Only God

".... from among your own selves will arise men speaking
perverse things, to draw away the disciples after them."

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

These reflections are a sharing of thoughts arising from conversations at our Hermitage in Polynesia. We pray. We contemplate God. And we work together on an eight-acre, non-profit farm. Before this, we lived in a larger, Franciscan community (Roman Catholic) in Haiti serving that prostrate country and intending to be buried there. When our ministry was taken over by secular humanists and our chapel suppressed, we made an untimely departure from Haiti but had no plans for a destination. Seeing that we now were old, we agreed on a principle: at the end of life, each woman or man should put aside time to contemplate God.

Setting about this task, one soon realizes that the first question to be answered is which God? We all have our conceptions of God. Which God? Which tradition, which path will lead to God as He has intended? Or stated differently, where exactly is the "One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church" which we find in the Nicene Creed? .... about which we have said tens of thousands of times, "We believe in ..."

Lest you believe that the path to God is obvious, or that you are certainly on it, I caution you that I have spent a lifetime seeking this path, and this lesson has taught me the opposite. I have sometimes feared that I might fasten my life to an illusion. You know, once you have entered a world, and you see that this world is not all that it should be, you have received (perhaps Heaven-sent) hints and clues. Perhaps this is all an illusion.

Can we ourselves be trusted to perceive the reality around us aright? We are shaped by so many different things — society; culture; scientific advances; indeed, even our notion of what truth is — all combine to shape what we think is excellent or right or good. To take one of many examples, consider these words from St. John of Kronstadt:

In Hell there is democracy. In Heaven there is a Kingdom.

"What? Democracy?! But, isn't democracy the only good way of life?" an American of the 21st century is apt to ask. Certainly, democracy has harmonized well with Protestantism, with its emphasis on equality and the primacy of individual rights. In the "pop Christian" world around us, each person is their own theologian-in-chief. All you need is a Bible. An Evangelical Christian man and his wife visited our Hermitage last week. The man told me that he didn't need university or theology books, and certainly he did not need the Church Fathers. All he needed was his Bible. He told me that he was planning to write books and to teach others.

I asked him if he were fluent in the Greek language of the first century. If not, then he was most certainly not reading the Bible but rather someone else's construction of what the Bible means. In some cases, English translations present the opposite of what we read in the Greek New Testament. But he was not interested in that. His own ideas were the main thing for him. And we begin to see how democratic principles — equality, individual prerogatives, and the right to a public opinion — might map on to the quest for God .... even bury it.

Here is another example. Many years ago I was teaching (call it Sunday school or CCD) high-school-age students at church. I began to sense that the young people before me saw the Bible and all that "other old dusty stuff" as being pointless and irrelevant. There was (I might add) a certain arrogance among them. So I asked the question head-on: "Do you believe that all this talking about Apostles and Jews and Romans of the first century is just a waste of time?" Of course, some of the students were embarrassed by my question. Some were surprised, Some were confused ("Wait, aren't you for this stuff?). One bold fellow said, "Yeah, we're way beyond all that today!"

I said, "Now, let me get this straight! Are you saying that because of our advancements in technology and in the sciences, that we're on a kind of mountaintop of superior knowledge? I mean, they thought the world was flat but now we're in outer space and landing on the round moon. So you believe that we're on a kind of mountaintop and that everyone behind us just didn't get it? .... so why would we want to hear anything they have to say?"

He replied, "Well, yeah, something like that."

I said, "Do the rest of you believe that? That we are simply above everyone before us .... that we've simply evolved beyond all that? So what is the point of consulting the past for anything?"

Yes, they agreed. That was it. That is what they believed.

I asked them, "Now, does this also have to do with Darwin's theory of evolution, that we have in all ways evolved beyond our predecessors .... in culture, in form of government, in our whole way of life?"

"Yes!" they all agreed. That's it."

