by Mother Raphaela Wilkinson

photo: Mother Katherine of the Holy Myrrhbearers’ Monastery with her team of oxen used in plowing the fields. Photo by Joshua Coolman

It is possible to be a member of the Orthodox Church, graduate from a seminary, perhaps even be a member of the clergy or other full-time Church professional, and not believe in God or in His providence. I would like to tackle this reality.

I suggest that there is a God; that He is everything He is cracked up to be by all the theology that is taught in our seminaries and preached in our churches; that whether or not we see Him working in history in the same way that the Biblical writers have seen Him work, He is the living, active and personal Source of all that has being. And that being includes us at this very moment as we sit and read, listen or dream or have a cell phone pressed to our ear.

If this is true, then it follows that a vital relationship with Him is probably a good idea.

I know that there are all sorts of approaches to liturgy, to worship and to prayer. What I have learned, sadly, over the years however, is that many people use liturgy, prayers, prayer books, prayer ropes, all sorts of paraphernalia that have come to be associated with various forms of religious expression, for many reasons other than forming a relationship with the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. I have learned that I can take nothing for granted in this department.

Now I add a side note, quoting a conversation I have had with priests multiple times over during the thirty-plus years that I have been an Orthodox nun.

“Mother, why are the American monasteries, why is your monastery, so small?”

“Father, who in your parish is being prepared for this life?”

It is not that I want the Church to hire someone to design posters advertising monastic vocations to place on parish bulletin boards, though I wouldn’t object to adding a line or two to one of the litanies praying not only for our “brotherhood in Christ” but for male and female monastic communities around the world.

But I suggest rather that healthy monastic life is a result of the “bene esse”  the well-being  of the Church. When monastic life is flourishing, it is because the Church is healthy. Small and beleaguered monasteries; monastics struggling with the wrong things, are a sign that something is wrong with our Church environment as surely as frogs showing bizarre mutations, strange diseases and simple disappearance from our landscape show that the world’s environment is poisoned.

There have been and are cultures where as young people seek to discern God’s will for their lives, monasticism is considered one healthy choice among others. But we have a culture, even a “Church” culture, where the phrase “as God wills” signifies a negative, fatalistic approach to life, and who in their right mind would try to find that for any future?

I have learned to use this phrase from my Arab Palestinian friends, most of whom are Christian. Nevertheless, influenced by the Moslem culture around them, some seem unaware of St. Paul’s words: “Work out your own salvation, knowing that God is working within you.”

Two persons are operative here: God Who is creating reality, allowing universes, galaxies, solar systems, black holes, and our planet to exist, allowing us our brief time on this strange planet Earth � and I whom God is allowing to be writing these words � and allowing you to be reading them at this present moment: allowing us simply to be.� In the place beyond space and the time beyond time where God exists, you and I each have an eternity to stand face to face with Him and in a personal relationship, grow eternally with Him into our personal reality.

It has been the teaching of our Church down the millennia that how we use this small portion of created time and space we call our life matters incredibly. Perhaps if we are angels, principalities, powers, it is different, for already they traverse the created universe in ways that we cannot imagine. We are human beings, and precisely because we are human beings, we are made in the image and likeness of God in the way no other creatures have been.

For this reason that you and I have been created as human beings we are persons. And if in some way each of us identifies with the definition of an Orthodox Christian person, we cannot see our God simply as the New Age “Force” behind creation, but as the three Persons in Whose Image we are formed. Moreover, since Jesus walked this earth, we see the second Person of the Trinity as a very human Person, both God and Man.

One of St. John’s Epistles tells us that if we are Christians, we will walk as He walked. Many of us Orthodox Christians cringe at the idea of wearing bracelets with the letters: WWJD (“What Would Jesus Do”) now being worn by many Protestants. But why do we cringe at this? A very Orthodox writer of Scripture said, “Walk as He walked.” Yet perhaps there is something to cringe at: Whether we like it or not, we are in the hands of the Living God and that is a fearful thing. However much we need to get to know God through the Man Jesus Christ, Jesus is not our pal. He is our true Friend, and that is a very different matter.

As Orthodox Christians, we are to learn to find our heart, the center of our being, if you will, our nous. We are to explore our relationship with our God more seriously than we could or might explore any other relationship in our lives, whether that be as lover, friend or co-worker. We do not dismiss the inclusion by the old rabbis of The Song of Songs in the Bible. Each of us sees God as our Lover or Spouse otherwise our relationships with any other lover or spouse will be idolatry.

