Today, near the close of our Lenten journey, we look back on the road we have traveled and see a theme: purification. Each week our penitential reflections have centered on a fact often forgotten in the Roman Catholic / Protestant West: Christian life fundamentally is about becoming purified.
You realize that Protestants teach that all a Christian need do is believe that Jesus is Lord. St. James replies, "You do well. But even the demons believe." The Roman Catholics, as we well know, believe that Jesus is offered on a high altar for our sins. It is done. It is finished. But this was not always the case, for the Church has always believed, by all people, at all times, in all places, that Christian life is fundamentally about be purified. St. Paul hammers away at this in letter after letter. St. John makes it crystal clear in his flinty way (carved in the form of the Master). Jesus Himself is unambiguous on this point.
You see, becoming purified is an essence of theosis. And it hearkens back to a basic teaching of the Fathers — the road to Heaven is a threefold path: purification, illumination, and finally union with God.
Three days ago we meditated on the Pure One: Mary, the Most Holy Mother of God, full of grace. She is the Virgin of virgins and the Queen of Immaculate Heaven, that state of life that has no stain. Her element is the angels over whom She is Sovereign. For the nature of Heaven's Kingdom resides in a most simple truth: it is the union of all purified ones, whom we call holy, with the font of Holiness and Unstained Purity. And, we add, this state of life alone may be called freedom. Everything else is enslavement to one thing or another.
Today, we venerate the saint of purification, St. Mary of Egypt. In her longtime wilderness life, she exemplifies purgation, illumination, and union with God. We might also say, she is the saint for our times.
Her story is well-known among Orthodox Christians. Before she had reached adulthood, sex had become the controlling theme of her life and the constant trend of her thoughts. "I never said 'No,'" she would relate in her later life. Over time, she had said "Yes" to hundreds of men. Whenever she saw a man .... a new possibility. At age seventeen she left her small town for the more exciting life of the city. Boat passage, lodgings, board, clothes, .... all of her needs were procured through sexual favors. Sex was her identity and her life.
She knew this life as well as any who have ever lived it. To quote from her Vita, written by the Patriarch of Jerusalem, St. Sophronius (c. 560-638), she said,
| "Already during the lifetime of my parents, when I was twelve years old, I renounced their love and went to Alexandria. I am ashamed to recall how there I at first ruined my maidenhood and then unrestrainedly and insatiably gave myself up to sensuality. It is more becoming to speak of this briefly, so that you may just know my passion and my lechery. For about seventeen years, forgive me, I lived like that. I was like a fire of public debauch." (Vita) |
She is the image of our times. Teenagers today dominantly use pornography and habituate sex as an expected dating activity. Half of all high school students have intercourse regularly. Students using porn is reported at 80% among all students in Poland, as one example, a once-traditionalist Roman Catholic country. The median age of first exposure is set at fourteen. That means elementary school children aged 8 or 9 or 10 are in this spectrum.
To take another example, students polled at the Roman Catholic Franciscan University at Steubenville reported that nearly 60% have used pornography.
Studies of 18-35-year-olds in the U.S. generally reveal porn use among women to be 78.4% and 79% among men. Women especially lead a double life in this regard keeping their porn use, though it is regularly used, an absolute secret. They permit sex to dominate their thoughts every day while working hard to project an image of virtue in public.
I can't imagine living a life like that. Talk about being enslaved .... never free to be anyone or anything.
Anecdotally, as I have shared, unmarried older women at parish retreats I have led vigorously defended what they termed their "healthy sex life" with the multiple men they dated week by week. To my amazement a group of about two hundred weekly communicants, mostly female, mostly sixty-five and over, agreed publicly. According to a recent AARP poll, fully 40% of unmarried nursing home residents and retirement home residents are sexually active. And I can tell you as a pastor visiting these places that sex is a primary recreation.
Of course, the great challenge for a priest is to deliver the sobering news that promiscuity is not compatible with Heaven and God. May I share with you that this comes as a shock to many communicants of the Church? They can't believe this is true. "Why, then, all my friends and I aren't going to Heaven!" Who has ears to hear let them hear!
But what about sexual fantasy, which has mainstreamed in all age groups and classes of American life? For pornography is fantasy in Technicolor.
