The funeral of Jimmy Carter, the 39th President of the United States, has just concluded. Whatever one’s personal opinion of Carter as a president or a politician, as Christians we are bound to recall the words of the Apostle Paul: “there is no authority except from God, and the authorities that exist are appointed by God” (Rom. 13:1). So in honor of President Carter’s passing, I thought it fitting to recall a few of his words, spoken during the course of one of the most remarkable political speeches in recent American history: “A Crisis of Confidence,” more popularly known as his “malaise speech.”

Given on July 15, 1979, during the height of the second energy crisis of that decade, the speech was originally intended to lay out a set of legislative solutions to that crisis. Yet at the last minute, President Carter decided not to offer such a standard political response; instead, he decided to do something far different: to call the American people to repentance.

I will quote just a few sections of his speech (which you can watch or read for yourself in full should you so choose):

It’s clear that the true problems of our nation are much deeper — deeper than gasoline lines or energy shortages, deeper even than inflation or recession… all the legislation in the world can’t fix what’s wrong with America.

…just as we are losing our confidence in the future, we are also beginning to close the door on our past. In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose….

We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a path I’ve warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure.

…there are no short-term solutions to our long-range problems. There is simply no way to avoid sacrifice.

The speech was bitterly criticized by politicians and pundits at the time, and according to the history books it even played a significant role in his landslide defeat one year later against President Ronald Reagan. Nevertheless, following the speech polls found that an overwhelming 77% of Americans agreed “that there is a moral and spiritual crisis, that is, a crisis of confidence, in the country today.” And despite its eventual moniker as the “malaise speech,” 42% said that they were “more confident in America” after having heard the speech, while only 5% said they were less confident.

The energy crisis of the 1970s is long over. But in my personal opinion, the “moral and spiritual crisis” facing America has only grown more pronounced since that time. In 1979, the American people listened when their president warned them of the poison of consumerism, and the peril of belief in “a mistaken idea of freedom.”

Are we willing to listen to him now?

It seems that, for at least a good many people, 2023 will go down in history as the Year of AI. Almost overnight, the release of ChatGPT on November 30, 2022 ignited a veritable arms race between the most valuable tech companies in the world (we can only pray that such an arms race remains metaphorical — a possibility that, alas, is looking more and more unlikely). The usual suspects (most notably Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Amazon, as well as Chinese firms like Alibaba and Baidu) have spared no expense in rushing their own AI products to market. Even Elon Musk, one of the most vocal of the handful of AI skeptics in the Silicon Valley set, has also jumped on board.

Despite their collective efforts, ChatGPT remains without any doubt the flagship example of the power of generative AI. It is interesting that ChatGPT was released precisely by OpenAI — a nonprofit which has dedicated itself to “safety” in AI research (whatever that might actually mean). Indeed, their board’s recent abrupt firing of CEO Sam Altman was widely rumored to have been provoked by his failure to be honest with them about a major breakthrough towards AGI (artificial general intelligence, defined more or less as an AI capable of the same intellectual tasks as a human). Of course, this “major breakthrough” was said to have been the ability to do grade-school math — not exactly the apocalyptic nightmare feared by many, though doubtless a significant step forward compared to large language models like ChatGPT (which essentially are nothing more than extremely impressive plagiarism algorithms).

Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that AI seems to be basically the only technological advancement capable of evoking fear — or even hesitation — amongst the cadre of scientists and technologists for whom the question of whether something can be done is assumed to automatically answer the question of whether it should be done. To return to the example of Elon Musk: this same outspoken billionaire who fears that AI might very well bring nothing less than “civilizational destruction” is currently hard at work implanting computer chips directly into the human brain (the fact that the FDA approved such procedures even after the horrific effects the chips had on monkeys is cause for grave concern).

It is extremely revealing that AI alone is able to strike fear into the hearts of people like these: although they will happily turn even the minds of their fellow men into their own personal playground, the prospect of AI terrifies them — precisely because it is the only means by which these technocrats can imagine themselves ever losing control. For centuries, the proliferation of information and technology has brought such people unimaginable amounts of power; now, for the first time, they see a technology which threatens to take that power away from them.

But what I myself find extraordinarily troubling is not the apocalyptic language surrounding AI — no, it’s the religious language so often surrounding it.

"The reality is we're creating God," a former Google executive tells us (Google may have had its start as a search engine, but almost from the beginning co-founder Larry Page declared openly that Google’s main work is the development of artificial intelligence). Anthony Levandowski, another former Google executive who literally founded a church dedicated to the worship of AI, likewise says: “What is going to be created will effectively be a god. It’s not a god in the sense that it makes lightning or causes hurricanes. But if there is something a billion times smarter than the smartest human, what else are you going to call it?”

Some might find Levandowski’s zeal for worshipping a hypothetical glorified chatbot to be more than a little absurd. But whatever we ourselves believe about artificial intelligence, I think it is important to confront the fact that we least understand what these people mean when they call AI a god. Some part of us fundamentally grasps their criteria for divinity — regardless of whether or not we actually agree with it.

Why is this so? Why should it make sense to us on any level that a calculator might one day become God, if only we can get it to teach itself how to calculate things really really well? What does that tell us about the way we think about God? What does it tell us about the way we think about ourselves?

To put it another way: if AIs are well on their way to taking their place among the idols of the coming millennium, then what kind of theology does this new cult preach?

At first glance, it might seem likely that such theology is rooted above all in our world’s staunch devotion to rationalism. According to men like Levandowski, AI’s supposed divinity will derive not from its possession of miraculous power, but rather from its being “a billion times smarter” than we are. And perhaps such a thought is conceivable in large part because we have already spent entire centuries replacing divine truth with our own intellectual edifices; after all, the Cult of Reason is far more powerful and pervasive today than it ever was during the days of the First Republic.

Yet it seems to me that there is much more to it than that. Yes, the scientism which has displaced God almost certainly disposes us to think of a superintelligent (and in many ways quite alien) entity such as AI in a nearly divine light. But scientism itself did not arise spontaneously in a vacuum. It did not overthrow Christendom and conquer the Western world by mere chance. And despite its scientific pretensions and atheistic veneer, it has made its legions of converts using precisely the same means as any other religion: by miracles, and by myth.

Before I explain myself fully, I must first make a bit of a digression. Almost 70 years ago, C.S. Lewis gave an inaugural lecture upon assuming the newly-created Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge University, entitled De Descriptione Temporum (I will note that Lewis is perhaps one of the only men in history capable of giving a university lecture which — even seven decades later — has the power to reduce one to tears). In this lecture, he asserts that the most colossal divide between any age of human history is that between the world prior to the Enlightenment and the world since. In defense of this thesis, Lewis offers four supporting points. The first is the worldwide political revolution which has obliterated nearly every incarnation of the Ancien Regime. The second is the vast sea change in art and literature of the modern era, ushering in forms (or more often formlessness) in artistic expression which would have been completely incomprehensible to any age of the past. The third is the apostasy of the Western world from the Christian faith. And yet — rather shockingly for those familiar with Lewis’ thought and worldview — this latter change is not the one he deems most momentous (though to be clear, I myself disagree with him on that point).

As to his fourth and final argument, I will yield the floor to Lewis himself:

Lastly, I play my trump card. Between Jane Austen and us, but not between her and Shakespeare, Chaucer, Alfred, Virgil, Homer, or the Pharaohs, comes the birth of the machines. This lifts us at once into a region of change far above all that we have hitherto considered. For this is parallel to the great changes by which we divide epochs of pre-history. This is on a level with the change from stone to bronze, or from a pastoral to an agricultural economy. It alters Man's place in nature. The theme has been celebrated till we are all sick of it, so I will here say nothing about its economic and social consequences, immeasurable though they are. What concerns us more is its psychological effect. How has it come about that we use the highly emotive word "stagnation", with all its malodorous and malarial overtones, for what other ages would have called "permanence"? Why does the word at once suggest to us clumsiness, inefficiency, barbarity? When our ancestors talked of the primitive church or the primitive purity of our constitution they meant nothing of that sort…. Why does "latest" in advertisements mean "best"? Well, let us admit that these semantic developments owe something to the nineteenth-century belief in spontaneous progress which itself owes something either to Darwin's theorem of biological evolution or to that myth of universal evolutionism which is really so different from it, and earlier…. I submit that what has imposed this climate of opinion so firmly on the human mind is a new archetypal image. It is the image of old machines being superseded by new and better ones. For in the world of machines the new most often really is better and the primitive really is the clumsy. And this image, potent in all our minds, reigns almost without rival in the minds of the uneducated. For to them, after their marriage and the births of their children, the very milestones of life are technical advances. From the old push-bike to the motor-bike and thence to the little car; from gramophone to radio and from radio to television; from the range to the stove; these are the very stages of their pilgrimage. But whether from this cause or from some other, assuredly that approach to life which has left these footprints on our language is the thing that separates us most sharply from our ancestors and whose absence would strike us as most alien if we could return to their world. Conversely, our assumption that everything is provisional and soon to be superseded, that the attainment of goods we have never yet had, rather than the defence and conservation of those we have already, is the cardinal business of life, would most shock and bewilder them if they could visit ours.

“The birth of the machines.” Lewis was quite clear: he viewed their advent as the single greatest change in the entire recorded history of mankind. Keep in mind too that he spoke these words in the 1950s, when computers weighed 20,000 pounds, took up an entire room, and were still millions of times slower than today’s average cellphone. The internet itself was not yet so much as a gleam in the eye of the Department of Defense.

And though Lewis had just finished speaking of the secularism of the post-Christian West, he nevertheless described the Age of the Machine in precisely religious terms: the technological advancements of men “are the very stages of their pilgrimage.” Here Lewis alludes to what I have made my own thesis: that our technological marvels are really the modern form of miracle, and the Myth of Progress is the creed to which such miracles bear witness. Because after all, how can anyone doubt our rightful and inevitable acquisition of “goods we have never yet had” when we need only tap our fingers to summon anything we desire to our doorsteps within the hour, or to instantly alter the room’s climate according to our whim, or to converse face to face with people halfway around the world? And truly, these are only the most prosaic of the wonders we unthinkingly consume every single day. We literally fly through the heavens and consider it a bore.

It is in this context that the deification of artificial intelligence finally begins to make sense. Up until now, the age of scientism has given rise to a mankind that makes his own miracles. But now such miracles might shortly have no further need of mankind; the miracles might soon decide for themselves when and how to act — and even who and what to become. And what else can an autonomous, incarnate miracle be called if not a god?

This is about so much more than naked intelligence. This is about — in Lewis’ words — “that myth of universal evolutionism,” the Religion of Progress, the worship of an inexorable and divine providence that claims absolutely no need of God. This modern religion also has an extremely heavy dose of Nietzscheanism: “This world is the will to power—and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power—and nothing besides!” Because despite Levandowski’s protestations, were it not for AI’s potential to seize absolute control of the countless miracles of technology which have become so indispensable to each of our daily lives, it is extraordinarily unlikely that we would be ascribing divinity to what would otherwise be but a glorified abacus.

This, then, is the shape of the new religion that has captured modern man. It is undeniably a religion of immense power, a religion which every second delivers signs and wonders scarcely imaginable in any past age of this world.

Yet its almost infinite might is what will ultimately prove to be its undoing. Yes, it has tremendous power, and abundant miracles, and even the promise of an imminent paradise on this earth. But despite what even we ourselves might believe, none of these things are that for which the human heart truly yearns. For all that this new religion can justifiably claim to give, it nevertheless offers precious little of love, or of beauty, or of mercy and generosity and self-sacrifice. In a word, it cannot offer us Christ — only raw power and cold calculation.

And I am convinced that the human heart can never truly be satisfied with anything less than Christ. As St. Augustine writes in his inimitable Confessions: “our hearts are restless till they find rest in Thee… whithersoever the soul of man turns itself, unless toward Thee, it is riveted upon sorrows, yea though it is riveted on things beautiful.”

But if you think that an Orthodox hieromonk might perhaps have his own particular bias in this matter, consider also the words of the founding father of virtual reality, Jaron Lanier:

The rhetoric from the companies is often about AI, that what they’re really doing — like YouTube’s parent company, Google, says what they really are is building the giant global brain that’ll inherit the earth and they’ll upload you to that brain and then you won’t have to die. It’s very, very religious in the rhetoric. And so it’s turning into this new religion, and it’s a religion that doesn’t care about you. It’s a religion that’s completely lacking in empathy… it’s a bad religion. It’s a nerdy, empty, sterile, ugly, useless religion that’s based on false ideas. And I think that of all of the things, that’s the worst thing about it.

Although his words certainly don’t go so far as to bring us to Christ, they nevertheless show that the religious promises of techno-futurism ring utterly hollow, even for its greatest devotees. In so many ways, the Book of the Apocalypse speaks directly to us children of the modern age: “thou sayest, I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing; and knowest not that thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked” (Rev. 3:17).

But then again, perhaps in our better moments we do know; perhaps, when our pride has finally begun to fail us, we can at long last hear at least a whisper of the voice of God.

And so it belongs to us Christians to obey the commandment given to us by the Holy Spirit through the mouth of the Apostle Peter: “be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear” (I Pet. 3:15). When the men and women around us begin finally to weary of all the feeble trinkets and flashing toys which our false idols bring, it is absolutely imperative that they be able to see shining in each one of us the love and hope and joy that come from Christ alone.

But we cannot give away what we ourselves do not have. And so I will end my words with the words by which the Gospel always begins: “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.”

The Kingdom of Heaven is, and will always be, the one and only answer to the false promises of the kingdom of man.

”The cleverest trick of the Devil is to persuade you he does not exist.” – Charles Baudelaire, 1864

Over the past decade, it has become commonplace to observe that American society is more deeply divided than at any time in our history since the Civil War. Countless studies, surveys, and opinion pieces have been produced in the attempt to analyze and explain this sad state of affairs. Blame has been cast in any number of directions: the prevalence of disinformation, the manipulativeness of social media algorithms, the erosion of institutional trust, the epidemic of loneliness and isolation, the politicization of nearly every aspect of modern life.

There is certainly a good deal of truth in many such theories. But with that said, such theories can only go so far. Even the most profound cultural criticism of our day almost never penetrates to the spiritual level — and the spiritual level is the only level at which truth ultimately resides. The crisis facing our nation has many aspects, but nevertheless at its core remains undeniably spiritual in nature. Tragically, our society has declared spiritual things to be “off limits” for public life, and so has long ceased from any serious attempt to look there for answers. Even we Christians all too often fail to look for the truth spiritually when it isn’t Sunday morning.

And so when it comes to the question of the causes of our division, there is one answer which all the studies and surveys and opinion pieces in the world will almost certainly never even come close to giving — and yet which may well explain this tragic phenomenon more thoroughly than any other: we no longer believe in demons.

To most people, this answer will almost certainly sound more than a bit bizarre. But if we become willing to step outside the narrow bounds of our modern skepticism, I think it will begin to make more and more sense.

Throughout human history, the existence of evil spirits has been something so obvious that it is practically a universal constant across every known religion and civilization. Mankind has always sensed the presence of spiritual beings filled with malevolence and evil. And regardless of whether we modern men consider this universal human experience to have been shaped by groundless superstition or not, the fact remains that the experience is undeniable. We have felt the forces of evil lurking around us ever since the dawn of time.

And we continue to sense such evil today. In fact, despite all of our rationalistic skepticism, I think we sense it now more strongly than ever. Because only in modern times has the Myth of Progress taken hold so completely within the human heart; only now — bolstered by the technological miracles which multiply around us almost by the hour — has the utopian fantasy of establishing heaven on earth seemed so certainly within our grasp. But our conviction that Paradise might well be just around the corner only makes it more painfully obvious that we somehow have not quite rounded that corner yet. Although we are surrounded by seemingly irrefutable evidence that the world is manifestly destined to become ever more good and perfect and just, even so the undeniable presence all around us of malevolence and hatred and evil remains.

So how does modern man reconcile all this to himself? If the spiritual world is mere superstition, and the material world is mere matter, then where can the hidden forces of evil — powerful enough to delay (at least for a time) the otherwise inevitable March of Progress — possibly be found?

There can be only one answer: in people. In one another. In our brothers and sisters, our kinsmen and countrymen, our family and friends. If we reject the belief that our enemies are spiritual beings, then the only enemies remaining to be found are human beings. And so, when inevitably confronted by all the wickedness and tragedy and pain of life in this world, we blame it all on one another. The conservatives blame the liberals, and the liberals blame the conservatives; the Americans blame the Russians, and the Russians blame the Americans; the secularists blame the Christians, and the Christians blame the secularists. We disbelieve in demons, and so make demons out of one another. And the demons themselves rejoice.

Yes, we Christians are guilty of it too. Because although we may be more likely than others to acknowledge intellectually the existence of demons, most of us don’t actually live like we believe they are real — or at least, we don’t live like they have much of anything to do with our lives. We somehow gloss over the fact that Christ spends practically the entire Gospel doing battle with the devil and his minions. We somehow ignore the countless volumes upon volumes in which the Holy Fathers instruct us and warn us — at great length and in tremendous detail — of the many tricks and wiles of our spiritual foes. And so we too, like the unbelievers, somehow come to forget all about our true enemies, and to turn our ever-increasing anger and condemnation and scorn on one another instead.

How easily do we forget the words of St. Joseph of Optina: “Zeal that desires to uproot all evil is in fact the very worst evil.” How easily do we ignore the words of our Savior: “But I say unto you, that ye resist not evil” (Matt. 5:39). How easily do our hearts cleave rather to the fantasy about which Solzhenitsyn warned us: “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them.”

