Daniel G. Opperwall's Blog: Daniel G Opperwall
May 4, 2022
New Novel
Hi everyone. Just a quick announcement that I have released a new novel. Hope you'll give it a read if you have a little time!
The God of the Cucumber Vine
The God of the Cucumber Vine
April 5, 2018
The Theology of Dostoevsky
Originally here:
https://www.dgopperwall.com/single-po...
[The following is a lightly edited version of my final remarks to the students for a course at Trinity College titled The Theology of Dostoevsky.]
Through this course we have treated Dostoevsky as a theologian, doing so in marked defiance of a number of important commentators for whom he is no such thing. The fruits of this approach have been manifold, and I must say I have learned a tremendous amount myself over the course of our inquiry. Dostoevsky is a lot of things, but I trust that we have shown very well that among these things he is indeed a theologian in the fullest sense—a writer who talks about God, who God is, and what that means for human beings.
One of the things that has stood out this term is how very little Dostoevsky challenges or even engages directly the traditional systematic and dogmatic questions of theology. We have seen precious little discourse on the topic of how God can be Three Persons and One God, for instance, or how exactly the nature or natures of Christ interact in the Incarnation, or how exactly God works in history or reveals Himself in scripture and so on.
This, I think, is not at all because Dostoevsky does not care about such questions, but rather because his approach to them is simple—almost reflexive—and bears only a little commentary. A careful engagement of his novels on these questions reveals to us a very typical Russian Orthodox thinker, one for whom the basic theological articulations of the Church are really not in doubt. God is Triune, God has become man so that man might become God, God acts within a world of human free will, and so on—Dostoevsky takes these things for granted, and accepts virtually whole-hog the Orthodox Church’s approach to what they mean. And maybe that is why he has so often been classed as something other than a theologian, or at least a very unimportant theologian indeed.
But I have already hinted that I think this is unfair. What, then, is Dostoevsky’s theological project? It is, I think, to do the very opposite of challenging long held orthodoxies—it is, rather, to push them to their absolutely shocking conclusions, and to leave us, his readers, as dumbfounded as we ought to be about the claims we as Christians are making. Nowhere does he do this better than in his explorations of the Incarnation. It is easy to say that God forgives us sinners, but are we prepared as the Underground Man was not, to accept the violence, the personal upheaval of God’s forgiveness as demonstrated by Liza's forgiveness and the Underground Man's inability to accept it? It is easy to say that God became man, but are we prepared to accept that in a world where Myshkin (in The Idiot) is roughly the best man that we can imagine? It is easy to say that God died and rose again—but are we prepared to face a God who has really died? Can we look at Holbein’s Christ, as we are invited to do in The Idiot, and yet maintain our faith? Can we believe in resurrection after all that? Can we embrace it for ourselves if it makes us into Nastasya or even more pointedly into Rogozhin, who murders out of love in the novel?
Yet more, perhaps, it is easy to say that God suffered for us, but are we prepared to accept what that means about the significance of suffering—that we too must suffer, and really suffer, if we are to be like God and come close to him like Dmitri in The Brothers Karamazov? Are we prepared for the destabilizing of our religious institutions, our canons, our politics to which this must all lead, as the Grand Inquistor is not, and as Alyosha and Zosima attempt to be? Can we accept this overturning without forgetting the message of Ferapont (anything but a pure foil to Zosima) and the importance of what we do as religious people, the reality of demons, the necessity of a true and active struggle? And are we willing to accept a ticket into God’s world even when innocent children must now suffer heinous crimes and be redeemed only by God suffering along with them—or do we stand with Ivan and try to hand “the ticket” back as he expresses it?
Unless a seed perish, it shall yield no fruit--this is the epigraph to The Brothers Karmazov. We agree so easily in thought. Yet we are seldom willing to die.
Simple orthodoxies, Dostoevsky shows us, are anything but simple. We are forgiven by a whore (Liza in Notes from the Underground), murdered for our love (Nastasya in The Idiot), forced to inhabit two spaces at once (all three brothers in The Brothers Karamazov), met face-to-face by the Devil himself (Ivan in The Brothers), convicted of crimes we did not commit but of which we are still guilty, guilty of crimes for which we will never be convicted (Dmitri and Ivan in The Brothers), forced into duels and love triangles, attempted suicide, madness, social disgrace, and constant, endless wrangling in our hearts—forced into this by God’s wild method of saving us. We, like the goose in The Brothers who was killed by Kolya's actions, must stick out our neck and have it run over by the cart of God’s Incarnation and Salvation. But we will not simply be baited by a few bits of bread, for He leaves us free. We must stick out that neck voluntarily. Dostoevsky’s program is built on the shock of realizing the ramifications of meaning what we say when we recite well-worn creeds and uncontroversial theological treatises.
If there is anything close to unique in Dostoevksy’s thinking, it is his ability to connect this shocking traditional orthodoxy to the vision of human community and sobornost that marks the most Slavophile aspects of his writing. He invites us to the personal shock, but then to the communal realization of this shock even more. He invites us to be saved in this seemingly impossible way together. For, to paraphrase Khomiakov who so deeply influenced Dostoevsky, man may fall alone, but he will never be saved all by himself.
This is quite the theology, astonishingly powerful in that it is precisely not unique or innovative.
So, then, let me respond to my own final question for the course: who is God for Dostoevsky?
For Dostoevsky, God is the creator of all things, yet transcendent of them. God is three persons existing in a communion, indeed a community, of love. God has become a man, and truly died to rise again. God is a God who loves human beings, and forgives them. And, most of all, God is a God who has implanted his image at the very heart of human nature, such that to contemplate mankind, or any given person, in fullness is to see precisely God—such that to become a real, true, and complete human being through co-suffering love in communion, whether in a monastery or the world, in America or Russia, in a court-room or jail-house or Siberia—to become truly human together anywhere at all is to become God. And so it is becoming a human being that turns out not to be so easy for us, these little icons of our creator, and every one of Dostoevsky's characters demonstrates some essential aspect of why it is so difficult, and thus when taken all together, give us a nearly complete index of the different reasons for which we all struggle to do so--to be really human; and that includes, Dostoevsky endlessly reminds us, perhaps especially those of us who are actually trying, to say nothing of those who are not.
Yet we venture boldly onward, for we can never escape the image planted within us together. The life-force in the heart of every grain of wheat may well drive us to madness in this world, but it will never vanish. God, for Dostoevsky, is a Love far too radical, shocking, violent, and absolute to leave us without that which makes death the doorway to Life itself.
https://www.dgopperwall.com/single-po...
[The following is a lightly edited version of my final remarks to the students for a course at Trinity College titled The Theology of Dostoevsky.]
Through this course we have treated Dostoevsky as a theologian, doing so in marked defiance of a number of important commentators for whom he is no such thing. The fruits of this approach have been manifold, and I must say I have learned a tremendous amount myself over the course of our inquiry. Dostoevsky is a lot of things, but I trust that we have shown very well that among these things he is indeed a theologian in the fullest sense—a writer who talks about God, who God is, and what that means for human beings.
One of the things that has stood out this term is how very little Dostoevsky challenges or even engages directly the traditional systematic and dogmatic questions of theology. We have seen precious little discourse on the topic of how God can be Three Persons and One God, for instance, or how exactly the nature or natures of Christ interact in the Incarnation, or how exactly God works in history or reveals Himself in scripture and so on.
This, I think, is not at all because Dostoevsky does not care about such questions, but rather because his approach to them is simple—almost reflexive—and bears only a little commentary. A careful engagement of his novels on these questions reveals to us a very typical Russian Orthodox thinker, one for whom the basic theological articulations of the Church are really not in doubt. God is Triune, God has become man so that man might become God, God acts within a world of human free will, and so on—Dostoevsky takes these things for granted, and accepts virtually whole-hog the Orthodox Church’s approach to what they mean. And maybe that is why he has so often been classed as something other than a theologian, or at least a very unimportant theologian indeed.
But I have already hinted that I think this is unfair. What, then, is Dostoevsky’s theological project? It is, I think, to do the very opposite of challenging long held orthodoxies—it is, rather, to push them to their absolutely shocking conclusions, and to leave us, his readers, as dumbfounded as we ought to be about the claims we as Christians are making. Nowhere does he do this better than in his explorations of the Incarnation. It is easy to say that God forgives us sinners, but are we prepared as the Underground Man was not, to accept the violence, the personal upheaval of God’s forgiveness as demonstrated by Liza's forgiveness and the Underground Man's inability to accept it? It is easy to say that God became man, but are we prepared to accept that in a world where Myshkin (in The Idiot) is roughly the best man that we can imagine? It is easy to say that God died and rose again—but are we prepared to face a God who has really died? Can we look at Holbein’s Christ, as we are invited to do in The Idiot, and yet maintain our faith? Can we believe in resurrection after all that? Can we embrace it for ourselves if it makes us into Nastasya or even more pointedly into Rogozhin, who murders out of love in the novel?
