The Neighbor Within Reach

We approach elections carrying concerns about our families, our communities, and the future of our country. We have judgments about what needs to change and whom we can trust. As citizens, we also have responsibilities. How should we approach them as Christians?

The parable of the rich man and Lazarus gives us a place to begin.

The rich man is clothed in purple and fine linen. He feasts every day. Lazarus lies outside his gate, hungry and covered with sores. The gate separates abundance from deprivation, but it also reveals how close these men are. Lazarus is within reach.

We are not told what the rich man thought about poverty, how he explained Lazarus’s circumstances, or whether he considered himself generous. We know that he feasted while Lazarus went hungry at his gate.

It is possible to have strong opinions about suffering while becoming accustomed to the suffering person nearby. We can explain the problem, assign responsibility, and describe what someone else ought to do. Meanwhile, Lazarus still suffers.

Christian citizenship begins with learning to recognize a neighbor. Love gives our civic action its purpose; prudence helps us choose how to act; responsibility requires us to act and answer for the consequences.

The people affected by our decisions are persons made in the image of God. They have names, families, fears, and hopes. Their lives matter beyond how well their stories serve as evidence for our arguments.

This includes people suffering material deprivation, as Lazarus did. It also includes those burdened by loneliness, estrangement, illness, and despair. It includes people whose troubles we struggle to understand—and people whose political judgments we struggle to bear.

Love as an Examination of Conscience

In his first letter to the Corinthians, Saint Paul describes gifts that anyone might admire: eloquence, knowledge, faith, and extraordinary generosity. Without love, even these amount to nothing.

We can understand a great deal and still fail to love. We can make sacrifices and still fail to love. We can give away everything we possess and still fail to love. The effort devoted to acquiring knowledge and cultivating discipline does not guarantee that we are using those gifts well. We can even turn them toward harmful ends.

Applied to politics, this should make us cautious about treating the strength of our convictions or our ability to defend them as evidence of spiritual health.

We may have studied the issues, identified a real injustice, and developed good reasons for our judgments. We must still ask what is happening in our hearts as we speak and act.

Saint Paul says that love is patient and kind. Does that describe the way we discuss public affairs? He says that love is neither arrogant nor rude. Does that describe how we treat people who disagree with us?

Love does not rejoice at wrong. Can we resist taking pleasure in someone’s disgrace because that person belongs to the other side? Can we acknowledge wrongdoing when it comes from someone we support?

These questions belong in our examination of conscience. If we approach them with a willingness to learn and repent, they can help us grow in wisdom and prudence.

Prudence Takes Consequences Seriously

Prudence is the discipline of discerning what love requires here and now, with these actual people, under these particular circumstances. It brings our moral commitments into contact with the world in which we must act.

Our obligation to care for the hungry is clear. Which policies will best relieve hunger requires further judgment about circumstances, institutions, and consequences. Some proposals are better supported than others, and some means are themselves unjust. Invoking compassion does not settle those questions; invoking complexity does not excuse us from answering them.

This helps explain why faithful Christians may disagree about a policy while sharing a commitment to the people it is meant to serve. Such disagreements call for careful inquiry. We need to examine the strength of the arguments, the evidence supporting them, and the moral character of the proposed means.

If we want to help our neighbors—and as Christians we must—we have to take the consequences of our decisions seriously. Is a proposed remedy likely to work? Who will benefit? Who may be harmed? What have we overlooked? What evidence would lead us to reconsider?

The warmth of our feelings cannot answer these questions. Good intentions are a beginning, but love demands that we keep learning. We must learn from our mistakes and acknowledge how little we may understand about other people, their needs, and the workings of the institutions we hope will serve them.

This requires humility. None of us understands everything. No candidate possesses every virtue. No party perfectly expresses the will of God. Every human institution needs correction, and every one of us needs repentance.

Yet we still have to act. Uncertainty cannot become a permanent excuse for avoiding responsibility.

Humility helps us carry that responsibility honestly. We make the best judgment we can with the knowledge available to us, while remaining willing to recognize and correct our mistakes. We should be prepared to discover that we were less right than we thought—and that someone else was less wrong.

Responsibility Beyond the Voting Booth

In a democracy, we share in decisions that shape other people’s lives. That is a serious trust. Our votes, our speech, our service, and our willingness to hold leaders accountable all have moral weight. We should bring our Christian convictions into these responsibilities. Mercy, justice, truthfulness, and respect for human life belong in the voting booth. They must also shape what we do when we leave it.

An election does not discharge our responsibility to Lazarus. Supporting a public program does not relieve us of the duty to be generous with our own time and possessions. And that goes both ways; practicing personal charity does not relieve us of the duty to consider whether our public arrangements treat people justly. Our neighbors need us to take both responsibilities seriously.

This work continues when the people we supported take office. Loyalty cannot excuse us from examining their conduct or the consequences of their policies. The same concern for our neighbors that informed our vote should inform our willingness to both offer encouragement and demand correction.

Government and the Limits of Politics

We also need a sound understanding of what government can accomplish and what we are asking it to carry. Government can restrain wrongdoing, protect the vulnerable, and help establish conditions in which families and communities can flourish. Its failures can cause terrible suffering. So can its abuses of power and its attempts to require what conscience forbids.

Following St. Paul’s first letter to St. Timothy, we pray every morning and at every Divine Liturgy that the Lord would strengthen our civil authorities so that it might provide a safe place for us to pursue perfection (1 Timothy 2:1–4). This is the basis of our political theology. The government’s failures, to include those times it oversteps its proper bounds and acts in accordance with anti-Orthodox ethics, can cause terrible suffering. These things matter.

The government, and thus politics, are important, but we ask too much of politics when we expect it to give us our ultimate identity, secure our hope, or overcome the brokenness of the human heart.

Our hope, for ourselves, our nation, and the world, is in Jesus Christ. He heals our estrangement from God and from one another. In His Church, through prayer, repentance, the sacraments, and the daily practice of mercy, we learn to receive His life and share it.

This should make us more faithful in our civic duties. It should also free us from the desperation that treats every political opponent as an enemy and every political victory as deliverance.

After an election, we will still need to pray for those who govern, speak truthfully, resist injustice, and love our neighbors. We will still need to repent.

And Lazarus will still have a name.

Hearing the Word and Acting on It

At the end of the parable, the rich man asks that his brothers receive an extraordinary warning. Abraham answers that they already have Moses and the prophets. They must listen to them.

We, too, have been given the word of God. We have heard that love is patient and kind, that knowledge and sacrifice are empty without love. We have been shown a hungry man lying at a gate.

The question is whether we will allow what we have received to shape our lives.

As we exercise our citizenship, let us ask God for wisdom to judge carefully, courage to accept responsibility, and humility to receive correction. These virtues grow through practice, including our response to the neighbor, like Lazarus, who is already within reach.

We can learn his name and listen to his story. We can share our time and attention, offer practical help, and sit and pray with them in their suffering. We can make clear through our actions that we see this person’s pain and desire their peace and salvation.

May the love we proclaim become the love our neighbors actually receive.

What has becoming Orthodox made us better at noticing: the faults of other people, or the image of God in them?

Giving our lives to Christ should change the way we see and love the world. As we enter more deeply into the life of the Church, we should become more capable of recognizing the image of God in our neighbors, receiving the good with gratitude, and responding to brokenness with mercy.

Yet this is not always what happens. Sometimes, as our knowledge of Orthodoxy increases, so does our capacity for disappointment and contempt. We acquire a more developed account of how things ought to be, then use it to find fault with the people and communities God has given us to love.

The Scriptures warn us about this possibility. At the end of the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, Abraham says that those who will not hear Moses and the prophets will remain unconvinced even if someone rises from the dead. We confess precisely such a resurrection. But we must still ask whether our hearts are becoming receptive to the life it offers.

Saint Paul presses the question further. We may speak with the tongues of men and angels, understand mysteries, possess extraordinary faith, and give away everything we own. Without love, we gain nothing.

These are warnings for people who believe, study, worship, and sacrifice. They are warnings for us.

The riches of Orthodoxy are given for our salvation. The Scriptures, the Fathers, the services, the ascetical disciplines, and the mysteries of the Church give us traction in our life in Christ. Through them, we learn to fulfill the great commandments: to love God and to love our neighbor. As our knowledge deepens, our love should deepen with it.

To turn these gifts against that purpose is a terrible misuse of holy things.

Learning to Love Our Spouses

Consider a marriage. A husband and wife enter the Orthodox Church, grateful to have found the fullness of the faith. The husband begins to study. He learns about marriage, the household, and the responsibilities of husbands and wives. Soon he has accumulated an impressive collection of teachings about how his wife ought to behave.

But what fruit does this knowledge bear? Does he become more patient? Does he see her sacrifices more clearly? Does he become more attentive to her burdens and more grateful for her gifts? Or does he simply discover more reasons to criticize her?

There is something tragic about using the Church’s teaching on marriage to become increasingly disappointed in one’s spouse. Marriage is meant to be an icon of communion. Its disciplines should help us repent, serve, and grow in love. When our study chiefly equips us to catalog another person’s shortcomings, we need to examine what we are doing with what we have learned.

Here is a temptation that reaches into every part of our lives: we learn what holiness looks like, then begin measuring everyone’s distance from it while giving comparatively little attention to our own need for repentance.

Recognizing Grace in Our Parish

The same thing can happen in our relationship with the parish. We encounter the Church’s beautiful account of herself: the Body of Christ, the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit, the communion of saints. We learn to appreciate the depth of the services and the glory they reveal. These discoveries should help us perceive more of what God is doing in the actual community where we worship.

Instead, they can become a standard against which everyone nearby is found wanting. The parish is poorly organized. The priest does not match our expectations. The bishop disappoints us. The people seem insufficiently serious about the things we have recently learned to value.

Some criticisms may be justified. Faithfulness sometimes requires correction, and love requires us to respond to real harm. But we should pay attention when the principal fruit of our religious life becomes an expanding list of complaints and criticisms. Are we learning to bear one another’s burdens? Are we becoming more willing to serve? Can we recognize holiness when it appears in an unfamiliar or unimpressive form?

The glory of the Church should help us recognize the grace at work among these particular people, including people whose weaknesses resemble our own.

Loving Our Country Through an Election

A third example concerns our country. Here I should acknowledge my own disposition. I am an American and a patriot. I am a Son of the American Revolution. I am grateful for our founding inheritance and believe that our constitutional arrangements contain considerable wisdom about governing a fallen people. Others will assess that inheritance differently. My argument does not require everyone to share my enthusiasm.

Whatever our judgment of America’s founding or present condition, growth in Christ should make us more capable of gratitude, truthful criticism, and service to the people who live here.

But I am troubled when growth in Orthodoxy seems to make someone less able to recognize anything good in the country and culture that helped form them and gave them the freedom to know and grow in Christ. Instead, every imperfection becomes evidence of comprehensive corruption. Every expression of gratitude seems naïve. Despair begins to pass for discernment.

Election seasons can intensify this habit. We are invited to imagine that everything depends on the next result and to catastrophize the future under the rule of those we regard as our political enemies. We rehearse the disasters their victory might bring until fear and suspicion shape the way we see the people around us.

Eventually, a neighbor’s vote becomes sufficient reason to dismiss his kindness, doubt his motives, or stop listening to him. We can describe the catastrophe we fear in great detail while overlooking the person standing before us.

Political judgments matter, and their consequences can be serious. We have responsibilities to exercise discernment, oppose wrongdoing, and protect our neighbors. But those responsibilities require us to remain attentive to the people affected by our choices, including people whose choices we oppose. Our convictions should not make us incapable of recognizing their goodness or receiving their kindness.

The saints could recognize evil while remaining attentive to the good that evil had failed to destroy. We need to develop that capacity. If our growing religious knowledge makes us less able to perceive and nourish goodness, we should ask what is forming our vision.

Letting Christ Heal Our Sight

This question reaches beyond patriotism. The image of God remains in every person, however obscured the likeness may be. We should expect our healing in Christ to make us more sensitive to that image. We should become better able to recognize goodness in our spouses, our children, our fellow parishioners, our clergy, and people whose lives differ profoundly from our own.

When that is not happening, the answer may not be to intensify the habits that have brought us here. We may already be working very hard at finding faults, defending positions, and measuring the distance between our ideals and everyone else’s performance.

We need to let the Gospel turn our attention toward our own repentance and open our eyes to our neighbor. Can we now see someone’s generosity where before we saw only his politics? Can we receive love from the spouse or parishioner we have become so practiced at correcting?

Christ saw us in our brokenness and came to heal us. He met our blindness with light and our estrangement with the offer of communion. As we receive that mercy, we can begin to approach others with the patience and attention of someone who desires their healing.

As Orthodoxy begins to work on us, we should start noticing people we previously overlooked. We should discover goodness in people we had written off, become willing to listen to people we once dismissed, and begin to love people we once hated. We do not have to discover their virtues before we owe them love. But as our hearts are healed, we should become more capable of seeing what our contempt had hidden.

We have received an extraordinary abundance of spiritual riches. May our knowledge bear fruit in patience, our worship in gratitude, and our repentance in mercy. And may the people we once failed to love encounter, through us, something of the love with which Christ has loved us.

Note: much of this is drawn from Fr. Michael Pomazansky’s Orthodox Dogmatic Theology.

Genesis: man was made for society; and that society was intentionally organized. While under the Old Covenant, the ecclesia was organized. That organization was transfigured in and by Christ, who is The High Priest and Shepherd (Pastor) and given a new hierarchical structure:

He “gave some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some pastors and teachers; for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the Body of Christ; till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (Eph. 4:11-13).

No one can call themselves into hierarchical ministry or create their own churches; “No man taketh this honor unto himself, but he that is called of God, as was Aaron” (Heb. 5:4).

Bishops

The first rank of the Church on earth is the apostles;

After His resurrection, Christ said to the apostles; “As My Father hath sent Me, even so send I you. And when He had said this, He breathed on them, and said unto them, Receive ye the Holy Spirit. Whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained” (John 20:21-23).

Then he describes their ministry; “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you. And, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world. Amen” (Matt. 28:19-20).

The Lord sending the Holy Spirit evidences ecclesial leadership is “inseparably united with special gift of the grace of the Holy Spirit.

Note that they are called to teach, perform mysteries, and to administrate (“observe”).

This Great Commission also points towards the need for successors or heirs to the Apostles who will continue the work (“always”). This was done by the laying on of hands as with St. Matthias (Acts I) and St. Timothy. For the latter; “Neglect not the gift that is in thee, which was given thee by prophecy, with the laying on of the hands of the presbytery” (1 Tim. 4:13) and “I put thee in remembrance, that thou stir up the gift of God which is in thee by the putting on of my hands” (2 Tim. 1:6).

From Fr. Michael Pomazansky;

“The succession from the Apostles and the uninterruptedness of the episcopacy comprise one of the essential sides of the Church. And, on the contrary: the absence of the succession of the episcopacy in one or another Christian denomination deprives it of an attribute of the true Church, even if in it there is present an undistorted dogmatic teaching. Such an understanding was present in the Church from its beginning. From the Church History of Eusebius of Caesarea we know that all the local ancient Christian Churches preserved lists of their bishops in their uninterrupted succession.” (p. 120)

St. Paul also gave them the authority ordain other bishops/priests: “For this cause I left thee in Crete, that thou shouldest set in order the things that are wanting and ordain presbyters in every city, as I had appointed thee” (Titus 1:5).

Presbyters

In addition to the above, Acts describes the Apostles Paul and Barnabas ordained presbyters in several places (Acts 14:23). Fr. Thomas Hopko points out that the words bishop and presbyter were not used as precisely as now, but this was well nailed down before too long, but it is clear that the order was for the senior bishop to assign clerics to lead the church in specific places. This pattern was certainly established in the mind of St. Ignatius of Antioch, who pointed to the need for proper church order. It is also true the word bishop was the same word as overseer; once again it was known by its context. Regardless, the presbytery is the second order of the priesthood.

Deacons

The third order of the priesthood is the diaconate. This office was started in Acts (chapter six), and Acts also describes that deacons, like priests are ordained by bishops (1 Timothy 3:8-13). They had specific tasks assigned to them, but their purpose was to assist the bishops and presbyters. At least once the deacons preached (St. Stephen!) and baptized (the eunuch in Acts 8:5 and 38). It natural flows that they would be entrusted to give communion at the Eucharist and take communion to people who were not at the Eucharist (St. Justin Martyr).

There were also specific requirements to become a deacon and presbyter/bishop:

Requirements for Bishops/Presbyters

1 Timothy 3:1-7 (KJV)

This is a true saying, if a man desire the office of a bishop, he desireth a good work.
A bishop then must be blameless, the husband of one wife, vigilant, sober, of good behaviour, given to hospitality, apt to teach;
Not given to wine, no striker, not greedy of filthy lucre; but patient, not a brawler, not covetous;
One that ruleth well his own house, having his children in subjection with all gravity; (For if a man know not how to rule his own house, how shall he take care of the church of God?)
Not a novice, lest being lifted up with pride he fall into the condemnation of the devil.
Moreover he must have a good report of them which are without; lest he fall into reproach and the snare of the devil.