How much of the human race now lives as though that fantasy were true!

But although a great man like Solzhenitsyn can expose the horrors that lurk behind our twisted way of thinking and perceiving the world, it is only the saints who can show us the way to overcome it: the way of true Christian love. And so I can think of no better prescription for the malady that ails us than the words of St. Porphyrios in Wounded by Love:

When someone injures us in whatever way, whether with slanders or with insults, we should think of him as our brother who has been taken hold of by the enemy. He has fallen victim to the enemy. Accordingly we need to have compassion for him and entreat God to have mercy both on us and on him, and God will help both. If, however, we are filled with anger against him, then the enemy will jump from him to us and make a mockery of us both. A person who condemns others does not love Christ. Our egotism is at fault. This is where condemnation of others stems from. Let me give you a little example.

Let’s suppose someone is all alone in the desert. Suddenly he hears a voice crying out in distress in the distance. He follows the sound and is confronted by a horrendous sight: a tiger has grabbed hold of a man and is savaging him with its claws. The man is desperately shouting for help. In a few minutes he will be torn to pieces. What can the person do to help? Can he run to his side? How? It’s impossible. Can he shout for help? Who will hear him? There is no one within earshot. Should he perhaps pick up a stone and throw it at the man to finish him off? ‘Certainly not,’ we would say. But that is exactly what can happen if we don’t realize that the other person who is acting badly towards us has been taken hold of by a tiger, the devil. We fail to realize that when we react to such a person without love it is as if we are throwing stones at his wounds and accordingly we are doing him great harm and the ‘tiger’ leaps onto us and we do the same as him and worse. What kind of love do we have then for our neighbor and, even more importantly, for God?

We should feel the malice of the other person as an illness which is tormenting him and which he is unable to shake off. And so we should regard our brethren with sympathy and behave with courtesy towards them, repeating in our hearts with simplicity the prayer ‘Lord Jesus Christ’ [i.e. the Jesus Prayer], so that the grace of God may strengthen our soul and so that we don’t pass judgment on anyone. We should regard all people as saints. We all carry within us the same ‘old self’. Our neighbor, whoever he is, is ‘flesh of our flesh’; he is our brother and, according to Saint Paul, we owe no one anything, except to love one another (Rom. 13:8). We can never pass judgment on others, for no one ever hated his own flesh (Eph. 5:29)….

In the realm of the Spirit of God all things are different. Here one justifies all things in the behavior of others. Everything!… Inquire more deeply into everything and don’t regard things superficially.

May each of us take close heed to the words of this great and holy saint. May each of us take much care to remember that the true Christian has no enemies at all on this earth, but only brothers and sisters suffering from the same afflictions which also torture us. May each of us strive to live always according to the words of our Savior: “By this shall all men know that ye are My disciples, if ye have love one to another” (John 13:35). Amen.

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. (Eph. 6:12)

As we once again approach the beginning of a new year, it is good for us as Christians to take advantage of this opportunity for self-reflection, to prayerfully reexamine how we are living our lives and whether we are doing so in light of the Gospel of Christ. Indeed, just as we Orthodox Christians pray each evening in the words of St. John Chrysostom: “though I have done nothing good in Thy sight, yet grant me by Thy grace to make a good beginning,” so too we ought to pray in the last hours of the year that is now coming to a close.

But how exactly should we examine ourselves, and how best can we strive — with the help of God’s grace — to make such a good beginning? What does “a good beginning” in the Christian life truly look like? For the answers to these questions, I suggest we meditate first on the beginning of the Gospel itself.

After Christ’s Theophany at the River Jordan (which we will soon once again celebrate) and His forty days of fasting in the wilderness (which we will soon once again emulate in the season of Great Lent), He began His preaching of the Gospel with these words: “Repent: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matt. 4:17). Though these words are extremely well known, they are also extremely poorly understood. Christ did not simply command His people to cease from their sins — as countless moralizers from time immemorial have done. Nor did He merely teach that some vague future bliss awaits the human race beyond the grave — as so many of our contemporaries have reduced our religion to mean. No, Christ instead preached repentance, because the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.

It is true that we Orthodox are more likely than most modern Christians to understand (at least intellectually) that repentance does not fundamentally mean to feel guilty about our past sins, nor even merely to cease from sinning in the future. Probably we know that the English word “repentance” is a (quite dubious) translation of the Greek word μετάνοια, “metanoia,” meaning literally to change one’s nous — that is, to change our fundamental way of understanding reality. But as Metropolitan Jonah (Paffhausen) once remarked, we modern Americans — regardless of our formal religious affiliation — are all in some sense Southern Baptists. That is, there is a common religious framework that our culture has instilled into our subconscious — and so when we hear Christ and His Church use words like “repentance,” on some deep level we really hear what our culture has taught us those words mean.

And so — no matter how good our intentions are, and no matter how correct our formal theological beliefs may be — when we hear someone like St. Isaac the Syrian say: “This life has been given to you for repentance; do not waste it in vain pursuits,” what we really hear is something like: “You should be spending your entire life on earth feeling bad about yourself instead of having any fun.” It is — to say the least — not the most inspiring philosophy by which to live.

It is not that our cultural conception of repentance is totally wrong; it is more that there is so much that it is missing. And the main thing that is missing is, quite simply, the reason Christ Himself actually gave for it: “the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.” And He really meant that it is at hand. He did not come simply to explain to us some cosmic legal system of merit-based rewards and punishments, having little to do with the here-and-now and which none of us will actually experience until the afterlife. No, He came to give sight to the blind and life to the dead, “to pour out His spirit upon all flesh” (cf. Acts 2:17).

He came to make us gods by grace.

It is precisely this “change of heart” that Christ came to give freely to mankind; it is precisely this change of being which we have been given our lives on this earth to acquire. And it does not belong simply to some far-removed future age; it begins here and now, with our baptism, just as Christ began His preaching of it with His own baptism. We enter deeper and deeper into this reality with every prayer we utter and with each hymn we sing, and above all at every one of those holiest of moments when we eat and drink the Body and Blood of the God-Man Jesus Christ. This reality, though perhaps invisible to our bodily eyes, nevertheless shines mystically and brilliantly in every church and monastery and icon corner throughout the entire world — no matter how humble or ordinary their outward appearance. And this reality lives and breathes in every single person that we meet — because the truth is that each and every one of us, no matter how ugly and terrible and all-encompassing our sins, nevertheless bears within ourselves the indelible image of God.

None of this is to say that repentance should not be something sorrowful; indeed, how could it not cause the keenest of sorrows to understand how great the riches are which we have squandered (and still squander), and how trifling are the trinkets we have clung to in their place? And yet, along with such sorrow, there must also come overwhelming joy and infinite gratitude when — like the Prodigal Son in the parable — we see our Heavenly Father still rushing out to meet us and embrace us, to clothe us with His finest garments and to give us the best of all that He has, though we have done less than nothing to deserve it, and though we are still so very far away from home.

So it is indeed with sorrow, but all the more with gratitude and joy, that we must make our good beginning of repentance in the coming year, imitating St. Paul who said: “this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 3:13-14). And in another place: “let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God” (Heb. 12:1-2). And finally, let us not cease to keep the joy of the Cross set before the eyes of our hearts “till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ: that we henceforth be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive; but speaking the truth in love, may grow up into Him in all things, which is the head, even Christ” (Eph. 4:13-15).

For truly, it is “the goodness of God [that] leadeth thee to repentance” (Rom. 2:4); “it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the Kingdom” (Luke 12:32). Amen.

Several months ago at their 20^th All-American Council, in response to the request of the faithful the Holy Synod of the Orthodox Church in America issued an encyclical entitled Statement on Same-sex Relationships and Sexual Identity. Within the historical context of the Christian faith, the only thing even remotely remarkable about this encyclical is the fact that anyone felt the need to issue it at all (sadly, however, such a need is only too real). It consists merely of a simple and calm reaffirmation of “the unchanging teaching of Christ the Savior” regarding sexual identity and morality, a repeated emphasis that such teaching proceeds solely out of “love and out of sincere care for souls,” and finally an exhortation to the faithful not to publicly contradict or undermine the teaching of the Church in these matters.

The totally unremarkable content of this encyclical notwithstanding, it was not exactly surprising that the usual suspects immediately began to scream bloody murder. The ghost of Ezekiel Bulver¹ busily began making the rounds on social media, everywhere declaiming that the Holy Synod had produced such a document because was in the grips of (take your pick) authoritarian mania, ideological possession, irrational fear, or — incredibly — an unnatural obsession with sex (to assert, within the context of 21^st-century America, that it is bishops who are inordinately fixated upon sex all but beggars belief). There was, of course, little-to-no discussion as to whether the Holy Synod was actually correct in its affirmation of universal Church teaching — indeed, such an approach would doubtless have proved considerably more difficult for the agitators than their attempt to cast the hierarchs as nothing more than a group of fearful, backward, power-hungry old white men.

I will, however, admit that I was a bit surprised by the tactic which the dissenters seized upon almost immediately: with one voice, they began to assert that the Holy Synod was abusively attempting to destroy academic freedom. To its detractors, the most offensive passage of the encyclical was the following:

We call upon all clergy, theologians, teachers, and lay persons within the Orthodox Church in America never to contradict these teachings by preaching or teaching against the Church’s clear moral position; by publishing books, magazines, and articles which do the same; or producing or publishing similar content online.

In other words, their (purported) objection was not so much to the Holy Synod’s reaffirmation of universal Church doctrine itself, but rather to the fact that they dared expect their flock to actually take that doctrine seriously. Apparently the Holy Synod might have the right to pontificate into the wind as much as it likes, but the moment it begins to call upon the faithful to refrain from publicly advocating soul-destroying teachings and practices, it has crossed the line into some sort of repressive totalitarian dictatorship.

But let me put this in another light: if the Holy Synod had instead issued an encyclical reaffirming the universal Christian teaching that God exists, and called upon communing members of the Church not to publicly teach that God is merely a figment of the Synod’s imagination, would any Orthodox Christian have batted an eyelash at anything other than the fact that something so obvious needed to be committed to paper? Of course not. Obviously the existence of God is well within the purview of Christian hierarchs, and to require that the faithful believe in God in order to commune is a perfectly reasonable matter of Church discipline and practice. So it seems clear that the real position underlying all of the agitprop is actually this: sexual morality is simply none of the Church’s business. It is not part of the Church’s legitimate province, and so the Church’s expectation that the faithful give heed to its precepts must therefore be illegitimate, repressive, and deplorable.

But if sexual morality somehow no longer belongs to the province of religion, then in what province does it lay instead? Conveniently for these academics, it apparently turns out that sexual morality belongs to the province of the academy. And thus their rather perplexing claim that the Holy Synod is intent upon destroying academic freedom finally becomes clear. So, too, does the source of their outrage: they feel that that Holy Synod is attempting to take away something that fundamentally belongs to them. It is they who have both the right and the competence to tell the Church what She ought and ought not teach regarding sexual morality — not the other way around.

To elucidate my point, I will put to you another thought experiment: if the Synod had instead issued an encyclical agreeing with these academics on the topic of sexual morality, and enjoining the faithful never to publicly teach that same-sex relationships or gender fluidity are morally wrong (on the grounds that judgment is sinful and Christianity is love), would we have heard the same outcry from the same quarters? Would we have heard the same impassioned defense of the “academic freedom” of Christians to deny such a doctrine… or would we have heard instead that the bigoted and backward ought to give heed to the path of love shown to them by their hierarchs?

Perhaps I am wrong. But perhaps, in addition to the voice of Ezekiel Bulver, we are hearing also the voice of Henry Ford echoing in the halls of academia: “the Orthodox Church is free to publicly proclaim and internally enforce any teaching it likes… as long as it’s ours.”

Of course, the dissenters maintain (and no doubt believe) that they are concerned simply with defending a human right to freedom of conscience: the freedom to believe what one decides to believe. But surreptitiously they are attempting to do something far different. After all, the plain fact is that everyone has precisely the same freedom to believe whatever they choose as they did before the Synod published its encyclical (the hierarchs of the OCA are not exactly beating down the doors of Fordham University and dragging away anyone who says something they don’t like). What the dissenters are objecting to so strongly is, in fact, nothing other than the Church spiritually guiding the very people who freely come to Her for spiritual guidance.

The Church proclaims what She has always proclaimed: the path to salvation. And the choice now before us is the same as it has ever been: will we freely choose to walk that path or not? In its encyclical, the Holy Synod of the OCA admirably emphasized

its pastoral concern and paternal love for all who desire to come to Christ and who struggle with their passions, temptations, and besetting sins, whatever those might be. The Church is a hospital for the sick; Our Lord has come as a physician to heal those who are ailing. Imitating our Savior, who stretched his arms wide on the Cross, we welcome with open arms all who desire the life of repentance in Christ.

The doors of the Church — the doors of Paradise itself — are open to one and to all. What is needed to walk through those doors is the same for one and for all. And the clergy of Christ’s Church (sinners though we be) stand ever ready to do what we can to strengthen each and every person to walk the “straight and narrow path” that leads unfailingly to eternal life and unending joy in the Kingdom of God.

But what we absolutely refuse to do is to pretend that sickness is health, that bondage is freedom, that the road to perdition is the road to paradise. And — to answer the charges brought by Bulver — the reason we refuse to do so has nothing to do with power or with politics, with judgment or with fear. The true reason is twofold: our pastoral love and care for each and every child of God, yoked together with our firm and unyielding faith that “the Church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth” (1 Tim. 3:15) can be trusted implicitly to lead all of us safely home.

Finally, all things considered I am glad that these academics have put the matter to us so plainly. We truly are being faced today with a choice: to listen either to the voice of the culture or the voice of the Church. Each one of us, of course, has absolute freedom to decide which to choose. But in considering our choice, let us carefully give heed to the words which Christ once spoke to us: “by their fruits ye shall know them” (Mat. 7:20).

The Church has brought us the saints. Our culture has brought us Twitter mobs and reality TV.

For myself, I do not have any trouble at all deciding which is more worthy to follow.

¹C. S. Lewis once wrote the following regarding the omnipresent fallacy which he named “Bulverism”:

You must show that a man is wrong before you start explaining why he is wrong. The modern method is to assume without discussion that he is wrong and then distract his attention from this (the only real issue) by busily explaining how he became so silly. In the course of the last fifteen years I have found this vice so common that I have had to invent a name for it. I call it “Bulverism”. Some day I am going to write the biography of its imaginary inventor, Ezekiel Bulver, whose destiny was determined at the age of five when he heard his mother say to his father—who had been maintaining that two sides of a triangle were together greater than a third—”Oh you say that because you are a man.” “At that moment”, E. Bulver assures us, “there flashed across my opening mind the great truth that refutation is no necessary part of argument. Assume that your opponent is wrong, and explain his error, and the world will be at your feet. Attempt to prove that he is wrong or (worse still) try to find out whether he is wrong or right, and the national dynamism of our age will thrust you to the wall.” That is how Bulver became one of the makers of the Twentieth Century.

I have often thought that, in many ways, the spiritual life comes down simply to remembering the things that we know — and yet so often forget. As a spiritual father, it frequently seems to me that my role consists not so much in teaching others something new as in reminding them of the truths they already know, and which they need at that particular moment to bear in mind. Nor am I alone in this way of thinking. The great Apostle Peter himself once declared to his flock:

I will not be negligent to put you always in remembrance of these things, though ye know them, and be established in the present truth. Yea, I think it meet, as long as I am in this tabernacle [i.e. his mortal body], to stir you up by putting you in remembrance. (2 Pet. 1:12-13)

But our modern culture looks at life much differently. It teaches us to prioritize — above nearly all else — the acquisition of new information and the invention of new ideas. We are obsessed with both knowledge and novelty, and subconsciously ascribe to them an unrivalled and well-nigh supernatural ability to overcome all our problems and to assuage all our woes. The new is always better than the old, and if there is anything we cannot do it is only because we do not yet know how. Ironically, we are like the ancient gnostics who believed that salvation is to be found chiefly in knowledge; we are like the ancient Athenians who “spent their time in nothing else, but either to tell, or to hear some new thing” (Acts 17:21). And in the ascendant cult of scientistic progress, there is precious little room for remembering.

Think, for example, of our recent experience with the global pandemic: it was immediately and implicitly assumed by nearly everyone that we ought to turn almost exclusively to Science to instruct us on how we ought to live. Each day we watched impatiently for news of the latest breakthroughs in our research, and waited eagerly for every advancement in our treatment of the disease. And though there were several abrupt reversals in the answers that Science gave to us — as well as no small disagreement over which answers were actually to be believed — there was nevertheless almost no real attempt to look for answers anywhere else. Faced with what was for many the greatest crisis in living memory, it occurred to almost no one to reach for enduring wisdom rather than merely for the latest data. And amidst the interminable distraction of acquiring, analyzing, and debating that data, we somehow managed to forget the one great and immutable truth that the pandemic ought to have brought clearly and unmistakably back to our remembrance. That truth, quite simply, is this: no matter what we do, no matter how hard we try, no matter how much we know, someday soon each one of us will surely die.

Our predicament has perhaps been put into words most poignantly by T.S. Eliot in his Choruses from “The Rock”:

The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to God.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.

These words were published in 1934, long before anyone could have possibly foreseen the advent of the internet — that raging torrent of mere information, incessantly pumped directly into our eyeballs by the screens which constantly surround us and which we carry with us everywhere we go. We are every bit as addicted to this torrent of information as any addict is to their drug of choice. Its cruelly sophisticated delivery mechanisms have conditioned us to keep perpetually clicking and scrolling and refreshing, ever in search of the future and our next dopamine hit. Our addiction has left us with (mostly) healthy bodies but tragically shattered minds, almost wholly unable to truly focus, or meditate, or remember what we once knew of life before the dawn of the Information Age.

