Where is the Kingdom of Heaven? Is it at the hardware store? Will we find it at the grocery or department store? What about about town hall or the police station? Does it crop up in news stories? Do our neighbors bring the subject up? Actually, signs of the Kingdom might appear anywhere and everywhere .... depending on how your life is ordered.
Overall, most stores are ordered to profit. Everything the store owners do advances this motive. At another, finer level, that same store is ordered to inventory. Workers will have lists of tasks, for example, to ensure nuts and bolts are in adequate supply.
Our personal lives are no different. The Kingdom of Heaven is present to the degree that our lives are ordered to it. Do we greet God when we open our eyes each day tracing the cross upon ourselves as we call to mind the blessings all around us? Do we thank Him for His love of us, His children, and for surrounding us with angels who guide us? Do we start each day praying Matins? Christians have been doing this from the earliest times. Do we conclude the day by praying Vespers? This what Sister Egeria discovered — the Spanish nun who traveled to Jerusalem in the early centuries. As the sun began to set, Christians made there way to a gathering place, lighting torches and singing the Phos Hilaron ("O gracious light ...."). This was known as the Lucernarium.
Most people reading this in the U.S. do not live near an Orthodox church or a monastery. If it were not for this religious house, there would be no Russian Orthodox presence anywhere on this large island. Yet, it is possible to pray the Divine Office in simplicity and sincerity. These are ancient prayers, which are prayed with a cloud of witnesses. Additionally, Jesus exhorts us to pray seeking a private place and opening our secret hearts to God, spontaneously, as a daughter or son prays to God "your Father." Such intimate prayers include the on-going conversation with God that we pray from our hearts. Instead of proclaiming "Holy Mackerel!" as a matter of habit, we might instead say, "What do we have here, Lord?" God is present. He wants us to see Him, and He wants to hear us. We do wrong by ignoring Him.
The life not ordered to God begins and ends with busyness. We wake up and immediately think of the tasks before him. Thoughts of God do not arise. Prayers go unsaid. And, finally, we find that God is simply not part of our lives. For the love of God, our most important relationship, is like any and all relationships. It must be lived hour by hour, or it grows cold and dies over time. Is our life the now of love. Or are we "worried and troubled about many things" — living in the past regretting things left undone or living in the future anxious about tasks still to be done? We make these lists our task-masters, which in time become the gods we worship, for here is where we devote our hearts and minds.
One of my former colleagues at a Roman Catholic college where I taught wrote a book entitled Loving God. It came about from his annual custom of asking incoming freshmen, "Do you love God?" Usually every hand would go up. But when he asked each student for evidence of this love, nearly all described tasks: one girl visited elderly nuns at St. Anne's Home; one boy worked at a soup kitchen at St. Michael's; still another boy mowed the lawn at Star of the Sea Parish. My colleague replied, "But these are all tasks intended as service. What do they have to do with loving God?"
We at the Hermitage sympathize with these students. We remember the '70s and '80s, when that same message was hammered into us from the pulpit year in and year out: "Real faith is service!" Certainly, service is one manifestation of faith, we might say, a by-product of faith. But service in and of itself does not constitute faith, much less love of God. I have met many religious and clergy who have fallen into this trap. Over time, they discover that they are busy in many things (which they style "bringing about the Kingdom") but have become themselves complete strangers to God. You see, this is where they began" "Real faith is service," and in high school declared, "I want to serve people! I want to be a servant!" And that is what they became, surrounded by people having that same vision.
But faith is an affair of the heart. Only from that intimate place can the work of our hands be called faith. Otherwise, we become strangers to God even in our busy service. Such religion is reduced to checklists and commodities. That is, we "trade off" units of labor or money and receive sacraments, which have also been commodified. But what does all of this have to do with loving God?
If the subject were marriage, for example, we would term such lifeless exchange of things a "cold marriage," a marriage where "the fire has gone out," or even "a dying marriage." "We have become strangers to each other," the wife or husband laments. For the heart of marriage is tender love and constant solicitude. Little tasks we do are to make manifest that solicitude and love.