Yet more, perhaps, it is easy to say that God suffered for us, but are we prepared to accept what that means about the significance of suffering—that we too must suffer, and really suffer, if we are to be like God and come close to him like Dmitri in The Brothers Karamazov? Are we prepared for the destabilizing of our religious institutions, our canons, our politics to which this must all lead, as the Grand Inquistor is not, and as Alyosha and Zosima attempt to be? Can we accept this overturning without forgetting the message of Ferapont (anything but a pure foil to Zosima) and the importance of what we do as religious people, the reality of demons, the necessity of a true and active struggle? And are we willing to accept a ticket into God’s world even when innocent children must now suffer heinous crimes and be redeemed only by God suffering along with them—or do we stand with Ivan and try to hand “the ticket” back as he expresses it?
Unless a seed perish, it shall yield no fruit--this is the epigraph to The Brothers Karmazov. We agree so easily in thought. Yet we are seldom willing to die.
Simple orthodoxies, Dostoevsky shows us, are anything but simple. We are forgiven by a whore (Liza in Notes from the Underground), murdered for our love (Nastasya in The Idiot), forced to inhabit two spaces at once (all three brothers in The Brothers Karamazov), met face-to-face by the Devil himself (Ivan in The Brothers), convicted of crimes we did not commit but of which we are still guilty, guilty of crimes for which we will never be convicted (Dmitri and Ivan in The Brothers), forced into duels and love triangles, attempted suicide, madness, social disgrace, and constant, endless wrangling in our hearts—forced into this by God’s wild method of saving us. We, like the goose in The Brothers who was killed by Kolya's actions, must stick out our neck and have it run over by the cart of God’s Incarnation and Salvation. But we will not simply be baited by a few bits of bread, for He leaves us free. We must stick out that neck voluntarily. Dostoevsky’s program is built on the shock of realizing the ramifications of meaning what we say when we recite well-worn creeds and uncontroversial theological treatises.
If there is anything close to unique in Dostoevksy’s thinking, it is his ability to connect this shocking traditional orthodoxy to the vision of human community and sobornost that marks the most Slavophile aspects of his writing. He invites us to the personal shock, but then to the communal realization of this shock even more. He invites us to be saved in this seemingly impossible way together. For, to paraphrase Khomiakov who so deeply influenced Dostoevsky, man may fall alone, but he will never be saved all by himself.
This is quite the theology, astonishingly powerful in that it is precisely not unique or innovative.
So, then, let me respond to my own final question for the course: who is God for Dostoevsky?
For Dostoevsky, God is the creator of all things, yet transcendent of them. God is three persons existing in a communion, indeed a community, of love. God has become a man, and truly died to rise again. God is a God who loves human beings, and forgives them. And, most of all, God is a God who has implanted his image at the very heart of human nature, such that to contemplate mankind, or any given person, in fullness is to see precisely God—such that to become a real, true, and complete human being through co-suffering love in communion, whether in a monastery or the world, in America or Russia, in a court-room or jail-house or Siberia—to become truly human together anywhere at all is to become God. And so it is becoming a human being that turns out not to be so easy for us, these little icons of our creator, and every one of Dostoevsky's characters demonstrates some essential aspect of why it is so difficult, and thus when taken all together, give us a nearly complete index of the different reasons for which we all struggle to do so--to be really human; and that includes, Dostoevsky endlessly reminds us, perhaps especially those of us who are actually trying, to say nothing of those who are not.
Yet we venture boldly onward, for we can never escape the image planted within us together. The life-force in the heart of every grain of wheat may well drive us to madness in this world, but it will never vanish. God, for Dostoevsky, is a Love far too radical, shocking, violent, and absolute to leave us without that which makes death the doorway to Life itself.
February 8, 2018
The Forgotten Discipline of Rest
Originally here:
https://www.dgopperwall.com/single-po...
God is a God of action, of work, of doing. In the story of Genesis, God spends the vast majority of the seven days of creation on active labour. One is invited to imagine God creating each and every physical thing in the universe, the immense bodies of sun and moon and stars and the magnificent construction of the firmament, but also every tiny detail, each animal and plant in all their uniqueness, the fish and the animals of the land, and the human beings Adam and Eve. The effort of these tasks is beyond our imagination--so much work is involved that we quite literally cannot comprehend it.
And then, of course, quite famously, God rests for one seventh of the process of creation--one out of seven days. God's days are not earth days, as Tradition has clearly taught from the beginning, but the point remains a crucial one; God is not active all the time. The people of God, from the earliest times, sought to emulate our creator by cordoning off one earth day out of seven as a space of rest, doing no work at all, for in Genesis God bore witness to this essential part of His nature.
Religions of the law are forever disastrous because they codify insights into rules, and in so doing the purity of the insight is lost. As Judaism progressed into the time of the Lord, the principle of the Sabbath had become a principle of pure law, so woodenly observed that even good and blessed things could no longer be done on that day, and so its beauty was lost to many. The Lord makes this point clearly Himself by healing on the Sabbath, and then arguing with the Pharisees who have become so focused on the law that they cannot even allow for such perfect expressions of God's love to be performed on a Saturday. Such an attitude toward the Law makes a nonsense of its intention, as the Lord so clearly teaches. The Sabbath is a day for the beauty of rest, and thus it is a day for all true beauty; Pharsaical law deformed this realization and had to be corrected.
Yet, I do not think it was ever the Lord's intent that we should lose the discipline of rest completely. As He Himself says, not a jot or tittle ought to be taken from the word of the Law. His meaning, I think, is that not one single core spiritual insight of the Law is overturned in His coming. We are thus meant to continue to make rest an essential part of our lives, and one of our most significant religious disciplines.
In my many years of being Orthodox, I have only very rarely heard anyone discuss rest as a part of spiritual life. There is much business, indeed much work, in our Christian lives, and there should be. We, as creatures made in God's image, are made to be active the vast majority of the time--six sevenths of our waking hours on the calculation of Genesis. As religious creatures, this means that most of our spiritual disciplines are indeed active. We pray, for one thing, typically in active ways that involve set prayer rules and the like. We fast, actively denying ourselves certain foods. We attend services, highly active affairs, and create the liturgy--literally meaning the “work” of the people. We prepare for feasts, cooking delicious foods, decorating, and then enjoying the celebration. This is as it should be--the thrust of religious life is active.
Our less explicitly religious activities are also mostly active in nature. We work, raise families, clean houses, and so forth, all to the glory of God. When we have some down time, we read, write some e-mails, talk with one another, maybe watch some TV (not that I recommend it). We stay active, even if less so. Once again, we should expect this--we are not meant to be idle creatures very often.
And yet, in all the shuffle, and in the Lord's relieving us of the letter of the Law, we seem to have forgotten entirely about rest--real rest--as a spiritual discipline. By rest here I mean spending conscious time, while awake, to do absolutely nothing at all except focus on rest. I mean sitting down and kicking up our feet, then, rather than opening a good book (including scripture) or even praying quietly, simply setting our minds on the process of being and becoming idle and simple in the act of rest. Thoughts must be silenced, for thinking is not rest. Plans must not be made, we must fight the urge to meditate on what we are going to do next, after rest is done. Idle fidgeting, simple activity, all of it must be stopped, though a cup of tea might be fair enough if it does not draw us to think about the tea itself. We must try to avoid thinking about how long we plan to rest; setting a timer and then forgetting about it might be helpful if we are truly on a schedule. Silence, mental stillness, bodily stillness--these are the markers of true rest.
A few months ago, I decided to start trying to do less on Saturday. For many of us, Saturday is our only day to get certain things done around the house, to visit friends, to have family activities. Those are good things, and as we are not Pharisees, we are not banned from doing them on the Sabbath. Yet, there is something disordered about spending the entire Sabbath day on these enterprises. Given how rare it is to have real rest on any other day of the week, including Sunday in which church likely takes up a large chunk of our time, wasting an entire Saturday on constant activity tends to leave us with no time at all for real rest during the week.
