Category Archives: humanity

We express ourselves in thanksgiving.

humanity, quotes, , , , , ,

At this season of Thanksgiving as a holiday, it seems good to consider thanksgiving as a way of life, even a way to Life. First, D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones brings up a good point about the Garden of Eden:

“. . . The terrible fallacy of the last hundred years has been to think that all man’s troubles are due to his environment, and that to change the man you have nothing to do but change his environment. That is a tragic fallacy. It overlooks the fact that it was in Paradise that man fell. . . .”

—D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Studies in the Sermon on the Mount (1971)

Mikael Toppelius, Expulsion of Adam and Eve, Finland

Fr. Alexander Schmemann also mentions that garden:

“In the story of the Garden this took place in the cool of the day: that is, at night. And Adam, when he left the Garden where life was to have been eucharistic — an offering of the world in thanksgiving to God — Adam led the whole world, as it were, into darkness. In one of the beautiful pieces of Byzantine hymnology Adam is pictured sitting outside, facing Paradise, weeping. It is the figure of man himself.”

But that sad picture is not the end. The Son of God became incarnate, and Jesus Christ is the New Adam. He has fulfilled all that the first Adam failed to do, and now in the Divine Liturgy we can:

“…ascend to heaven in Christ to see and to understand the creation in its real being as glorification of God, as that response to divine love in which alone creation becomes what God wants it to be: thanksgiving, eucharist, adoration. It is here — in the heavenly dimension of the Church, with ‘thousands of Archangels and myriads of Angels, with the Cherubim and Seraphim … who soar aloft, borne on their pinions …’ — that we can finally ‘express ourself,’ and this expression is: Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord of Sabaoth. Heaven and earth are full of Thy glory. Hosanna in the highest. Blessed is He that cometh in the Name of the Lord. This is the ultimate purpose of all that exists, the end, the goal and the fulfillment, because this is the beginning, the principle of Creation.”

“In thanksgiving we recognize and confess above all the divine source and the divine calling of our life. The prayer of thanksgiving affirms that God brought us from nonexistence into being, which means that he created us as partakers of Being, i.e., not just something that comes from him, but something permeated by his presence, light, wisdom, love – by what Orthodox theology, following St. Gregory Palamas, calls the divine energies and which makes the world called to and capable of transfiguration into a ‘new heaven and a new earth,’ and the ruler of creation, man, called to and capable of theosis, ‘partaking of the divine nature.’”

-Fr. Alexander Schmemann

These three quotes from Fr. Alexander are from the book, For the Life of the World, an incredibly rich and deep explanation of Orthodox Christian theology. Our women’s book group and sisterhood at church are reading it right now during our Nativity fast, and I discovered that it can be found on YouTube being read in its entirety. You can listen for free here on the channel The Orthodox Voice: For the Life of the World.

If you want to read for free instead, a pdf file is here: For the Life of the World

“In everything give thanks, for this is the will of God.”
I Thessalonians 5:18

Getting back to thanksgiving as a holiday, this year I’ll be giving thanks and praise with the angels in the morning in Liturgy, and in the afternoon feasting in the traditional American way. Whether your celebration is small and quiet, or large and festive, I hope you remember much to be thankful for ❤

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

Currier & Ives, Home to Thanksgiving

 

 

 

 

Not Star Trek mythology.

humanity, quotes, reality, , , , , , ,

More and more I notice that people, including me, use the words brain and mind interchangeably; but they are not the same thing at all. No scientist has been able to find the mind in the brain. And when we are considering mind vs. heart, where is the heart exactly? As the Scripture says, “We are fearfully and wonderfully made.” The more researchers probe into the intricacies of the human body and its functions, the more complex we are found to be, the more questions emerge.

I am using the photo of the book cover at right only to illustrate one use of the word mind; it’s been a while since I read it, but I think the author may have been thinking of this passage of Scripture:

Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men: And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.

Father Stephen Freeman draws attention in a recent article to the way we moderns tend to think about minds and our thinking:

“We are material beings. We are not souls that have bodies, or bodies that have souls. The soul is the ‘life’ of the body, but is not, strictly speaking, a thing in itself. Most moderns mistake the soul for consciousness, and they imagine that at death their consciousness migrates somewhere else (to heaven, etc). And, we do not care very much about what then happens to the body, so long as our precious consciousness abides. This, I might add, is the mythology of Star Trek, where in at least several episodes, Spock’s consciousness is deposited in various other places. It is not, however, true Christianity.”

You can read the whole article here:  “The Secular Mind Versus the Whole Heart.”

Auguste Rodin, The Thinker; Rodin Museum, Paris

Lewis compares tyrannies.

humanity, politics, quotes, ,
Periander, 627-587 BC, Vatican Museums

 

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

-C. S. Lewis

We encounter the small black dot.

art, humanity, icons, quotes, , , , , ,

“The intimate darkness of our most precious cognitive organ constantly reminds us – whether we like it or not – that the “inner” content of any human is never absolutely available to our cognitive powers. The most powerful among the senses, thus, recognizes the deepest human cognitive powerlessness precisely during the encounter with the most powerful sense organ of another human being. However carefully we approach or analyze it, the unique personal existence of every human always stays partly hidden in the darkness of the unknowing.

“And this is most expressively manifested when we encounter the small black dot that is the pupil of the  eye. At this place we truly do “enter into the human soul,” but at the same time –confusingly and paradoxically –  we realize that we cannot enter it. In this kind of darkness, we can get lost and go crazy, or feel warm and safe – for the same reason: because we cannot possess what it reveals/hides. This darkness can be scary or the most welcoming place in the world for the very same reason: because, herein, we recognize the utmost freedom of the human being.

“Through the encounter with the pupil of another human being, we fall directly into the other’s personal infinity, which can never be fully attained – even if our faces are only a few centimeters from each other. Experiencing this kind of infinity, finally, becomes the cognition of the utmost human freedom – freedom that does not depend even on itself.”

I added paragraph breaks to this excerpt from an article by Todor Mitrović from the Orthodox Arts Journal, on “The Epiphany of the Eye.”

I found the author’s ideas fascinating, and convincing. I am not an artist, but I do gaze upon icons quite a bit. When I do, I am looking through the “window,” not caring to analyze what features of the image are having what effect on me. This article nonetheless does help me to better appreciate the whole phenomenon. The artistry of an icon is not the most important thing about it, but contributes to its beautiful effect on our souls, our deepening relationship to Christ through prayer.