We have even forgotten what it means to remember.

Remembrance is not, as we may think, merely the ability to recall information; it is not merely a function of the intellectual mind. As we gradually enter into the spirit of Orthodoxy and little by little come to acquire the mind of the Church, we begin to see that remembrance is something far deeper. For instance, we sing precisely “Memory Eternal” as our quintessential prayer for the faithful departed. This is not merely a pleasant wish for them to be recalled from time to time by those who are living; rather, it is we the living offering on their behalf the prayer of St. Dismas the Good Thief: “Remember me, O Lord, when Thou comest in Thy Kingdom” (Luke 23:42). To put it plainly, to pray for remembrance is to pray for communion.

We are now (on the old calendar) celebrating the Afterfeast of the Dormition of the Mother of God. And — just as with all the feasts of the church calendar — we are not merely recalling the occurrence of a past historical event: we are actually participating in it. In a mystical sense, we really are standing with the Apostles chanting funeral hymns before the Burial Shroud of the Theotokos; we really are standing with St. Thomas beholding her empty tomb. Our remembrance of her is communion with her — and through her, with her Son who has already raised her up to reign in glory with Him in His Father’s Kingdom.

In the solemn service of Proskomedia always celebrated before the beginning of the Divine Liturgy, the priest commemorates not only the saving events of the Lord’s earthly life, but also the Mother of God, the saints and the angels, and the living and departed who are especially important to the community. A particle of bread is placed for each of these on the Holy Diskos surrounding the Lamb that will shortly be made into the Body of Christ, and at the end of the Divine Liturgy these particles are poured into the Chalice and suffused with the Blood of Christ. The universal witness of the Church is that such commemoration is one of the most powerful forms of prayer it is possible for anyone to offer on this earth, as it brings a possibility of union with Christ and His Church perhaps second only to our own reception of the Holy Mysteries themselves.

And of course, the Divine Liturgy itself is the manifestation of remembrance as communion par excellance. In the Divine Liturgy (which properly speaking takes place outside of Time itself) we remember and recapitulate and renew our participation in the whole history of creation, the entire economy of our salvation, and most especially the saving Passion and Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. As the priest prays in the Anaphora of the Liturgy of St. Basil the Great: “All things hast Thou given unto us.”

Indeed, He has given us all things — if only we remember them.

It is more important that we should remember God than that we should breathe: indeed, if one may say so, we should do nothing else besides.

-St. Gregory the Theologian

When people think about the vows that a monk or a nun takes before God (if they think about such things at all), three likely come to mind: chastity, poverty, and obedience. Such vows are quite striking, since in the modern world these three things are no longer generally considered to be virtues common to the life of all Christians, exemplified in monasticism chiefly by the degree to which they are put into practice. Indeed, to the world at large these three things, each in their own way, have become essentially anti-virtues. Celibacy, poverty, and obedience are no longer regarded as ideals to be esteemed, but as social ills to be eradicated.

But there is another vow made by monastics, a vow to practice a virtue that has gradually become lost to us so thoroughly (even to the Christians of the modern world) that it is scarcely thought about at all. If it is, then it is almost certainly never thought about as a virtue, nor as something with any moral or spiritual dimension to it at all. That vow is the vow of stability.

Therefore it might come as a surprise that this vow is not only given in the Service of Monastic Tonsure, but that it actually precedes the other, better-known vows. Immediately after the candidate declares his or her renunciation of the world, the superior asks: “Wilt thou abide in this Monastery or in that to which under holy obedience thou shalt be ordered, and in the ascetic life until thy last breath?” And the candidate answers: “Yes, God helping me, Reverend Father.” Only then does the candidate go on to give his or her other vows, and afterward to receive tonsure into the schema.

Why is this vow of stability — the vow to not only remain a monk or a nun, but to remain a monk or a nun in one particular monastery — considered so necessary to the monastic life that it is given before all other vows? Why should it matter if a monastic might wish to pursue their vocation in some other monastery at some point in the future? To those of us accustomed to the ubiquitous interchangeability so carefully engineered for the modern world, such dogged insistence on remaining in the same place for one’s entire life — come what may — might seem more than a little strange.

But just as with all the other monastic vows, the vow of stability is not simply an arbitrary test of faith or of commitment; on the contrary, it is given because of its irreplaceable ability to bring about spiritual healing in the heart of the monastic. And just as with all the other monastic vows, it represents a virtue that — although put into practice most fully in the monastic context — should be present to some degree in the life of all Christians.

First and foremost, the vow of stability is the foundation stone of repentance. It allows the monastic to come face to face with the great truth that the roots of all the various troubles in our life are to be found not in our outward circumstances, but in our own hearts. By choosing to turn our backs on the easy promises of the “geographic cure” in all its varied manifestations, we force ourselves instead to turn inward, to confront the sin inside us that is the true cause of all our pain and loneliness and unhappiness, and to allow the light of Christ to gradually drive that darkness from our lives. Without such a vow, it becomes all too easy for us to blame this or that person or place or thing for our problems, and so to become trapped in an endless and fruitless effort to change our circumstances, rather than to change our hearts.

Even more than this, the vow of stability is the seed of true Christian love. In a world where even the closest human relationships all too often seem to have become more or less disposable, the monastic makes a solemn promise before God to remain in the same community, with the same people, until the day he or she dies. To live — all day every day — shoulder to shoulder with people whom we did not choose (and whom we may not even like) is not always a small or easy thing. But it is a path to a love far deeper and truer and more meaningful than even the closest worldly friendship can attain: it is a path to the love of Christ, to a love capable of seeing and serving and knowing the image of God in every single person that we meet. It is a path that our rootless, lonely, and atomized age needs now more than ever.

Not everyone is called to the monastic life, and the monastic vows are of course not meant for those living in the world. But the virtues enshrined in the monastic vows are simply the virtues preached by Christ in the Gospels, belonging equally to every Christian. And so I think that every Christian would do well to give careful and prayerful consideration to the advice once given by St. Anthony the Great, the founder of cenobitic monasticism:

Someone asked [Abba Anthony]: “What must one do in order to please God?” The old man replied, “Pay attention to what I tell you: whoever you may be, always have God before your eyes; whatever you do, do it according to the testimony of the holy Scriptures; in whatever place you live, do not easily leave it. Keep these three precepts and you will be saved.”

-Sayings of the Desert Fathers

Recently the company formerly known as Facebook officially rebranded itself as “Meta,” declaring that its new “overarching goal” is “to help bring the metaverse to life.”

What exactly is the metaverse? According to an increasing number of influential CEOs and other leaders in the tech world, it is a nascent globally connected virtual reality experience which, in the words of Mark Zuckerberg, will eventually become “an embodied internet, where instead of just viewing content — you are in it. And you feel present with other people as if you were in other places.” Zuckerberg and his cohorts expect the metaverse, under their guidance, to gradually emerge from — and eventually supplant — the internet as we know it today.

Unsurprisingly, the word “metaverse” (a portmanteau literally meaning “beyond the universe”) finds its origins in science fiction. But what might be somewhat more surprising, given the near-euphoria with which tech pioneers are embracing both the term and the concept, is that the metaverse in the literature of science fiction is an overwhelmingly dystopian idea.

In the novel which originally coined the term “metaverse,” Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, the United States has collapsed into a violent, impoverished, crime-ridden collection of city-states governed by (coincidentally?) corporations. The metaverse of the novel has become an avenue of escape from an increasingly unbearable reality, and some people have become so addicted to the metaverse that they become “gargoyles,” which is to say they choose to disfigure themselves physically in order to be permanently plugged in to the metaverse. Facebook’s decision to reshape and even rename itself after the vision of such a novel is therefore quite sobering, in addition to being astonishingly brazen — given on the one hand that its own former executive for monetization has described the deliberately engineered addictiveness of its products as “eroding aspects of society,” and on the other that Zuckerberg himself has gone on record describing Facebook as “more like a government than a traditional company.”

Think that all this might be not so much brazenness as mere coincidence? Think again: Zuckerberg made Snow Crash required reading for product managers at Facebook.

In fact, to give you a sense of the extraordinary level of hubris the tech industry has attained, Zuckerberg recently gave an interview about the metaverse in which he quite pithily lays out one of the most dire problems our society is facing:

A lot of the time that we’re spending, we’re basically mediating our lives and our communication through these small, glowing rectangles. I think that that’s not really how people are made to interact.

… and then, in the next breath and presumably with a straight face, asserts that the solution to this catastrophic collapse of normal human interaction is for everyone to strap these same “small, glowing rectangles” straight onto our eyeballs instead:

What virtual and augmented reality can do, and what the metaverse broadly is going to help people experience, is a sense of presence that I think is just much more natural in the way that we’re made to interact. And I think it will be more comfortable. The interactions that we have will be a lot richer, they’ll feel real.

Here the business model of Meta is laid bare: it sells itself as the cure for the very epidemic of loneliness which it has itself done so much to spread. Meta wants us to believe that the best way to be connected with one another is to be connected to its machines, that the apotheosis of human relationships will be for all of us to sit alone in our rooms, with screens covering our eyes and speakers covering our ears, having quite literally bought in to the illusion that our friends are actually right there all around us — for precisely as long as we happen to want them to be, after which we can conveniently make them vanish as easily as we close a browser window today.

And indeed, in the world of deepfakes, how long before we dispense with the need for such digital avatars to even have a real human being at the other end of them at all? How long before we can all be “friends” with our favorite celebrities or fictional characters, brought to life for us by the most convincing AI personality models imaginable? How long before digital necromancy will enable us to summon up the ghosts of our departed family members, and to continue to “live” with them as though they had never died? I am, unfortunately, not exaggerating; such things have already begun.

But even the illusion of friends and loved ones is nothing compared to the real product which Meta offers to sell us: the illusion of our self. The chief allure of social media has always been its promise to allow us to curate our own identities. We can pick and choose the personal information, the interests, the photos, the memories, which we present publicly and which therefore define us in the eyes of others. We can hide the things that are embarrassing, we can delete the things that we find distasteful. And in the metaverse, this power will be multiplied exponentially: we will be able not only to redefine but even to recreate ourselves in any way we like, in any way we can possibly imagine.

No wonder the most rich and powerful companies on earth are so desperate to build such a product. It is the product to end all products; it is consumerism incarnate.

In the final analysis, it is a product designed to prey on the deepest desires of the human heart: the desire for love, the desire for deification. It promises to bring us together, to connect us with one another, to take away our loneliness and isolation and unhappiness. It promises to allow us to immediately transform ourselves into whoever and whatever we want to be, without effort (not to mention without repentance). It promises to make us into gods, commanding the very fabric of the reality around us. Many whisper that someday soon it will even bring us the promise of immortality itself, by allowing us to upload our consciousness into a digital medium and so to dwell in the metaverse forever.

And in hearing these false promises, it becomes clear that mankind in the 21st century — even with the advent of technological landscapes absolutely inconceivable for nearly all of human history — cannot do otherwise than prove the truth written long ago in the Book of Ecclesiastes: “there is nothing new under the sun.” Ever since the moment when our First Parents Adam and Eve ate of the fruit, mankind has been trying to become as gods without God. Ever since we left the Garden of Eden, we have been trying to build for ourselves the Tower of Babel to replace the paradise that we lost. But no matter how good the engineers at Meta might be, whatever digital version they eventually create of “a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven” (Genesis 11:4) will no more satisfy the human heart than has any other attempt ever made by man. Utopian dreams have always and will always end in one way, and one way only: as dystopian nightmares (and again, let us not forget that this particular utopian dream even began as a dystopian nightmare).

Because mankind was not created for any utopia, whether digital or analog. Mankind was created for Heaven, and we will never be able to find our true home anywhere in this fallen world — much less in an electronic facsimile of it. As St. Augustine writes in his Confessions: “Thou hast made us for Thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in Thee.”

In closing, I will say that Meta and its cohorts are not trying so hard to build the metaverse out of the goodness of their corporate hearts (an oxymoron, I know). No, they are building it in order to further addict us, to compel us to surrender even more of the short time remaining in our lives to them and their products than we already have. And I suspect that — even as things are — if most people spent even half the time in prayer that we spend on the internet, we would all be surrounded by saints and miracles every day. Let us therefore think long and hard before we sell these companies any more of our lives, no matter how captivating the fantasies they offer us in return.

“Such beauty has power,” Adelaida said hotly. “You can overturn the world with such beauty.”

–The Idiot, by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Perhaps the most famous phrase from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s quite voluminous body of writing is the statement that “beauty will save the world.” Much ink has been spilled concerning this phrase by all manner of critics and commentators, both Orthodox and non-Orthodox alike. And without doubt it is extremely important that we Orthodox put due emphasis on the centrality of beauty in our faith — perhaps especially those of us who are children of the West, having all too often inherited an understanding of Christianity which is prone to a cold legalism and an abstract moralism. Such an emphasis on beauty must occur not only in our worship and our theology (after all, in both cases this has already largely been done for us), but also in the inward struggle of each of our own spiritual lives.

But how exactly are we to do so? When we come down to it, this is not exactly an easy question. And indeed, for Dostoevsky beauty was not nearly so straightforward a subject as a cursory reading of his famous quotation might lead one to believe.

And in point of fact, Dostoevsky himself never actually said that “beauty will save the world.” The phrase appears a handful of times in his novel The Idiot… and yet the titular character, Prince Myshkin, also never says it; rather, it is attributed to him at several points by various other characters. What we do hear Myshkin say concerning beauty is something rather different and more nuanced: “Beauty is difficult to judge; I’m not prepared yet. Beauty is a riddle.” It is a riddle (I do not want to give away too much of the book) that nearly destroys him.

Dostoevsky returns to this theme in his magnum opus, The Brothers Karamazov, in the course of which Dmitry Karamazov speaks what is in my opinion one of the most profound paragraphs in all of literature:

Beauty is a fearful and terrible thing! Fearful because it’s undefinable, and it cannot be defined, because here God gave us only riddles. Here the shores converge, here all contradictions live together… Beauty! Besides, I can’t bear it that some man, even with a lofty heart and the highest mind, should start from the ideal of the Madonna and end with the ideal of Sodom. It’s even more fearful when someone who already has the ideal of Sodom in his soul does not deny the ideal of the Madonna either, and his heart burns with it, verily, verily burns, as in his young, blameless years… What’s shame for the mind is beauty all over for the heart. Can there be beauty in Sodom? Believe me, for the vast majority of people, that’s just where beauty lies—did you know that secret? The terrible thing is that beauty is not only fearful but also mysterious. Here the devil is struggling with God, and the battlefield is the human heart.

And indeed the struggle has been long and terrible, and the battlefield is strewn with many corpses of the slain. Let us not forget that it was precisely beauty that overthrew our First Mother Eve in the Garden; it was precisely beauty that brought about the Fall of Man. “And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat” (Gen. 3:6). Let us also not forget that even “Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light” (2 Cor. 11:14).

Just as the most dangerous lies of the devil are those which are hidden among half-truths, so too the most terrible horrors of sin are those which are hidden under a veneer of beauty. This is precisely what St. Augustine warns us about — from his own bitter experience — in his incomparable work The Confessions: “For whithersoever the soul of man turns itself, unless toward Thee, it is riveted upon sorrows, yea though it is riveted on things beautiful.” Yet this warning of the saint also reveals to us the way of escape: we must turn our souls not simply toward that which is beautiful, but toward the beauty which it is only possible to behold in the Lord God Himself.

In short, we must become ascetics.

It might seem strange to say that the only way to build our lives around true beauty is through the path of ascetic renunciation. But if this is so, it is only because we do not understand what asceticism really is. That we have difficulty understanding asceticism should not surprise us, for as St. Ignatius (Brianchaninov) writes in The Field: “The Fall has become so assimilated to the essence of all mankind that rejection of the Fall has become tantamount to rejection of our very life.” For us darkened sinners and spiritual infants, the beginnings of the ascetic life no doubt feel quite painful and profoundly unnatural.

But though this may seem to be so, the truth is that asceticism is infinitely far from being some dour exercise of medieval self-flagellation. We do not undertake ascetic labors in order to deprive ourselves of good things, or to somehow punish ourselves for the sake of God. No, we undertake ascetic labors in order to teach ourselves to no longer be satisfied with what is merely earthly and fleeting, to reorient our hearts toward eternity, to seek above all other things the incomparable beauty of the Kingdom of God. We become ascetics not in order to close off our hearts, but rather to open them.

The great 19th century God-bearing Elder, St. Barsanuphius of Optina, explained this when some pilgrims came to ask him whether Christians ought to spend their time going to the symphony. The Elder had greatly loved music before he entered the monastery, and so he was able to affirm that some of these works are indeed beautiful and edifying. But he also pointed out that the human heart only has so many “valves,” so to speak. The more of these valves we open to earthly beauty, the less room there is for spiritual beauty to enter into our hearts. And conversely when we close off our hearts to earthly good things, we open them all the more to be filled with spiritual good things.

My brothers and sisters, generally speaking our hearts today are small and withered. Yet they are stuffed to overflowing — as never before in all the history of the world — with an overwhelming multitude of both cares and pleasures of this life. How will we create room in them for God, for the Mother of God, for the saints, for one another? There is quite simply no other way to do so than the way of the ascetics.

