Confession and Spiritual Direction

I want address two very important and immensely practical things: how to avoid sin and how to overcome sin. But first, we need to put sin in its correct context in the scheme of salvation. You’ve heard it many times before, but it bears repeating that we can do nothing to earn our salvation. No matter how good we are, we can never be good enough to merit heaven. If we approach the vital question of salvation and try to answer it with a list of good deeds, we are going to be in trouble. This is one of the favorite themes of St. Paul: righteousness can never be wrested from deeds alone, otherwise there would have been no need for the Incarnation, Life, Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension of our Lord. The whole point of the law, as St. Paul reminds us in the Epistle to the Romans, was to show that no one could keep it, not so that men would despair of their salvation, but so that men would recognize their need for the Savior.

Heaven is not our reward for good behavior; heaven is not our reward for anything. Heaven is the result of our joining ourselves, through faith, with the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. And yet it is not true that our actions or inactions have no relation at all to our spiritual state. Grace comes first: “And this I say, that the covenant, that was confirmed before of God in Christ, the law, which was four hundred and thirty years after, cannot disannul, that it should make the promise of none effect” (Gal. 3:17). The promise comes before the law; grace also comes during our actions, and after them. Grace is God’s uncreated energy working for our salvation, and grace comes first and last, and our works are merely our cooperation with grace. We can’t provide ourselves with grace, we can’t earn it; but we can turn away from it, close up the channels of grace by sin, and ultimately alienate ourselves from grace and from God who is the Source of grace.

It follows that we need to pay attention to our spiritual lives. The Christian life is not a flight on autopilot, but a pilgrimage on foot, one we have to undertake anew with each step, and one with many obstacles, many distractions, and many false turnings. We can’t simply assume we’re progressing as we ought to. We need to learn to identify sin in our lives, to avoid it, and to overcome it. Two great helps in this regard are confession and spiritual direction, but surprisingly, these are things we don’t talk about much.

Let’s look first at the question of sacramental confession. The proper name for this is the Sacrament of Penance, though it’s commonly called simply “confession”. As in all his priestly acts, the priest does not act in the Sacrament of Penance in his own right, but in the place of Christ and through his authority. The penitent making his confession is speaking to the priest, but his words are addressed to God. And the priest does not forgive the penitent his sins, but pronounces God’s absolution on behalf of Christ. God forgives the sins of the penitent; the priest’s words, “I absolve thee” constitute the vehicle for the grace of the sacrament, and they are spoken on God’s behalf. As such, the Sacrament of Penance is extremely comforting, and it removes any doubt as to our spiritual state, for the sacrament remits all sins and restores us to the state of grace we enjoyed at the moment of our baptism. It also gives us grace to overcome sin and to grow in the life of Christ. Sacramental confession, though, is not the only way we can receive forgiveness of sins. Baptized persons can be forgiven even the most serious sins by making an act of true contrition and repentance, and when we do this, we’re forgiven even without using the Sacrament of Penance. We need to be clear about this, but more on this later.

Now, the Anglican Catholic Church is a bit different from, say, the Roman Catholic Church when it comes to these matters. Regarding the Sacrament of Penance, Canon 989 of the Roman Code of Canon law puts it this way: “After having attained the age of discretion, each of the faithful is bound by an obligation faithfully to confess serious sins at least once a year”. The ACC canons contain no such requirement. Of course, there’s no rite for sacramental confession in the Prayer Book, but this is because the Prayer Book is a book of “common” or public prayer, and Penance is a private rite. Still, the supposed silence of the Prayer Book and the lack of external compulsion give many of the faithful the idea that confession isn’t important.

I say the “supposed” silence of the Prayer Book, because the writers of the Prayer Book simply assume that priests will be available for the Sacrament of Penance when necessary. The second of the Exhortations directs any who cannot quiet his conscience by means of private self-examination to see a priest and to “open his grief; that he may receive such godly counsel and advice, as may tend to the quieting of his conscience, and the removing of all scruple and doubtfulness” (p.88). Moreover, the Order for Visitation of the Sick directs that the “sick person be moved to make a special confession of his sins” (p.313). And most importantly, the Prayer Book rite for ordaining priests requires the bishop to lay hands upon the candidate, and using the words that Christ said to the Apostles, to say, “Receive the Holy Ghost for the Office and Work of a Priest in the Church of God, now committed unto thee by the imposition of our hands. Whose sins thou dost forgive, they are forgiven; and whose sins thou dost retain, they are retained” (p.546). So while the Prayer Book has no rite for the Sacrament of Penance, it simply assumes that the Sacrament is available, and that the people will have recourse to it. Our Canons assume the same, and Canon 12.5 of the ACC sets forth the requirements for those priests who hear confessions, but there is no minimum requirement regarding the number and frequency of confession as there is in the Roman canons.

