Today Fr. Anthony covers Chapters Seven and Eight from Dr. Zachery Porcu's Journey to Reality,  "The Life of the Church" and "The Bible and the Church."  Enjoy the show!

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Journey to Reality
Chapters Seven and Eight
You are What You Do (Including Eat)
10/29/2025

As creatures, we were made malleable.  It was built into our design so that we could grow towards perfection eternally.  While this is a characteristic of the entire cosmos – and every member of it – it has a special purpose for us.  We are the shepherds, farmers, and priests of the cosmos.  The system is designed so that as we become better, we are able to shepherd or grow the cosmos from one made good – that is to say made both beautiful and beneficial into one that is even better; that is to say even better and more beneficial.

This malleability is built into us.  Alas, we have left our true home, so that malleability leads to malformation.

Let’s talk about the malleability.  The way Dr. Porcu puts it is that we become what we do.  Much of my own work reflects on the way our rituals form us.  These rituals are embedded within a culture, and living within that culture shapes us into members and bearers of it.

A few weeks ago, we talked about how we live in a materialist, secular, and consumerist culture.  Living in it means that we automatically participate in its rituals.  These develop within us a certain way of thinking, acting, and relating to other people, God, and our environment.  How could it not?

The unfortunate thing for us is that our primary culture is imperfect and reifies its imperfections into our way of being.  I propose that the answer is not really to actively oppose it – as in some kind of culture war – because doing so before we break out of its conditioning is just going to ingrain its patterns more deeply into our hearts. 

Rather, we must find a new way of living.

This new way of living should come with its own rituals that will gradually get enough traction to lessen the hold that the majority culture has on us and replace it with its own. 

To the extent that we must participate in the old rituals, we should reframe our participation in a way that resonates with our new life rather than our old one.  We have to give them new meaning, so that, eventually, even these old ways of doing things can work with our new rituals to deepen the hold that our new way of life has on us and on our minds and how we relate to God, other people, and the environment.

Some rituals, such as pornography, fornication (i.e., sex outside marriage), and driving slowly in the left-hand lane on the expressway, cannot be redeemed and so they have to be avoided.

It will take discernment to figure out how to best engage in this process, so this way of life should involve developing a community that is all focused on the same sort of new life.

Now let’s go through chapter seven, “The Life of the Church.”

Quotes for discussion:

“[Y]ou don’t have to do anything, but if you want to become something, you have to participate in it.” (77)

“Sacramentally, the purpose of attending church services is to participate in a higher spiritual reality.” (70)

“[N]othing is ‘just’ physical.  Objects and actions have intrinsic, spiritual meaning.  Everything is participatory… [I]f the physical and the spiritual can’t be  separated, then imitation is always participatory.  … You can’t participate in something physically without also participating in its spiritual meaning.” (72)

“[As Orthodox Christians, our] goal is to imitate, and therefore participate in, a spiritual reality through the physical ritual.  And the spiritual reality that sacramental Christians are trying to imitate through their liturgy is nothing less than heaven itself…. This is why sacramental Christians call their liturgy the “Divine Liturgy.”  To participate in it is also to participate in the exact same cosmic liturgy that the angels perform around the throne of God…. [W]hen you step into a sacramental church space that’s correctly imitating the heavenly liturgy, you are stepping into a small bit of heaven itself – you are participating with the angelic powers in a higher spiritual reality.” (73)

“Sacramental Christianity is not just about doing a particular set of actions; it’s a whole way of life.  One way to describe this life is as participation in what the Church calls “liturgical time.” (75)

“[T]o be sacramental is not merely a matter of attendance, nor is it merely about thinking a certain way or performing certain ritual actions; it is a lifestyle… [G]oing to church and participating in the sacraments is about living out the idea that the physical and the spiritual are bound up together, and that you encounter them together through participation – not just in church, but in everything you do and are.” (77)

“You can’t become healthy by sitting at home and reading a lot of articles about health.  You don’t become a member of a family by skipping family gatherings in order to sit at home looking at pictures of past family events.  If you want to be a part of something, you have to live it.” (77)

“[Y]ou don’t have to do anything, but if you want to become something, you have to participate in it. And in sacramental Christianity, the thing you’re participating in is the higher spiritual reality of the arche’ Himself.” (77) 