As I said, when we first set out on this path it will no doubt be difficult, and the demons will do their utmost to make it seem both unnecessary and joyless. And that is why, when undertaking our small labors of asceticism, we must constantly call to remembrance the purpose of this asceticism: through leaving behind that which is paltry and perishing, to lay hold already in this life on the true joy and true beauty which can only be found in the Kingdom of God.

If any doubt my words, I urge them to read the book Wounded by Love (actually, I urge every Christian to read it anyway), which explains all of this much better and much more beautifully than I possibly could. But even more than this wondrous book, St. Paul in the 12th chapter of Hebrews offers us to greatest possible proof of the glory of the ascetic path:

Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God.

Of course, like St. Barsanuphius we do not need to deny the authentic goodness and beauty that exists in this world, nor do we automatically need to cut ourselves off from it entirely. Even St. Isaac the Syrian, who was by no means a stranger to strict and rigorous asceticism, declares that Nature is one of two books (alongside Holy Scripture) through which God reveals Himself to man. And this, in the final analysis, is the true criterion by which Christians must judge beauty: is it leading us toward God? Is it drawing our hearts toward heaven?

Even Ippolit — the angry, dying, revolutionary nihilist in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot — knew what question to ask Prince Myshkin about the famous phrase: “What beauty will save the world? Kolya told me what you said … Are you a zealous Christian? Kolya says you call yourself a Christian.”

What beauty will save the world? Only the beauty of Christ. Only the beauty of the Cross.

Let us cleanse our senses, and we shall behold Christ shining with the unapproachable Light of the Resurrection.”

Paschal Canon

Several months ago a landmark Gallup poll found that as of 2020, for the first time in American history fewer than 50% of Americans belong to a church, synagogue, or mosque. Ever since 1937 when the survey was first conducted, that percentage remained fairly constant at around 70% until the turn of the century, when the number began its plummet all the way down to 47% in only two short decades.

And the pace is only accelerating. While the decline is present in all major subgroups, it is most pronounced amongst Millenials (born 1981-1996): only one in three are members, down 15% in the past decade alone, and only half of those who claim a religious affiliation are members of a religious body. Early data has showed an even more extreme decline amongst Generation Z (born 1997 or later). All signs point to this grievous development being a lasting trend, and not a temporary anomaly.

Without question, the decline of Christianity in our society is an unspeakable tragedy. There are now countless thousands of children being born among us who may never hear the Gospel of Jesus Christ preached to them, and who on the contrary are more likely to hear only various slanders and calumnies about the faith He came to this earth to bring.

And yet we also know, according to the witness of this same faith, that the providence of God would not allow this — or any other tragedy whatsoever — to come to pass unless He sees that it can serve to accomplish our salvation… if only we ourselves strive to receive it in a spirit of humility, repentance, and faith. And so we must ask ourselves how we ought to understand and respond to these events in such a way as to become co-laborers with God in turning even this spiritual catastrophe to His glory and to the salvation of souls.

And after all, now more than ever — in the midst of Paschaltide — we should need absolutely no further reassurance that the wisdom of God is abundantly able to accomplish this. For what greater apostasy, what more terrible rejection of God has ever occurred in all the history of the world than that of Great and Holy Friday? Yet God, in His mercy, used precisely mankind’s most vile rebellion and most horrifying sin to work for us not only the forgiveness of every transgression, not only the healing of every disease of body and soul, not only the defeat of Death itself, but even our deification and eternal union with Him, raising our fallen nature far above even the holy angels themselves, who never once sinned nor turned themselves away from His glory. Truly incomprehensible is the mercy and loving-kindness of our Savior.

And indeed, the example of the Savior on the Cross must forever and in all things be our own model for living out our Christian life — especially in the midst of temptations and tragedies such as those which now face our nation and our world. When Christ was rejected and crucified by the uncomprehending world, He did not fight against and condemn His torturers and accusers. On the contrary, He made excuses for them and prayed for them: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). And so now when we see the world once again reject and mock the Lord, we ought to restrain our fiery zeal and indignation just as Christ restrained the sword of Peter, and above all we must remember what St. Paul has told us: “we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places” (Ephesians 6:12).

The men and women who reject Christ and Christianity, even those who actively fight against and slander Him and His Holy Church… these men and women are not our enemies. On the contrary: they are souls beloved by God, souls for whom Christ died, who have been cruelly and maliciously abused by our true enemies the demons. They are souls for whom we ought to be willing to make any sacrifice and to go to any length to show forth the same love and mercy which the Lord Christ Himself showed to all sinners… “of whom I am chief” (1 Timothy 1:15).

We would do well to recall the words of St. Porphyrios:

“One day you are walking quietly on your way and see your brother walking in front of you, also quietly, when at one point a crook jumps out in front of your brother from a side road and attacks him. He beats him, pulls his hair, wounds him and throws him down bleeding. Faced with a scene like that would you be angry with your brother or would you feel sorry for him?”

I was puzzled by the Elder’s questions and I asked him in turn: “How could I possibly be angry with my wounded brother, who fell victim to the criminal? The thought didn’t even cross my mind. Of course I would feel sorry for him and I would try to help him as much as I could.”

“Well, then,” continued the Elder: ”everyone who insults you, who hurts you, who slanders you, who does you an injustice in anyway whatsoever is a brother of yours who has fallen into the hands of some criminal demon. When you notice that your brother does you an injustice what should you do? You must feel very sorry for him, commiserate with him and entreat God warmly and silently both, to support you in that difficult time of trial, and to have mercy on your brother, who has fallen victim to the evildoer, the demon. Because if you don’t do that, but get angry with him instead, reacting to his attack with a counter attack, then the devil who is already on the nape of your brother’s neck will jump on to yours and dance with the both of you.”

If we Christians treat the unbelievers as our enemies, how will this possibly bring them any closer to Christ? How will they possibly be able to see the Holy Spirit shining within us, the Spirit of God for Whom their hearts truly yearn — though they may not yet realize it?

And indeed, I am convinced that the decline in church membership in our society is by no means entirely the result of a decline in the hunger of the American heart for the Kingdom of God. I have long contended in my writing here that modernity is not rejecting Christianity for mere spiritual apathy and hedonism, but for a new religion, an “improved” Christianity (which I have termed Antichristianity), a religion of the man-god rather than the God-man, a religion promising the Kingdom of Heaven right here and now on this earth. Even The Atlantic is now writing stories that sound remarkably similar to this.

But if I am right, if the American heart does indeed still yearn for God, then why is it turning away from Christianity? To be sure, the devil has not been idle in working these many long centuries to distort and to poison the heart of man against the Gospel of Christ. Much of the my writing here has been an attempt to understand and counteract such poison.

Yet Christianity has always been slandered; from the very beginning the preaching of the crucified Christ was “unto the Jews a stumblingblock, and unto the Greeks foolishness” (1 Cor. 1:23). The early Christians were even accused by society of being atheists and cannibals, but these and all such accusations were utterly powerless to stop the spread of Christianity even unto the ends of the earth.

So what has changed? Certainly God has not changed, the Gospel has not changed, and the devil is still up to the same old tricks he has been using since the beginning. And though many have lost the likeness, not one single person has lost the image of God in which they were created (though certainly there are those who would prefer that it were not so). It seems, then, that there is but one clear answer: it is we Christians who have changed.

I imagine that few of us need convincing that we are very far from the spiritual stature of our fathers and mothers in the faith. We do not have the fiery zeal of the apostles to proclaim the Word of God. We do not have the joyful longing of the martyrs to give up our very lives for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven. We do not have the glad and selfless charity of the first Christians who sold every single thing that they owned without taking any thought for their own needs. We do not have the ascetic courage and heroism of the ancient monastics in putting to death the old man and renouncing all that is merely earthly.

And above all, we do not have the all-consuming love for God — and for each and every one of His children — that alone can make any of the rest of the Christian life worth anything.

No, we by and large live comfortable and respectable lives in this world, perhaps going to church on Sundays, perhaps resisting some of the more egregious sins, but otherwise in most ways indistinguishable from the 53% of Americans who no longer see any reason to walk through the doorway of a church. And so if our society which is so obviously thirsting for truth and for holiness cannot find these things in Christianity, we must ask ourselves if this is not because they cannot find these things in us who dare to call ourselves by that most lofty and precious and exalted name.

Yet, as I said earlier, God is extraordinarily merciful and compassionate, and even our worst mistakes and our most terrible sins He can turn toward our spiritual good and our eternal salvation in Him. “Where sin abounded, grace did much more abound” (Romans 5:20). It is precisely by death that Christ has trampled down death.

And so I believe that it has come about by Providence that we are beginning to find ourselves in a situation where it is no longer quite so easy to be a comfortable and respectable Christian in this life. It is no longer quite so easy to imagine that we can have the best of both worlds, that we can enjoy happiness and success and prosperity and respect in this life, and then waltz easily and carelessly into the Kingdom of Heaven in the next. It is no longer quite so easy to forget the sure and certain word of the Lord that “whosoever doth not bear his cross, and come after Me, cannot be My disciple” (Luke 14:27).

Not without good reason has it been said that “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.” And of course, the word “martyr” simply means “witness.” And whether the time of physical martyrdom is soon approaching once again or not, it nevertheless now seems that the witness of being a Christian is no longer quite so easy for the world to overlook, no longer merely an inevitable part of the cultural backdrop of our society.

And, my brothers and sisters, whether this will turn out to be a great and incomparable blessing for the world, or the cause of immense and unspeakable tragedy, depends entirely on us. If we bury our talent, if we squander the grace with which each of us has been entrusted according to our own measure, if the witness we make to the unbelieving world is one devoid of the love and mercy and compassion of our Lord Jesus Christ, then truly it would be “better for [us] that a millstone were hanged about [our] neck, and [we be] cast into the sea, than that [we] should offend one of these little ones” (Luke 17:2). For “unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required” (Luke 12:48).

But let us not despair over our sins and our failures, let us not be overwhelmed by grief over the times we have forsaken the high calling to which we have been summoned. For the Holy Apostles themselves fled out of fear at the hour of the Lord’s Passion, and even the great St. Peter denied the Savior thrice. Yet none of these sins prevented God on the holy day of Pentecost from sending down upon them the Most Holy Spirit in the form of tongues of fire, and on that same day thousands of souls around them were saved. Even the bloodthirsty persecutor Saul became the greatest preacher of the Gospel of Christ that this world has ever seen.

There is absolutely no more powerful witness on this earth to the Kingdom of Heaven than a life renewed and transfigured by the grace of God. And before God Himself I tell you the truth: such a life, and such great and ineffable grace, is open to each and every one of us, no matter who we are and no matter what we have done. It is open to us through Holy Baptism, through Holy Communion, through the Mystery of Repentance, through a life of prayer and fasting and almsgiving, through a life filled with mercy and compassion and love. And above all: it is open to us through the Cross. So let us strive with all our hearts to say with St. Paul: “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me” (Galatians 2:20).

We Christians are once again becoming strangers in a strange land, and “here have we no continuing city, but we seek one to come” (Hebrews 13:14). And truly all the world longs for the city of God… but they will never hear of it if we ourselves do not tell them, and they will never reach it if we ourselves do not lead the way. So let us make the most of this great and holy opportunity which we have been given. Let us make all our lives a witness to the Heavenly Jerusalem. Let us always remember Sion, even as we sing with great and unspeakable grief here by these waters of Babylon.

Let us make it the sole purpose of our lives to bring every single person we meet with us on our journey Home.

It has now been a year since the COVID-19 pandemic emerged, changing almost overnight nearly every aspect of our day-to-day lives in the modern world. Some of us have lost loved ones; the Church has bidden farewell to more than a few holy men and women whom the Lord chose this year to call home. The quarantine restrictions that have been in place more or less continuously throughout the world have also parted those of us still among the living from one another, to an extent most of us never even dreamed was possible. Many have lost their livelihoods, and face the real possibility that they may never get them back. But by no means the least among the tragedies brought about by this pandemic has been the loss suffered by many people of normal Church life: regular corporate prayer and worship, and regular reception of the Holy Mysteries of Christ.

Yet we know that absolutely nothing in this world happens that is not in accordance with the providence of our loving and all-merciful God. Though God does not send us temptations, as the Apostle says: “Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God” (James 1:13), nevertheless the temptations which He does allow to befall us are allowed precisely because through them we have the opportunity to find our salvation. And though without question the COVID-19 pandemic has brought immense tragedy, at the same time it has also brought the most precious gift which this vain and fleeting life can possibly offer: the opportunity for repentance.

How many of us took the Church services — and even the Holy Mysteries of Christ — for granted, squandering countless opportunities to come and pray during the Divine Services, to confess our sins, and to receive the Holy Eucharist? How many of us took for granted the people whom God placed in our lives (perhaps preferring to commune instead with the countless screens which are now with us everywhere we go), and whom we now wish we once again had the opportunity to see and speak with, face to face? How many of us were lulled into complacency by the subtle yet ever-present lie that this life will go on forever, that the treasures we gather will never be taken from us, that the world we spend so much time building up will never fade away? But for those with eyes to see, the pandemic has exposed this lie once and for all: everything earthly is fleeting, and every human life leads inexorably to the grave.

But for the true Christian, such a revelation is not at all a cause for despair: on the contrary, it is a great and holy opportunity to turn our eyes instead toward Christ, toward the Kingdom of Heaven, toward the resurrection from the dead, and toward the eternal life and the unending and unspeakable good things which God promises to give to all those who ask. And all these promises are both found and fulfilled in precisely one thing, and one thing only: a holy life, a life offered freely from a heart given entirely unto Christ our God.

It is to just such a life that Great Lent summons us. It is to just such a life that the current pandemic summons us. We see all around us the futility of putting our hope in earthly happiness, of placing our trust in things fickle and fleeting. Let us instead take the opportunity of this great and holy fast to accept the summons of the Divine Liturgy, to imitate the holy angels and “lay aside all earthly care, that we may receive the King of All.” And just as we penitentially fast from the joy of the Divine Liturgy during the weekdays of Great Lent, let us accept any absence from the Divine Services which circumstances have forced upon us as a penance for our sins, which is to say an opportunity for us to repent more fully and to pray more deeply, so that when God calls us once again to meet Him in the Divine Liturgy we will do so with purer hearts and humbler spirits — and then will our joy truly be made full.

The Holy Fathers tell us that there are many times when we might wish to exercise various virtues, but circumstances prevent us: we might wish to give alms but have no money, or to visit the sick but have no time, and so on. In the midst of this pandemic we doubtless do not need to think very hard to come up with examples of this from our own lives. But the Holy Fathers say there is one virtuous deed that no circumstance whatsoever has the power to prevent us from accomplishing: and that is prayer. Wherever we are and whatever our life is like, up until the moment of our last breath we always have the opportunity to offer up prayer to the Lord God — both for ourselves and for the sake of others. And as we ourselves draw closer to God through prayer, so too we will mystically draw closer to one another in Christ, according to the witness of the saints. Such union in Christ is the only possible solution to the loneliness and isolation so many of us now feel.

And so during this Great Lent, in a time of so much inconstancy and uncertainty, let us resolve to make prayer the sure and certain foundation of our lives. Let us fast especially from anger and judgment, which have the power to drive away prayer as nothing else can. And let us give what alms we can, including in the form of increased prayer for the souls of those who have departed this life (especially during the past year of this pandemic) and are no longer able to offer up repentance on their own behalf.

In the midst of this season of sickness and death, of suffering and hardships of so many kinds, the world is in more need than ever of the witness of faithful Christians to the hope and joy of the Resurrection of Christ. As Orthodox Christians, we have been given so much: and now, according to the word of the Lord, much is therefore being required. So let us strive with all our hearts to make a new beginning this Great Lent in prayer and repentance, so that our hearts will become vessels of the Holy Spirit and thus able to shine as beacons of grace and truth to all we meet, drawing all men and women to shout alongside us on Pascha night: “Christ is Risen! Truly, He is Risen!”

Over the last month we have been given a glimpse of just how much power Big Tech has gained over our society. In the aftermath of the Capitol Hill riot, the corporations which have become the de facto gatekeepers of the internet acted with remarkable unanimity in deplatforming those they deemed to be responsible for the outbreak of violence… including no less than the sitting President of the United States.

For the better part of a century, POTUS has been widely considered to be the most powerful person on the planet. Yet he was summarily silenced, without a fight and without any recourse whatsoever, by a handful of corporate executives.

Of course, people are deeply divided as to whether the actions of Big Tech were justified. But everyone, I think, can agree that they were wholly unprecedented. Throughout human history there have been very few authorities capable of systematically suppressing freedom of speech on a societal level: essentially, state authority and religious authority. To this short list must now be added corporate authority.

At least in part because until a short time ago such power was scarcely conceivable, there exist virtually no checks against it at all. The First Amendment has no power over corporations. The concept of due process is utterly irrelevant. Companies can do what they please with the products they proffer.

The display of such unchecked power over even the chief executive of the most powerful government in the history of the world has therefore caused a good deal of consternation among many, including prominent heads of state who are perhaps realizing that their authority is somewhat less unrivaled than they had supposed.

And — to come to the reason why a monk is bringing up such a subject — many Christians are becoming increasingly wary that the enormous power now wielded by Big Tech may eventually be brought to bear against them as well. It is hardly a secret that Silicon Valley is not exactly well-disposed toward those expressing support of traditional Christian morality (including even the corporations most vocal in their support of internet freedom). Nor is the deplatforming of Christian voices by such corporations merely a theoretical concern; some Christian publications have already been banned by industry-leading providers such as MailChimp.

