"Then Face-to-Face"

Today we celebrate a great landmark of the faith: the First Ecumenical Council. In a sense we celebrate it every day, every time we chant or speak the Nicene Creed. But today, we devote our weekly time of reflection to this First Council and to its Fathers. As our epigram suggests, the main subject is to know God. After all, hasn't this been the main subject all along? For Abraham to have known God and to have spoken with Him? For Moses to have met God .... in the Midian Wilderness and atop Mount Sinai? As our Gospel lesson today discloses, "To know You is eternal life" — an ancient prayer from the lips of Jesus.

St. Paul famously wrote in his First Letter to the Church at Corinth,

The knowledge St. Paul speaks of here is knowledge of himself: what he is truly like, the content of his character. For the mirror, έποστρον / épostron, of the classical world was not made of glass, but of steel. You see, however carefully hammered out the steel might be, however finely polished, it would always yield an image that is not quite right: "dimly" he says. The English translation dimly does not say enough. The Greek is αινίγματι / ainígmati, from which we get our word enigma. St. Paul says we are a riddle, but a riddle that will be solved as we advance in our spiritual journey. The solution comes by "putting away childish things" (he says in the preceding verse). We must put down the comic book version of our knowledge and faith. We must grow up.

Now, isn't St. Paul already in possession of all of the facts. After all, his subject is self-knowledge, that is, himself. Who knows the facts of St. Paul's life better or more certainly than St. Paul?

Of course, he is not the one who knows this subject best. For we humans have blind spots. When I trained for hospital chaplaincy, I learned about the "Johari Window" — a little technology, we might say, to help us through the challenge of self-knowledge. The Johari Window has four panes. The bottom left pane is our "public window": what we know about ourselves and what others know. The bottom right pane is our "blind spot": what others know about us but which we cannot see. The upper left window is our "secret window": what we know about our lives but which no one else knows. Finally, the upper right window is the "mystery window": what God alone knows about us.

As we hear the truth of these four window panes, we begin to grasp the formidable challenge implied by self-understanding. And we begin to understand why the solution should lie only with God and, therefore, in our own spiritual advancement towards God.

The great Western theologian, Hans Urs von Balthasar (who with Henri de Lubac and Joseph Ratzinger saw the Greek Fathers as a key to reforming the Roman Church), wrote that when we die we shall see the Lord Jesus face-to-face. In His face — the face of perfect mercy but also of perfect judgment, knowing all things — we shall see the truth about ourselves. — no blind spots, no secrets, no mysteries. And this truth will be a consuming fire — a mortification so great as to split open the callous that covers us, causing it to fall away, revealing the tender one beneath, whom God had made in purity and innocence.

Was not this the scene scene on Calvary: in the face public humiliation, one thief rebelled, and the other's heart broke. Is this not the final judgment awaiting us. The decisive moment.

On reflection, it is no different from the Orthodox doctrine of the Toll Houses through which we must pass during the forty days following our deaths, according to Tradition. It is no different from St. Columba's vision of demons and angels battling for our souls in the air — the demons confronting us with our shameful truths publicly and the angels testifying to our many goodnesses. Is this not all one? At the center is self-knowledge to be immediately followed by the grace of reconciliation: self-understanding calling immediately for our need to be reconciled .... bestowed by the Lord in the same moment that He founds the Church (Jn 20:23). You recall the passage: "He breathed on them .... 'Receive the Holy Spirit.'" And then immediately, "What sins you bind on earth will be bound in Heaven; what sins you loose on earth will be loosed in Heaven." It is the first sacrament because it is the most important: baptizing the Apostles with the Holy Spirit and then immediately instituting re-baptism. For self-knowledge must always be followed by a plea to be forgiven .... unless of course we have fallen into the admantine posture of the unrepentant thief, choosing Hell right from the gate.

And we must never forget that our word repentance means in its Greek form transformation of mind and soul. That is, "I no longer want the old person. I only want the new one."

