Saint Seraphim of Sarov

Saint Seraphim of Sarov
Originally uploaded by unworthy seraphim.

Silly Questions, Serious Answers

I don't know about other Orthodox Christians, but I suspect a number of them have some silly sounding, but to them serious questions they would like a well thought out answer on from someone like a priest or pious scholar of Orthodox theology who might know. They are the kind of questions that if brought up in almost any context from casual conversation to a catechism class could set crickets chirping faster than one could say horologion. But at their root....when one gets past the question itself...the things one has to think about and to weigh to give a meaningful answer...that is very serious.

The biggest problem with my questions is that even if given a serious answer they would pretty much remain in the realm of abstraction and conjecture, realms with which Orthodox theology is not terribly comfortable. To illustrate I was reading book length interview with Fr. Roman Braga on the course of his life. During it, speaking on the subject of the Jesus Prayer, he related the thoughts of some monks, deep practitioners of the prayer, commenting on another more urban monastery or seminary. They said that there, "they lecture about the Jesus Prayer." The implication is clear...lecture teaches one little or nothing worthwhile in regard to the Jesus Prayer. To learn about prayer or any sort one must simply pray and that without ceasing. Prayer teaches prayer. And the point is well taken. Theology properly needs to be incarnated not just batted about like balls at a tennis match. And yet my questions, my mental itches remain.

They remain because they are not an end in themselves; the answers matter to me at a creative level. As I've mentioned before, I like to write. I have big unfulfilled novel ideas, but going further with some of those ideas, developing the story I've been pondering for decades depends upon some useful answers from Orthodox anthropology. But informing fictional endeavors is probably not high up on the best use scale of theological discourse. It is, I admit dicey territory. There is a vast gulf between the use put to theology in the works of Dostevsky and that of Katzanakis. One writer is lauded as nearly a saint and the other was excommunicated for his gross impiety. And it seems to me, unless one is careful, even with an honest creative effort one can too easily find oneself more in the company of Katzanakis than Dostevsky.

But now there is this web log thing, this blog. Who knows, perhaps if I post my questions some kind passing priest or theologian in days to come will offer me something useful to consider. So here goes.

The Big Question: The larger question I want to deal with is the safest: What is man? It is to this overarching question that all the silly questions relate.

The Silly Questions: There are a couple of things I've run across in St. Gregory of Nyssa that intrigue me from a creative writerly standpoint. I recall reading somewhere he said that man was/may have been created en masse like all the other animals on the sixth day, but one became Adam when God breathed upon him. Other saints I've read on this point relate how man was not created a dead lump, but was created alive prior to God breathing on him making him what he was before the fall. Also, if I am not mistaken St. Gregory and others seem to hold a view that fallen man in many respects reverts in varying degrees to living in his "beastial" animal nature or something like that. St. Gregory and others also seem to be saying that man's rational character is part of the impress of the image of God in him.

In another place St. Gregory says that the Holy Eucharist is not for irrational animals. And this brings me to the threshold of my questions. Here it is:

Can there be another rational animal besides man? Could another creature like a capauchin monkey, chimpanzee, African gray parrot, or an octopus even be genetically "tinkered" with by man to have more complex brains and thus at least at the raw equipment level have the capacity for "rationality". Would having that capacity actually "produce: a rational creature? Could just having bigger more complex brains give something more than just very clever animal? This would seem to be the implication of a materialist perspective, that human sentience arises out of his particual biology with its highly developed central nervous system. If that development can be duplicated or parallelled in another species then that should produce other sentient beings who are not human.

But if like St. Gregory suggests mere materiality is not enough, that the distinguishing feature of the human persona as it were arises not first from his biology but from an earlier direct encounter between our earliest progenitor and God, where God impressed man with something of Himself so to speak, then what would such genetically enhanced creatures be? By "aping" aspects of his own physiology in that of another species could man for better or for worse succeed in sharing the gift of what he is to some degree with another species? And if he did as a fallen man then would this new species of sentient rational creature be likewise fallen as man is fallen?

Or if our efforts only yielded very clever beasts something like Adam before God breathed on Him, whatever that may have been, could God be prevailed upon to breathe also upon these creatures made more or less in the image of man? What would that mean regarding such creatures and their relationship with God and His Church?

Which brings us to the next round of silly questions? If by tinkering man can share his own "rational being" or if by Divine fiat God raises up other creatures man has tried to make like himself, then what does this mean for the Church. What would be the cosmological place for such creatures. Would they stand more or less with the angels? What could be permitted them within the Church? Could they attain to holy orders? Could they even be allowed to partake in the Holy Eucharist which would make them also members of the Body of Christ in the same way mankind can be? If that cannot be why not? What kind of sacramental life would be open to them?