In his Proverbs of Heaven, Jesus reveals that the Kingdom of God is also not compatible with the sexual imaginings. You know that for first-century people, the heart was seen as the seat of the imagination. We pray at every Mass, "cleanse the thoughts of our hearts with the inspiration of Thy Holy Spirit that we may perfectly love Thee and worthily magnify Thy Holy Name." Jesus says,
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"But I say to you that whoever looks at a woman to lust for
her has already committed adultery with her in his heart." (Mt 5:28) |
The English word adultery is translated from the Greek moichea, which can mean "intercourse with married women." But Jesus does not mention married women. He says, "a woman," that is, all women. And we recall that the word moichea also means "illicit sex" or "debauchery." His teaching is a hard one for many people: sexual fantasy is no different from actual intercourse .... at least by the standards of Heaven's Kingdom.
As I say, the Sermon on the Mount are the Proverbs of Heaven. These reveal life in Heaven to us who long to be part of it. As we have also considered in past reflections, these proverbs are not compatible with life on earth. So we cannot be surprised at today's teachings. Didn't we know them all along? Could Heaven really be Heaven with men ogling women or women "checking out" men? Could Heaven really be filled with people preoccupied with sexual fantasies? Is that what Heaven is like?
We live in a society that has formed people in sexual fantasy — children exposed to pornography at age 7, 8, 9. At no time in human history has fantasy so dominated a society as our huge proportion of our entertainments and social networking attest. All the movies are about fantasy and sci-fi. Social networking is all about "avatars" — the persons we fantasize ourselves being. who would argue that this same society is highly eroticized? Our world is a kind of living Hell in this regard. Where is stable reality? We think of the disordered imagination of Iago in Shakespeare's play Othello, who says, "Goats and monkeys! Goats and monkeys!" His imagination is on fire with lust.
If we are intent on Heaven, where do we go from here .... those of us who live in the year 2022? To whom do we turn? Where is the way out of this Hell? The remedy, we suggest on this feast day, is go to St. Mary of Egypt (b. 344).
She began her long journey from Hell encountering the Pure One, the Most Holy Theotokos, Who instructs her, after she has prostrated herself before the Life-giving Cross, to head northeast to the Jordan River and thence into the wilderness. That is, like the people Israel of ancient time, she departs from the fleshpots of sensual "Egypt" where she might leach out the toxins that have filled her to overflowing for many years. As at Sinai, she is alone in the wilderness with God. Mary said,
| "I went down to the Jordan and rinsed my face and hands in its holy waters. I partook of the holy and life-giving Mysteries in the Church of the Forerunner .... Then, after drinking some water from Jordan, I lay down and passed the night on the ground. In the morning I found a small boat and crossed to the opposite bank. I again prayed to Our Lady to lead me whither she wished. Then I found myself in this desert, and since then up to this very day, I have been estranged from all." |
Let us pause here, for an indispensable truth has been spoken. An elemental question is asked: what is the human person? When you boil the human creature down to essences, isolated from the influences of society, what do you find? Is it the gruff mountain-man hermit depicted in Western movies? No, it is quite the opposite. The essential human person is tender-hearted, God-centered, and mindful of her (or his) faults and frailties. As a hospital chaplain, I can tell you that even the emotional and spiritual isolation of grave illness swiftly renders the human heart in this condition. So God has set a desert within each of us where we are alone with Him. It is called extreme illness.
And here we encounter another truth. The inescapable career of the body is disintegration and then a process of rotting. This is the way of the entire physical word as rusting steel, molding textiles, and aging lumber reveal .... to name a few among billions of examples.
And what of the mind? What is the career of the mind over time? This is an especially poignant question for us, for we live in the great age of the mind — marvelous technological achievements .... even as we suffer through a poverty of wisdom. Our minds are perfectly contented to drop from one labyrinth into another exploring whatever it finds without regard to general direction, much less moral implications.
Many will not like to hear this, so let us consider the subject carefully. The trend of technology is always to advance without paying heed to its destructive consequences. We ask, "Who could stop it?!" as if we have no choice but to bow before this cruel juggeraut. But who would dispute that these technological advances have caused the unraveling of our environment, our planet, and our life world .... not to mention the corruption of our children. On this subject I leave you with one word: plastics.
The telos of the soul, the cause for which it was created and the destination it always seeks, is God. To borrow a concept from the great mathematician, Blaise Pascal, God has set a void within us which we attempt to fill with everything the body craves or the mind devises if we do not fill it with God. I like the formula expressed by Pascal scholars: God has placed a God-shaped hole within us, which might only be filled with God.