When I decided to set aside a little time on Saturdays to do nothing at all, I noticed a palpable change within myself. At the start, the experience was very difficult. So accustomed had I become to constant activity, that even five minutes of sitting quietly filled me with an agonizing sense of acedia--the desire to get up and do something, anything at all. I felt that I should be working, reading, playing with the kids, napping (if nothing else!), or at the very least praying. Activity, and perhaps sleep, was all I had come to know, and the patterns of my mind demanded it. “No moment can be just wasted like this!” something inside me screamed, “there is so much to get done!”
Yet, the discipline of rest is precisely to refuse such thoughts, to turn them aside, to reject them. I forced myself to talk back to these thoughts. “No,” I began to say, “there are times for those things. What is required of me in this moment, as a faithful servant of Jesus Christ, is to do nothing--absolutely nothing at all, and to turn my conscious mind to the fact that this is my current discipline; in this, I act in the likeness of the God who did precisely the same on the seventh day.” No nap, no prayer, no books--rest and rest alone, consciously recognized, is what we are called to make a part of our lives.
I am still not very good at resting on Saturdays. They are as busy for my family as for any other, and that will not fundamentally change. Indeed, I am writing this very essay on a Saturday after a few moments of true rest, moments in which my mind began demanding that I write down my thoughts to share them. I sit here, typing away and ruining my own Sabbath just a little--hopefully for the greater good of sharing it with others. I will need, however, to set down this keyboard in a few moments and return to my rest. Acedia is a difficult demon to conquer.
Yet, in introducing some amount of rest--however small--into my spiritual discipline, the results have been astonishing. Peace and emotional regulation become vastly easier. Humility flows as one realizes that no matter how hard we work, there is always something more we could do, and that by resting we bear witness to the fact that the world keeps turning without us all on its own. Patience bubbles forward; a rested father with a clear head can spend his time with his children so much more richly, and embrace his wife with forgiveness and tenderness far more easily. The cloying thoughts that say “you could pray more, you could worship more, you could do more at the parish,” must be silenced, and thus spiritual vainglory is given a kick and told to shut up, for in this space I do not even pray; once again, the world turns even without my prayers for these moments (though it will certainly need them later). This rest, the harshest and most difficult of my spiritual disciplines, is also the most nourishing and refreshing. Man is a creature mostly of activity, but, like God, he is utterly incomplete without genuine rest.
Perhaps you are precluded from using Saturdays for this purpose. Perhaps you have to work at your job or studies each weekend, or some other good reason gets in the way. In the evening you will hopefully go off to vespers and thus your religious work of Sunday will begin. Perhaps there is little time before this to rest. If so, then you must find another time and place each week to truly rest--a regular time demarcated for the purpose at the same intervals each week. That is well, the Sabbath invites a reminder to rest, but the point is the rest itself not the day of the week. Yet, whenever you do it, rest you must--and truly rest you must. To sit, to do nothing, to be. Without this, we are not complete servants of the Lord; without this, we reject a critical piece of the image within us of the God who does not forget to rest.
https://www.dgopperwall.com/single-po...
God is a God of action, of work, of doing. In the story of Genesis, God spends the vast majority of the seven days of creation on active labour. One is invited to imagine God creating each and every physical thing in the universe, the immense bodies of sun and moon and stars and the magnificent construction of the firmament, but also every tiny detail, each animal and plant in all their uniqueness, the fish and the animals of the land, and the human beings Adam and Eve. The effort of these tasks is beyond our imagination--so much work is involved that we quite literally cannot comprehend it.
And then, of course, quite famously, God rests for one seventh of the process of creation--one out of seven days. God's days are not earth days, as Tradition has clearly taught from the beginning, but the point remains a crucial one; God is not active all the time. The people of God, from the earliest times, sought to emulate our creator by cordoning off one earth day out of seven as a space of rest, doing no work at all, for in Genesis God bore witness to this essential part of His nature.
Religions of the law are forever disastrous because they codify insights into rules, and in so doing the purity of the insight is lost. As Judaism progressed into the time of the Lord, the principle of the Sabbath had become a principle of pure law, so woodenly observed that even good and blessed things could no longer be done on that day, and so its beauty was lost to many. The Lord makes this point clearly Himself by healing on the Sabbath, and then arguing with the Pharisees who have become so focused on the law that they cannot even allow for such perfect expressions of God's love to be performed on a Saturday. Such an attitude toward the Law makes a nonsense of its intention, as the Lord so clearly teaches. The Sabbath is a day for the beauty of rest, and thus it is a day for all true beauty; Pharsaical law deformed this realization and had to be corrected.
Yet, I do not think it was ever the Lord's intent that we should lose the discipline of rest completely. As He Himself says, not a jot or tittle ought to be taken from the word of the Law. His meaning, I think, is that not one single core spiritual insight of the Law is overturned in His coming. We are thus meant to continue to make rest an essential part of our lives, and one of our most significant religious disciplines.
In my many years of being Orthodox, I have only very rarely heard anyone discuss rest as a part of spiritual life. There is much business, indeed much work, in our Christian lives, and there should be. We, as creatures made in God's image, are made to be active the vast majority of the time--six sevenths of our waking hours on the calculation of Genesis. As religious creatures, this means that most of our spiritual disciplines are indeed active. We pray, for one thing, typically in active ways that involve set prayer rules and the like. We fast, actively denying ourselves certain foods. We attend services, highly active affairs, and create the liturgy--literally meaning the “work” of the people. We prepare for feasts, cooking delicious foods, decorating, and then enjoying the celebration. This is as it should be--the thrust of religious life is active.
Our less explicitly religious activities are also mostly active in nature. We work, raise families, clean houses, and so forth, all to the glory of God. When we have some down time, we read, write some e-mails, talk with one another, maybe watch some TV (not that I recommend it). We stay active, even if less so. Once again, we should expect this--we are not meant to be idle creatures very often.
And yet, in all the shuffle, and in the Lord's relieving us of the letter of the Law, we seem to have forgotten entirely about rest--real rest--as a spiritual discipline. By rest here I mean spending conscious time, while awake, to do absolutely nothing at all except focus on rest. I mean sitting down and kicking up our feet, then, rather than opening a good book (including scripture) or even praying quietly, simply setting our minds on the process of being and becoming idle and simple in the act of rest. Thoughts must be silenced, for thinking is not rest. Plans must not be made, we must fight the urge to meditate on what we are going to do next, after rest is done. Idle fidgeting, simple activity, all of it must be stopped, though a cup of tea might be fair enough if it does not draw us to think about the tea itself. We must try to avoid thinking about how long we plan to rest; setting a timer and then forgetting about it might be helpful if we are truly on a schedule. Silence, mental stillness, bodily stillness--these are the markers of true rest.
A few months ago, I decided to start trying to do less on Saturday. For many of us, Saturday is our only day to get certain things done around the house, to visit friends, to have family activities. Those are good things, and as we are not Pharisees, we are not banned from doing them on the Sabbath. Yet, there is something disordered about spending the entire Sabbath day on these enterprises. Given how rare it is to have real rest on any other day of the week, including Sunday in which church likely takes up a large chunk of our time, wasting an entire Saturday on constant activity tends to leave us with no time at all for real rest during the week.
When I decided to set aside a little time on Saturdays to do nothing at all, I noticed a palpable change within myself. At the start, the experience was very difficult. So accustomed had I become to constant activity, that even five minutes of sitting quietly filled me with an agonizing sense of acedia--the desire to get up and do something, anything at all. I felt that I should be working, reading, playing with the kids, napping (if nothing else!), or at the very least praying. Activity, and perhaps sleep, was all I had come to know, and the patterns of my mind demanded it. “No moment can be just wasted like this!” something inside me screamed, “there is so much to get done!”
Yet, the discipline of rest is precisely to refuse such thoughts, to turn them aside, to reject them. I forced myself to talk back to these thoughts. “No,” I began to say, “there are times for those things. What is required of me in this moment, as a faithful servant of Jesus Christ, is to do nothing--absolutely nothing at all, and to turn my conscious mind to the fact that this is my current discipline; in this, I act in the likeness of the God who did precisely the same on the seventh day.” No nap, no prayer, no books--rest and rest alone, consciously recognized, is what we are called to make a part of our lives.
I am still not very good at resting on Saturdays. They are as busy for my family as for any other, and that will not fundamentally change. Indeed, I am writing this very essay on a Saturday after a few moments of true rest, moments in which my mind began demanding that I write down my thoughts to share them. I sit here, typing away and ruining my own Sabbath just a little--hopefully for the greater good of sharing it with others. I will need, however, to set down this keyboard in a few moments and return to my rest. Acedia is a difficult demon to conquer.
