We now come to the second to last post in this series on Kallistos Ware’s The Orthodox Way. In this post, I will be discussing the second half of his chapter, “God as Prayer,” in which he discusses what he considers to be the four qualities of the active life of a “traveler on the Spiritual Way.”
A Change of Mind
Repentance marks the starting point of the journey. The Greek word, metanoia, primarily refers to a changing of the mind. Far from being seen in mostly negative terms, Ware says that repentance is really a positive. It is the beginning of a re-centering of our lives on God, and thus marks a “waking up” from what we can call a drunken stupor of sin. It is the beginning of being spiritually clear-headed, what Ware calls watchfulness, so that you are able to be truly present where you are. As Ware states, “All too often we are scattered and dispersed; we are living, not with alertness in the present, but with nostalgia in the past, or with misgiving and wishful thinking in the future” (114).
Ware points out that this is the same sentiment C.S. Lewis echoes in The Screwtape Letters, when he speaks of how God wants people to attend to two things: “to eternity itself, and to that point in time which they call the Present. For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity. Of the present moment, and of it only, the humans have an experience which [God] has of reality as a whole; in it alone freedom and actuality are offered them” (114).
Repentance and watchfulness leads one to have a growing sense of discernment, where we are able to learn the difference “between the evil and the good, between the superfluous and the meaningful,” and between fantasies inspired by the devil and true creative inspirations from the Holy Spirit. Finally, there is a growing awareness of the need to guard the heart and to “war against the passions.” Ware emphasizes that the passions are not evil in and of themselves, and therefore they don’t need to be killed. Rather, they are, in their natural state, untamed and corrupted, and therefore they need to be tamed, educated, and used positively. Simply put, they don’t need to be suppressed as they need to be transfigured.
Through Creation to the Creator
The next thing Ware discusses is the contemplation of God in and through nature. As he states, “The contemplation of nature commences when I open my eyes, literally and spiritually, and start to notice the world around myself—to notice the real world, that is to say, God’s world” (118). This contemplation of nature, though, shouldn’t be understood in some scientific, analytical sense. It isn’t just a “figuring out how the gears work,” so to speak. To contemplate nature means “to become aware of the dimensions of sacred space and sacred time” (118). It means to appreciate the “thisness” of particular things, persons, and moments. As Olivier Clement said, “True mysticism is to discover the extraordinary in the ordinary” (119). It means to see all things, persons, and moments “as signs and sacraments to God” (119).
This might at first seem contradictory. After all, most consider “mysticism” as some sort of flight from the natural world. Yet that mindset divides God’s creation into two levels of “secular” and “sacred,” and assumes that to be “spiritual” means to denigrate the natural and retreat from the “secular” world. Ware, though, rejects that mentality. He states, “We are not to restrict God’s presence in the world to a limited range of ‘pious’ objects and situations, while labelling everything else as ‘secular.’ We are to see all things as essentially sacred, as a gift from God and a means of communion with him” (120).
This actually reminds me of my reaction to the Divine Liturgy when I first started attending the Orthodox Church. There was something beautiful and holy to the chanting and singing in the liturgy. So much so, that (and I know this sounds odd) but I started hearing the liturgy in everything I listened to. I heard it in Led Zeppelin; I heard it in classical music; I heard it in all kinds of music. For me, the Divine Liturgy wasn’t a separate, pious event I experienced once a week. It permeated my reality to where the “secular music” I listened to became a vehicle for contemplation of God.
From Words to Silence
The contemplation of nature will eventually lead to contemplation of God Himself. Yet God is ultimately “beyond nature,” and so contemplation of God ultimately is a matter of negation, what Ware calls the apophatic approach. The things in nature might get you to the door, so to speak, of the contemplation of God, but once you walk through that door, you leave nature behind, in the sense that you acknowledge nothing within nature can adequately capture what God is truly like.
Ware states that contemplation of God requires a stillness and inward silence that is known in Greek as hesychia—concentration combined with inward silence. He also points to the Jesus Prayer (Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner) as the “arrow prayer” used in the Orthodox tradition that leads one to that contemplation of God. Ware mentions three levels in the saying of the Jesus Prayer: (1) The prayer of the lips, which is simply the oral prayer and the repeating of it; (2) The prayer of the intellect, which is mental prayer in which (if I can put it this way) the prayer is always floating around in your mind; and (3) The prayer of the heart, where the prayer moves beyond anything we say or think but becomes something we are. As Ware puts it, “The ultimate purpose of the Spiritual Way is not just a person who says prayers from time to time, but a person who is prayer all the time” (123). The Jesus Prayer thus may begin with specific acts of prayer, but the goal is to establish within a person a constant state of prayer.
In all honesty, I am nowhere near that final state. Having grown up Evangelical, in my rational, Western-thinking mind, this discipline of the Jesus Prayer still seems, well, “odd” to me. I simply do not have much of the needed discipline yet.
Union with God
The ultimate aim of the Spiritual Way is, in fact union with God. Ware states that Christianity denotes three different kinds of union. First, there is the Trinitarian union according to essence. This is the unity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit that is wholly unique within God. Second, there is the union between the divine and human natures of the incarnate Christ according to hypostasis—what we call a “hypostatic union” of Godhood and manhood in Christ. Finally, there is the union between human beings and God according to energy. The hypostatic union in Christ makes it possible for human beings to be participate with God in the “energies of God,” namely His life, power, grace, and glory. We will never be in union with God’s essence, for that is wholly unique to God Himself. But through the hypostatic union in Christ, God has not only “filled the earth with His glory,” but He has made it possible for us to be unified with Him through Christ, who fills all creation.