The difference between our scheme and the Roman Catholic one is that the onus in our Church is laid upon the individual to make his confession, rather than upon the hierarchy to enforce confession. I said earlier that an act of perfect contrition and repentance will do the same thing as sacramental confession. I think many people rely upon this fact to minimize the role of confession. Many people also make the mistake of seeing the General Confession in the Mass as a substitute for the Sacrament of Penance, but the teaching of the Church is that this is not the case. From a technical theological standpoint, the General Confession alone, said with faith and repentance, will remit less serious sins (also called “venial sins”), but it does not remit serious sins (sometimes called “mortal sins”), unless it is accompanied by true contrition. I don’t want to address here the differences between the Roman teaching, on the one hand, and the Orthodox on the other regarding the difference between serious and less serious sin. There are Anglican Catholics who lean toward either emphasis, and many who probably don’t think about the question at all. The point I want to make is that the General Confession is a supplement to, and not a substitute for, sacramental confession, though many neglect the latter because of the former.

Two considerations follow, however. First, if the General Confession can be relied upon to remit less serious sins, how are we to be sure which of our sins are less serious and which are more serious? Sin is sin, certainly, but Scripture and the clear teaching of the Church hold that some sins are, from a practical standpoint, more damaging to us than others. Some sins are so serious that they endanger the very spiritual life upon which we rely for our salvation, and these sins are not always apparent to us if we are not engaging in systematic self-examination. We tend to think the most serious sins are the more spectacular ones, but in fact, the most serious sins are the most insidious and invisible ones: pride and envy, for example. The more visible sins, like murder or adultery or theft, are all preceded and made possible by an interior disposition which grew, in all likelihood, mostly unheeded by the person who later committed the acts. All sins, great and small, grow out of an interior turning-away from God. How are we to weigh and discern the spiritual virulence of our many sins?

The second consideration is that if even serious sin can be forgiven by making an act of perfect contrition and repentance, how can we be sure if we have made such an act? When much is at stake, it’s always best not to rely upon our own understanding. We are never the best judges of our own spiritual states and interior dispositions; St. Paul tells us that we tend either to be too hard or too easy on ourselves. This is where spiritual direction comes into play. A spiritual director can tell us when we need sacramental confession, and can help us evaluate the state of our spiritual life. I spoke about the Sacrament of Penance first because most folks making their confession will receive, not only absolution, but advice and counsel. Spiritual direction is part and parcel of the relationship between confessor and penitent. Yet spiritual direction can be had apart from sacramental confession, and anyone who is serious about growing spiritually will want to give serious consideration to finding a spiritual director. Unlike a confessor, who must be a priest, a spiritual director can be any baptized person who has some spiritual discernment and understanding. Some of the greatest spiritual directors have been women, such as St. Theresa of Avila or Evelyn Underhill. Spiritual direction and confession are related, however, because it would be a very rare instance in which spiritual direction did not lead to a recommendation for more frequent confession.

I must be honest and admit that it is not easy in our Church to make one’s confession. Many of our parishes don’t have resident clergy who can hear confessions, and not all priests in our Church are licensed to hear confessions. Still, inconvenience isn’t the same as impossibility; for instance, the Bishop visits all parishes in the diocese at least once a year, and he, of course, can hear confessions. And many of our clergy are able to hear confessions, as well. I’m not here to tell you that you need to make your confession any particular number of times per year, because the Church doesn’t lay that responsibility upon you; I am, however, more and more convinced that it is very hard to make progress in the spiritual life without the benefit of spiritual direction and confession. Spiritual direction in particular is not so hard to come by: as I said earlier, your spiritual director doesn’t have to be a clergyman, and communication can be in person, by phone, by letter, or by email. Having a spiritual director is something available to everyone, and something which will immediately pay off in terms of spiritual progress.