Titus 1:5-9 (KJV)

For this cause left I thee in Crete, that thou shouldest set in order the things that are wanting, and ordain elders in every city, as I had appointed thee:
If any be blameless, the husband of one wife, having faithful children not accused of riot or unruly.
For a bishop must be blameless, as the steward of God; not selfwilled, not soon angry, not given to wine, no striker, not given to filthy lucre;
But a lover of hospitality, a lover of good men, sober, just, holy, temperate;
Holding fast the faithful word as he hath been taught, that he may be able by sound doctrine both to exhort and to convince the gainsayers.

Requirements for Deacons

Acts 6:3

Wherefore, brethren, look ye out among you seven men of honest report, full of the Holy Ghost and wisdom, whom we may appoint over this business.

1 Timothy 3:8-13 (KJV)

Likewise must the deacons be grave, not doubletongued, not given to much wine, not greedy of filthy lucre; Holding the mystery of the faith in a pure conscience.
And let these also first be proved; then let them use the office of a deacon, being found blameless.
Even so must their wives be grave, not slanderers, sober, faithful in all things.
Let the deacons be the husbands of one wife, ruling their children and their own houses well.
For they that have used the office of a deacon well purchase to themselves a good degree, and great boldness in the faith which is in Christ Jesus.

Three Orders

While there were other callings and gifts, the bishop, presbyter, and deacon are the only orders early on. Here is St. Ignatius;

“It is essential, as indeed you are acting, to do nothing without the bishop. Likewise obey the presbytery as apostles of Jesus Christ — our hope, in Whom may God grant that we live. And everyone should cooperate in every way with the deacons that serve the ministers of the Mysteries of Jesus Christ, for they are not ministers of food and drink, but servants of the Church of God.” “All of you should revere the deacons, as a commandment of Jesus Christ, and the bishop as Jesus Christ, the Son of God the Father, and the presbyters as the assembly of God, as the choir of the Apostles. Without them there is no Church” (Ignatius the God-bearer, Epistle to the Trallians, par. 2; To the Smyrneans, par. 8).

There can be Church and the Eucharist without priests and deacons, but not without a bishop. The relations between ranks and across episcopacies were spelled out by councils.

Councils

The Council in Jerusalem is Acts (15 – 16) flowed naturally from the Apostolic faith; there was a wide dispute that required a universal response. This became normative. The Ecumenical Council of bishops is the highest authority in the Church.

Fisnish with a meditation on the one, all, and few (Fr. Thomas Hopko and Mp. Kallistos Ware).

When it comes to patristics, we need to avoid two opposite mistakes.

The first is treating “the Fathers” as though they all said exactly the same thing about everything. They did not. They argued with one another, emphasized different things, used different philosophical vocabularies, speculated, and sometimes said things that the Church did not ultimately receive.

The opposite mistake is therefore to conclude that anything said by an ancient Christian is equally “patristic.” It is not.

A useful mental model is a normal curve. There is a thick center: a remarkably stable grammar of Scripture, worship, sacrament, asceticism, Christology, ecclesiology, morality, and holiness. As one moves away from that center, one encounters increasingly unusual or speculative positions. We need to learn the center before studying the tails (a good prayer role helps with this process). That is important because Tradition does not mean simply “old.” Origen is old. Tertullian is old. Arius is old. What matters is what has been received, purified, confessed, prayed, and lived by the Church by all, at all times, in all places.

A second principle follows:

Tradition is not “find a Father who said it.” The Fathers are a living conversation with a recognizable center of gravity. We need to know that center well enough to recognize both legitimate diversity and genuine deviation. The Apostolic Fathers are especially important because they show us Christianity while the living memory of the apostles was still present.

I. The Apostolic and immediately post-apostolic age — receiving the faith
The Apostolic Fathers (plus St. Justin)

1. St. Clement of Rome, 35–99

St. Clement was a leading figure in the Church of Rome near the end of the first century, traditionally numbered among its earliest bishops. He belonged to the generation immediately following Sts. Peter and Paul and lived within the Roman Church that remembered their martyrdom.

His surviving First Epistle to the Corinthians, usually dated around AD 96, was written to address disorder and division in Corinth.

Main concern: apostolic continuity, ecclesial order, humility, and peace.

St. Clement understands Christian ministry as something received through an ordered chain: “Christ therefore was sent forth by God, and the apostles by Christ.”

He goes on to describe the apostles appointing bishops and deacons and providing for the continuation of ministry after them.

Teaching point: already at the end of the first century, Christianity is understood as something received and handed on, not reinvented by each congregation. Here we see the center before it has technical vocabulary.

2. St. Ignatius of Antioch, 35–107

St. Ignatius was bishop of Antioch, one of the great apostolic churches associated especially with Sts. Peter and Paul. On his journey to martyrdom in Rome, he wrote seven letters that provide one of our clearest pictures of Church life immediately after the apostolic generation.

St. Ignatius emphasizes the bishop, presbyters, deacons, Eucharist, and unity of the local Church. He also strongly insists on the genuine humanity and suffering of Christ against docetic tendencies.

Main concern: ecclesial unity centered on bishop and Eucharist.

His most famous line: “Wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church.”

He also insists that the Eucharist should be celebrated under the bishop or one authorized by him.

Teaching point: a sacramental, episcopal understanding of the Church is extraordinarily early. It is not a medieval development.

3. St. Polycarp of Smyrna, 69–155

St. Polycarp was bishop of Smyrna and one of the strongest personal links between the apostolic and post-apostolic generations. St. Irenaeus later remembered hearing St. Polycarp recount his conversations with St. John and with others who had known the Lord face-to-face.

His Letter to the Philippians reveals a Christianity shaped by Scripture, moral discipline, perseverance, charity, and fidelity to the apostolic teaching.

Main concern: living the apostolic faith faithfully and concretely.

A useful line: “He that has love is far from all sin.”

Teaching point: Tradition is already more than information. It is an inherited way of life.

4. St. Papias of Hierapolis, 60–130

St. Papias was bishop of Hierapolis in Asia Minor. He deliberately sought testimony from those who had known or heard the apostles and preserved traditions associated with Sts. Andrew, Peter, Philip, Thomas, James, John, Matthew, and others.

His writings survive only in fragments, but one statement is particularly important for understanding early Christian Tradition.

Main concern: living apostolic memory.

St. Papias writes: “What was to be got from books was not so profitable to me as what came from the living and abiding voice.”

Teaching point: this is not “oral tradition against Scripture.” Written texts already matter enormously. But the texts exist within a larger ecology of worship, discipleship, teaching, memory, and personal transmission.

5. St. Quadratus of Athens, 80–130

St. Quadratus was one of the earliest Christian apologists and addressed an apology to Emperor Hadrian, probably around AD 125. He lived sufficiently close to the apostolic era that he could still appeal to living memory of those who had encountered the healing ministry of Christ.

Only a small fragment of his work survives.

Main concern: the historical reality of the Gospel.

He writes: “Our Saviour’s works were always present, for they were real.” He then says that some who had been healed or raised by Christ survived for many years.

Teaching point: Christianity is still presenting itself as an event within living historical memory, not as a distant mythology.

6. St. Justin Martyr, 100–165

St. Justin belongs slightly later than the Apostolic Fathers proper, but he makes an excellent bridge from the apostolic age into the age of the apologists. Born in Samaria and trained in philosophy, he converted to Christianity after searching through several philosophical schools and eventually taught the Christian faith in Rome, where he was martyred.

He stands close enough to the apostolic age to show us how the inherited Christian faith begins to engage systematically with Greek philosophy and pagan culture.

Main concern: Christ as the Logos—the fulfillment of truth wherever truth has been genuinely perceived.

One of his characteristic ideas is: “Whatever things were rightly said among all men are the property of us Christians.”

St. Justin does not mean that Christianity merely absorbs pagan wisdom. Rather, every true insight participates in the Logos whose fullness is revealed in Christ.

St. Justin is also enormously important for liturgical history. In his First Apology, he gives us an early description of Sunday Christian worship: readings from the apostles and prophets, preaching, common prayers, Eucharist, and distribution to those absent.

Teaching point: St. Justin demonstrates that Tradition is not isolation from the intellectual world. The Church can recognize truth outside herself because all truth finds its coherence in Christ.

Summary of the apostolic and immediately post-apostolic period

St. Clement — apostolic order
St. Ignatius — apostolic Church and Eucharist
St. Polycarp — apostolic holiness
St. Papias — apostolic memory
St. Quadratus — apostolic witness
St. Justin — apostolic faith engaging culture and philosophy

The technical language of Nicaea and Chalcedon has not yet developed, but the underlying Christian grammar is already recognizable.

II. The great controversies — defining the faith
Sts. Athanasius, Cyril, and Maximus

Transition: the earliest Fathers receive and live the faith. The great dogmatic controversies present a new problem: What happens when people use Christian words but mean radically different things by them?

The implicit grammar of the Church now has to become explicit dogma.

St. Athanasius the Great, 296–373

St. Athanasius became bishop of Alexandria and the great defender of Nicene Christianity against Arianism. He endured repeated exiles rather than compromise on the divinity of the Son.

His deepest argument has to do with salvation (soteriology):

Only God can save. Christ saves. Therefore Christ cannot be merely a creature.

Main concern: Christ must truly be God if humanity is truly to participate in divine life.

His famous line from On the Incarnation: “He was made man that we might be made god.”

That sentence gives us one of the great organizing principles of Eastern Christian theology: the Incarnation is ordered toward theosis.

St. Cyril of Alexandria, 376–444

St. Cyril was patriarch of Alexandria and the principal theological figure at the Council of Ephesus in AD 431. His controversy with Nestorius concerned how we speak about the union of divinity and humanity in Christ.

Main concern: protecting the divinity and humanity of Christ.

This is why the title Theotokos matters. St. Mary did not give birth merely to a human person later associated with God. The one born from her is the eternal Son in the flesh.

Teaching point: Christology is about salvation. Humanity is saved because human nature has truly been united to the divine Person of the Word.

St. Maximus the Confessor, 580–662

St. Maximus was a monk and theologian who became the great defender of the doctrine that Christ possesses both a divine will and a genuinely human will. For his resistance to Monothelitism, his tongue was cut out and his right hand mutilated; he died in exile.

Main concern: Christ must assume the fullness of human nature, including the human will.

St. Gregory’s principle, later worked out with great precision by St. Maximus: “That which He has not assumed He has not healed.”

St. Maximus applies this with extraordinary rigor. If Christ does not possess a human will, the human will is not healed. But Christ’s human will is not abolished; it is healed and brought into perfect harmony with God.

Teaching point: salvation does not destroy human nature. Grace restores it to its proper operation.

The dogmatic spine

St. Athanasius: Who is Christ I? Truly God.

St. Cyril: Who is Christ II? The one incarnate Word, fully God and fully man.

St. Maximus: Who is Christ III? Complete human nature, including will and energy.

The great controversies are therefore not exercises in metaphysical pedantry. They are arguments about salvation. Here the center is forced to define itself.

III. The Three Holy Hierarchs: inhabiting the faith

St. Basil the Great, 329–379

St. Basil was bishop of Caesarea, theologian, monastic legislator, liturgical father, organizer, and advocate for the poor. Together with Sts. Gregory Nazianzen and Gregory of Nyssa, he helped secure the triumph of Nicene Trinitarian theology.

St. Basil is indispensable because of On the Holy Spirit.

Main concern here: written and unwritten Tradition belong to the one life of the Church.

St. Basil says that some teachings and practices are received through Scripture and others through apostolic tradition handed down within the Church, and that: “Both have the same force for piety.”

He then gives remarkably concrete examples: the sign of the Cross, facing east in prayer, features of Eucharistic prayer, baptismal practice, chrism.

Teaching point: Tradition is not a second encyclopedia beside the Bible.Tradition is the Church’s Spirit-filled manner of receiving, praying, interpreting, and embodying the Truth of Scripture.

St. Gregory the Theologian, 329–390

St. Gregory Nazianzen was bishop, poet, contemplative, and one of the greatest theologians of the Trinity. His Theological Orations played a major role in clarifying Nicene theology and the divinity of the Holy Spirit.

He combines precision about doctrine with reverence before the incomprehensibility of God.

Main concern: salvation requires the complete assumption of human nature.

His great Christological principle: “That which He has not assumed He has not healed.” Christ does not heal humanity from outside. He heals our nature by assuming it.

If the human mind is not assumed, the mind is not healed.
If the human will is not assumed, the will is not healed.

Teaching point: Orthodox dogma is therapeutic and soteriological.

St. John Chrysostom, 347–407

St. John was priest of Antioch and later archbishop of Constantinople. “Chrysostom”—“Golden Mouth”—reflects his reputation as one of Christianity’s greatest preachers and biblical interpreters.

His theology is rarely allowed to remain abstract. Scripture must produce repentance, mercy, chastity, generosity, forgiveness, and holiness.

Main concern: turning Scripture and sacrament into Christian life.

A famous passage from his preaching on St. Matthew says: “Would you do honor to Christ’s body? Neglect Him not when naked.”

The Eucharistic Christ and Christ encountered in the poor cannot be separated.

Teaching point: patristic theology terminates in a form of life. If theology does not produce holiness, something has gone wrong. Here the center becomes liturgy, preaching, asceticism, and pastoral life.”

The three together

St. Basil — Tradition received and practiced
St. Gregory — Tradition articulated theologically
St. Chrysostom — Tradition preached and lived

IV. Deepening and Synthesizing the Faith
Sts. John of Damascus, Symeon the New Theologian, and Gregory Palamas

St. John of Damascus, 675–749

St. John lived under Muslim rule near Damascus and later became a monk at Mar Saba near Jerusalem. He came after the great Trinitarian and Christological controversies and gathered much of the earlier patristic tradition into a systematic synthesis.

His Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith becomes one of the great summaries of Eastern Christian theology.

He was also a major defender of icons during the iconoclastic controversy.

Main concern: receiving and synthesizing the doctrinal inheritance—and applying the logic of the Incarnation to matter.

His famous statement: “I do not worship matter; I worship the Creator of matter, who became matter for my sake.”

Teaching point: because God truly became material and visible in Christ, matter can become a bearer of grace.

St, John provides a faithful summary and synthesis.

St. Symeon the New Theologian, 949–1022

St. Symeon was a Byzantine monk and spiritual writer associated especially with Constantinople. He insisted that the realities confessed by the Church must become personally known in repentance, illumination, and the conscious presence of the Holy Spirit.

Main concern: Tradition must become a lived experience of God.

His theology repeatedly returns to divine light, repentance, purification, and conscious communion with the Holy Spirit.

A useful way to summarize him: It is not enough to believe that the saints knew God; the Christian life is itself a call to communion with God. But this is not religious individualism. St. Symeon’s mystical theology is monastic, sacramental, ascetical, and ecclesial.

Teaching point: Tradition is not the preservation of theological artifacts.

It is the transmission of sanctified life.

St. Gregory Palamas, 1296–1359

Gregory was an Athonite monk and later archbishop of Thessalonica. During the Hesychast controversy, he defended the monks’ claim that human beings can genuinely experience the divine light while God remains incomprehensible in His essence.

His theology is especially associated with the distinction between God’s unknowable essence and His uncreated energies.

Main concern: salvation must involve real participation in God.

God remains utterly transcendent in essence, yet genuinely communicates Himself in His energies. We do not become God by nature, but we truly participate in God by grace. St. Palamas therefore takes the Athanasian claim seriously: God became man so that man might become god.

His question is:

How can this be real without confusing Creator and creature?

The essence–energies distinction protects both truths.

Teaching point: St. Palamas is not an exotic medieval innovation. He is giving mature dogmatic expression to the earlier patristic theology of theosis. Here the center is synthesized, experienced, and articulated as participation in God.

The three together

St. John: What has the Church received?
St. Symeon: Have we actually entered into it?
St. Gregory Palamas: What does participation in God mean?

V. Conclusion: Saints – embodying the faith

Return to the normal curve.

A Father is not simply old, eloquent, a bishop, a saint, or someone who produced a quotation useful to my argument. The Fathers matter because they are exemplary witnesses to the Church’s reception and embodiment of the apostolic faith. But, like scripture (and all literature), they must be read contextually.

And this is where the category of saint becomes essential.

Tradition is not ultimately transmitted only through books and conciliar definitions. It is transmitted through transformed human beings.

The martyr shows us what faithfulness looks like under persecution. The ascetic monk shows us repentance and undivided prayer. The missionary shows us Tradition translated without being diluted. The holy fool reveals the limits of conventional respectability. The bishop preserves and orders the Church. The righterous mother, father, grandmother, godparent, catechist, and confessor transmit the faith through habits of prayer, fasting, worship, mercy, and fidelity. It’s good to read the Fathers (especially as they are shared our prayers!), but it’s also really beneficial to read the lives of the saints.

So we can end where we began:

Patristics has a center of gravity. Tradition means learning to inhabit that center before exploring its edges.

And the saints demonstrate what happens when that center moves from a text into a human life.

