To Always Have Been; To Always Be
Orthodox Christian Thoughts
NOTE: This is a piece based on the beliefs, teachings and practices of the Eastern Orthodox Church. If this sort of thing is not your bag, don’t waste your time reading. Man and Men is used as a general reference to both men and women.
Shakespeare’s Hamlet asks “To be or not to be, that is the question: “. God has always been and will always be. How can we humans begin to even grasp such a concept or reality? Man is caught up in his life with so many outer things and rarely takes time to ponder his inner being. If we who have faith in God, accept that which we know about Him, we must also be ready to embrace and accept that which we do not know about Him. In order to know Him, it seems that we must know more about ourselves.
Man’s existential reality differs across all regions and locales. Each individual’s life is different from that of his neighbor just as it is from another across the globe. But what all men have in common is God, whether they believe in Him or not. Free will allows us to choose to believe and follow or the opposite in many shapes and forms. We say God is omnipotent, this is something we can say we know about Him. However, defining it with our minds or speaking about in words is not possible. Yet, it is not fantasy that we are pursuing but acceptance that we know God is omnipotent, but we don’t know what His omnipotence really looks like.
Man may choose “not to be” in physical reality by ending the life of his body. However, Man did not choose “to be” because God chose that for Man and gave this life as a gift. We cannot grasp would it is to have always been and to always be. Yet, God, in His infinite wisdom has chosen to give us a gift that we so easily don’t consider or cast aside. That is, once He brought us into being, He now offers us to always “be” with Him.
Man can be with God while he lives in the body and again when he falls asleep and can spend eternity in the Heavenly Kingdom. This home which we also cannot know is His home and He offers us to come and live in His home…forever. God tells us this is possible. He shows us through His taking on physical form, allowing us to witness His Transfiguration on the mountain. God then shows us that the physical form passes away but shows us that our souls may rise with Him through the Resurrection. Humans have witnessed God’s work throughout the Scriptures. He has shown us what He wants us to know about Him. What He wants us to accept is that which we cannot know about Him.
This is the consummate “leap of faith’ for Man. In this corporeal life, we are given the chance to choose Him. How we live and believe in our physical time on earth, determines how we spend eternity. God has given enough information about Himself to us to accept that He exists and loves us. That is the first step we must take. We must accept that this is truth with a small ‘t’ in order to accept His Truth with a capital “T”. He has handed us His Truth, it is reliant on our free will whether we accept it or not. The world is full of skeptics and naysayers who try to lead us in the way of the rational logical only. “That is, the Father seeks those who are aware that He cannot be worshipped through human reason…”[1] We are called to have a rational mind but to use it for the benefit of God and our own salvation. We must discern for ourselves what we believe is truth. Man’s truths are fleeting while God’s are eternal.
We must trust what we know about God before we can begin to trust what we don’t know about Him. We cannot have the first without the second. Faith comes first and that comes from our trusting what we do know about God. The US Declaration of Independence states in its opening lines “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” All men do not accept that God is “Self-evident” despite the Scriptures, Desert Fathers, Lives of the Saints and other miracles documented over time. A person who accepts that the above are the self-evidence of God then becomes a person of faith. God exists because He has made Himself known and now that believer must take Christ’s yoke[2] upon himself to begin to go deeper into the faith so that he may further grasp what he cannot know about God. The beginning of belief is usually the time we get our first visit from the Holy Spirit.
Once a person has felt the Holy Spirit, there is that feeling within that no matter what, something bigger, better, and eternal is out there. Why do we know it (He) is out there? Because we can feel it within us. How do we explain it? We can’t explain it and that is God’s gift of His unknown self to us. Only those who have felt that flame of immortal being within their nous can understand. We can’t really describe it in real terms. We can give words to it but it does not do justice to the experience we feel within us. It just “is”. Now, those of us who have had this experience then join the ranks of all our fellow Christians who have felt the Holy Spirit make itself known inside them. Thus, we join with our brothers and sisters in corporate worship of that which we now know to be true.
