-- "Flight into Egpyt," by (Pittsburgh native) Henry Ossawa Tanner
Orthodoxy is a beautiful religion, full of joy and peace. But this beauty comes at a price: it demands hard thinking.
The hardest thought of all requires that on one hand we know that Jesus Christ, the Second Person of Holy Trinity, is “un-knowable” in His Divine Nature.
But on the other hand, Jesus Christ became the Son of Man in His Nativity according to the flesh. And in taking upon Himself our weakness, He becomes “know-able” to us.
The second-hardest thought has to do with our Orthodox religion itself, which is the fullness of all truth. Again, this thought is stretched by a seeming contradiction. On one hand, the Orthodox Faith will endure forever, despite our weakness. Even in our faithlessness and shortcomings, God is faithful. Orthodoxy will survive this generation.
On the other hand, there is a mysterious weakness of the Church in our own thoughts and actions. Successes come and go. Programs rise and enterprises either fall or stall. No human structure can stand the tides and floods of time by itself.
This is an important point that gets missed (intentionally) by most schools. It is too bad that boys and girls are not made to memorize the classic poem “Ozymandias.” In it, the poet Shelley describes the broken remains of a statue in the desert sands of Egypt. On the pedestal were inscribed some of the most arrogant (and colossally stupid) words ever written by a king: “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
The bitter joke is that the very statue of the king in question (who is better known to history as the Pharaoh Ramses II) had fallen into ruin.
Things change in time. Nothing stays the same in the world. Humanity, left to its own devices, is not so much evil as it is completely weak.
We Orthodox Christians hold a religion of infinite beauty in our weak human hearts. It is okay to admit this frailty. We are grownups. We can think hard, even scary, thoughts.
But in our weakness, God’s all-sufficient strength is made obvious. Christ, if we cooperate, will be formed in us (Galatians 4.19).
Speaking of Egypt, the Baby Jesus had to be taken there as a political refugee by His adolescent Mother and his senior citizen Foster-father Joseph.
They must have looked just like one of the many uncounted Middle Eastern refugee families that have wandered the Holy Land for thousands of years. We should consider that the warfare against the Innocents is still going on (as Patriarch Bartholomew recently pointed out) in the abortions of unborn babies, and in the demonic violence in Syria … and in Egypt.
The Holy Family fled to Egypt to escape another of many Jewish Holocausts -- this one executed by the mad Herod in Bethlehem. But the Egypt of Jesus’ time was no sanctuary. It was inhabited by enemy ghosts, rebellious bodiless powers who had duped the natives into building idols and temples for them.
It is said that these very idols and monuments fell apart whenever the Christ Child passed by: a 17th century Russian icon beautifully depicts the fact that false words of the ancient polytheistic culture could not stand in the presence of the One True Word.
In this episode the strength of Christ’s divinity is clearly seen. At the same time, the weakness of His humanity was also plain. He had to be protected and nourished. He had to be sheltered from Herod’s storm troopers, and shielded from Egypt’s demonic atmosphere.
Just as Herod’s hitlerian campaign continues today in abortion and war, so also Egypt remains just as real. Here, we are not referring to the nation that is located on the Nile nowadays, but to a much greater, global reality. The “Egypt” of today -- the alien Egypt into which we much protect the refugee Child Christ -- is the worldwide culture of an anti-religious marketplace. It is where all religions are tolerated because all religions are disregarded. It is where everything is assigned a price and a value. It is where creation is consumed, polluted, discarded and destroyed. It is where entertainers are idolized as celebrities, and only eccentric cranks are bothered by this. It is where thoughts of eternity and the spiritual reality, and even the possibility of God are ridiculed with barely-concealed contempt.
This is the “Egypt” in which we are fostering the Body of Christ. It is the Egypt of prima facie and materialized denial, a globalized cult of meaninglessness.
The problem is that despite its anti-religious rhetoric, it is even more infested by demons than the ancient Egypt of the Pharaohs and the Ptolemy’s.
The extraordinary new Pope of Rome, Francis, is acutely aware of this demonism. In the last few months, a number of new, additional exorcists have been trained for ministry in both Italy and Spain, because so many people have experimented -- insanely -- with satanic magic.
In a less than honorable contrast to the Pope, the Church of England is experimenting with a new baptismal liturgy that has removed any mention of the devil or sin. There are no exorcisms in this new, modern ritual (which is in a trial period until April). Former Anglican Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali has complained that his church is trying too hard to make everyone feel welcome and to not offend anyone. Any mention of sin or the devil is bound to make people (and the institutional development front office) feel uncomfortable, and thus, the church unpopular.
This new style of baptism stands for a popular attitude about the reality of the mystical, secular “Egypt” of the modern world: embrace it, accept its values and its language, blend in. Go about your business and look busy. Be entertained and distracted. Be assimilated (“resistance is futile,” as the Borg once said).
