Eliot,

I wasn’t suggesting you go elsewhere. It has been good discussing this with you.

Yesterday I noticed that the discussion is on the “Praying for Christopher Hitchens” page. Christopher certainly needs God’s help. Maybe our discussion will be of use to him. I read in a couple of books that a saint, after dying and going to heaven, he or she is able to help people on earth. Actually it is even more easier for them to help us after death.

Anyway, it was really nice talking to you. Your last post actually made me laugh. Be assured that I am very happy and I do not focus only on the afterlife. Lord’s command found in the Scriptures: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” means to love and appreciates all that surrounds you. If you do that you cannot be unhappy.

I am not going anywhere … Cheers!

Eliot,

Do whatever you want. You’re not really paying attention anyway. If you are constantly full of energy and your belief about your own capacities and what you actually do happens to coincide with what you are indeed capable of – – that is if you are 100% most all the time, then my hat goes off to you. Most people are not regardless of whether they believe that Christ is risen. Even given that faith, most people who do believe suffer to some extent from anxiety, lack of confidence, occasional melancholy. Most people aren’t motivated and enthusiastic anywhere close to 100% of the time. If repeating to yourself that “Christ is risen and nothing else matters” makes you enthused and motivated, more power to you. Your focus on the other world almost to the exclusion of this one seems a bit gnostic and anti-Incarnational. But that’s just my take.

“Christian hope is that there is life beyond the grave, that we will see again our loved ones who die in Christ.”

That is part of Christian hope. But another part of Christian hope is that Christ, in His Incarnation, invaded the world and brought us the possibility of theosis in the world. Overcoming death by death is not just something that happens in the next life. It happens in this life by overcoming spiritual death. He said if you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could move mountains. What has this got to do with the afterlife?

Eliot, you have tunnel vision. You narrowly focus on part of Christian hope and ignore the rest. Perhaps this life is too painful for you to find joy in it from living in faith that God’s boundless energy will sustain you. Perhaps you need to exclude activity in the world from your hopes and only focus on the afterlife because that is the only hope you see.

Go your way in peace.

Scott: ” … when you speak as though God were going to miraculously clear the way for you and therefore you do not need to cultivate a positive attitude, I think you err.”

Cultivate positive attitude? Let me put it this way:
“If Christ is risen, nothing else matters. And if Christ is not risen – nothing else matters.” Jaroslav Pelikan (1923-2006)

Scott, I do not need to cultivate anything! Why? Because Christ is Risen!

For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.
(2 Corinthians 4:16-18)

I choose to read and pay close attention to the writings of the saints because they reveal to us what is unseen. I do not ignore miracles when I read about them in books. I definitely do not pray for miracles! The one miracle I hope for is the forgiveness of my sins. I do not know from where did you get the idea that I pray. I was here all day writing comments.

Christian hope is that there is life beyond the grave, that we will see again our loved ones who die in Christ. We choose to please God and to reject the short-term pleasures of sin. No sacrifice we make for Him can be too great. This is pretty much all you need to develop emotional management. This is how I persevere with joy in my heart even in adverse circumstances.
If Christ is not risen, then life lacks purpose and death is hopeless.
How do you cultivate your joy?

Essentially, what therapists use to treat depression is a combination of antidepressant medication, exercise and a therapy which teaches the patient to use their mind to have a positive effect on their emotions. For severe depression the medication is the most important part in the short term.

Having experienced depression first hand (about 20 years ago), I can assure you that the mind is the best tool one has to influence emotions. This is not at all mutually exclusive with Christianity. In fact, there is a lot of what moderns would call psychotherapy built right into the Bible and Tradition. When people recite psalms during times of distress, they are not only praying but exercising emotional control.

Self-reliance is a virtue so long as you do not rely exclusively on yourself. I’m happy you pray and rely on God. However, when you speak as though God were going to miraculously clear the way for you and therefore you do not need to cultivate a positive attitude, I think you err. He might. He might also want you to learn how to persevere with joy in your heart even in adverse circumstances during which He chooses to refrain from performing miracles. We should not be so presumptuous as to believe that we should not exercise efforts to develop emotional management since this is “self-reliance” and God will take care of everything. Have faith, do what you can (and that is where optimism is vital) and don’t tempt Him. By all means pray for miracles. Occasionally He may grant them. But if He chooses not to, although you still rely ultimately on Him, you have to motivate yourself to persevere without the miracle. This is by far the more frequent situation.

If, however, by the command of God, one of the saints or angels wanted to appear to us in a material way, there is no transgression in this, for we didn’t desire this or seek after this. Yet, even in such cases, it is necessary for us to be very careful, humble, prudent and full of the fear of God, for knowing that Satan also assumes the guise of an angel, it may well be a fantasy of the Devil (2 Cor. 11:14-15). Of course, even when the vision is from God it is better for us not to receive it. For if we do this with humility God will not be sorrowful because He knows that we are taking heed not to accept within us the wolf instead of the shepherd. We don’t, indeed, have need of seeing the saints and angels, but only to pray with faith and internal vision. Saint Neilos the Ascetic says “Blessed is that intellect which arrives at the point of worshiping God without giving shape to His form within itself.”