If even the ability of the President of the United States to communicate with his constituents is at the mercy of monopolistic corporations — in many important ways unaccountable to anything other than their own bottom line — what kind of defense can ordinary rank-and-file Christians possibly hope to muster?

Given how drastically dependent our society has become on Big Tech (I write these words sitting in an airport, having just witnessed a woman in an Amish head-covering walk past me with her eyes glued to her smartphone), it is easy to forget that we were able to get along without them from the dawn of human history up until about ten years ago. Ten years is a long time (especially these days), but not that long a time. The inescapable truth is that Big Tech has gained such immense power over us for one reason only: because we chose to give it to them. Nay, rather: because we chose to sell it to them.

There is a saying of the advertising age in which we live: “When the product is free, you are the product.” We have sold our attention, our privacy, and vast untold quantities of our time to advertising firms, in exchange for their flashing toys.

So if we don’t want them to have such power over us, there is one solution which is really quite simple: we can just stop selling it to them. Even if it means giving up some of their toys.

If we’re honest with ourselves, we don’t actually need Facebook or Twitter or YouTube. In fact, our lives would almost certainly improve without them.

As rapidly as our society is changing — and as dystopian as it is beginning to seem in so many ways — even so, nobody is anywhere close to stopping us from speaking the truth of Christ to the real, flesh-and-blood human beings in our lives. And though we so often ignore them in favor of our screens, they are still right there. They are, Lord willing, not going anywhere anytime soon.

Let’s try to build our lives around them, instead of the gadgets to which we have been busily selling our souls.

There is no question that we live in troubling times. The 20th century witnessed an unparalleled persecution of Christianity across the entire world — primarily through revolutionary violence in the East, but primarily through worldly seduction in the West (if you doubt that the two are comparable, I will simply point to the witness of Alexander Solzhenitsyn who had ample occasion to experience both for himself). Such persecution was prophesied to us by our Lord: “Then shall they deliver you up to be afflicted, and shall kill you: and ye shall be hated of all nations for My name’s sake” (Matthew 24:9). And before this He had warned of the rise of false prophets, of wars and rumors of wars, of plagues and famines and troubles of many kinds — none of which are by any means far from our contemporary experience. And now that the year 2020 — with all its multitude of tragedies and temptations — has drawn to a close, more and more Christians are coming to the conclusion that the times in which we live are not merely troubling, but are in fact apocalyptic.

What are we to make of this as Orthodox Christians? On the one hand we cannot agree with the dispensationalist systems of some Protestants, nor can we encourage a fixation on determining “the times or the seasons, which the Father hath put in His own power” and which Christ declared are simply not for us to know (cf. Acts 1:7). Yet at the same time we are certainly commanded to “discern the signs of the times” (Luke 12:56), and above all we are called to a ceaseless vigilance in anticipation of the coming of our Lord: “And what I say unto you I say unto all, Watch” (Mark 13:37).

And theologically speaking, there can be no doubt that we are indeed living in the end times — for according to the teaching of the Orthodox Church, we have been living in the end times ever since the Day of Pentecost. Even in the first years of Christianity, the Apostle Paul already spoke of himself and his fellow believers as those “upon whom the ends of the world are come” (1 Corinthians 10:11). Indeed, so expectant were the early Christians of the imminent return of Christ that St. Paul at one point even had to assure the church in Thessalonica in the strongest terms that the Day itself had not already arrived (cf. 2 Thessalonians 2). For the early Christians, it was only too clear that “here have we no continuing city, but we seek one to come” (Hebrews 13:14). That we Christians today have lost the immediacy of such eschatological vision is, I think, greatly to our hurt.

Because this eschatological awareness was by no means a cause of despair to the Apostles and the early Christians, in keeping with the words of the Lord when He warned us of the trials and tribulations of the last days: “See that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass” (Matthew 24:6). On the contrary, it is clear that the knowledge of the end of this world was, for the first believers, a source of boundless hope and joy. In the earliest Liturgies celebrated by the Apostles, after Holy Communion the celebrant exclaimed: “Let grace come, and let this world pass away” (Didache 10), echoing the prayer uttered with love and longing at the close of the Apocalypse of St. John: “Even so, come, Lord Jesus” (Revelation 22:20). But as for us, if the signs of the coming apocalypse fill us primarily with anxiety or with anger, then we must recognize that we have lost something precious of the authentic Christian vision of life.

And this brings us to what in my opinion is the most urgent and troubling of the signs of the times: “Because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold” (Matthew 24:12). If our love for the Lord was pure and fervent, our hearts would be utterly unable to be touched by distress or dismay at the crumbling of that which, after all, has always been earthly and fleeting. But our iniquities have bound us to this world, and have made our hearts cold toward the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven. For as our Lord said: “No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other” (Matthew 6:24). And so to whatever extent the signs of the times provoke fear or anger in our hearts, to that same extent we must realize that we have fallen under the sway of our passions and have given our love to this world rather than the Kingdom of God.

I think many Christians are aware that the world as a whole has been in the process of falling away from the love of God and giving itself over to various iniquities for some time now. Yet when studying the signs of the times, we must always keep in mind that the primary concern of Christians must not be to sit in judgment over the sins of the world, but rather to deepen our own repentance. As St. Ignatius (Brianchaninov) wrote:

Apostasy is permitted by God; do not be tempted to stop it with your feeble hand… Distance yourself, and preserve yourself from it; and that will be sufficient for you. Know the spirit of the times; study it, so that you may avoid its influence as much as possible.

We must look for the spirit of the times not simply in world events, but above all in our own hearts. This is our true spiritual battleground, the one on which our eternal fate will ultimately be decided.

And I think if we are honest with ourselves, many (if not most) of us will recognize that our love has indeed grown cold. Not only our love for God and the Kingdom of Heaven, but also our love for our neighbors — and tragically, in some cases even for our brothers and sisters in the Faith. The events of 2020 have catalyzed a level of divisiveness in our nation that has not been seen since the Civil War. The worst of this can most often be found on the internet (and I am beginning to seriously wonder if society can survive the internet). Yet it has spilled over at all too many times into our streets, into our parishes, and into our families.

We are so quick to believe the worst about one another. We are so quick to interpret what we see and hear in the worst possible light, looking upon one another not with maximal charity but with maximal suspicion. More and more we are disposed to see those with whom we disagree not merely as wrong or mistaken, but as wicked and evil. We view them not as souls whom Christ died in order to save, but rather as enemies whom it is our task to destroy. And we regard all of this as the fruit of wisdom and insight.

But the ascetic teaching of the Church repeatedly warns us that such a state is in fact precisely what the demons are trying so hard to produce in us. The very name devil comes from the Greek word for “the slanderer.” The name is well earned. There is no truth they will not twist, nor any lie they will not employ, in their ceaseless attempt to turn us aside from the clear and simple path to salvation laid out by the Lord Himself in Luke 6:35-38:

But love ye your enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing again; and your reward shall be great, and ye shall be the children of the Highest: for he is kind unto the unthankful and to the evil. Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful. Judge not, and ye shall not be judged: condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned: forgive, and ye shall be forgiven: Give, and it shall be given unto you; good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over, shall men give into your bosom. For with the same measure that ye mete withal it shall be measured to you again.

Recently there was a report of a vision a woman in Greece had of her recently departed spiritual father, Elder Ephraim of Arizona. The fathers of St. Anthony’s Monastery testify that this vision is true:

She saw Geronda Ephraim, who was very sad and who was imploring Christ concerning the coming tribulations—things which certainly correspond with the things Geronda spoke about while he was in this life. And he told her:

“Repentance! Repentance! Christ is very angry. We people today should not be in the spiritual state in which we find ourselves. Great evils are coming—you cannot imagine how evil. Alas, what awaits you! Repent as long as there is time. Get on your knees and weep; shed tears of repentance so that perhaps Christ will soften. This also has to do with what is happening in America. Many people will depart through all that is coming, many people will depart [i.e., they will die]. You are not merciful toward one another, you do not have mercy. You are harsh. One person will devour the other. Tell these things to your spiritual father and to others.”

God knows there is no shortage of sins abounding in this world as a whole, and in our nation in particular. Truly we can make our own the words of the Prophet: “For our transgressions are multiplied before thee, and our sins testify against us” (Isaiah 59:12). Yet out of all of them, the Elder sent by God warned solely — and in the strongest possible terms — of only one: our mercilessness and our harshness toward one another. Each of us should take these extremely sobering words to heart.

Yet we should also take courage and be of good hope. The Elder’s warning was dire, but he also pointed us toward the sure and certain path to salvation: humble repentance and fervent prayer to our all-merciful God. The Lord has arranged absolutely everything in the whole world and in all our lives in order to give each one us every possible opportunity “to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim. 2:4).

And the way to be saved is really quite simple. “Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful.”

After all, the word “apocalypse” does not mean “destruction” or “the end of the world.” It means “revelation” or “unveiling.” It will reveal and unveil that which is within each of our hearts. And so our task in the time that remains is to prepare our hearts for that uncovering, so that on that day “we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, [will be] transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as by the Spirit of the Lord” (2 Cor. 3:18).

May God grant all of us the grace to become merciful. May He grant us the grace to become like Him. Amen.

America is a nation in crisis. We have been facing a political crisis of ever-deepening division and widespread distrust in our own leaders for many, many years now. With the emergence of the COVID-19, we are being confronted with a public health crisis of a magnitude unparalleled in living memory. This in turn has precipitated an economic crisis of massive proportions, one which will almost certainly rival (if not exceed) the Great Depression itself.

But as significant as these various crises no doubt are, nevertheless in the past month there has arisen a crisis which may yet prove to be more critical than any of them (although in truth they are all intertwined). And that crisis is a moral crisis. That crisis is a spiritual crisis.

Exactly one month ago today, George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis by the police officers arresting him for a nonviolent crime. The nation was utterly appalled by the videos which surfaced immediately afterward, showing a police officer kneeling on Floyd’s neck for almost nine minutes while he repeatedly begged for his life, saying “I can’t breathe.” Shortly afterward Floyd was pronounced dead.

George Floyd was black, and the police officer was white.

This tragedy provoked an enormous wave of outrage and protests, beginning in Minneapolis and spreading rapidly not only across the nation but also throughout the entire world. Floyd’s death quickly came to be seen as the latest instance in a long pattern not only of police brutality, but more importantly of what has become known as “systemic racism” in general.

And therefore the outrage and protests began to be about much more than the crime of a handful of Minneapolis police officers (all of whom have been charged with murder or aiding and abetting murder). The movement has grown to be about much more even than the police. It is now a movement about the very heart and soul of our country, a country which has always believed itself to be founded upon the solemn promise of “liberty and justice for all” — and yet far too often has failed to live up to this pledge which we are are all taught as children to make.

In many ways the movement that has arisen in the wake of this brutal tragedy represents the best of America. An America which cares deeply for the poor and the downtrodden and the oppressed. An America which is willing to honestly confront its own failures. An American which desires to repent of its sins (and it should go without saying that racism is a terrible sin). An America which constantly strives “to form a more perfect Union.” An America which truly hungers and thirsts after righteousness. And this is an America which we as Christians must love and nurture and cherish, to the best of our ability.

And yet it must be admitted that along with this great good, the movement has a darker side as well. Alongside peaceful protests came rioting, looting, and destruction nationwide. In Minneapolis alone, over 1,500 buildings were vandalized, looted, damaged or destroyed, many of them reduced to rubble or burned to the ground. Police officers everywhere and of every color are being categorically condemned and subjected to insults, slurs, and violence by angry mobs. Anarchists and armed vigilantes in downtown Seattle took over a police precinct and the surrounding area; this was first lauded by the city’s mayor as a “block party” and “summer of love,” but then tragically turned deadly in a string of horrific shootings. The police arrived, trying to help, but were turned away by a violent and angry crowd. In Minneapolis, the city council has vowed to disband the police department entirely, although they admit they don’t yet know with what they will replace it.

Across the country historical monuments, often associated with the Civil War, are being defaced and torn down by mobs. Given that slavery is believed by many people to have been the sole reason the Civil War was fought, it is quite understandable that they therefore view monuments to Confederate leaders as an intolerable affront (and I think this is a good reason to enter into a discussion regarding these monuments, out of love for neighbor and desire for peace). Yet this is not simply about the Confederacy, for among the targets for mob destruction have also been statues dedicated to Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant, both of whom were obviously instrumental in defeating the Confederacy and freeing the slaves. Even a statue of the abolitionist activist Hans Christian Heg was decapitated and thrown into a lake (apparently because the mob didn’t actually have any idea who he was). Not spared either were monuments to Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, or Christopher Columbus. It is not my contention that any of these men were flawless. Nor is it the purpose of this article to take a position one way or the other as to whether any of these statues ought to be removed. This is a discussion worth having, and there are points on both sides to be considered. But there is something deeply disturbing about roving mobs desecrating monuments to the honored dead because the mob judges that their entire life and their entire memory ought to be reduced solely to the sum of their sins.

The acceptance of lawlessness, even if it is in the pursuit of a righteous cause, is not something to be taken lightly. We would do well to take heed in this regard to the warning given by Sir Thomas More in the incomparable film A Man For All Seasons:

And the winds are indeed beginning to blow. Reports are coming in at a steady pace of people from all professions losing their jobs and their careers for being insufficiently vocal in their support for the social justice movement. The editor of the New York Times op-ed section was ousted because he published a US Senator’s opinion that the government ought to stop the rioting with force if necessary. The Catholic chaplain of MIT was asked by his diocese to resign for writing a private email to his flock urging restraint and charity in our dealings with one another during these difficult times, even while condemning the killing of Floyd by the police. These are but a few examples. And this is to say nothing of the way in which Americans are treating one another on social media. It seems that the America described in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is still a part of us: a Puritanical America which seeks to hunt down sinners and destroy their lives through public humiliation and shame.

The yearning of the American people for righteousness is truly honorable and praiseworthy and necessary. But tragically, it seems that many of us have been convinced that the path to righteousness is through rage. And quite simply, this is very far from the path shown to us by Christ.

And both Christ and the society in which He lived were by no means strangers to injustice and persecution and unrighteousness. The Israelites under the Roman occupation were a subjugated and humiliated people, routinely exploited and without the rights of Roman citizens, and Christ Himself as well as most of His followers were brutally and unjustly murdered by the authorities acting with complete impunity. Everyone — even the disciples — expected Christ to do something about it, to cast off the hated oppressors, to “at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel.”

Yet what did Christ actually do? He taught us that when we are beaten we are to turn the other cheek, when we are extorted we are to give more than is demanded, when we are exploited we are to do more than we are told. He told us to bless those who curse us, to love those who hate us, to pray for those who persecute us and abuse us. And He told us, in the midst of all of these things, to rejoice.

His words were not mere empty talk; He proved that on the Cross. Nor were His teachings in vain; He proved that through the Resurrection. Nor was He Himself an exception to the rule of human existence; He proved that on the Day of Pentecost.

If we as Christians want to bring righteousness into the world — and we must want this, with all our hearts! — then we must always remember the words of St. Seraphim of Sarov: “Acquire the Spirit of Peace, and a thousand souls around you will be saved.” Only by our personal union with the Lord Jesus Christ can we possibly hope to do any good for anyone. For as the Scriptures say: “All our righteousnesses are as filthy rags; and we all do fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away.”

And if our hearts are truly united with Christ, if we are truly filled with the Holy Spirit, then there will be absolutely no place in us for anger or rage or blame. These things drive away the Holy Spirit as nothing else can, as the Scriptures and Holy Fathers repeatedly warn us.

Rage may be effective in bringing about some temporary political change (and make no mistake, all political changes are temporary). But broken though our political system may be, it is not ultimately the source of our unrighteousness. To heal our country we must heal our own hearts. As Gandhi once said, inspiring Martin Luther King Jr. and countless other activists: “We but mirror the world… If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change.” Rage and resentment will not cure the sickness in us, or in our nation. For that, we need repentance, and forgiveness, and mercy, and prayer, and love.

May God grant us these gifts. May He grant us His Spirit of Peace. May He grant us to love one another, even as He first loved us, with a love sparing nothing — not even our own lives — for even the worst and least deserving among us. This is the new commandment of Christianity, and there is absolutely nothing that the world needs more.

Wherefore, my beloved brethren, let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath: for the wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God

James 1:19-20

The Holy Fathers teach us that in order to conquer any given passion, we must strive to cultivate the opposing virtue. If we are greedy, we must cultivate generosity. If we are angry, we must cultivate gentleness. If we are proud, we must cultivate humility. If we are lazy, we must cultivate zeal for working the works of God.

But I have often thought that there is one virtue which encompasses all the other virtues, and which therefore constitutes repentance for every sin, the antidote to every vice, and the utter destruction of every passion. That virtue is gratitude.

For if we are grateful, how can we possibly be at the same time angry, suspicious, resentful, envious, greedy, or proud? If we are continuously grateful to Almighty God, how can we possibly be at the same time forgetful of Him, or coldhearted toward our neighbor? If we are grateful at all times and for all things to our All-Merciful Savior, how can we possibly be distracted by anything — whether good or bad, important or insignificant — from our divinely-appointed mission, the only meaning and purpose of our life on earth: pursuing the path toward theosis, toward union with Him who “filleth all in all”? For indeed all things and every single event which transpires in our life — whether good or bad, important or insignificant — have been either sent or allowed by the Divine Providence of God, precisely in order to lead us to deification and the salvation of our souls.