If we cannot directly raise creatures to rational status by tinkering with what genetic capacities they alrealdy have...what if we in some small measure hybridize them...unite some key sections of our DNA with theirs. Does our leven leven them to rational status because they sare directly if minutely in humanity's biological nature?

The thing is this, if God made us capable of being like Him and participating in His Divine energies and be thereby transformed into His likeness why can we not do the same for other creature in the world to which we have an ontological connection? Cannot not enable them to become something like us, and becoming like us then able like us to bear the both the image and likeness of God?

Think of Chimpanzees...genetical they are less than two percentage points of difference away from us...how much of a DNA bump would it take to push them across the line in our direction. What would they be then?

Or what of Neanderthals..a seperate human species, stronger bodies, bigger brains, bigger noses. What if using Jurassic Park science one flesh specimin was found, its DNA extracted used to ferilze an embyro that was implanted and brought to term. What would that "human" be? True rational, potential Body of Christ, human, or very clever 'pre-Adamic" beast?

We are taught that at the end of the age everything will be transparent to the glory of God. What I wonder is would that include some opening of the communion now avaiable to man to other creatures as well...which would it seem have to include raising them to rational beings somehow.

Which raises another question. Let us say that this the plan and it will unfold in something of the same stream that brought forth man. God made man, man fell, God redeemed man and united Himself to our humanity, time goes by until the judgement, divinized man imparts something of his gift to one or more groups of animals so that they become rational beings and are in some capacity brought into the life of the Church where they may grow to experience divinization and well...and so on.

Let's just say that is the plan, or something like it. That would mean that it might be possible for man to jump the gun prior to the Judgement...making the creatures lifted into sentience be modeled on our fallen humanity, not our divinized humanity. They would begin existance as a kind of abomination...a frankensteinish race that still might be redeemable and ultimately brought back to the place they were meant to occupy if not a better place.

These are the kinds of things that bump around inside my skull, because, in addition to the story potential available in what ever answers may come, the core question may be more fully addressed...what is man, not just in the context of other men or God, but in relation to the rest of creation, and what are the implications of that?

Reflections on my Gourd

I have a gourd, an unfinished work of presumptive art perched above my computer. It's a bushel gourd about 13 inches in diameter and carved into its deep woody surface are images of ancient moss bearded oaks and long lazy bayous. It took hours...hours and hours over a couple of days to get it done, the designs lifed from internet images of Newcomb pottery. It should be beautiful...gorgeous even, but its not.

My gourd's problem is I tried to approximate the colors of the Newcomb pottery with shoe polish, black, blue, and neutral. It should have worked. The books said shoe polish would give gourds a nice leathery sheen. They even had pictures to prove it. So I beleived them. First I laid on the blue, but I just couldn't get it quite dark enough where I wanted it....and the natural tan of the gourd showing through the blue tended to neutralize..dull its imact which I tried to regain by selective applications of neutral to areas I wanted warmer...but it just desolved and diluted the blue...and so I replied with black and my detail got lost unless you stand ten inches away...and even then it's not "black" just dirty looking tan with some really dark splotchy areas.

I want to fix it, to get rid of the wax and start over with paints...something I have more experience with. But to do that I've got to come up with a way to get the wax off...soak it in ammonia, heat gun and paper towels...I think I could do it, but it will take work...hours and hours perhaps. And so it sits there above my computer waiting for me to get around to it. It has been waiting for months and will probably wait a couple more before that day dawns, barring a miracle or a burst of inspiration.

The sad thing is the gourd is the perfect metaphor for so much of my life...so much begun well, so much anticipated and hoped for, worked earnestly at...and then comes the hitch...the problem, the snag that raises the ante not higher than I am willing to pay as an abstract proposition, just higher than I'm willing to pay right then, or tomorrow, or the next day...but maybe, maybe next week will do, until next week is this week and the best time was yesterday but not today, something has come up. A TV show, work, a game, a book, a guest, a sink full of dishes, that newspaper I just remembered I forgot to buy.

I've done the gourd thing before, many times. A couple of years ago when I lived in Saipan I had the largest unplanted garden that anyone has never seen. So many beautiful flowers, so many great vegetables, such an array of herbs and curiosities to delight any chef or child or child chef, all in little packets neatly stored in box full of all my seeds and dreams. On on the back porch I had lots of pots, potting soil and all the tools I would need. What did me in? Grass ninjas, children, typhoons, and postage stamp yards. My gourds and muscadines were routinely savaged by yard workers with their weed eaters and small children who thought it great sport to pick my one green gourd in its infancy. Typhoon winds shredded my other attempts...oh yes and the snails devoured my mint. Set back, frustrated...I stopped trying until I got back to Mississippi. Over the past two years I must have planted three to five hundred gourds only to see them all die from drought, a neighbor's friendly bush-hogging of my hidden patches deep in the wood, or a neighbor's friending disking a field bare inches from the fenceline I chose as trellis.., oh, and there was this hurricane that did in the five or six plants that survived all that.