How wonderful that God should place a gate directly across our paths, at which we reveal everything about our selves and our lives, all of it, leaving nothing out. We offer it freely and regret what was regrettable. And the gate opens. And He says, "Pass on to the new life, leaving all of that burden behind you."

Or refusing to disclose the content of your life, refusing to offer candor, regret, and repentence (transformation). In that case the gate does not for open us. We cannot advance. He says, in effect, "You wanted your old life? Then, have it." Is this not the content of Hell: our old lives. The ancients wrote that people in Hell spend all eternity revisiting all their sins over and over and over again. It is the House of Regret, where their is no freedom, only bondage to ourselves.

☦

From this little meditation, we understand that knowledge and insight are not the same thing. Indeed, a mystery operates here: insight shows us the facts we already knew but were blind to. The Early Church Fathers taught that purgation, which repents of the unworthy things inside ourselves, clears the way for light to flood in, and that light illumine our interiors revealing further unworthinesses and clutter.

The principle extends beyond self-understanding. It touches on all classes of knowledge. So often, the facts are all before us, but we cannot see them. We are selective in the ones we notice. We are selective as we later recall our data, our memories. And we are selective as we marshal facts in the service of our arguments and favorite conclusions. (We call this "cherry picking.") Only illumination and insight will help us sort through the facts.

The stakes go beyond the shame of seeming foolish or childish. They are part and parcel with eternal life. St. Paul suggests that this knowledge is an attribute of the Kingdom of Heaven: "and then face to face." The Lord Jesus says much the same in our Gospel lesson today. Eternal life is equated to knowing God and being known by God.

A defining mark of Holy Orthodoxy is getting this knowledge right. The distinction made by the Orthodox Catholic Church refers to "right doctrine" and "right glory, or worship." The counterexample to this are ecclesiae that accept, or even invite, innovation. They promise all sorts of things ..... which are lies, endangering our souls. How often during the latter twentieth century have liberal Christian ecclesiae made bold changes — ordination of women, same-sex marriage, freely dispensed remarriage after divorce, acceptance of abortion, and, of course, that most ruinous promise: "Oh, don't worry about your sins .... they're nothing." Is this not the promise of a demon, who wishes to trade your eternal life with God in exchange for the slavery he suffers under? The list is a long one. Things that were unthinkable, say, in the year 1960 suddenly became thinkable, even widely practiced .... and in the space of one generation.

Each time the innovating ecclesia cited Deutero-Isaiah: "Behold, I do a new thing!" (Isa 43:19). (I heard this over and over again from the liberals of the Episcopal Church, where I was a priest.) The great question put before us, then, is, "When new thing is of God?"

In the Orthodox Church this question is answered in two different ways. The first forms the foundation of all Orthodox theology: the Patristic consensus: what the Greek Fathers — who wrote in the same Greek language into which the Hebrew Bible was translated, which Jesus and the Apostles quoted and which they spoke, in which the New Testament was written —  .... what these Greek Fathers mostly agreed upon. You see, numbers greatly matter here. One wise, erudite, and godly man might get a few things wrong, might have a blind spot, but the consensus of all the Fathers praying ardently to God? In this we trust.

The second principle is when original facts are newly discovered. It does not matter when they were discovered. It could have been 1947. It could have been 1956. The important thing is that they are original, authentic, and open a true window on to the Early Church, or on to the lifeworld preceding the birth of Jesus. (I will not go into this right now. One of the Sisters told me that if I mentioned the word Mesopotamia one more time, she is going to protest!)

Today, we celebrate the Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council. They met during the early fourth century and defined certain truths which we call dogmatic, or infallible. To be Christian is to accept these truths with all our minds and souls. If something should seem amiss, then we may be sure that the error is in our understanding not in these transcendent, changeless truths. In particular, the Council met frame words and sentences that describe the nature of God the Father, of God the Son, and of God the Holy Ghost, but mainly to describe the Son: Who is one Person in two natures, human and Divine.