Chapter eight, The Bible and the Church

 “[T]he Bible is not the source of Christianity.” (77)

“The Bible is not a scientific of historical document in the particular sense that modern people mean this.  It’s important here to distinguish between truth and fact.  Facts are those things that are objectively verifiable…. But even though facts are verifiable…, they have no deeper meaning.  Truth, on the other hand, includes facts but goes beyond them to encompass the deeper meaning of reality itself.” (77)

“As modern people we tend to care only about facts [read whole section] … even over meaning.” (77)

“There are plenty of mistakes and errors in the Bible that have been thoroughly documented… The Bible is about truth, and truth is higher than fact. (78)

“From the very beginning, ancient Christians recognized three levels of biblical interpretation: the literal, the moral, and the spiritual (what they called the typological). (78).

“But how do you know which passages in the Bible have a literal meaning and which don’t, or which have both?  How do you know what the correct typological meaning is?” (81)

“To really read the Bible with the mind of the Church requires that you have a certain kind of formation – not just intellectual but spiritual.” (84)

“And just as you can’t really understand the Bible’s true depths without participation in the life of the Church, so too the whole life of the Church [resonates with] imagery from the Bible.”

“The Bible… is not merely read or memorized, but lived and experienced.  Or, to put it another way, being reconnected with the arche’ is not something you do only in your mind.  It’s a new kind of life, and it must therefore be lived. 

Questions for Discussion

What are some of the new rituals that a commitment to living the Orthodox Way gives us, and how do they help transform our thinking and way of relating to others?

In addition to pornography and fornication, what are some of the rituals that you believe work against our new way of life?

What are some of the things that we have always done that can be given new meaning and help us become better Christians?

Are you concerned that the book claims that there are errors in the Bible?

Luke 16:19-31

Fr. Anthony reflects on the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus, revealing how our blindness—born of sin and a materialist worldview—turns the world and one another into mere commodities. Yet when we learn to see with love and humility, tending creation as God’s garden, we rediscover beauty, grace, and the feast of life already set before us.

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The Gospel of Lazarus and the Rich Man
Homily – gardening in love

It is hard for us to live the way we should.  From our time in Eden to now, we have failed, and the consequences to our hearts, our families, and our world have been disastrous.  The world groans in agony.

One of our challenges is that we do not see things as they really are.  We do not see their beauty and we do not see how they are connected.  Instead of seeing things as both intrinsically good and perfectible, we evaluate them based on what they mean for us; what we can get from them.

We see through a mirror dimly, in part because of our personal sin, and in part because our corporate worldview is fallen.  The two work together to blind us to the world and opportunities for grace.  There is this idea that cultures that do not have a word for something, say for instance a specific color, then they cannot see it.  Their visual system will receive the requisite frequencies for that color, but it will not match any concept within their minds, so it either gets mislabeled or simply missed altogether.  This was certainly the case with the Rich Man in today’s parable – somehow he missed seeing Lazarus and the opportunity for grace a relationship with him would have provided.  Moreover, he and his community – here represented by his brothers – had missed the point of the entire religion that they claimed to be a part of.  And Abraham says that even a great miracle – a man rising of a man from the dead – would not be enough to restore their sight.

Humility is the root virtue of discernment; and in humility, we have to take it as a given that we are in may ways just like the Rich Man.  And I say take it as a given, because if it is true, then we will automatically mislabel – in this case meaning justify – our misperceptions and the gaps in our vision.  The Rich Man missed the purpose of his riches and his calling to serve the man at his doorstep; more than that, he missed the very purpose of his life; the thing he was put on this earth to do.  We are like Him and his brothers – and we claim to know the truth of the resurrection.

The Rich Man and his brothers had the same calling that all of us have.  This is the calling given to us at the beginning; we talked about this yesterday.  We were designed – made as God’s imagers - to bring out the best in everything and everyone; to heal those that are hurt and to build up those who are already well towards perfection.  But instead of this, our fallen materialist worldview and our sin combine, for example, to get us to think of things as objects and ourselves as consumers.  We want to know what we can use things for and what we can get out of people. 

One of the results of this is that our souls are starving from - a lack of grace.  We feast sumptuously on commodities, but cannot see the more real and and much more vital meal God has put before us.  We feed our bodies, but take no thought of the food required for our souls.