I said, "No one who understands this field, this evolution field, believes that. There is no professor teaching Darwin's theory of evolution who believes that culture evolves, or morals, much less forms of government. They simply believe that evolution as a theory applies to biology." I asked them, "Which writer on the New York Times bestseller list is superior to Shakespeare from the sixteenth century or Milton from the seventeenth century or even Chaucer from the fourteenth century? Which contemporary writer is above them? Which composer today is superior to Mozart or Bach? Because our technologies have advanced, does not mean that we have advanced on any other fronts, as well. In fact, teaching at university in both sciences and humanities, I have developed the personal hypothesis that one is inversely proportional to the other. Maybe, a civilization can manage to do a few things exceptionally well .... at cost to all the others. In fact, our preoccupation with scientism (the mind you develop by studying the sciences) has greatly limited our ability to understand things beyond the material world."

Later that morning, the rector saw me at the reception following Mass and asked me how the class had gone. I told him, "The students do not understand the difference between wisdom and knowledge. I wonder if this is also true of their parents."

I do not have time to expand on this. But let me point out something basic this morning. For roughly fifteen hundred years following the birth of Jesus, civilization valued wisdom. This gave rise to the general belief that the world has deteriorated from a golden age to a silver age, to a bronze age, and then to an iron age. We once had a golden time, but as we advance forward in time, leaving that golden city behind, things get worse and worse and worse. There are many versions of this idea, but you understand what I am saying.

During the sixteenth century (in the writings of Francis Bacon, to name one figure), a different way of the looking at the world began to take hold: empiricism, which means "studying the thing yourself first-hand." Each thing. Making up your own mind about it.

Instead of looking backward, the new way was to look forward. For example, how do we really know that the world is flat if we do not investigate this idea ourselves? In time, a kind of mania, a craze, of empirical investigation swept over the Western world. Societies sprang up. People shared data and discoveries. Journals began to appear. And soon a scientific revolution had begun.

At the same time, a New World was discovered across the Atlantic and soon would be held up as an alternative to the Old World of error. A fresh start. The error is so deep in Europe, you just cannot be free of it. It's in everything because of these centuries and centuries and centuries of what we might call "wisdom worship" and belief in a Golden Age.

People saw an opportunity, looking across the Atlantic, to start civilization again from scratch. One such group were the the Puritans. This word has come to mean "prudish" or perhaps "anti-sensual," but Puritan meant "someone who wanted to strip error from everything" or "to get down to what was pure." They wanted to build everything on empirical principles, detail by detail, and to get it right. In fact, the Puritans founded colonies in New England in the New World for precisely these reasons. And when they founded Harvard College, they even debated whether they should retain the error-ridden (stinking) English language, in which was embedded all the errors of the Old World. So they invented a new language, uncontaminated by the Old World. (The idea was abandoned on grounds of impracticality.)

Do you see what happened? For fifteen hundred years, civilization and the cultures it comprised looked to the past for wisdom. But then, following a series of intellectual revolutions, the opposite principle would about: wisdom could only be found in the future. Gradually, gradually, gradually, going into the future getting closer to wisdom, getting closer to getting it right.

I don't have the time today to show that this story has a surprise ending. For now let us say that they believed the past had nothing to offer. Library collections across Europe were burned. And John Donne, the poet and Anglican Dean of St. Paul's, wrote:

And new philosophy calls all in doubt ....
(John Donne, An Anatomy of the World, 1610)

Let me shift focus a bit. Have you heard the proverb, "In matters of religion, geography always wins"? Anyone who moves from Vicksburg, Mississippi to Portland, Oregon understands what I mean. Or if they move from Knoxville, Tennessee to Seattle, Washington, they get this. Some regions of the U.S. are dominantly anti-religious while other regions are not. On a global scale, the Western Hemisphere has been shaped by scientism as no place else on the globe. (Of course, I am speaking in generalities to simplify things, so I can make a very important point.) Let us take another example. Consider the map of the English language. Wherever the English language is spoken, you will encounter minds that have been shaped by science, technology, and democracy. These are the reference points for what is good, what is excellent, what is right.

