“Not as the guarantor, but as the adversary of salvation”

I’ve posted this excerpt before, but since it is Reformation Day, I was thinking about it again.  And once again, I am astounded by the Pope’s capacity for self-criticism.

With Luther another kind of division that had its roots in Augustine appeared in the Church. The split between Donatists and Catholics that rent the Church of his African homeland caused the great doctor of the Church to distinguish with a sharpness until then unknown between the theological greatness of the Church as a salvific reality and her empirical existence: many who seem to be in the Church are outside her; many who seem to be outside her are in her. The true Church is the number of the predestined who, on the one hand, transcend the visible Church while, on the other hand, the reprobate are present at her very center. For Augustine, it must be admitted, this concept had no adverse repercussions with regard to the value of the sacramental and apostolic structure of the Church and her tradition. But the great Western schism of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries had imbued it with a degree of realism that would have been inconceivable up to that time. For nearly half a century, the Church was split into two or three obediences that excommunicated one another, so that every Catholic lived under excommunication by one pope or another, and, in the last analysis, no one could saw with certainty which of the contenders had right on his side. The Church no longer offered certainty of salvation; she had become questionable in her whole objective form—the true Church, the true pledge of salvation, had to be sought outside the institution. It is against this background of a profoundly shaken ecclesial consciousness that we are to understand that Luther, in the conflict between his search for salvation and the tradition of the Church, ultimately came to experience the Church, not as the guarantor, but as the adversary of salvation.

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology: Building Stones for a Fundamental Theology, p. 196. (Emphasis mine.)

Further thoughts on Indianness

Here is the second essay germinated by my concerns about the ethnic particularity of the Indian (Malankara) Orthodox Church.

*****

July 27, 2008

Last week I had a long conversation with my pastor, Fr. Philip, who helped me lay to rest my concerns about fitting into the Indian ethos of the Malankara Orthodox Church. He assured me that it must be possible for one to embrace the Orthodox faith without having to first become Indian, and pointed to the historical example of the successful Persian (so-called “Nestorian”) mission to China in the seventh century to demonstrate that Syriac Christianity (of which the Malankara Orthodox Church is an heir) “worked” for other peoples too.  He also believes that the Malankara Church, with its roots firmly in Asia, might yet be able to proclaim Christ in a way that the Western colonial and post-colonial endeavors could not do.

There was a lot more to that conversation, but suffice to say, I find myself deeply encouraged by Fr. Philip’s sense of the catholic identity of the Church and his desire to see the Orthodox Church fulfill the Great Commission in the modern world. I’m very thankful for his presence in my life—especially here at this juncture, where I’m already suffering from a bit of vertigo from encountering the West Syriac tradition, with which I am entirely unfamiliar.  (I had to ask him to teach me how to make the sign of the cross the Oriental Orthodox way, and also had a few very basic questions about stuff I’ve seen people do in church.)

I attended my first all-Malayam Qurbana today (with the Syriac and Greek bits intact, of course).  Even the readings and the homily, which are usually in English, were in Malayalam because the principal celebrant was a visiting priest from India.  You know what?  To understate it: it wasn’t so bad.  It helped me to realize more than ever that the liturgy and the faith of the Church as a whole are larger, much larger, than intelligible words. I am reminded of the words of the Orthodox theologian Fr. Andrew Louth which I happened upon recently.  Warning against the attempt to reduce the liturgy to what can be understood in simple conceptual terms, Fr. Andrew writes:

What can be articulated, what can be understood, is only a part, if an important part. The life in which we share as we commit ourselves to the tradition of the Church goes much deeper.  (Discerning the Mystery: An Essay on the Nature of Theology, p. 90)

Today, I got a taste of that.  I worshipped with people with whom I shared a faith which is much deeper than what can be expressed. I felt carried by the Liturgy’s chants, its gestures, the colors, the incense.  But above all, I felt carried by the singing and the faith of the 100-or-so people in the congregation into the presence of the Living God.

Coming to think of it, I felt a bit like the paralytic whose friends laid him on a stretcher and hauled him all the way to the house where Christ was.  In that moment, I forgot that they were of a different skin color and spoke a language utterly foreign to me.

So maybe the Indian Orthodox Church isn’t just for Indians after all.

Indianness and universality

One of the very real questions I had to ask myself these past few months was whether or not I, a person of Chinese descent, could find a place in the Indian Orthodox Church.  This was the first of two essays I wrote on the subject.

*****

July 23, 2008

Perhaps my greatest reservation about entering the Malankara Orthodox Church at this point is its Indianness and my non-Indianness.

Unlike most non-Orthodox, I don’t see the ethnic particularity of the various Orthodox Churches as an objective weakness. In fact, I see it as a strength—a sign that the Gospel has been successfully handed down and received, and allowed to permeate the entire way of life of those who’ve received it. Just as there is not Gospel without the particularity of the Incarnation, there is no obedience to the Gospel without its being incarnated in the everyday lives of those who hear it.  This is how the Gospel fills time and space, and how it makes history.