The knowledge we are given of the Holy Spirit is not granted through the intellect. We cannot think that experience into existence. In our heart is where we are visited and in our heart is where we must pray. Many great Orthodox teachers have spoken about the soul’s resting in the nous and not the mind. Once a true experience of the Holy Spirit comes, one knows that what has been said is true. Therein, also lies our spiritual warfare. Now that our heart has felt it and our mind has processed that our heart is right, the two eventually do battle for dominance. Or rather, the mind must humble itself before the heart and for many of us, this is a lifelong task.
We see in many Lives of the Saints and others that they became Saints and Fathers because they were capable of joining the mind with the heart. We can pay lip service to it all we want but to actually accomplish it is a journey and discipline that very few can complete. Most of what we know about God has already been written or spoken. Now, we must explore the unknown territory and we must tread carefully and slowly in many places. Luckily, others have gone before and left us their maps. Others are still on the path and are further ahead of us. “One who climbs a mountain for the first time needs to follow a known route, and he needs with him, as a companion and guide, someone who has been up before and is familiar with the way.”[3] Living guides are often as hard to find as the path itself. If we truly need a guide, we must believe that God will plant one on our path. We can’t obsess over finding “just the right guide” or we may end up sitting on a bench for far too long. Some walk together while others go alone.
Now that we know that God is there and that we can’t know Him completely, a new knowledge also manifests. Someone stands on the path and does not want us to pass. This is an enemy that wants to throw us off the bridge. If we are one of the lucky ones to have made it onto the path, this enemy fights harder because we have found it. How many has the enemy kept from ever finding or following the path we cannot know. What we can know, is that once on the path, we are a primary target. Now we must try to walk the path and fight our way past the enemy as we go. God knows this and provides us with armor[4], but we can also strengthen ourselves by using the tools given to us by the One Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church.
Church sacraments give us the strength to continue along the path while also reminding us of both our individual and corporate journey toward the same destination. The Lord said about a certain demon “These can only be driven out with prayer and fasting.”[5] The church gives us fasting seasons and prayer rules in order to fight the enemy. We are not condemned if we do not pray or fast but merely strengthened. This is something that Christ made known to us. He told us that we need discipline if we are to travel with Him and conquer our enemies. Christ went down into the abyss and trampled upon death. He rose again according to the Scriptures and sits at the Right Hand of God. The door is opened once we knock upon it.
Man’s ego often struggles with accepting that there is something bigger, better and smarter than us. Fanciful arguments abound for the lack of evidence of God. Truthfully, we rely on human witnesses who make the case in Scripture and other mediums. We are told not to trust in prince and sons of men[6]. Yet, we do believe because of what we feel in our hearts. We learn to filter out the lies of man and our enemy, to discover the known truths of God. We accomplish this with our minds and finish it with our hearts. As we grow in faith, we begin to understand just how much God is not understandable. Thus, we give our lives over to a God we cannot know because of what we do know about Him.
In conclusion, trust is what we put in what is unknown about God. Faith is a journey and also a task. We must continually work at it and practice it if we hope to move beyond being apprentices. God is our Master, and he gives us teachers who help us become better at finding Him. The church gives us tools, shows us that we are not alone and gives us the chance to worship with our brothers and sisters in Christ. God has given us only what we can handle, and He expects us to find Him on the path. He gives us Truth which we must first learn to trust as the Truth despite living in a world full of doubt. In the end we know that God has invited us to eternally “be” with Him, but we don’t know what that state of “being” will feel or look like because it is beyond the grasp of our intellect and exists only within the elation we feel when we sense the Divine Presence within our nous. “According to the working of His unfathomable will, God created man and set him before Him as His target, the target of His lovingkindness, so that He might care for him night and day through His grace. What honour is greater than that given to man — for the Creator of the world to become his servant, the minister of goodness and of his salvation?”[7]
[1] Zacharias, Archimandrite. “Remember Thy First Love.” Stavropegic Monastery of St. John the Baptist. Essex, UK; 2nd Edition; 2011
[2] Matthew 11: 27–30.
[3] Bp. Kallistos Ware. “The Spiritual Father in Orthodox Christianity,” Cross Currents (Summer/Fall 1974) p. 296
[4] Ephesians 6: 10–18.
[5] Mark 9:29.
[6] The Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom: The Second Antiphon from Psalm 146
[7] Zachrou, Archimandrite Zacharias. “Man, the Target of God.” Stavropegic Monastery of St. John the Baptist; Essex, UK. 2016. P. 17