Yet, in introducing some amount of rest--however small--into my spiritual discipline, the results have been astonishing. Peace and emotional regulation become vastly easier. Humility flows as one realizes that no matter how hard we work, there is always something more we could do, and that by resting we bear witness to the fact that the world keeps turning without us all on its own. Patience bubbles forward; a rested father with a clear head can spend his time with his children so much more richly, and embrace his wife with forgiveness and tenderness far more easily. The cloying thoughts that say “you could pray more, you could worship more, you could do more at the parish,” must be silenced, and thus spiritual vainglory is given a kick and told to shut up, for in this space I do not even pray; once again, the world turns even without my prayers for these moments (though it will certainly need them later). This rest, the harshest and most difficult of my spiritual disciplines, is also the most nourishing and refreshing. Man is a creature mostly of activity, but, like God, he is utterly incomplete without genuine rest.
Perhaps you are precluded from using Saturdays for this purpose. Perhaps you have to work at your job or studies each weekend, or some other good reason gets in the way. In the evening you will hopefully go off to vespers and thus your religious work of Sunday will begin. Perhaps there is little time before this to rest. If so, then you must find another time and place each week to truly rest--a regular time demarcated for the purpose at the same intervals each week. That is well, the Sabbath invites a reminder to rest, but the point is the rest itself not the day of the week. Yet, whenever you do it, rest you must--and truly rest you must. To sit, to do nothing, to be. Without this, we are not complete servants of the Lord; without this, we reject a critical piece of the image within us of the God who does not forget to rest.
January 5, 2018
Thabor
Originally at:
https://www.dgopperwall.com/single-po...
Fr Luke lifted the hat brim from his eyes. He did not sit up right away, but shifted slightly until the hammock swayed under him. The gentle rocking, the perfect acceptance of his weight--these were worth enjoying for a moment. He lifted his wrist and looked at his watch. He had napped just a little too long. He had one hour until the meeting. With three minutes to wash up and put on his cassock and shoes, and a seventeen minute drive to the parish, that made forty minutes to plant. A little less than he had banked--still enough. He twisted himself and sat up, dropping his bare feet into the warm grass and shifting the hat back onto his head.
Fr Luke took a stride toward the shed, then stopped, trying to shake off a sense of melancholy. In the height of spring, in the perfect weather, such a feeling did not belong. The shortness of the time--this slice of real existence--wanted to draw him to disdain the moment, as if it were not gift enough for being there at all; the shortness of time said that he should remember instead the upcoming shouting match, two hospital visits to follow, the evening's vespers done hastily, confessions, three kisses goodnight for three little girls, one for a wife, a moment to sleep, the morning liturgy, a ladies' luncheon, the rest rolling on forever. He looked at the garden, the begonias and the tomatoes spread out along the walkway, waiting to be planted. He took a breath. “Not my will, Your will,” he said.
His ears pricked suddenly--the car in the driveway, a sinking feeling; they were home early. The girls' laughter would follow, yes, but the quiet--he had wanted just a little bit of that quiet and sun. He shouldn't think that way--there was nothing for it. “Not my will, Your will,” he said again. But, then--no, the car backed up. It wasn't them. He sighed in relief, then felt a pang of guilt at the feeling.
Fr Luke leaned over and picked up the spade sitting next to the shed, along with his gloves. He counted the plants again--three dozen. He looked back across the lawn at the flower patch and the vegetable patch--visualized where everything would go. He picked up the tray of begonias first.
He stopped halfway across the lawn as if seized. He turned his face up into the air. The odour of it had taken him up for a moment--he breathed it in--coal smoke. Someone was lighting charcoal. He smiled to himself--it was always the charcoal, not the incense, that brought him back--back to memories of hallowed places; the Holy Mountain this time--many years ago.
He shook his head at himself and let recollection rise--the crooked bench near the cliff, and a grey-bearded monk speaking with a twenty-three year old man. Luke was, then, two years Orthodox, all zeal and energy--evangelism--the Church holy in his eyes and constituted (so he thought) only of still prayer and piety and peace and rigid adherence. He was asking the old monk for advice; he was explaining his desire to become a priest. He was asking....
Fr Luke clucked his tongue. The thought of the impending council meeting had suddenly cropped up, trying to crowd out the old memory. “Always looking for a way in,” he said quietly to himself. He cleared his mind, held it steady in tension. “Not my will, Your will.” He continued to the flower patch, set down the tray of begonias, and let his toes caress the loose black dirt. Then he knelt down, put on his gloves, and began to dig.
His lips started to move without thought--the prayer trained and automatic. His mind was here, on the warm soil, on the spade cutting into the earth, on the heat of the sun on his back, his hat slipping forward. Then, like a cascade, he noticed it--noticed the motion of his lips--and began to focus. The prayer was now in the mind--the wrong place--with memory soon to follow, and dread soon to follow that. He could see it coming, but he had nothing for it. Try to hold the prayer, get it back into the heart--try to slip back away from his awareness of it. It wasn't going to work. The faces of the council members were already in front of him.
What would the old monk have said? Nothing. He would have shrugged, just like he had shrugged on that bench those years ago while the waves crashed over near them. “Fine,” he had said. “It is good to be a priest.” How Luke's heart had leaped up to hear that--to have everything confirmed! How his thoughts raced, as they always did then, pondering the thousand sermons already being written in his mind. “It is good to be a priest,” the old monk repeated. “If everything is prayer, then everything is given to God.”
Fr Luke had stopped looking at his hands as they dug--an easy mistake--the memory vanished. He was thinking now about what he was going to say in thirty minutes--about the money. It was a waste, what the council wanted. The entry steps to the parish were only a few years old--in no need of repair. But the donation had been made for only one purpose: new steps, needed or not. It was practically spite, the money; and everyone's hands were tied. Fr Luke shook his head to himself.
He drew his mind back to his work. He was on the tenth begonia already. His hands were doing the digging as if of their own accord. “If everything is prayer,” he said to himself, “then everything is given to God.” He heard it in the monk's voice as well as his own. He tried to believe it either way. Ten begonias, given to God. The sunshine on his back given to God. And then the bickering and the giving up and the walking away? “Given to God,” he laughed softly. He shook his head.
Fr Luke paused and wiped the sweat from his brow. He looked up into the clear sky, the depth of the blue-white light perfect and still. He let his eyes strain as if looking for its limit--but the blue-white poured backward, as always--the light never quite to be grasped. He tried to take a deep breath--tried to chase the adrenaline out of his veins. One funeral, one gift, one meeting, and here was his stomach turning upside-down. He tried to focus on only this, only the sun, only his hands, only the smell of the charcoal and the green of the grass--the blue-white sky, that light--above all that light.... He looked back down at the begonias, remembered:
“Serve quietly,” the old monk had said, though frowning as ever. “Pray. Do what your bishop tells you. Hear confessions. It is good to be a priest.”
Of course. Pray as if there was any time for it. Hear confessions as if there was anyone there to give them. Obey the bishop as if he had anything to say. And then (unmentioned), be left to die of exposure, wind-whipped by what must arise amid parish councils, every service lost to hurried repetition--the mind poured out on the scowling people standing just inside the narthex, only a fragment of real light managing its way under the dome.
Fr Luke was planting the first of the tomatoes, it seemed. He could not remember walking back over to the shed to get them, and now he was back on the soil. He took a deep breath, and let a shiver run across him. He wiped the sweat from his forehead, felt the light of the sun on his palm. His right fist, holding up his weight off the ground, was bound tight. He could feel that he was angry--his heart began to beat quickly. If his mind couldn't clear, where could he send it? To the old monk, to the bench? No--there was no comfort there. Then, another shiver across his spine, a deep breath, the hand beginning to relax. “If everything is prayer,” he tried to say again, “then everything is given to God.”
But then he paused, turned his head sideways. He clenched his fist again. “But if nothing is prayer,” he now retorted, his lips nearly speaking aloud, “then nothing is given to anyone.”
“It is good,” the old monk answered. “You will have more time with holy things.”
“And less time for the garden, and the sun, and the light of the sky,” Fr Luke shot back, his voice breaking aloud into the yard.
There was silence. Fr Luke listened for an answer. There was silence. “If everything is prayer,” Fr Luke snipped finally, more softly, “then why not just plant a garden?”
