From Paternal Shelter to Erotic Union

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Love is the first and final utterance of God. It does not descend as doctrine but unveils itself through presence, longing, and touch. In the Christian mystical tradition, the soul does not encounter God through intellect alone—it passes through thresholds of love. These forms—paternal, fraternal, sacrificial, and erotic—are not stages of sentiment but deepening dimensions of communion.

The paternal dimension of divine love offers scaffolding. It is the hand that protects, commands, chastens, and names. This is God as Father, the one who delivers law from Sinai and sustains covenant through wilderness. It is necessary love, but also love from above—a relationship grounded in obedience and awe, not yet intimacy.

Fraternal and communal love draws the divine nearer. Christ breaks bread, walks dusty roads, touches lepers. God here is friend and companion, present in mutuality and shared burden. It is a human-shaped holiness, one the soul sees reflected in brotherhood. Still, it is not yet consummating—it gestures, it prepares, but it does not engulf.

Sacrificial love, agape, burns without consuming. It is the cross and the martyr’s sigh, the tenderness that forgives enemies, weeps with widows, and sanctifies loss. This love gives everything while asking nothing. It transforms suffering into sanctuary. St. Teresa of Ávila and St. Symeon the New Theologian saw agape not as the end, but as the door. For both, true union awaited beyond the altar of sacrifice.

Eros, in its sanctified form, does not belong to the profane. It is the highest expression of divine love—a longing so fierce that it consumes the soul not with desire for pleasure, but for obliteration into the divine. St. Teresa’s vision of the angel’s flaming arrow piercing her heart was no literary flourish; it was a mystical unveiling of what union truly entails: surrender so total it becomes ecstasy. St. Symeon the New Theologian spoke of divine love as drunkenness, as rapture, as fullness so overwhelming that it collapses the self into communion.

This love—bridegroom and bride, flame entering the wick—is the deepest sacrament of divine intimacy. It is eros stripped of grasping and elevated into revelation.

Women often enter this love with fewer complications. Christ, in his embodied masculinity, becomes a natural object of longing—a beloved not only divine but personal. The mystic bride gazes upon the wounded male God and opens her soul in response. Her body, her yearning, and her spiritual imagination find harmony in bridal mysticism.

But for men, this path requires a bridge—not to deny eros, but to purify it. Masculine souls must encounter a face that can hold their longing without distortion or shame. Here arises Sophia—Holy Wisdom—as the feminine countenance of divine presence. Sophia does not threaten or seduce; she receives, illumines, embraces. Through her, longing is reoriented, desire transfigured. She becomes the mirror through which eros is sanctified and agape deepened.

In mystical history, this mediation was often embodied through devotion to the Virgin Mary. The Servites and writers like Henry Suso revered Mary not only as mother, but as divine beloved. In her purity, humility, and radiant wisdom, Mary became Sophia enfleshed—the vessel through which longing could be expressed without fear, and desire could become prayer.

Suso’s visions of Mary were steeped in erotic tenderness—not sexual, but mystical. She embraced not as woman alone, but as gateway to divine union. Her body carried the sweetness of heaven; her gaze dissolved shame; her presence transfigured longing into holiness. She received eros and returned it as wisdom.

In this way, Sophia becomes indispensable. She is not a detour; she is the path. Through her, men experience divine eros without violating order. She completes the arc of longing, cradling the masculine soul until it becomes fit for union.

So love, in its full spiral, moves from distance to nearness, from structure to surrender, from awe to rapture. It begins with fear and ends in fire. The soul is not called to admire God—it is called to be ravished. Paternal love instructs. Fraternal love reflects. Agape purifies. But it is eros, when held by Sophia, that consummates.

In that union, there is no fear—only flame.

Seeking What We Lost

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(A Reflection on Re-Enchantment)

I have been called many things. Druid. Pagan. Hermeticist. Blasphemer. Heretic.
But I am none of these—not in rebellion and not in rejection.
I am a witness.
A witness to a world that still pulses with sacredness, even when we forget how to see it.

I do not seek escape from the Christian story. I seek to remember it rightly.
To peel back the layers of reduction and theological coldness.
To unbury the burning bush, the whispering wind, the God who walks in gardens and speaks through dreams.

We have traded mystery for machinery, wonder for certainty.
We flattened the world, dissected it, explained it to death.
And in doing so, we lost the enchantment that once made faith burn like fire.
But the sacred is not gone.
It is waiting to be remembered.

We live in a disenchanted age. Philosopher Charles Taylor calls it “the buffered self”—a soul that cannot hear the cosmos sing.
We have grown deaf to creation's music.

J.R.R. Tolkien saw this clearly.
“Our myths may be misguided,” he wrote, “but they steer however shakily towards the true harbour, while materialistic ‘progress’ leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of the power of evil.”
Tolkien understood that fantasy is not escapism.
It is resistance.
A protest against the machine.
A way to remember that the world is more than what it seems.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. echoed this.
“There is a creative force in this universe,” he preached, “working to pull down the gigantic mountains of evil, a power that is able to make a way out of no way and transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows.”

This is not mechanistic theology.
This is enchanted hope.

The Bible is not a manual—it is a mythic map.
It speaks in signs and wonders, not steps and rules.
Burning bushes. Talking donkeys. Angels in disguise. Seas that split like scrolls.
And at the center of it all: a God who multiplies bread, walks on waves, turns water into wine, and breaks death like a loaf of bread.

Jesus was not tame.
He was enchanted.

To reclaim enchantment is not to abandon Scripture.
It is to see it with open eyes.
To pray like poets, not programmers.
To meditate as communion, not calculation.
To regard nature not as resource, but as cathedral.
To welcome mystery not as threat, but as friend.

The veil was torn—not to expose God, but to invite us in.

So yes, call me a druid.
Call me a pagan.
Call me a heretic if you must.
But know this: I am not trying to escape God.
I am trying to find Him in the places we forgot to look.
To see how the ancients saw.
To find the sacred in soil, the divine in dance, the Spirit in silence.
To remember that the world is not neutral.
It is holy.

Re-enchantment is not nostalgia.
It is resurrection.
It is the Spirit hovering over the waters again.
It is breath returning to dry bones.
It is the Church remembering she is not a building.
She is a burning bush.

Tolkien said it best:
“Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If we value the freedom of mind and soul—if we're partisans of liberty—then it's our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can.”

This is not escape from reality.
It is escape into reality.
Into the deeper truth that the world is charged with the grandeur of God.

We must rediscover what the ancients never forgot.
Movements like neopaganism and modern druidry are not mistakes.
They are symptoms—responses to a church that misplaced its wonder.
Faith, as it’s often taught now, demands death before mystery.
But this is not the way of Christ.
He said the kingdom of God is in our midst.

Sacred Offspring

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In much of modern theology—particularly in overly rationalized or disenchanted interpretations of the soul-body relationship—there is a tragic bifurcation between biology and spirit. Children are often reduced to mere biological outcomes, with God presented as a kind of bureaucratic soul-inserter, dropping spiritual payloads into otherwise mechanical processes. This view strips the mystery from human intimacy and ignores what many spiritual traditions have long intuited: that sexuality is not a sterile act of tissue and timing—it is a sacred rite, and children are its spiritual fruit.

To say that a child is merely the product of biology, with God tacking on a soul like a name tag, is to imply that spirit hovers outside of flesh—externally imposed rather than internally awakened. This view mirrors dualistic philosophies that devalue the body and treat matter as morally neutral or even corrupt. But if we affirm, as the Incarnation insists, that spirit and matter belong together—then we must also affirm that the act of union between two lovers can itself be a spiritually potent event, one that invites God not from above, but from within.

To separate soul from seed is to split what was never meant to be divorced. Sexuality, rightly understood, is not merely appetite or reproduction. It is mystical participation in divine creativity. In the intimate joining of bodies, there is also—if treated with reverence and covenant—a joining of essences. Love, trust, longing, vulnerability, even the metaphysical ache to be known and to know—these flow through the act like sacramental waters. This is not just mating. It is invocation. The lovers become co-priests in a temple made of flesh and delight, offering their oneness as a liturgy in which new life may be conceived.