In today's Gospel lesson, we are presented with a tableau of our own life. Martha represents our busyness, our days packed with many things to do. Life becomes a never-ending checklist. Yes, Martha's tasks might very well be good and necessary. But God is right there in her midst, and she misses Him because she is too busy with other things, including what she thinks of as being service to Him.
On the opposite side of the tableau sits Martha's sister Mary. God is near to her. To ignore Him would be the height of insolence. Besides, He is the source of love and of wisdom. Without Him, life soon becomes meaningless. What does Mary do? She kneels before Him and communes with Him, receiving the blessing of relationship with the Lord of Life .... and, therefore, connection with all of life. Her life is ordered to God. This is the Kingdom of Heaven.
How do we fix a broken life mastered by tasks? Going to church on Sundays will not necessarily help, not if our church also has devolved into a checklist experience — you know, the sing-song spoken Creed, the perfunctory homily, and finally a line filing down the nave receiving the Holy Eucharist mechanically: "Next! Next! Next!"
When did the Catholic faith — and recall that Orthodoxy is the original Catholic faith — when did the Catholic faith become commodified? When did the faithful devolve into consumers? All of this began around the time of the Great Schism, when the Western Patriarchate of Rome broke off to set up its own organization: "the Roman Catholic Church." At that time the theology of Scholasticism, based on Aristotle, spread throughout the Benedictine monasteries and thence to the dioceses. This movement would gather strength on all sides, West as well as East, rising in the thirteenth century to a huge tsunami called Thomism, which washed over the entire Church, permeating everything with its many waters. Indeed, this lifeworld would dominate the Church through to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its method was a hyperlogic of dichotomies and sub-dichotomies reducing all to an analysis having microscopic detail: an affair of the brain, to be sure, not of the heart. Its patron saint, we might say, was Martha of Bethany who was busy in many things, but not her sister Mary, the picture of holy contemplation.
As Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev has written in his magisterial five-volume Orthodox Theology, the Eastern Church, too, was influenced by Scholasticism. It, too, reduced the sacraments to lists, and conceived of them as commodities, defined in terms of matter, form, and correctly ordered clergy (Alfeyev, V.12). It would not be until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that the Orthodox Church recovered her understanding of the mysteries, or sacraments, as rooted in the ancient Fathers.
In this return to her roots, the Eastern Church once more viewed the entire world as being sacramental. The entire world .... it shimmers in sacramental beauty. For God made everything and saw that it was good. In this view, could there be a place for lists or dichotomies? How many sacraments are there, anyway? The question begs another question: How many things did God create? If we open our hearts and our souls, we will discover that God is everywhere and in everything good. In the humblest creature, we behold that divinely ordained motion, that spark we call life. We could never create it ourselves. Does it not fill us with wonder? How great is the One Who set all this into motion!
Met. Hilarion continues,
| The very term sacrament or mystery is used by the holy fathers not so much to signify a sacred rite as to refer to the "mystery of salvation" in the broader sense. In a similar vein, Gregory of Nyssa speaks of the "mystery which Christians cherish," meaning the whole body of Christian tradition. (Alfeyev, V.14). |
That is, the holy Father St. Gregory says, all of Christian life is sacramental.
St. Athanasius wrote (De Incarnatione) that our entire lifeworld was renovated and renewed as the Lord Jesus, God's Son, touched it with His Sacred Person at conception. As my Patristics professor at Yale told me, the Fathers taught that our world was redeemed whether or not Jesus should go to the Cross. For He blessed the creation incommensurably with His Life. What is uppermost in our lives, then, is our participation in this good creation ordered to God: our disposition .... that is, our intentions, our eyes, our ears, our hearts, our souls.
The problem of sacramental intention became a crisis during the fourth century. The Emperor Diocletian plunged the Church back into an age of martyrs. Upon pain of death, many bishops and priests repudiated the Lord Jesus and pledged their allegiance to pagan gods. Some even turned over the names of their congregation members, so they too could be arrested and tortured. When official persecution ended, these same bishops and priests returned seeking to be restored to their sees and parishes. But the people refused to accept their sacraments. They saw them as being tainted.