Recommended Reading

Start Here

1. Michael W. Holmes, ed., The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations
The best single-volume entry point for the Apostolic Fathers. It includes Clement, Ignatius, Polycarp, Papias, and the broader early Christian material that forms the foundation of the lecture.

2. St. Justin Martyr, The First and Second Apologies
Especially valuable for his account of early Christian worship, Eucharist, Baptism, and his engagement with philosophy and the doctrine of the Logos.

3. St. Athanasius the Great, On the Incarnation
One of the clearest and most accessible patristic introductions to Incarnation, salvation, and theosis.

4. St. Basil the Great, On the Holy Spirit
Essential for understanding the relationship between Scripture, ecclesial practice, and written and unwritten Tradition.

5. St. Gregory the Theologian, Theological Orations
A central text for Trinitarian theology and for understanding the theological precision of the Cappadocian tradition.

6. St. John Chrysostom, On Wealth and Poverty
An excellent example of patristic theology becoming moral and ascetical practice, especially in relation to wealth, almsgiving, and the poor.

7. St. Cyril of Alexandria, On the Unity of Christ
Probably the best accessible introduction to Cyril’s Christology and to why the unity of Christ matters for salvation.

8. St. John of Damascus, Three Treatises on the Divine Images
A superb example of Tradition being faithfully extended into a new controversy, especially through the logic of the Incarnation.

9. Georges Florovsky, Bible, Church, Tradition: An Eastern Orthodox View
One of the most useful Orthodox works for understanding Scripture, Fathers, Church, and Tradition as a single ecclesial reality.

10. John Behr, The Way to Nicaea
Excellent for tracing the development of Christian theology from the apostolic and second-century world into the Nicene confession.

For Further Study

11. St. Gregory the Theologian, Epistle 101 to Cledonius
Short and highly significant, especially for the principle: “What has not been assumed has not been healed.”

12. St. Maximus the Confessor, On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ
A very helpful anthology that makes Maximus more approachable than beginning directly with the Ambigua.

13. St. Symeon the New Theologian, The Discourses
Important for the experiential and mystical dimension of Tradition: repentance, illumination, divine light, and conscious communion with the Holy Spirit.

14. St. Gregory Palamas, The Triads
The key primary text for hesychasm, divine light, the essence–energies distinction, and the theology of real participation in God.

15. Andrew Louth, The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato to Denys
Very useful for tracing the contemplative and participatory strand of patristic theology.

16. John Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes
A strong overview of later Byzantine theology and an important corrective to the idea that the patristic tradition effectively ends in the fifth century.

17. Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, Vol. 1: The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100–600)
Broader, historical, and more academic; excellent for understanding doctrinal development within the life of the Church.

18. Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church
Especially useful for the Orthodox integration of apophatic theology, Trinity, theosis, and spiritual life.

19. John Meyendorff, St. Gregory Palamas and Orthodox Spirituality
A more accessible route into Palamas than starting with the Triads alone.

20. Andrew Louth, St. John Damascene: Tradition and Originality in Byzantine Theology
Particularly good for your lecture theme because it shows how fidelity to Tradition and genuine theological creativity belong together.

21. John Behr, The Nicene Faith, 2 vols.
A natural continuation from The Way to Nicaea for those who want to follow the development through Athanasius, the Cappadocians, and the Nicene settlement.

22. Georges Florovsky, The Eastern Fathers of the Fourth Century
Very useful for Athanasius, Basil, Gregory, and the broader theological world of the fourth century.

23. Georges Florovsky, The Byzantine Fathers of the Fifth Century
A strong companion for Cyril and the Christological controversies.

24. Georges Florovsky, The Byzantine Fathers of the Sixth to Eighth Century
Particularly useful for Maximus and John of Damascus.

This essay is based on a talk I gave at the retreat, “Ancient Christianity in the Modern World” on 24 October 2026. The keynote speaker was Fr. Stephen Freeman, and the second speaker was Fr. Gregory Rogers.

Music, Creation, and Our Vocation

There is something strange and wonderful about music. Sound is simply part of creation. It depends on matter, movement, time, and the capacity of one thing to affect another. Yet sound was made in such a way that it contains the possibility of music. Strike a note on a good instrument and it is not really alone. Other tones are already implicit within it. Harmonics resonate above and around it. What sounds like one note already contains the possibility of relationship. And human beings hear those possibilities. We recognize pattern. We discover harmony. We learn how one note can prepare for another, how dissonance can create expectation, and how resolution can make sense of what came before. Then we take what was given to us and cultivate it. We make music.

That small miracle tells us something important about creation—and about ourselves. Genesis tells us repeatedly that what God created was good. But “good” does not mean static. Creation contains possibilities. Wheat is already good as wheat, but it can become bread. Bread can feed a hungry person. Bread can become an offering. And through the grace of God, bread offered in thanksgiving can become Eucharist. Creation is good, and part of its goodness is its capacity to be cultivated toward fulfillment.

Human beings were given a particular vocation within that world. We were created in the image of God and commanded to be fruitful, to multiply, to fill the earth, and to subdue it. Because of our fallen experience of power, “subdue” can sound like domination: forcing creation into the shape of our own will. But that is already a corruption of the vocation. Humanity was placed in creation not to exploit it but to discern its nature, its possibilities, and its proper end—and then to shepherd it toward fulfillment.

We were given reason and wisdom so that we could understand the nature of things. We were given prudence so that, having understood them, we could cultivate them rightly. Science does this. Engineering does this. Art does this. Friendship does this when two people take the possibility of human relationship and cultivate it into something deeper and more beautiful. And, most perfectly, Liturgy does this.

This is part of what it means to speak of humanity as the royal priesthood of creation. We receive creation as gift, cultivate it according to its God-given pattern, offer it back to God in thanksgiving, and share it in love with our neighbor. Music is therefore more than an illustration. It is something like a sacrament of this vocation. We receive sound. We discover the harmonies already latent within it. We cultivate those possibilities into music. We use that music to glorify God, and then we share its beauty with other people for their consolation, delight, formation, and healing.

The Problem Is Not Power, but Disorder

The problem, of course, is that human beings remain extraordinarily powerful even when we are disordered. The Fall did not remove our capacity to affect creation. It distorted the way we exercise that capacity. This is why the curses of Genesis are so revealing. Human beings remain fruitful, but fruitfulness is accompanied by pain. Men and women remain made for communion, but relationships are distorted by domination and struggle. The earth remains productive, but now thorns and thistles grow among what we intended to cultivate.

We still change the world. We just do not always change it well. We remain capable of science, engineering, politics, economics, art, music, marriage, childrearing, and community-building. The tragedy is that the same powers that could move creation toward fulfillment can instead produce thorns and damaged relationships.

In other words, the problem is not simply that human beings sometimes choose evil things. Something has gone wrong in the way the whole person perceives, desires, interprets, and acts. St. Paul describes the problem vividly in Romans 7:19. Eugene Peterson’s idiomatic rendering captures the frustration particularly well: “I decide to do good, but I don’t really do it.” Something, he says, has gone wrong deep within.

St. Paul knows the good. He wants the good. He decides to do the good. Yet something else emerges in his actions. If ignorance were the fundamental human problem, Christianity could largely be reduced to education. Teach people the commandments. Give them more information. Explain the Gospel more clearly. Correct their theological mistakes. Once everyone knew enough, holiness would follow.

But Scripture describes something deeper. In Genesis 3 the serpent does not physically force Eve to eat. He changes the way she perceives what is in front of her. She sees that the fruit is good for food, delightful to the eyes, and desirable for gaining wisdom. She perceives, desires, interprets, and then acts. The fruit has not changed. God has not changed. What has changed is the human relationship to reality.

The disorder affects the whole person. Our passions and instincts pull us toward things that are not good for us. Our intellect becomes remarkably skilled at explaining why those desires are reasonable. And the nous—our capacity for spiritual perception and communion with God—becomes darkened and distracted. This is why the Christian answer is not the destruction of human nature but its redemption.

St. Maximus the Confessor is especially helpful here. The human faculties themselves are good. Desire is not evil. Reason is not evil. Creativity is not evil. Action is not evil. The problem is their misuse, misdirection, and disorder. We do not need to stop desiring, thinking, creating, or acting. We need those good powers restored to their proper purpose. Holiness is that restoration.

We may have united ourselves to Christ, the New Adam, but much of the Old Adam remains habitual within us. Our desires, reactions, interpretations, and perceptions still require healing. That is why sanctification takes time. It is the long, slow slog of salvation. Sin is not merely the occasional wrong note. It is the good powers God placed within us operating out of harmony with God, with one another, and with creation. But Christ does not throw away the instrument. He restores the pattern in us so that, through the Holy Spirit, we can once again join the music.

The Particular Distortions of Our Age

That is the perennial human problem. But we do not work out our salvation in the abstract. We live here. We live now. And every age develops characteristic ways of exploiting the wounds of fallen humanity.

Our Lord gives us the basic pattern in the parable of the sower. The seed is good. The Word has not failed. But the environment matters. Some seed falls on the path. Some falls among rocks. Some is choked by thorns. Some falls into good soil. The condition of the field matters, and ours is a remarkably crowded field.

Temptation.
The first characteristic of modern life is not that temptation exists. Temptation has always existed. What is different is the astonishing efficiency with which temptation can now be identified, personalized, delivered, repeated, and monetized. St. James says that each of us is tempted when we are lured and enticed by our own desire. Modern systems have become very good at discovering those desires and feeding them back to us. Advertisers study them. Algorithms learn them. Pornographers exploit them. Political campaigns exploit them. Entire industries prosper by keeping us anxious, angry, hungry, envious, aroused, or afraid.

These systems did not create the passions. The passions were already ours. But we have built extraordinarily effective systems for feeding them—and then placed those systems in our pockets. The result is dissipation. Attention is scattered. Desire is scattered. Emotion is scattered. Time is scattered. Energy is scattered. And then we wonder why we have so little strength left for prayer, patience, love, repentance, or sustained attention.

Polarization
Modern life also magnifies polarization. We increasingly learn who we are by learning who we are against. This is more spiritually significant than simple disagreement. Polarization changes perception before it changes argument. Once we have classified someone as belonging to the other tribe, we begin interpreting everything he says through suspicion. Certain words become shibboleths. Certain questions are dismissed before they are considered. Disagreement itself becomes evidence of stupidity, wickedness, or malice.

Christians are not immune. We can baptize exactly the same habits and call them zeal. But once contempt becomes normal, something has already gone wrong, no matter how correct our position may be. Christ did not command us merely to defeat our enemies. He commanded us to love them.

Secularization
Modern life also secularizes. By secularization I do not simply mean declining church attendance. A community can become more religious statistically while remaining deeply secular in imagination. Secularization is learning to experience the world as though it were not sacramental. It is learning to live as though creation were not enchanted, as though it were not permeated with divine purpose and grace, as though there were no deeper meaning to things beyond their immediate utility.

Food becomes fuel. Sex becomes appetite. Work becomes production. Time becomes a commodity. Nature becomes raw material. Human beings become consumers, producers, voters, demographic categories, or economic units. The world becomes flat.

The danger is not that creation has ceased to be sacramental. It has not. We have simply lost the ability to perceive and engage it sacramentally. St. Paul writes to St. Timothy that “everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving.” Thanksgiving: eucharistia.

The secular person may still enjoy creation. What is lost is the instinct to receive it as gift, cultivate it as stewardship, and offer it back to God and neighbor in thanksgiving and love. Once that pattern disappears, consumption becomes much easier than communion.

Isolation
Modern life also isolates us. It increasingly treats the autonomous individual as the fundamental unit of reality. Scripture does not. St. Paul tells the Romans, “We, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another.” Not merely members with one another. Members of one another.

That is a radically different anthropology. Human beings are relational creatures. We are formed in families, friendships, parishes, communities, and traditions. We need people who know us well enough to correct us, forgive us, frustrate us, encourage us, and hold us accountable. Isolation can feel like freedom because nobody interferes. But nobody helps either.

When communities of genuine correction disappear, self-delusion becomes easier. We confuse affirmation with confirmation and confidence with wisdom. The Church has always known that salvation is relentlessly communal. It is worked out in worship, marriage, friendship, almsgiving, service, forgiveness, obedience, and life with actual people. The Church does not save us from difficult people. She gives us difficult people to love. That is a feature, not a defect.

I can be extraordinarily holy in my imagination. It is only when another person irritates me, disagrees with me, needs something from me, disappoints me, or wounds me that the actual condition of my patience, humility, generosity, forgiveness, and love becomes apparent. There is no salvation of an isolated self. We are saved in communion.

Purpose
Finally, the modern world obscures purpose. If we no longer know what a human being is for, we have to invent our own telos. So we experiment: career, success, romance, experiences, politics, consumption, identity, recognition, more followers, more likes, more activity.

Some of these things are perfectly good in their proper place. But none of them can bear the weight of being the purpose of a human life. Christ asks, “What will it profit a man, if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul?” That question only makes sense if human life has an end greater than gaining the world.

It does. We were created for holiness. We were created for love. We were created for communion with God and with one another. We were created to grow from image into likeness. Everything else must find its place inside that vocation.

These modern distortions—temptation, polarization, secularization, isolation, and loss of purpose—are therefore not five unrelated social problems. They reinforce one another. Temptation disorders desire. Polarization disorders our relationship with our neighbor. Secularization disorders our relationship with creation. Isolation disorders communion. Loss of purpose disorders the direction of the whole life. The result may still be an intelligent, sincere, successful, even religious person—but one being formed away from the harmony for which he was created.

Christ in His Fullness

The answer, of course, is Christ. But the fullness of that answer matters.

When Christ is reduced, the things He seems no longer able to provide must be sought somewhere else. If Christ becomes primarily a moral teacher, Christianity becomes moral instruction. If Christ becomes a tribal symbol, tribal loyalty begins to look like faithfulness. If He becomes a political ally, politics begins to look salvific. If holiness means escape from corruption, isolation begins to look salvific. If evil resides primarily in other people, then defeating those people—even through violence—can begin to look salvific.

But politics cannot cure the passions. Isolation cannot create communion. Defeating an enemy cannot teach us to love him.

The answer is Christ in His fullness, encountered in the fullness of His Church. Orthodoxy answers the fragmentation of the human person not with a single technique but with a whole way of life. It restores purpose, trains freedom, embeds us in communion, forms the whole mind, restores sacramental perception, and gathers all of these together in the Liturgy before sending us back into the world.

Meaning: What a Human Being Is For

First, Orthodoxy restores meaning. Not meaning in the shallow sense of helping us feel that our lives matter. It tells us what a human being is for.

We are created in the image of God and called to grow into His likeness. We are made for holiness, communion, love, and participation in divine life. We are created good, but we are meant to become saints. We are God’s imagers, His representatives, His royal priesthood.

That means our purpose is not something we invent. And because we do not invent it, circumstances cannot finally take it away. Success cannot give it to us. Failure cannot destroy it. Illness cannot destroy it. Aging cannot destroy it. Political defeat cannot destroy it. Even death cannot destroy it. Our circumstances may change, but our vocation does not.

That is an extraordinarily liberating anthropology. The world may define us by productivity, attractiveness, wealth, intelligence, politics, sexuality, trauma, or achievement. Orthodoxy begins somewhere else: You are the image of God, and your end is not success. Your end is likeness.

But Orthodoxy does not merely tell us this. It gives us practices through which that identity becomes habitual. We say prayers. We sing hymns. We fast. We feast. We gather. We kneel. We stand. We make prostrations. We give money away. We confess. We forgive. We serve. We gather in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit to do what human beings were created to do: offer ourselves and the world to God in love.

There is no love without duty. That can sound unpleasant in a culture that often treats authenticity as spontaneity. But every mature love develops obligations. Parents care for children when they are exhausted. Friends keep promises when it is inconvenient. Spouses remain faithful when emotion fluctuates. Duty is not the enemy of love. Properly ordered, duty gives love a durable form. And within that form, holiness can grow.

Freedom: Asceticism Against Dissipation

Orthodoxy also teaches self-control. This matters because so much of modern life is dissipative. The world often describes freedom as multiplying choices. But having more choices does not necessarily make us freer.

If I cannot say no to an appetite, I am not free. If I cannot sit quietly without reaching for my phone, I am not free. If hunger automatically makes me irritable, I am not free. If disagreement immediately makes me angry or contemptuous, I am not free. I am being ruled by something.

Orthodox asceticism is not a war against desire. It is a remedy for dissipation. Fasting gathers desire. Prayer gathers attention. Silence gathers thought. Tithing and almsgiving gather our possessions around love. Repentance interrupts self-justification. Watchfulness teaches us not to follow every thought merely because it has appeared. These practices slowly give us back the ability to direct ourselves toward what is good.

St. Mary of Egypt gives us an extreme example. She left the noise and stimulation of ordinary society and entered the desert, but she discovered that she had brought the world with her. The old songs, memories, desires, and habits remained. Geography alone could not make her free. Freedom came through long repentance and endurance until the old desires no longer ruled her.

That is the freedom Orthodoxy seeks: not freedom to follow every impulse, but freedom not to be ruled by them. The world scatters us. Asceticism gathers us.