He might have asked that on the bench--on the Mountain--but he did not know then how to plant. He did not know how to bask, and to be. He knew how to do, and say, and speak, and teach--the least of all things, nothing more.
Fr Luke shook his head once more and patted down the soil around the last tomato.
“Why not just plant a garden...” he repeated slowly to himself.
“What's the difference?” It was the monk's voice suddenly--as clear as if he were standing there, the tones curled by his accent, teasing and real. Father Luke looked up and saw him, the monk's sullen Greek face now a bright smile, blooming with light. The monk had never smiled like that on the Mountain--all was sternness then.
Fr Luke stared for a moment too bewildered to be amazed, then nodded. “Right,” he said finally in response. “Not my will, His will.”
“Even if you make a mistake!” smiled the old monk, an unruly stream of sunshine pouring out from a cloud behind him.
Fr Luke let his head drop, then sat up on his knees, and checked his watch. Five more minutes. Five more minutes not to move--to, instead, be here. The memory was gone completely--there was no monk, just tomatoes and begonias, freshly planted, in need now of some water. He looked around at the light-soaked spring, at the blue-white sky. He felt his heart beat as his mind went clear.
https://www.dgopperwall.com/single-po...
Fr Luke lifted the hat brim from his eyes. He did not sit up right away, but shifted slightly until the hammock swayed under him. The gentle rocking, the perfect acceptance of his weight--these were worth enjoying for a moment. He lifted his wrist and looked at his watch. He had napped just a little too long. He had one hour until the meeting. With three minutes to wash up and put on his cassock and shoes, and a seventeen minute drive to the parish, that made forty minutes to plant. A little less than he had banked--still enough. He twisted himself and sat up, dropping his bare feet into the warm grass and shifting the hat back onto his head.
Fr Luke took a stride toward the shed, then stopped, trying to shake off a sense of melancholy. In the height of spring, in the perfect weather, such a feeling did not belong. The shortness of the time--this slice of real existence--wanted to draw him to disdain the moment, as if it were not gift enough for being there at all; the shortness of time said that he should remember instead the upcoming shouting match, two hospital visits to follow, the evening's vespers done hastily, confessions, three kisses goodnight for three little girls, one for a wife, a moment to sleep, the morning liturgy, a ladies' luncheon, the rest rolling on forever. He looked at the garden, the begonias and the tomatoes spread out along the walkway, waiting to be planted. He took a breath. “Not my will, Your will,” he said.
His ears pricked suddenly--the car in the driveway, a sinking feeling; they were home early. The girls' laughter would follow, yes, but the quiet--he had wanted just a little bit of that quiet and sun. He shouldn't think that way--there was nothing for it. “Not my will, Your will,” he said again. But, then--no, the car backed up. It wasn't them. He sighed in relief, then felt a pang of guilt at the feeling.
Fr Luke leaned over and picked up the spade sitting next to the shed, along with his gloves. He counted the plants again--three dozen. He looked back across the lawn at the flower patch and the vegetable patch--visualized where everything would go. He picked up the tray of begonias first.
He stopped halfway across the lawn as if seized. He turned his face up into the air. The odour of it had taken him up for a moment--he breathed it in--coal smoke. Someone was lighting charcoal. He smiled to himself--it was always the charcoal, not the incense, that brought him back--back to memories of hallowed places; the Holy Mountain this time--many years ago.
He shook his head at himself and let recollection rise--the crooked bench near the cliff, and a grey-bearded monk speaking with a twenty-three year old man. Luke was, then, two years Orthodox, all zeal and energy--evangelism--the Church holy in his eyes and constituted (so he thought) only of still prayer and piety and peace and rigid adherence. He was asking the old monk for advice; he was explaining his desire to become a priest. He was asking....
Fr Luke clucked his tongue. The thought of the impending council meeting had suddenly cropped up, trying to crowd out the old memory. “Always looking for a way in,” he said quietly to himself. He cleared his mind, held it steady in tension. “Not my will, Your will.” He continued to the flower patch, set down the tray of begonias, and let his toes caress the loose black dirt. Then he knelt down, put on his gloves, and began to dig.
His lips started to move without thought--the prayer trained and automatic. His mind was here, on the warm soil, on the spade cutting into the earth, on the heat of the sun on his back, his hat slipping forward. Then, like a cascade, he noticed it--noticed the motion of his lips--and began to focus. The prayer was now in the mind--the wrong place--with memory soon to follow, and dread soon to follow that. He could see it coming, but he had nothing for it. Try to hold the prayer, get it back into the heart--try to slip back away from his awareness of it. It wasn't going to work. The faces of the council members were already in front of him.
What would the old monk have said? Nothing. He would have shrugged, just like he had shrugged on that bench those years ago while the waves crashed over near them. “Fine,” he had said. “It is good to be a priest.” How Luke's heart had leaped up to hear that--to have everything confirmed! How his thoughts raced, as they always did then, pondering the thousand sermons already being written in his mind. “It is good to be a priest,” the old monk repeated. “If everything is prayer, then everything is given to God.”
Fr Luke had stopped looking at his hands as they dug--an easy mistake--the memory vanished. He was thinking now about what he was going to say in thirty minutes--about the money. It was a waste, what the council wanted. The entry steps to the parish were only a few years old--in no need of repair. But the donation had been made for only one purpose: new steps, needed or not. It was practically spite, the money; and everyone's hands were tied. Fr Luke shook his head to himself.
He drew his mind back to his work. He was on the tenth begonia already. His hands were doing the digging as if of their own accord. “If everything is prayer,” he said to himself, “then everything is given to God.” He heard it in the monk's voice as well as his own. He tried to believe it either way. Ten begonias, given to God. The sunshine on his back given to God. And then the bickering and the giving up and the walking away? “Given to God,” he laughed softly. He shook his head.
Fr Luke paused and wiped the sweat from his brow. He looked up into the clear sky, the depth of the blue-white light perfect and still. He let his eyes strain as if looking for its limit--but the blue-white poured backward, as always--the light never quite to be grasped. He tried to take a deep breath--tried to chase the adrenaline out of his veins. One funeral, one gift, one meeting, and here was his stomach turning upside-down. He tried to focus on only this, only the sun, only his hands, only the smell of the charcoal and the green of the grass--the blue-white sky, that light--above all that light.... He looked back down at the begonias, remembered:
“Serve quietly,” the old monk had said, though frowning as ever. “Pray. Do what your bishop tells you. Hear confessions. It is good to be a priest.”
Of course. Pray as if there was any time for it. Hear confessions as if there was anyone there to give them. Obey the bishop as if he had anything to say. And then (unmentioned), be left to die of exposure, wind-whipped by what must arise amid parish councils, every service lost to hurried repetition--the mind poured out on the scowling people standing just inside the narthex, only a fragment of real light managing its way under the dome.
Fr Luke was planting the first of the tomatoes, it seemed. He could not remember walking back over to the shed to get them, and now he was back on the soil. He took a deep breath, and let a shiver run across him. He wiped the sweat from his forehead, felt the light of the sun on his palm. His right fist, holding up his weight off the ground, was bound tight. He could feel that he was angry--his heart began to beat quickly. If his mind couldn't clear, where could he send it? To the old monk, to the bench? No--there was no comfort there. Then, another shiver across his spine, a deep breath, the hand beginning to relax. “If everything is prayer,” he tried to say again, “then everything is given to God.”
But then he paused, turned his head sideways. He clenched his fist again. “But if nothing is prayer,” he now retorted, his lips nearly speaking aloud, “then nothing is given to anyone.”
“It is good,” the old monk answered. “You will have more time with holy things.”
“And less time for the garden, and the sun, and the light of the sky,” Fr Luke shot back, his voice breaking aloud into the yard.
There was silence. Fr Luke listened for an answer. There was silence. “If everything is prayer,” Fr Luke snipped finally, more softly, “then why not just plant a garden?”
He might have asked that on the bench--on the Mountain--but he did not know then how to plant. He did not know how to bask, and to be. He knew how to do, and say, and speak, and teach--the least of all things, nothing more.
Fr Luke shook his head once more and patted down the soil around the last tomato.
“Why not just plant a garden...” he repeated slowly to himself.
“What's the difference?” It was the monk's voice suddenly--as clear as if he were standing there, the tones curled by his accent, teasing and real. Father Luke looked up and saw him, the monk's sullen Greek face now a bright smile, blooming with light. The monk had never smiled like that on the Mountain--all was sternness then.
Fr Luke stared for a moment too bewildered to be amazed, then nodded. “Right,” he said finally in response. “Not my will, His will.”
