This Temple Still Lives
It is interesting to consider how the variety of theological emphases in the Christian traditions tend to create different spiritual cultures.
Where there is an emphasis on the Incarnation, especially with a concentration on the thought that Christ was a man, there tends to be a focus on social and political activity. Jesus Christ is interpreted as merely a man, but a prophet, calling his followers to live out their lives seeking justice for the poor and humble. There is value in social action, but where it lacks a firm grounding in true Christian spirituality it becomes little more than secular social work.
On the contrary, in those communities where there is a grave distrust of ‘the world’, Christ is often understood especially in terms of his divinity. A dichotomy is created between that which belongs to the heavenly realm, to the spiritual, to the Christian, and that which belongs to the world, to the flesh, to unbelievers. In such communities there is a retreat from action in the world. This view, which is widespread even among Orthodox, fails to allow for the working out of the Christian life ‘in the world’, even while Christians are called to resist being ‘of the world’.
In my own Evangelical background there was a strong focus on the passion of our Lord. The weekly communion service was essentially a remembrance of one who had died. There was no sense that he was present with us because practically speaking our faith had not progressed beyond the events of Good Friday. Nor is this only a perspective built on hindsight because even at the time there were many of us in this community who understood that we were a people of the crucifixion and not of the resurrection. This emphasis tended to produce a rather weak faith that could only assert that Christ died for our sins, but was unable to express what difference it made in the Christian’s life.
Of course the Orthodox tradition has a fuller, more comprehensive and more balanced understanding of theology. No single aspect should be allowed to dominate all others. This is one of the very positive reasons for having an annual calendar which leads us step by step through the history of salvation in Scripture readings, hymns, prayers and other devotions. But just as it is those Christian communities which allow for the greatest degree of individual opinion in theology and spirituality which tend also to have an unbalanced faith, so we find that if we are isolated from the theology and practice of our Orthodox Church we will also run the risk of developing an unbalanced Christian faith.
My experience of Orthodoxy had brought me from being stuck at the foot of the cross to being in the upper room or on the road to Emmaus. Orthodoxy taught me to live as one of those celebrating and experiencing the resurrection of the Lord. After more than ten years I had learned that it was not enough to repent for sins committed, but it was necessary to walk in the newness of life. I had progressed from Good Friday to Resurrection Sunday. Each Sunday, especially since being made a subdeacon and serving beside my priest at the altar, I have received the Body and Blood of Christ for ‘remission of sins and life everlasting’, being convinced that participation in the Holy Communion truly means that I am receiving the life of Christ, the Incarnate Word into my own being.
Yet after twelve or thirteen years of such experience, after having received the life-giving mysteries hundreds of times, there was still something unbalanced in my spiritual life and experience. Reflecting on the experience of the Apostolic community I see now that I was in some sense as they were in the days after the resurrection. They were no longer filled with that fear and confusion which had incapacitated them in the hours after the crucifixion, but they were nevertheless still a community turned rather in on itself. They met in the upper room, and continued in supplication. They found a replacement for Judas Iscariot. But they were still not that dynamic group of people which would turn the world upside down in just a few short years.
They had not yet reached the experience of Pentecost, and in some sense I also had not fully understood the meaning of Pentecost in the Orthodox context. After more than ten years of being Orthodox I am not sure that I had really come to terms with the role of the Holy Spirit. There is so much emphasis on the resurrection in Orthodoxy, and not least in the celebration of the resurrection each Sunday, that a special activity of the Holy Spirit seemed rather superfluous. Of course he facilitates the offerings of bread and wine becoming the Body and Blood of Christ. He is the one who renews our human nature in baptism, and we ask that the Holy Spirit will descend on the one baptised in a personal Pentecost by the sacrament of chrismation.
But day by day, year by year, it is very easy to live without a clear sense of the activity of the Holy Spirit. It seems all to easy to pray, and to fast, and to participate in the Liturgy, all the while referring to the Holy Spirit at the right times but not living in any meaningful relationship with him. And this is how I was living. In a real sense as disadvantaged as the protestant examples given at the beginning of this article.