My high school students so many years ago received this legacy .... and bias. Sadly, the Western Church, Catholic and Protestant, has received this legacy, as well. On the eve of my ordination exam into the Roman Catholic priesthood, my bishop told me that I should study one Ecumenical Council, not twenty-one. "Only Vatican II matters," he told me .... the Council which famously was about aggiornamento, about updating itself to the contemporary culture. Aggiornamento! Let in the day! Updating! The culture will lead, and the Church will follow. "This is the only Council to study," my Roman Catholic bishop said. "This is the only one that matters."

Even from the point of its schismatic departure from the Church that Jesus founded, the Roman Catholic Church has stood out for its constant theological innovations. It goes without saying that the empiricist revolution in the sixteenth century, emphasizing "decide for yourself," is inseparable from the Protestant Revolution. Consider the so-called "Solas" of Martin Luther: Sola Scripura, Sola Fides. Decide for yourself! All you need is your Bible and your faith .... self-directed faith, as it often turns out in practice. These are cultural buzzwords from the sixteenth century. Decide for yourself. Reject authority. Question theories you have received.

The great point for all the rest of us .... we observe today. Today is the Sunday when we venerate the Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council, and by extension we venerate those who have taken great pains to preserve the faith against the onslaughts and the feverish demands to change, to change, always to change. In this, we observe the truth of a very great axiom: there was, indeed, a Golden Age. A Golden Age did occur. This is no myth from the Greeks. When did it occur? Two thousand years ago .... planted on earth by Heaven into a world of error. For the only time in human history, perfect words were spoken; perfect precepts were taught; perfect values were instilled. Perfection. Divine Perfection For Wisdom, the Eternal Word of God, had become incarnate on the earth. What is truth? He is Truth (Jn 14:6) .... and Wisdom and Enlightenment. He is the Light of the World (Jn 8:12).

We read or say it often enough, but do we stop to consider what the word holiness means? It means no more or less than this: proximity to God. The closer one draws to God, the greater the holiness. The saints close to God are holy. In some cases, their interred bodies do not decay!

The same principle holds true for wisdom. The closer one draws to God, the greater and clearer and more illuminated the wisdom. "Taking God seriously is the beginning of all wisdom" we read in the Psalms and the Proverbs. There is no process of social or cultural evolution that can possibly increase it. Indeed, all roads stretching forward away from God will only attenuate it until it is lost. Do you wish to draw closer to the wisdom of God? Then you must go backward, not forward.

We might say that the entire vocation of the Orthodox Catholic Church (which is the formal name for Eastern Orthodoxy) is to guard the purity of this unchanging wisdom. This is the name of the greatest church of Antiquity, the Church of the Holy Wisdom. The Orthodox Church understands that the Apostles were taught plainly and directly from the mouth of Wisdom (on which we meditated just last Thursday). The Orthodox Church understands that the students of the Apostles, such as St. Ignatius of Antioch and St. Polycarp, received a golden education and formation not so distant from the Person of Jesus, the Son of God. And the Orthodox Church sees that the greater the distance between the Golden Age of God and the ages to come, the greater the error until God Himself finally is lost to us, which was our state of being on the eve of the Advent.

This sacred guarding, this holy protection ensured by the Orthodox bishops and enshrined in the early Ecumenical Councils, we observe today. We celebrate, we praise, and we count our blessings. For Christianity has been preserved for us.

At the end of his life, St. John the Evangelist was carried on a litter from community to community (some say he lived to be 100) that children might set their eyes on the eyes that saw and adored Jesus. And, like these first Christians, as a gift from our Church, the gift of a protected and changless faith, we too are able to know and experience, and, in a sense, to touch the sacred head which lay on the breast of Christ.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.