This is our faith, the faith of our fathers. It was perhaps for such a reason that St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco declared Thanksgiving to be one of the only secular American holidays that Orthodox Christians ought to observe (the other being Mother’s Day). And we American Orthodox Christians who keep the Old Calendar have been given a special gift by the Church to remind us of the full depth and meaning of gratitude: every year, the feast of St. John Chrysostom falls exceptionally close to Thanksgiving Day. And of all the words ever uttered by the Golden-Mouth, perhaps the most famous is the phrase: “Glory to God for all things.”

These words of profound Christian gratitude were spoken by a man sick and dying, persecuted and exiled, reviled and mistreated, spat out and trampled upon by an ungrateful and uncomprehending world. Yet for all those things — and precisely for those things — he gave most heartfelt thanks, in imitation of His Lord and of all the holy martyrs, whose most cherished hope and whose crowning joy was to receive absolutely unjust and undeserved torment, mockery, derision, and death.

For many it is a custom on Thanksgiving Day to share with their close ones the things for which they are most grateful. And indeed, this is fitting and proper. But how many of us give “glory to God for all things”? How many of us — even of us Orthodox Christians — choose on this day to give thanks to God for all of the sicknesses and sorrows and misfortunes of our lives, trusting with firm faith that Divine Providence has arranged even and especially such trials and tribulations, in order to bring us to eternal salvation and joy beyond all compare? How many of us imitate the Prophet Job, saying “What? shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil?” And how many of us remember that the evils of this life are given to us as signposts, pointing us beyond this fallen and fading world toward our homeland which is in Heaven, toward the Jerusalem which is on high? How many of us recognize that even the blessings of this life are mere foretastes of the joy laid up for us in the Kingdom of God? How many of us remember the saying of our Lord: “where your treasure is, there will your heart be also”? All too often our treasures are entirely those of this earth, and our hearts are held fast by the trinkets of this world. And all too often when we are deprived of such treasures, gratitude is absolutely the furthest thing from our hearts.

Why are these things so, even for many of us Christians? Why can we perceive the love of God so dimly in His blessings, and in His chastisements not at all? The answer, in large part, is that we have been seduced by narrative of modernity.

Perhaps the defining feature of modernity is its utopianism: the conviction that this world can be made into paradise, indeed that it must be made into paradise, because there is no other world and there will be no future paradise (though the gullible may still be permitted to believe privately in such “fantasies,” so long as those “fantasies” in no way impede the March of Progress). The construction of such an earthly paradise is even taken by many to be the true aim of Christianity, thus — in Voegelin’s words — “immanentizing the eschaton.” And indeed, the utopianism of modernity is quite simply a Christianity without any Christ, the pursuit of Heaven without any God.

But ironically, the “Problem of Evil” which has so often plagued Christians returns in even greater force to plague the utopianism of Antichristianity. As long as there is evil in this world, it is a sign that there is something wrong with the prevailing order, a sign that we have been deprived of our rights, a sign that there remains some injustice which must yet be rooted out. And in such a worldview, how could gratitude for suffering be considered anything other than the chief of all sins? Such gratitude is literally sacrilege, an unholy desecration of the dream of a perfect and perfectly just world.

When George Washington gave our nation’s first Thanksgiving proclamation in 1789, he prayed God to “promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue… and generally to grant unto all Mankind such a degree of temporal prosperity as He alone knows to be best.” But any politician who uttered any such words today would be laughed out of office. For today prayer and “true religion” have no place in public life, and modern man needs no God to determine what “degree of temporal prosperity” is best. Even if some Christians might be foolish enough to pray, why would they pray for any degree of prosperity short of the highest? What could possibly be the point of praying for anything less than paradise on earth?

There is indeed some resemblance between the modern worldview and true Christianity, for otherwise such a worldview could have no hold on the hearts of those created in the image and likeness of God. Yes, Christianity is a religion of love, and of mercy, and of the unity of all mankind. Yes, Christianity is even a religion which promises nothing short of the paradise for which our hearts all truly yearn.

But it is also the religion of the Cross.

And it is precisely the Cross that has been eradicated from modernity, and from the modern Christianity which has been swept away by it. And for us modern children who would be faithful to Christ and His Church in the midst of those seeking to once again build Babel, there is one bulwark, one firm foundation, one divine weapon of truth which has the power to withstand and demolish all the lies of the modern world: gratitude for the Cross.

Gratitude first and foremost for Christ and His Cross, which delivered us from bondage to the prince of this world. But gratitude also for our own crosses, the crosses which we ourselves have been commanded to take up, and thus to follow after our Savior in death as well as in resurrection. Gratitude for the crosses that put to death the old man, for the crosses that point us beyond this broken world, for the crosses that — more than anything else — allow us to witness to those around us that there is so much more to life than the fleeting joys and dim echoes of happiness which are all that this fallen world can offer.

Tertullian famously remarked that “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.” But I think that it was not simply the act of martyrdom itself which shook the pagan world to its core and finally brought about its conversion, but above all the profound gratitude and joy shown forth by those great Christian men and women as they were brutally persecuted, shamed, tortured, and put to death.

Truly, “the Cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God.”

Let us remember these things on this Thanksgiving Day. Let us indeed give thanks for the innumerable blessings which our loving Father has abundantly bestowed upon us, but let us by no means neglect to give thanks also for all of our sorrow, pain, illness, mistreatment, loneliness, and loss. For as one modern writer put it: “what punishments of God are not gifts?” Such sufferings are nothing other than the means of our salvation, the tools of our sanctification, the crosses which alone have the power to bring us to eternal life, and to everlasting union with the One Who came “to give His life a ransom for many.” Let us walk the very path shown to us by our Savior and our Great High Priest. And above all, let us do so joyfully and with overwhelming gratitude, for truly, “through the Cross joy has come to all the world.”

Gratitude is indeed the cure for every sin and every passion, and for all the many poisons of this modern age.

Glory to God for all things.

Many spirits are abroad in the world, and the credentials they display are splendid gifts of mind, learning, and of talent. Christian, look carefully. Ask for the print of the nails.

St. Justin the Philosopher

Recently, a well-known Orthodox monastic and academic shared some of her thoughts on 1 Corinthians 5:9-13, which passage I will now quote:

I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually-immoral people; not at all meaning the sexually-immoral of this world, or the greedy and robbers, or idolaters, since then you would need to depart from the world. But rather I wrote to you not to associate with any one who bears the name of brother if he is guilty of sexual immorality or greed, or is an idolater, reviler, drunkard, or robber—not even to eat with such a one. For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Is it not those inside the church whom you are to judge? God judges those outside. ‘Drive out the wicked person from among you.’

This monastic stated that she does not understand this passage of Scripture, nor does she “relate to St. Paul’s words, as he phrased them in the first century,” to wit: St. Paul’s injunction to judge those inside the church. In her own words: “So I’m wondering, – if all these are to be ‘driven out from among us,’ – then who from among us would be left?”

Before I continue, I want to be completely fair: it is by no means a sin to admit that one does not understand a passage of Holy Scripture. And this monastic was quite clear that what she went on to say (which I will quote and address below) was said “cautiously,” and that she is quite open to being corrected. So this article is not at all intended as a condemnation of this sister in Christ.

With that said, I think the point of view which she voiced is rooted in certain modern assumptions — assumptions which are as widely prevalent as they are vitally important for us to understand as Orthodox Christians. And so I want to take this opportunity presented by her comments to try to get to the bottom of things.

On the most basic level, I want to first point out that — unless I am very badly mistaken — St. Paul’s injunction in 1 Corinthians does not apply to every single person who is guilty of the sins that he mentions. Were this the case, our monastic friend would be quite right to ask: “who from among us would be left?” But in fact St. Paul is referring to those who call themselves Christians while remaining obstinate and unrepentant in their sins. To be a sinner is no obstacle to being a Christian. But to defend our sins — or even more, to take pride in our sins — is a very great obstacle to our Christianity, which after all consists precisely in our repentance.

This distinction is not at all an academic one. Indeed, we are witnessing a veritable renaissance of pride in pagan vice — even, alas, among those who publicly profess themselves to be Christians.

Yet even with this distinction made, I suspect that our monastic would nevertheless not “relate to St. Paul’s words, as he phrased them in the first century,” and would continue to feel discomfort with the idea of judging or cutting off from ourselves Christians who insist that there is nothing wrong with their sins.

And I think that there are also very many of us who feel this same discomfort. Many of us converts were first drawn to the Holy Orthodox Church because She preaches a God of mercy and love, rather than the harsh, vengeful, and juridical deity which Western Christianity has often portrayed. So any call from the Church that contains anything other than our idea of mercy is deeply distasteful to us.

But I chose my words deliberately just now: “anything other than our idea of mercy.” What is really at issue here is that we have unconsciously absorbed the definitions and ideas of the prevailing culture when it comes to words like “mercy” and “humility” and “love.” What is really at issue is that we find St. Paul’s words offensive to our modern sensibilities, and especially to our modern conviction that nobody has any right whatsoever to tell another human being how they ought to live.

Again, this is eminently understandable. Too many have been alienated by a Christianity distilled into nothing more than a set of misunderstood — and therefore apparently arbitrary — demands. And so we are increasingly wary of demanding anything from anybody — even from our fellow believers. We are afraid of driving people away. And so when St. Paul explicitly tells us to drive them away when they refuse to repent, we simply do not understand.

This phenomenon has given rise, in the mind of our monastic friend, to a certain theory:

Today, in the 21st century, the Church is much stronger, and able to “carry” those of us who are the drunkards, the greedy, the sexually-immoral, and the revilers and idolaters, and to admit us to her “table,” without being diminished. Because the Holy Spirit has been at work, and has made progress, in the Church, for many generations since the first century. I don’t subscribe to what Fr. George Florovsky has called the “Theology of Demise,” which sees the Church as going downhill, after the “Golden Age” of the Fathers. No, we are stronger today, glory be to God, and we’ve been brought closer to the ethos of our Lord Jesus Christ, Who “ate and drank” with us sinners, without this diminishing Him. So we’re far less peevish about admitting “sinners” to our table, including ourselves, because we’ve become stronger in our faith in Him, Who presides over His “table.” That’s the way I see it, mistaken as I may be, as I say: Glory be to God, for our today.

Although I certainly sympathize with the inclination to be as charitable to others as possible, this is where I have to get off the bus. When we encounter a contradiction between the words of the Apostles and our own view of what constitutes moral and loving behavior, the absolute last thing we should do is assume that we are so far advanced in holiness and sanctity that we ought to simply ignore the words of Apostles entirely on the grounds that they have become “outdated.”

Whig history is a dangerous animal, and never more so than when it is ecclesiastical history that is in question. When we assume or postulate that discrepancies between our current condition and that prescribed by the Apostles and Holy Fathers is a result of our progress rather than our falling short of that lofty standard, we alienate ourselves from the spirit — and at worst, the very possibility — of repentance. When we assume that the problem is with the wisdom of the Church rather than with our own sense of truth and morality, we become no longer the children of the Church, but rather Her judges. That we make various excuses for the irrelevancy of Her counsels (and thereby backhandedly denigrate the spiritual caliber of our mothers and fathers in the Faith, compared to whom we have “made progress”) does nothing to mitigate the horror of having come to such a pass.

And having thus alienating ourselves from the authentic teachings of the Faith, we turn out to have accomplished precisely the opposite of what we set out to do: we have not drawn people to Christianity, but rather driven them away from it. This can be seen quite easily by examining any of the countless churches that have embraced this “modernization” of Christianity: these churches now stand all but empty.

I recently saw an interview between Jordan Peterson and the Roman Catholic Bishop Robert Barron which gets to the heart of this phenomenon:

Peterson here speaks (as is his wont) the unpopular but extremely necessary truth:

Love is a terrible thing… if you really love someone, you can’t tolerate when they are less than they could be. It hurts. And so, when someone comes into the Church, and it’s all “forgiveness,” there’s no care there… What’s required is a re-emphasis on the potential nobility of the human being, and the moral responsibility to make that nobility a reality…. We’re afraid of hurting people’s feelings in the present, and willing to absolutely sacrifice their well-being in the future. And that’s the sign of a very immature and unwise culture.

He’s absolutely right about this. In our emphasis on mercy — humanly understood — we have forgotten that it is indeed “a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (Hebrews 10:31). And we “have forgotten the exhortation which speaketh unto you as unto children, My son, despise not thou the chastening of the Lord” (Hebrews 12:5) — there is scarcely a verse in all of Scripture more needful for our generation than this one.

We have forgotten these things because we have forgotten that there exists such a thing as love that is willing to risk pain in pursuit of healing, that is willing to use even suffering as a means of salvation. In short, we have forgotten the Cross, and the God Who in His surpassing love was willing to be crucified upon it, and Who called each and every one of His disciples to nothing less than that same suffering in pursuit of that same measure of self-emptying love. No, we are a generation of opiate addicts and helicopter parents, and we have instead made for ourselves a god in our own image and after our own likeness.

And that’s why we can’t understand the words of St. Paul. That’s why we can’t understand his exhortation to “deliver such an one unto Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus” (1 Corinthians 5:5).

The problem is the one spoken of by Metropolitan Tikhon (Shevkunov):

One day, I was able to pose one and the same question to two different ascetics—Fr. John (Krestiankin) and Fr. Nicholas Gurianov: ‘What is the main illness of contemporary Church life?’ Fr. John replied at once, ‘Unbelief!’ “’How could that be?’ I protested. ‘And what about the priests?’ He again replied, ‘For the priests also—unbelief!’ Then I went to Fr. Nicholas Gurianov, and he gave me the very same answer, independently of Fr. John: unbelief.

The problem is our unbelief. We don’t really believe in Heaven, so we are unwilling to sacrifice our happiness — or the happiness of those for whom we care — on earth. We don’t really believe in the wisdom of the Church, and so we are unwilling to crucify our own understanding. We don’t really believe that God loves us, and so we try to cover over anything in Christianity that doesn’t feel to us like love.

But more than almost anything else: we don’t believe that there is such a thing as a saint.

That is what is missing from modern churches: the icons of the men and women who have — in actual reality and even in this present life — been transfigured by the grace of God, and become that which human beings were always truly meant to be.

We don’t believe that we can really become that way: sanctified, purified, transfigured. We are afraid even of the idea of it.

Some of my spiritual children tell me that when they hear the lives of the saints or read their writings and exhortations, they feel overwhelmed and discouraged because they fall so far short of such a standard in their own lives. I usually answer with a metaphor: when we feel like this, we are like a small child who walks into a gymnasium and sees the posters on the wall of extraordinary gymnasts accomplishing incredible feats, and who then becomes downcast and disheartened because they cannot yet do those things. The posters on the wall aren’t there to intimidate us — they are there to inspire us.

We have forgotten how to be inspired by sanctity, and when faced with it we feel only guilt. And so we have taken down the saints’ icons and we have forgotten about their lives, and to make ourselves feel better we have dismissed such things as idolatry, or naïveté, or both. But somehow, I don’t think that we actually feel any better about our lives for having done so.

Because Jordan Peterson said it, as best he could in his secular and psychological and intellectual way: “we’re built for nobility.” What the Christian knows is that we are built for even more than nobility. We are built for sanctity. We are built for divinity.

We are born to become saints.

And here is what Archimandrite Vasileios of Iveron has to say about that:

When we are in the presence of a Saint, he does not make our heads spin with theories. Our minds have become a seething mass of theories, anti-theories, and super-theories. But in the person of the Saint we have before us a true human being, a clear image of God; and the important thing is not what he says but what he imparts through his presence… The Saint imparts something: he imparts the grace of God, which tests man. For those who speak the language of the family, man’s natural language, it is a blessing. And for those who speak the language of self-love and hatred, it is hell. It cannot be otherwise…

But the Saint does not destroy us; he does not use us. He loves us. But do not think that his love is sentimental. It is harsh, much harsher than any cruelty. He wants each of us to be saved, to become god by grace.

The gratitude and reward for him is that we should find ourselves, that we should be sanctified, and that from the depths of our being there should arise the doxology: ‘Glory to God!’ He does not want to make us supporters of his party or members of his association… He only wants us to find our way in Christ Jesus.

Let such a love fill each and every one of us. “It is harsh, much harsher than any cruelty,” but it is the only kind of love that can possibly bring healing and salvation and peace. The world needs such love, now as much as ever. But now, far more than ever, it only has the chance to see such love in the faithful sons and daughters of the Church. Let us therefore beseech the Lord, through the intercessions of His Most Pure Mother and of all the saints, that the world will be able to see such love in us. Amen.

A headline caught my eye several days ago: “They Tried to Start a Church Without God. For a While, It Worked.” While the concept of a church without God is doubtless bizarre, at the same time it nevertheless also makes perfect sense. In our age of loneliness, amidst the near-total collapse of practically every traditional form of community and social structure, to abandon Christianity is to hurtle oneself into the void foretold by Nietzsche when he proclaimed the “murder” of God:

What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us?

Living in cities, we remain strangers. We talk to our friends by sitting alone and staring at screens. Moving from job to job and from place to place, we remain perpetually rootless — only half-committed to our own lives. When my parents moved into a new subdivision outside Raleigh, North Carolina in 1999, they purchased the last new house on the street. In less than two decades, every single family on that street had moved away besides them. More and more, our lives have absolutely nothing to do with the people right around us. Half of all American children will experience the shattering of their own homes through divorce before the day they turn eighteen.

In a world such as this, churches are among the last remaining havens of love and community — although even they have largely been eroded in American life due to the phenomenon known as “church-shopping,” in which Christianity becomes “cafeteria-style”: that is, merely another consumer commodity. But even so, it is not really much of a surprise when the article tells us that Justina Walford, upon apostatizing from her faith and moving to New York City, “had never felt more alone.”