Of course, the ethnic or cultural particularity of the reception of the Gospel means that, in some way, it is more difficult for outsiders to identify with it.  I’m sure the Jewish particularity of the Early Church was a scandal to many Greeks.  Did they think that they were converting to the religion originally meant only for a particular race?  I suspect so.  Maybe that’s why the earliest Gentile converts were those who were already “God-fearers”, i.e. Gentiles who effectively practicing Judaism, like Cornelius in Acts 10.  These people had already crossed the cultural barrier in some way, at least mentally.

Thinking about this makes me want to reread the Acts of the Apostles and the letters of Paul in light of this question of ethnic particularity.  My impression is that many of Paul’s letters were occasioned, one way or another, by the tension between the historical specificity of the Gospel (that the God of the universe became a Jewish man) and its universal destiny (that this Jewish man is the Savior and King of the whole world).  The whole dilemma about circumcision and the Torah which plagued the Church and which led to the first council in Jerusalem (Acts 15) suggests that the paradox between particularity and universality is, I think, more than something of my own imagination.

I hear it said a lot that the Catholic Church is the only one that is truly universal, unlike the Orthodox Churches which are often tied to their respective national or ethnic identities.  But I think this, first of all, involves a misunderstanding of what universality means.  It is not the case that the Catholic Church, in its universality, is free from all national, ethnic or cultural expression.  That would mean that there is some kind of “generic” Catholicism that is practiced in the exact same way by all peoples.  But there is no such thing.

Where I live, which is in Asia, people have simply embraced Catholicism in its Western forms (European and North American), but they have in fact become too modernized and Westernized to see it.  Our forefathers saw the Christianity presented to them by the Catholic missionaries as an essentially “Western” religion, and I think rightly so.  Until today, for many of my fellow countrymen, becoming a Christian is inherently tied to adopting a Western lifestyle, although I think that most of them are not conscious of this.  People go to church on Sundays in suits and ties and Western dresses, but rarely in traditional clothing.  Most services are conducted in English, and the ethos of these congregations barely show any anchoredness in the indigenous cultures of this place.  These, I think, are indications that “Christian” and “Western” are very much married.  I don’t think it’s an inherently bad thing.  All it means is that universality has little to do with evacuation of cultural particularity. If anything, universality, I think, has a lot to do with being truly and radically open to cultural particularity.

So can I, a non-Indian Christian, find Christ in the Indian Orthodox Church?  The theoretical answer is: “Of course!”  But existentially?  My answer is still, “Yes”, but I think the process is entirely foreign to me, as is the Indianness of the Church.  The conservative in me is scared, but the adventurer in me is thrilled precisely by the unknowns.  Nevertheless, I’ve set out on the way.

Bishop Kallistos of Diokleia tells the story that, when he was received into the Greek Orthodox Church, the priest made it clear that he should never expect to be ordained, for only Greeks could receive Holy Orders in the Greek Orthodox Church.  (It didn’t bother him then, because he had no clerical ambitions anyway.)  The fact that he is one of the most articulate and prolific voices—and a Metropolitan!—in the Orthodox Church today encourages me to keep going.  I, like that Englishman named Timothy Ware, am not looking for someone to lay hands on me.  I want only to find a habitable place among a people very different from me, and share with them not “only” the Eucharist but the whole of that life, that koinonia, which is energized by that same Food.  But I know that it will require some kind of genuine conversion on my part, and metanoia, in my experience, is always a hairy process.

Reasons and the heart

I wrote the following essay some months ago as a way of thinking through my journey into the Orthodox Church.  Over the next few days, I’ll be publishing similar pieces in which I wrestled with various issues (primarily existential) during the months leading up to my becoming Orthodox.

*****

August 7, 2008

Around this time last week, I wrote an e-mail to my close friends in the United States and informed them of this journey I’m making towards Orthodoxy.  Everyone on the list was and is a devout Catholic, and many of them knew little to nothing about Orthodoxy, much less about my investigation of it, which I’d until now kept hidden from them.  As one might expect, I spent the last few days writing some lengthy responses, mostly to explain why I’m doing what I’m doing in a bit more detail.  I hadn’t given any reasons in my first e-mail lest it came across as a triumphalistic tract for Orthodoxy—only a short narrative of how I’d come to this point. Which left my worried friends quite hungry for reasons.

As I was doing all that explaining these past few days, these words kept coming to mind:

The heart itself is but a small vessel, yet dragons are there, and there are also lions; there are poisonous beasts and all the treasures of evil. But there too is God, the angels, the life and the kingdom, the light and the apostles, the heavenly cities and the treasuries of grace—all things are there. (The Homilies of St. Makarios, 43.7)

The reason I thought about them so much was that, in the process of attempting to articulate what’s happened and what brought me here, I realized that I can’t name all the reasons because I don’t know them all.  I cited “intellectual” reasons.  I told them about my own study of the issues of Petrine primacy and papal infallibility and Vatican I, and about how I’ve become more inclined toward “local church ecclesiology”.  I could have also told them about my long-standing attraction to the Syriac tradition and St. Ephrem in particular, and my love for the liturgies of the Eastern Churches, and my hunger for the Patristic tradition which I see better retained in Orthodoxy.  But this whole journey is larger than all that, and I would only be deceiving myself and others if I thought that I could articulate every cause of it—or that every reason was a good or noble one.