What does this mean? It does not mean neglecting our spouse, our sisters and brothers, our children, our friends and co-workers or the rest of our lives so that we may think about God or say prayers all the time. It certainly does not mean having a warm fuzzy feeling or even a theological understanding that God is here all the time. None of these are at the basis of prayer without ceasing, a healthy monastic vocation, nor the vocation of any Christian, lay or clergy, all called to be the holy priesthood of our God in this world.

We all know that lovers seek physical closeness and awareness, “quality time” in appropriate places, private exploration and discovery. But we also know that something is wrong with a relationship if one cannot let one’s lover out of one’s sight. I am rather to allow those times and places of physical closeness and awareness to change me.

Those of you who are happily married know that your relationship gives you the support you need to go out into the world each day and do your very best at whatever you are doing. You cannot be thinking about your spouse every moment. You must be putting your thoughts and efforts into your studies, your job, your children, your clients, or whatever else. Your relationship stabilizes you  it does not define you. Rather you and your spouse support one another in growing into whomever and whatever God in His infinite wisdom calls you to be.

Our relationship with God alone defines us. If we are Orthodox Christians, we acknowledge our God as the most important Person in our lives.

This is where I think many Orthodox Christians are functionally atheists, or at best New-Agers. Do we treat God with a rudeness that allows us to wake up, hear the radio music, smell the coffee and check our e-mails before, if we happen to be in a pious mood, we nod in His direction? Far too often we act as if God is not there, or is not there as a Person, the One Who is everywhere and fills all things. When we can go whole days not speaking to Him, to someone we know is in the same house with us, we know that relationship is in trouble.

We are called to be changed by God’s reality. We are called to use liturgy and personal prayer in all their forms as lovers do with their beloved, to deepen and form a relationship that allows us to be our true selves even, or especially, when we are not in the felt, physical presence of the beloved.

This is as God wills. This is who we are when we face the terrifying reality of God who says to us: “I have called you friends.” To be a friend is to have infinite responsibility placed on one’s shoulders. To be a friend is to become a co-worker, treating each person including oneself with the infinite respect one gives the children of valued friends and co-workers.

To be a friend is to acknowledge our Friend, our co-worker, even when we may feel He has abandoned us, as Jesus was abandoned on the Cross. This should not surprise us. “If anyone would be my disciple, let him take up his cross and follow me.” Mother Teresa of Calcutta walked where many friends of Christ have walked, allowing her life to be formed by the reality she had experienced as a young lover of God, even when it seemed He had abandoned her.

We are made in the image and likeness of a God Who is the great story-teller. How we each will live out our lives, our existence as created beings, will depend upon the stories we tell ourselves and others. If we think we are not telling stories, we tell a story about ourselves.

There are the basic negative stories we tell ourselves: “I can’t do it.” “I don’t feel well.” “I’m sick.” “It’s too hard for me.” “It’s their fault.” “I can’t help it.” If we tell ourselves these little stories over and over, day after day, they will indeed become our story. And there are other stories: “I can do anything I want to do.” “I can have anything I want.” “I can use anyone I want to use.”

All these stories have one thing in common: they are based in our human reality apart from God. To begin to live as God wills, we must place ourselves within God’s reality. We must repeat to ourselves until we literally get by heart the Gospel story, the story of good news for the poor, healing for the sick, eyes for the blind, life for the lifeless, hope for the hopeless and we must place ourselves within that story. We must play out daily the actions and words before us, again and again bringing ourselves and those around us back before the possibility of God, whose will is true, alive and active. Placing ourselves within His will does not limit us; rather by opening the door to humility, it allows us to accept our true God-given limitations and thus to grow into our honest God-given potential.

Much of our responsibility as adults, as parents or teachers, parish priests, healers and care-givers, office-workers and professionals, builders, artists, lies in our God-given ability to tell and interpret the story of those around us.

If one day follows another with boring regularity and increasing vulnerability to economic downturns, do we understand how each day He sustains us? Gives us our daily bread? Do we accept His blessing for the poor in spirit and, with St. Paul, learn to rejoice in the story of our poverty as well as we did in our wealth?

Has our parish church burned down? How we interpret that disaster to our people, to our bishop, will create the future, or the demise, of our congregation. Has a friend won the lottery? Can we help him or her stay grounded with a story that has a future with family and friends? Has a family been visited with a disastrous death or long-term illness? How do we help that family with their story? Will we feed them platitudes? Will we know rather when to stand back and support them as they live their own story through such times.

