Amen. I appreciate especially your point about the need to properly acknowledge, appreciate and be grateful for what God has done and is doing – even in the midst of our messes. Your penultimate comment expresses this well and makes the reason for it especially clear:

Again, none of this denies the myriad errors in my life. Much less does any of this deny my sinfulness. It is however to deny that in whatever form it takes human sinfulness has the last word in the face of divine grace. If anything, the fact that God’s grace triumphs over my sinfulness makes the latter more tragic.

This hits at a personal level – and I am very grateful for the insight. In most of my day-to-day life, I tend to reflexively focus on what is wrong, where I am failing. To do so without giving proper due to God’s grace is to give my sinfulness “the last word in the face of divine grace.” It is an expression of both pernicious ego-centrism and unconscionable ingratitude and thus quite the opposite of the exercise in humility that I have flattered myself in thinking it was. (Unfortunately, how we are with ourselves is also how we are with others – and when I am this way with others it can not remotely be justified as an expression of humility; it just comes across as a harsh ingratitude, at best, and a relentless perfectionism at worst.)
Fortunately, you comments also indicate the way to true humility, which gives proper priority to grace and thus, as a consequence, helps us to see our (myriad) failings as the affront of ingratitude that they are. As Elder Joseph points out – we are indeed mud, and we have made a muddy mess of that, but we are also mud imbued with the breath of God. We must honor both (mud and breath) – as both are the truly good gifts of God – to acquire the healthy humility needed to become “all fire” (if you’ll pardon the mixed reference). Thank you for the important – and, for me, very much needed – amplification of your point.

Chrys,

YES!

Our criticisms must be gentle, moderate and based in love.

BUT merely pointing out error isn’t loving and it is foolish to make such an equation. A loving criticism, as St Silouan suggests in the passage you quote above, see what is good, true, beautiful or just in the other person’s life or faith. To merely point out error and say, as some do, “The most loving thing I can do is tell you the truth,” is at best self-deceiving and at worst self-serving.

The moral and pastoral problem here isn’t, so I’m clear, with pointing out error. Rather it is the reduction of the truth of the other person or his situation to merely error.

It maybe true that I am ugly and my mother dresses me funny but it isn’t the whole truth of my life. Yes I’m ugly, but I am still created in God’s image and so bear within myself the traces of the divine glory in whose presence the angels weep for joy. And yes, it is true that the clothes my mother chooses for me are mismatched and ill-fitting. But they are still her gift to me and as such reflect–however poorly–something of God’s love for me and so my incomprehensible worth and dignity in His eyes if not in my neighbor’s (or even my mother’s!).

Again, none of this denies the myriad errors in my life. Much less does any of this deny my sinfulness. It is however to deny that in whatever form it takes human sinfulness has the last word in the face of divine grace. If anything, the fact that God’s grace triumphs over my sinfulness makes the latter more tragic.

Forgive me but it seems to me that St Silouan’s word is especially important for American Orthodoxy with our tendency to hold to a sectarian rather than a catholic vision of the Church and the Christian life.

+FrG

Thank you Father for your encouraging words!

Let me see what I can manage in the next day or so.

FrG

Agreed. It also expresses a dynamic that I find in my more effective (and unfortunately too rare) moments as a parent. It is easy to criticize, but rarely effective – if for no other reason than that there are myriad ways of doing something incorrectly. It is much more effective and productive to show what is right. (Kind of like shooting an arrow: there are many, many ways to go wrong and only one that hits the bullseye.) St. Silouan expressed it this truth much more profoundly in his discussion with a zealous missionary. After discussing the missionary’s criticisms and then asking about certain aspects of the faith among the people he was evangelizing, St. Silouan offered some important guidance. He said:

“If you condemn their faith, they will not listen to you . . . But if you confirm what they were doing well . . . and then gently point out their mistakes and show them what they ought to amend, then they would listen to you, and the Lord would rejoice over them. And this way by God’s mercy we shall all find salvation . . . God is love, and therefore the preaching of His word must always proceed from love. Then both preacher and listener will profit. But if you do nothing but condemn, the soul of the people will not heed you and no good will come of it.” (Saint Silouan, the Athonite, pp. 64-65)

This approach – abjuring criticism, and embracing the way of humility, gratitude and love – was consistently emphasized by St. Siluoan as well as by Elder Porphyrios and so many other modern elders when discussing how we are to deal with others. These elders insist on this approach not only because it is more effective, not only because it is necessary for us if we are to remain in the Spirit, but also because – consistent with that Spirit – it embodies the approach of Jesus. His strongest criticism was offered not to the worst in society (though there was so very much to condemn), but to the Pharisees, whose righteousness was self-serving – and which righteousness we are required to surpass (Matt 5:20).

Chrys, you are expressing something I found elucidated best (so far) in David Bentley Hart’s “Atheist Delusions.” He examines in great detail the success of the early Christians and concludes that their good works appealed to the conscience of the pagan culture surrounding them and affected the tectonic shift from pagan antiquity to classical Christian culture. This is oversimplified a bit, but you have to question if the Edict of Milan under Constantine would have held if the moral ground was not tilled first in those first three centuries of persecution.