Spiritual direction and confession are important for finding your way, charting your course, and avoiding pitfalls and detours. The spiritual life is not something to be neglected. Anyone with money to invest would be thought a fool if he merely left his investments untended; first of all, he has to choose carefully where to invest, and then he has to keep any eye on what he’s done. And we’re all aware of the need to check with our doctors on a regular basis and to get some idea of the state of our health. We don’t just do this so the doctor can buy a new BMW: there are diseases which can creep up on us without any outward signs, and there are conditions which can get out of hand without proper oversight and care. It is no different with our souls. If we put this much care into what will not last forever, why shouldn’t we put at least as much care into what will last forever? When was the last time you sat down and made a full and frank evaluation of the state of your spiritual life? Do you know where you are on the road, or are you just wandering? Are you keeping an eye on incipient dangers, and looking out for the less-than-obvious pitfalls? Are you on guard against the great dangers of spiritual illusion and self-delusion? Spiritual direction and confession, taken together or separately, are your great safeguards.

The lawyer in St. Luke’s Gospel knew the right answer to how to have eternal life: “...love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbor as thyself” (Lk 10:27), but as the rest of his conversation showed, and the rest of the New Testament makes clear, this is not something we can do on our own. “This do, and thou shalt live”, Christ said, and I think he must have been smiling, because he was setting the lawyer an impossible task, impossible at least without the aid of Christ, but the lawyer didn’t see his need. He was, we are told, “willing to justify himself”, which is something none of us can do. We must have grace, and spiritual direction and confession are two keys to ensuring that we are always open to the operations of grace, and that we are doing nothing to hinder its work in us. We are not of course interested in spiritual progress for its own sake, but because the goal of our progress is loving union with the Holy Trinity. Each step on the journey brings us more and more fully into loving communion with God himself; each mis-step robs us, to a greater or lesser degree, of that communion. “This do, and thou shalt live.” We can be comforted and cheered by the knowledge that God earnestly desires our salvation, earnestly desires to know us, that He makes possible for us what would be impossible without Him and that He has provided us with the means to grow in that loving knowledge of Him which, both now and in the life of the world to come, is the fulness of heaven.

Halloween & All Saints

“Grant, O Lord, we pray thee : that thy faithful people may evermore rejoice in the veneration of all thy Saints; and be defended by their perpetual intercession.” (Postcommunion Collect for All Saints)

My favorite Feasts of the Church year are the autumnal feasts. I love Michaelmas, at the end of September, St. Francis, in early October, Christ the King at the end of October, and All Saints at the beginning of November.

There’s a lot of popular misunderstanding about All Saints, and about the related celebration of Halloween. Halloween is nothing more than the observation of the eve of All Saints. If you look in the lectionary at the beginning of the Prayer Book, you’ll notice that there are special lessons and psalms appointed for Morning and Evening Prayer on the various named Feasts that fall throughout the year. And you’ll also notice that on the day before any such Feast, the readings for Evening Prayer relate to the theme of the following day’s Feast. So, for example, if you look at the table in the lectionary which gives the readings for the Fixed Holy Days (that is, the Holy Days that fall on the same date every year), and look on November 1st, you’ll find the readings for Morning and Evening Prayer for All Saints Day. And just above this, you’ll find the readings for the night of October 31st, which are described as the “eve” of All Saints. This holds true not only for the Daily Office, but also for Masses. Many of the greatest feasts are celebrated by special masses, not only on the day of the feast itself, but also on the evening prior, in which case the mass is called a “vigil”.

The reason the major feasts overflow, as it were, onto the previous evening is that, liturgically speaking, a day begins at sundown the day before. In our Christian context, the greatest and most noticeable of these liturgical “eves” is Holy Saturday. When the Great Easter Vigil is celebrated, the First Mass of Easter takes place, not on Sunday morning, but on Saturday night. It is the same with All Saints, which used to be commonly called “All Hallows”. “Hallows” is an archaic term for “Saint” – to “hallow” something is to make it holy, and the Saints are those who have been made holy by God. And the vigil mass of All Hallows took place the night before, on All Hallows Eve, which was commonly shortened to Hallow E’en. “Halloween”, then, is nothing more than a contraction of “All Hallows Eve”.