Communion: The Church Gives Us People to Love

Orthodoxy also gives us community and accountability. This begins simply with being part of a body. We do not choose everyone in a parish any more than we choose everyone in a family. We are given to one another, and that gift creates the possibility of real formation.

We need people with whom we can be honest. This is one of the neglected gifts of confession. In John 20, the risen Christ breathes upon the apostles, gives them the Holy Spirit, and grants authority regarding the forgiveness of sins. At the heart of confession is precisely that sacramental work: repentance offered to God and forgiveness received through the ministry of His Church.

But confession also models something increasingly rare in a suspicious and manipulative world. It creates a relationship in which vulnerability can be answered with healing rather than exploitation. The penitent can say, “This is where I am weak. This is where I am ashamed. This is where I am struggling.” And, when spiritual fatherhood is functioning properly, the response is neither humiliation nor manipulation but forgiveness, encouragement, accountability, and love.

We need relationships like that. We need people who know where we struggle and who can ask us how that struggle is going. We need communities in which weakness does not automatically become leverage. We need to learn that being known does not have to mean being controlled. The Church gathers us into such a body so that we can be known, corrected, supported, forgiven, and formed together in Christ.

Formation: Healing the Whole Person

Orthodoxy also forms the whole person. It does not merely correct our opinions.

We can speak, with some caution, of three aspects of the human mind. There are the passions and instincts—the gut, so to speak. These include what we crave, fear, love, and react to before deliberate reflection. There is the intellect—the brain—which reasons, interprets, narrates, explains, and justifies. And there is the nous, the heart—the faculty of spiritual perception and communion with God.

After the Fall, all three remain good, but their relationship is disordered. The passions pull in unhealthy directions. The intellect becomes skilled at rationalizing what the passions have already decided. And the nous becomes so darkened and distracted that it barely perceives what is happening. Sometimes we even mistake our passions for our conscience.

The Church therefore forms all three. Fasting, repetition, posture, and discipline retrain the instincts. Scripture, doctrine, psalmody, and prayer reshape the intellect. Stillness, repentance, attention, and worship purify the nous.

The goal is not simply to know what is true. It is to learn to desire the true, interpret reality through the true, and increasingly perceive reality truthfully. Orthodox formation is comprehensive because salvation is comprehensive. Christ does not save an abstract mind floating above a body. He heals the human person.

The Enchanted World

And as that healing proceeds, Orthodoxy immerses us once again in an enchanted world.

The word can sound fanciful, but the reality is deeply Christian. Creation is not dead matter occasionally interrupted by supernatural events. God is everywhere present and filling all things. The Logos through whom all things were made is not absent from His creation.

The Christian therefore learns again to encounter water, oil, bread, wine, touch, words, bodies, time, place, beauty, suffering, and relationship as capable of bearing grace. In the Mysteries this becomes unmistakable. Water becomes baptism. Oil becomes healing and sealing. Bread and wine become communion. Human touch becomes blessing. Words become absolution. Bodies become temples. Creation becomes gift, offering, communion, and love.

This is what I sometimes call the deeper magic. The fallen world does not get the last word about the things within it. In Christ, even what has been turned against its proper purpose can be taken up and redirected.

The Cross is the supreme example. Humiliation becomes glory. Suffering becomes an offering. Death itself becomes the means by which death is destroyed. The thing intended as defeat becomes victory.

This pattern changes how Christians look at the world. We do not deny corruption. We refuse to believe corruption has final authority over the things God has made. Creation still belongs to God. Its deeper purpose remains. Grace can restore what sin has distorted.

The Liturgy: Humanity Doing What Humanity Was Made to Do

And all of this reaches its most complete expression in the Divine Liturgy. There the whole person and the whole Church are gathered into the experience of God.

Think about what comes together there. We receive words—not merely any words, but Scripture, psalmody, apostolic teaching, and hymnography refined through centuries of worship. The Church does not simply explain the faith in Liturgy. She gives voice to it.

Then those words are joined to music. Music bears witness to the goodness of creation. It takes sound and cultivates it into harmony. At the same time, singing together trains human beings in harmony. We breathe together. Listen together. Adjust ourselves to one another. Give voice to one text.

Then human persons give breath to those words and that music. People made in the image of God stand together in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. And love changes everything. Without love, worship can remain performance or observation. With love, participation becomes communion. We do not only worship beside one another. We become, in Christ, one Body.

Nor does the Liturgy turn inward upon the congregation. Listen to the litanies. We pray for the peace of the world, for the Church, for civil authorities, for travelers, for the sick, for those who suffer, for favorable weather, for the fruits of the earth, for those who have fallen asleep, and for people who are not standing in the building with us.

We bring the world before God. That is royal priesthood. We receive creation, gather it into thanksgiving, and offer it to God on behalf of all and for all.

Then comes the great mystery. Bread and wine—the fruit of creation and human labor—are offered. God returns them as the Body and Blood of Christ. And that gift is shared.

Here the vertical and horizontal dimensions of love are revealed as aspects of one reality. Love of God and love of neighbor are not rival obligations competing for our attention. In the Liturgy they become one act. We offer to God. God gives Himself to us. And we receive Him together.

There is one Eucharist. Across times and places, the Church participates in that one Eucharistic reality, gathered into the life of Christ. This is the New Adam. The New Humanity. Christ is the Head, and the members are joined to Him and to one another: loving God, loving neighbor, and offering creation back toward its fulfillment.

The Liturgy therefore does not merely symbolize the human vocation. It enacts it. It is humanity doing, in Christ, what humanity was made to do.

The Liturgy After the Liturgy

And then the Liturgy ends—or rather, the service ends. The vocation does not. We are dismissed back into the world.

The priestly vocation does not stop when we leave the church building. We carry the pattern of the Liturgy into every thought, relationship, and action. We receive the world as gift. We discern its proper purpose. We cultivate what is good. We offer it back to God in thanksgiving. And we use it for the love and healing of our neighbor.

Then all of life begins to become liturgical. Work becomes service. Speech becomes blessing. Possessions become stewardship. Relationships become communion. Suffering becomes offering. Beauty becomes praise.

And every thought and action becomes another opportunity to move what is crooked toward straight, what is broken toward healing, and what is good toward perfection. This is our royal-priestly vocation in the world: to love God, to love our neighbor, and through that love to participate in creation’s movement toward its fulfillment in Christ.

Helping Creation Sing

Which brings us back to music.

The Fall scatters the notes. Our passions pull one way, our intellect another, our bodies another. Our communities fragment. Our relationship with creation becomes exploitative. Our sense of purpose disappears. The world trains us in distraction, consumption, suspicion, and isolation.

Christ gathers the scattered notes. He does not destroy them. He restores them to harmony. Through the life of His Church He gives us purpose, trains us in freedom, places us in communion, heals the whole person, restores sacramental vision, and gathers all of it into the Liturgy.

And then He sends us back out—not to escape the world, not merely to condemn it, and not to surrender to it, but to serve within it as His royal priesthood.

We receive what God has made. We discern the pattern He has placed within it. We cultivate it in wisdom. We offer it in thanksgiving. We share it in love. And by His grace, we help move creation from the good toward the better, from disorder toward harmony, from brokenness toward healing, and from what it is toward what it was created to become.

Christ gathers the scattered notes of our lives back into harmony. And then He sends us into the world with His harmonizing grace—to help creation sing.

[Cue the earwig from the Coke commercial: “I’d like to teach the world to sing … in perfect harmony.”]

We see how the world suffers, and it breaks our hearts. This is one reason we love the Gospel: it is the proclamation of mankind’s deliverance from suffering, sin, death, and the powers that hold us captive. We have given our lives to this Gospel because it is the Truth that offers salvation not only to individual souls but, ultimately, to the whole creation.

But it is possible to love even good things wrongly. We can take something precious into our hands and hold it so tightly that our whole posture changes. Our fingers close. Our hands become fists. And before long the very thing we intended to protect becomes something we use to strike our neighbor.

The Gospel itself can be treated this way. So can doctrine. So can tradition. So can canonical order. All of these are good. All of them matter. But none of them was given to us so that we could use it against the salvation of our neighbor.

Our Lord said that His disciples would be known by their love. The truth is never opposed to love, because both have their source in Christ. But it is possible for us, through our passions, to separate things that belong together. We can defend truth without love, order without mercy, purity without humility, or unity without patience. And once we do that, even the defense of something genuinely good can begin to deform us.

We see something of this danger in the Gospel of the demoniac in the country of the Gadarenes. The man Christ encounters is in terrible condition. He is isolated from his community. He lives among the tombs. He has lost control of himself. Whatever attempts others may have made to restrain or help him have failed. He is tormented.

And Christ delivers him.

When the people come out, they discover the man who had been possessed sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind. This should have been an occasion for rejoicing. A brother had been restored. A human being who had been living among the dead had been returned to the living. A man who had been isolated had been restored to communion.

Yet this is not the only thing the people see. They also see the swine. Something valuable to them has been lost. Their familiar order has been disrupted. Christ’s healing has cost them something. And they become afraid. Then they ask Christ to leave.

It is tempting to tell this story as though these people simply loved pigs more than people. Perhaps there is truth in that. But I suspect the spiritual problem is subtler, and therefore more dangerous. People rarely tell themselves, “I choose livestock over my neighbor.” We tell ourselves that we are protecting something important: our livelihood, our community, our traditions, our stability, our rights, our order. And often these really are important things.

The spiritual danger begins when a good thing becomes so important that we can no longer see anything beyond it. Then the good ceases to serve its proper purpose. Instead of serving love, communion, and salvation, it begins demanding that they serve it.

This is one of the great dangers of the spiritual life: not merely that evil things may possess us, but that good things may become disordered within us. The desire for justice can become hatred of the unjust. Concern for truth can become fascination with error. Love for the Church can become contempt for those whom we think threaten her. And concern for canonical order can become so consuming that canonical order itself begins to obscure the purpose for which the canons exist.

That possibility should make every Orthodox Christian uncomfortable. It certainly makes me uncomfortable.

For several years I have thought about this in connection with the ecclesiastical crisis in Ukraine. The temptation is to tell that story very simply. Millions of Orthodox Christians wanted an ecclesiastical life free from the divisions and historical burdens that had accumulated around them. Constantinople intervened and granted autocephaly to the newly constituted Orthodox Church of Ukraine. For those who supported that decision, this looked like an act aimed at healing division and restoring people to full ecclesial communion.

Others saw the same events very differently. They believed that canonical boundaries had been violated, that ecclesiastical order had been overturned, that people previously regarded as schismatic had been received improperly, and that Constantinople had acted outside its legitimate authority.

Those concerns should not simply be mocked. Canonical order is a good. Continuity is a good. Episcopal responsibility is a good. The preservation of ecclesial boundaries can be a good. The fear that political or national pressures might manipulate ecclesiastical structures is not imaginary either.

Indeed, it would undermine the entire argument of this essay if I were simply to declare that my preferred ecclesiological good is holy while someone else’s is merely a herd of swine. That is precisely the temptation I want to avoid.

The harder question is this: What happens when one ecclesiastical good becomes so dominant in our imagination that we can no longer perceive the other goods that are at stake?

Canonical order matters. But communion matters. Historical continuity matters. But the healing of schism matters. Jurisdiction matters. But souls matter. Stability matters. But so does the missionary and pastoral responsibility of the Church to gather those who desire to live within her sacramental life.

Those goods will sometimes come into tension. And when they do, slogans will not save us. Neither “canonical order” nor “autocephaly” is sufficient by itself. Neither “this is our canonical territory” nor “these people are Orthodox and deserve their own Church” resolves every ecclesiological question. The Church must discern how all these goods serve the greater purpose for which Christ established His Body: the salvation and sanctification of His people and their communion with Him and with one another.

That is why the aftermath of the Ukrainian ecclesiastical dispute should trouble all of us, regardless of which canonical analysis we find most convincing. The result has not been greater visible Orthodox unity. Communion has been ruptured. Jurisdictions have hardened against one another. Suspicion has deepened. National and geopolitical antagonisms have become intertwined with ecclesiology. People who confess the same Creed, celebrate the same Liturgy, venerate the same saints, and receive the same sacramental tradition increasingly speak of one another as though they were enemies.

That should cause all of us to examine ourselves. Because once we reach the point where the preservation of our position requires permanent estrangement from other Orthodox Christians, we ought at least to ask whether something has gone wrong.

That question does not automatically tell us who was canonically correct. One, both, or neither could be correct. Nor does it erase legitimate questions about jurisdiction. It does not mean that communion can simply be restored without addressing serious disagreements. It means something much more basic: canonical order exists for the life of the Church; the Church does not exist for the preservation of canonical arguments.

The canons protect communion, sacramental integrity, episcopal responsibility, peace, and good order. They are therefore enormously important. But their purpose is therapeutic and ecclesial. They are part of the Church’s medicine. And medicine is given for the healing of persons.

This brings us back to the Gadarenes. Their mistake was not necessarily that what they valued was worthless. Their mistake was that when Christ restored a human being before their eyes, they could see only what the restoration had cost them.

That possibility should haunt us. What if I become so attached to something genuinely good that I can no longer rejoice when my brother is healed? What if the preservation of my preferred ecclesiastical arrangement matters more to me than reconciliation? What if vindication becomes more precious than communion? What if proving that I was right becomes more important than finding a way to live again with my brother?

And perhaps most dangerously: What if I become so convinced that the other side is possessed by ideology, nationalism, ambition, or pride that I never notice the thing that has begun to possess me?

This is where the Gospel turns its judgment back upon the reader. It is very easy to identify the swine belonging to somebody else: their nationalism, their canonical theory, their historical grievances, their patriarch, their jurisdiction, their politics, their pride.

It is much harder to identify our own herd. The things we have fed for years. The things around which we have organized our identity. The things whose loss frightens us so deeply that, if Christ were to threaten them for the sake of reconciliation, we might prefer that He leave them alone.

This is why I now think the question raised by the Gadarene Gospel is less, “What pigs do they love more than the salvation of man?” and more: What good thing have I begun to love in the wrong way?

That is a much more frightening question. It also leaves room for repentance.

The solution is not contempt for canonical order. Nor is it indifference to ecclesiology. It is to put every ecclesial good back into its proper hierarchy. Truth must serve communion justly. Authority must serve the building up of the Body. Canons must serve the health of the Church. Jurisdiction must serve pastoral responsibility. Tradition must bring us into deeper conformity with Christ. And all of them must serve love—not sentimental affection, but the difficult, cruciform love that seeks the salvation of the other without abandoning the good, the beautiful, and the true.

This requires open hands. The Gospel cannot flourish in fists. Neither can canonical order.

If we hold these treasures as gifts received from God, then we can offer them for the healing of His Church. But if we clutch them as possessions, we should not be surprised when they begin to possess us.

The path forward in Ukraine—and in every Orthodox dispute—will require more than proving who was right. We all know the Canons; we all have very big brains; and we can justify our positions well. Instead, it will require repentance. It will require patience. It will require cooperative historical and canonical work by people who are willing to learn and benefit from well-intentioned people with whom they disagree. It will require people willing to surrender the pleasure of seeing their opponents as enemies and condemning them. And it will require the willingness to ask not only what justice demands from the other side, but what love requires from us.

Perhaps then our hands can open again. Perhaps then what we have received from Christ can cease being a weapon and become what it was always meant to be: a gift offered for the life of the world.

And perhaps then we will be able to look upon a brother restored to communion and simply rejoice that someone who had been far away is now sitting peacefully at the feet of Jesus—and then turn, together, to the necessary work of repairing whatever canonical proprieties were damaged in the process of his restoration.

St. Luke 8:26-39. At that time, as Jesus arrived at the country of the Gadarenes, there met him a man from the city who had demons; for a long time he had worn no clothes and he lived not in a house but among the tombs. When he saw Jesus, he cried out and fell down before him, and said with a loud voice, “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I beseech you, do not torment me.” For he had commanded the unclean spirit to come out of the man. (For many a time it had seized him; he was kept under guard, and bound with chains and fetters, but he broke the bonds and was driven by the demon into the desert.) Jesus then asked him, “What is your name?” And he said, “Legion”; for many demons had entered him. And they begged him not to command them to depart into the abyss. Now a large herd of swine was feeding there on the hillside; and they begged him to let them enter these. So he gave them leave. Then the demons came out of the man and entered the swine, and the herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and were drowned. When the herdsmen saw what happened, they fled, and told it in the city and in the country. Then people went out to see what had happened, and they came to Jesus, and found the man from whom the demons had gone, sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind; and they were afraid. And those who had seen it told them how he who had been possessed with demons was healed. Then all the people of the surrounding country of the Gadarenes asked him to depart from them; for they were seized with great fear; so he got into the boat and returned. The man from whom the demons had gone begged that he might be with him; but he sent him away, saying, “Return to your home, and declare how much God has done for you.” And he went away, proclaiming throughout the whole city how much Jesus had done for him. (Antiochian.org)

Introduction – the context of the story

Our Lord had just come across the water with his disciples. They had faced one kind of fear when they were on the water: a fear of the chaos of a storm. A great wind had come up while Jesus slept, and the disciples panicked. They woke Jesus up and he calmed the wind and rebuked them for their lack of faith.

