Fr. Stephen Freeman is an Orthodox (OCA) priest in USA. You can read more by him at his excellent blog Glory to God in All Things or listen to his podcast.
The image is from republishing of the article in our Roman Catholic brother's blog.
Our feelings and desires are trained
by our culture to seek satisfaction. In our spiritual life, we often
need to learn how to be disappointed. Fr. Stephen looks at the
"disappointment of religion."
Reading the lives of the saints often
raises our expectations, we read of someone transfigured with light, or
someone who is present in two places at once, we read beautiful
descriptions of the inner life of an awareness of our union with God, a
clarity in regard to the nature of all things.
And in comparison our own religious experience will seem sterile, a voice crying out in the wilderness met with stony silence.
For some such comparisons can lead to
despair, or others these comparisons make them doubt the authenticity of
saints lives and in many cases we discover what I term the
Disappointment of Religion.
The modern religious search often
begins in disappointment, the rhetoric of “religious believing” and the
reality can be miles apart. There can be very legitimate reasons for
this disjunction. The Truth claims of many religious groups borders on
the absurd, complex dogmatic constructs quickly reveal themselves to be
the intellectual fabrications of cultural and psychological forces. Thus
disappointment leads to disbelief.
A hallmark of the modern world is emphasis on the individual.
Religious systems that cater to this
emphasis, whether knowingly or unknowingly often find rapid success. The
same rapid success can be followed with rapid disappointment, the
criteria of individual values rooted in emotion and psychological states
are notoriously changeable. Those who live by experience, die by
experience.
Experience is the great watershed of
individualism. The greater the emphasis on the individual, the greater
the emphasis on psychology and emotion for these are the primary aspects
of individual experience.
If the focus shifts from my place in a
network of relationships to my place within myself, then the focus
necessarily leaves me with nothing but me.
Love ceases to be a set of practices and simply becomes a feeling.
Feelings and psychological states are
inherently a part of the human experience but they’re a very poor basis
for human community and culture. The rise and dominance of consumer
culture is result of experience being exalted to the pivotal point of
our existence, we shop, we buy, we consume, in order to feel good.
And the feelings which we deem good
are themselves those which are sold to use in the deeply psychologized
world of advertising. That God makes me feel good, can be little more
than saying “I like salt, sugar and fat.”
People are always hungry for salt,
sugar and fat, and people always have an array of feelings and
psychological states, but these are secondary elements of human
existence, they’re meant to be balanced, made whole, and subservient to
our greater life.
Consumer societies will never be
happy, stable or healthy, their happiness and stability can be managed
by those who have the power of propaganda. By themselves they will never
create a healthy civilization.
Now the purpose of the Church is not
to create healthy civilizations, nor does the Church exist to be yet one
more outlet of good feelings and neurosis. The Church is that place
where God is being reconciled to man, and man to God.
It is that place where all things are
being gathered together in one, in Christ Jesus. It is the ecclesia,
the divine community of the Body of Christ in which we may be made whole
and which the truth of our existence can be made manifest.
So how does that make you feel?
Depending on the state of our lives,
feelings in the ecclesia can be terrifying, satisfying , depressing,
meaningless, in fact everything that human beings are capable of
feeling. It’s also inevitable that we bring with us into the divine
community, the brokenness of our own psyches, thus we are prone to use
others in distorted ways, we attach ourselves to the leaders, and use
their confidence or eloquence, or far darker things, to patch together
the shattered pieces of our own psyches.
We use our peer groups in destructive
ways to create islands of belonging, fleeing the alienation and
abandonment of our inner history.
These and many similar things are the
distortions of individualized consumers. We do not know how to live
without meeting the irrational demands of our feelings, our psyches have
no training in how to heal, only in how to use things and people around
us for comfort, defense and need.
Now this cultural reality makes it
very difficult to speak of authentic Christian experience for we speak
to one another as addicts, we largely know experience as an alcoholic
knows alcohol, that an alcoholic might prefer vodka to wine tells me
nothing about vodka or wine. Religious experience tells me almost
nothing about God, the Church, truth or anything like that.
It is God, the Church and Truth
viewed through the fog of distorted modern perception. Facebook offers
us the icon of our modern senses…“I like it”
Well not surprisingly Orthodoxy is
not well adapted to modern existence, you may or not like it, Orthodoxy
does not care if you like it, or at least it should not care whether you
like it. There are many drawn to certain aspects of orthodoxy,
conversions are common place today, conversions that are similar to the
consumer variety, those that populate the world of denominationalism and
non-denominationalism are not unknown, but they are productive of three
things:
- Unhappy Orthodox
- Former Orthodox, or
- Former consumerist Christians
It is this latter that is the proper goal of the transformation of the mind as Paul describes in Romans 12:2.
Now that transformation from being
simply a consumer governed by the passions to becoming a disciple of
governed by Christ is the very heart of the Christian life. In it’s
earliest stages it is deeply disappointing and necessarily so, our
passions need to be disappointed and reordered. I’ve written and spoken
elsewhere that 90% of Orthodoxy is just showing up, I meant then and
repeat now, that the slow work of transformation requires our presence
within and to the ecclesia, the Church gathered. My forgiveness of
others is often a rebuke of my own passions. I find you irritating
because I’m governed by my passions, so I confess them as sin.
Christianity, from the time of it’s
gifting to us by Christ, has consisted of the daily taking up of our
cross and following Him. It is a road of dispassionate living. Learning
to live within the Church, is learning to denounce the distortions of
individualism and the dominance of our desires. We don’t renounce our
individuality we rather take up our individuality as persons, that is,
as those who live for and with others.
My individual life is not strictly my
own, my life is a common life, the life of Christ that dwells within
His Church. This new life is far from a disappointment, it is
fulfillment, but those who would be fulfilled must first be
disappointed. A beloved friend once advised me the “Truth will make you
free…but first it makes you miserable.” Glory to God.
See also
A Letter from an Orthodox Christian to our Indian Brothers
LOVERS OF TRUTH: THE LIFE OF HIEROMONK SERAPHIM ROSE
“Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future”
Matthew Gallatin: Thirsting for God in a Land of Shallow Wells
OUR TALENT OF FREEDOM & SOME PITFALLS
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