Again, let’s go back to Adam and Eve.  Think of how they fell.  One of the ways to understand their fall (from St. Nikolai Velimirovich) is that they turned the thing they were meant to tend – the garden – into a commodity; from something that deserved respect and the greatest of care to something that was useful primarily as food.  Even the thing God told them not to eat became a commodity to them: they wanted what it offered.  And remember what they learned?  That it “tasted good.”  What a loss.

Hear me well:  Adam and Eve were meant to eat the things that grew in the garden, but the availability of food was really just a side-effect (what economists call a “positive externality”) of being a good steward.  They got it all wrong when they put what they wanted from the garden before their love for it.  Instead of tending the garden, they tended to themselves.  They forgot about beauty; they forgot about connectedness; they forgot about service.  And so all the fruits of the garden became completely unavailable to them.

We are so much worse than they were; our commodification of people and things in this world knows no end.  We are always looking for an angle; looking for the best deal.  Looking for how things do or do not fit into our plans.  And because the materialist worldview is fallen and because selfishness is a sin, we do not see grace nor the many opportunities God has given us to multiply it in this world.  And so we starve in a world of plenty. 

Let me give you a concrete example.  Marriage was given to us in the Garden.  It was meant to bear fruit, and this fruit was meant to be both physical and spiritual.  But men should not love their wives because they hope for something physical in return, they should love their wives because they want to help nurture them towards perfection (but I am not speaking of marriage but of the Church).  If we cannot see this here and in our marriages, how will we see it in the world?

Christ does not love us because He wants something from us.  He does not sacrifice Himself for us in hopes of getting help with His plan to restore beauty to this world.  As we become perfect as God is perfect, we will help Him with this plan; but He sacrifices Himself for us because He sees the potential beauty within us and wants it to grow.  He does it because He loves us.

We have to stop looking at one another as things to be used, things that either bring us pleasure or pain; that are useful or irrelevant.  We have to see one another the way God sees us.

[More on Blindness: Commodification leads to a lack of proportion]

Surely one of the ways we have cursed ourselves through our blindness is that we cannot see the beauty that emanates from all of God’s creatures; the potential for grace that is present in every moment and every encounter.

Why is this so hard?  Why are we unable to enjoy the fruits of God’s love for us?  Why don’t we see things the way they are?  Why couldn’t the Rich Man see the grace that would flow from helping Lazarus; why could he and his brothers not understand the deeper meaning of the Law and the Prophets?  This blindness really is a curse; it pulls us further away from our purpose and robs us of the joy we were meant to have and share.

There are so many examples in our lives where we are blind to miracles.  Yes, the problems are there, but they are so minor compared to the miracles!

This even happens in Church.  I bring this up because it is the Eucharistic Feast and the Church that gathers around it that is most permeated with grace.

And yet, in many communities, parish life becomes a magnet for discontent, and a forum for judgment and complaints.  I pray it not be so here.  There are very real issues that parishes must deal with – things like how best to evangelize, what sorts of projects should be focused on, and how limited resources like space should be used.  But our automatic inclination – even here where God’s grace should flow most abundantly – we treat these things as objects about which we disagree with the natural inclination for polarization, rather than an opportunity to grow collectively in discernment, in earned harmony, and in love. 

The Orthodox internet is often more perverse. Every aspect of church life becomes something to be analyzed and debated, objects to market for or against… and it all threatens to turn the celebration of God with Us into a series of political or ideological positions that can be analyzed and judged … I do this all the time; I suspect some of you do, too.

We have turned even the Church, the vessel of everything good and true, into a commodity, something to be judged, to be measured, to be evaluated like some product on a grocer’s shelf.

Is it any wonder that we do the same thing with our spouses, our children…our enemies… the beggar on our doorstep?

Conclusion:  Love without reservation

My point is not that the things that attract our attention in this way are not important or that they should not be discussed.  Going back to the example of the garden, food is important.  If we don’t eat, we die.  But Christ reminds us;

“Do not be anxious about what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Life is more than food, and the body is more than clothing.” (paraphrase of Matthew 6:25).

God is right here with us, working miracles in our midst, and we miss them by focusing on His height (“Oh, is that Jesus; I imagined he’d be taller.”)

Let’s not get distracted.  Let’s love without reservation.  Let’s love without expecting anything in return. 