Darkness and Light
All this talk of union with God ultimately takes us beyond what human language can adequately describe. As Ware states, “Human speech is adapted to delineate that which exists in time and space, and even here it can never provide an exhaustive description. As for what is infinite and eternal, here human speech can do no more than point or hint” (126). Or if I can put it another way, human speech might be able to “knock on heaven’s door,” but it can’t take you over the threshold.
Nevertheless, Ware points out that that early Church Fathers often used the paradoxical symbols of light and darkness to point to this union with God. Darkness is used to denote the apophatic approach to God, using Moses entering the dark cloud on Sinai to meet with God as the primary example. By contrast, the effect of that encounter in darkness is that of being filled with light. Moses covered his face with a veil once he came down from Sinai, and when Christ was transfigured and seen with Moses and Elijah, his face “shone as the sun” before the cloud descended and the disciples only heard God’s voice. This is what the Church Fathers call the “divine light.” It denotes not literal light that causes certain Christians to glow, mind you! Rather, it describes a certain state of some Christians that is hard to describe with human language—they are just different. It is what Ware calls “bodily glorification.” It would be easy (but wrong) to say they are somehow “more than human.” More accurately, they are the truly human ones, while most of us are not yet fully human because we have not yet achieved that true union in Christ. We are still novices on the Spiritual Way, and hence are still more like Pinocchio the puppet, and not yet Pinocchio the boy.
There is one more post to go in The Orthodox Way—God as Eternity.
The Eternal Now
The bliss of the animals lies in this, that, on their lower level,
They shadow the bliss of those—-few at any moment on the earth—-who do not
“Look before and after, and pine for what is not” but live in the
Holy carelessness of the eternal now.
George MacDonald (Mentor of C.S. Lewis)
Note: Walton talks at length about “Sacred space” in his Old Testament Theology for Christians.
I remember the drugged out look of the detached Orthodox monks that were into this type of pursuit of “the divine” (their favorite name for God). The very look in their eyes was the mark of the man who had seen the uncreated light. Its mostly repackaged neo-platonic philosophy from the same wells of Greek thinking that Orthodoxy evolved into. Yes there is a level of other transcendence to God, an infinity for sure. Yet he chooses to limit himself in the incarnation not to remain far off, so that we can draw near into calling him Abba father rather than “the divine force”. He is close and not far off. He doesn’t demand the mystical encounter the apophatic no thingness of the Orthodox traditions. Which sounds mysticliy enticing with their beyondness, yet ultimately it is an embrace of non relational no-thingness not a God who weeps at the tomb of his best friend or who blesses children on his lap. He is vast and awesome no doubt. Orthodoxy is stuck in Greek philosophical tautologies about the infinite. Like the infinite divisibility of space into ever smaller bits between two points. Or that numbers are infinite yet can express the finite. Or like language which can say an infinite amount of things and no one can “know all of language”, and that no one can know all that can be said with language. Yet it says things like “I love you” and that is what is significant, not that language is infinite and can never be fully known. Yes God is infinite and vast, that is not the big point of the Bible. It is that he makes himself finite and that people can “walk with him”. He relates to us in his finiteness, and he walks with us there. Infinite by definition has no meaning. These Greek mind games sound more like a psilocybin trip than the embrace of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. A Father who chose to relate to Families, people children like us. To grasp for the philosophical infinite is to miss the open arms of his embrace right in front of you. I chose to jump on his lap not to zen out and contemplate how infinite and mystical the hypostatic union I could see with the eyes that don’t see and try to grasp the unknowable divine nature of the theophania in front of me. The Orthodox brothers are brothers in Christ. Yet they are looking down a path of Greek Platonic thought chasing the unknowable and not into they eyes of their Daddy.
It’s a shiny attractive bit of Greek thinking for those of us who didn’t grow up in the tradition. Yet look to it’s roots. You won’t find it in the Hebrew traditions that Jesus, Paul and others knew as their context. No these are the thoughts of Greek Orthodox thinkers who were steeped in Greek thought in the second and third centuries who went off into the deserts to starve themselves into psychedelic states to achieve this psychedelic state that they describe. I’ve read the mystical Fathers. They sure found it in near death starvation experiences, which has mind altering effects and if you starve yourself and say the Jesus prayer enough, you too can have these experiences.
I prefer the world of Jesus where he walked, and to walk with the weeping Jesus who comforts me and embraces me. I know the Orthodox are not offering such a harsh dichotomy that I am painting here. But they do offer the mystical union as the primary path to Glorification on earth, and in heaven as “the path” ultimately. I don’t see that as “the path” I don’t want to get to the gates of heaven and encounter the uncreated infinite light. I want to meet the prodigal father who runs to me when he sees me a far off and weeps on my shoulders. Saying “my son has come home!”
Well, as you say, Orthodoxy doesn’t offer as harsh as a dichotomy as you say. I think there are those in all religions, as well in all different branches and denominations of Christianity, that go to unhealthy extremes. But as I point out in the post, Ware warns against this:
This might at first seem contradictory. After all, most consider “mysticism” as some sort of flight from the natural world. Yet that mindset divides God’s creation into two levels of “secular” and “sacred,” and assumes that to be “spiritual” means to denigrate the natural and retreat from the “secular” world. Ware, though, rejects that mentality. He states, “We are not to restrict God’s presence in the world to a limited range of ‘pious’ objects and situations, while labelling everything else as ‘secular.’ We are to see all things as essentially sacred, as a gift from God and a means of communion with him” (120).