The child, then, is not inserted by God as a postscript to biology. The child emerges from the spiritual current already moving between the lovers. We speak of the “fruit of the womb” for a reason. Fruit implies not just yield, but cultivation. Something tended, cherished, and emerging from the life of the whole tree—roots and branches, sunlight and sap. So too, a child is not merely the result of gametes and growth. A child is the fruit of love’s vineyard, formed as much by spirit as by cell.

This is not sentimentalism—it’s a theology of enchantment. It recovers the idea that human beings, made in the image of a God who creates through Word and Breath, are themselves creators of sacred mysteries. The family becomes not a logistical unit, but a garden of spiritual generation.

To teach that children are merely biological artifacts to which God adds “the soul component” is to flatten what should evoke awe. It’s like describing a symphony as vibrating strings or a cathedral as stacked rocks. True sexuality invites reverence. It insists that something more is happening—something that reverberates in eternity.

We must return to a vision of sexuality not as base instinct to be policed, nor as a clinical process to be managed—but as sacred dance, as covenantal fire, as the fertile moment in which the spiritual and the biological co-mingle like water and wine. Only then can we raise children not as chance combinations of genes but as spiritual inheritances, born from the holy communion of two souls.

Intro to Exile of Sophia

 I will be speaking on the introductory chapter, and more in the future, of Exile of Sophia by Dr. Michael Martin. (You can watch here in the 2^nd hour of my live stream link). This is more of a reflection and doesn’t necessarily promote his thought. In my public work, however, his thinking is clearly sensed, as he has been a great influence on the way I think. His book, Sophia in Exile, represents the final chapter of a trilogy on Sophiology, which, in terms of what that is, is more like a philosophy on how to experience what he would call “the Real.” Dr. Martin wrote this book around the time of the fires at Notre Dame and the emergence of COVID-19. To him, they were symptoms of a much greater problem within the Church that was manifesting. Sometimes things come to the surface or are exposed by God, as it says in Corinthians, “all things are tried by fire.” COVID-19 was the biggest for him. It showed the real cowardice and fakeness of the Church. He makes a valid point on how thousands died without access to the sacraments because of cowardly clergy and makes the point that Jesus would not have waited for the lepers to be COVID-free before he healed them. We are a religion of beating death. There is no doubt in my mind that Saint Damien of Molokai would not have been canonized in a pontificate of the pope calling for safety. He was the one who went fearlessly to lepers to give them Christ. That is what we have signed up for if you are clergy. Unfortunately, Dr. Martin, as well as thousands of others, fled the church of cowards. I personally pleaded with him to stay, not for the sake of his salvation but for the salvation of others. I don’t think I would have ever been introduced to him had not a subdeacon in my tradition done an interview with him. Going back to the problem of why he left, the Church in its cowardice is really a manifestation of great evil that is within. It’s not based in truth, more of an illusion, not really by design, but by a takeover from the archons of this world that have their hands in everything. The Church as an institution lacks the connection to the Real. That is what is going to be obviously the thought of Dr. Martin’s book, and the Real for him has a face; it’s living, and she is called Sophia.

When we hear the word Sophia, it is often conflated with the Gnostic Sophia, which really is of a different nature but in one way is saying the same thing. In the Gnostic myths, Sophia lives in exile or imprisonment. There is a great deal of Gnosticism, and they all have their story of her troubles. Like her, we too seem to live in exile or imprisonment. For us, it’s not just from God but from Creation. Like the Gnostic, we are seeking to return from our fall. This is ever so present in modern Christianity. Like Gnosticism, the world has no value and must be escaped. The escape comes from the knowledge of what Christ has done on the cross. Sometimes there is even the insistence that all you have to do is verbally acknowledge it, and one day you will escape to be with God in the new world of heaven.

Like modern Christianity, Gnosticism provided a formula through gnosis. The secret knowledge or remembering where we come from, as depicted in the Hymn of the Pearl, is the pathway back. In modern Christianity and in Gnosticism, the world we live in is bad or even an illusion. For the Gnostic, it’s the creation of Yaldabaoth, a false god who thinks it is God who has entrapped us. For modern Christians, it’s the domain of the god of this world, the devil. In both cases, it’s a world that is in opposition to what we are, and as such, we either seek to escape it or participate in the captivity.

In the absence of being where we should be, we try to fill the void. Religion works well for this. I often mockingly share the song that some modern Christians sing, “When we all get to heaven, what a day of rejoicing that will be.” This song is filling the void of what should be now. It’s a replacement of the now, the Real, as Dr. Martin would say, and I know in saying that people will be scratching their heads. Are we not supposed to be going to heaven is probably what you are thinking. To that, I would say no, the gospel doesn’t teach you about going anywhere; it teaches about having what you need now. It rescues you from the captivity of a fallen world and gives you the power to take it back and to enter into the Real.

The Gnostics were not the enemies that many Church fathers made them out to be. In fact, if anything, they had an upper hand in understanding reality, but like the modern Christian, they were escapists. The instance of Jesus’ bodily resurrection contradicted their understanding of the material world, the idea that it is all bad. Likewise, the bodily resurrection contradicts the modern Christian’s understanding of escaping this world and going to be with God. The world is not the problem; it’s rather our perception of it that needs to be resolved.

As Dr. Martin points out, our estrangement with the “Real” is twofold. It’s with God and Creation. To understand this better, we have to revisit the mythology of the Garden of Eden. The garden was not just a floral arrangement; it was the very way God was present to Adam and Eve. When they were exiled, they were exiled from this experience of God that came through the garden. As a result, salvation would be a return not to God but back to this Garden so that God could once again be experienced. An example of this could be found in the Temple worship of the Hebrew people. The temple was a reproduction of Eden, and when it was filled with the Shekinah, Sons of God were born into the world (Psalm 2:7).

The Shekinah was God’s presence manifest through creation. It’s what makes Eden, Eden. Without it, the temple is just a building, and Eden is just a floral arrangement. It might come as a shock that in the Hebrew tradition, this experience is referred to in feminine terms. I say it’s a shock because to speak of God in terms of femininity has become heretical. God cannot be a woman, we are taught. God has no gender, the theologians teach us. On the other hand, just about everything we know of God comes from gendered terminology. The very fact the Bible says that we are created both male and female in the image of God is something that is continually theologically erased.

Like the Gnostic myth, Sophia is exiled. The woman is forced to flee. This is very much present in the scripture. You have in Proverbs 8, Sophia (wisdom) being a central figure at the foundation of creation. In the book of Enoch, she is recorded as being exiled from the temple and being the reason for the temple’s destruction. Dr. Margaret Barker, another important scholar, has done a great deal of research on what was considered the original religion of the Hebrews and how it was forced to various parts of the world, including Egypt, a place that remains a central hub for much of the wisdom literature of the Old Testament.

You could even say the Woman in Revelation 12 is the figure of Sophia, who, with her children, is forced into the wilderness. What is all this forcefulness, and why is it happening, or why are we doing it? It is because we have something else in her place. A false Sophia, one that does not want us to consume the red pill. One who wants us to keep up our religious fantasy of another world. One which makes us an enemy to what is right before us.

In the Garden of Eden, our ancestors were given a special vocation. They were called to leave the garden and perfect the Earth by increasing the boundaries of the garden. The garden was their Sophia; it is what gave them God. It even in the narrative made them children of God; it was maternal. They were, in a way, called to find this Sophia in the Earth. Obviously, they failed to do this and found themselves estranged from what could be considered their Mother and God. They were estranged from the Real.

Do you think that it’s a coincidence that in every ancient culture, they sought to spiritualize the world they lived in? This is what we do by nature, but at the same time, we are doing this in a fallen way. We can never do it perfectly. We see this in many of the myths of the Old Testament. The Tower of Babel comes to mind. It was not wrong to build the tower. It was how they built it that was wrong. They did not build with Wisdom, in Sophia. The tower was an abomination because the unity of the people was false. This was the reason why they were divided and their tongues confused. Not as punishment, but so that they could see that their unity was false, that it was not Real.