We certainly should not ask to see saints or angels. It is far more beneficial for us to see our own sins.

I sense in your post some sort of self-reliance. You do not rely on things that are out of your control. I can assure you that if you’ll ever sink into a deep depression you won’t be able to cure it with optimism. You’ll have to implore God to help you!

Regarding divinely placed bridges, here is what St Theophan the Recluse says:

Nothing comes without effort. The help of God is always ready and near but is given only to those who seek and work, and only to those seekers who, after putting al their powers to the test, then cry out with their whole heart: “Lord, help us!”

St. Nila did exactly that. She did put all her effort and having lost all hope to be saved she implored the Mother of God:

Once Mother Yevfrosinya had nearly departed this life while picking cranberries at a swamp. She fell into a swamp. Having lost all hope to be saved she implored the Mother of God to help her. Suddenly, without knowing how, she found herself on a tussock. When the priests found out how the young nun got the precious cranberries for them, they forbade her to go to the marshes and risk her life.

Michael,

I think somehow some people who have read my comments on this article have gotten the impression that I don’t believe in miracles or that heaven is real or that Christ and His saints are real. Nothing could be further from the truth. I was explaining the reasons why I believe, not the substance thereof.

People decide to believe in things they can’t perceive with their senses for a reason. We just don’t choose Christianity or Islam or Sikhism from among a smorgasboard because somehow we just “know” it is true and the others aren’t. We choose to have faith for reasons other than the substance of that faith. Only when other factors convince us that this creed is true do we choose to trust in it; i.e., have faith.

So yes, I believe that the afterlife, Christ, etc. are real, not just some projection of my own psyche. It’s just that the reason I do believe they are real is that it fits with all that experience has shown me in my life about the power of belief or optimism itself. Such power indicates to me that God gives a host of reasons to be hopeful at every stage in life. It makes perfect sense to me then that He provides for an afterlife.

Eliot,

Thank you for your editorial suggestion; however, we will not always agree on what is relevant.

If you’d bothered to read what I actually wrote, you would know that I distinguished between true visions given by God and those that arise from our own psyches or are of demonic origin. The devil is most certainly real. Evil, however, has no ontological reality. It is the absence of good much like darkness is the absence of light.

Nothing whatsoever that I wrote above should give you the impression that I do not think that God allows or causes saints to appear to the faithful or that other miraculous occurences associated with such appearances don’t happen. I’m sure they do. However, your comment was that optimism alone will not get us through hard times and you suggest that God will help us through with visions or miracles. I have to point out that maybe He will and maybe He won’t. It might be that we are meant to be martyrs, to suffer some terrible fate or to die what appears to us in this limited existence to be a senseless death. No sense in dwelling on that but it is certain God doesn’t issue visions and miracles to all people to save them from every calamity, or even to all the faithful to save them from every calamity. I trust He will help, but just from observation I have to say that it isn’t highly likely that we’ll be graced with a true vision or miracle. It is certainly possible. I don’t rely on it though.

I don’t rely on it because it is out of my control. God decides how He will help. What I can influence or control is my own attitude. If you think your own attitude is irrelevant since divinely placed bridges will appear out of nowhere whenever obstacles arise, that’s your own affair.

Scott, no visions–I’m not even sure one could call them sensory really, just an undeniable presence–experential encounters. Most often during the Eucharist. I am told these are not particularly unusual, certainly nothing to make me prideful. I am always quite careful to submit them to my priest. They have never directed me to any other place but to prayer, repentance and thanksgiving.

Resurrection: a few years ago, my wife of 24 years died during the midst of Lent. Tragic. Yet, there were so many experietial encounters around her death for myself and others that I can’t really name them all. The greatest of these, perhaps, was during Pascha about a month later. Suffice it to say that the Paschal Toparian was never more real to me and will never be the same again.

Christ is Risen, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life!.

If in some way Jesus Christ is not real beyond our own state of mind and heart, what do we really have? I cannot say how those encouters come for others, I don’t really know how or why they come to me but that they are real I have no doubt.

Your analysis (4.1.2.1.1 & 4.1.2.1.2) seems to have to do more with psychology and positive thinking than it has to do with Orthodoxy. You call the sighting of saints visions …

I recall an article I read more than twenty years back. I have not a clue where I found it back then. It was saying that during the war people were seen going through walls and locked doors, that Einstein discovered invisibility but humanity was not ready to learn of this knowledge and use it. How thoughtful, humanity was ready for the atomic bomb but not ready to handle invisibility!

Much later, when I started to read the lives of the saints I read about the saints appearing to sick people and healing them. You can call it a vision, but the healing was very real. The healing, most of the time, cured patients whose doctors had given up.

Visions you say … is the devil real then?