Let me repeat the irony; if we tend this world – this garden – in love, we will receive what we need – the necessary commodities, if you will, in return.  As the Lord says in almost the next breath, if you really love, if you really give of yourself without reservation, then “it shall be given unto you in return; a good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over…” (St. Luke 6:38).

And again in St. Matthew (paraphrase of 6:33-34); “seek first God’s kingdom and his righteousness, and all the things you need will be given to you as well.”

The beggar is not an obstacle to our enjoyment of live – nor is our alleged enemy.  They are not objects to be judged in this way at all.  They are the cosmos, in need to God’s grace – and we are called to be its steward, the priests who minister them towards healing and perfection. 

Let’s open our eyes and our hearts to beauty and feast on the abundant grace God has surrounded us with; the feast of grace here in the Church, the feast of grace that is achieved when we love our neighbor, and the feast of grace that God blesses us with when we tend to the needs of the world.

This talk was given at St. Nicholas Orthodox Church (UOC-USA) in Charlottesville, VA.  In it, Fr. Anthony presents Orthodoxy's sacramental view of creation and uses music as an example of how the royal priesthood, in Christ, fulfills its commission to pattern the cosmos according to that of Eden.

My notes from the talk:

I’m grateful to be back in Charlottesville, a place stitched into my story by Providence. Years ago, the Army Reserves sent me here after 9/11. I arrived with a job in Ohio on pause, a tidy life temporarily dismantled, and a heart that didn’t care for the way soldiers are sometimes told to behave. So I went looking for an Orthodox church. I found a small mission and—more importantly—people who took me in as family. A patient priest and his matushka mentored me for six years. If anything in my priesthood bears fruit, it is because love first took root here.

Bishops have a sense of humor; mine sent a Georgian convert with no Slavic roots to a Ukrainian parish in Rhode Island. It fit better than anyone could have planned. The Lord braided my history, discovering even ancestral ties in New England soil. Later, when a young man named Michael arrived—a reader who became a subdeacon, a deacon, and in time a priest—our trajectories crossed again. Father Robert trained me; by grace I was allowed to help train Father Michael; and now he serves here. This is how God sings His providence—melodies introduced, developed, and returned, until love’s theme is recognizable to everyone listening.

Why focus on music and beauty? Because they are not ornamental to the Gospel; they are its native tongue. Beauty tutors us in a sacramental world, not a “God of the gaps” world—where faith retreats to whatever science has not yet explained—but a world in which God is everywhere present and filling all things. Beauty is one of the surest ways to share the Gospel, not as salesmanship or propaganda, but as participation in what the world was made to be. The Church bears a particular charism for beauty; secular beauty can reflect it, but often only dimly—and sometimes in ways that distort the pattern it imitates. Beauty meets the whole human person: the senses and gut, the reasoning mind, and the deep heart—the nous—where awe, reverence, and peace bloom. Music is a wonderfully concrete instance of all of this: an example, a symbol, and—when offered rightly—a sacrament of sanctifying grace. 

Saint John begins his Gospel with the Logos—not a mere “word” but the Word whose meaning includes order, reason, and intelligibility: “All things were made through Him.” Creation, then, bears the Logos’ stamp in every fiber; Genesis repeats the refrain, “and God saw that it was good”—agathos, not just kalos. Agathos is goodness that is beautiful and beneficial, fitted to bless what it touches. Creation is not simply well-shaped; it is ordered toward communion, toward glory, toward gift. The Creed confesses the Father as Creator, the Son as the One through whom all things were made, and the Spirit as the Giver of Life. Creation is, at root, Trinitarian music—harmonies of love that invite participation. 

If you like, imagine the first chapter of Genesis sung. We might say: in the beginning, there was undifferentiated sound; the Spirit hovered; the Logos spoke tone, time, harmony, and melody into being. He set boundaries and appointed seasons so that music could unfold in an ordered way. Then He shaped us to be liturgists—stewards who can turn noise into praise, dissonance into resolution. The point of the story is not that God needed a soundtrack; it is that the world bears a pattern and purpose that we can either receive with thanksgiving or twist into something self-serving and cacophonous. 

We know what happened. In Adam and Eve’s fall, thorns and thistles accompanied our work. Pain entered motherhood, and tyranny stalked marriage. We still command tools of culture—city-building, metallurgy, and yes, even music—but in Cain’s line we see creativity conscripted to self-exaltation and violence. The Tower of Babel is the choir of human pride singing perfectly in tune against God. That is how sin turns technique into idolatry. 