St. Augustine of Hippo fought tirelessly against these Christian faithful (known as Donatists), articulating the principle, ex opere operato — the sacraments "work because they work" independent of who ministers them. By this doctrine, bad priests became indistinguishable from good priests — reminding us of the situation in the West today. You need look no further than the headlines to discern the state of that group.
The Eastern Church rejects this principle. Met. Hilarion Alfeyev writes,
| The Latin teaching that a sacrament is valid ex opere operato ("by virtue of the action having been performed") is foreign to Orthodox consciousness. (Alfeyev V.16) |
Met. Hilarion concludes by saying that the mysteries or sacraments are inseparably and seamlessly organic with "the will of the Church" (Ibid). It is the will, that is the state of the heart and of the soul, which undergirds validity in the sacraments.
Accordingly, we find that the state of one's soul lies at the heart of the sacrament of ordination of those people who administer sacraments. In the ordinal consecrating a Bishop, drawn from the third-century Apostolic Tradition of St. Hippolytus of Rome, we find that the bishop must be "without blame" .... "constantly propitiating [the] countenance" of God .... being always "pure of heart" and offering to God "the scent of sweetness," that is, the fragrance of holiness. Likewise, the ordinal for a priest emphasizes above all "a pure heart," "a pure mind," and "a willing soul."
Let us pause to consider these defining ingredients. Each of them — they are not sugar or flour or butter, unchanging in its composition. Each of them an outward sign of the state of the soul: blameless, pure, willing, constant. These are not static things. They are not frozen like a snapshot for all time. They are living and therefore changeable, depending on the intentions of the active soul, moment by moment and day by day. What I am saying is that, if you are no longer in it, then you are no longer in it, whether the people call you "Father" or not.
As St. Athanasius wrote in his De Incarnatione, Jesus has renewed and renovated our lifeworld at His conception. He flipped the telos of each human life from a blueprint ordered to death to one ordered to Divine Life. But how do we remain in that blessed state? How do we hold to this course ordered to God and Heaven? This can only be done, St. Athanasius writes, by constantly fixing our hearts and souls upon the Lord, moment-by-moment, day-after-day, emulating His tender heart, His willing soul, and His purity of mind. Isn't this what He means with the phrase "the Greatest Commandment"? To love God with all our heart and all our soul and all our mind? Anyone who understands love knows that it is a minute-by-minute thing.
But if we should become busy with many things, if we should fail to see Him present in everything we do, then we shall lose our lifeline to Heaven .... giving thanks it can be restored, so long as we have time, opportunity, and a sincere intention to do so. Sincerity!
What do we say of bishops or priests who have lost this connection? Certainly, we must have compassion on them. Certainly, they become brothers urgently in need of a listening heart. But do we detect the sweet fragrance of holiness in the sacraments of an unrepentant heart? Such a notion, Met. Hilarion writes, is alien to the sensibilities of the Orthodox Church. Such checklist religion and commodified sacraments are foreign to the Orthodox soul.
Real religion sees God everywhere present. Heaven surrounds us breaking into our lives with signs of wonders and grace. The sacraments are a particularly brilliant manifestation of this sacramental world already-present. A burning point breaks through! The sacraments! .... in a world that already is sacramental. Where hearts open to God and lives ordered to God gather, this is the Church. That is, the Church, like love itself, is constantly coming into being, constantly being renewed in wonder, in love, in grace .... because the Church is composed of people, living stones built into a spiritual temple (1 Peter 2:5). The Church is a living, stirring, and holy motion of the heart and soul. And it comes into a particular magnificence when the Lord Jesus emerges from the sanctuary preceded by a procession of holy and devout ministers, entering amongst His gathered people, and commanding all present, "Do this!" For "This is My Body," and "This is My Blood," a "ransom offered for many" .... but not all, for we, the faithful, must have a heart for this communion, for this gathering, and for this life.
This is Christian life — our hearts continually fixed upon Jesus. And our exemplar of constancy, of countenancing His holy presence always among us, is St. Mary of Bethany. This is the "one needful thing." And it will not be taken from her.
St. Mary of Bethany,
teach us to love God with all our hearts, souls, and minds.
Teach us to seek God at all times in holy conversation.
And pray that we too might choose that one, needful thing,
which can never be taken from us.
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.
Amen.