All things are in the heart, St. Makarios says: demons, beasts, angels, the kingdom of God.  God knows, I very likely have both good and bad reasons for becoming Orthodox.  Worse, even of the “good” reasons, I can put my finger on a few—and only poorly articulate them at that.

A few months ago, a friend who is a convert to Orthodoxy said to me: “Whatever you do, you’ll do for a mix of motives, good, bad, indifferent.”  With regards to my journey towards Orthodoxy, he wrote:

What you do should be done because you believe Christ is calling you to the Orthodox Church.  To the degree you do this for any other reason (and you will have other reasons—I did, we all do), you will be hurt.  The more important those reasons are, the more you will be hurt.

Hardly a day has gone by that I’ve not thought about these words.  I appreciate my friend’s sobriety about the whole thing.

I think every Christian has a multiplicity of reasons for following Christ—some noble, some ignoble, some good, some bad.  The Twelve, for the longest time, thought Jesus was going to lead them into a military show-down against the Romans in Jerusalem (as did the crowds who cheered him on Palm Sunday), and followed him so they could have a slice of the action and the glory afterwards. But maybe what’s most important is that we keep coming back to the question, “Is this about Christ?”  If we’re honest, our answers at least some of the time will be, “Not really” or, “Sort of.”  I think God’s mercy is broad enough for Him to put up with us despite all that.  The only other alternative to this kind of honesty, as I see it, is self-delusion.

So, why am I moving towards the Orthodox Church?  As far as I can see, I’d say it’s because I’m looking for a habitable place in this short life to I follow Christ, to pray, to serve, and maybe even to make a difference in someone else’s world.  If I need to, I can give more cerebral justifications too—ecclesiology, the Patristic tradition, etc.  But if I were to think or say that all the reasons, including the ones I can’t express, are noble, worthy and justified, then I’d just be kidding myself.  My heart, like any other, has in it light, the apostles, the kingdom, but also demons, beasts, and “the treasures of evil”.  I don’t like to think about that very much, but I’m glad there is One who can see all this and still let me trail behind Him.

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing. ~ Blaise Pascal

Something happened on the way to Malaysia

When I put this blog on “pause/stop” in July, I explained that it was in part due to seismic shifts in my theological outlook in recent years.  Some, if not most, of these struggles would’ve been quite obvious to regular and observant readers of this blog.  While I don’t recall making explicit references to these shifts—except, perhaps, for the piece about being a Zoghbyite—, the undercurrents in my thought were not exactly well-hidden either.

I was received into the fellowship of the Orthodox Church three weeks ago, on Saturday, October 4th, 2008.  It was a decision that had grown inside of me for over a year, though the concrete possibility of its realization came only when I moved away the United States.

While living in Denver, I was not only teaching at a sizeable Catholic institution, but was also a part of a thriving local Catholic community that would’ve made this change all the more difficult on the personal level. Moving back to Malaysia gave me a sufficient amount of physical and psychological distance that enabled me to take what I believed to be the next logical step.

More important was the fact that my mom had only been Catholic for 3 years, and my becoming Orthodox would have potentially interrupted her newfound experience of Jesus Christ in the Catholic Church. I had no intention of doing so.  But part of what it meant for me to grieve and accept her death was coming to terms with the fact that she is probably now in a better position than ever to understand my decision to be reconciled to the Orthodox Church.  My confidence is that, from her place in the memory and mercy of God, she finds my decision not a scandalous one but rather a reasonable one.

But why become Orthodox?  This question will no doubt come to Catholic readers of this blog, especially those who know me in-person.  I’ve spent many words trying to explain myself to some friends in recent months, and have fallen short every time.  By this I do not mean that the theological justifications that are wanting (though my articulation of them is).  There is rather something else going on on the existential level, something deeper than anything I can say.  The truth is, I cannot name all the reasons for my becoming Orthodox, but of this I am certain: not all of them are noble, profound or theologically-compelling. Today I am an Orthodox Christian because I am convinced that it is something that God asks of me.  How my heart knows this is a long story I haven’t even begun to comprehend.

It is important for me that I say all this at the beginning of this blog’s second lease.  I have no intentions of using this medium as a “weapon” for Orthodoxy, but I do think it is vital that readers be aware of the presuppositions and experiences of its author.  No point in my joining the ranks of writers who purport to be “objective” (a mythic category of the Enlightenment indeed!) while using that “objectivity” as a sheath for what are in fact subjective, directed arguments. Here, I write as an Orthodox Christian who is working out his own ideas—maybe even his salvation—by re-living experiences under the discipline of the creative process.

Lastly, from those who are in any way confused, angered or distressed by my having “left the Church”, I will appreciate prayers.  Whatever you think about this, I’m not yet beyond the bounds of His mercy and can only be helped by them.

Thank you for reading.