Two Paths

What to do? There are two paths.  The path of self-service and the Christian path.  One can either follow Jesus Christ or be one’s own god.

But within the Christian path there are two lines, the monastic and the lay.  Obviously, I am not a monastic, but the question of how to apply monastic advice/guidance to the lay life is glaring.  Because I am a layman, I am responsible to care for my family. But at what cost?  Do I really need to immerse myself in earning enough money? Who defines “enough”?  What comfort level is acceptable/appropriate? 

There are questions to answer and decisions to be made that may be irreversible (bridges burned, if you will).  How realistic (Orthodox) is idealism?  Does one pursue the “right thing” even when no one else seems to be doing so?  How does the fact that we, as human, are painfully limited in our knowledge and understanding of reality affect the huge decisions that must be made?  It seems that most follow the “sensible” path (i.e., easy/American).  When one steps back and looks at it all, it seems most likely that one will make the wrong choice.  If there are ten possible good paths to take, but 1000 wrong ones, the odds are against us.  Especially when “the world, the flesh and the devil” are against us, pushing us toward the wrong paths.

Even more so, by what criteria are we to judge the fruit of our actions?  The other thing is to determine if we are even setting good/right/Christian goals.  It’s easy to throw around platitudes and truisms in response, but these are really not that helpful, as they give no specific direction.

The most beautiful day and location mean nothing is someone is punching you in the stomach.

What happens when, looking back, you have formed your psyche and personality, to not fit in or “click” with others?  Built on idealism.

Environment

Contrary to what may seem obvious, this post is not about environmentalism.  A very large (and legitimate) concern in many cultures today is concern over the environment.  We are concerned about the quality of the air, the quality of the water (both fresh and salt water), we are concerned with the quality and health of the atmosphere, we are concerned with climate change.  With the exception of the last one (a buzzword really), we ought to be concerned with the creation that God has given us.
But I believe, even more importantly, is the spiritual environment in which one lives.  It is very easy to see the quality of air (smog), the quality of water (clear or clouded) and the changes in global temperatures.  But what is not easy to see, unless one has been trained to see, is the spiritual quality of life.  This is especially true in the US.  The United States, supposedly a Christian county, presents an image of freedom.  But with freedom comes responsibility and we are not responsible.  We use the freedom we have as a license for sin.
When someone is free to flaunt sexual perversion as a right, the mentality of the culture has gotten away from thinking Christianly.  The last thing I am arguing for is a draconian state that crushes anyone and anything that disagrees with it.  That would be bad.  We no longer live under the law as they did in the Old Testament.  But this does not mean we are then free to indulge in whatever our imaginations can conceive.
Ask yourself, what is the spiritual environment in which you live?  Does love for God and love for neighbor control and direct the culture?  Or is the culture motivated by comfort and entertainment?  Try to step back, look at the spiritual health of your environment by comparing to the life Jesus taught and the life that the Orthodox church teaches.  We are all a long ways away from faithfulness.

The goal

Why do we think that life should be comfortable and entertaining?  We go to school/university in order to get a job that we enjoy so that we can have enough money to be comfortable and entertained so that we can retire comfortably (i.e., stop being productive) and entertain ourselves.
It seems that most people (the culture in the USA) is built around comfort and entertainment.  But this is not a Christian attitude.  When one works through the New Testament and hears the words of the saints throughout church history, we do not hear a promotion of comfort and entertainment.  In fact, we hear the opposite.  Our lives should be formed in a way that our first thought should be how to love God and love neighbor.
Would we consider giving up our comfort if we could use our time, money and energy to provide for the needs of others?  Would we lower our standard of living so that someone else could actually eat today, so that someone else may have a place to sleep, so that someone else could learn a skill in order to provide for their own needs?
We have become so accustomed to our present way of life that, unfortunately, we cannot even conceive of living with less comfort, so that someone else can simply have their foundational needs met.  Think of the story of Jesus and one of his disciples watching people give money at the temple.  Jesus praised the old woman who gave out of her need and criticized the rich man who gave out of his abundance.  In other words, the giving of the rich man, though objectively a large sum of money, was nothing to him, as he was still fat and comfortable.
This is a topic I am really struggling with and thinking about.  How do I live in a way that is consistent with the faith I claim as my own?  We should not be idealistic, as it typically fails, but instead, we should be realistic and faithful.  We need to understand what the church means, what the church has historically taught and practiced and strive to emulate this.
We cannot allow mediocrity and ease to control and direct our lives.

