My appointment with Fr. Joshua went swimmingly. Not only was he his usual, friendly and reassuring self, but he also validated for me several questions I had that were giving me pause. I have very esoteric understandings of spiritual things, but most people I meet online do not. It is sort of like speaking past each other, except I tend to forget that they are in no way more knowledgeable than me just because they parrot back what their favorite spiritual authors have said.
Faith will take a nuanced approach. It will not be black-or-white, even though many would like me to believe that you either believe X or you don't, and only one of the beliefs is correct. No, faith is fluid. Faith is "yes, and".
One of my main concerns was the literal interpretation of scripture. I was focusing on the OT/Hebrew Bible, especially the Adam and Eve story. Fr. Joshua surprised me with a rendition of Jesus's Ascension that was very refreshing and reassuring.
And with that open mindedness, I started to see that if we can get past the "giftwrap" of the myth's language, we can receive the gift of the message contained therein.
Fr. Joshua and I compared notes on our understanding of the Holy Trinity, which was super rewarding. He likened the Father to the sun, and Christ and the Holy Spirit to the light and heat that comes from the sun (the Source). I likened the Father to reality and Jesus and the Spirit to matter and energy - something I recently read from a scientific point of view that can be seen as one and the same. If matter and energy are interchangeable at their core, yet we experience them differently, and they both emanate from (for lack of a better word) Ultimate Reality, and we experience Reality only thanks to matter and energy, then are the three not one and the same? A trinity yet unity? And isn't what we do with one automatically influencial over the other two?
In the same light, I got my answer to why we worship Christ and not the Father. First, the Father is a personification of that Source aspect of God. God the Father is not embodied, and therefore not gendered. Rather, it's the personification of the Tao which allows us to more easily relate to it/Him. When we worship Christ, we worship God. There's only the one God, so there is nothing to get jealous over; there's no idolatry, as Jews and Muslims would accuse us of.
Further, when we say "worship", Fr. Joshua gave me a new way of looking at the meaning of the word: self-offering. How do we offer ourselves to an abstract ideal? We only know what we live, and we live embodied lives, and we can only relate to other embodied people. Therefore, we know what it means to be humble in relation to another human being, but we cannot possibly compare ourselves to the Cosmos at large! We cannot worship the Cosmos, Reality, the Source, because we cannot define it nor contain it in language or our mind. But God emptied Himself in the Incarnation, and made Himself available to us in the form of a human, Jesus, precisely so that we could worship in spirit and in truth. So we can now worship God by worshipping God's Incarnation. We can offer ourselves to God. And if we think about it, we have nothing to offer God but what God has given us, and if we know what's good for us, we empty ourselves of our egos and replace them with Christ and the Holy Spirit, and then we offer back to God... God Himself!
I like also that ecological concerns in burial practices are on the radar at least at this church. I like that there's no objections to organ donation. I like that while cremation does not lend itself to an Orthodox funeral, it does not imply anything about our eternal salvation.
I like that due to this sense that God can still save us after death, we pray for our deceased loved ones. And therefore, we can hold out hope for our non-Christian sisters and brothers as well.
I like that it seems I can bring all of my concerns and beliefs and values, so long as I also bring my humility and willingness to learn and be corrected.
I know that I cannot expect perfection, not from myself and not from the Orthodox Church, either. But I can expect to grow and deepen my faith.
I was even reassured that Fr. Joshua doesn't often experience this "relationship with Jesus" that is the cornerstone of Protestant faith.
No comments:
Post a Comment