisters, we can only truly understand ourselves, we can only lay claim to the image of God within us, when we recognize that like God the truth of our identities are centered in community. The truth of our very nature demands that we fully embrace our relationships with others. This is the key to personhood according to the Trinitarian image. Not isolated self-awareness, but relationship in mutual love.

Remember the words of Christ in His prayer to the Father at the Last Supper: “That they all may be one, as you, Father, are in Me, and I in You; that they also may be one in Us.” The mutual love of the Holy Trinity is the model for our human personhood. We are here on earth to reproduce within time the love that passes in eternity between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

How different this understanding of life is from the thin gruel offered by the cult of individualism. But still, we all feel the call of selfishness, of putting ourselves first. This shouldn’t surprise us. Like I said, the temptation of individualism has a long history—in fact, it goes all the way back to our beginnings. The essence of the fall of Adam and Eve in Paradise was the rejection of relationship. When God asked Adam if he had eaten the fruit of the tree, what did he say? “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I ate.” And what did Eve say? “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.” Adam and Eve each chose to think only of themselves, of their own needs. They each chose selfishly, and sought to place the blame for their act on someone else.

But we have received a different invitation. God is asking us to join with others, and with himself, in holy fellowship—to come alongside our fellow believers and dedicate ourselves to training in the life of Christ.

Of course, there is one great challenge in living as part of a community. Can you guess what it is? That’s right—other people! Why is it so tempting for us to isolate ourselves, to avoid church, to want to flee from any relationship that might make demands on us? Because when we become involved with others, we will be hurt. There’s no getting away from it. Relationship means pain. It means people will hurt us, and we will hurt them. 

C. S. Lewis put it well:

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket – safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers of love is Hell.

If you believe you can protect yourself from pain by holding back, by not engaging with others, you are lying to yourself. We must engage, we must commit, we must come together. We must love. And we will all suffer for it, and cause suffering to others. If you want to live, there is no other way.

We can begin by getting anything that might hinder this bonding out in the open. Forgiveness isn’t just about saying the words, or going through the motions. And it isn’t about excusing or justifying someone’s actions, pretending that they didn’t really cause you pain. True forgiveness means recognizing that someone has sinned against you, and choosing to love that person anyway.

This is our goal – bringing about the breakthrough of the Kingdom of Heaven in to our world. This is what God is calling you to be part of. This is why He wants you to choose to be part of His Church, of this holy community. Remember the saying: “The only thing we can do alone is go to hell.” But together, we can transform our lives by transforming our relationships. We can become more than individuals – we can become true persons in the image of God. We can become saints. Fr. Alexander Schmemann once said, “The saint is the only true revolutionary in this world.”

This reflection is adapted from a speech originally written for Fr. Christopher Metropulos of St. Demetrios Greek Orthodox Cathedral of Ft. Lauderdale, FL, and SCOBA's Orthodox Christian Network. Learn more about the powerful ministries of OCN on their website, www.myocn.net.

Source: http://www.antiochian.org/node/18159

The Orthodox Church: An Introduction by Metropolitan Kallistos Ware

The Orthodox Church was founded by our Lord Jesus Christ and is the living manifestation of His presence in the history of the mankind. The most conspicuous characteristics of Orthodoxy are its rich liturgical life and its faithfulness to the apostolic tradition. It is believed by Orthodox Christians that their Church has preserved the tradition and continuity of the ancient Church in its fullness compared to other Christian denominations which have departed from the common tradition of the Church of the first 10 centuries. Today Orthodox Church numbers approximately 300 million Christians who follow the faith and practices that were defined by the first seven ecumenical councils. The word orthodox ("right belief and right glory") has traditionally been used, in the Greek-speaking Christian world, to designate communities, or individuals, who preserved the true faith (as defined by those councils), as opposed to those who were declared heretical. The official designation of the church in its liturgical and canonical texts is "the Orthodox Catholic Church" (gr. catholicos = universal).

The Orthodox Church is a family of "autocephalous" (self governing) churches, with the Ecumenical (= universal) Patriarch of Constantinople holding titular or honorary primacy as primus inter pares (the first among equals). The Orthodox Church is not a centralized organization headed by a pontiff. The unity of the Church is rather manifested in common faith and communion in the sacraments and no one but Christ himself is the real head of the Church. The number of autocephalous churches has varied in history. Today there are many: the Church of Constantinople (Istanbul), the Church of Alexandria (Egypt), the Church of Antioch (with headquarters in Damascus, Syria), and the Churches of Jerusalem, Russia, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Georgia, Cyprus, Greece, Poland, Albania and America

There are also "autonomous" churches (retaining a token canonical dependence upon a mother see) in Czech and Slovak republic, Sinai, Crete, Finland, Japan, China and Ukraine. In addition there is also a large Orthodox Diaspora scattered all over the world and administratively divided among various jurisdictions (dependencies of the above mentioned autocephalous churches). The first nine autocephalous churches are headed by patriarchs, the others by archbishops or metropolitans. These titles are strictly honorary as all bishops are completely equal in the power granted to them by the Holy Spirit.