The tension here is basic. The soul longs to be filled with closeness to God. But the mind's rejection of God leads us to bodily appetites without let, glutting our lives with all that is not God, eclipsing the soul, even denying its existence.
What is the relationship of the body to the soul? We all know the answer: whether it be surfeit of food or excess of alcohol or habitual drug use or pornography or illicit sex .... the soul is weakened by the body's rampant appetites.
Isn't this why I meet people who question whether there is a God? They spend every minute obeying their appetites, chasing after their impulses. Their souls are so diminished as to be on the point of spiritual death. The tyranny of the body's cravings renders contemplation of God to be alien, even repulsive.
My family is visiting from the Mainland. They joked, "Watch what you say. Someone is listening." My daughter told us that she mentioned to her husband only once and in private what golf attire he thought she should buy. But her phone was turned on. Immediately, she began seeing adds for golf attire in Google and Instagram. How did that happen? I think we have all experienced that phenominon. They said to me, "Poppy, be careful! You're probably on someone's 'watch list'!" I said, "Of course I am. I'm a religious fanatic .... and probably a terrorist on that account. And I am a Russia-sympathizer. Isn't that how the FBI would see me? I am a Russian Orthodox priest. Isn't that proof that I am a fanatic? I am so peculiar .... because I really believe in God. I have made Him my Idol. Yes, I idolize Him. I have given my life over to Him. And in the year 2022, that is seen as a dangerous oddity." Is this not the evil one's chief strategy? Yet, again, the evil one cries out, "Checkmate!
What is the effect on our children? Their vision becomes blurred. Their spirits become muddied. Soon they become, not the noble creatures God created in His own Image, but rather they become, before our eyes, grotesques of that Holy and Noble Family Resemblance.
What is the mind's relationship to the soul? The mind is an egotistical fellow. He always proposes himself to be first and best. He ordains that all other things must be measured by whatever standards he proposes .... which are constantly changing. The mind invents its own religion — usually ethical culture societies that supplant morality — and the mind invents its own god — always a god who approves whatever the body craves and whatever the mind devises.
It is the soul alone which can never stray from God. It is the soul which apprehends the only stable reality, which is God. This is the soul's vocation, its natural sympathy, its genius, and the direction to which it always tends. It is absolutely dependable on this point.
What happens to the body and mind of a solitary living in the desert? Everyone who has retreated to a wilderness discovers the same things. Bodily appetites diminish in a relatively short time. Interest in gourmet foods vanishes. Alcohol, which renders the mind dull in the short term and reduces everyone to idiocy in the long term, holds no attraction. And the madness of drugs is seen for what it is: madness.
The last poison to loose its hold on us, whether in a desert or in a hermitage, is sexual fantasy. Erasmus of Rotterdam wrote that no sin drags as many women and men off to Hell as certainly as this one. It is the evil one's most potent weapon and the one with the greatest power over us as the biography of St. Mary of Egypt reveals.
But in the end the soul asks, "Which would you rather have: true love without sexual stimulation or indiscriminate sex with never any possibility of love?" Is this not an essential difference between Heaven and Hell?
The love of God is no abstraction. It is an overwhelming experience that transports us to the sensibilities of Heaven. God has given us human love as the primary gateway into understanding Him, Who is Love. By experiencing true love, by being elevated to the highest heights, our hearts are stretched open unto bursting as preparation for Divine Love. For we quickly see, as our hearts swell within us, that this must be of God. Here is the key that unlocks the mystery of the Two Great Commandments. To love God with all of your heart and to love each other — The two are inseparable: human love in all its purity and love's union with the Uncreated Light of Divine Love.
Ask St. Mary of Egypt. Her feet barely touched the ground as her soul ascended over body and mind. The monk Zosima beheld her as "the semblance of a human form gliding" over the rocky ground. (Vita). And when he saw her from across the Jordan River,
| "she at once stepped on to the waters and began walking across the surface towards him" (Vita). |
She required little food. Zosima asked in astonishment,
| "Can it be that you did not need food and clothing?" (Vita) |
She was the fellow of angels. And, following nearly half-a-century in the wilderness, where she mastered her unruly body and quieted her busy mind, she stepped out of this broken world into the one she loved and actually became, becoming united with the God Whom she loved above all.
Pray for us,
O Desert Mother, Mary,
that we may become worthy of the promises of Christ.
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.