Saint Paul describes the creation groaning in agony, longing for the revealing of the sons and daughters of God. This is not mere poetic flourish; it is metaphysical realism. The world aches for sanctified stewardship, for human beings restored to their priestly vocation. It longs for its music to be tuned again to the Logos. 

Christ enters precisely there—as the New Adam. Consider His Theophany. The Jordan “turns back,” the waters are sanctified, because nothing impure remains in the presence of God. He does not merely touch creation; He heals it—beginning sacramentally with water, the primal element of both life and chaos. In our services for the Blessing of Water we sing, “Today the nature of the waters is sanctified… The Jordan is parted in two… How shall a servant lay his hand on the Master?” In prayer we cry, “Great are You, O Lord, and marvelous are Your works… Wherefore, O King and Lover of mankind, be present now by the descent of Your Holy Spirit and sanctify this water.” This is not magic; it is synergy. We offer bread, wine, water, oil; we make the sign of the cross; we chant what the Church gives—and God perfects our offering with His grace. The more we give Him to work with, the more He transfigures. 

And then Holy Friday: the terrible beauty of the Passion. Sin’s dissonance swells to cacophony as the Source of Beauty is slandered, pierced, and laid in the tomb. Icons and hymns do not hide the scandal—they name it. Joseph and Nicodemus take down a body that clothes itself with light as with a garment. Creation shudders; the sun withdraws; the veil is rent. Liturgically, we let the discomfort stand; sometimes the chant itself presses the dissonance upon us so that we feel the fracture. But the dissonance does not have the last word; it resolves—not trivially, not cheaply—into the transcendent harmony of Pascha. On the night of the Resurrection, the church is dark, then a single candle is lit, and the light spills outward. We sing, “Come receive the Light from the unwaning Light,” and then the troparion bursts forth: “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death…” The structure of salvation is musical: tension, longing, silence, and a resolution that is fuller than our peace had been before the conflict. 

Here is the pastoral heart of it: Christ restores our seal. Saint Paul says we are “sealed with the promised Holy Spirit.” Think of a prosphora seal pressed into unbaked dough; the impression remains when the loaf is finished. Sin cracked our seal; everything we touched bore our corruptions. In Christ, the seal is made whole. In Baptism and Chrismation, that seal is pressed upon us—not only on the brow but on the whole person—so that our very engaging with the world can take on the pattern of the Logos again. We do not stop struggling—Paul’s “what I would, I do not”—but we now struggle inside a music that resolves. Even our failures can become passing tones on the way to love, if we repent and return to the key. 

This is why the Church’s common life matters so much. When we gather for Vespers and Liturgy, we enact the world’s purpose. The Psalms give us perfect words; the Church’s hymnody gives us perfected poetry. Music, rightly offered, is Logos-bearing—it is rational in the deepest sense—and love is the same. Music requires skill and repetition; so does love. Music benefits from different voices and timbres; love, too, is perfected when distinct persons yield to a single charity. Music engages and transfigures dissonance; love confronts conflict and heals it. Music honors silence; love rests and listens. These are not analogies we force upon the faith—they are the way creation is built. 

The world says, “sing louder,” but the will to power always collapses into noise. The Church says, “sing together.” In the Eucharistic assembly, the royal priesthood becomes itself—men, women, and children listening to one another, matching pitch and phrase, trusting the hand that gives the downbeat, and pouring our assent into refrains of "Lord have mercy" and "Amen." The harmony is not uniformity; it is concord. It is not sentimentality; it is charity given and received. And when the Lord gives Himself to us for the healing of soul and body, the music goes beyond even harmony; it becomes communion. That is why Orthodox Christians are most themselves around the chalice: beauty, word, community, and sacrament converge in one act of thanksgiving.

From there, the pastoral task is simply to help people live in tune. For families: cultivate attentiveness, guard against codependence and manipulation, and practice small, steady habits—prayer, fasting, reconciliation—that form the instincts of love the way scales form a musician’s ear. For parishes: refuse the twin temptations of relativism and control; resist both the shrug and the iron fist. We are not curators of a museum nor managers of a brand; we are a choir rehearsing resurrection. Attend to the three “parts” of the mind you teach: let the senses be purified rather than inflamed; let the intellect be instructed rather than flattered; and let the nous—the heart—learn awe. Where awe grows, so does mercy.