When they got to the other side, they faced a new kind of fear: the fear of ghosts. The demons in this man at Gardenese had driven him into the graveyard to play on men’s superstitions about ghosts. In different parts of the Gospels, the disciples had shown themselves to be subject to this superstition. But the Lord identified the demoniac for what he was: not a ghost haunting the cemetery, but a man possessed by a legion of demons.

There are three main points I would have us learn here.

The first has to do with fear.

Fear is a strong instinct, and it is one that the powers of the air and marketers of this world like to use to manipulate us. Fear is a strong instinct, but for we who have given our lives to Christ and to His peace and to His power, it is not a rational one. Do we fear for our bodies? Why, when Our Lord Himself said that we should be more concerned with the state of our souls? Why, when He has given us proof of the resurrection of His sons and daughters into new bodies in the world to come? Do we fear for the health of others? Why? Do we believe that we love them more than God does?

There are dangers in this world, and we need to be aware of them; but fear does not help us see and react to these dangers more effectively. Quite the opposite. The only laudable fear that Scripture speaks of is the fear of God – and this is the fear that brings His peace and power to bear in the most difficult of times.

We should not fear the storms. God can bring calm to us even when the winds blow around us. Remember, he did that for St. Peter when he became overcome on the water.

Nor should we fear the ghosts. What power could a ghost have other than the power we give it to threaten our peace? Moreover, as St. John Chrysostom points out, they are not the disembodied spirits of the dead, but illusions created to scare and control us.

We should not even fear the demons. They have no hold over the righteous, and God has granted His Church His power over them.

We should only fear the Lord and that should lead us to peace and calm as we learn to trust in His great power and his love for us.

The second has to do with how this man got there in the first place.

How did that man end up running through the graveyard naked?

Such things don’t just happen. The monastic tradition gives us a very useful way of understanding how thoughts acquire power over us. There is a progression. It begins with temptation. A thought presents itself. At this point, it is not yet ours. We have not chosen it; it has merely appeared. Thoughts do that. But if we begin to entertain it, turn it over in our minds, and feed it, temptation can become fascination. Because of our concupiscence, this is the dangerous point at which temptation begins to become ours: we start consenting to it, feeding it, and taking pleasure in it. If we continue to give it our attention, fascination can become obsession. The thought begins to dominate our attention. We see the world through it. We begin interpreting events according to it. We return to it again and again. And if that process continues, it can become possession.

Sometimes Christians use that word to refer specifically to demonic possession, and that is real. The Gospel before us makes that very clear. But the spiritual principle is broader. Long before demons become directly involved, something destructive has already happened: we no longer possess the thought; the thought possesses us. It begins to govern our attention, our emotions, our interpretation of events, and eventually our actions. Whether or not a demon ever becomes involved, that kind of possession is already destructive because it takes away our freedom to respond to the actual needs of the moment in peace and love.

And importantly, it is not only evil thoughts that can lead us down this road from temptation to possession. A bad thought may begin with the remembrance of wrongs. Someone hurts us. We remember it. We rehearse it. We justify our anger. We imagine conversations. We gather evidence. Eventually, the person who wronged us occupies far more of our interior life than he ever should have been allowed to. But the process can begin with something good as well. Take the protection of children. A parent should protect his children. That is good. It is part of the duty of love; but this good desire can become disordered. Concern can become anxiety, then anxiety can become fixation, then fixation can become a need to control every environment, every person, every danger, and every possible outcome. And eventually, the parent who began with the perfectly good desire to protect his children can become a curse to himself, to his children, and to everyone around him.

The same thing can happen with health, with work, with justice, and, as Fr. Alexander Schmemann powerfully points out, it can even happen with church and religion.

We are trained by our faith to love the good and hate what is evil. That is good. But without discernment, peace, and humility, even that zeal can become distorted. The problem is not that the original good has become evil, but that it has been detached from its proper place under love, humility, discernment, and trust in God. The desire for justice can become hatred of the unjust. Concern for truth can become an obsession with error. Love for the Church can become contempt for everyone we think is harming her. The good desire to protect others can become the need to control them and keep them from making mistakes.

This is especially dangerous now because so much of our media environment is designed to feed precisely this process. It learns what gets our attention and then gives us more of it. It knows what frightens us, angers us, flatters us, confirms us, and keeps us coming back.

The real danger for Christians is not simply that the world will tempt us with things we already know are evil; we recognize that as a problem and those thoughts are on our radar. The greater danger is that it takes our good desires—our concern for our children, for justice, for truth, for the Church—and feeds them until they become distorted. Without discernment and peace, our feelings can open us to manipulation that moves us from temptation to fascination, from fascination to obsession, and from obsession to a kind of possession. And before we know it, the very thing we thought we were controlling is now controlling us.

That is one of the ways people end up metaphorically running crazy through the graveyards. But the Gospel does not leave the man in the graveyard—and it does not leave us there either.

The third and concluding point is to remind you that this is the place where miracles happen.

Look again at the man in the Gospel. When Christ first encounters him, he is naked. He is violent. He is isolated from everyone who loves him. He lives among the tombs. He is controlled by powers that have robbed him of his freedom and his humanity.

And then Christ comes.

Later, the people find that same man **sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind**. That is one of the most beautiful images of salvation in the Gospels. The man who lived among the dead has been restored to life. The man who could not live with other people has been restored to communion. The man who had lost control of himself has been restored to peace. The man whose dignity had been stripped away is clothed again. The man whose mind had been ruled by alien powers is now in his right mind.

And where is this former madman? At the feet of Jesus. That is what Christ does. And this is what His body, the Church, is for. The Church is where God works to bring peace to our souls, to our families, to our community, and to our world. The Church is where God roots out the demons and obsessions that have all but ruined our lives. The Church is where God brings joy to those who have been oppressed by the wickedness of a fallen world. The Church is where those who have been scattered are gathered, where those who have been enslaved are restored to freedom, and where those whose thoughts have run wild learn once again to sit peacefully at the feet of Jesus.

We have all seen it happen. It has happened for many of us. We are here because we know this to be a place of peace and power.

Conclusion: Give your life to Christ

But God will not force His miracles on us.

Remember in the story that the demoniacs were not the only ones possessed: there was a whole town nearby that loved their swine and the money those pigs made them so much that they could neither rejoice in the healing of their brother nor embrace the one God who brought healing into their midst; much less see the demons in their own hearts and seek his mercy themselves.

Instead, they ran Christ out of town.

Think of the contrast. One man had been living among the tombs, naked and insane, possessed by a legion. And now he is sitting peacefully at the feet of Christ, clothed and in his right mind. The supposedly sane people look at this miracle—and ask Christ to leave. They had not been possessed by a legion, but something possessed them nonetheless. Their attachment to what they had—their livelihood, their expectations, their familiar way of life—had become strong enough that when Christ disrupted it in order to save their brother, they preferred the herd to the miracle.

We all need healing. We are all tempted by obsession. We all have thoughts, fears, desires, wounds, and even good concerns that can begin to control us if we do not continually return them to Christ. We need to let go of—and renounce—“the devil and all his works, and all his worship, and all his angels, and all his pomp,” as we did when we joined the Church.

And then we must do what we promised next. We must unite ourselves to Christ. Completely. So that, as St. Paul puts it “it is no longer we who live, but Christ Who lives in us; and so that the life we now live in the flesh we live by faith in the Son of God, Who loved us and gave Himself for us.” (Galatians 2:20)

This is the way out of fear. This is the way out of obsession. This is the way out of madness. This is the way out of the tombs.

And this is the way back to ourselves: clothed, in our right minds, and sitting peacefully at the feet of Jesus.

This is the only Way to perfect peace and joy.

St. Luke 10:16-21

The Lord said to his disciples, “He who hears you hears me, and he who rejects you rejects me, and he who rejects me rejects him who sent me.” The seventy returned with joy, saying, “Lord, even the demons are subject to us in your name!” And he said to them, “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven. Behold, I have given you authority to tread upon serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy; and nothing shall hurt you. Nevertheless do not rejoice in this, that the spirits are subject to you; but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.” In that same hour he rejoiced in the Holy Spirit and said, “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to babes; yes, Father, for such was your gracious will.”

The seventy disciples return to Jesus full of joy. “Lord, even the demons are subject to us in your name!” We can understand their excitement. They have seen suffering relieved and people set free. They have discovered that the name of Jesus carries an authority they could never possess on their own. Jesus receives their joy, but He also teaches them where their deepest joy must rest. St. Cyril helps us hear that lesson by showing us how Christ teaches His disciples to rejoice.

1. Whatever God gives us is meant to lead people to Christ.

St. Cyril says that the disciples received their authority so “that Christ might be glorified by their means.” That gives us a question to ask about every gift we have: Where does this lead the people around me?

We may have a gift for teaching, organizing, singing, encouraging, or helping someone through a difficult day. We may have resources to share or time to give. Whatever the gift, its purpose surely reaches far beyond our own recognition.

It is easy to begin by wanting to serve and gradually become concerned about whether anyone notices. We start keeping track of who thanked us, whose name appeared, whose contribution received attention. Christ calls us back to the person who needs our love. If someone leaves an encounter with us more able to trust Him, our gift has served its purpose—even if our name is forgotten.

2. Christ’s victory gives us courage to face evil.

St. Cyril says that those who serve the divine word should be “very hearty and courageous,” because they have “Christ to help them.”

There is much that can make us afraid today. We see cruelty rewarded, lies repeated, families divided, and people worn down by suffering. Within ourselves, we encounter sins we thought we had overcome or are growing weary of struggling with.

When Jesus says, “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven,” He reveals whose authority is greater. St. Cyril understands this as the overthrow of the enemy’s power through the coming of Christ.

We still have a struggle before us. Faithful people still suffer. But we can enter that struggle trusting the Lord who sends us. Christ’s promise gives us courage even in suffering, because the enemy cannot separate us from Him against our will.

We can tell the truth when a lie would be convenient. We can seek reconciliation when resentment feels safer. We can ask for help with a sin we have been hiding or continue to ask for help for sins we have not yet overcome. We can keep praying for someone when we cannot yet see a change.

Our courage rests in Christ’s faithfulness. We do not have to know how everything will turn out before we take the next faithful step. Sometimes that step is simply to pray again, ask forgiveness, or keep doing the good in front of us while trusting God with what we cannot yet see.

3. Spiritual success needs the protection of humility.

St. Cyril warns that delight in extraordinary gifts can produce “the desire also of vainglory,” whose close companion is pride.

The disciples have done something good. Yet even a good work can become an occasion for self-importance and vainglory.

That should make us attentive to our hearts. We can become proud of our service, our theological knowledge, our years in the Church, even our reputation for humility. We can begin to treat another person’s weakness as evidence of our own strength.

In his homily on this, St. Cyril compares Christ to a gardener who pulls up a thorn before it takes deep root. That is what the Lord is doing when He corrects the disciples. He is caring for them.

We need that care too. Sometimes it comes through being overlooked. Sometimes through a correction we would rather not hear. Sometimes through discovering that someone else can do the work just as well.

At those moments, we can ask: Can I still give thanks? Can I rejoice that someone was helped, even when someone else receives the credit.

4. Our deepest joy is that we belong to God.

Jesus says, “Rejoice that your names are written in heaven.”

St. Cyril explains that in saying this, “Christ raises them to something greater.”

The disciples are rejoicing in what they have accomplished, but Christ directs them to look instead at what they have received from Him.

We spend much of life measuring ourselves. Have I achieved enough? Have I been useful enough? Do people respect me? Even our spiritual lives can become another list of accomplishments and failures.

Then illness comes, or age changes what we can do. A responsibility passes to someone else. Or perhaps we pray and see no visible result. If our joy depends entirely on being effective, those seasons can leave us feeling worthless.

But in all these situations, the Lord still knows our names.

The person who can no longer organize the parish meal is still precious to Him. The caregiver whose work goes unseen is known to Him. The person who returns to confession ashamed of the same old sin is being called again into His mercy.

We serve because we belong to Christ. And when our strength grows small, His constant and undiminished love remains the ground of our hope.

5. We receive God’s wisdom with a teachable heart.

Jesus rejoices that the Father has revealed these things to babes. St. Cyril describes them as people with “an innocent and guileless mind.”

St. Cyril is speaking about the disposition of the heart. He urges us to study Scripture eagerly. Learning bears fruit when we remain humble enough to receive instruction and allow what we learn to change us.

Today we can carry a world of information in our pockets and still find it difficult to listen and learn. We can have an answer ready before another person has finished speaking. And when we are so busy preparing our answer, we may miss what we need to hear.

The Gospel invites us to approach God with open hands.

“Lord, help me understand.”

“Lord, show me where I need to repent.”

“Lord, teach me how to know and love this person.”

And notice what makes Jesus rejoice. St. Cyril says that He finds joy “in the conversion of those that were in error, in the enlightenment of those that were in darkness.”

Christ invites us to share His joy whenever a person comes home, a heart opens, or someone discovers that forgiveness is possible.

So let us bring Him our gifts, asking that they may lead others to Him. Let us face our struggles with courage and receive correction with humility. And let us remember, through fruitful days and difficult ones alike, the joy He sets before us:

“Rejoice that your names are written in heaven.”

It sounds like a simple question, but the answer depends on what we mean by “the Bible.” The Scriptures of the Old Testament existed before the Church’s birth at Pentecost. The books of the New Testament, however, were written within the life of the Church, addressed to its communities, and received and preserved by them.

When I was first exploring Orthodoxy, one of my concerns was whether becoming Orthodox would mean loving Scripture less. What I discovered was an invitation to enter more deeply into Scripture—to hear it in worship, encounter it in the Fathers, and learn to live it.

Scripture, Tradition, and the Fathers belong together. They direct us toward the same Lord, Jesus Christ. Here are five points that help explain how.

1. The apostolic faith was a shared life before it was a completed book

“And they continued stedfastly in the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayers.”
—Acts 2:42, KJV

St. Ignatius of Antioch writes:

“Wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church.”
—Epistle to the Smyrnaeans, chapter 8

Here “Catholic” means the whole or universal Church.

The first Christians did not begin with a completed New Testament. They began with the proclamation of Christ’s death and Resurrection, baptism, the Eucharist, prayer, and a common life shaped by the apostles’ teaching.

They also had Scripture: the sacred writings of Israel, now understood in the light of Christ. The apostles taught them how the promises, commandments, histories, and prophecies bore witness to Him.

As the Church spread, the apostles and their companions wrote letters and accounts of Christ’s life. Communities received these writings, read them aloud, copied them, and shared them with other churches. All this happened amid missionary work, persecution, disputes, and the ordinary demands of caring for one another.

Acts describes people who worshiped together and shared their possessions so that others would not go without. Their faith had content, and that content formed a way of life.

We need both. We need to know what the apostles taught, and we need to become the kind of community their teaching creates.

2. Holy Tradition is the faithful handing on of life in the Holy Spirit

“Therefore, brethren, stand fast, and hold the traditions which ye have been taught, whether by word, or our epistle.”
—2 Thessalonians 2:15, KJV

The Didache, an early Christian document preserving the apostles’ teaching, instructs believers:

“Every Lord’s day gather yourselves together, and break bread, and give thanksgiving.”
—Didache, chapter 14

When Orthodox Christians speak of Holy Tradition, we mean the apostolic faith handed on within the continuing life of the Holy Spirit in the Church. As Fr. Stephen De Young emphasizes in The Whole Counsel of God, this is a living witness to Christ.

That includes written teaching, but also worship, prayer, sacramental life, and the practices through which Christians learn to follow Him. St. Paul explicitly speaks of teaching delivered both orally and in writing.

During one of our classes, someone raised an important objection about relying on Tradition outside of Scripture: “That’s what you say, but the book says nothing about it.”

That is a fair challenge. Calling something “Tradition” does not establish its apostolic character. A priest cannot invent a practice on Tuesday and announce on Sunday that the apostles handed it down.

We should be able to point to evidence: early Christian writings, the Church’s worship, and the continuing witness of Christian communities. The Didache, for example, describes baptism, fasting, regular prayer, Eucharistic thanksgiving, and reconciliation. It helps us see how early Christians understood and practiced the faith.

Think of a family recipe. A written recipe matters, but watching someone prepare the meal teaches things the page may leave unexplained. The recipe and the practice help preserve each other. Moreover, some family recipes are passed down without ever being written! Of course, making chicken and dumplings is easier than becoming a saint—but the comparison helps.

We also need discernment. Local customs, personal preferences, and familiar habits do not all carry the authority of Holy Tradition. Christ Himself warned that human traditions can obscure God’s commandments.

Faithful Tradition keeps bringing us back to Christ and the apostolic faith. I especially recommend beginning with the Didache or a letter of St. Ignatius. These belong to the writings commonly called the Apostolic Fathers—early Christian writers from the generations immediately following the apostles. They help us see the continuity between the New Testament and the Christian communities that followed.

