Au contraire

In a recent conversion with my wife, she pointed out how the church fathers teach just how contrary the Christian faith is in comparison to the world.  One could almost say that whatever it is that the world does or teaches, we should do the opposite.
The Christian faith is all about loving God and loving neighbor.  We are to seek after the good of others, we should seek to serve and live a life of self control and self sacrifice.  The world pretty much lives out the opposite.
Considering such a reality puts an interesting approach within our grasp.

Action without understanding

One of the arguments against the Orthodox church is the apparent use of dead formalism in worship.  The argument is that we are simply going through the motions and none of it has any devotional value, it is simply "mindless, man-made formalism."  An honest answer needs to be formulated and articulated. 
If course, any answer or response given to these accusations need to be understood from within the Orthodox worldview.  It cannot be any other way.  To try to understand the Orthodox faith from a Protestant/other religious perspective makes as much sense as trying to understand Russian when you only know English.
Rightly understanding the worship service, as articulated and worked out in the Divine Liturgy, is based upon the fact that it was given to us by the apostles/apostolic tradition.  This means that it is not man-made.  Is it formal?  Of course it is.  But I would argue that something excellent and worth doing will be well formulated.  Is it dead?  Working out the worship of God, as given to us by God, will never be dead if done with a heart for God.
This last point is especially important.  Reading a poem to a loved one will not carry any meaning if the reader is acting without love.  To read a poem to someone simply because you know that it is important to them is an expression of love.  Even without knowing what the words mean, the love can still be the motivator.  How much more so when one has worked to understand the poem.
The illustration is even more powerful when applied to the reality.  To express our love for God in a form given by the apostolic tradition is exactly what God desires.  It is only dead formalism when there is no love moving it.

Ultimately, we need to strive to understand what it means to love God and how we can best exhibit/display that love.  This will only come about when we love Him in the way that He has defined, not in the way that we like.  Hopefully, as we become more and more holy, those two concepts will become identical.  We can work out our love for God, in the Divine Liturgy, even without fully understanding what it all means.  But we should always be moving toward God motivated by a love for God.  One is always moving.  The direction though, will be either towards God or away from God.  You choose.

An explanation

Here is how we see it.  Jesus taught his disciples everything they needed to know about a faithful life and eternity.  The disciples, becoming apostles, passed this life/doctrine on to their successors, ad infinitum. The Holy Spirit, as promised by Jesus, led and is leading his church in faithfulness.  This means that there has never been a time when the church was not.
This is not to say that the church has not had bad bishops or gone through difficult times.  But that is how things are improved and clarified.   The seven ecumenical councils were held in response to heretical assaults from within and outside of the church.  In essence, the council's were not about introducing new doctrine but were about clarifying what the church had always believed and practiced.
This is why we believe that the Eastern Orthodox Church is "the" church.  God formed it, gave it its mission and has provided direction by the power of the Holy Spirit, from the very beginning.

Thirty minute window

I stopped and considered.  In one thirty minute window of time, I posted and read about the origins and historicity of ancient Babylonian witchcraft.  I watched an instructional video on death metal guitar playing.  I listened to the music of No-man, an experimental/ambient/dance side project of Steven Wilson and Tim Bowness.  I wrote a blog on the possible connections between emotion, music and self control, and I texted a note to my sweet wife about thoughts and prayer.
I'm not sure what it all means, or if I am simply widely scattered.

Self control

The thought just occurred to me, I admit, for the very first time, after a brief conversation with my dear wife.  The church Fathers direct us to keep the Jesus prayer on our lips and on our mind, at all times.  Obviously, this is not taken crassly literally, but the idea is not to allow whatsoever thought to come to mind or to allow whatsoever comment to pass from our lips.
This is about self control.
The thought that came to me was this.  I saw a connection between self control, emotions and music.  Since we are called to manifest self control, as a fruit of the spirit, this would mean that we are not to haphazardly allow emotions to run amok.  I had the thought, right or wrong, of using music, and its powerful ability to communicate emotion, to direct our emotions. It seems to me that far too often our emotional state runs loose and free with us as a slave to the whole thing.
What about using music as a tool, just like any other tool, to get us to a right place?  Could we learn from this practice?

Love

My oldest son introduced me to a rock band out of California by the name of Crosses, a side project by the vocalist from Deftones.  I was listening to the song, "The Epilogue" (which is quite good), and was struck by the humanity and underlying message of the song.  Basically, the vocalist was describing his time out with someone he loved.   What struck me was this, everyone, regardless of personality or personal history, wants to love and be loved. 
I started thinking about what this means.  As human beings, we are created in the image of God and therefore we were created to love and be loved.  But because are screwed up by sinfulness, the places we look for love are often wrong.  But this is not to say that these places are completely wrong.  People look to marriage for happiness, and they should because marriage should make us happy.  But they shouldn't look to marriage as the source of happiness.  People look to wine for happiness, and they should (the book of Proverbs speaks of this) but people shouldn't look to wine as the source of happiness or as a place to help them escape.  Examples such as these could be multiplied, but hopefully you understand what I am saying.
The reason people look to such a wide variety of places for love is because these places and things do contain shades or slivers of love/truth.  The problem is our fallen nature.  Because we are sinful, we corrupt the very things we use/create/manipulate as love.
The answer, of course, is the Eastern Orthodox Church.  It is here that God has given his Holy Spirit and called his people.  But again, even here, because the church is made up of sinful/stained/selfish people, we do/say/think wrong things.
Because the church is made up of fallen people, we don't do everything right, and this turns people away.  One would think that because the church has THE TRUTH, people would be flocking to us, but because we're sinful, they often don't.
People look elsewhere for two reasons.  One, people are sinful and cannot think or see clearly in order to rightly seek out perfection.  But two, the sinful people in the church say and do things that turn people away.
If we begin to approach life and the people around us, communicating unconditional love, we will see amazing results.  A successful life is all about love, but that life can only be successful when it is built upon a love for God within his church.

So much, so little

We have so much money to make things so easy and so comfortable and that is exactly what we do.  Why don't we use that money to help others and further our own holiness, instead of making ourselves comfortable?