And for evangelization in our late modern world—filled with distraction, suspicion, and exhaustion—beauty may prove to be our most persuasive speech. Not the beauty of mere “aesthetics,” but agathos beauty—the kind that is beautiful and beneficial, that heals what it touches. People come to church for a thousand different reasons: loneliness, curiosity, habit, crisis. What they really long for is God. If the nave is well-ordered, if the chant is gentle and strong, if the icons are windows rather than billboards, if the faces of the faithful are kind—then even before a word is preached, the Gospel will have begun its work. “We no longer knew whether we were in heaven or on earth,” the emissaries of Rus’ once said of their time at worship in Hagia Sophia. Beauty did not close their minds; it opened them to truth. 

None of this bypasses suffering. In fact, beauty makes us more available to it, because we stop numbing ourselves and begin to love. The Scriptures do not hide this: the Jordan is sanctified, but the Cross remains; the tomb is real; the fast is pangful. Yet in Christ, dissonance resolves. The Church’s hymnody—from Psalm 103 at the week’s beginning to the Nine Odes of Pascha—trains us to trust the cadence that only God can write. We learn to wait in Friday night’s hush, to receive the flame from the unwaning Light, and to sing “Christ is risen” not as a slogan but as the soundtrack of our lives.

So: let us steward what we’ve been given. Let us make the sign of the cross over our children at bedtime; let our conversations overflow with psalmody; let contended silence have a room in every home; let reconciliation be practiced before the sun goes down. Let every parish be a school for choir and charity, where no one tries to sing over his brother, and no one is left straining alone in the back row. If we will live this way, not perfectly but repentantly, then in us the world will begin to hear the old pattern again—the Logos’ pattern—where goodness is beautiful and beauty does good.

And perhaps, by God’s mercy, the Lord will make of our small obedience something larger than we can imagine: a melody that threads through Charlottesville and Anderson, through Rhode Island and Kyiv, through every parish and prison and campus, until the whole creation—long groaning—finds its voice. Let God arise. Let His enemies be scattered. Christ is risen, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life.

Today Fr. Anthony covers Chapter Six from Zachary Porcu's Journey to Reality, "Sacramental Being."  (FWIW, he still doesn't buy the idea of something becoming a spiritual battery as batteries work seperate from an active power source and nothing is separate from the presence of God). Enjoy the show!

Luke 7:11-16 (The Widow of Nain)

At the gates of Nain, the procession of death meets the Lord of Life—and death loses. Christ turns the widow’s grief into joy, revealing that every tear will one day be transformed into the eternal song of alleluia.  A "by-the-numbers" homily - enjoy the show!

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This was an encounter between two forces: death and the very source of life. We know how this encounter always turns out. Life seems so fragile (war, disease, accidents, violence) and we seem doomed to die.

What happened (Jesus brought the dead back to life)

Focus briefly on three parts of this Gospel reading: the procession, the grief of the mother, and how it ended.

The funeral procession.  How we do funerals.  Preparation for it.  Psalms.  Preparation of the body.  Funeral service(s).  Burial.  The movement of the person from one list in our daily prayers to the other. Nine-day prayers.  Forty-day prayers.  Annual prayers.  Often with koliva or a special bread.

The grieving mother.  Do not weep.  “Blessed are those who mourn.”  Jesus Himself, always in the Spirit, wept at the death of Lazarus.  Do not weep “like those who have no hope…” (I Thessalonians). Repent of the sin that leads to unhealthy tears; and that repentance requires that we live knowing that we may never have another chance on this side of a funeral to mend a relationship.  Tears of honest grief are cathartic, as are tears of outrage at the absurdity of living in a world where death is so prevalent.  But let those tears flow in the knowledge that as outrageous, ignoble, and offensive as death is; that our tears of sorrow are being turned, as we sing in the funeral service, into the song “alleluia!”  And that is how I want to conclude...

How it ended.  This was an encounter between two forces: death and the very source of life.  Who won?  And who won when death took a man captive and found that it, instead, it was forced to encounter God?  Who won?  It was no real contest!  As we hear from St. John Chrysostom on Pascha: Christ-God annihilated death!  In a world that was made and is governed by the source of Life, death place is temporary, a consequence and concession to our sin – sin which itself is, again through Christ, only temporary.  It is holiness and life that endures forever.