It is interesting to note that Justina grew up in a non-religious family, and converted to Christianity on her own as a child. She was apparently quite zealous, and even wanted to be a pastor herself. It is even more interesting to note the reason she lost her faith: it was “a casualty of overseas travel that made her question how any one religious community could have a monopoly on truth.”

Upon reading this, I involuntarily thought of a pithy quotation of Sir James Stephen: “The notorious result of unlimited freedom of thought and discussion is to produce general scepticism on many subjects in the vast majority of minds.” Those who expose themselves to the confusion and tumult of the world without being firmly grounded in the Truth quite often find themselves fulfilling an observation made many centuries ago in the Tao Te Ching: “The longer you travel, the less you know.” The modern world has strangely convinced us that such ignorance is really a sure sign of knowledge, and that a truly enlightened person must necessarily inundate himself with the greatest volume of cacophonous nonsense possible, in order to “make up one’s mind for oneself.” That to do so generally engenders confusion, skepticism, disbelief, and ultimately apathy should really not come as any surprise.

To the Orthodox Christian: obey the words of St. Ignatius (Brianchaninov), and of all the Holy Fathers!

Once again I address you, faithful son of the Eastern Church, with a sincere, good word. This word is not my own—it belongs to the Holy Fathers. All my counsels come from them.

Keep your mind and heart from false teaching. Do not even speak about Christianity with people who have been infected with false thoughts; do not read books on Christianity that were written by heretics.

The Holy Spirit accompanies all Truth. He is the Spirit of Truth. The devil accompanies and acts together with every lie. He is false, and the father of lies.

He who reads the books of a heretic immediately communes with an evil, dark spirit of falsehood. This should not seem strange or incredible to you—this is the unanimous opinion of the Holy Fathers…

Only those religious books that are written by the Holy Fathers of the universal Orthodox Church are acceptable to read. The Orthodox Church requires this of her children.

If you think otherwise, or find this command of the Church less authoritative than your own opinions or the opinions of others who agree with you, then you are no longer a child of the Church, but a critic of the Church.

Do you call me a one-sided, unenlightened rigorist? Leave me my one-sidedness and all my other deficiencies. I would rather be a deficient, unenlightened child of the Orthodox Church than an apparently perfect man who would dare to instruct the Church, who would allow himself to disobey the Church, to separate from it. My words will be pleasant to the true children of the Orthodox Church.

Let me be clear: I am not suggesting that we get together and burn books. I am not advocating enforced censorship by the State. I am simply suggesting that we, spiritual infants that we are — and especially seeing as how we generally cannot be bothered to fill ourselves with the spiritual food of the Holy Fathers — at the very least heed their advise, and refrain from drinking poison on an empty stomach.

But let us return to Justina. Having been sadly persuaded of the non-existence of Truth by reason of the innumerable errors of men, having uprooted herself from her home and family, and having arrived in New York City amidst a vast multitude of people, she found herself feeling intensely alone.

Then Walford read an article about Sunday Assembly, a community started in Great Britain in 2013 that had spread quickly across the Atlantic to her doorstep. Members gather on Sundays, sing together, listen to speakers, and converse over coffee and donuts. Meetings are meant to be just like Church services—but without God. “That’s it,” she thought. “That’s what I want.”

Such groups apparently sprang up and grew rapidly until about three years ago. This article in The Atlantic tries to figure out why they began to die out just as quickly as they arose. The surface-level explanation is quite simple: after a while, people just got tired of making the necessary efforts and preparations to organize each Sunday’s concert/lecture/what-have-you, and the whole thing just fizzled out. But somewhat surprisingly, the article also identifies at least part of what was going on underneath:

Ara Norenzayan, a psychologist studying religion at the University of British Columbia, told me that secular communities might have trouble getting members to inconvenience themselves, as people of faith routinely do for their congregations. He cited a study by Richard Sosis, an anthropologist at the University of Connecticut who studied 200 American communes founded in the 19th century. Sosis found that 39 percent of religious communes were still functioning 20 years after their start, but only 6 percent of secular communes were alive after the same amount of time. And he determined that a single variable was making this difference: the number of sacrifices—such as giving up alcohol, following a dress code, or fasting—that each commune demanded of its members.

For religious communes, the more sacrifices demanded, the longer they lasted; however, this connection didn’t hold for secular communes. The implication, Norenzayan said, was that challenging rituals and taxing rules work only when they’re part of something sacred; once the veil of sacrality is removed, people no longer care to commit to things that demand their time and dedication. “If it’s ‘Come and go as you wish,’ that’s not going to work,” he said. Even if secular congregations could create a sense of the sacred, they tend to attract people who are explicitly looking for a community without costly rituals—one that lets you do what you want.

It seems as though simple etymology has eluded the author: the word “sacrifice” literally means “to make sacred.” To “make a sacrifice” in common parlance means to give something up, but it literally means to give something to God. It means not to lose something, but rather to make that thing holy.

Without God there can then be no sacrifice, but merely an exchange. I invest my time, I get something out of it. If I don’t “get something out of it,” then I simply stop investing my time. Apparently, there is only so much “something” that can be gotten out of singing Bon Jovi songs and eating donuts with strangers.

What really struck me about the article, however, is the very idea that singing Bon Jovi songs and eating donuts has any resemblance at all to the Church. It manifests all too clearly the modern notion that the Church fundamentally consists in people getting together to talk and sing about God. If this is the case, then it’s no great stretch to conceive of a “church without God” that consists in people getting together simply to talk and sing.

But in reality the Church consists not in talking and singing, nor even in the sacrifices that we make in order to be able to do so. The Church consists not in sacrifice, but in the Sacrifice: the Mystical Sacrifice of the Eucharist. In the Divine Liturgy Christ offers us Himself, and we offer ourselves to Him: “the Holy Things are for the Holy!” Without the Mystical Sacrifice there is no Church, and neither speech nor song can make it so.

Metropolitan Tikhon (Shevkunov) in his wonderful book Everyday Saints explains the meaning of this great and terrible phrase, “the Holy Things are for the Holy!”:

What this means is that the Body and the Blood of Christ are now being taken in by holy people. But who are these people? They are the people who are now in our Church, priests and laypersons alike, coming here to us with faith and waiting for Communion. They do this because they are faithful Christians who are yearning to draw closer to God. It turns out that in spite of our frailties and sins, we, the people who compose the Church on earth are, to God, also saints.

It seems to me that it is for this reason that so many abandoned their churches in the first place: because they found there neither God nor saints, but merely men — not Communion, but mere community. And as Abba Dorotheos teaches, so long as we are absent from the Mystical Sacrifice we will remain absent also from one another, no matter how many songs we sing or how many donuts we eat in one another’s company:

I shall give you an example from the Fathers so that you may understand the power of the word. Suppose that there is a circle on the earth, as if drawn by a compass. The center is exactly the middle of the circle. Take care to understand what I mean. Let us suppose that this circle is the world and God is the center. The straight lines drawn from the circumference to the center are the lives of men. As far as the saints, desiring to approach God, move inward, they become near to God and near each other and as far as they approach God, they approach each other. As far as they approach each other, they approach God. You should understand separation in the same way. When they move away from God and follow external things, it is evident that as far as they move away and become distant from God, they distance themselves from each other and as they distance themselves from each other, they distance themselves from God. This is the very nature of love. In as far as we are outside and do not love God, each one of us is also distanced from his neighbor, but if we love God, they more we approach Him through love for Him, the more we are united to our neighbor through love, as as much as we are united to our neighbor, we are united to God.

So let all of us who are lonely, let all of us who long for meaning and purpose and sacrifice and love, take heed to the words of St. Ignatius of Antioch (who once sat on the lap of Christ as a young child and later eagerly gave his life as a martyr, longing above all else to be “the wheat of God, ground by the teeth of beasts to become the pure bread of Christ”):

Stand fast, brethren, in the faith of Jesus Christ, and in His love, in His passion, and in His resurrection. Do ye all come together in common… breaking one and the same bread, which is the medicine of immortality, and the antidote which prevents us from dying, a cleansing remedy driving away evil, which causes that we should live in God through Jesus Christ.

Amen.

In the Gospels there are many “hard sayings” of our Savior. Of these hard sayings, there are also many which have been all but forgotten — even by those who sincerely strive to be faithful Christians. Of these hard and forgotten sayings, I would like to call our attention today to one in particular:

When you give a dinner or a banquet, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your kinsmen or rich neighbors, lest they also invite you in return, and you be repaid. But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you. You will be repaid at the resurrection of the just.

If we are honest with ourselves, I think most of us will find that the idea of taking Christ at His word here makes us deeply uncomfortable. Now, I am not trying to suggest that Christ is forbidding us from ever inviting our friends and family over to dinner. But I do think that He was quite serious was He commanded us to invite “the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind.”

But how many of us actually do so? More than that, how many of us are able to even consider doing so without experiencing a profound feeling of dismay?

Perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps many Christians really do make a habit of inviting homeless and disabled strangers into their homes for dinner. They sure used to:

Nor were the poor stigmatized [during the Middles Ages]. If anything they were thought to be morally superior to the rich, particularly if they had voluntarily renounced secular wealth and power. Monks, nobles, and wealthy persons would wash the feet of the poor and invite them to dine. St. Louis, King of France in the 13th century, cut bread and poured drink himself for the paupers whom he fed at his own table.

If one reads the lives of the saints, it is clear King Louis was far from an isolated exception. And although hospitality towards the poor is a quintessentially Christian phenomenon, it is also one with echoes in many ancient cultures and religious traditions throughout the world. Yet in the modern West, hospitality is all but dead:

In a recent issue of The Alabama Baptist, state leader Dr. Rick Lance tells of a foreign exchange student who was completing his education in the United States and about to head home. To his roommate, he said, “You can have this suitcase and everything in it.”

The friend said, “What’s in it?”

The exchange student said, “When I left home for America, my family filled it with gifts to be presented to families inviting me into their homes. But no one ever invited me, so everything is still in the suitcase.”

Rick says this is just about the saddest story he has heard in a long time.

This is not to say that the poor are entirely forgotten. On the contrary, modernity has facilitated the creation of vast social organizations and welfare programs dedicated entirely to feeding, clothing, and housing the poor. The War on Poverty might have fallen out of fashion as a catchphrase, but not for lack of funding: the US government spent $754 billion last year on domestic welfare programs alone (this does not include foreign aid).

Charity has become organized. Almsgiving has become systemized.

But the word “alms” comes from the Greek word “ἔλεος” — mercy, the same word used in the eternal refrain of the faithful in Orthodox worship: “Lord, have mercy.” To give alms means to participate in the mercy and the divine love of God.

It most emphatically does not mean to merely give someone a handout.

Likewise, the word “charity” once meant “love.” And not just any love — no, it once meant divine love, the love of God, a love so great and eternal that St. Paul once thundered forth some of the most famous words in all Christendom: “and now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.”

Nowadays, the word “charity” means a check that we write once a month and stuff absentmindedly into an envelope, never to be thought of again.

And so it has come to pass that we Americans can spend hundreds of billions of dollars each year on “charity,” and yet for the most part it would never even occur to us to invite so much as one destitute stranger into our homes. More than this, I truly believe that most of us would far prefer to part with hundreds or even thousands of our hard-earned dollars rather than to spend even one such evening “entertaining strangers.”

Though this bizarre and depressing phenomenon has perhaps reached its apogee in modern times, it has its roots at least several centuries into the past. In the 19th-century novel Bleak House, Charles Dickens describes the “telescopic philanthropy” of Mrs. Jellyby, whose constant obsession with missionary work halfway around the world blinds her to the misery she causes her to her own family. Likewise, in The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky there occurs a character who states:

I love mankind, but I am amazed at myself: the more I love mankind in general, the less I love people in particular, that is, individually, as separate persons. In my dreams, I often went so far as to think passionately of serving mankind, and, it may be, would really have gone to the cross for people if it were somehow suddenly necessary, and yet I am incapable of living in the same room with anyone even for two days, this I know from experience. As soon as someone is there, close to me, his personality oppresses my self-esteem and restricts my freedom. In twenty-four hours I can begin to hate even the best of men: one because he takes too long eating his dinner, another because he has a cold and keeps blowing his nose. I become the enemy of people the moment they touch me. On the other hand, it has always happened that the more I hate people individually, the more ardent becomes my love for humanity as a whole.

Both novels present these characters with some degree of humor, but the tragedy here is deadly serious — and one which, if we are honest, is not so far from our own hearts.

What is this tragedy, in its essence? We can gain some insight from the meditations which Micah Mattix recently shared based on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics:

Friendship according to Aristotle is the “most necessary” virtue. I won’t go into Aristotle’s types of friendship (those founded on utility, pleasure, and virtue), but I appreciated his view that friendship is one of the foundations of civilization. It is what binds a city together. We see this idea in classical and modern literature, too. Friendship and hospitality (which is welcoming a stranger as a friend) are quintessentially human attributes in The Odyssey, for example, which are not shared by the gods or the sub-human cyclops. These two ideas—that friendship is the basis of civilization and a touchstone of humanity—are also found in Francis Bacon’s short essay “Of Friendship,” which is obviously drawn from classical sources. Whatever “delights in solitude,” Bacon writes, “is either a wild beast or a god. For it is most true, that a natural and secret hatred, and aversation towards society, in any man, hath somewhat of the savage beast.” It’s not that solitude is bad or unnecessary. It is that to live only in solitude is to live a sub-human life. Without friends, Bacon continues, the “world is but a wilderness.”

I want to continue with Mattix’ train of thought, but before doing so I must point out that it is precisely for this reason that the eremitic life of solitude is so incredibly dangerous for monastics who have not first spent many long years learning humility, obedience, and love in a cenobitic monastery. If a monk departs into the desert thinking that he is finally freeing himself from the burden of his brothers, then he will swiftly and undoubtedly perish. The Christian life of solitude can only be rightly undertaken by one whose heart, in the words of St. Isaac the Syrian (truly the hermit par excellence), “is burning with love for all creation.”

To return to Mattix:

It seems to me that we’ve lost this high view of friendship as an aspect of human identity, which we now regularly confuse with personality or view as a discrete construction of the autonomous will rather than as something that is composed of universal attributes. So, it is no surprise that our lives increasingly look like those of the cyclops. We live in caves, in fenced-in back yards, and “consume” each other—on television, in movies, on Facebook and Twitter. And because our lives (I’m speaking generally here about American culture) are ordered around maximizing physical pleasure, not virtue, they must end in suicide when the body’s capacity for physical pleasure wanes. The opioid crisis starts with this low view of human nature and won’t end until a grander view is recaptured, which I don’t see happening any time soon.

Mattix’ insight here is tremendous. The suicide of the West which we see all around us is, in a very real sense, the logical outcome of a society which no longer loves the poor, but merely hates poverty — a society in which men and women have chosen to give one another their money, but not themselves. A society which has departed infinitely far from the spirit in which St. Paul (whom we commemorate today on the Old Calendar) once cried out: “I seek not yours, but you.”

And let us Christians not allow ourselves to be distracted and confused by the many who preach the so-called “social gospel”: our Faith is not ultimately an attempt to eradicate poverty. The Lord said: “ye have the poor always with you” — and what is more, He repeatedly pronounced the blessedness of the poor, while preaching woe to the rich and the comfortable.

How are we to reconcile this with the tremendous emphasis on almsgiving in Christian life? After all, the charity of Christians was second perhaps only to martyrdom in attracting converts to the Faith during the early centuries of Christianity.

It is really quite simple: Christian almsgiving has nothing to do with money — it has everything to do with Christ. Almsgiving is about obeying the commandment of Christ to “make to yourselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness,” and of St. Paul to be “they that buy, as though they possessed not; and they that use this world, as not abusing it: for the fashion of this world passeth away.”

Almsgiving is about turning the worthless things of this vain and swiftly-passing life into a means of giving to another human being the eternal love of God.

The early Christians caused astonishment to the secular society around them precisely because they showed such indifference towards wealth, freely distributing it to those whom society scorned as worthless. And yet this same contempt for worldliness has somehow been slowly transformed into a desire to make sure that everyone has plenty of stuff.

Consider the following passage from the books of Acts:

Now Peter and John went up together into the temple at the hour of prayer, being the ninth hour. And a certain man lame from his mother’s womb was carried, whom they laid daily at the gate of the temple which is called Beautiful, to ask alms of them that entered into the temple; who seeing Peter and John about to go into the temple asked an alms. And Peter, fastening his eyes upon him with John, said, Look on us. And he gave heed unto them, expecting to receive something of them. Then Peter said, Silver and gold have I none; but such as I have give I thee: In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth rise up and walk. And he took him by the right hand, and lifted him up: and immediately his feet and ankle bones received strength. And he leaping up stood, and walked, and entered with them into the temple, walking, and leaping, and praising God.

Here St. Peter fulfilled the true purpose of almsgiving, though he gave neither silver nor gold. Nor was it even physical healing that St. Peter principally gave; no, instead he gave to the lame man — and to all around — the most precious gift of all when he then cried out: “Repent ye therefore, and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out, when the times of refreshing shall come from the presence of the Lord.”

Now I will ask you: what if St. Peter had merely taken out a twenty, dropped it in the man’s hat, and walked away?

Consider also what we have been warned concerning the Last Judgment, when we will stand before Christ and make an account of our lives on this earth:

When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory: and before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats: and he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left.

Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: for I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.

Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink? When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee? Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?

And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.