Perhaps I had hesitated to think too much about the Holy Spirit because of the distortions of pneumatology or the theology of the Holy Spirit which are found in the Pentecostal movement. This tends to be very emotional, and too often confuses the movements of the human psyche with the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. In my own experience I have seen that there can be a discontinuity between personal holiness and the practice of so-called gifts of the Spirit. This seemed to me, even before I became Orthodox, to disqualify much of the teaching of this community.
Yet after more than ten years of being Orthodox I needed to look at the theology of the Holy Spirit again.
The occasion was a growing sense of my own complete inadequacy as an Orthodox Christian. I was trying hard to be a good Christian. I prayed a little, fasted a little, studied a little. Yet it seemed to make no difference. Even my participation in the eucharist, though I believed it was indeed for remission of sins and eternal life, seemed to refer to some future experience of sinlessness rather than to any real change in my present experience.
On top of this personal sense of weakness, I was overcome with an awareness of the humbleness of my Church community and the fragility of its existence in the country where I was born and belong. Why do so few people seem to want to become Orthodox in the United Kingdom? Why did all of my carefully developed plans for mission seem to fall flat? What was the point of it all if even being Orthodox I was unable to transform the weakness of my humanity, and see fruitfulness in my ministries?
I wonder if this is the experience of those whose theological emphasis is focused on the resurrection, as mine was? Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! But what does that mean for me? Certainly if Christ is not risen then there is no value in the Christian life at all. As St Paul says, our faith would be vain. But if Christ is indeed risen then how is this more than a simple historical fact? It is easy to construct a protestant theology which describes how the death and resurrection of Christ gives us the hope that in the future we might also join him in heaven, but this is not what the Orthodox tradition offers those who commit themselves to Christ. Yet after years of effort it seemed to be all that I was able to hope for.
There were several different threads which allowed me to find a way out of this rather despairing sense of failure, and they were all essentially ways back into the patristic and spiritual tradition of the Orthodox Church. I cannot remember which ones came first and it doesn’t really matter. But one of them was the account of the spiritual conference between St. Seraphim of Sarov and Nicholas Motovilov. This entire document bears very close study and it is not so long that it should not be read and reflected upon by all Orthodox Christians. Seraphim, a Russian saint, was asked what the aim of the Christian life was, and he replied:
“Prayer, fasting, vigil and all other Christian activities, however good they may be in themselves, do not constitute the aim of our Christian life, although they serve as the indispensable means of reaching this end. The true aim of our Christian life consists in the acquisition of the Holy Spirit of God.”
This passage was important to me because it suggested that rather than concentrating on the apparent success or failure of various Church activities, rather even than concentrating on how well I performed various ascetic practices, I needed to concentrate on becoming a spiritual man. I needed to develop a relationship with the person of the Holy Spirit so that above all things I desired to live in that Spirit.
I needed to re-order the way I lived the Christian life. Just as the Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath, so prayer and fasting and all the other activities in which I engaged, however weakly, needed to be understood as means of helping me find the place where I could meet the Holy Spirit, rather than as things which would help me earn merit towards God.
With this reversal of my understanding of my Orthodox spirituality I have now found that prayer, fasting and service become opportunities for blessing and growth, not for judgement and condemnation. I do not pray because I must and will be considered a failure if I don’t, rather I pray so that the Holy Spirit might find a place in my heart. If I am unable to pray the first hour I can still pray the Jesus Prayer, and if I am prevented from a time of quiet in the morning I can find time at lunch and in the evening. But I do not judge myself, there is no point, I know that I am weak and sinful, and God knows me even better than I know myself. But I pray because I desire to find the Holy Spirit, and having found Him and praying in His strength I am able to somehow find Him still more. As the Scripture says, to him who has even more will be given.
If I learned that the Christian life is all about the Holy Spirit, then I also had to learn that His presence is a gift. Trying to please the Holy Spirit in my own strength is as useless as trying to please our Heavenly Father, or Jesus Christ our Lord in my own strength.