The order of precedence in which the autocephalous churches are listed does not reflect their actual influence or numerical importance. The Patriarchates of Constantinople, Alexandria, and Antioch, for example, present only shadows of their past glory. Yet there remains a consensus that Constantinople's primacy of honor, recognized by the ancient canons because it was the capital of the ancient Byzantine empire, should remain as a symbol and tool of church unity and cooperation. Modern pan-Orthodox conferences were thus convoked by the ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople. Several of the autocephalous churches are de facto national churches, by far the largest being the Russian Church; however, it is not the criterion of nationality but rather the territorial principle that is the norm of organization in the Orthodox Church.

In the wider theological sense "Orthodoxy is not merely a type of purely earthly organization which is headed by patriarchs, bishops and priests who hold the ministry in the Church which officially is called "Orthodox." Orthodoxy is the mystical "Body of Christ," the Head of which is Christ Himself (see Eph. 1:22-23 and Col. 1:18, 24 et seq.), and its composition includes not only priests but all who truly believe in Christ, who have entered in a lawful way through Holy Baptism into the Church He founded, those living upon the earth and those who have died in the Faith and in piety."

The Great Schism between the Eastern and the Western Church (1054) was the culmination of a gradual process of estrangement between the east and west that began in the first centuries of the Christian Era and continued through the Middle Ages. Linguistic and cultural differences, as well as political events, contributed to the estrangement. From the 4th to the 11th century, Constantinople, the center of Eastern Christianity, was also the capital of the Eastern Roman, or Byzantine, Empire, while Rome, after the barbarian invasions, fell under the influence of the Holy Roman Empire of the West, a political rival. In the West theology remained under the influence of St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430) and gradually lost its immediate contact with the rich theological tradition of the Christian East. In the same time the Roman See was almost completely overtaken by Franks. Theological differences could have probably been settled if there were not two different concepts of church authority. The growth of Roman primacy, based on the concept of the apostolic origin of the Church of Rome which claimed not only titular but also jurisdictional authority above other churches, was incompatible with the traditional Orthodox ecclesiology. The Eastern Christians considered all churches as sister churches and understood the primacy of the Roman bishop only as primus inter pares among his brother bishops. For the East, the highest authority in settling doctrinal disputes could by no means be the authority of a single Church or a single bishop but an Ecumenical Council of all sister churches. In the course of time the Church of Rome adopted various wrong teachings which were not based in the Tradition and finally proclaimed the teaching of the Pope's infallibility when teaching ex cathedra. This widened the gap even more between the Christian East and West. The Protestant communities which split from Rome in the course of centuries diverged even more from the teaching of the Holy Fathers and the Holy Ecumenical Councils. Due to these serious dogmatic differences the Orthodox Church is not in communion with the Roman Catholic and Protestant communities. More traditional Orthodox theologians do not recognize the ecclesial and salvific character of these Western churches at all, while the more liberal ones accept that the Holy Spirit acts to a certain degree within these communities although they do not possess the fullness of grace and spiritual gifts like the Orthodox Church. Many serious Orthodox theologians are of the opinion that between Orthodoxy and heterodox confessions, especially in the sphere of spiritual experience, the understanding of God and salvation, there exists an ontological difference which cannot be simply ascribed to cultural and intellectual estrangement of the East and West but is a direct consequence of a gradual abandonment of the sacred tradition by heterodox Christians.

At the time of the Schism of 1054 between Rome and Constantinople, the membership of the Eastern Orthodox Church was spread throughout the Middle East, the Balkans, and Russia, with its center in Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, which was also called New Rome. The vicissitudes of history have greatly modified the internal structures of the Orthodox Church, but, even today, the bulk of its members live in the same geographic areas. Missionary expansion toward Asia and emigration toward the West, however, have helped to maintain the importance of Orthodoxy worldwide. Today, the Orthodox Church is present almost everywhere in the world and is bearing witness of true, apostolic and patristic tradition to all peoples.

The Orthodox Church is well known for its developed monasticism. The uninterrupted monastic tradition of Orthodox Christianity can be traced from the Egyptian desert monasteries of the 3rd and 4th centuries. Soon monasticism had spread all over the Mediterranean basin and Europe: in Palestine, Syria, Cappadocia, Gaul, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Slavic countries. Monasticism has always been a beacon of Orthodoxy and has made and continues to make a strong and lasting impact on Orthodox spirituality.

The Orthodox Church today is an invaluable treasury of the rich liturgical tradition handed down from the earliest centuries of Christianity. The sense of the sacred, the beauty and grandeur of the Orthodox Divine Liturgy make the presence of heaven on earth live and intensive. Orthodox Church art and music has a very functional role in the liturgical life and helps even the bodily senses to feel the spiritual grandeur of the Lord's mysteries. Orthodox icons are not simply beautiful works of art which have certain aesthetic and didactic functions. They are primarily the means through which we experience the reality of the Heavenly Kingdom on earth. The holy icons enshrine the immeasurable depth of the mystery of Christ's incarnation in defense of which thousands of martyrs sacrificed their lives.

Source: http://www.antiochian.org/node/25438