“Even if you make a mistake!” smiled the old monk, an unruly stream of sunshine pouring out from a cloud behind him.
Fr Luke let his head drop, then sat up on his knees, and checked his watch. Five more minutes. Five more minutes not to move--to, instead, be here. The memory was gone completely--there was no monk, just tomatoes and begonias, freshly planted, in need now of some water. He looked around at the light-soaked spring, at the blue-white sky. He felt his heart beat as his mind went clear.
December 2, 2017
Fall Swallow
Originally at:
https://www.dgopperwall.com/single-po...
The swallow had circled the horizon twice already, and not said a word. I stood, just wondering why it would bother to make such an arc, and to begin yet another, without sound. How could it stand that kind of silence, living to see everything, lake and field, the sun beginning to die for the evening, simply to leave it all within--to let it all die at the end of a short life, the memory gone with the little brain in which it was housed? A man could dream wild to see such things, to make a five thousand mile migration, with food and love and home awaiting, home so full and bright as to be on both sides of the journey. A man would write a volume after living such a thing, wouldn't he? Not so with a swallow, home in spring, home in fall, alpha and omega his ever-present sum.
A man's mind is so often full, minute to minute, of words and pronouncements. We live in a dialectical state; our sense of reality is shaped in response to something, or more often someone, whether through rebellion or submission. We are ever seeking to be a particular way, or to meet another particular expectation, all of it framed by others around us, their approval and their scorn, spurring and driving us from this place to the next, this state to the next. As decade rolls into decade we turn around to realize that we have been spending our entire migration (life, that is to say) merely proving a point to someone, real or imagined, to ourselves, real or imagined. The alpha of our lives is seldom Christ, and thus neither will the omega be Him.
And thus some audience is ever on the mind of a writer. To capture is to hold, and upon holding to try and give to those with whom we are ever in conversation. Another person's reception of the intended gift becomes the writer's validation, and rejection his spur to improve. It is not just the writer, either. A man without a pen will instead take endless photographs, share them endlessly. The result, however, is the same--a material scene, a swallow photographed and thus held (or so goes the attempt), given to posterity, the observer (the writer, the photographer) somehow taking the credit for having been the one to observe.
In a poem many years ago I wrote what may still be my best lines. In the piece, I imagined a group of birds sitting on a wire and speaking to me. They were dissatisfied with my attempts to write about them, accused me of being a fool for writing at all, and at the closing of the poem, in their superior tone, they shared this thought with me:
“We do not write the wind / we are it.”
So it goes with swallows, those fluttering and fleeting things filled with the purest and realest apophaticism--being the wind and thus letting it ripple over them never to be held or understood, but in so doing becoming the only creatures to know it as they do. Would that in prayer I could steal away such a moment of being, and so silence whatever audience is within. Yet here I sit, putting letters to a page, my migration once again not a journey from home to home--from Christ, alpha, to Christ, omega--but a halting progression from one goal to the next, some audience ever to be addressed, peace of soul touched just long enough for me to crush it between a keyboard and these fingers that should instead be wings.
https://www.dgopperwall.com/single-po...
The swallow had circled the horizon twice already, and not said a word. I stood, just wondering why it would bother to make such an arc, and to begin yet another, without sound. How could it stand that kind of silence, living to see everything, lake and field, the sun beginning to die for the evening, simply to leave it all within--to let it all die at the end of a short life, the memory gone with the little brain in which it was housed? A man could dream wild to see such things, to make a five thousand mile migration, with food and love and home awaiting, home so full and bright as to be on both sides of the journey. A man would write a volume after living such a thing, wouldn't he? Not so with a swallow, home in spring, home in fall, alpha and omega his ever-present sum.
A man's mind is so often full, minute to minute, of words and pronouncements. We live in a dialectical state; our sense of reality is shaped in response to something, or more often someone, whether through rebellion or submission. We are ever seeking to be a particular way, or to meet another particular expectation, all of it framed by others around us, their approval and their scorn, spurring and driving us from this place to the next, this state to the next. As decade rolls into decade we turn around to realize that we have been spending our entire migration (life, that is to say) merely proving a point to someone, real or imagined, to ourselves, real or imagined. The alpha of our lives is seldom Christ, and thus neither will the omega be Him.
And thus some audience is ever on the mind of a writer. To capture is to hold, and upon holding to try and give to those with whom we are ever in conversation. Another person's reception of the intended gift becomes the writer's validation, and rejection his spur to improve. It is not just the writer, either. A man without a pen will instead take endless photographs, share them endlessly. The result, however, is the same--a material scene, a swallow photographed and thus held (or so goes the attempt), given to posterity, the observer (the writer, the photographer) somehow taking the credit for having been the one to observe.
In a poem many years ago I wrote what may still be my best lines. In the piece, I imagined a group of birds sitting on a wire and speaking to me. They were dissatisfied with my attempts to write about them, accused me of being a fool for writing at all, and at the closing of the poem, in their superior tone, they shared this thought with me:
“We do not write the wind / we are it.”
So it goes with swallows, those fluttering and fleeting things filled with the purest and realest apophaticism--being the wind and thus letting it ripple over them never to be held or understood, but in so doing becoming the only creatures to know it as they do. Would that in prayer I could steal away such a moment of being, and so silence whatever audience is within. Yet here I sit, putting letters to a page, my migration once again not a journey from home to home--from Christ, alpha, to Christ, omega--but a halting progression from one goal to the next, some audience ever to be addressed, peace of soul touched just long enough for me to crush it between a keyboard and these fingers that should instead be wings.
October 3, 2017
Grief: Love
Originally at:
https://www.dgopperwall.com/single-po...
Love is often festal. A baby is born to tears of joy, grows, laughs as she is tossed into the air by her father, perhaps marries and feasts at her marriage, cherishes her friends and family, welcomes children of her own. Love as feast looms large in our culture--something celebrated in so much of our art.
Yet, in the world as it really is, there is an ascetic side to love as well--something full of anguish and distance, something that requires endurance. We find ourselves at a distance from a beloved, pining for their presence; such distance may be physical, or just as often emotional or spiritual. Or it may be, most notably, the distance of death. We lose someone too soon and the grief wells and overflows.
It has been just about a year since my brother and only sibling died suddenly and without warning. The grief comes and goes, as one might expect. For many with whom I speak, grief is a problem--something to work through or overcome. And in many ways this is true. One cannot lie on the couch in shock forever. Eventually life must move forward. Yet, in other respects, I have come to see grief not as something to get past, but as something to accept and in a certain way embrace.
Grief, I think, is not so much an experience or emotion of its own, but rather it is the very experience of love itself under certain conditions. Grief is the ascetic side of love--that side that does not feast, but rather waits and suffers and fasts.
We live in a world from which we will all depart sooner or later. Everyone we know will either leave us for good, or we will leave them. There are no exceptions. And that means that if we get into the business of loving people--really loving people--then we will, by definition, also find ourselves in the business of grief eventually. Grief is what love feels like when the beloved is far distant. It begins at the small pin-prick feeling we have when a friend moves away, and grows commensurate with the scope of our love, and the distance of the beloved. This is why death is not the only cause of our grief, but yet it is the greatest--for in death, the greatest distance that we can know is realized. This is why those we love most are the hardest to lose--our love, being greater in our hearts, becomes a greater grief.
As Christians we know that there are no feasts without an accompanying fast, and the greater the feast, the greater too the fast. Ultimately, there is no Pascha without Lent, and Lent is the greatest of fasts precisely because Pascha is the greatest of feasts. There can be no celebration without ascesis because human experience in this world contains no such thing. There is no victory without accompanying defeat, no health without illness, no happiness without sorrow, no festal love without grieving love. In this life, all joy is dyadic with an accompanying pain by its very definition.
So long as I continue to love anyone--including my departed brother--I will have grief, for in this life not all those I love will forever be with me. Grief--love at a distance, love made ascetic--is part of what love is, and so it is a part of what I am. Love, for me, cannot ever again be seen in feasting alone. From here on, while the feasts will also come, there will be an ever-present fasting of grief in my heart. It will grow, in fact, for I will lose others over the years (unless they lose me first). And this fasting, this grief, while it is not happy, not joyful, not festal, is nonetheless beautiful. For to fast, to endure, to suffer for the love of someone is the very essence of beauty. And this is what grief is--its very nature--grief is to suffer for continuing to love someone, having dared to open one's heart in a world in which everyone is a sojourner, and thus from which everyone will depart.
