The loneliness and boredom pandemic is caused by selfishness and ignorance. “We are products of a corrupt culture that teaches selfishness”. Many live selfishly, striving to acquire worldly power and material possessions, and to fill the emptiness inside them with passing pleasure. “Grab every single morsel of happiness which comes your way” becomes their motto. Often, their effort to attain happiness implies to willingly hurt others. They cannot adjust to the demands of married or religious life.

The history of the Church teaches us that the saints were neither lonely nor bored. They lived for Christ!

About Prayer – by Fr. Cleopa

St. John of the Ladder says: Whoever has found sweetness of prayer, will always want solitude. And St. Isaac the Syrian says: Whoever has found sweetness of prayer, will flee from crowds as a wild donkey! He will want to stay in that sweetness and in his dialogue with God, always. And vain chatter and business and other things will draw him away from prayer, but he will always be sorry and long for it whenever that happens.

God doesn’t ask us to only take our body out of the world and run into the woods; but it is with our minds that we should leave the world. I could sit in the midst of the noisy world, as St. Theodosius would do – the initiator of monastic communities – yet they would see him pray as a pillar of fire, in the middle of the world. He would receive three thousand poor in his dining hall every day and would tend to them at table. And you would see him in the middle of the world just as he would have been in the farthest desert, because he had acquired perfection in that. He would no longer hear or watch anything of this world, but only the things Above. But such a life belongs only to the ones who have perfected that [practice].

They might be coming at the right time: it seems the Patriarchate of Jerusalem in Palestine has a majority of Hebrew members now.

Yes, I think we are simpatios.

It doesn’t affect it all. My term “historical inevitability” deals more with the trajectory of culture.

One other point though, I’ve never been comfortable with the notion of “free will.” I prefer “radical freedom”, that is, our freedom is so free that we can turn our back on our Creator. Our freedom of course consists of the freedom to obey or disobey, but the fact that disobedience is, well, allowed, or to put it another way that our Lord is not coercive — he does not compel us to believe — is a remarkable testament to the sovereignty granted to mankind. (Calvinists don’t like that, but then Calvinists have great trouble with human freedom.) The freedom of course is necessary for love to be love. Love cannot exist without freedom; ultimately love also circumscribes and directs that freedom.

Quite by accident almost ten years back, I met the leader of the Messianic Jewish movement on a street in New York. We just basically bumped into each other, had a quick conversation and I told him: “If you want to follow your Judaism to its final completion you would become Orthodox Christian.”

Interesting thoughts. I tend to agree. I also find it interesting that in the Wests’ movement towards Eastern Christianity is the protestant facination with Messianic Judiasm. I’ve even heard that one Messianic Christian in California is attempting to “recreate” the ancient Liturgies. Hopefully, he’ll come to see that Orthodoxy has already done this and preserved it. But I also fear that we may have a return of “Judaizers” and their attempt to push “authencity closer to Jewish” (please note. I’m not trying to be anti-semetic here.)

Father, what does historical inevitability do to our free will?

If my only choice were Western Christianty in all of its perverse manifestations, I would not now be a Christian.

Why did the Archbishop of Canterbury not become Fr Roman?

Nevertheless, the article does reveal that the Anglican Archbishop’s first encounter with God was at a liturgy of the Russian Orthodox Church, when he was aged 14. Here he met the ‘living God’ and when he left he felt that he ‘had seen glory and praise for the first time’. ‘I felt I had seen and heard people who were behaving as if God were real. I came away with the sense of absolute objectivity and majesty and beauty of God which I have never forgotten. If people worshipped like this, I felt God must be a great deal more real (than) I have ever learnt him so far’.

How about “historical inevitability”?

More on the rest of your post later.

I will not dignify any concept by calling it an ‘historical necessity’ because I reject Marx, and all his intellectual tripe, utterly.

There are fashions in thought both fleeting and long term, and nihilism, as a fashionable thought, has almost run its course. Nihilism is a bleak, pessimistic and depressing pall, under which nothing can grow. The only authentic response to life for a true nihilist is, ultimately, self-annihilation. We’ve been self-destructing for the last 100 years and are rapidly approaching the point of total dehumanization. The tide will turn–sooner, rather than later. Having manifested an idea to its uttermost extreme, people will ultimately seek more fertile avenues of activity. (That may be the inherent value of boredom.) As a small example, you can see this now, with the resurgence of interest in classical art training and formal values in art. Abstraction is dead.

The Christianity rejected by the West is Western Christianity, not Eastern. If my only choice were Western Christianty in all of its perverse manifestations, I would not now be a Christian. There is–to my mind, at least–boundless opportunity for the Eastern Orthodox church to lead the spiritual recovery of western civilization. One major reason is that its authenticity is not circumscribed by logic. Rather, its validity is enhanced by mystery. Counterintuitive though it may seem, people accept mystery more readily than they accept tortured logic. And they are not looking for judgement, they are looking for healing. In our fallen-ness, it’s a need that will always be with us. The Christ of the Eastern church is a healer.

Come what may, we must keep the flame alive.

In one sense the task of consciously building a cultrual Christianity is going to fail because the essence of Christianity and the cultural pneumbra of it is the personal encounter with the risen Lord in the community of believers.

Any artificial construction simply doesn’t have the life it needs to really work.

Regarding the “subjectivity of truth.” Christos Yannaras has a great chapter in “The Freedom of Morality” titled “Pietism as an Ecclesiological Heresy” that lays out the theological rationale for the necessity of moral action you outline above but from a different direction.

The conceptual overlap between the pietistic impulse in American culture and the necessity of subjective moral action (I agree with your thesis of “truth-subjectivity” above) portends some confusion for American Orthodox I think. The Roman solution is the notion of an operative natural law as you point out. The Orthodox solution is to elevate the Church as the locus of (ontological) communion between people and thus the antidote for a ‘subjectivity without boundaries’ — a kind of corral around subjectivity that prevents it from devolving into pietism.

I’m not sure if the Yannaras and Schememann definition of the Church works either, though. The sociology strikes me as too idealistic. On the Greek side it too often morphs into a hermeneutic of Byzantine supremacy, on the other/American side it leads to the the notion that the proper observance of rubrics is the pathway to Christ. I am not denying that the Church is the “pillar and ground of the truth” of course. I’m merely questioning whether some popular understandings of what this means is adequate to the cultural task at hand.

Thinking more about it I really think this ‘boredom’ or ‘ennui’ idea is on the right track. An athiest living in relative comfort might really be in a pickle finding any source of motivation. That John Malkovitch character comes to mind. Comparable to a marble sitting a bowl– hard to find a reason to put out enough effort to climb anywhere, do anything.