Another popular attitude to the modern reality is to simply refuse to go to Egypt in the first place. Some would recommend retreat, seeking shelter in nostalgia. Metropolitan John (Zizioulas) of Pergamon, in Orthodoxy in the Modern World, rightly warns against this craven attitude of retreat. Christians are not permitted to hide out in the margins, he writes: instead, they are called to walk as grownups into the secular globalized (and luridly gnostic) Egypt and to even “plunder its wealth,” as St Gregory of Nyssa recommends in his book, The Life of Moses.
The disregard of the devil and sin is less than rational, and it is actually un-Christian. We go into this Egypt with our eyes wide open. To pretend that there is no Enemy does not make the Enemy go away. There is a ravenous lion, after all, that seeks to devour (1 Peter 5.8).
But we cannot be afraid. The Pope has added to his ranks of exorcists: this sort of exorcism is practiced in Orthodoxy, with much less public attention and in a quieter fashion. Orthodoxy has always put more emphasis on “preventive exorcism,” which is nothing other than good robust catechism – a catechism that is “mystagogical” rather than “educational” (at least in the sense of Dewey and his progeny).
It will become clearer, in the decades to come, that mental health has always been predicated upon the interiorization of Orthodox dogma.
Always, more important than the spectacle of exorcizing devils is the higher task of nurturing the Christ “being formed in us.”
(I wonder whether exorcism is so popular a concept because it is so much quicker -- i.e., over-and-done-with -- than the life-long task of mystagogy.)
How to foster the Christ Child in our Egyptian exile in the modern world? How do we respond to the new anti-religious culture, whose media missionaries aggressively preach their anti-Trinitarian gospel? Who wave the tattered atheistic/agnostic banners in Dante's vestibule, while trying to conceal the lazy polytheism that persists only because such neanderthal and indeliberate religion is the only thing that can support today’s Sears catalog of crazy, passionate diversions?
This work of nurturing the refugee Christ is only for grownups -- adult Christians who are brave enough and loyal enough to keep the faith in an alien land. I say this with some hesitation, because saying so runs counter to so much youth-orientation in religious publicity nowadays.
In contrast to so much youth-ministry-rhetoric, the mature work of Joseph in Egypt requires the constant learning of Orthodox doctrine and theology. Reading the Bible is necessary for everyone, especially for boys and girls -- but to be honest, reading and “interiorizing” Orthodox dogma is even more important (because Bible study is never sufficient, by itself, for the faith). Orthodox theology is necessary for all Orthodox Christians, not just clergy: it is Orthodox doctrine that is the best therapy for mental health.
This work requires constant, local loyalty to the parish all year long. A grownup Orthodox Christian needs no entertainment or attention or acknowledgement. He or she is willing to serve and self-sacrifice in his own locality. Fostering the Christ Child means attending to the Sacraments at every possible occasion in the local parish: the Eucharist especially, Reconciliation, and Unction.
It is troubling that in some circles, “localism” is conflated with the "margins and ghettos" as an existential place of shrinking back from the frightening aspect of globalization. To conflate two very different reactions to the congealing single metropolis is to construct a meaningless category. The very catholicity of Orthodoxy can only start in the immediacy of family and the present neighbor – in the little parish, that is, where age-cohorts and interest-groups are clumped together in a heterogeneous mass, and not programmed apart in institutional programming.
Orthodoxy takes root in the Good Samaritan gift-exchange of intimacy. Then, and only then, can it grow as a mustard seed into a larger diocesan (and meta-diocesan) experience – like a tree whose branches can shelter the birds (Matthew 13.31-32).
Only a mature Orthodox Christian can foster, through prayer and fasting, the Christ Child “being formed within you” (Galatians 4.19) in an alien world -- a world that is still infected by the Prince of the Air.
The adults of the Holy Family knew that children and youth, in the Egyptian meantime, should be protected instead of being lionized -- they cannot be assigned the grownup task of finding shelter in the storm, and fending off the devil.
The attempt to retain youth by lionizing them in programming is of the same dubious quality as recruitment for the institutional development. Frankly, I am weary of hearing the constant shibboleth that the youth are the church of tomorrow or today. Codswallop. Everyone is the Church of yesterday, today and tomorrow – from the unborn infant to the elderly infirm … from the well-heeled and under-educated executive to the inconvenient poor and the disregarded vagrant who just can’t find his "place.”
Everyone is of infinite value, and should be of equal “programmatic” concern.
Why do young people leave the church? Not because there is not enough attention paid them. That has been thought long enough, with little to show for over fifty years of experimentation.
No. Boys and girls leave the church not because of a lack of programming, but rather because of a lack of real adults. What youth really need is more "programmatic attention" given to adults for the growing up into theosis.
It is grownups that are called to follow the Theotokos and the Righteous Joseph into the Egypt of modernity...
... to give shelter, and a dwelling-place of an adult rational mind, to the Prince of Peace -- Who alone is the source of beauty and joy.
Let us be grownup in Egypt. It is what the adult Orthodoxy of the Holy Family requires.
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