These awesome and wondrous words of our Savior tell us that we have the chance, every single day, to meet Him in the flesh. But we will never meet Him — nor will we be found at the end of time to have fulfilled His commandments — if we think that it is merely our money that He wants. He is not asking for a check or for a handout. In the person of every stranger and every pauper that we meet, He cries out: “My son, give me thy heart.”

What we have lost in all of our foundations and benefits, our welfare programs and charity drives, is precisely this: we have lost Christ, and we have lost one another. And as a result, we are well on our way to losing our hearts, and our very humanity.

On this feast of the Holy Chief Apostles Peter and Paul, let us follow their example and their advice. Let us obey the words of their Divine Teacher.

Let us invite a stranger over to dinner.

It has been argued by some that modernity is, at its core, simply the continuation of the Protestant Reformation. I think that there is a great deal of merit to this theory — at least, so far as it goes (it passes over the fact that the Reformation itself was simply an inevitable consequence of the Great Schism, as I have alluded to before). The truth of such a theory is especially borne out when examining the attempted incursions of modernity into the Orthodox Church: unavoidably (much though their instigators would doubtless prefer to avoid it), such incursions must needs lay their foundation on an unmistakably Protestant ecclesiology.

Indeed, it is largely on this account that such attempts are so dangerous: they are actually about far more than the specific issue they call into question. Though they purport to be undertaken in a spirit of devotion to the Church, though they profess to seek only to “correct” one particular and isolated “misunderstanding” in Church life, in reality they seek to stealthily replace “the pillar and ground of the truth” (1 Tim. 3:15) with the quicksand of mere human reasoning — and thereby seek to subjugate the Church to the spirit of the age.

As St. Paul writes: “the carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be” (Romans 8:7). Reliance upon the “carnal mind” is the hallmark of the fallen West — and therefore we ought to beware whenever anyone begins with a set of principles (even the best and most Christian of principles) and then begins to reason. Indeed, let us call to mind the words of St. Irenaeus of Lyon at the beginning of his treatise Against Heresies:

Inasmuch as certain men have set the truth aside… and by means of their craftily-constructed plausibilities draw away the minds of the inexperienced and take them captive, I have felt constrained, my dear friend, to compose the following treatise in order to expose and counteract their machinations. These men falsify the oracles of God, and prove themselves evil interpreters of the good word of revelation. They also overthrow the faith of many, by drawing them away, under a pretense of superior knowledge, from Him who founded and adorned the universe; as if, forsooth, they had something more excellent and sublime to reveal, than that God who created the heaven and the earth, and all things that are therein. Error, indeed, is never set forth in its naked deformity, lest, being thus exposed, it should at once be detected. But it is craftily decked out in an attractive dress, so as, by its outward form, to make it appear to the inexperienced (ridiculous as the expression may seem) more true than the truth itself.

It is precisely in such a spirit that the modernist culture warriors descend upon Orthodoxy: “as if they had something more excellent and sublime to reveal” than that which the Church of Christ has already revealed, “more true than the truth itself,” which is “the faith which was once delivered unto the saints” (Jude 1:3). And in the service of this newly-discovered “truth,” those who still claim to adhere to Orthodoxy have no choice but to “falsify the oracles of God, and prove themselves evil interpreters of the good word of revelation.” Thus it was in the time of St. Irenaeus, and thus it remains today.

Yet today, our modern culture warriors must do even more than this: they must not only become “evil interpreters of the good word of revelation,” but they must also do something about all the many good interpreters of revelation who have already spoken — the Holy Fathers and saints of the Church. Let us observe then (with humility, and with hearts filled with sorrow rather than scorn) as an Orthodox clergyman attempts thus to advance the LGBTQ agenda within the Church:

If we turn instead to Christ, we find that he neither forbade nor saw fit even to mention homosexuality—nor any other sexual activity that we class under LGBTQ+… Both sides of the debate appeal to Tradition. But from Holy Tradition itself we hear only…silence. For Holy Tradition is rooted in the word and work of Christ. And here, as we have seen, we find nothing concerning LGBTQ+. So the opinions of the Church Fathers on sexual behavior (aside, always, from adultery) are just that: opinions, growing out of their own cultural context, but not out of Christ’s word.

While paying lip service to Holy Tradition — without which nobody can make any serious kind of claim to be speaking for Orthodoxy — this article has, in a single paragraph, surreptitiously restricted the entire scope of Holy Tradition to only the words and actions of Christ which are specifically recorded in the Gospels. Anything else concerning which the Church has ever spoken in all the thousands of years since — including, apparently, the words written in the Epistles themselves — are instantly reduced to mere opinions which can be freely discarded at will. This is nothing other than an incredibly extreme form of Sola Scriptura (one which few even of the Reformers would have countenanced) with the thinnest veneer of Orthodoxy possible.

Extreme though such a stance may be, there is really no other choice for the one who tries to assert the compatibility of Orthodoxy with the dogmas of the LGBTQ movement. The witness and practice of the Orthodox Church — indeed, of every Christian church from the time of St. Paul up until approximately yesterday — has simply been far too clear and unambiguous to deny.

Having stripped all doctrinal authority away from the Church in favor of the Gospels alone, the article then proceeds to suggest sweeping Protestant-style Eucharistic reforms. Watch carefully: it begins with humility— that most Christian of principles! — and manages to reason its way, within three sentences, to the conclusion that the entire history of Eucharistic discipline in the Church has actually been nothing but rank clerical hypocrisy:

Each of us confesses, as we approach the Chalice, that we are chief among sinners (1 Tim 1:15). Then by our own confession we are worse sinners than any sexual transgressor. If, then, we forbid “practicing” LGBTQ+ persons to approach the Chalice, we ourselves had better run out the exit door before we brazenly approach that same Chalice with judgment in our hearts.

Note that this line of reasoning is in no way limited only to “LGBTQ+ persons.” According to such logic, none of us (including priests and bishops) has any right to forbid any person from approaching the Chalice for any reason whatsoever. After all, we confess that we are worse sinners than pagans and blasphemers — so how can we forbid them from receiving Holy Communion merely for the sin of persisting in unbelief?

Of course, it seems to have completely eluded such a reasoner that imposing a Eucharistic penance on someone is and must be nothing other than an act of pastoral love on the part of the priest or bishop imposing the penance. Even an anathema — the last and most severe admonition that the Church can possibly give — is only ever pronounced out of heartfelt love and sincere desire for such a person to be saved:

And of course, anathema is not a curse or a death penalty, as secular mass media often try to present. This is the last attempt to return a person to the path of salvation. The anathematized can still repent, admit that he/she is wrong, humble himself before the Church, experience a deep inner transformation – and then he will be gladly accepted back.

To return to the article at hand: yes, it is absolutely true that “we cannot use Rom 1:26-7 to judge others without calling judgement upon ourselves.” And yet when Christ commanded those whom He healed to “sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto” them, was He judging them with His words? Or was He reaching out with divine love to heal their souls as well as their bodies? So why is it that the shepherds of Christ’s flock cannot likewise call wandering sheep to repentance and to spiritual healing, not out of scorn and judgement, but out of Christlike love and compassion?

As I have said, this article makes the appearance of being rooted in the deeply Christian principle of humility. It claims that we cannot know with certainty what Leviticus really meant (it is “impossible to translate reliably”), or what Romans really meant (“we can pursue historical investigation forever before we discover just what Paul had in mind”), when those books forbade homosexuality. It claims that we who are pastors cannot even think of rebuking the sins of others, since “we are all living in sin.”

All of this comes across as very humble. But it is actually nothing but the grossest pride. It is a pride so monumental that it does not hesitate to overturn, in two short pages, two thousand years of unbroken and unanimous Christian ecclesiology and teaching and practice. It is a pride that considers itself a better translator than the Church, a better teacher than the Church, a better physician of souls than the Church. It is a pride that considers itself more loving and more compassionate than the Church.

But St. Paul — who, after all, was himself the first of anyone to confess that he was the “chief among sinners” — spoke the following words from a heart burning with pastoral love:

Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.

What kind of humility declares that this cry of St. Paul was nothing but arrogant and judgmental bigotry — the same St. Paul who was willing to be damned himself, if only those who persecuted him could be saved (cf. Romans 9:3)? What kind of humility believes that St. Paul, who “was caught up into paradise, and heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter,” was somehow confused on this point, that he somehow mistook mere cultural prejudice for the authentic teachings of Christ? What kind of humility considers itself in full possession of the wisdom, insight, and compassion necessary to root out and correct the “mistakes” of Christianity?

And herein is the absurdity of such pride revealed: it requires the belief that for two thousand years the entire Orthodox Church was filled with bigotry, judgment, pride, and hypocrisy, and nobody knew it, until modern society happened to figure it out yesterday, right after apostatizing from the Christian Faith. It requires the belief that the Holy Church of Christ ought to take moral instruction from a society which absolutely prides itself on the routine massacre of millions of babies, a society with far more innocent blood on its hands than all the Herods and Caligulas and Stalins of the past combined.

I do not wish to seem too hard on the clergyman who wrote this article. I believe that he is sincere, that his love for the Church is sincere, that his love for Christ is sincere. Sincere, but nevertheless deceived, and in danger of deceiving likewise many of the faithful who are so hungry to find love.

And indeed, all of us are hungry for love. But the hard truth, the truth that the ugliness of the modern world makes all too clear, is that we simply do not know what love really is — we do not know Who Love really is — unless and until we become willing to be taught. Unless and until we become willing to obey. Only once we humble ourselves in obedience to His Church can our darkened minds be enlightened with the light of Christ.

We might sometimes find the teaching of the Church strange, or difficult, or even incomprehensible. But do we, as Orthodox Christians, really believe that we know better than the Church? Do we really believe that we can love better than the saints?

The world preaches love, and the Church preaches love. But how irreconcilably different are these loves! It is as Fr. Seraphim (Rose) writes:

Christian love seems difficult to the world, primarily because its reward is not in this life, but in the life to come. Those who preach worldly ‘peace’ and ‘love’ do not believe in the future life, or else they believe in it half-heartedly, regarding it as something vague and distant. For the Orthodox Christian, on the other hand, the whole meaning of love resides in its fulfillment in eternal life. ‘For God so loved the world, that He gave His only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life’ (John 3:16). The worldly man, if he loves his fellow man, does so out of pity for his weakness and mortality, and from concern to make his short life pleasant while it lasts; such love has no power over death, and it ends with death. The Christian, however, loves his fellow man because he sees in him one created in the image of God and called to perfection and eternal life in God; such love is not human but divine, seeing in men not mere earthly mortality, but heavenly immortality.

It is only in the Church that such divine and heavenly love can be found, and it is only through obedience to the Church that such love can be acquired. Then — and only then — will it be as St. Ignatius (Brianchaninov) prophecies:

By rejecting carnal love tainted by sin, you will become capable of spiritual, pure, holy love, which is the highest blessedness. He who has felt spiritual love will only despise carnal love — seeing it for the unsightly parody of love that it is… Humility and loyalty to God destroy carnal love. That means that it lives through lack of faith and arrogance. Do whatever good you can to your beloved loved-ones, whatever the commandments declare, but always commit their care to God. And your blind, carnal, careless love will transform – little by little – into a spiritual, wise, holy love.

We are not wiser than the Church. We are not more loving than the Church. We are not more merciful than the Church.

Knowing this is the only path to real humility. And such humility is the only path to real love.

Immanuel Kant once wrote: “Ingratitude is the essence of vileness.” And while I think that this is doubtless true in the modern sense of the word “vileness,” for the purpose of this article I would like to consider the archaic meaning: it comes from the Latin vilis, which means “worthless.” Kant is saying that there is nothing more worthless to human beings than ingratitude.

“Not so!” argues a recent article in The Atlantic, entitled: “Mothers Shouldn’t Be Grateful for Their Husbands’ Help.” The bulk of the article consists of an amalgamation of anecdotes and statistics marshaled in order to prove that women are not only being taken advantage of by their husbands in “the distribution of child-care labor in their home,” but that they have even been somehow duped into being grateful for it. The gratitude of women toward their husbands is declared to be “an impediment to the elusive goal of equity in the home.” Ingratitude, says the author, is not vile and worthless, but rather useful and even virtuous.

This article is exemplary of many of the chief dogmas of modernity (which, I suppose, is hardly surprising given that it ran just above one entitled “Abolish the Priesthood“). The most obvious of these dogmas is a radical egalitarianism, in which equality is more or less defined as complete and total interchangeability. The article clearly assumes that equality between the genders demands a precise 50-50 split in all childcare duties. It thereby also implicitly assumes that caring for children is something inherently undesirable: after all, nobody is filled with “righteous anger” because they get to do more of something which they themselves desire to do!

Let me be clear: I am certainly not trying to pretend that caring for children is not difficult or taxing at times; indeed, to speak thus as a monastic would be both naive and hypocritical. But it must also be admitted that almost any sort of professional work is also likewise difficult and taxing at times. So the question is this: why is professional work regarded as inherently more desirable than domestic work? Why should women actively cultivate ingratitude in the hopes that they will get to do more of the former and less of the latter? Why is it that women supposedly ought to find more fulfillment in pursuing a career than in raising children?

We find an important clue in this statement from the article:

In 2017, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development called the uneven distribution of unpaid labor between men and women in the home one of the most important gender-equality issues of our time.

Here it is, unmistakably: “the uneven distribution of unpaid labor.” To put it plainly, caring for children is less desirable work because it doesn’t come with a paycheck. This reveals another of the hidden dogmas of modernity: career advancement and material success are sine quibus non of a happy and fulfilled life — for both men and for women, both of whom are now reduced to interchangeable and, moreover, intrinsically economic units. The cult of the market is one of the most powerful forces of the modern age.

I have written on this subject before, in the context of the modern system of public education:

Is it any wonder that there was a mass exodus of women leaving their homes for the workplace just after their five-year-old children began leaving their homes for government schools? And here’s a question that nobody’s asking: who exactly is it that benefits from such an arrangement? Mothers and their children, or Wall Street and the GDP? Because according to the actual data, less than half of American women describe themselves as happy in their jobs. Meanwhile, an absolutely overwhelming 84% of working mothers say that they wish they could be full-time mothers, but can’t afford to. Somehow it seems that “empowerment” and “liberation” have turned out to actually mean “indentured servitude” and “wage slavery.”

But there is another cult even more powerful than the cult of the market: the cult of the goddess called Progress. And more than anything else, it is this dogma which undergirds the article in question: the March of History must on no account be stopped. If gratitude stands in the way of Progress, then gratitude must be a sin, and ingratitude must therefore be a virtue. The author concludes her article:

Gratitude is a brand of benevolent sexism, a force that repels change…. Only once gratitude is relinquished for righteous anger will gender rules in this realm be rewritten. Then we can land somewhere different: not grateful, only glad.           

Here is the grand vision with which the goddess Progress inspires her adherents: a world in which everyone is equal, a world in which everything is fair, a world in which there is no more unhappiness because all wrongs have been righted. And this world, the goddess promises, is right around the corner… if only we would cooperate with her.

And if such a world can only be brought about by destroying gratitude and embracing anger, then that is a small price to pay for our imminent earthly paradise. Indeed, why after all should I feel grateful for anything to anyone? I am only claiming, at long last, that which is rightfully mine.

Let us Christians not underestimate the power and appeal of such a vision. Nor let us imagine that it is straightforwardly wicked and wrong. Rather, let us consider again — in a slightly different light — these qualities of modernity: the desire for all to be well-treated, the refusal to countenance injustice, the search for a life of fulfillment, the longing for a better world. These qualities are not sinful; on the contrary, they are Christian. So what is the problem?

The problem is that these desires are no longer entrusted to Christ, but rather to our own power and planning. These desires are no longer directed toward the Kingdom of Heaven, but rather toward this fallen and swiftly passing world. Instead of returning to Paradise, we are trying once again to build Babel. Instead of searching for Sion, we are making ourselves at home in Babylon.

And this is the essence of the spirit of Antichristianity, as Fr. Seraphim (Rose) once wrote: “The Antichrist is the fake Christ who promises to give outwardly and obviously what Christ brought inwardly and hidden.”

And in the end, the promises of Antichristianity cannot really be kept. The vision shown to us by the goddess Progress has much appeal, but precious little actual beauty. The world she seeks to bring about may be “fair,” but it is also sterile, empty, and ugly. After all, what gladness can there really be apart from gratitude? What joy can there really be without sacrifice?

And that is the great truth the article fails to acknowledge: that “greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends,” that “through the Cross joy has come to all the world.” There is no real joy to be had in a world where there is nothing left except one’s own fair share — and I think that the author would soon realize this herself, if once her goals were actually achieved. There is a certain freedom in such a world, perhaps, but freedom merely to be an interchangeable cog in an economic machine, freedom to be (like spoiled children) angry at those we love until all our demands are met. Freedom, in the words of one modern writer:

to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the “rat race”–the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

To bring it back to the topic of children, I will quote another passage from the same article I previously wrote concerning education:

To raise godly children is the highest joy, the most beautiful gift, and the most solemn responsibility of any parent, whether man or woman. And the widespread idea that fulfillment and purpose in life come primarily (or even secondarily) from a career, and that the absence of a career is a result of oppression and marginalization, is nothing but a glaring indicator of the vapidity and spiritual poverty of the modern age.

Kant was right: ingratitude is indeed the essence of vileness. It is cheap, and it is worthless, and it will do nothing except rob us of the great and profound joy which God desires to give to all of His sons and daughters. “It is more blessed to give than to receive.” “Whoever wants to save their life will lose it.” For even “the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

Let us therefore say with St. Paul these beautiful words, and strive with all our might to carry them out in our lives: “I seek not yours, but you.”