Orthodox Asceticism and Spirituality for the Modern World

Orthodox Asceticism and Spirituality for the Modern World

Friday, July 5, 2013

Paradox and Mystery

     This is the second in a series I'm writing on the paradox, mystery, hiddenness, and seeming absence of God.  The first was "Christianity as a Mode of Being."  You may want to read that post first before continuing with this one.




Paradox and Mystery

     One day, some of the brothers came to see Saint Anthony, and among these was Father Joseph.  Wishing to test them, the saint mentioned a text from Holy Scripture, and starting with the youngest, he asked what it meant.  Each brother explained it as best he could, but to each one, the saint said, “you have not found the answer yet.”  Last of all, he asked Father Joseph, “What do you think the text means?”  He replied, “I do not know.”  Then Saint Anthony said, “Truly Father Joseph has found the way, for he said: I do not know.”[1]
The Sayings of the Desert Fathers

     To encounter God—and through encountering God to therefore follow Christ—means to encounter the twin pillars of mystery and paradox.  God is mystery.  He is both known and not known.  He is One and yet Trinity.  He is immanent, and yet He transcends all.  He is fully human, and fully divine.  Because of these things, He is also paradoxical.
     To be Christian also means that we cease following a religion, for the truth is that Christ is the end of religion.  This is why Christianity is not a religion, and a “religionless Christianity”[2]—to use the words of Boenhoffer—is the only way to fully follow Christ.  Religion implies a belief system.  It is the pagan impulse that is so prevalent in our human, fallen condition.
     If it is not a belief system, then what does following Christ mean?  Unfortunately, “following Christ” today means “studying” the Bible on a regular basis, becoming a “prayer warrior”, or engaging in any of the many clichéd “experiences” you can have or groups you can belong to at any number of fundamentalist churches.
     But this is not the way to truly follow Christ.
     Following Christ means, first and foremost, encountering the God of mystery and paradox—the God that is Mystery and Paradox—and then to live this encounter in the world, and through living this paradoxical encounter, to be paradox and mystery.  It is only at this point of being—a being that embraces and yet transcends all that is paradox and mystery—that we can be true to Christ, and it is at this point that he becomes our savior.  He saves us from an idol of God that we have made for ourselves, and he saves us from the philosophies that attempt to usurp this pagan idol-worship, but in the end only mire us in an attempt at life that ultimately rejects Christ.
     By embracing paradox fully, an ironic thing happens.  In a sense, it ceases to be paradox, for it no longer presents us with a problem that needs to be solved.  But it never ceases being mystery.  In fact, the further we enter into an encounter with God, the deeper the mystery tends to be—utterly and forever fathomless.
     And this Mystery that we encounter, and then live through and in, pervades everything that is our life, and everything that Christianity offers to us, and to the world that Christ has saved.
     This happens at many levels, and in many ways.
     The first way—and perhaps it is not the first way for everyone, but I think it tends to be—is that mystery pervades life, and by this I mean that it pervades our human existence, an existence that we would have previously encountered as an existential angst and pull.  When mystery enters into our existence, we cease searching for answers, or searching for satisfaction, or searching for meaning that we thought we would find in Christianity to begin with.
     In this encounter with mystery and existence, we are free to be ourselves, we are free to finally be human.  (And to be fully human is to enter into Christ’s way, and to become divine.)  We are free to not know.  We are free to be broken, and not pretend that we were ever anything else.  This is the true salvation that Christ offers.
     Our brokenness is not something to hide from.  It is not something that prevents us from “achieving” salvation—although I understand this is often how it’s presented.  In fact, our brokenness is the very thing that saves us.
     It is often thought that Christ loves us—and therefore God loves us—in spite of our brokenness.  But I don’t think this is true.  Our brokenness only doesn’t save us when we don’t admit it, when we don’t embrace it as the very fact of existing.
     This failure to admit brokenness—and therefore fail to encounter the God of seeming paradox in this instance—was the very sin that the Pharisees are guilty of in the gospels.  Repeatedly in the gospel stories, our savior hangs out with sinners of the worst sort, but he never berates them for what they are.  In fact, it seems that he is almost lackadaisical about just how broken they truly are.
     Personally, I never really thought enough about this as a path to salvation until I was reading a passage from the Russian martyr-saint Pavel Florensky[3]:
     “Why did Christ love so much the society of harlots and publicans?  Just imagine—these were real harlots who would fight, conduct indecent talks, and swear…  and Christ preferred their company to that of the Pharisees.  Just think, why is it said that the ‘power of God is performed in poverty’?  Poverty is not only weakness, not some poetic sickness like tuberculosis, but sinfulness, defilement.  Christ was with sinners not because they needed him more, but because, for Him, it was more pleasant to be with them; he loved them for their simplicity and humbleness.”[4]
     It was more pleasant to be with them; and it is more pleasant for Christ to be with us—in a real, palpable sense; mysterious yet utterly real—when we too admit our brokenness, actually get in touch with how broken we are.
     When our brokenness becomes real to us, so does God become real to us, and so does Mystery become real in ways that no words can ever do justice.
     For Mystery to pervade our life, and for God to become an ever-present state of being, I think that something else must occur: we must often enter into our faith slowly through a process of doubt.[5]
     Now, I’m not saying here that conversion happens through a process of doubt.  In fact, I think that true conversion has little to do with weighing all of the rational arguments for and against God.  No, our initial conversion when it is true—and by true I mean that it is not contrived, but rather it is a deep pull, a longing of the heart—is centered in the heart, when we encounter things such as truth, beauty, love, and mystery.
     When I think about initial conversion[6], I am often reminded of the story of how Russia was converted to the Orthodox Catholic faith.  To those who are Orthodox, it’s a common enough story.  For others reading, I think it bears repeating[7]:
     Prince Vladimir of Kiev and of all of Rus wanted to find a religion to unite his imperial court. Any religion would do. He just wanted to find the right one. So he did what a good ruler would do—he took emissaries from the royal court and sent them out and said, “Find out about all the religions out there and come back and tell me which one is best, and that’s the one we’ll use.”