3. Scripture has a unique and indispensable place within Tradition

“All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness:
That the man of God may be perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works.”
—2 Timothy 3:16–17, KJV

St. Clement of Rome writes:

“Look carefully into the Scriptures, which are the true utterances of the Holy Spirit.”
—First Epistle to the Corinthians, chapter 45

Recognizing Scripture’s place within Tradition should deepen our reverence for it. Scripture is inspired, authoritative, and indispensable to the Church’s life.

The early Fathers demonstrate this reverence. St. Clement directs his readers to Scripture and, elsewhere in the same letter, tells them to take up St. Paul’s epistle to their community. Apostolic writings were already exercising authority before there was a universally received list of New Testament books.

We call the collection of books received as Holy Scripture the canon.

As Fr. Stephen De Young explains, the New Testament canon developed through the Church’s reception of these writings. Communities received texts associated with the apostles and their companions, shared them, and recognized in them the faith they had been taught. Discussion and discernment accompanied that process, particularly where a book was less widely known or its reception was disputed.

St. Athanasius’s Easter letter of AD 367 contains the earliest surviving list matching our twenty-seven-book New Testament exactly. By the end of the fourth century, that collection had widespread acceptance, although the reception of certain books—especially Revelation in parts of the East—continued longer. There is no single date by which every Christian community had settled every question.

Despite what we may encounter online or in The Da Vinci Code, the canon was not an invention of St. Constantine or the product of a single meeting.

The Old Testament has its own history of reception. Two questions belong here: Which books were received as Scripture? And what wording of those books has been preserved?

On the first question, De Young contrasts Palestinian, Alexandrian, and Ethiopian Jewish traditions. These communities did not all receive precisely the same collection of sacred books, and early Christian communities inherited Scriptures from those different settings. This helps explain why the Orthodox Old Testament includes books such as Wisdom, Sirach, Tobit, and Judith that are absent from most Protestant Old Testaments.

“Jerusalem canon” and “Alexandrian canon” can serve as shorthand when explaining the smaller collection familiar to Protestants and the broader collection familiar to Orthodox Christians. We should remember, however, that ancient Jewish practice was more varied than two completely fixed lists would suggest.

Alongside these differences in the collections of books, there are differences in the textual traditions: the wording preserved and handed down through copying and translation.

The Masoretic tradition preserves the Hebrew text, together with markings and notes that guide its reading. The Septuagint is a collection of ancient Greek translations and writings; some of its translations reflect different ancient Hebrew readings. The Hebrew tradition behind the Masoretic text is much older than its surviving medieval manuscripts.

The Septuagint has a central place in Orthodox worship and interpretation, but the Hebrew text also helps us study and understand Scripture. In that sense, our approach is “both-and” rather than “either-or.”

The most important thing is to study the Scriptures we have received. Knowing how the Bible came to us is valuable. Opening it and allowing it to shape our lives is essential.

4. We read Scripture for its immediate meaning, its moral teaching, and its witness to Christ

“And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.”
—Luke 24:27, KJV

The early Epistle of Barnabas offers an example of this reading:

“Let us further inquire whether the Lord took any care to foreshadow the water and the cross.”
—Epistle of Barnabas, chapter 11

For our purposes, three levels of interpretation provide a useful starting point. They work together, and they do not exhaust everything the Fathers have to teach us about reading Scripture.

The immediate meaning asks what the passage says in its literary and historical setting. Who is speaking? To whom? What kind of writing is this? What comes before and after it? Poetry, history, parable, and prophecy require attentive reading. A verse lifted out of its setting can easily become an answer to a question its author never addressed.

The moral meaning asks how the passage calls us to live. What does it reveal about repentance, courage, mercy, faithfulness, or love? What needs to change in us? We can become very skilled at explaining a passage while avoiding its demands. Scripture calls for obedience as well as understanding.

The symbolic or typological meaning asks how the passage participates in the larger story fulfilled in Christ. Typology recognizes people and events that foreshadow or help us understand that fulfillment. The Exodus, for example, is an account of Israel’s deliverance and a pattern through which Christians understand deliverance from sin and death.

St. Paul writes:

“And were all baptized unto Moses in the cloud and in the sea.”
—1 Corinthians 10:2, KJV

And:

“And did all drink the same spiritual drink: for they drank of that spiritual Rock that followed them: and that Rock was Christ.”
—1 Corinthians 10:4, KJV

This kind of reading has roots in Scripture itself. It requires discipline: a symbolic interpretation should be guided by the biblical witness, the Church’s worship, and the Fathers, rather than whatever association happens to occur to us. When an interpretation is new to us, we should test it against the wider witness of Scripture and the Church’s received teaching.

Fr. Stephen De Young also reminds us that the Fathers read Scripture within lives of prayer and worship. Their example invites us to read whole passages, follow biblical connections, and bring what we learn into the life of the Church. These levels of interpretation reinforce one another as Scripture teaches us to know Christ and follow Him.

5. Receiving the faith means becoming faithful Christians

“A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another.
By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.”
—John 13:34–35, KJV

St. Ignatius of Antioch writes:

“For the beginning is faith, and the end is love.”
—Epistle to the Ephesians, chapter 14

We can become so busy being Orthodox that we forget to be Christian.

We may know which translation we prefer, explain the history of the canon, and quote the Fathers—and still speak cruelly to someone who disagrees with us. Our knowledge needs to bear fruit.

Scripture and Tradition teach us to worship God, repent, forgive, care for people in need, and grow in love. The Fathers and Mothers of the Church matter because their teaching and lives help us learn that faithfulness. Reading them should draw us toward the Lord they followed.

A good beginning is simple: begin with a Gospel, read a short passage each day, and bring your questions to class or to your priest. Participate attentively in worship, and spend time with an early Christian text such as the Didache, Clement, or Ignatius. Let your questions lead to deeper understanding and more faithful practice.

Then attend to the people God has placed before you. Pray for them. Listen to them. Offer help. Seek reconciliation.

The apostolic faith has been handed on to us so that we may live it—and, through that life, help others encounter Jesus Christ.

[For a better presentation, I strongly recommend Fr. Stephen De Young’s The Whole Counsel of God: An Introduction to Your Bible from Ancient Faith Publishing.]

ST. PAUL’S LETTER TO TITUS 3:8-15

Titus, my son, the saying is sure. I desire you to insist on these things, so that those who have believed in God may be careful to apply themselves to good deeds; these are excellent and profitable to men. But avoid stupid controversies, genealogies, dissensions, and quarrels over the law, for they are unprofitable and futile. As for a man who is factious, after admonishing him once or twice, have nothing more to do with him, knowing that such a person is perverted and sinful; he is self-condemned. When I send Artemas or Tychicos to you, do your best to come to me at Nicopolis, for I have decided to spend the winter there. Do your best to speed Zenas the lawyer and Apollos on their way; see that they lack nothing. And let our people learn to apply themselves to good deeds, so as to help cases of urgent need, and not to be unfruitful. All who are with me send greeting to you. Greet those who love us in the faith. Grace be with you all. Amen.

There is something in today’s epistle that is likely to catch our attention: “A man who is a heretic after the first and second admonition reject.”

That is a strong statement. It’s easy to hear it and immediately begin thinking about someone who needs to be corrected. We may even already have a name in mind, and we may already have our admonitions locked and loaded, complete with quotations from our favorite influencers.

But St. John Chrysostom begins his commentary somewhere else. He asks us to remember what St. Paul has just said about the love of God: what we were, what God has done for us, and the mercy by which He has saved us.

That is where we need to begin, too.

Before Paul tells Titus what to do about someone else’s stubbornness, he reminds him of God’s kindness toward us. We also needed correction; we also needed healing; and God came to us in love.

Then St. Paul says: keep teaching “these things,” that is to say, keep teaching about God’s merciful gift of salvation, so that those who believe in God will learn to devote themselves to good works.

The mercy we have received is supposed to bear fruit.

If we understand that God has been patient with us, we can become more patient with others. If we understand that He has been generous with us, we can become more generous. If we understand that He came looking for us when we were lost, we can begin looking for people who need our help.

This is how St. John Chrysostom approaches the passage. He moves from God’s love for mankind to our care for one another.

And he is quite concrete about that care: help those who have been wronged; protect the vulnerable; care for widows and orphans; offer refuge to those who are suffering.

Sometimes that requires money. Sometimes it requires our time, our presence, or our willingness to stand beside someone who would otherwise be facing a difficult situation alone. And we should ask whether our own words and actions are adding to the burdens we say we want to relieve.

The question is: having received so much unearned mercy from God, what are we learning to do with it?

St. Paul juxtaposes two kinds of activity:

On the one hand, there are things that are “good and profitable to men,” and on the other there are things that are “unprofitable and vain.”

Good works belong to the first category. Foolish disputes belong to the second.

We can spend a remarkable amount of energy on things that produce very little good.

We know how this happens. We begin with a question worth discussing. Then, somewhere along the way, we become more concerned with getting the last word. We rehearse our response while the other person is still speaking. We look for the sentence that will finally settle the matter.

And afterward, what has happened; what is the fruit?

Has anyone become more faithful? Has anyone been helped? Have we understood one another better? Or have we simply become more practiced at being angry?

Referring to the logic in the parable of the sower, St. John Chrysostom asks why we would keep sowing seed on a rock when there are people ready to benefit from our care.

Our attention is limited. Our time is limited. If we spend an evening feeding an argument (an argument with “rocks,” nonetheless), that evening is no longer available for prayer, for our family, or for someone who could use a phone call.

This does not mean that truth is unimportant. St. John Chrysostom explicitly says that when false teaching is harming others, the shepherd must intervene. There are people to protect. There are errors that need to be answered.

But protecting someone from harm and keeping an argument alive are different activities. We need enough humility to ask which one we are doing. And we should remember that an online argument can be profitable for the platform while being utterly unprofitable and counterproductive for our souls.

That helps us understand Paul’s instruction about the person who refuses correction.

Notice that there is a first admonition, and then a second.

There is an honest effort to reach the person. There is an opportunity for him to listen, reconsider, and return. St. Basil likewise places correction within a process of accountability and reconciliation. He says that someone who persists after correction should be brought to the superior, “that perhaps he may be ashamed when further rebuked.”

Even here, the hope is that the person will listen and return.

The passage concerns someone who persists in destructive teaching and division despite that correction. It is addressed to St. Titus in his responsibility as a shepherd. It does not give any of us a commission to identify and expel everyone who irritates us.

Still, it gives all of us something to examine. Because there are two sides in every dispute. Are we ready to receive correction? Can we hear it when someone tells us that we have misunderstood a situation and acted inappropriately? Can we admit that we have spoken unfairly? Can we reconsider our opinions without feeling that our whole identity is under attack? In general, how do we react to criticism and accountability?

It is possible to become so attached to being right that we lose the ability to be taught. And that is dangerous for all of us.

The Church is a place where we come to be healed. Healing requires that we allow Christ to show us something we would rather not see, and He often does it through people we would rather ignore.

So before we use this passage to diagnose another person’s stubbornness, we should bring our own stubbornness to confession.

After this, as he is wrapping up his epistle, St. Paul turns to travel arrangements and gives us a practical example of everything he has been saying.

Artemas or Tychicus will come to Crete. Titus should meet Paul at Nicopolis. Zenas and Apollos need to be helped along on their journey.

It can sound like the important theological part is finished and we have reached the housekeeping.

But look at the instruction: make sure they lack nothing.

Here are particular people with particular needs. They need provisions. They need help getting where they are going. Someone has to notice those needs and take responsibility for meeting them.

This is what the teaching looks like when it becomes life.

It is easy to speak warmly about hospitality. It takes more attention to make sure a guest has something to eat and somewhere to sleep.

It is easy to affirm that Christians should care for one another. It takes a little planning to bring a meal, arrange a ride, or sit with someone whose caregiver needs a break.

St. Paul wants the people of the Church to learn how to do this; to develop a solid instinct and capacity for providing hospitality and love. He says that we are to devote ourselves to good works. There is responsibility in this language; we are to take initiative in caring for others.

And St. John Chrysostom presses the point further: do not simply wait for people in need to come to you. Look for them.

That is worth contemplating for a moment.

Some people find it very difficult to ask for help. They do not want to be a burden. They are embarrassed. They assume that everyone else is already too busy.

If our charity begins only when someone makes a sufficiently clear request, we will miss people.

We can learn to notice even unspoken needs. Who has been absent? Who is carrying more than usual? Who has become quiet? Who is going home alone to something difficult?

We do not need to pry or appoint ourselves managers of someone else’s life. We can offer something simple and specific: “I can bring dinner on Tuesday.” “Would a ride help?” “I have some time this afternoon if you would like company.”

That is a skill we can practice. And St. Paul says it’s one we must learn.

St. John Chrysostom builds on this call to serve with a surprising question: why does God give us a part in this work? Could Christ, who fed thousands, not have provided for the needs of His ministers without anyone’s assistance? Could He not have supplied everything Zenas and Apollos needed?

Of course He could have. Yet He allows people to help. He gives them a share in His generosity. The person receiving help benefits. So does the person giving it.

When we give, something happens within us. Our grip loosens. We become less governed by the fear of having too little. Another person’s well-being begins to matter enough that we are willing to sacrifice and make room for it in our day.

St. John Chrysostom calls almsgiving the mother of love.

We often act as if we must first feel sufficiently loving in order to act. But sometimes we learn to love by performing the act of charity that is already within our reach; regardless of our feelings, we bring the meal, we make the visit, we give what we can. And then, through that practice, God teaches our hearts to become more generous.

This is part of how He binds the Body of Christ together.

An argument can train us to regard another person as an obstacle. An act of mercy can train us to recognize a neighbor.

That is why St. Paul is so concerned that his people should not be unfruitful. Their participation matters. God is forming them through the good they learn to do.

This lesson from St. Paul is so practical—be on the watch for ways to put it into effect. Find a need you can help meet, then make a concrete offer; and think of one fruitless dispute you can stop feeding with your attention and participation.

That may free some time and attention for the person who actually needs you.

We will not all be able to offer the same things. Some can give money. Some can give time. Some have skills, a car, a spare room, or the patience to listen. Some of us need to receive help right now, and allowing another person to care for us can itself require humility.

We belong to one another. There is room in this life both to give and to receive.

St. Paul closes with a blessing: “Grace be with you all.” Grace has been the foundation of everything he has said. God has loved us, saved us, and brought us into His household. Now He is teaching us how to live there.

May we receive correction with humility, speak the truth with care, and notice the needs He places before us.

And may the mercy we have received become mercy someone else can experience through us, to the glory of God and furtherance of His Kingdom.

There is a curious tendency among some Orthodox Christians to regard any friendly encounter between an Orthodox hierarch and a non-Orthodox religious leader as evidence that something has gone terribly wrong. A patriarch meets with the Pope of Rome, photographs appear on social media, and almost immediately there are warnings about ecumenism, betrayal, and the impending surrender of the Orthodox faith. The meeting itself becomes the evidence. The conversation need not even be examined.

Mikhail Lermontov captured this way of thinking wonderfully in the preface to the second edition of A Hero of Our Time. He compares the Russian public to a provincial observer who overhears two diplomats from hostile governments speaking amicably and concludes that each must be betraying his country for the sake of their friendship. The observer cannot imagine that people who represent opposing interests might nevertheless speak respectfully, understand one another, and even enjoy one another’s company without abandoning their responsibilities.

The analogy reveals a problem of interpretation. We do not simply observe events; we interpret them through the expectations we bring with us. If we have already decided that dialogue is necessarily a betrayal of Orthodoxy, every cordial encounter will appear to confirm that judgment. The conclusion precedes the evidence.

Of course, diplomats sometimes betray their countries, and theologians sometimes compromise the faith. There is such a thing as false ecumenism. But cordiality is not capitulation, and conversation is not communion. Serious accusations about the fidelity of our bishops require attention to what they actually say and do, and to what the Church’s own tradition teaches about those separated from her.

That brings us to a more difficult question: Where does the Church end?

The Church is One

Orthodox Christians confess that the Church is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic. This is not merely an aspiration for future unity or a description of an invisible collection of people who happen to believe in Jesus. The Church is the Body of Christ, constituted and sustained by the Holy Spirit, gathered around her bishops, and manifested most fully in the celebration of the Eucharist.

We encounter this life in the Orthodox Church’s apostolic faith, sacraments, canonical order, and communion of bishops and faithful. We should affirm that fullness without embarrassment.

St. Ignatius of Antioch describes ecclesial life in relation to the bishop and the Eucharistic assembly. The faithful gather in communion with their bishop, sharing the one faith and the one Eucharist. This gives us a positive account of the Church’s unity.

But a positive account does not automatically answer every question about separated Christians. Identifying the fullness of ecclesial life is one task; determining the spiritual and sacramental consequences of every kind of separation is another.

Three questions therefore need to be distinguished. Can God act among people outside Orthodox communion? How should the Church understand sacramental acts performed in separated communities? What constitutes membership and full communion in the Church?