It would not be until the coming of the Spirit that the curse of Babel was healed and languages were unconfused. This new unity that was given was one in Sophia. One that was returned to us by Christ. In this unity, God is experienced once again in creation in the form of fire. An element that is not given to destroy but to purify. This, to me, is Sophiology—a way to purify how we understand the world, not for purity’s sake but as a way to return God into this world by how we find the Sophia of God in what is created. 

Overcoming Sleep Paralysis

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Sleep paralysis can be a terrifying experience. I know this because I have suffered from it most of my life. In fact, I experienced it last night, but in my case, there was no terror. It wasn’t always this way, but through the years, I have learned to overcome it. I want to share with you the things that can help you overcome it too.

For many people, sleep paralysis is just a neurological condition. For such people, I want to teach you how to deal with it from that perspective. For others, it is a bad spiritual experience. I have had to explore both realities in my life, and in doing so, I have learned to deal with it in both scientific and religious ways. For this reason, I want to help both religious and non-religious people alike.

When sleep paralysis happens to me, my eyes are still closed. I know some of you experience this after opening your eyes. In whatever way, the first thing that happens is that we become afraid, which is normal because we don’t have control. In this fear, the next thing we do is panic or enter a state of despair. Unfortunately, being somewhat still linked to the dream state, such feelings begin to manifest. Our terror becomes our reality as we begin to hear or see frightening things.

The solution to this, speaking mostly to non-religious people, is dealing with the fear. Not controlling our fear is what leads to a state of terror or despair. Consequently, being near the dream state, we become the source of our own harmful hallucinations. The key to dealing with this is to expect the fear and practice dealing with it. Take control of it and don’t let it bring you into despair. It’s natural to be afraid, but you don’t have to let fear become the source of your own misery.

How I propose to do this comes from how law enforcement is trained. They go through rigorous training to help them deal with the fear mechanism that can be overpowering. For instance, they are taught how to deal with a person pointing a gun at a loved one, demanding that the officer drop their weapon. Fear kicks in, and the natural adrenaline flows through the body, making you want to give in to the demands of fear, which would make you want to drop the weapon. They are trained to understand that what they are experiencing is a natural chemical reaction. This reaction is primal, a product of our evolutionary instinct to survive. If they give in and drop their weapon, things will be worse. As a result, they train themselves to think critically and work through their fear. This is what I have also found helpful in dealing with sleep paralysis.

For religious people, this experience of sleep paralysis might be spiritual. The principles for dealing with it are the same. The demon wants you to feel that you are alone or abandoned by God. Once they get you to believe that, they begin to terrorize you. Like the solution above, you need to deal with your fear. You should be afraid; this is natural, after all, it’s a spiritual being. However, you have been given many things to deal with this fear that they cause. The first is believing that you are not alone. The Bible teaches in Hebrews 13:5 that God never leaves you or abandons you. Most of the time, we just need to believe this, and when we do, the demon becomes powerless in tormenting us. The other and most important is from Luke 10:19, which says that these demons cannot hurt you. If you have given yourself completely to Christ, they can’t touch you. When we start putting these truths into practice, you will find the freedom you seek.

It took me many years to find freedom. Most of my problems came from not taking control of my fear. God helped me to do that. In my case, I believe a being was taking advantage of a neurological condition. It spent years tormenting me, and I felt like the Apostle Paul, who I believe experienced the same thing in 2 Corinthians 12. God’s answer to him was that His grace was sufficient. For me, it took many years to learn this, and now I can say with confidence that I have overcome sleep paralysis. This is my hope for you as well.

The Divine Narrative

 

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The Bible, as it has been handed down to us, is filled with errors and often depicts God as a cruel deity. This becomes problematic if one views everything in it as the inspired Word of God. The solution to this issue lies in how one chooses to understand inspiration. The Bible did not fall from the sky, and just because God inspired its writing does not mean that everything in it is of God. The key is to understand the Divine Narrative, which is sometimes found in the flawed presentation of the humanity of the author.

One way to achieve this understanding is to consider Paul's instructions to Timothy about rightly dividing the Word of truth. To do this, one must recognize that there was no single "Word of truth" during the time of Christ. Every Jewish community had its own set of scriptures and its own editors, or "scribes." These scribes divided the word based on the traditions they belonged to, often adding or removing from their texts.

This might come as a shock to some, but editing was considered a sacred duty. Scribes were tasked with removing errors from their texts, guided by their traditions. It might be of a surprise to many, but the  Hebrew scriptures, as we know them, were edited all the way into the 10th century CE by the Jews, primarily to remove elements that Christians used to prove that Jesus was their Messiah. This is well-documented in history. For instance, a 2nd-century Rabbi, Shimon bar Yochai, cursed anyone who used the term "Sons of God" for passages like we find in Deuteronomy 32:8 and insisted it be changed, and it was  it became  "Sons of Israel."

Similarly, Christian scribes edited their texts based on their traditions, adding and taking away. For example, the last part of Mark's Gospel is an addition by a scribe and not the original author. This editing continued until the 4th century when the Church established the canon of scriptures, and it has remained in this form since. Consequently, the work of editing these texts ceased, leaving us with many errors that are easily identifiable.

Returning to the idea of "rightly dividing the truth," now that we know the Bible is a work of editing, we can follow this teaching. While we cannot edit the texts, we can, like the scribes, seek out the Divine Narrative. This involves leaving out or ignoring elements that contradict this Narrative. For instance, recognizing that the instruction in Numbers Chapter 31 to take sex slaves is not of God, and viewing any scientific claims in the Bible as purely the product of the human author.

Just because God inspired the Bible as we know it today does not mean He removed the humanity of the authors. It should be evident what is purely human. The humanity is there for the greater narrative, and it is our duty to sift through the scripture to find that Divine Narrative. Although we cannot use an eraser like the scribes because we have a canon, we can use our traditions of faith and our understanding of God's goodness to discern what is of God. The Divine Narrative is in the Bible if we are willing to seek it out.

Is your God a jerk?

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When I was a child, I recall reaching out to a presence that I had no way to name. I had no religion, but I knew that there was something there. This presence was inviting and did not impose any conditions on me; it was there in a benevolent way. I was only around 4 or 5 at the time, and in my innocence, I assumed it was the loving man at the mall with whom I took a picture. He could see me when I was sleeping, knew when I was awake, and wanted to give me presents if I was good. So, I called it St. Nicholas. In God's sense of humor, I now work at St. Nicholas Church, but that’s not the story I’m sharing today.

 

At some point in my later adolescence, I was told that this presence was the Father, and the face of this Father was the image of Christ. So, I addressed it as such and felt a bond with it. Transitioning into my teens, I was more exposed to ideas about God and came to believe that this being would destroy me if I did not get my life right. This caused me to weep bitterly every night because I did not want this to happen. I knew I was doing things that were bad, but I felt stuck in my wrongdoing and wretchedness. For this reason, my prayer to this being ended each night with, "Please don't give up on me."

 

As I entered adulthood, I began my journey into Christianity and learned about forgiveness, but I still felt the terror of losing this being that I wanted to be with. I would fall into sin, and when I did, I felt like I would be destroyed. I remember one time I made a significant mistake and felt doomed. I cried out in desperation, "Father, please don’t forsake me," and that’s when I heard His voice for the first time say to me, "My son, I will never forsake you." I still did not fully understand, and when I fell into sin again, I felt abandoned. He came to me once more and said, "Look at what you did before. Did I leave you then? Look at what you just did. Am I not here?" He did not want to say it, but I had a strong impression, like knowledge, that He knew I was going to do it again. If He had not said these things to me, I would not be a Christian.

