Orthodixie

If all the lights, decorations, and general hoopla was about some nebulous Winter Festival … Why are businesses taking down all the decorations when winter’s just begun?

This is the current guess at the number of souls lost in last week’s Tsunami.

Thanks to Cheese & Crackers.

First there was Bill Cosby’s crusade against the dumbing down of Black Americans, now Essence magazine gets on board.

I hope it’s okay for a conservative to say: “Keep hope alive!”

The Church’s view of human nature is: God created Man in His image and likeness to be in communion with Him. Man has free will to respond to this relationship. Although created in the image and after the likeness of God, humanity does not sustain communion with God (p.15). While humanity is still a creature, fashioned after God’s image, the likeness has been lost and, through sin, the image tarnished.

What is this “image?” St Gregory Palamas claims the “image” resides in man’s intellect. “For that which is in the image resides not in the body but in the intellect, which is the highest aspect of human nature. If there was something else still higher, that which is in the image would reside in that” (p.17).

One of the “truths” of Orthodoxy that has meant a great deal to me is the Fathers’ understanding of the parable of the Prodigal Son. Here I speak specifically of the understanding of what it means to say that he “came to himself” (Luke 15:17a). Georgios Mantzaridis writes:

I have found this to be a valuable tool during periods of personal discernment. For, as Mantzaridis states, “If there exists something that man can and must seek and find within himself, it is not the self which deviated but the new man in Christ, born through baptismal grace and the other church sacraments” (p.83).

Thus, we do not come to our base nature which is corrupted by sin. Rather, we come to that which is good, beautiful and true. We come to that which Adam was before the Fall — we come to Christ, Who is within us.

We are called to “put on Christ.” We are to become like God — thereby regaining the “likeness” that we have lost by transgression. The first step in this process is the we “come to ourselves.” This coming to oneself is the first step toward repentance and reconciliation that leads to communion with God and neighbor. This is true when “man, ‘having entered wholly within himself’, becomes aware of himself and awaits within himself the coming of God and the divine transformation” (p.85).

Over the years, I’ve become aware of these moments of “coming to self” in my own life and ministry. It is an enlightening moment. It is a sober moment. It is a “reality” moment. Most often, it is a sudden moment — one which was seemingly long in coming.

This reflection, and page numbers referenced, is based on Georgios Mantzaridis’s book, The Deification of Man: St Gregory Palamas and the Orthodox Tradition.

Per Huw Raphael’s mention of the article entitled “EDUCATION: The End of Faith,” in the January issue of The WORD, here follows an excerpt from Tom Wolf’s latest novel, “I Am Charlotte Simmons,” which speaks to the moral/ethical struggle of college life.

[Charlotte’s friend, Laurie, is attending NC State; Charlotte, Dupont. They both hail from a small town in the mountains of Western North Carolina. By phone, Laurie is making an apology for cutting loose.]

“I guess what I really mean is college is like this four-year period you have when you can try anything — and everything — and if it goes wrong, there’s no consequences? You know what I mean? Nobody’s keeping score? You can do things that if you tried them before you got to college, your family would be crying and pulling thier hair out and giving you these now-see-what-you’ve-gone-and-done looks? — and everybody in Sparta would be clucking and fuming and having a ball talking behind your back about it? — and if you tried these things after you left college and you’re working, everybody’s gonna … blow a fuse, and your boss or whoever will call you in for a …”

“… little talk, he’ll call it, or if you have a boyfriend or a husband, he’s gonna totally freak out or crawl off like a dog, which would be just as bad, because it’d make you feel guilty? I mean look at it this way, Charlotte. College is the only time in your life, or your adult life anyway, when you can really experiment, and at a certain point, when you leave, when you graduate or whatever, everybody’s memory like evaporates. You tried this and this and this and this, and you learned a lot about how things are, but nobody’s gonna remember it? It’s like amnesia, totally, and there’s no record, and you leave exactly the way you came in, pure as rainwater.” [p.157]