Let us ask the obvious question: why did it take three hundred years to define these truths? Was all not known three hundred years earlier? Was new information divulged?

Part of the problem had to do with the persecution of the Church, which was classed as a criminal activity (during these centuries). A plenary meeting of all bishops and theologians promulgating decrees in a formal way would have been difficult-unto-mortally-dangerous. It is not a coincidence that the Edict of Milan, decriminalizing Christianity, was issued in 313, and the First Ecumenical Council was convened in 325.

Another factor is that the Church had come to a crisis on these questions, which we now call Arianism, fracturing the Church to the point of ruin.

But that is not all of it. The primary point is that, through crises, through divisions, through rancorous debates, insight must catch up with knowledge. Yes, all things were known, but all things were not known aright. The main issue here was the need for insight.

If you do not believe this, then I point out that by 325 the Church still did not have an agreed upon teaching concerning the Holy Spirit. St. Basil the Great's landmark work, On the Holy Spirit, would not be completed until some time in the 370s. That's more than two generations later. But still this did not settle the question.

It turns out that meditation goes to the heart of Christian life. If we at the Hermitage were compelled to define who and what we are, we would say, we are hermits who pray and meditate together. The meditation is constant and ongoing. Basic and big questions are placed before us every day. We receive the Eucharist regularly in order to dwell in God and He in us, greatly assisting our meditations. And we are sons and daughters of God who seek to love God, to love each other, and to love our neighbor through and with and in this holy community of worship. It is this atmosphere, of godly love and humble seeking, in which understanding slowly unfolds, even in the humble scale of our own little lives .... unto the Kingdom of Heaven, by the grace of God.

Certainly, as we countenance the wisdom, erudition, and holiness of the First Council Fathers, we trust that this same Christian life revealed the facts in their crystalline clarity and Divine Truth.

Here at ground level, a solitary soul cannot hope to penetrate all four window panes of the Johari Window. But a large group of absolutely sincere and holy souls, communing with God in constant prayer, can. I say, "communing with God."

☦

These principles go far beyond an academic exercise contemplating a Church Council convened seventeen centuries ago. In the year 2022 we have an array of first-magnitude questions lying directly before us. This list includes nothing less than

Tragically, these questions belong to a much, much longer list, which, in sum, depicts a people who are desperately lost. And that phrase we heard in our Gospel lesson this morning had a frosty sound: "son of pertition," hopelessly lost.

However much we might perceive these items to be disconnected, things unrelated to each other, things pointing to subfields like psychology, anthropology, medicine, and the law, I assert that every item here does share an essential property: they are organically united to a catastrophe, which is the loss of God guiding our lives.

What happens when God is no longer guiding our lives? We have mass hysteria and confusion because now it is left to each one of us to decide who and what we are — a mass identity crisis experienced at the level of each human mind and soul. Well might such a list come before an Ecumenical Council!

We have watched our culture — our schools, our local churches, our marriages, our children, our families — torn to shreds over this list. Now, we begin to see global war — hearing the dreaded phrase World War III — breaking out for reasons having to do with this list.

Are you surprised at this claim? The liberal media regularly characterize the war in Ukraine as being fought over "liberal democracy." I commend to you, therefore, the New York Times of March 20, 2022, which defines "liberal democracy" in terms of same-sex marriage. I recently mentioned this to a well-educated women (Phi Beta Kappa graduate of one of this country foremost colleges), and she told me, "That's absurd! That cannot be!" So permit to read from the New York Times:

Liberal democracy, you see, defined in terms of one main feature: same-sex marriage. No. The so-called "LGBQT agenda" is no side issue. This is not one of many social issues people need to be more open to. This is the very thing the Russians claim they are fighting over — to push this unacceptable Western lifeworld out of their living space, and away from their children and far, far away from their Beloved Church. They will not have it!

Over the past two generations, we have been willing (some people tripping over each other, they are so willing) to sacrifice our children and our way of life over the so-called "cause" of the homosexual lifestyle (which, by the way, means "your preferences" according to Andrew Sullivan, a widely read "gay intellectual").