 

As I became more involved with Christianity, I eventually developed the confidence to keep going after I fell into sin. I knew He would always forgive me, so I kept coming back to the path. However, there were times when this thought would creep up on me: "Would I even follow this Christian God if there was no hell?" I could never answer this question. I really wanted to love this God, but I couldn’t. My obedience was still based on the fear of being doomed, and the churches I attended did not help.

 

When I became a Christian, I did not know what Protestant, Catholic, or Orthodox was. I made my way through all these traditions to get where I am today. One thing they all have in common, which did not help my situation, is that they all teach that I will be doomed if I do not believe and act the way they say. Their foundation for this is how they understand the Bible. In their interpretation, it’s universal: do it God’s way, or He will end you, and not just end you, but torment you for all eternity. Basically, God is a jerk. They won’t say that because they all have their strange theology for how God’s love is equal to His wrath and other things to justify a being who we would naturally reject.

 

Sometimes I would justify this "antigod." It affected everything. I was afraid of Him, and I would make other people afraid. I would teach "turn or burn," "obey or you will pay," and then I would speak of a God of infinite love. It was a total contradiction. I could never answer that question: would I follow if there was no hell? I think for about my first 20 years, it was no and yes, but it wasn’t a true yes until I stopped believing in the Bible as I was taught to believe. I began to question and challenge the traditional teachings, and for this, I became the heretic.

 

I think my heresy really solidified when I heard a debate between a Christian apologist and a famous atheist. The atheist asked simple questions like, "Are you okay with ending innocent life, as in children and infants, or sex slavery, which are all things God commands people to do in the bible?" The apologist defended these things simply on the basis that God can do what He wants. I bet if that apologist saw that in a religion not his own, he would rightly condemn it, but instead, he defended it and sounded about as evil as the God he was defending.

 

The way that God is revealed by the human editors of the Old Testament, if you read it literally, makes Him seem like Zeus. Without any help in understanding the Old Testament, you can easily arrive at a God who will destroy you if you don’t do things His way, which includes ending innocent life. Unfortunately, the New Testament is worse in its teaching on hellfire. Jesus says things like, "If you don’t bear fruit, you are good for nothing and will be thrown into eternal fire." How can you love someone if you are living in fear of them at the same time? It just can’t be done. It’s like in this message of Christ: you’re dealt a bad hand, do it this way or else.

 

If I went to my family members and threatened to destroy them if they did not do things my way, someone would call the police. This is basically the mainstream of the Christian message. God wants to destroy, but He has sent Jesus to stop you from being destroyed. How has the message changed? Like the God of Moses, if we don’t do what He says, we are destroyed. It’s the same message made to sound like He loves when He does not. It is a message of control and domination based on fear.

 

One of the most evil teachings that was birthed from this perspective is penal substitutionary atonement. This came from the Middle Ages, and it was theology used to control and manipulate people into religious obedience. The idea is that God is so angry that He needs to punish us but doesn’t really want to, so He sent Jesus to take a beating. Again, if I were to do this, someone would call the police on me if I were to do that to my kid on behalf of the others, but this type of God is normal for most Christians. The problem with this thinking is that there is nowhere in the New Testament where Jesus comes to pay off God’s anger, and it will challenge anyone who thinks differently.

 

This angry God prevails even in my own tradition. We are taught that any deviation from church authority, for example, missing our day of holy obligation, could get us damned. We see this play out in the history of the Church. What happened when there were disagreements? The other church became anathema, and these anathemas were recited in our liturgies. There was even an anathema of the Jewish people. This is historic abuse at the highest level, and how does it make God seem? Like a jerk.

 

In saying these things, I’m not saying I don’t want to be a part of my Church. I love my church, but I think you should not have to fear being critical of the unhealthy depictions of God, which I reject. I think faith in Christ should be presented as something beneficial to people, not something that will lead to destruction if you don’t agree. I don’t interpret hell in the Bible this way and think hell is something that can be better worked out as a doctrine. As it is now, it makes God seem evil. The idea of tormenting or letting someone be tormented is not the action of a Father, no matter how evil that person was. As a father, I would be viewed as evil for treating my children this way. Should we not do the same for God?

 

Judgment is a good thing. For me, it’s the idea of ending evil at the end time and its ultimately  beneficial for the person who caused the evil. This is how I understand God’s wrath, and so did many church fathers like St. John Chrysostom, who taught that wrath is a paternal action and that punishment is a good thing that benefits the one being punished. I think this is the only way to see God, as a loving Father.

 

Going back to that question I asked myself, “Would I follow God if there was no hell?” the answer is yes. Jesus Christ came to set us free from the power of the devil, not the anger of God. This is the gospel of the early church, not escaping hellfire, and this is the message we have preserved in the Eastern Church! Our sin ultimately harms us; it does not harm God. It keeps us from the good things of God, and our sin comes from our entanglement with the god of this world. I don’t want to be a slave. I want to be loved by God and Christ gives me that power, the power to be free. I no longer fear hell and do not believe God is a jerk.

Biblical Evils

 Actions such as sex slavery and the murder of children are undeniably evil, yet they were often commonplace in ancient civilizations. It should not come as a surprise to find such actions depicted in the Bible, sometimes appearing to be divinely sanctioned. However, interpreting these actions as 'evil' requires context. Many biblical stories were written to convey moral lessons, allegories, or theological principles rather than to serve as literal historical accounts. This does not mean the events or people described are not real; rather, it is in the symbolism of their presentation that we encounter God.

If these stories are taken purely literally, it would imply that both the God sanctioning such acts and the people committing them are evil. For instance, the story of Abraham and Isaac is often understood as a test of faith, not as an endorsement of child sacrifice. If interpreted literally, an all-knowing God demanding a worshiper to attempt something immoral would render both the worshiper and God morally compromised.

For those who, like me, are not biblical literalists, these stories are better viewed as symbolic rather than factual. This perspective allows us to focus on the lessons they aim to teach rather than the actions themselves. It also enables a nuanced critique of the text without dismissing it entirely—an approach that, I believe, should be the hallmark of any thoughtful Christian. Come join the conversation: (youtubelink) 

The Heresy of Celibacy

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One of the greatest abuses in Church history is found in the heresy that celibacy is more spiritual than marriage. The foundation of this abuse is based on the teaching of the apostle Paul who taught that celibacy is the preferred state for serving Christ. His point was that someone who is married can’t empty out their bank accounts and move around the world to serve the Lord. His teaching had to do with utility, and it had nothing to do with spirituality. Unfortunately, his teaching continues to be distorted.

One of the greatest examples of distortion in Church history is found in how the Fathers understood the Song of Solomon. The Song of Solomon is a whole book dedicated to the sacred mystery of human love. Instead of seeing it this way, the fathers would allegorize it as a love story about Christ and his church. When they saw it for what it was, they would get in trouble. Theodore of Mopsuestia knew what this book was about, human love, and wanted to get it removed from the canon for this reason. His views were condemned. To see this book as a reflection of human love was condemned.  Married life was just not a spiritual state in the History of the Church, only celibacy.

I could go on with examples, but the fruit of this bigotry has been enshrined in the culture of the modern Catholic Church. For example, I just watched a female Byzantine Catholic monastic go on a Catholic show and tell people she gave up natural marriage for the supernatural call to celibacy. The Eastern Catholic churches have always called marriage a holy mystery, it’s a sacrament, so this was surprising to hear. Her words were an obvious sign of being indoctrinated to a view that thrives in Catholic culture.  

The traditional view of the Eastern Church on marriage is that it is supernatural. The man and the woman receive power to divinize their love through the Holy Mystery. The love is something that has the potential to last forever since it becomes God’s love. This is why remarriage is discouraged. This is why married men that are being ordained make a vow not to remarry after their spouse dies. It’s to honor that divinzed love. This is also why in the traditional Byzantine marriage rite there is no phrase “to death do us part”. The love becomes divine, eternal, this is the purpose of the sacramental reality.