And then there is this mileau novel...this series of novels that I have been not quite writing for over 20 years. I've dozens of note books filled with my jottings and sketches. I even had a couple of reasonably good "seed" short stories favorably reviewed by my peers and almost published...not quite impersonally rejected. I've even taught creative writing at the college level...but the ideas bumping around in my skull, some of which I think are very good ideas, never quite make their way to paper in any finished form. But it will...one day....when I don't feel tired or stressed by work or family, when my furniture and books are all arranged and ordered just the way I want, when I've updated my software, when that last unifiying keystone idea hits, one day, some day before pigs fly.

What bothers my conscience though is not an unplanted gardern or an unfinished gourd, or even an unwritten novel, rather it is an unlived life...a life unlived or at least not lived enough where it counts, where it matters forever. When I see my gourd, I see my prayer life, my study of Scripture, my undealt with faults and failures. My sins. What have I lost to those hours spent doing anything that would distract me for a while...not because I do not want to pray, I do, or read the scriptures, I do, or engage in some liturgical art like iconography (I've hundreds of dollors of books and art supplies and one troublesome unfininshed gessoed board), I do, but always it seems I don't want to do it just now, rather I will do it latter...and latter...and latter...until I reach a place where it takes an almost herculean effort to make myself do what I ought when I ought, if just for a little while.

So here I sit, typing for a blog on the internet and there sits my unfinished almost beautiful gourd.

God and Chess pie cookies at Steve's Deli

This past Thursday something new happened in Jackson, MS. Two Orthodox priests, Fr. Paul Yerger, and Fr. John Henderson took time to talk about God and man at Steve's Downtown Deli. Oh yes, and there were chess pie cookies too, and fountain drinks. The combination of all the above contributed to a profitable time body and soul for all who attended...and it was well attended, only a very few uninhabited seats in this bright little blue and burnt orange shoebox of an eatery.

The standout moment for me was when Fr. John read a quote of St. Sophrony from "His Life is Mine" on the nature of man as he was created to be. The archemandrite said, "The Creator of the universe rejoiced more over man than over the glorious choir of heavenly bodies. Man is more precious than all the rest of the cosmos. Man, completed and perfected, is wondrous, even as God is wondrous. He is immortal and supra-cosmic. He is more than a microcosm - he is a microtheos. For the eternal Logos of the Father to be made flesh 'in the likeness of man' (Phil. 2:7) means that, with the gift of His love, man in turn may become like God."

It made me rethink some comments I've made recently regarding the tragedy of abortion. I had presented a short argument on a Christian forum against abortion grounded on things like the potential good, even greatness lost directly or indirectly from descendants of those untimely taken, the late Ethyl Waters, a child concieved when her own mother as a child not yet 13 years of age was raped, being my example. And while those considerations are certainly valid to the broader argument they miss by a hair something far more central. To argue from the good that may be lost in the life of the one aborted is arguing about utilitarianism. A person should live on the chance that they or one of their descendants might do great good...or even a little more good than average for that matter. But this is not right. Human life is not precious because it may produce some social utility down the road. It is precious for the reasons Archemandrite Sophrony gave in the quote above. Human life matters intrinsicly because we are made in the image of God.

A Blog is Born

Here we are at the beginning and I have to wonder what will become of this blog. Will I be faithful to keep it up? Will I get bored and forget that it exists? Will I decide that it is counterproductive to the kind of interior life I hope to develop over the course of the rest of me, such time as the Lord may grant me? Who can say?

So many questions? Who do I think I am that I should plaster my feeble thoughts across cyberspace, the datasphere, or whatever trendy name the great virtual blue is called nowadays? It is a danger. It can disapate so easily so many potentially good intentions whether creative or spiritual. One can talk it all into nothingness. What level of discretion is necessary both to say something useful and not do damage to my soul?

Is this just a fleeting fancy, a bit of playtime with an internet novelty...or is it...will it be something more? How much do I have to write before friends and strangers tell me how wise or interesting I am...tickle my ears with compliments, with praise, the food of demons. Who will laddle scorn on all my efforts, mock my pretensions, and help save my soul? How angry will I be with those who praise me and how joyful over those who ridicule? How long before I bore both to sleep with my hand wringing.

I suppose the end of the matter is this: a man must be true to himself. And I am what I am...by turn quiet and gargulous. The Saints say that there are those who say little but always in vain and those who speak continuously but speak to the good of their hearer. May the Lord grant mercy that the posts of this blog weigh more towards the latter than the former.

And thus this blog is born.