I do not know for certain when I will die, but the odds are that I have several decades left to go. For all those decades, I will fast the fast of grief much of the time. This can seem like a terribly long Lent indeed.
And yet...and yet. Some twenty centuries ago a Galilean mystic proclaimed to the world that this Lent--the Lent of death, and the grief that joins it--while it may be long, will have an end--that the end of the story of the world is not with the fast--not with ascesis alone--but with the Feast, the Feast beyond which there is no compare, the Feast that finally will last eternally without another fast to come. There will be, he claimed, a final resurrection into a Kingdom eternal. And to prove it, He rose from a tomb.
His claims, His rising, are hard to believe and impossible to prove. And yet, without this promise, without the promise that our fasting is all for something--that it is leading us into the feast of the Kingdom--without this promise, both the ascetic love of grief and the festal love that gives birth to it are meaningless. We are lost in grief if we forget that under other conditions that very grief--that very same point of contact with the beloved--becomes and is our festal love itself, the beauty, the joy, the delight. And we are, in turn, lost in hopelessness if we cannot believe that that delight is where the story will really end--not with the fast, as necessary as that may be, but with the Feast, not with grieving love, but with festal love.
To end our grief, we would need to cease to love--a life of utter nihilism. Then, too, to decide that grief is the final experience of love, we would need to give up hope--a life of pure despair. To choose both to continue loving, and also to claim (perhaps wildly) that the feast of love will one day come again--this is to be a follower of the Lord. And this, if nothing else, puts grief into its place, and lets it be what it already is--nothing other than love itself--and so lets it be endured with patience, embraced with humility, even cherished as a fragment of something profoundly beautiful, all in anticipation of the coming day in which the final Feast will be celebrated and we shall be grateful for this long and beautiful fast.
Bring on the Lenten decades, then, Lord. Give me the strength to fast the fast of grief for so long a time. And give me to know that as great a fast as it shall be--that fast of grieving love--so the feast shall be a thousandfold, and eternal in You.
https://www.dgopperwall.com/single-po...
Love is often festal. A baby is born to tears of joy, grows, laughs as she is tossed into the air by her father, perhaps marries and feasts at her marriage, cherishes her friends and family, welcomes children of her own. Love as feast looms large in our culture--something celebrated in so much of our art.
Yet, in the world as it really is, there is an ascetic side to love as well--something full of anguish and distance, something that requires endurance. We find ourselves at a distance from a beloved, pining for their presence; such distance may be physical, or just as often emotional or spiritual. Or it may be, most notably, the distance of death. We lose someone too soon and the grief wells and overflows.
It has been just about a year since my brother and only sibling died suddenly and without warning. The grief comes and goes, as one might expect. For many with whom I speak, grief is a problem--something to work through or overcome. And in many ways this is true. One cannot lie on the couch in shock forever. Eventually life must move forward. Yet, in other respects, I have come to see grief not as something to get past, but as something to accept and in a certain way embrace.
Grief, I think, is not so much an experience or emotion of its own, but rather it is the very experience of love itself under certain conditions. Grief is the ascetic side of love--that side that does not feast, but rather waits and suffers and fasts.
We live in a world from which we will all depart sooner or later. Everyone we know will either leave us for good, or we will leave them. There are no exceptions. And that means that if we get into the business of loving people--really loving people--then we will, by definition, also find ourselves in the business of grief eventually. Grief is what love feels like when the beloved is far distant. It begins at the small pin-prick feeling we have when a friend moves away, and grows commensurate with the scope of our love, and the distance of the beloved. This is why death is not the only cause of our grief, but yet it is the greatest--for in death, the greatest distance that we can know is realized. This is why those we love most are the hardest to lose--our love, being greater in our hearts, becomes a greater grief.
As Christians we know that there are no feasts without an accompanying fast, and the greater the feast, the greater too the fast. Ultimately, there is no Pascha without Lent, and Lent is the greatest of fasts precisely because Pascha is the greatest of feasts. There can be no celebration without ascesis because human experience in this world contains no such thing. There is no victory without accompanying defeat, no health without illness, no happiness without sorrow, no festal love without grieving love. In this life, all joy is dyadic with an accompanying pain by its very definition.
So long as I continue to love anyone--including my departed brother--I will have grief, for in this life not all those I love will forever be with me. Grief--love at a distance, love made ascetic--is part of what love is, and so it is a part of what I am. Love, for me, cannot ever again be seen in feasting alone. From here on, while the feasts will also come, there will be an ever-present fasting of grief in my heart. It will grow, in fact, for I will lose others over the years (unless they lose me first). And this fasting, this grief, while it is not happy, not joyful, not festal, is nonetheless beautiful. For to fast, to endure, to suffer for the love of someone is the very essence of beauty. And this is what grief is--its very nature--grief is to suffer for continuing to love someone, having dared to open one's heart in a world in which everyone is a sojourner, and thus from which everyone will depart.
I do not know for certain when I will die, but the odds are that I have several decades left to go. For all those decades, I will fast the fast of grief much of the time. This can seem like a terribly long Lent indeed.
And yet...and yet. Some twenty centuries ago a Galilean mystic proclaimed to the world that this Lent--the Lent of death, and the grief that joins it--while it may be long, will have an end--that the end of the story of the world is not with the fast--not with ascesis alone--but with the Feast, the Feast beyond which there is no compare, the Feast that finally will last eternally without another fast to come. There will be, he claimed, a final resurrection into a Kingdom eternal. And to prove it, He rose from a tomb.
His claims, His rising, are hard to believe and impossible to prove. And yet, without this promise, without the promise that our fasting is all for something--that it is leading us into the feast of the Kingdom--without this promise, both the ascetic love of grief and the festal love that gives birth to it are meaningless. We are lost in grief if we forget that under other conditions that very grief--that very same point of contact with the beloved--becomes and is our festal love itself, the beauty, the joy, the delight. And we are, in turn, lost in hopelessness if we cannot believe that that delight is where the story will really end--not with the fast, as necessary as that may be, but with the Feast, not with grieving love, but with festal love.
To end our grief, we would need to cease to love--a life of utter nihilism. Then, too, to decide that grief is the final experience of love, we would need to give up hope--a life of pure despair. To choose both to continue loving, and also to claim (perhaps wildly) that the feast of love will one day come again--this is to be a follower of the Lord. And this, if nothing else, puts grief into its place, and lets it be what it already is--nothing other than love itself--and so lets it be endured with patience, embraced with humility, even cherished as a fragment of something profoundly beautiful, all in anticipation of the coming day in which the final Feast will be celebrated and we shall be grateful for this long and beautiful fast.
Bring on the Lenten decades, then, Lord. Give me the strength to fast the fast of grief for so long a time. And give me to know that as great a fast as it shall be--that fast of grieving love--so the feast shall be a thousandfold, and eternal in You.
August 11, 2017
Contemplation (and a Rose)
Originally here:
https://www.dgopperwall.com/single-po...
It was through the back alley that I was walking, that alley that is lined with overhanging trees and wild growth that smells (in morning dew) of okra and cut grasses and rot. It is cliche to say that it was a rose, but it was a rose--a pink one on a bush that was meant to be kept (and indeed was mostly kept) on the far side of a wooden fence, but which had dangled a little arm of itself through one of the cracks in its search for the light, finding enough to bother blooming; the pink on the bloom was an outgrowth of a deeper white, and the flower was small--as with any real rose more in touch with its wild self--and very fragrant. I let the smoke from my pipe waft up a moment and simply looked at it. Shall I say again what a cliche it was? The creator deals in cliches, I suppose. It really was a rose that, for the first time, my eyes met in something approaching sincere contemplation.
We talk very little about this now--contemplation. I was never taught about it--to say nothing about being taught it--and then we are products of what our minds are fed more than we would wish to admit. In a sense, it eludes definition--contemplation does--because the act of contemplating necessitates the collapse of words and mental rubrics, the abandonment of description and narration, and no truly wordless moment can ever be described except in regards to what it lacks. Yet, to describe it is something that great thinkers have sought to do more than once, and I have learned from them--had been learning something from them before standing in front of the rose. Joseph Pieper, somewhere in Leisure: the Basis of Culture, observes that when faced with a thing such as a rose, a human being makes a choice between attempting to measure and describe the thing--thus imposing a kind of human order and comprehension--and simply contemplating it, which is to let it be what it is--to let it face the viewer and be itself without the mind trying to bend or capture it in any way.