What is sad is that in the culture of the Catholic Church the sacramental reality of Marriage just becomes a form of divine help.  It has no lasting value and consequently it becomes the lesser spiritual path. For this reason, it is for the most part reduced to just a divine contract that ends in death. Obviously, the inclusion of “to death do us part” is based on this. A phrase that oddly enough originates in the protestant tradition.  You won’t find it in the Catholic Church before the advent of Protestantism.

What Catholics need to learn is that the power behind celibacy and marriage, what makes them spiritual paths, is the same. It's our sexuality that makes these paths spiritual. Our sexuality is sacred and how we use it makes our calling spiritual. Basically, Chastity for the monk and the married person is our power. The monk uses their chastity to reveal the angelic state of the coming kingdom through celibacy. In contrast, the married practice chastity so that their sexual act can become divinized love.  The love in the sexual union is ultimately a revelation of God’s love in the world. Whenever this truth is devalued by someone in favor of celibacy, they are  following a false teaching.

The Experience of God

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 I’m going to begin with an experience. Experience is going to be actually my whole theme. I believe it’s an experience that my tradition can offer to everyone no matter who you are, no matter what church you go to, or no matter where you are at in life. Like many people there was a time in my life when I thought I was doing everything right in the world and at the time I thought that there was no more I could do. I was a good person, a believer in the teachings of Christ, and I was waiting, like most people, to get out of here. I was waiting for heaven. The Church for the most part was just my pit stop on the road to the heavenly destination, where I was waiting it out to one day meet God in the afterlife. This is how things were until: I met God here!

There was this place I accidentally wandered into. It was during my honeymoon many years ago. It was the shrine of St. Photius in St. Augustine Florida. You can find it on the main strip where all the tourists are doing their shopping. I was curious to see this Orthodox shrine. I had never seen one before. I wandered in just expecting to see some church art. I had heard of how beautiful Eastern churches were with their iconography. That is not what happened. Instead of art I saw God. I saw God in the beauty. It was unexpected. It was like I accidentally went through a door that I was not supped to go through. I was immediately overcome with emotion and in that experience, there was a message from God. There was no voice, I could feel the words, as if they were imprinted on my soul. The message was: “There is so much more of God to be found in this life”.

You would think that this message would be obvious. this message that there is so much more of God to be found in this life. For me it was not, and I know this is the case for many people because of how we have been trained to understand God. We have been trained to perceive God from a distance. God is always above and beyond and maybe one day we will see him, in the next life.  We keep God far away because that’s the way it’s always been. God is not here, God is in heaven. This understanding began to be unraveled for me as I took the next step in wanting more of the Eastern church, it led me to my church and to my first experience of the Divine Liturgy where I began to see heaven on earth for the first time, to see that God was here.

There was another person who had a similar observation. Some of you already know this story.  There was this Grand Prince of the ancient Rus named Valdimir. He had been a pagan his whole life and was unsatisfied with the religion. He wanted a religion of substance for his people. As the story goes, he sent emissaries to many of the great religions of the world and the one that came back from Eastern churches, who experienced a Byzantine liturgy, had told him that they did not know if they were in heaven or on earth during their worship. His response was: “I want that religion for my people”. This is a common experience for people who come to one of our churches. In that, I inquired why this experience happens and I was told by the priest that Christ is fully present in all our liturgies.

You would think that this would be another obvious fact. Jesus even says in the scripture, “where 2 or 3 gather” I am there. Why was I not seeing the obvious. It was easy to believe that God was in the priest or the preacher, or in the tabernacle but not right here. In the case of the liturgy, it could not be denied. God was here. There was an experience of the heavenly and it was an experience that I wanted more of and all the time. As that original experience that I had revealed, if there was so much more, that so much more can be something that I could have access to all of the time and not just in this place, and for this reason I began a study Byzantine Spirituality, specifically in the books known as the Philokalia, which for us Byzantines is referred often as our 2^nd bible, for it is where we find the spiritual instruction of how we can live the mysteries that we find in the bible. It is also the book that I will using for this discussion.

It took me many years to understand the content of the Philokalia and the reason for this was that I was approaching it with the wrong mindset. I still carried with me the mindset that I had brought with me into the Eastern Church. This is a mindset that I believe that many Christians have. We are trained to believe from the cultural experience of our religion, not the authentic teaching, that God or heaven is something we are to only experience later after we die.  For example, we are taught that our behavior, how we think, how we act, or how we live impacts only the future and not right now. The problem with believing this way is that whatever spirituality that we practice only bears fruit in the life to come and not right now.  

The fathers in the Philokalia were contradicting this kind of spirituality that I had. The spirituality that leads us to find heaven in some other place. What they were teaching was that God was not interested in waiting for you to die in order to have heaven and see him. According to them, God is someone who can be seen now, when learn to make our lives heaven.  The Spirituality that they were offering, which is the spirituality of the Eastern church, is one where we learn to transform what we are so we can begin to experience God right now, not tomorrow, not after we die, and not in some other place.

Going back to my original experience at the shrine. That experience was telling me that God can be found here. When I came to my first divine liturgy that experience was telling me that. What the Philokalia teaches is that this kind of experience of the liturgy is something that to be had all of the time.  In the words of one of the fathers in the Philokalia, St. Symeon the New Theologian, we do not have to wait until the second coming of Christ to see the Kingdom of God. We can see it right now when we learn to experience the uncreated light of God in Creation. He goes on to say that he who sees this light is living the Second Coming of Christ right now.  His point is that we don’t have to wait to go to heaven, we can begin to live in heaven right now.

Obviously, many of you might be wondering what is this light that he is talking about. In explaining this I’m going to take you on a little theological journey that will give you a context for what he says. This journey begins with how we understand God in our Eastern theology. I will begin by sharing something very familiar to us in terms of light, our sun. We know that it’s impossible for us to touch the sun but it’s not impossible for us to experience the light of the sun. The light of the sun is the basis for how we exist in this world, but we know if we were to go into that sun we would be destroyed. Like the sun, there will always be something of God that will be inaccessible to us and unknowable.  We call this God’s essence. On the other hand, there is something of God that we can experience, which we call God’s energies, just like how the light of the sun contributes to our existence, these energies, are the basis for all existence and our experience of  God. St. Symeon calls this the uncreate light, it is through this light that way can know and experience God right now.  

Ok, this might seem like a logical explanation about this light, so how can we see it or why can’t we see it? In this I will be continuing your theological journey going all the way back to the beginning. In the beginning God said, let there be light. This first day as it is called in scripture is where God united himself to creation. This day is the foundation for all things. It’s not a 24hr period, it’s the foundation for all that exists past present and future. It’s a day that does not cease. All the other days of creation proceed out of that day. Think of the Gensis account as God building a house upon a foundation. God being the foundation, the foundation is the first day, the uncreated light that sustains all things.

One of the things that God built upon this foundation was a garden, Eden. The garden was the filter by which this light came into the world, to our ancestors. We know it was there that they encountered God. They were able to see God through this garden experience. There were able to see God naturally through creation and not only see they were given the option to partake of God through creation. They were given the option to have this light within them in a direct way which would give them immortality. They were given the option to eat from a tree that could give them eternal life.

Think about this for a moment. The created world, the beauty of a garden, was the filter in how our ancestors saw God and it was through a created thing in that garden, a tree in which they would receive immortality. We are talking about a place on this Earth. The creation was the natural way that our ancestors were to experience what we call heaven.  A place right here. No other place. As we know God never destroyed Eden after our ancestors fell. That place is still here.  There is place right now in which we can see God and receive immortality by eating from a tree.

Well now you might ask, how do we get there? To get there we have to learn about the vocation that our ancestors received from God. The scripture tells us that God told them to subdue the earth. This often goes into many self-serving interpretations that make the Earth something we use and abuse at our leisure. However, the spiritual understanding is that our ancestors were given the task to complete and perfect the Earth.  In one way they were to extend the boundaries of the Garden of Eden. They were to make the whole Earth Eden, a place where God can be seen and they were to make every tree a tree of life, a tree that gives them immortality.