      They went out and visited many different religions, many different forms of Christianity. Christianity was not yet firmly divided in the way we think of it today, but there were already longstanding schisms by the time of the conversion of Russia. We often think of the Great Schism as being the schism between the Roman West and Constantinopolitan East. But this was a late schism, much sadder. More divisive schisms had happened long ago—schisms, for example, at the time of Chalcedon (451 A.D.). Schisms which, lest you think history is all in the past, still divide us today in 2010. Lord, have mercy.
    So he sent out his emissaries and they visited here and there. By one tradition, they went to the Islamic court, asked about Islam, and wrote back to Vladimir and said, “It’s a nice religion, but they don’t allow alcohol, and this would never go over with Russians.” They went to Germany, Europe and throughout the world.
     One group of envoys went to Constantinople. This is what they wrote in their own words, “When we stood in the temple [this is Hagia Sophia where you can still go today, the Church of Holy Wisdom], we hardly knew whether we were in heaven or on earth. For in truth it seems impossible to behold such glory and such magnificence on earth. We could not possibly relate to you what we saw in that place. But one thing we know, there God dwells among men, and all the worship of other countries is to us, forevermore, as nothing. We cannot forget that beauty which we saw. Whoever has enjoyed so sweet a sight will never be satisfied with anything else; nor will we consent to remain any longer in paganism as we are now.”
     We cannot forget that beauty.
     It was not some system of catechesis that converted the Russian people, nor was it some long-winded diatribe—as you might find at your average fundamentalist church on any given Sunday morning—but it was beauty.
     But after that initial, genuine conversion, then what?  This is where entering into faith slowly through a process of doubt comes into the picture.  This is where a process of doubt allows us to deepen our conversion experience by making it constantly experiential.  We must encounter doubt as a path of not knowing that is deep, abiding, and never settles for shortcuts.


[1] Adapted from “The Sayings of the Desert Fathers” by Benedicta Ward.
[2] By “religionless Christianity” I certainly don’t mean a “Churchless Christianity.”  What I mean is a Church that loses all sense of paganism (see my previous post on Christianity as a way of being).
[3] Florensky was a martyr that was killed under Russian communist yoke in 1943.  His thoughts should have a wider readership, but he is little known to the Christian world outside of the Orthodox Church.
[4] From “Salt of the Earth,” pg 16.
[5] I am borrowing this phrase from the Czech—and Roman Catholic—priest Tomas Halik.  He writes of this in his book “Night of the Confessor,” chapter 5, entitled “Discreet Faith”.
[6] I say initial conversion because we must not think of conversion as something that happens once, and then is done.  (As is so common among “born-again” evangelicals who speak of “being saved” or “knowing our Lord Jesus Christ as our personal savior”.)  Rather, conversion is an ever ongoing, ever deepening relationship with the Triune God.
[7] The story as told here is quoted from Archimandrite Irenei’s “Orthodoxy and Mysticism” which you can find elsewhere on this blog, or you can listen to his series of the same title on Ancient Faith Radio .  For a more in depth account, see Metropolitan Kallistos Ware’s book “The Orthodox Church.”

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