In the same way, as I read you and Fr. Gregory, you are advocating the same kind of enterprise, although in this case a restoration and renewal. Tilling the ground may unearth some pearls that restore the rationale to the old habits that have since become skewed. Merely criticizing them wont.

This response is so good that it merits an essay by itself.

Merry Christmas, Brother George, Happy New Year, and Monomakhos! How are you, friend?

Michael,

Christ is born!

Thank you for your thoughtful comment and my God bless your resolve for a more ascetical preparation for Christmas!

I agree with you that embracing our culture’s celebrates Christmas does not reflect “either personal holiness or a love for America” but the rejection of our culture doesn’t either. Neither response is necessarily the response off a holy love.

It is to offer a corrective to the latter response, of the quick and easy rejection typical of sectarianism, that partly inspired this sermon. As I said above, there is much to criticize in how our culture celebrates Christmas.

But even though there is much which is wrong in how American’s celebrate Christmas, there is also something right about it. There is a generosity of spirit there as well as a certain childlike innocence. The challenge is not simply in seeing what is wrong but what is right in how our culture celebrates the Nativity. Unfortunately the latter is almost wholly lacking among Orthodox commentators.

You used a lovely phrase in your post, the “ghostly longing” for Christ in our culture, that helps me clarify my own thinking here.

I would tweak the phrase a bit and say that what is ghostly in American culture is not the longing for Christ but our memory of Him. Flannery O’Connor’s description of the South as “Christ haunted” is also true of America (and of Western culture more broadly). The pathos (and so at times the bathos) of our culture arises out of the convergence of O’Connor’s observation with what St Justin Martyr calls the seminal presence of Christ (logos spermatikos–the seminal presence of the Word of God).

As I have reflected on St Justin, I have come to realize that my longing for Christ is constitutive of both human nature AND personal identity. I can be neither human nor myself save that I desire (i.e., love) Christ. The sorrow of Christmas in our culture is that it in response to Justin’s ontological and existential longing it offers only the faint–and terrifying–memory of Christ.

Though not referring to Christmas, I think O’Connor nevertheless illumines of us the pathos and bathos of how our culture celebrates Christmas. She also helps me at least understand how we relate to our culture’s Christian foundation. In a 1960 lecture, “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction,” she says

Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one. To be able to recognize a freak, you have to have some conception of the whole man, and in the South the general conception of man is still, in the main, theological. That is a large statement, and it is dangerous to make it, for almost anything you say about Southern belief can be denied in the next breath with equal propriety. But approaching the subject from the standpoint of the writer, I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted. The Southerner, who isn’t convinced of it, is very much afraid that he may have been formed in the image and likeness of God. Ghosts can be very fierce and instructive. They cast strange shadows, particularly in our literature. In any case, it is when the freak can be sensed as a figure for our essential displacement that he attains some depth in literature.

For all our aggressive secularism, crash consumerism, and let’s just say it, our increasing freakishness I remain fundamentally hopeful for our culture. How we celebrate Christmas, our cultural debate over the definition of marriage, and any number of other issues are for me not good things in themselves but seen with the eyes of faith they are the hopeful evidence of our cultural displacement. They are the symptoms that contain within themselves the cure for the disease and dis-ease of our culture.

This displacement and the dis-ease that comes with it, however, are also personal and I fool myself if I imagine that as an Orthodox Christian I an exempt; I am still an American and eve if I were not, I am still a sinful human being. This should be stronger. I am a fool if I think I am exempt. I’m not and this is why the ascetical response to which you refer Michael is absolutely necessary both personally AND as the foundation of the Church’s evangelical ministry.

What I’m calling into question in this sermon is not cultural shortcomings or the necessity of asceticism but the cheap grace of cultural criticism which I all too often seek out as a substitute for personal holiness. I would offer as evidence of this ease with which–from both the left and the right–Orthodox Christians voice cultural criticism without any attempt to see past the freakishness to the beauty it conceals.

A commitment to the truth requires not simply that we point out the darkness of sin but illumine it with the light of the Gospel. This latter work is wholly positive because it brings to the fore the good, the true, the beautiful and the just that sin would obscure.

Glorify Him!

+FrG

Father, I think I understand your point and to some extent agree with it the statement that our cultural celebrations of Christimas express a ghostly longing for Christ. I agree even more that for we Orthodox to evagelize America we have to be committed to both personal holiness AND a true and abiding love for this country and our culture (boy do we fall short there). That being said, it does not necessary follow that embracing the manner in which Christmas is celebrated reflects either personal holiness or a love for America.

My Nativity experience this year led me to the conclusion that the manner in which the Orthodox Church approaches the Nativity and the manner in which the our culture approaches it are not really all that compatible. The key is that the Church teaches us, out of personal holiness, to prepare for His coming by fasting, repentance and almsgiving. Once He has come forth–then we celebrate with Christ: He is Born-Glorify Him!. Christmas is just beginning. All the while never forgetting the slaughter of the innocents and the flight into Egypt.

I don’t know why I had never seen the difference before, but I had not. For next year I hope to enter into the Church’s understanding of the Nativity more deeply, but that has to be conscious and planned and it means much less participation in the pre-Nativity celebrations of our culture. I further hope to do this without any condenscension toward what is the predominant approach–enjoying the genuine joy of others while recognizing how far I am from the source of that joy.