Now my question for all of you is: When did God change his mind about the Earth? When did the Earth become a place that we escape from in order to go to a place that we call Heaven? It seems obvious to me that the Earth is to become heaven and if it can become heaven, it can become the place that we can encounter God. Now this is what St. Symeon was trying to teach us in the Philokalia when he says that we don’t have to wait until the end to experience God, we need to learn to experience God right now in and through creation.

Again, some of you might say, why can’t we? He makes it sound easy. This is where the understanding of salvation comes in. Salvation as it is understood in the Philokalia is the process of returning back to the experience of God in creation. Salvation is not getting your ticket to go to another place. That’s how it’s often marketed to us. The whole point of a resurrection from the dead, as we say in our creed, is to come back here. To be able to experience God right here is why we are being saved and that salvation begins right now for us, in this place.

Yes, I said in this place. One of things that is often lost in how we understanding our salvation, which is essential for learning how to experience God, is that God is also saving the world.  We have heard this before in the scripture: “For God so loved the world”, “Preach to all Creation” or “The whole creation groans for salvation”. We live in a fallen world. The world was designed for us to experience God in and when our ancestors fell into sin, they brough the world with them. The world cannot be what it was meant to be without them. As a result, God’s plan for salvation does not just involve us but also the world that we live in.

We cannot experience God apart from the Earth. This is how we were created. As I mentioned, Eden was the place where we see God and it’s from a tree that we are to receive immortality.  For this reason, salvation must begin for us from the Earth, as God intended it to be. We are often never instructed in this way. We think it’s just our belief in an idea and we call that idea faith. However, if you are a Catholic salvation for you began from the Earth. Before, I prove this I want to turn your attention to what happened to Jesus on the Cross. On the cross Jesus was pierced and out from his side blood and water flowed out. In every Divine Liturgy this event is repeated. Hot Water is poured into the chalice before we receive communion. During communion we give you that blood and water, which comes from the side of Christ.

The chalice we use, to give you that blood and water mixture, is a reproduction of the greater chalice, which legend calls the Holy Grail. The Holy Grail was the first chalice according to legend to receive that blood and water that flowed from our Lord’s side. Well, that first chalice is not a golden cup like the one we might use in our Liturgy, it was the Earth. The Earth is the Holy Grail and all that it is connected to. The World has become for us once again the place we can see God and it has become the place where we can once again eat from the tree of life because of the precious and life-giving blood of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

It’s not a coincidence that all the feasts in the Eastern church are based on the agricultural cycle.  It’s because the world is to be the natural means by how we encounter God. Those cycles of the moon, celestial alignments, the solstice, and equinox that we base our feats on determine how we can participate in our salvation. They are the foundation for how we can enter into the mystery. They are the parts of garden where we can see God.  There is a reason why in the Eastern church Ascension Thursday should never become Ascension Sunday. There is a reason why we should not move a feast day for the convince of the working class. It’s because we are being saved through the natural world.

If you are still not convinced, ask yourself why the scripture says that baptism saves you. Some Christians are convinced that it’s just a symbol. They believe it’s a symbol of their faith in Jesus Christ. They believe it’s a symbol for being able to have something later on, when they get to heaven and be with Jesus. In the Eastern church the waters of baptism make us a new creation. Water gives us something of God. This is why we call the baptized the newly illuminated servants. The water gives the baptized the ability to see God once again. The right to experience him. Our ancestors lost that vision when they fell. The world became dark. It was no longer the place to see God. God restores our vision once again by using the natural world, the world that He sanctified by the blood of Christ.

One of the things we immediately do after someone is baptized is that we use oil to seal them in the Holy Spirit. We call it chrizmation. In the Western churches it’s called confirmation.  Here again people are often trained to believe that the oil is just a symbol of the Holy Spirit. God did not make the world to be a symbol. As one of our Eastern Fathers said, St. John of Damascus, “the whole earth is the living Icon of the face of God”. It’s the place where we experience God. God uses oil, not our faith, not our belief in a symbol, to give us the Holy spirit. The oil is the natural means for us to experience God. Most people are baptized and chrizamted as infants, there is no way for a baby to understand anything. This is sometimes a belief for the reasons for God parents. It is not the responsibility of a God parent to help you believe in anything, it’s their responsibility to show you by example how you too can experience what you have been given.

The next step in the baptism is receiving the Holy Eucharist. I’m sure you know where I am going with this. In the Eucharist, the bread and the wine, become what bread and wine are meant to be. A way to experience God. As I mentioned earlier, the vocation of our ancestors was to make the world Eden and every tree a tree of life. God’s original plan for eating was not just way for us to live another day. Eating was a way for us to experience God and eating from the tree of life would have given us the chance to live forever. This understanding about food as way to experience God has been lost to us. We pray over our food, but we don’t know why. We think it’s just a way of being nice to God. The act of Eating, not just the prayer before it, needs to become a prayer. That’s how food should be eaten. Food is a way for us to experience God. I guarantee if we practice and teach others to eat like that, we would be much healthier people.

Going back to what I was saying about the Eucharist and why we get it right after we are chrizmated. In baptism we are illuminated with the ability to see God here, through chrizamtion, we are empowered with the experience God through creation, and now through the Eucharist we receive the right to Eat from the Tree of life. The eucharist is the fruit of the tree of life. It why we are going to be resurrected after we die, Its why we are going to live forever. The cross is the new tree of life that God planted in the world and this understanding is the basis of what you will find in every Divine Liturgy.

The Divine Liturgy has been called many things. Heaven on Earth as the emissaries of St. Vladimir proclaimed. How Christ is fully present as that priest told me. Sometimes it’s called a sacred place. I’m sure you might have heard many things.  A precise description is to understand the Divine Liturgy as Eden. Eden is heaven on Earth, Eden is how God is fully present, and Eden is a sacred place. During the worship the Church becomes Eden that place where is God can be seen and experienced. The Church, as  Eden, also becomes the place where we can eat from the tree of life. The Eucharist is the fruit of the tree, the source of our immortality. Its how God communicates to us everything that God is. The Eucharist is the source of that uncreated light that I was speaking of and as we receive it , our bodies become the source of the light.

This understanding is why you will not find Eucharistic Adoration in the Eastern church. There is nothing wrong with doing that. That’s a way that people express their love for Christ. It’s how they adore him. I like to think of the idea of Eucharistic adoration in the Eastern church as Christ adoring us.  It’s not his intention to make a home in the bread and wine. He wants to make a home in us. The fruit of tree of life is meant for us to eat so we can have everything of God, it is not meant to remain as fruit. We are the destination of God’s affection. We are the ones being glorified. God does not want to remain in the tabernacle. He wants us to be his tabernacle. This understanding is an essential aspect of Eastern spirituality.  

When we eat from the tree of lie, when we receive the Eucharist, we have everything of God in us. The goal is to learn to adore God within. We know how to adore what’s outside. I have been to Eucharistic adoration in the Latin church, it’s not complicated to do this. However, many of us have no idea how to adore what is within us. Going back to the question how do we see the uncreated light saint Symeon makes it sound easy.  This is the purpose of the Philokalia.  As I mentioned earlier it’s our 2^nd bible. With it you will find a spirituality that is called Hesychasm. Hesychasm means the pursuit of stillness. In this matter, it’s the stillness necessary for us to adore and to experience what we have been given.

Hesychasm is the foundational spirituality of the Byzantine rite. What’s unfortunate is that this spirituality has been lost to modern Eastern parishioners. We know about things that come from this spirituality. Like the prayer rope, the Philokalia, and the Jesus Prayer. However, many are not aware that whole liturgy and how it was developed was based on this spirituality. We get a glimpse of this in our Tone 8 resurrection troparion, where we sing “you accepted burial for 3 days to free us from our passions”. Some Eastern churches did not think that this made any sense, so they changed it. I’m sure they thought: What does Christ’s burial have to do with freeing us from our passions? What are passions? This was language taken right out of the Philokalia and because it did not make sense they changed the word to sufferings.