Actually, Eliot, I would rather rely on optimism than on the possibility that a vision that may or may not be from God will come to me. I see those true visions as miracles of God. I have read the lives of a number of saints. But in this context I have to comment that for each person that experienced such visions, there are very many who were just as faithful who during hard times did not experience such visions. Also, there are those who have been deceived by evil powers using false visions of the divine.

Very often, optimism alone can get you through hard times, religion or not, if you are adamant in your optimistic attitude. There are many, many people who – – whether Christian, non-Christian, athiest, etc. – – managed to get through hard times by never losing hope and always staying postive, no matter what. There’s no way to calculate the number, but I’m pretty confident that it is greater than the number of people who have had true visions from God.

I do not suggest that optimism alone, however, will get you into heaven.

Michael,

By experiential I mean what you yourself have personally experienced with your own senses. If by that standard you have experienced a resurrection I’d be interested in knowing it.

Visions are a different matter. Perhaps they are trustworthy, perhaps not. But you should consider that those in non-Christian religions experience visions in accord with their non-Christian beliefs as well. So, in and of themselves, visions aren’t too reliable an indicator.

I didn’t say that Christianity is the power of positive thinking. What I said is that optimism is very powerful in this life from cradle to grave and therefore it makes perfect sense to me to extend this optimism to embrace the Christian vision of the afterlife. Optimism seems to me to be a clearer reflection of truth than pessimism or melancholy-ness (if that’s a word). Optimism releases potential, pessimism stiffles it. In that sense, optimism is actually more “real” since very often we could do a thing but do not attempt it since we do not believe we can.

The talk about “hope in vain”, I assume, echoes St. Paul. At least that is what it reminds me of. But, of course, St. Paul was addressing those who denied the bodily resurrection of Christ. Elsewhere he commends faith, hope and charity as the greatest virtues.

What Christ Himself was essentially saying by speaking about faith in the amount of a mustard seed and chiding his followers as being, “ye of little faith”, is that optimism is essential and pessimism is self defeating. I’ve even read translations that render the phrase “of little faith” as “pessimist”. Hope, optimism, faith, trust, etc. are all just slightly different aspects of an underlying positive appreciation of reality. Without it, we are helpless and despondent.

The problem is that this positive appreciation of reality does not always come naturally to us and is more scarce in some than others. It is thus necessary to become convinced of its power as a fundamental principle. Then, even when we don’t “feel like” seeing or trying to see the positive, we can do so on principle. The thought might be something like, “I don’t feel like there’s any hope for X, but I know it’s just a feeling and that my view of reality gets warped by negative emotion.”

Much in life depends on how successful we are at controlling or guiding our emotions. Much of our energy comes from enthusiasm (another facet of positive appreciation). Recalling and using the power of optimism is a fairly reliable method (at least in my experience) for conquering negative emotions like anxiety, hopelessness, despondency, etc. – – things that hinder progress, steal energy and effort.

This is often dismissed by those that have a tendency to melancholy, despondency, etc. as “Panglossian” or something to that effect – – and thus reinforces their own captivity in negativity. Most of what we fear never happens. Most of what we worry about is worry in vain since there is always something to worry about if we choose to do so – – an infinite number of things, in fact. And with the “wind at our backs”; i.e., enthused, we are capable of dramatically more than when we are dragging our feet from being doubtful, anxious or despondent.

Optimism as a tactic is summoning the courage to argue with your own automatic premises and assumptions when they don’t encourage you toward your goals – – daring to believe the positive version. It’s not magic but it is profoundly powerful. But in order to work, it has to be arrational; i.e., taken as an unquestioned assumption. Since it has proven its value to me in my experience, that’s not too difficult for me. But I do need reminding from time to time.

Scott, you need to read the lives of the saints. Seriously …optimism alone is not going to work when harsh times will come our way. Very different books from different periods and places reveal a different reality, the true reality. See this example:

SCHEMONUN NILA

During the prison life on the Solovetsky Islands, a Russian saint, Reverend Nilus Stolobensky appeared to Mother Yevfrosinya. “I was once taking a walk in the forest,” she told her spiritual children, “when suddenly I saw an Elder-monk. He came up to me, gave me communion bread and an icon with his image. “Who is this?” I asked, pointing at the icon. “Nilus Stolobensky,” answered the Elder and added that when I would become a schema-nun, I will carry his name.” That, by the way, is what did happen later. Before Yevfrosinya had time to come to her senses the Elder disappeared as if he dissolved in the air.

The Mother of God was all the time helping her. Here’s one incident that occurred with Mother Yevfrosinya. In autumn when the young nun went out in search for mushrooms and berries for the priests, she got lost in the forest. She began to pray to the Mother of God, and all of a sudden she saw a wooden deck. How did it get there in those backwoods, she wondered, but, nonetheless, she used it. The deck took her exactly to the place she knew. After thanking the Blessed Virgin for having indicated her the way to safety, she looked back – the deck was gone, it had disappeared.

At another time, when the nun could not get over a channel, she suddenly saw a small bridge that had disappeared immediately after she got over to the other side of the channel.

In other words, the Lord and the Mother of God helped the young nun all the time on her way of the cross.