Shall we now up the ante, hazarding global nuclear war? Is this not the theater of the absurd?! Is this not the Mad Hatter's tea party?! Certainly, President's Biden confrontive policies suggest that we will as he now uses Ukraine as a proxy for making direct war upon Russia .... in their own country! You see, Russia is not invading Canada. They are not invading Mexico. The U.S. is pumping weapons of mass destruction as well as (we may be sure) troops into the Russian lifeworld Talk about unthinkable! French President Macron said yesterday, "This must stop!"

We must not forget a most important fact which our media conveniently buries in their reporting: this is a civil war. I say, civil war. First, Ukraine is the same ethnos as Russia. The word Ukraine means "outskirts [of Russia]." Second, Ukraine is the same language group as Russia — a fact confirmed in any cursory glance at the Indo-European tree. Third, Kiev is the traditional capital of Russia and has been Russian territory for roughly a thousand years (though the earth movements of past wars have juggled boundaries at various times).

Russia is engaged in a civil war as prelude to a policy of isolation. They do not want any part of the Westernized world. They have gone on the gold standard. And the ruble recently has emerged as the strongest currency in the world .... as our shakey dollar drifts out into ever more perilous waters. If you do not believe that we in this country are on the brink of an economic catastrophe, then I suggest you pay attention to Warren Buffet, who said that no economic textbook published in the past century can explain our situation.

The whole world is walking through a most dangerous fog. Self-knowledge is famously intractable. National self-understanding and self-definition is hopelessly beyond us .... as the past two generations in the U.S. have proved.

We cannot solve this .... though our lives be lost and our civilization be consigned to chemical dust. But we can pray. We can receive the Lord in the mystery of the Eucharist. We can love God seeking His ways and, within the life-giving world of those ways, seek to love others. So many around us are so toxified that they do not know what is wholesome and what is not wholesome.

☦

St. Paul sees his reflection in a piece of polished steel, an épostron, and perceives his image dimly. Is not this our common state and condition — to perceive ourselves through a fog of stubborn lies and unrealistic self-flatteries? How many trillions of dollars have been spent in psychoanalysis or therapy as we seek to "know ourselves" .... preferring the always the therapist who "understands us" (which is to say, "flatters us")?

We want instant answers. How many men I have known — men who have been a disappointment to their wives and their children, men whose careers have stumbled or collapsed, men who drink too much or take drugs .... how many men have declared to me in middle age (or in old age!) that they have discovered they are gay .... though they have been avidly heterosexual for decades. You see, this has been the problem all along! They have have been victims, really. They have not failed! Society has failed them! How quickly activists and lobbyists will rush in to lionize them! These men have seized upon an instant solution to an intractable problem: explaining themselves to the world .... midst the confusion of their troubled egos .... depicting them in a light that is not only favorable but which casts them in the role of misunderstood victors.

Isn't identity crisis a primary cause for the recent "Great Resignation"? A brush with mass annihilation (the world's first global pandemic) has caused a vast multitude of employees to announce that they must find themselves? .... 47 million in the United States alone. Talk about a crisis of identity!

As we have shared in this chapel many, many times (I insert one link), we are inscrutable, as the Cappadocian Father St. Gregory of Nyssa has written, just as God in Whose Image we are made is inscrutable: The inscrutable image of the Inscrutable.

Then exactly what is the image that St. Paul expects to behold in clarity in the culmination of his spiritual journey? "Face to face," he says. It is the Family resemblance. It is our birthright to the only Royal Family that matters, perfectly and radiantly embodied in our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. This is the purpose of all our earthly journeys. This is the purpose of every life: mysteriously to become the Lord Jesus Christ, to enter that fluid situation where angels are ascending and descending freely.

How do we achieve this ideal? We do this through faithfulness, with hope, and in a profound state of love. These three, St. Paul writes, and the greatest of these is love.

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