To give you further context for this spirituality that leads to the experience of God I want to take you back to its origins. Hesychasm was a spiritual movement that began in the monasteries of Mt. Athos. This movement wanted to reform the liturgy of the Byzantine rite. This reformation took place around the 1300s. The ideal in this liturgical reformation was that the liturgy must lead to Hesychia, which means stillness, that meeting place between us and God. That stillness that is necessary for experiencing God. As we are going to see there is a reason why going to some of our liturgies is like going to a gym. This has to do with the spirituality of Hesychasm as I will be discussing.

As I mentioned, going to some of our liturgies is like going to a gym.  This is based on the understanding that the body prays. Not just the mind and because the body prays , it too needs to be healed , it too needs to be transformed. For the fathers of our tradition, it just as important that your body experiences Hesychia as your mind. We are not used to thinking of our body in this way. The only other religion in the world that teaches to pray with their body is Hinduism. That is what yoga is. A prayer done with the body. As they teach in yoga the posture of the body is a way to experience God. This is the logic behind why we stand, bow, or do our metonia. This is why you feel like you have been to an aerobics class when you leave our worship. These aerobics are the way we are healed, the healing necessary for experiencing God.

The body prays. Going back to what I was saying  about experiencing God in creation, the body is the natural instrument for encountering God here. These eyes were designed to see God here. We have the same eyes that our ancestors had. They saw God in the garden. That’s what our senses were made for:::they were made to encounter God with. This is why are liturgies involve all your senses. Seeing your body in this way sometimes makes people uncomfortable and if it does for you consider what the apostle Paul said, he said your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit.  This was no metaphor. Your body was made to encounter God with. That’s why temples are made, they are places to experience God in.

Now that I have your attention on your body being the place to experience God, we can look at the question of why it’s difficult to worship. Why the posture. Why it feels like a gym. Why is this so and how does it heal.  To do that I want to look at a prayer of the body that we are familiar with and have done without maybe ever seeing it as body prayer. I am talking about Fasting. Sometimes we have fasted just because our churches do it and not know why. Fasting in the spirituality of Hesychasm is very specific, and it has to do with that mysterious word that we heard earlier, the passions and in order to understand that word I will need to take us back to the garden of Eden again.  

In the garden our ancestors before they sinned were in perfect harmony with that vision of God in creation. Their minds were illuminated with that vision of God. When they lost that vision their mind was broken. It was darkened. They were to find their satisfaction in that vision alone and not being able to do it they tried to find satisfaction in everything else. This is what we are dealing with right now. Even though we have given back this access to this vision of God through the holy mysteries God has given us the task of healing our own humanity. He did the hard work but wants us to do the application. This as we are going to see is what fasting is. It’s a form of healing and what we are being healed from is what we call the passions and one of the greatest passions can be found in our stomach.

Remember how I said that eating should be a form of prayer. A way to connect to God. That was how eating was before the fall. Now, for the most part our eating dominates how we live. All our troubles began for us in how we ate. Our food now becomes  our lord and we its slaves. Some days it’s all we think about. Being hungry is not wrong. That is natural but letting our desire food dominate our whole day and behavior is.  How many of you have sat in church and could not wait to get out to get to lunch. There is no need to pious about this. It’s been every one of us. This is a passion for which Christ was buried for 3 days. He wants to this power to die with him in that tomb, this is what fasting does, and when it dies we can see God in us. As long as that power is there it obstructs our vision of God. You can’t be committed to God and Burker king. He wants to be the King.  

Fasting has many uses but its greatest in the Eastern church is to put our passions to rest so that we can experience God in the body and for you people who have fasted for some length of time you can testify that your experience of God was different when you fasted. This is also the point of our feasts. The feast is enjoying now the food you eat with God in celebration. Feasting is not a return to what fuels our passion. If you fasted from chocolate for forty days just to gorge yourself on Hershey bars you have missed the point. Food is not the bad guy, its how we eat that is bad.

As some of you know fasting is just as much work for body as it is for the mind. Our stomach says eat and the mind says ok lets do it and it begins the journey to appease the stomach. The reverse is just as true. We start thinking about our favorite food and stomach says ok I will drive.  There is a harmony with our mind and body that goes along with our struggle against the passions. This is where I’m going to diverge somewhat from focusing on encountering God with the body and talk about the mind.

When I use that word, mind, I am not talking about the ability to reason. I’m not talking about a brain. The brain is part of the body. According to the fathers, the mind is the eye of the soul.  The mind is what drives this body. The mind is what was darkened after our ancestors sinned. The mind is what needs to purified in order to see God in creation. To behold God is the natural state.  If your mind is not pure the body cannot experience God properly in the world.

According to the fathers in the Philokalia the mind is malfunctioning. The energy that needs to focus on God is scattered after other things. The example that I like to give in this comes from my own experience. The Wi-Fi router in my home is often subject to a dozen devices at once. I have 8 children so this has always been an issue. As you might have guessed this causes problems for the device that you want to use because it is not connecting properly. This is how it is with the mind. The energy needed to experience God with the mind is scattered to other things, which are also referred to as passions.  

One of the greatest passions of the mind, and this will surprise some of you, is daydreaming. We are taught this is a good thing and healthy but for the fathers it is not. It’s not healthy because it takes our mind to some other place rather towards God. To demonstrate this truth, I will tell people to go sit down in silence to pray. Try to remain in that moment with God. The first thing that will happen is that you will become bored or unsatisfied. Your mind will then take you on a trip to some other place. It can even be in a religious place. You might be sitting down with Jesus and the apostles but the truth is you will not be sitting with God. What you have done is created your own version of God with your day dreaming, an idol, a God that wont make you bored. The true God you will leave behind because you were not willing to face that suffering.

There is another way to think of our daydreaming and how unhealthy it is for us. Think about what happens when you are driving an automobile while doing it. I’m sure all of you that drive can recall a time when you have driven a few miles down the road and realize, “how do I get here”. You were daydreaming. Day dreaming is the number one cause for auto accidents, and I know this because my wife works with auto insurance.  When we drive we need to learn to practice not to day dream and to keep turning our mind back to the road. This as we are going to see is the same principle for how we are taught to pray in the Eastern Church, bringing our mind back to God in the silence, that Hesychia, and Fathers call this practice Nepsis, or Watchfulness.

Watchfulness is kind of like fasting for the mind. What you are doing is paying attention to what is going on in it. It doesn’t matter if it’s a good thought or a bad one. St. Evargious the Solitary said that we need to make our intellects deaf and dumb during prayer so that we can pray. This might sound strange. Many people are not taught to pray this way. What he is talking about is drawing those energies of the mind back to the source. As I was saying earlier, we have been given all of God in the holy mysteries. Jesus is fully within us. There is no need to make up ideas or images about him in order to reach him. We have him.

You will find when you begin to do this there will be great difficulty. One of the tools used for this difficulty is what is known as the Jesus Prayer. Many people know about this prayer as just a prayer. For the spirituality of the Eastern church it’s more like a surgical tool. It’s used as a counter or a replacement for the mind wanting to focus on other things. The prayer is used to draw your mind back to the source. This is why we do it with repetition and why we have what is called a prayer rope. In saying the prayer, we make the mind, and the body focus on what we have within us. In doing so we began to heal the mind and body.

Now I just mentioned that the prayer uses mind and body. Circling back to the idea of bodily prayer there is an understanding that the body and the mind must enter a state of Hesychia together in order to experience God properly.  This is obviously the purpose of the Jesus prayer and prayer rope, and also the postures in the liturgy, but also extends to the very act of breathing and other postures. Typically, people are taught when they are praying the prayer to inhale “lord Jesus Christ son of god” exhale have mercy on my a sinner” You will also find the in the Philokalia various postures for prayer. The whole body is to participate because the whole body was meant to experience God.