Contemplation is in this: in letting things be--in letting them speak on terms wholly undefined by the viewer. It is to an encounter (with object or person) what listening is to a symphony, or what listening is to the symphony of good conversation, or what listening is to the symphony of good silence. It is passive but never anaesthetized, quiet but never really silent, soft but backed by the essential and most concrete foundation of the human self. Contemplation is a cool drink when one is thirsty but not parched, the water both lush and rich and yet beautifully tasteless. It is to sit back and let the world dance its dance, or perform its part, with no hope of remembering it later, of reporting back to those waiting at home who have not seen--there is no impulse, in contemplation, to capture either for the purpose of preservation or of sharing. It is, therefore, an unmercenary act, a kind of defeated moment, white-flagged, yet in the certain knowledge that mercy will be shown--is being shown--to the vanquished and therefore utterly peaceful soul.
This, at least, is contemplation in the face of another created thing--person or animal or object (like a rose). In the face of the Lord it is much the same, though its results as described in the great mystical tradition of Christianity from the desert fathers to the hesychasts is all the more profound. For to sit before God and let Him be as He will be is to encounter Him with a force far past description. It is enough to stop the heart when we stand in front of a flower without script or expectation, and to let what it is really enter the deep part of the soul. To stand before that flower's creator in the same pose would destroy most of us--we may approach it, perhaps, as Moses seeing the back parts of God, but He is too merciful to let us make the mistake of complete openness before we are prepared. Still, in the tastes of it--of the little draughts that we may take into ourselves in this life--it is no surprise to see the magnificent and powerful results so often reported by sainted mystics; the creator, ten dimensions or more beyond us, has found His creature with its guard down, so rises the beautiful fear of the Lord, so comes the Light.
For the moment, though, I was thinking not of God the creator, but of the thing that He had made--the rose in front of me in the humid morning alley. I am a man of my culture, to be sure--trained to measure, think about natural history and scientific evaluation. I am also a writer, primed to consider the verses or lines I might write in description of this little rose (here are some!). I am also a married man and a father, eager to take home slices of beauty to my family in words or pictures or by simply picking the flower itself. But for the moment I was standing there with none of that in my mind. And there, out as though from the rose itself, flowed a kind of oxygenated peace, stripped of anxieties and hurry--a simple peace that could not and cannot be held onto (that being its very point, really), nor described, nor photographed (as we are so terribly wont to do in our present age), nor dried and preserved and kept. There, joy for the taking, but only for a moment--presence and reality, firmness and nearness and truth, but only if we are willing to let them slide away. There, Christ, but only if He is willing to die. There, I stand something like the the bewildered women at the tomb, but only if I am willing to watch Him do so first.
And, by Grace, for just a few seconds...did?
Rare the moments, common the rose--how seldom do we accept anything on terms other than our own. This loss was much of what darkened Eve in eating of the fruit too soon. Ah, but the new Eve....
The moment was over, though, by then. The rose was a countable thing once more, described as pink and white, described as small, memorable, something to build a short essay upon. And so it was as it had been a few second before--nothing (to me) but a little decoration to the alley on which I live and walk; it ceased to be an object of real and brilliant creation; it was now uncontemplated again. I lifted my pipe to my lips and continued on my way.
https://www.dgopperwall.com/single-po...
It was through the back alley that I was walking, that alley that is lined with overhanging trees and wild growth that smells (in morning dew) of okra and cut grasses and rot. It is cliche to say that it was a rose, but it was a rose--a pink one on a bush that was meant to be kept (and indeed was mostly kept) on the far side of a wooden fence, but which had dangled a little arm of itself through one of the cracks in its search for the light, finding enough to bother blooming; the pink on the bloom was an outgrowth of a deeper white, and the flower was small--as with any real rose more in touch with its wild self--and very fragrant. I let the smoke from my pipe waft up a moment and simply looked at it. Shall I say again what a cliche it was? The creator deals in cliches, I suppose. It really was a rose that, for the first time, my eyes met in something approaching sincere contemplation.
We talk very little about this now--contemplation. I was never taught about it--to say nothing about being taught it--and then we are products of what our minds are fed more than we would wish to admit. In a sense, it eludes definition--contemplation does--because the act of contemplating necessitates the collapse of words and mental rubrics, the abandonment of description and narration, and no truly wordless moment can ever be described except in regards to what it lacks. Yet, to describe it is something that great thinkers have sought to do more than once, and I have learned from them--had been learning something from them before standing in front of the rose. Joseph Pieper, somewhere in Leisure: the Basis of Culture, observes that when faced with a thing such as a rose, a human being makes a choice between attempting to measure and describe the thing--thus imposing a kind of human order and comprehension--and simply contemplating it, which is to let it be what it is--to let it face the viewer and be itself without the mind trying to bend or capture it in any way.
Contemplation is in this: in letting things be--in letting them speak on terms wholly undefined by the viewer. It is to an encounter (with object or person) what listening is to a symphony, or what listening is to the symphony of good conversation, or what listening is to the symphony of good silence. It is passive but never anaesthetized, quiet but never really silent, soft but backed by the essential and most concrete foundation of the human self. Contemplation is a cool drink when one is thirsty but not parched, the water both lush and rich and yet beautifully tasteless. It is to sit back and let the world dance its dance, or perform its part, with no hope of remembering it later, of reporting back to those waiting at home who have not seen--there is no impulse, in contemplation, to capture either for the purpose of preservation or of sharing. It is, therefore, an unmercenary act, a kind of defeated moment, white-flagged, yet in the certain knowledge that mercy will be shown--is being shown--to the vanquished and therefore utterly peaceful soul.
This, at least, is contemplation in the face of another created thing--person or animal or object (like a rose). In the face of the Lord it is much the same, though its results as described in the great mystical tradition of Christianity from the desert fathers to the hesychasts is all the more profound. For to sit before God and let Him be as He will be is to encounter Him with a force far past description. It is enough to stop the heart when we stand in front of a flower without script or expectation, and to let what it is really enter the deep part of the soul. To stand before that flower's creator in the same pose would destroy most of us--we may approach it, perhaps, as Moses seeing the back parts of God, but He is too merciful to let us make the mistake of complete openness before we are prepared. Still, in the tastes of it--of the little draughts that we may take into ourselves in this life--it is no surprise to see the magnificent and powerful results so often reported by sainted mystics; the creator, ten dimensions or more beyond us, has found His creature with its guard down, so rises the beautiful fear of the Lord, so comes the Light.
For the moment, though, I was thinking not of God the creator, but of the thing that He had made--the rose in front of me in the humid morning alley. I am a man of my culture, to be sure--trained to measure, think about natural history and scientific evaluation. I am also a writer, primed to consider the verses or lines I might write in description of this little rose (here are some!). I am also a married man and a father, eager to take home slices of beauty to my family in words or pictures or by simply picking the flower itself. But for the moment I was standing there with none of that in my mind. And there, out as though from the rose itself, flowed a kind of oxygenated peace, stripped of anxieties and hurry--a simple peace that could not and cannot be held onto (that being its very point, really), nor described, nor photographed (as we are so terribly wont to do in our present age), nor dried and preserved and kept. There, joy for the taking, but only for a moment--presence and reality, firmness and nearness and truth, but only if we are willing to let them slide away. There, Christ, but only if He is willing to die. There, I stand something like the the bewildered women at the tomb, but only if I am willing to watch Him do so first.
And, by Grace, for just a few seconds...did?
Rare the moments, common the rose--how seldom do we accept anything on terms other than our own. This loss was much of what darkened Eve in eating of the fruit too soon. Ah, but the new Eve....
The moment was over, though, by then. The rose was a countable thing once more, described as pink and white, described as small, memorable, something to build a short essay upon. And so it was as it had been a few second before--nothing (to me) but a little decoration to the alley on which I live and walk; it ceased to be an object of real and brilliant creation; it was now uncontemplated again. I lifted my pipe to my lips and continued on my way.
We Pray Resources
Daniel's recent children's book We Pray is perfect for building a Sunday-school or home-school lesson on prayer. Here you'll find some resources to help you design a lesson and provide some hands-on activities for children using We Pray.
Find the resources posted here:
https://www.dgopperwall.com/single-po...
Find the resources posted here:
https://www.dgopperwall.com/single-po...
Daniel G Opperwall
Original posts available at:
www.dgopperwall.com
This is a slow blog. Polished work and resources updated once a month (not more). ...more
www.dgopperwall.com
This is a slow blog. Polished work and resources updated once a month (not more). ...more
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