A practical objectivity

We need to start living by acknowledging that certain things are objectively true. Contrary to the typical sentimentality of modern American evangelicalism,  God actually is king of the world, Satan has actually been defeated and Jesus actually died for the sins of all men.
What does this practically mean?  It means that when we sin, we are rejecting the leadership of God,  we are following a defeated rebel and we are submitting to sin that genuinely has no power over us. We sin, practically speaking, because we want to. No one is forcing us. No one can make us sin. Forced sin is not sin.
We far too often fall down and wallow in our sin because we don't make use of the tools that God has given us for our sanctification.  Prayer,  confession,  repentance, worship,  and the sacraments.

Time and the proper identification of literature

For many years I held to a literal interpretation of the chronologies of the Old Testament.  So often people will make of the mistake of limiting their interpretive options to two, either a literal understanding of Scripture, or a nonliteral.  But this is a false dichotomy.  We are not restricted to only two options.  As is the case with literature, you must read the particular genre within its own rules.  One does not read poetry literally.  If someone says that they only have eyes for one particular girl, this is not read in a scientific sense, as if their eyeballs are only functional when around the one specific female.

When one reads a cookbook, one does not do so for romantic reasons or with the goal of understanding the world better.  The Bible, in the same line of thought, is not just a book.  It is a collection of letters, histories, poetry, apocaplytics and instructions.  You have to know and understand what it is you are reading.  One thing I like to say, when responding to those who say things like, no one in their right mind would read the Bible literally, is this.  The Bible may speak of things scientific, but it is not a science book and it was not given to us to teach us science.  The point of speaking about creation is not to give a science lesson in Newtons laws or the such.  It is to communicate that God is the creator and we are his creatures.  There is a specific relationship between us.

This brings me to the chronologies found in Scripture.  When we understand that the chronologies were not given to be a science or sociological study, we can understand that we do not need to read them literally, in order to read them honestly.  First, the chronologies were given to communicate that mankind has been descending from the singular Adam and that the sinful nature that we have inherited from is really truly part of the nature of man.  Second, the chronologies communicate that Jesus is truly a man.  A living, breathing, from the line of David, man.  He was not a ghost, a literary figure or a creative collection from various peoples imaginations.

So ultimately, we can read the chronologies in Scripture as chronologies but because they are not communicating scientific fact, we do not need them to be generationally succinct. There may be gaps.

Choosing our culture

There are two events/circumstances in history that I find particularly interesting. First, during the 4^th century, when Constantine came to power and made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire, the response of many Christians, was to flee into the desert. An odd response?  Not really.  They did so because the Christian faith, now no longer illegal and frowned upon, became, the opposite.  It was not merely acceptable, but presumed.  It became easy.

The second is the time immediately after the fall of Constantinople.  The fall of Constantinople came by the hand of militant Islam.  The Christians in Constantinople responded with, “We would rather live under the domination of the Muslims than the heresy of papal Rome.”

The Christian faith is anything but easy.  This time we have on earth is not for our comfort, for our entertainment, or for our distraction.  We have been given this life so we have time to repent.  The world around us wants us to buy their story, their interpretation of things.  But the world is lying to us.  It is not proper for Christians to build their lives around comfort and play.  Our life is a battle.  We are fighting against the world, the flesh and the devil.  So much of our time and money is spent on gratifying our whims and passions. 

These two events make we wonder.  Is it right to live in easy, comfortable America, when doing so only seems to water down our faith and blind us to the battle that we ought to be engaged in?  It is interesting to me that the Christians that live in poor or dangerous cultures are the Christians whose faith is the strongest.

Verification

To be able to verify the accuracy or “orthodoxy” of any particular belief, one must apply an objective approach.  The question is, “Does this belief agree or disagree with what the church has always believed and taught?”  To answer this question, one must use logic, analysis and criticism.  One cannot “feel” their way to an answer, for to even formulate an answer, the work of criticism must be performed.  In essence, to say, “I just don’t feel right about that” is irrelevant.  It does not matter how one feels.  What matters is what the church says.  And in order to identify what the church believes/teaches, one must examine and compare, i.e., critique the item in question.