Conclusion. That is the side we have chosen: we reject sin and we reject death.  We have intentionally chosen the side of holiness and of life.  It seems as though our relationship with life is so vulnerable – to sickness, to violence, to sudden catastrophes; but in the only reality that matters in the end, it is quite the opposite.  It and all its associated grief, anxieties, traumas, and pain are products of this world, doomed to end when it is remade in glory. 

Again, we have intentionally chosen the side of life.  Let’s live it as it was meant to be lived, not in fear of death but in the joy of the One who has through death defeated death and who desires us to live well both now and into eternity.    

 

Luke 8:5-15.

Faith is a living seed sown by God, but it cannot survive in the air of ideology or emotion—it must take root in the heart. Fr. Anthony calls us to cultivate this inner soil through the ancient disciplines of the Church so that our faith might stand firm and bear fruit a hundredfold.  Enjoy the show!

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Filling all things…
Journey to Reality
Chapter Five: Sacramental Thinking

St John 14: 1-7.  Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also. And whither I go ye know, and the way ye know. Thomas saith unto him, Lord, we know not whither thou goest; and how can we know the way? Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me. If ye had known me, ye should have known my Father also: and from henceforth ye know him, and have seen him.

St. Basil the Great (On the Holy Spirit).  We understand the “way” to be the road to perfection, advancing in order step by step through the words of righteousness and the illumination of knowledge, always yearning for that which lies ahead and straining toward the last mile, until we reach that blessed end, the knowledge of God, with which the Lord blesses those who believe in him. For truly our Lord is a good way, a straight road with no confusing forks or turns, leading us directly to the Father. For “no one comes to the Father,” he says, “except through me.” Such is our way up to God through his Son. ON THE HOLY SPIRIT 8.18.

 “Modern, westernized people tend to think about the world from the starting point of physicality.  The physical world, as we would say, is the primary reality… It is the objective, measurable world on which we can all agree.”  Page 50 of 142.

The assumption of materialists is that if a thing cannot be measured, then it is unprovable, a matter of opinion, AND of lesser importance.

The natural world is everyone’s baseline.  Religious or spiritual people have an added category, that of the “supernatural,” but as long as we operate in the material paradigm, these are the things that BY DEFINITION cannot be measured and are thus kind of optional.  Belief then becomes a way to stand up and assert that there are some things that are important that cannot be measured directly.  “I believe…” is our assertion that there is a supernatural reality and that it is well-ordered and that there are supernatural outcomes that should matter to us:

·      Forgiveness of sins

·      Sacramental marriage (vs. an agreement or contract)

·      Eternal life

When we talk about religion, it is often in materialist terms.

·      What good is it (for health, family, society)?

·      What does it cost in terms of time and money?

·      Does its system make sense?  E.g. Juridical vs. Therapeutic vs. Holistic Healing

But this worldview can only take us so far.  It “misses the mark” when it comes to understanding the world and how it works.

An irony:  the materialist world may allow us to see things objectively, but not truly.  I am playing with words here, but it points to the difficulty.

Objectivity refers to the quality of being unbiased and fair, making decisions based solely on facts rather than personal feelings or beliefs. It is often considered essential in fields like science and journalism to ensure accurate and impartial reporting or analysis.

Objects have attributes that can be measured.  As a social scientist, I was taught that we have a poor understanding of something if we cannot put a number to it and that if we took enough measurements, we could explain everything.  Omniscience – or godhood – then is a matter of having enough data and the computing power to run the numbers.  Omnipotence involves the ability to manipulate everything towards a desired outcome.  This is no longer just the stuff of science fiction. 

This is another one of those areas where claims are being made for technology that should not be made.  We can rightly question double-predestination, but what will keep us from doing the same thing as we grow in material understanding and power?

A step in the right direction is to recognize that there is a moral dimension to the world.  But the problem is that it cannot be measured.  Outcomes can be measured, but their values can only be asserted.  This is why both secular philosophers like Nichze and religious ones like C.S. Lewis and Fr. Seraphim Rose claim that this kind of worldview leads to nihilism and the assertion of will. 

