I sometimes wonder what life in the church would be like if we had never ever developed the concept of winning and losing. In many of the great controversies that face the church at the moment, and Lord knows there are enough of those, many of those controversies it seems to me increasingly clear that nobody’s going to win. In other words, there is not going to be a situation of sublime clarity in which one group’s views will prevail because the other group simply says, ‘Oh I see it all now.’ But if we’re not in the business of winning and losing like that, what does the church look like? What if we were sufficiently unafraid, (and there’s a key word) sufficiently unafraid to be able to put winning and losing on the back burner, to move away from the notion that my triumph is another’s loss. What if we were able to think of the health of the Christian community in terms of our ability or otherwise, our freedom or otherwise, to connect one another with the wellsprings of reconciliation. Let me go back to a phrase I used a bit earlier: ‘Sin is healed by solidarity’.
The monks of the desert were looking for solitude, but not isolation. A good deal of research has been done in the last couple of decades on the importance of community to these people. And the way in which time and again in the narratives and the sayings that stem from them, time and again point is reinforced. Only in the relations they have with one another can the love and the mercy of God appear and become effective. And those mutual relations have to do with that identification, that solidarity, that willingness to stand with the accused and the condemned. And somehow it’s in that action that the real healing occurs. Prayers and fasting, sleepless nights and asceticism, well various of the fathers take varying views of it. Most of them are rather sceptical about how significant that is. But if you are able in some sense, to take away what in you stands between God and the neighbour, then your own healing, as well as the other person’s healing, is set forward.
So asceticism is not simply about loading your body with chains, spending 30 years on top of a pillar, sleeping two hours a night, or whatever, or even working for a merchant bank, it’s about learning to contain that aspect of acquisitive human instinct that drives us constantly to compete and to ignore what’s around us.
Asceticism is a purification of seeing. It’s not a self-punishment, but a way of opening the eyes.
The “good” Archbishop knows about the desert fathers of Orthodoxy but not much of Orthodoxy in practice. So sad. Hence my family has moved to the OCA.
[i] There is not going to be a situation of sublime clarity in which one group’s views will prevail because the other group simply says, ‘Oh I see it all now.’ [/i]
That’s why we have structures of authority and mechanisms for discipline.
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[i] Asceticism is not simply about loading your body with chains, spending 30 years on top of a pillar, sleeping two hours a night, or whatever [/i]
Yes, sir. Perhaps you are called to the asceticism of disciplining your soulmates at 815.