These questions are related, but an answer to one does not settle the others. A person may be moved by grace toward Christ without yet being incorporated into Orthodox communion. Recognition of a previous baptism does not amount to recognition of complete ecclesial unity. And the absence of Eucharistic communion does not, by itself, explain everything about the spiritual condition of those who are separated.

The Church’s history requires us to make these distinctions carefully.

Saints Cyprian and Stephen: An Ancient Disagreement

In the third century, St. Cyprian of Carthage and Pope St. Stephen of Rome disagreed sharply over the reception of Christians baptized in heretical and schismatic communities.

Cyprian’s ecclesiology was uncompromising. In On the Unity of the Catholic Church, he famously declared:

“He can no longer have God for his Father, who has not the Church for his mother.”

For Cyprian, the unity of the Church was inseparable from the unity of her sacramental life. Baptism belonged to the one Church of Christ. Those who had separated from her could not administer what they no longer possessed; consequently, those coming from such communities needed to receive baptism within the Church.

Stephen disagreed. His position survives principally through opponents who quoted and criticized it. He defended the practice of receiving those with a previous baptism through repentance and the laying on of hands, rather than baptizing them anew.

The disagreement concerned how fidelity to the one Church and the one baptism should govern reception. Both bishops took ecclesial unity seriously, but they drew different conclusions about the status of baptism administered during separation.

Their disagreement does not make doctrinal truth relative. It does show that the relationship between separation and sacramental reality was already a serious theological question within the ancient Church. We cannot adequately explain that history by assuming that every faithful bishop has always understood the matter in precisely the same way.

St. Basil and the Distinctions that Matter

St. Basil the Great provides a more differentiated account in his first canonical letter to Amphilochius, commonly known as Canon 1. He distinguishes heresy, schism, and unlawful assembly, or parasynagogue.

Heresy involves a departure from the faith itself. Schism concerns ecclesiastical disputes capable, in principle, of resolution. Unlawful assemblies arise when clergy or others establish unauthorized congregations in defiance of ecclesiastical discipline.

These distinctions affect how people are reconciled to the Church. Basil reports that earlier authorities treated the categories differently and accepted the baptism of some schismatics because they were understood as still belonging, in some sense, to the Church. He also acknowledges the stricter reasoning associated with Cyprian and Firmilian and recognizes differences in regional practice.

Basil’s account therefore requires more than the extraction of a convenient sentence. He preserves doctrinal seriousness, distinguishes among forms of separation, and considers how established practice should serve reconciliation.

Here we encounter a fundamental purpose of Orthodox canonical discipline: the salvation of human beings. The canons protect faith and order because these belong to the Church’s saving life. Their application requires attention both to what has gone wrong and to how it can be healed.

The distinction between akribeia and oikonomia belongs within this responsibility. Strict observance and pastoral economy are not competing allegiances, one to truth and the other to convenience. Economy must remain accountable to the Church’s faith, while canonical strictness must be exercised with attention to the people whose salvation is at stake.

Basil’s categories also warn against treating every separation as equivalent. A dispute over ecclesiastical authority and a rejection of the Trinity cannot simply be assigned the same theological significance.

Reconciliation and the Character of Separation

The Church’s practices of reception reflect this differentiated approach. Christians coming from separated communities have been received through baptism, chrismation, or profession of faith, depending on the community, circumstances, and ecclesiastical judgment involved.

The meaning of these practices has itself been debated. Some explanations emphasize recognition of a sacramental reality already present; others emphasize what reconciliation with the Church supplies. The variation establishes the need for discernment, even where it does not establish a single explanation of every reception.

An instructive example comes from the history of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia and the Moscow Patriarchate. Their prolonged rupture in communion raised serious questions of ecclesiastical authority and fidelity. Yet Fr. Michael Pomazansky, writing within the ROCOR tradition in Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, refused to deny the grace of the mysteries celebrated by the Moscow Patriarchate. He distinguished temporary divisions of a non-dogmatic character from departures affecting the faith itself.

This example concerns a rupture within the Orthodox world. It cannot simply be transferred to every separated Christian confession. Its value is more specific: disrupted canonical communion does not necessarily mean that every spiritual bond has been severed or every sacramental act rendered empty.

Ukrainian ecclesiastical history raises related questions.

The Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the USA was received beneath the omophor of the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 1995; its unification with the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in America followed. Its hierarchy and faithful were received without repeating baptism or ordination.

In 2018, the Ecumenical Patriarchate likewise received appeals from the leaders and followers of the UOC-KP and UAOC, describing their separation as non-dogmatic and petitioning for the restoration of ecclesiastical communion. The Ecumenical Patriarchate then helped bring these communities together through the Unification Council in December 2018, which established the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, and granted the new Church its Tomos of Autocephaly in January 2019. While the authority and canonical basis of those actions remain disputed among Orthodox Churches, the point here is that the Ecumenical Patriarch treated them the way he treated the UOC-USA before and that Russian Orthodox Church treated the ROCOR.

These examples should be distinguished from another event many of us celebrate: the reception of numerous Evangelical Orthodox Church congregations into the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America in 1987. Their members were received through chrismation, and those chosen to serve as Orthodox clergy were ordained. A similar pattern marked the reception of Christ the Saviour Brotherhood communities into canonical Orthodox jurisdictions around 2000, and has also been followed in the reception of some former Anglican and Episcopalian congregations. In these cases, receiving members without baptism did not entail accepting their clergy’s previous ordinations. Recognition of baptism and recognition of holy orders are distinct ecclesiastical judgments.

Such examples demonstrate why reconciliation requires attention to the character of a separation and the authority responsible for addressing it. We should be cautious about demanding that contemporary bishops exercise less discernment than their predecessors.

The process can be disconcerting to those who expect everything to be perfectly tidy. In the short term, it can actually be quite messy.

What Follows—and What Remains Unresolved

Fr. Georges Florovsky examined sacramental recognition in his essay “The Limits of the Church” (1933). He questioned whether canonical boundaries necessarily coincide with the full reach of sacramental grace—the Church’s “charismatic” boundaries.

His concern was concrete. If the Church receives some Christians without baptizing them, how should their previous baptism be understood? Florovsky believed that an appeal to canonical separation alone did not adequately explain the Church’s practice.

Vladimir Lossky approaches ecclesial life through the intimate relationship between the Church and the Holy Spirit, drawing upon St. Irenaeus. His emphasis reminds us that an institutional description, however necessary, cannot exhaust the Church’s divine-human reality.

Metropolitan Kallistos Ware offers a related caution: we know where the Church is, but cannot be certain where she is not.

These are distinct theological reflections, not interchangeable dogmatic definitions of the Church’s boundaries. Florovsky addresses sacramental recognition, Lossky the Church’s life in the Spirit, and Ware restraint in judging separated Christians. Each must be read in context, rather than enlisted as a slogan to settle a contemporary dispute.

Together, however, their witness challenges an unwarranted inference: that because we can identify the fullness of Orthodox ecclesial life, we can also describe exhaustively everything Christ is accomplishing among separated Christians.

The Church is the ark of salvation because she is the Body of Christ. Salvation cannot be detached from Him. But our confession of what He has given the Church does not provide us with a complete account of every person He will save.

We know what Christ has given us. We do not know everything Christ may accomplish in others.

The Eucharist and the Reach of Intercession

The Eucharist makes another distinction visible.

The faithful gather around their bishop, or a priest serving with his blessing, to receive the Body and Blood of Christ. Eucharistic communion expresses a unity of faith and ecclesial life that must actually exist. Its boundaries matter and must be respected.

Yet the Divine Liturgy is offered for the life of the world. We pray for civil authorities, travelers, the sick, the suffering, captives, and the peace of the whole world. The Church’s intercession reaches beyond those standing in the building and beyond those eligible to approach the chalice.

We must distinguish between those who receive the Eucharist and those for whom the Church intercedes. Prayer for someone does not make that person a communicant. Nevertheless, the Church prays because she believes that God hears and acts.

This supports a claim about the reach of divine mercy and ecclesial intercession. It does not, by itself, establish the sacramental status or ecclesial membership of those for whom we pray. Keeping that distinction clear allows us to appreciate the breadth of the Church’s prayer without dissolving the particularity of her communion.

The Church’s canonical order is real, but God is not a prisoner of our categories. Aslan is not a tame lion.

Dialogue and Doctrinal Fidelity

These distinctions help clarify contemporary arguments about ecumenism.

St. Justin Popović’s description of ecumenism as a pan-heresy expresses a profound warning against approaches that displace the God-Man and relativize the uniqueness of His Church. That warning deserves serious attention. Institutional unity purchased through the abandonment of truth would betray the communion it claims to restore.

But the word ecumenism is used for markedly different things: doctrinal relativism, proposals for sacramental communion, theological dialogue, charitable cooperation, and ordinary meetings between religious leaders. Each requires its own evaluation.

Fr. Seraphim Rose, whose glorification ROCOR is now preparing, was himself a vigorous critic of ecumenism. Yet he recognized the danger of treating every contact as proof of heresy. In his defense of Fr. Dimitry Dudko, he distinguished a denial of Orthodoxy’s identity as the true Church from participation in discussions with other Christians.

We can criticize particular theological claims, questionable statements, and imprudent actions without assuming that every Orthodox bishop who participates in dialogue has betrayed the faith.

Conversations often explore what the Church has in common with other Christian communities. To a suspicious observer, that emphasis can look as though the participants have brushed aside their differences in pursuit of unwarranted communion. But identifying common ground does not, by itself, mean that unresolved differences have been dismissed.

A conversation about Roman primacy is not an agreement to accept papal supremacy. A discussion with Oriental Orthodox theologians about Christology must be judged by its account of Christ and the councils. Cooperation in protecting persecuted Christians must be assessed according to what that cooperation entails.

The relevant questions are specific: What was affirmed? What was denied? What commitments were made? Do they accord with the apostolic faith?

The Eastern Patriarchs’ encyclical of 1848 provides a useful historical example. It firmly rejected Roman claims the patriarchs regarded as departures from apostolic tradition, while expressing a desire for the healing of division. Doctrinal firmness and a desire for reconciliation belonged together.

The Holy and Great Council of Crete likewise affirmed theological dialogue while insisting upon fidelity to Orthodox faith. Its reception remains contested, but the distinction its documents make must still be examined on its merits.

Participation in dialogue does not establish uncertainty or ambivalence about our own faith. We may speak with others precisely because we believe the truth matters and desire that they should share in its fullness. That inquiry requires honest conversation, including the willingness to acknowledge disagreements that remain unresolved.

Reading the Canons without Turning Them into Weapons

The internet has made an extraordinary quantity of patristic and canonical material available. This is a blessing, but access to information is not the same thing as formation in wisdom.

A reader can extract a passage from Saints Cyprian, Basil, or Ignatius and imagine that he possesses a complete account of Orthodox ecclesiology. Another can extract a sentence from Florovsky or Ware and imagine that canonical boundaries no longer matter. Both substitute a fragment for the sustained work of interpretation.

St. Basil’s first canon is particularly instructive. It contains strict judgments, distinctions among separated groups, recognition of differing practices, and pastoral concern. Reading it faithfully requires holding these elements together.

The same discipline applies to contemporary criticism. We can identify errors without seeking the healing of those who hold them. We can condemn bishops without understanding the circumstances in which they are acting. We can turn concern for truth into an excuse for the suspicion, resentment, and division that our own Orthodox circles sometimes reward.

The irony is considerable. In the name of defending the unity of the Church, we can cultivate habits that make genuine unity more difficult.

Bishops can make mistakes; their decisions are accountable to the faith and canonical tradition of the Church. Fidelity may require questioning or resisting a particular decision. But criticism should identify the error, examine its circumstances, and objectively proportion its judgment to the evidence. A photograph of a cordial meeting cannot bear the weight of an accusation of heresy.

Nor is episcopal authority merely ceremonial. The Church entrusts bishops with responsibilities of judgment and reconciliation. Those responsibilities have limits, but they cannot be replaced by the confidence of a commentator who has collected quotations.

The purpose of canonical discipline is to preserve communion, correct disorder, and guide people toward salvation. Our use of the canons should serve those purposes too.

Confidence without Presumption

At the heart of this discussion is a temptation to make the Church’s uniqueness depend upon denying or demonizing every manifestation of grace beyond her visible communion.

The Orthodox Church does not become less fully the Body of Christ because the Holy Spirit prepares someone outside her communion to receive the Gospel. Acknowledging that separated Christians may love Christ and respond to grace does not require us to minimize their separation or the doctrinal differences that sustain it.

Indeed, if communion in the Orthodox Church is the blessing we confess it to be, we should desire that blessing for everyone. Separation should grieve us. It obstructs common witness and deprives Christians of the fullness of communion we desire to share.

That desire requires patience, respect, and honesty. We must neither conceal genuine differences nor presume that contempt will help resolve them. We cannot heal a division we refuse to discuss.

As I grow older, I find myself increasingly appreciative of the apophatic dimension of Orthodox theology. Our formulations are necessary, but they do not exhaust the reality they describe. This recognition calls for careful speech and reverence.

We confess the visible, sacramental fullness of the Orthodox Church. We also confess that God’s mercy exceeds our comprehension and that He desires the salvation of all. We should be able to affirm both without claiming to resolve the spiritual condition of every community or the eternal destiny of every person.

Some things have been clearly taught. Others require discernment informed by the Church’s history and practice. Still others remain within the judgment of God. Wisdom includes learning the difference.

The question “Where does the Church end?” can arise from a desire to understand communion and heal separation. It can also arise from a desire to identify people we may safely dismiss. We should examine the disposition with which we ask it.

The canons protect communion. The bishops preserve and administer it. The Eucharist manifests it. The Holy Spirit sustains it. And the Church’s mission is to invite all humanity into it.

We have been entrusted with an extraordinary treasury of faith, worship, and spiritual wisdom. Our responsibility is to preserve what we have received, live it faithfully, and welcome those whom Christ calls.

We should care for the Church’s boundaries because we treasure the life within them, rejoice that God’s grace is at work beyond them, and look for every opportunity that grace gives us to share this life with others.

II Corinthians 9:6-11; Luke 6:31-36

What do we have that we should be giving away?

When we hear today’s epistle, we naturally think about money. St. Paul tells us that “God loveth a cheerful giver,” and we picture tithing to the Church or giving alms to someone who needs help paying the bills.

That is a good place to start. In this epistle, St. Paul is collecting help for people in need. We should not spiritualize his words so thoroughly that our wallets remain untouched. Taking tithing and almsgiving seriously is part of our repentance, our healing, and our growth in Christ. Through giving, God changes our hearts and teaches us to offer the other gifts He has entrusted to us.

But listen to what else St. Paul says. God gives us what we need so that we “may abound to every good work.” He promises to “increase the fruits of your righteousness.”

Money is one thing we can share. But what about our attention? Our patience? Our willingness to forgive? What about kindness offered to someone who has done nothing to earn it? These, too, are riches. And these, too, are meant to be given away.

St. John Chrysostom draws our attention to the word St. Paul uses. He does not simply call our generosity giving. He calls it sowing. Think about that. A farmer could keep all his seed safely in the barn. He could count it, admire it, and congratulate himself that he had not lost a single grain. But he would have no harvest. Seed fulfills its purpose when it is planted. And the gifts God gives us bear fruit when we put them to work in love.

This helps us understand something about the asceticism of relationships.

We pray. We fast. We give alms. Through these practices, we learn to resist the demand that everything serve our comfort and our will. We make room for God, and we learn to offer ourselves to Him. There are moments when this brings us such peace. We become aware of His grace.

Then someone interrupts us; and suddenly we discover how much work remains.

We may have been quite willing to offer God twenty minutes of prayer. Offering our neighbor five minutes of undivided attention turns out to be more difficult. We may be keeping the fast carefully. But can we fast from having the last word? Can we give up the pleasure of repeating a story that makes someone else look foolish? Can we surrender our right to make sure everyone knows that we were right?

Those are places where the seed goes into the ground. Those are places where our prayer and fasting can actually bear fruit.

But if we keep waiting for people to become worthy of our patience or deserving of our kindness, the seed stays in the barn. We keep it to ourselves, and our neighbor goes hungry.

Consider patience.

We often treat patience as something people must earn by behaving reasonably. We will be patient with them once they stop doing all those things that bother us. But patience is needed precisely when those conditions are missing. The field needs the seed. The fruit needs to grow.

St. Augustine gives us a powerful warning about this; “Now we must be on our guard, more than anything else, not to lose patience in our eagerness to be justified.”

We know how that happens. We begin with a real grievance. Someone misunderstood us. Someone treated us unfairly. Someone acted unjustly. We want to set the record straight. And in the process, we become harsh, careless, and cruel. We win the argument and wound the person. The seed never makes it to the ground.

The ascetic struggle is to tell the truth while remaining faithful to love. Sometimes that means speaking more gently. Sometimes it means waiting in silence. Sometimes it means asking an honest question, without trying to trap the other person, and then listening to the answer in love.

And here is something that we must always keep in mind: we never know the burdens another person is carrying. We see the distraction, the short temper, the injustice, or the missed responsibility; we may not see the grief, the fear, the pain, or the exhaustion underneath it. Remembering how little we know about another person’s burdens, we can leave room for what we do not understand. That is one way to give mercy.