I share here what I find personally useful so that I can live in the present moment, remembering the past and looking towards the future.

Our own predisposition colors how we view past, present or future. When I find myself looking at people and past or present situations, seeing everyone and everything in a cold clear light, my voice laying bare the evil, the limitations, the sin, the ugliness, the falsity, the wrongness around me with mocking accuracy, then I am seeing with demonic eyes and telling the story that the devil has told since before the beginning of the world a devastating vision of condemnation. (Then of course there is another variation: to see myself and my present friends with great love and deep understanding. Here we are the wave of the future and I see that all the past individuals and institutions who created the mess we are in were poor helpless idiots whose ideas and designs must be overturned and thwarted if we are to get God’s will done on earth.)

The Book of Job is our guide here. It is the devil’s role to be the accuser of our brethren. Every one of us, whatever our position in or relationship to the Church, needs to be very careful not to be the ones who do his work for him. We are called to see Christ within one another; we are called to create Paradise for ourselves and others even when we find ourselves in the midst of the worst hell of a concentration camp, a gulag, a parish, our family, work, school, any situation.

As our stories are true, we will come to see that they come together as His story. May we want, may we love both the story of our own lives and of His reality. May we find ourselves and one another, every one of us, rejoicing as it is written, seated together in eternity as the spouse, the Bride of Christ, at the Marriage Supper of the Lamb.

This is indeed as God wills.

Mother Raphaela Wilkinson is abbess of the Holy Myrrhbearers’ Monastery in Otego, NY. She is the author of Living in Christ and Growing in Christ: Shaped in His Image, both from St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press. She is a member of the advisory board of the Orthodox Peace Fellowship. Her text is a shortened version of the commencement address she gave in May at St. Vladimir’s Seminary in Crestwood, New York.

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Spring 2009 issue of In Communion / IC 53

By Metropolitan Kallistos Ware

Most of the time we think we know who we are. But do we, in fact, know in the full and profound sense who we are?

One text that is very important for the Orthodox understanding of the human person is Psalm 64:6 [LXX 63:7]: “The heart is deep.” That means the human person is a profound mystery. There are depths or if you would like, heights within myself of which I have very little understanding.

Who am I? The answer is not at all obvious. My personhood as a human being ranges widely over space and time. And indeed it reaches out beyond space into infinity, and beyond time into eternity. Our human personhood is created, but it transcends the created order. I am called to be a “partaker of the divine nature,” as Peter said in his second letter. I am called to share, that is to say, in the uncreated energies of the living God. Our human vocation is theosis deification, divinization. As St. Basil the Great says, “The human being is a creature that is called to become God.”

I am reminded of the story of the Fall at the beginning of Genesis, of the promise of the serpent, who says to Eve, “You shall be as God.” The irony behind that story is that this was exactly the divine intention. The humans were indeed called to divine life. But the Fall consisted in the fact that Adam and Eve grasped with self-will that which God, in His own time and way, would have conferred upon them as a gift.

The limits of our personhood are very wide-ranging indeed. We should adopt a dynamic view of what it is to be a person. We shouldn’t think that our personhood is something fixed. To be a person is to grow. To be on a journey. And this journey is a journey that has no limits, that stretches out forever, that goes on even in heaven. Some people have an idea of heaven as a place where you do nothing in particular. But surely that is deceptive. Surely heaven means that we continue to advance by God’s mercy from glory to glory. Heaven is an end without end.

St. Irenaeus remarks, “Even in the age to come God will always have new things to teach us, and we shall always have new things to learn.” Even in heaven, we shall never be in a position to say to God, “You are repeating Yourself. We have heard it all before.” On the contrary, heaven means continuing wonder and unending discovery. To quote J.R.R. Tolkien in The Fellowship of the Ring, “The Road goes ever on and on.”

Now there is a specific reason for this mysterious and indefinable character of human personhood. And this reason is given to us by St. Gregory of Nyssa, writing in the fourth century. “God,” says he, “is a mystery beyond all understanding.” We humans are formed in God’s image. The image should reproduce the characteristics of the archetype, of the original. So if God is beyond understanding, then the human person formed in God’s image is likewise beyond understanding. Precisely because God is a mystery, I too am a mystery.