It was especially our prayers in the Agpeya which taught me this lesson. It is one which applies to personal spirituality as well as service in any ministry. Of course the prayers are all Trinitarian, but that can easily become just a matter of form. Nevertheless over a period of time I was struck by the fact that while asking for forgiveness of sins and other blessings in these prayers there was often a request for the gift of the Holy Spirit.
So in the First Absolution of the First Hour we pray:
"..grant us to pass this day in righteousness…through the gift of the Holy Spirit…"
And in the Psalms we pray at each hour there is the passage,
"..and do not take your Holy Spirit away from me.."
While in the Gospel of the Evening Hour we read that Simeon was ‘in the Holy Spirit’.
I came to see that it is not possible to live the Christian life without the Holy Spirit, and that the Holy Spirit was a gift. If the gift was given then all things were possible, but if the gift was witheld for whatever reason in the will of God, then all we could do was wait patiently and hopefully. A friend of mine once taught me that God does not call us to be victorious, but he does ask us to be obedient.
Looking at my life I could see that I had set my eyes on activity rather than on acquiring the Holy Spirit, but also that even while seeking to live with the Holy Spirit in mind it had been easy for me to continue to live in my own strength and seek the Holy Spirit on my own terms.
This thought that the Holy Spirit is always a gift has helped me to see that the success of my life is not my problem, it is God’s. If He wants hundreds of people to become Orthodox in my home town then He will give all that is necessary to accomplish such service. I cannot make it happen. It is a gift according to God’s will. I cannot make myself be a successful Christian. I cannot simply promise to pray all the Hours, or fast strictly at every season of fasting, or learn the Psalms, or knock on every door in my street and tell people about Christ. These are all good things in their place, but my own activity must always begin with the gift of God.
If I do not feel the presence of the Holy Spirit then there is a little rule of prayer and fasting which is suitable for a weak and humble Christian such as I am, and which we can all follow in patience. If the Holy Spirit is present then all things are possible as He makes Himself known. But not only is the Christian life all about the Holy Spirit, but it all depends on Him coming as a gift of Christ.
If my little Church does not grow, then that is God’s problem, not mine. It is His Church after all. If I am weak and sinful then this is no surprise, God must send His gift to me if He wants me to be transformed. For myself I will plod on, but I know myself, I am not surprised by myself, but when the Holy Spirit comes then everything is possible. I am saved the despair of knowing that I am sinful and cannot change, because I now know that I could never change in my own strength and it was a waste of time even trying. But to seek the Holy Spirit and to ask for and wait for His coming as a gift, that changes everything.
Finally, I was struck by the place of the Holy Spirit in the writings of St. Severus of Antioch. In one of his works he had cause to spend some pages describing the nature of our humanity. His aim was to show that our human nature has not changed since the Fall of Adam, rather that we have lost the life of the Holy Spirit who is the breathe which God breathed into Adam.
‘And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.’
Severus, following St. Cyril and other Fathers, interprets this to mean that the Holy Spirit was the life of mankind when Adam was created. This presence of the Holy Spirit was a gift to elevate our human nature and grant us immortality and incorruptibility. When Adam and Eve sinned, the Holy Spirit withdrew from them, and while remaining in their human nature they were now without the fulness of life and became as we are, mortal and corruptible, first in a physical sense but also in a moral sense.
These passages struck me because I finally understood that the Holy Spirit is not an optional extra, but He gives us that life which allows us to become fully and properly human as God intended. The seeking after the Holy Spirit is not something only for especially committed Christians, but is necessary for us to be Christian, and necessary for us to become truly human.
We only become the people we are called to be with the gift and presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives. Nothing else matters, or rather everything else becomes properly ordered and possible only with His presence. But we cannot demand His coming. It is a gift. We can only prepare ourselves for His coming.
The Apostles waited in the Upper Room. They were in prayer together. They had hope. But they hesitated to do anything without His coming. And when Pentecost was fully come the Holy Spirit descended upon them and nothing was ever the same.
I hope that in my experience I am now in some small sense one of those who have received the Holy Spirit, and having received Him as a gift I am now able to serve as He leads. I am not a Calvary Christian, I am not even an Empty Tomb Christian. I hope that now I am a Pentecost Christian, because this is what makes sense of the Cross and the Tomb.