But today’s Gospel takes us further.

It is pleasant to be generous when generosity is appreciated. We listen, and the other person listens to us. We help, and later they help us. We forgive, and they apologize.

Thanks be to God for relationships like that; may all of the world’s crooked lines be made straight like this!

But Christ asks:

“For if ye love them which love you, what thank have ye? for sinners also love those that love them.”

Then He says:

“But love ye your enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing again.”

This is where we discover whether our kindness has an invoice attached. Perhaps we never asked for money. But we expected gratitude. We expected affection. We expected the person to recognize how much we had done. And when the payment of whatever type does not arrive, we become resentful.

Christ calls us to give without making the other person’s response the condition of our love. We can offer kindness without being thanked. We can pray for someone who continues to misunderstand us. We can correct someone privately and gently, seeking their healing rather than the satisfaction of embarrassing them.

We cannot control what they do with that offering. We are responsible for what we offer.

This goes against some of our strongest instincts. Why should we live this way?

Christ gives us the answer:

“For He is kind unto the unthankful and to the evil.”

That is how our Father loves.

And before we start identifying all the unthankful people who need our kindness, we should remember how often we have received His. How much mercy has God given us that we barely noticed? How often have we received His gifts without giving thanks? Yet even when we turn away from Him, He continues to seek our healing and salvation. We see the fullness of this love on the Cross. Even as His persecutors were putting Him to death, Christ prayed for their forgiveness.

As St. Ambrose observes, “What Christ said in word, he proved also by example.”

We ourselves live by that mercy. Christ has forgiven us, borne with us, and loved us when we have given Him little love in return. When He commands us to be merciful, He calls us to offer our neighbors what we have already received from Him.

His mercy has borne fruit in our lives. That fruit contains seed for another’s field: forgiveness we can offer, patience we can practice, kindness we can share. He gives us the grace to sow even when the ground seems unpromising. That is how the harvest grows.

That brings us back to St. Paul: “God loveth a cheerful giver.”

How do we become cheerful when giving costs us something, and when we may never see the fruit? This, too, is part of our ascetic struggle. We practice giving without keeping a tally. We remember how generously God has treated us. We ask Him to help us find joy in sharing His mercy, even when no one thanks us for it.

That joy may take time to grow. This is part of the long, slow work of our salvation.

Sometimes the first offering is the struggle itself. We feel the sharp reply forming, but refuse to speak it. Instead of offering sarcasm, we stay quiet and choose to listen. We ask God to help us mean the kindness we are trying to show.

Even in this small offering, the sharp reply withheld, the attention freely given, something is growing. Perhaps the person receiving our kindness will become more merciful in turn. We cannot know. But as we cooperate with God’s grace, we do know that He is cultivating mercy within our own hearts.

We begin with the meager strength we have, asking Him to heal our reluctance and enlarge our hearts.

This week, choose one relationship in which you are tempted to keep a tally. Offer one concrete act of mercy there. Listen. Help. Pray. Speak gently. Give without presenting the bill afterward.

The other person may be surprised. They may respond with the same sarcasm as before; they may even see your silence as an opportunity to double down. One act of mercy may not change an established pattern. Offer it anyway, and ask God for the grace to offer another. That is certainly how God Himself acts toward us.

Keep working toward a tithe, and give materially to those in need. The same mercy that opens our hearts to our neighbors should also open our hands. Let that love shape how we spend our money, how we offer our time, and how we relate to one another.

God has given us seed to sow. The harvest He promises is righteousness, thanksgiving, and a life increasingly like His own.

“Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful.”

Reflecting on II Corinthians 9:6–11 and Luke 6:31–36, Fr. Anthony explores cheerful giving through the asceticism of relationships. Money is one gift we are called to share, but so are our attention, patience, forgiveness, and kindness. Drawing on the Church Fathers and the image of sowing seed, he considers what happens when we wait for others to deserve our mercy or attach an expectation of repayment to our love. Christ calls us to give even when gratitude never comes, trusting that God is cultivating mercy within our own hearts. The homily concludes with a practical invitation: choose one relationship in which you keep a tally, and offer an act of mercy without presenting the bill afterward.

Introduction

For most of us, most of the time, our principal ascetic struggle is learning how to love the people around us. We may keep a prayer rule and follow the fasting calendar, but then someone interrupts us, disappoints us, or refuses to see something that seems obvious. Suddenly we discover how much work remains. The person in front of us has revealed an impatience that was already there.

Asceticism is spiritual training. Through God’s grace, we learn to govern our thoughts, appetites, and reactions so that we can serve Him more faithfully. God has given us real power to affect the world. As His image bearers, we are called to help straighten what has become crooked and cultivate what is already good. Our own crookedness complicates the work. Pride and resentment enter into our attempts to help, and we can end up adding to the very disorder we hoped to heal.

This is why relationships belong at the heart of our ascetic life. Every encounter gives us an opportunity to recognize our fallenness, repent, and become more available to grace. This includes the difficult conversation at home and the brief exchange with the person working the checkout. Our neighbor is a person to love, and in learning to love that person we discover where we need healing.

There is a parallel here with prayer. Keeping a prayer rule disciplines our attention, but the purpose of prayer is communion with God. Likewise, relationships train us in patience and self-control as we learn to live in communion with one another. Our Lord prays:

That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me.
—John 17:21

That unity preserves the persons who share in it. We grow in our capacity to love one another without demanding that everyone become an extension of ourselves.

I sometimes remind my seminarians that all our theological learning must serve our love of God and neighbor. We can spend hours discussing difficult theological questions and still fail to attend to the person who needs us. Theology should help us worship God and serve His people. Otherwise, even a conversation full of Orthodox vocabulary can become a form of entertainment for the ego. The asceticism of relationships brings our learning into the ordinary circumstances where love is required.

Love that gives itself

A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another.
—John 13:34

Our Lord’s self-offering is the measure of our love. He teaches us to surrender the insistence on having our own way. In a conversation, that may mean giving up the pleasure of making a clever point. It may mean staying present when we would rather leave, or accepting that our service will cost us time and comfort without earning recognition.

Such love requires discernment. The other person’s wishes do not automatically tell us what God wills. Parents, pastors, and people entrusted with responsibility sometimes need to be firm. We must ask what would actually serve this person in this moment.

Sometimes I need to say something difficult. Sometimes I, the knucklehead in the conversation, need to get out of the way and let the other person speak. Humility makes room for either possibility.

During our class discussion on this topic, one participant described learning to see himself as a participant in a situation instead of treating everything as something happening to him. That is a helpful shift. We can become so occupied with what we might lose, or how we are being regarded, that we lose sight of the person beside us. Asking what our part should be opens a little space for freedom. We can choose a response that serves the moment instead of defending our position automatically.

This is one of the sacrifices love asks of us: to relinquish the assumption that the encounter revolves around us. We are present with another person, before God, and we have an opportunity to serve.

Listening with humility

Wherefore, my beloved brethren, let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath:
—James 1:19

Listening is a gift of attention. For the duration of the given conversation, we undertake a small fast from interrupting, rehearsing our answer, and deciding in advance what the other person really means. We attend to what is being said and leave room to discover what we have misunderstood.

Many of us are fixers. We hear the beginning of a problem and immediately recognize the solution. Or we remember something similar that happened to us and begin telling our own story. We may intend to build a bridge, but the effect can be to take the conversation away from the person who was speaking and cut them off from continuing with their thoughts. Even sound advice can arrive before we understand enough to know whether it is the advice that person needs.

Learning to listen involves practical skills. A brief retelling of what we think we have heard, or a short questions/rpompt, or the combination of the two, can invite someone to say more. But people can tell when they are being managed by a technique. Our questions should arise from a real desire to understand. We can ask, “I am so sorry. That must have been awful. What happened?” and then attentively give the person enough room to answer.

When someone is upset and is directing it towards us, we need not take that anger into ourselves. We can remain attentive without preparing for a fight. Their anger may be something we need to respond to, but it need not determine the spirit in which we respond. De-escalating things enough to allow a real conversation requires peace, not confrontation. We can be ready to step aside should things go sideways without getting angry ourselves.

Listening also reminds us how little we know about another person’s life. The only people whose lives seem uncomplicated or easy are the people we do not know very well. We see a reaction; we do not see every grief, disappointment, or fear behind it. We should make room for burdens we cannot see. Everyone is carrying and healing from something.

This does not require us to invent excuses for harmful behavior. It does require humility about our ability to read another person’s heart. We may know what someone said or did. We rarely know everything that brought them to that moment. And we are there to be part of their healing before we are there for judgment, which is best left to God.

Patience and forbearance

With all lowliness and meekness, with longsuffering, forbearing one another in love;
—Ephesians 4:2

Forbearance is patience with connection. We remain with the person through ordinary weakness. We resist the demand that everyone grow at our pace or become easy to live with before we will love them.

Much of this work is wonderfully ordinary. After thirty-six years of marriage, my wife has had many opportunities to practice forbearance with a husband who forgets things. I generally try to clean up after making my coffee, but sometimes I am in a hurry and leave a mess. Every such lapse does not need to become a formal hearing. There is room for, “He must have been in a hurry,” and for quietly taking care of it.

The same charity should work in both directions. When my wife leaves something undone, I can assume that she had a reason and help. We do not need to turn every inconvenience into a discussion about the quality of our marriage.

If something becomes a persistent problem, we need to discuss it and change what we are doing. Forbearance gives a household room to breathe while people continue learning to live together. It allows us to distinguish an ordinary weakness from a pattern that needs attention.

This kind of patience grows as we remember that everyone is going through something. We need not know the details before choosing to be charitable. We can begin by allowing for what we do not know.

When irritation rises, a pause and the Jesus Prayer can help us recover our purpose. The person before us is someone we are called to love. We can address what needs addressing without allowing contempt to govern the encounter.

Bearing one another’s burdens

Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ.
—Galatians 6:2

We then that are strong ought to bear the infirmities of the weak, and not to please ourselves.
—Romans 15:1

Whatever strength we have received becomes something we can place at another person’s service. We might offer a meal, help with a practical task, or introduce someone to a person better equipped to help. Sometimes we can share a burden simply by being willing to remain present.

I think of being in a hospital room with a family preparing for the death of someone they love. There is little use in trying to impress anyone with theological knowledge. Gentle prayer and familiar words can give people something to hold on to. Most people are comforted with The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want (Psalm 22/23:1) and will recite or sing along to it. The same goes for the Our Father.

Much of the work of love and connection in grief is simply being there with them in their grief; the ministry of presence. We cannot remove the loss, but we can help them bear it. We can trust the Holy Spirit to work through an offering that feels inadequate to us.

Some burdens are harder to recognize. We readily understand why someone who is physically frail needs help. Spiritual weakness can be less appealing. It may appear as pride, self-righteousness, or a readiness to take offense. Are these special categories of weakness that exempt us from patience? They, too, call for love. We should resist the temptation to answer another person’s spiritual immaturity with a display of our own.

Bearing a burden also requires us to recognize our limits. We may lack the needed experience, or our history with someone may make every conversation fall into the same painful rut. Sometimes the most useful thing we can do is connect that person with someone else.

Love may also require clear boundaries. Understanding a person’s suffering does not oblige us to remain available for manipulation. Those responsible for a community must consider everyone entrusted to their care. Welcoming someone who struggles does not mean permitting that person to make the community unsafe for others.

We offer what we can, with discernment and prayer. The desire to be indispensable can get in the way of service just as surely as indifference can.

Offering the fruit of the Spirit

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance: against such there is no law.
—Galatians 5:22–23

The fruit of the Spirit gives us a useful way to examine ourselves. As we grow in Christ, the people around us should receive the benefit of that growth. We should be becoming more patient, more faithful, and more capable of kindness when kindness costs us something.

If our religious learning mainly gives us new ways to be smug, impatient, or cruel, something has gone wrong. We may have acquired a vocabulary without allowing the truth expressed in that vocabulary to change us. We should ask whether life with us is becoming more peaceful.

A peaceful response can change what becomes possible in a conversation. We do not have to join every quarrel into which we are invited. A person accustomed to conflict may discover, through repeated encounters, that another way of relating is possible. We cannot guarantee that response, but we can be faithful in what we bring.

Peace must reach deeper than the volume of our voice. A softly spoken question can still be calculated to wound. We know how to provoke people while maintaining an appearance of innocence. “I am only asking a question” can conceal a very deliberate attempt to start a fight.

The ascetic work reaches into that intention, where we must give up the pleasure of pushing a button and watching what happens. We ask the Holy Spirit to heal the desire itself and help us offer something better.

This is why the ordinary practices matter: a kind word, quiet generosity, a gentle response when tension rises. Through such acts, we cooperate with the grace we have received and allow others to share its fruits.

Forgiveness and repentance

And be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you.
—Ephesians 4:32

We will often discover that we have already responded badly. Then the work becomes repentance. We must be willing to examine our contribution to a conflict and ask forgiveness without building a defense into the apology.

“I should not have said that. I am sorry” gives the other person something very different from an explanation of why our behavior was understandable or somehow justifiable.

After an encounter goes sideways and I have time for reflection, I find it useful to do an after-action review. What happened? Where did I stop listening? What could I do better next time? The temptation is to replay the conversation until we come up with the line that would have won it. Repentance asks us to identify what we can change in ourselves so that love can manifest grace the next time.

We cannot control whether the other person does the same. That is the ideal, but it isn’t always available. We can take responsibility for our own conduct without accepting responsibility for someone else’s choices. Even when our contribution was the smaller one, it remains ours to address.

We also need the humility to recognize when a conversation should pause. “I should not have taken it there. Let us stop and come back to this later” can be an act of love. It takes practice to interrupt an old habit, especially when a sharp and sarcastic reply comes so easily. Repeatedly choosing to pause, apologize, and return more calmly helps form a different habit. This is part of what spiritual training looks like in daily life.

Forgiveness does not make everything that happened irrelevant. History can teach us what boundaries are needed. A grudge keeps an offense alive as something to rehearse and nourish; discernment remembers enough to respond wisely.

We can pray for someone and desire their repentance while recognizing that trust has not yet been restored. Reconciliation requires a response from both people, and sometimes the other person is unwilling or unable to offer it. Forgiveness can begin before reconciliation becomes possible. Forgiving someone and refusing to hold a grudge allows us to remain available for future opportunities for healing.

Our task is to stop feeding resentment, remain open to whatever healing God makes possible, and act faithfully within the circumstances we actually face. Sometimes that means renewing a conversation. Sometimes it means stepping back and continuing to pray.

Correcting privately and gently

Moreover if thy brother shall trespass against thee, go and tell him his fault between thee and him alone: if he shall hear thee, thou hast gained thy brother.
—Matthew 18:15

Brethren, if a man be overtaken in a fault, ye which are spiritual, restore such an one in the spirit of meekness; considering thyself, lest thou also be tempted.
—Galatians 6:1

Correction belongs within this same work of love. In the ordinary faults and conflicts of daily life, we should begin privately and gently. We have seen something that concerns us; we should first find out what happened. We can name the action, listen to the explanation, and ask what could be done differently next time.

The purpose is restoration. Our Lord describes the good outcome as having gained our brother. That should guide the manner of our correction. Public humiliation may satisfy our anger, but it makes everything we are actually called to do more difficult.

But correcting someone in private and thus gaining a friend is not enough. We have to guard our tongues. Even a private conversation can be undermined if we later gossip about it. By telling other people what someone is “really like,” we can make it harder for them to love that person and harder for that person to find a way back. We may congratulate ourselves for having addressed the problem while continuing to spread it.

Charity leaves room for repentance. We can speak truthfully about an action without claiming complete knowledge and being charitable about the motives behind it. Even where motives are mixed, we may be able to appeal to a person’s desire to do good. As a pastor, I often want to remind people of the person they want to become rather than shaming for the part of them that is working against that.

And when someone takes me aside to offer corrections, I need the same humility I ask of them. My first responsibility is to hear whatever is true in the correction, take ownership of it, and find a better way forward through genuine repentance. The fact that someone has misunderstood part of the situation does not relieve me of responsibility for the part they have understood correctly.

When both people are willing to do this, a difficult conversation can deepen a relationship. We discover that we can tell the truth, admit our failures, and remain committed to one another. That is a great gift, and it grows through practice. Every conversation is a test to see if a connection can grow into a real friendship or mutual sacrifice, accountability, and love.

Conclusion

The asceticism of relationships gives us work we can begin today. We can listen through the end of a sentence. We can bear an ordinary inconvenience without contempt. We can offer concrete help, apologize for a careless word, or refrain from repeating a story that would diminish someone in another person’s eyes. Each small act asks us to surrender some measure of self-will and entrust ourselves to God.

Bring one relationship to prayer: the person with whom patience fails, the person whose burdens we have overlooked, or the person from whom we need to ask forgiveness. Ask for the grace to see that person more clearly and to serve faithfully in the next encounter. Then practice. This is how the discipline of prayer and fasting enters the life we share with others, and how, through God’s grace, we learn to love.