Now in mentioning the image, we’ve come to the most important factor in our humanness. Who am I? As a human person, I am formed in the image of God. That is the most significant and basic fact about my personhood. We are God’s living icons. Each of us is a created expression of God’s infinite and uncreated self-expression. So this means it is impossible to understand the human person apart from God. Humans cut off from God are no longer authentically human. They are subhuman.

If we lose our sense of the divine, we lose equally our sense of the human. And that we can see very clearly from the story, for example, of Soviet communism in the 70 years which followed the revolution of 1917. Soviet communism sought to establish a society where the existence of God would be denied and the worship of God would be suppressed and eliminated. At the same time, Soviet communism showed an appalling disregard for the dignity of the human person.

Those two things go together. Whoever affirms the human also affirms God. Whoever denies God also denies the human person. The human being cannot be properly understood except with reference to the divine. The human being is not autonomous, not self-contained. I do not contain my meaning within myself. As a person in God’s image, I point always beyond myself to the divine realm.

I remember a visit in my student years in Oxford from Archimandrite Sophrony, the disciple of St. Silouan of Mt. Athos. He gave a talk on Orthodoxy, and there was a discussion afterwards. Towards the end, the chairman said, “We have time for just one more question.” Somebody got up at the back of the audience and said, “Fr. Sophrony, please tell us what is God?”

Fr. Sophrony answered very briefly, “You tell me what is man?” God and the human person are two mysteries that are interconnected, and neither can be understood apart from the other. “In the image of God” means there’s a vertical reference in our personhood. We can only be understood in terms of our link with the divine.

But then, let’s think of another point. “In the image of God” means in the image of the Trinity. As St. Gregory the Theologian says, “When I say God, I mean Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” That is what as Christians we mean by God. We don’t understand God as a series of abstractions. We understand God as three Persons. And that we see very clearly from the Creed. We begin in the Creed by saying, “I believe in One God.” And then we don’t continue by saying, “Who is an uncaused cause, who is primordial reality, who is the ground of being.” This is the way many modern theologians speak. But in the Creed we say, “I believe in One God … the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” We continue, that is to say, in specific personal terms.

God for us is Trinity. And if we’re in the image of God we’re in the image of the Triune God. What does that mean for our understanding of our personhood? Let’s think first of the Trinity, and then of ourselves.

“God is love” declares St. John in his first letter, and goes on to say, “There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear.” In true love there is no exclusiveness, no jealousy. True love is open, not closed. God is love. There is no fear in love. And so God is not the love of one. God is not love in the sense of being self-love, turned in upon itself. God is not a closed unit. God is not a unit, but a union. God is love in the sense of shared love, the mutual love of three Persons in one.

When the Cappadocian Fathers in the fourth century are describing God, one of their key words is koinonia, meaning fellowship, communion, or relationship. As St. Basil says in his work on the Holy Spirit, “The union of the Godhead lies in the koinonia, the interrelationship, of the Persons.” So this then is what the doctrine of the Holy Trinity is saying: God is shared love, not self-love. God is openness, exchange, solidarity, self-giving.

Now, we are to apply all this to human persons made in the image of God. “God is love,” says St. John. And that great English prophet of the eighteenth century, William Blake, says, “Man is love.” God is love, not self-love but mutual love, and the same is true then of the human person. God is koinonia, relationship, communion.

So also is the human person in the Trinitarian image. God is openness, exchange, solidarity, self-giving. The same is true of the human person when living in a Trinitarian mode according to the divine image.

There’s a very helpful book by a British philosopher, John Macmurray, entitled Persons in Relationship, published in 1961. Macmurray insists that relationship is constitutive of personhood. He argues that there is no true person unless there are at least two persons communicating with each other. In other words, I need you in order to be myself. All this is true because God is Trinity.

From this it follows that the characteristic human word is not “I” but “we”. If we are all the time saying, “I, I, I,” then we are not realizing our true personhood. That’s expressed in the poem of Walter de la Mare, “Napoleon”:

What is the world, O soldiers?

It is I:

I, this incessant snow,

This northern sky;

Soldiers, this solitude

Through which we go

Is I.

Whether the historical Napoleon was actually like that or not, de la Mare’s point is surely valid. Self-centeredness is in the end coldness, isolation. It is a desert. It’s no coincidence that in the Lord’s Prayer, the model of prayer that God has given us, and which teaches what we are to be, the word “us” comes five times, the word “our” three times, the word “we” once. But nowhere in the Lord’s Prayer do we find the words “me” or “mine” or “I”.