Religious and spiritual people who believe in the supernatural will then say that God (or spirit, or Arche) is the solution to this problem.  Again, this gets us heading in a good direction, but it usually keeps within the materialist worldview.  Again, which system makes sense, agrees with what I prefer, has the best agape meal, and so on.

But it really is strange to come at God in this manner.  All we are doing is taking the “God of the Gaps” concept and applying to morality and value.  This is like looking at the world through a two-dimensional, black and white filter.

We can do better.  Let’s see how our ancestors did it.

They did not see the natural and supernatural as separate.  It was just “the world.”

Some things were visible and some things were invisible.  Just as we cannot see radiation, atoms, and gravity know them to be part of reality, so it was with our ancestors for the invisible things. 

“This idea that the physical and the spiritual are not seperable has a few important implications.  If we say that the physical and the spiritual have to go together, then what we’re really saying is that there is a spiritual quality to everything physical, and a physical quality to everything spiritual.  This means, among other things, that physical objects and actions can have intrinsic meaning.” (Page 53 of 142)

The example of two bisecting lines.  A Cross.  There is a story behind it, and that gives it subjective meaning, but there is more to it.  The things that are described in that story create meaning.  The cross is part of something primal and real it has “cosmic significance” (ibid).  And this is true regardless of whether people recognize it as such (example of vampires).

Another way of describing this older view is as “enchanted” (vs. disenchanted). 

Another way is that we are part of a grand story.  Stories are excellent at conveying meaning.  This is why some stories are said to be true even though they are fiction.  This is complete nonsense to the materialist mind.

What about objectivity?  Isn’t this view biased?  Isn’t it subjective?

It certainly is biased.  But it is only subjective because our perception of the world is incomplete and often wrong, and we really do assert our wills to create and share meaning. 

We have to go beyond thinking about things primarily as either objective – meaning things that can be measured, or subjective – meaning things that cannot. 

A refresher on objective vs. subjective:

Pizza.

·      Objectively, it has bread, sauce, and topics of a certain type and consistency and spices that affect the olfactory system in certain measurable ways.  This is seen as what the pizza IS.

·      Subjectively, we prefer certain kinds of bread, sauce, topics, and spices.  This is our opinion about the pizza. 

·      We can argue about what belongs on a pizza or how it should be prepared, but it’s easy to come to an agreement on what the pizza actually is. 

The problem with this kind of a dichotomy is that it turns value and meaning into a matter of opinion and not only does that lead to disaster – it doesn’t describe the way the world really is.

Why disaster?

Disagreeing about pizza can lead to arguments and bringing home a pizza one person sees as valuable and another doesn’t may lead to temper tantrums; but what if the thing being described is something like human life or someone else’s freedom? 

Why is it wrong?

Because everything has intrinsic value.  And this is because it has being through it’s connection to the source of value – the Arche.’

Personal Knowledge

Another step in getting us to where we need to go is to look at knowledge that is gained personally, from the inside. 

But even in relationships, we miss the mark.  Vices and virtues affect how well we can know things and people.  An angry person is going to notice – and even create – things in people and their behaviors that stoke their anger.  Humility allows the person to be open to the truth.  Vice clouds our vision.

“The practice of virtue is, therefore, an essential element in seeking knowledge and the ultimate truth of things.  Why?  Because reality is participatory.  Or, to put it more simply, if you’re a bad person, you’re also going to be a bad friend.  If you’re jealous, resentful, petty, or arrogant, your going to have a hard time building a relationship with anyone to the extent that those impulses control your life.  To have better relationships, you have to be a better person.  And if Truth itself is a Person, you’re only going to be able to know Truth to the extent that you’re able to have a relationship with Him.” (Page 61 of 142)

In summary: the physical and spiritual world are inseparable.  This gives everything meaning.  We learn that meaning through participation; this involves both intellectual and moral growth.  How can this work?  Tune in next week!

Some questions: 

·      How is personal knowledge more than just data?

·      How do we keep from pretending our subjective opinions are illumined?

·      How does anyone know how clean their mirror is or how true their sight is?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

St. Luke 6:31-36
The Gospel’s “Golden Rule” reveals more than an ethical ideal—it unveils the way God heals His creation. Fr. Anthony shows how practicing mercy, even toward our enemies, transforms hearts and communities, turning the parish itself into an ark of salvation and mechanism of the world’s perfection.