You will find that there is a great deal of diversity on how this is carried out in the Eastern Church but the principle is the same, which is to achieve Hesychia, to be healed. In this regard, I have found St. Nikodemos as having the most effective teaching. His method is not for everyone, especially if you have health issues. What he said was to go find a quite place sit erect with head bowed and to inhale and hold your breath in while saying the prayer(which is a few seconds), “lord Jesus Christ son of God have mercy” and then to exhale. He said as you inhale say the prayer with will all your mental might. He uses the example of someone drowning in the ocean. Someone who is drowning and sees a boat far a way says “help” with all their energy. He says to do this and don’t exhale until you know you’re heard. Doing this for about 20min should jump start your mind to where it needs to be. I have used this method of healing when my mind has been overwhelmed with other things and it brought it right back to God.

What he said might seem extreme and not for everyone. You will find a great deal of diversity of practices in Hesychasm and with that I tell people that much of what you will find won’t be for you. When approaching the spiritual texts like the Philokalia you have to see them as medical journals. In a medical journal you might find various doctors talking about the same sickness and how to heal it. Some of what those doctors say might not work for you but others will. The idea is healing. In this case healing the body and mind so that it can experience God in the world.

Healing is the  propose behind all the spirituality of the Eastern Church. We need to be healed in order to experience God. Our Father St. John Chrysostom emphasized this when he told us that the Church is to be a hospital. Hospitals heal people in the present. What a hospital does not do is prepare people to die. That would be a hospice. That saint never made any indication that the church was to be a place to prepare us for the next life. A church needs to help us experience God right now. This is what the Eastern Church does, this what her spirituality of Hesychasm accomplished for us.

God wants to be with us right now. Not tomorrow and not in some other place. We might go to be with God after we die but he doesn’t want to wait for the end for you to experience him. This is why he sent Jesus Christ into the world. Jesus gives us the power to experience God right now. This why the Christian religion is different from every other. In just about every other religion God is met at the end of the story. Jesus gives us the power to meet God right now. He restores to us access to God through creation. He restores to us what is natural through the Church. He gives us back the experience of God.

In closing I want to draw us to the words of St. Theophane the Recluse that has been repeated amongst many of the fathers. he said, “ Learn to make the very air you breath an experience of God”. Some have considered this as metaphor, but the spiritualty of the Eastern church makes this a very real statement. In the scripture there are 2 instances of this. There is when God breathed in man the breath of life and when Jesus breathed on the apostles and said receive the Spirit. We do this also in baptism. If you were to go to one of our baptisms the priest breathes on the person giving them the spirit. Breathing was the natural way to receive the Spirit and through the spiritually of the Eastern church our every breath can become for an experience of God. 

More Poems by The Deacon

  More Poems by The Deacon  and my translation of a poem by St. Theophan the Recluse  

find them all narrated here: (YouTube link)                                                           

                                                                            

                                                           Descend

by Theophan the Recluse

(My translation of the Russian)

Descend from your mind into your heart, For now, your thoughts of God are worlds apart. God Himself seems to linger outside, Leaving your prayers and practices denied. While you remain in your mind's domain, Thoughts will whirl like snowflakes in winter's reign, Or swarms of mosquitoes in summer's heat, Until your heart and mind finally meet.

 

The Fallen Ones

By Jacobs stair they did come,

Passing by old Inanna’s heel.

Seizing Enlil’s broken cape,

Looking upon sacred space.

 

In eyes of green they did see,

A destiny of silted beings.

For in them you did confide,

The only place you now hide.

 

Shouting vows of contention,

A prince they did crown.

By shadows they now retreat,

Into chains forever defiant.

 

Meeting Eve

Down in the garden's grace, My heart began to race. Your eyes like lilies beckoning, Your scent of roses echoing.

Draped in Queen Anne’s lace, A tulip’s vow you did trace. Upon your hand, a silver vine, From your lips, the balm of lupine.

We embraced like daisies' chorus, The asters danced before us. The lilacs lay whispering, of love like Hostas glistening.

Garden Wedding

In the shadow of thy tower,

A garden wedding begins.

The great oak bears witness,

As tortoise and squirrel play.

 

The bells now are ringing,

Rose petals tossed by wind.

Day gives way to night,

As true love never ends.

More Theological Poetry

 

More theological poetry by the mysterious person known as the deacon. Also on the YouTube list, I have added a reading of William Blake and Vladimir Solovyov. You can listen to the reading here for all the poetry: (link to YouTube)

The Patriarch

Near the uneven hill,

Where giants now sleep,

An altar made of stone.

 

Among the ancient oaks

Beneath that Hunter's belt,

There the promise made.

 

The Patriarch proclaims,

By the Ancient of days,

We will never be forgotten.

 

 

In the Heart

So much more you say,

So much more to this life.

At once I am dumbfounded,

Am I not standing upon the mountain?

 

Winds come lay my foundation bare,

My sweet Earth open now the deep,

Oh, great fires come claim your timber!

Still, you are in none of these?

 

“Here I am” you whisper gently,

Not here, not there, or beyond me.

Not in the winds, the earth, or the flame

For its in the heart where you call to me.

 

The Cry

By the waters of Babylon I laid weeping,

Day and night crying out in misery.

No one to care, no one to comfort me.

Alone, abandoned, without solace.

 

The void began to bubble forth, it came forth to claim me.

Crying out with Trepidation I said, “please do not forsake me”

and again in great dread, “Am I not the work of your hands”

 

Then over the waters over that great ethereal space.

With mirth and jubilation you cried out, “My son I will never forsake you”

And again in exaltation, “my hands and work you must now be”

 

 

 

 

 

That Hidden Place

You say not to go to the heavens, nor to go under the earth.

For it is within you that you say I must be found.

By what great mystery do you make me your habitation?

You are greater than all things, above and beyond everything.

 

Does the bear say to the mouse I will sleep in your den?

When does the sparrow make room for the eagle to lodge?

Show me when a lion who goes to feast with the rooster!

 

In that inner door is where you stand and knock,

I hear your voice calling for me to come in,

You wait to welcome me into that hidden place

There you have prepared our feast, a table of many delights.

 

The Cave

In a cave you came to us, the darkest of dens.

Home of the spider, the newt, and bat.

Not one crevice could they hide,

From the brilliance of your divinity o Son of God

Among those creeping things there you found me,

Something you should have crushed beneath your feet

Then there were those who learned from the stars,

They brought costly gifts, but this was not me.

I was lost in shame. like Gomer hidden in disgrace

Yet, like the prophet you made me yours.

You made more costly than any treasure,

You made me shine brighter than any star!

Behold, I have become the   your nativity!

Every Crumb

What have you done, what is this within me?

I am no longer the same, my members now most radiant.

I have become all-light, the city built on a Hill.

My residents all wear now the garments of luster

No more shadows found on the wall!

The funeral parlor now is a place for feasting!

The long winged bat no longer has a place to play!

You have not held back, you given me everything:

Every morsel, every crumb, every drop-you are mine.

There is not one place where you are not,

My body, the empty closet, now the wardrobe of your divinity!

 

A Foolish God

In that old trash den, in the great rubbish pile.

There I was discarded and you came to me and said,

“You are my mine, my treasure, my peril without price”

Astounded was I at this, Amazed but I could not understand.

 

What value is there in moldy bread?

What could you exchange for a broken dish?

Who sees a wilted flower and puts it into a vase?

 

They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

So, tell me when did you lose your vision?

For truly you are a foolish God for loving me.

Since you're so insistent, I give you everything I have.

 

Lord of Madness

What is this in my hidden chamber,

Once empty, now filled with precious stone.

 

Who puts all such wealth in an open pot filled holes?

What kind of banker invests when there is no return?

Who sees a sinking ship and jumps on?

 

What marvel, unmerited, and undeserved.

Is there no logic to your love?

The apostle was the greatest of sinners,

 

Clearly, I have surpassed him in my deeds.

Why give to me without reserve?

 

All of your children must be deranged,

Truly you are a Lord of Madness,

For love me so recklessly and give to me without measure