In the beginning of the era of modern philosophy in the early seventeenth century, the philosopher Descartes put forward his famous dictum, “Cogito ergo sum”  “I think therefore I am.” And following that model, a great deal of discussion of human personhood since then has centered round the notion of self-awareness, self-consciousness. But the difficulty of that model is that it doesn’t bring in the element of relationship. So instead of saying “Cogito ergo sum, ought we not as Christians who believe in the Trinity say, “Amo ergo sum I love therefore I am”? And still more, ought we not to say, “Amor ergo sum”  “I am loved therefore I am”?

One modern poem that I love particularly, by the English poet Kathleen Raine, has exactly as its title “Amo Ergo Sum.” Let me quote some words from it:

Because I love

The sun pours out its rays of living gold

Pours out its gold and silver on the sea.

Because I love

The ferns grow green, and green the grass, and green

The transparent sunlit trees.

Because I love

All night the river flows into my sleep,

Ten thousand living things are sleeping in my arms,

And sleeping wake, and flowing are at rest.

This is the key to personhood according to the Trinitarian image. Not isolated self-awareness, but relationship in mutual love. In the words of the great Romanian theologian Fr. Dumitru Staniloae, “In so far as I am not loved, I am unintelligible to myself.”

If, then, we think of the divine image, we should not only think of the vertical dimension of our being the image of God; we should also think of the Trinitarian implication, which means that the image has a horizontal dimension relationship with my fellow humans. Perhaps the best definition of the human animal is “a creature capable of mutual love after the image of God the Holy Trinity.” So here is the essence of our personhood: co-inherence; dwelling in others.

What is said by Christ in His prayer to the Father at the Last Supper is surely very significant for our understanding of personhood: “That they all may be one, as you, Father, are in Me, and I in You; that they also may be one in Us” (John 17:21). Exactly. The mutual love of the three Divine Persons is seen as the model for our human personhood. This is vital for our salvation. We are here on earth to reproduce within time the love that passes in eternity between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Metropolitan Kallistos is a bishop of the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Great Britain. From 1966 until 2001, he lectured in Eastern Orthodox Studies at the University of Oxford. In 2007, the Holy Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate elevated Bishop Kallistos to Titular Metropolitan of Diokleia. He is a member of the advisory board of the Orthodox Peace Fellowship. His books include The Orthodox Church, The Orthodox Way and The Inner Kingdom. This text (first published in Again magazine) is adapted from a lecture he gave in August 1998 at the Eagle River Institute of Orthodox Christian Studies in Alaska.

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Spring 2009 issue of In Communion / IC 53

We can only meet God in the present moment. This is an area where God chooses to place limits on His own power. We choose whether or not to live in the present moment. Because we can encounter God only in that present moment, whenever we live in the past or in the future, we place ourselves beyond His reach.

We can only make decisions in the present moment. We can only enjoy sights and sounds in the present moment. We can only love or hate in the present moment. The present moment is the interface between ourselves and the rest of the universe, and, more importantly, it is the only point of contact between the individual and God. Of all the possible points of time, only the present moment is available for repentance. The past cannot be taken back and remade. The future remains forever outside our reach.

The present moment may appear to be tiny in duration – so much so that the human mind thinks it hardly exists at all – but in depth it is infinite. Actually, it has no shape or form. There is nothing to measure here, and that really infuriates the mind, since measurement is what the mind is good at. It is remarkable that this quality, so essential to our existence, has no shape. It just is. And it just is in a way which the past and future cannot be. The past is a done deal, the future is all guesswork. The formless present moment may be experienced as large or small. In some senses it is of almost no duration. In other ways, it is eternal life. Whichever we choose, it is, nevertheless, the only space within which we can operate. Indeed, this is the unique means through which we can confront the reality God gives us second by second.

It is odd that we do not consciously spend more time in the present moment than we do. Unfortunately, the mind blocks the availability of the present

moment whenever it has the chance to do so. The mind cannot trust the present moment, since it cannot control it, and is thus almost always at enmity with it. I think this may be part of what Jesus means when He contrasts “this world” with the Kingdom.

The mind cannot control the present moment, the time during which things can arise, so it pretends that it does not exist. This causes a person to behave in a completely unconscious way, forcing the individual to wait for the mind to absorb an event (which by then has become an event in the past) before she or he is allowed to experience it.

Archimandrite Meletios Webber an extract from his book, Bread & Water, Wine & Oil (Conciliar Press)

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Spring 2009 issue of In Communion / IC 53