That this seems utterly unknown to many people can be the source of some amusement. Evangelical churches, for example, are often at pains to replace what they see as a pagan celebration with something more Christian, and I saw a church sign last year which read, “Instead of Halloween, come to our ‘Holy-ween’ celebration”. They’d simply replaced one word for “Holy” with another, and the result was sort of comical. The change, which was meant to be significant, was merely redundant, and it didn’t sound very good, either.

So what about the charge that Halloween is really a pagan celebration? Obviously, as I’ve just been at pains to demonstrate, Halloween, as the eve of All Saints day, is a Christian celebration. Without the Feast of All Hallows or All Saints on November 1st, there would be no All Hallows Eve or Halloween on October 31st. Actually, until the 9th Century, All Saints was celebrated in May, but was moved to November 1st by Pope Gregory IV in 837. We can only speculate as to Gregory’s reasons for this move, but as it happened, the new feast-date coincided exactly with Celtic autumnal celebrations. It seemed natural to the ancient peoples of northern Europe that the end of the year came at the end of the harvest-season, after the autumnal equinox when the days begin to be shorter than the nights, and so the Celtic New Year came on or near what is now the beginning of November. This is roughly halfway between the autumnal equinox at the end of September, when day and night are of equal lengths in the northern hemisphere, and the winter solstice at the end of December, when darkness lasts its longest and daylight is at its briefest. This natural wisdom was taken up by the Church, which begins the liturgical year with the season of Advent at just about this same moment, when darkness begins to be dominant in the natural world, for this is a natural analogy to the darkness and shadow of death in which the world lay as it waited for the coming of the Savior.

And it was also natural that, at the end of the year, as the leaves fell and much of the green and growing world seemed to die or sleep, men should turn their thoughts to the friends and loved ones who had died during the preceding year. In many Celtic cultures, the days surrounding the beginning of November were thought to be days in which the veil, as it were, between the living and the dead, between the visible and invisible worlds, was at its most transparent and permeable. It was believed by our pagan ancestors that the dead could move about the land of the living during this season of growing darkness, and a good deal of mystery was attached to the darkening of the world as autumn drew on past its glorious prime and took on more of the shadings of winter.

Whether the deliberate adoption and exploitation of these natural themes was the motive behind the transference of the feast of All Saints to November 1st, we can’t know, but it certainly makes sense. Grace, it is often said, does not destroy nature, but perfects it; and the same can certainly be said of the overlay of Christian feasts on top of, as it were, older pagan festivals with similar themes. If pagan man, searching for truths amongst the raw data of creation, tentatively reached conclusions that seemed to foreshadow Christian truth, this can certainly be attributed to the work of the Holy Ghost preparing the pagan world for the fullness of truth to come in the Church. C.S. Lewis called these foreshadowings “pagan good dreams” and argued that, since all truth comes from God, the truths arrived at by pre-Christian men of good will were inspired by God; men so inspired would be more prepared to recognize in Christianity the hallmarks of familiar truth. St. Paul makes a similar argument to the philosophers of Athens in Acts chapter 17.

So in the feast of All Saints (and its related feast of All Souls, which falls on November 2nd), the Church ties together the incomplete threads of pagan reasoning concerning the dying of things and concerning the souls of the departed and gives us the fuller picture, the clarified reality at which the pagan world guessed and toward which it grasped. For All Saints teaches us that the veil between the living and the dead is, in the Church, very thin indeed. And while we do not believe that the dead come back to wander the earth, we do believe that the dead in Christ continue to have an active role in the affairs of the living. Membership in the Church is not like membership in a human organization; membership in the Church comes from the creation at baptism of a new and indelible nature within us. Faithful members of the Church, therefore, do not cease to be part of the Church just because they have died.

The Lesson for the Epistle for Halloween, in fact, is from Revelation chapter 5, and shows us the twenty-four elders, who symbolize the Patriarchs and Apostles, presenting before the throne of God the prayers of Christians on earth. And the Lesson for the Epistle for All Saints is from Revelation chapter 7, in which we are told that the Saints in heaven do not cease from serving God night and day. Taking these two readings together, we can see that the teaching of Halloween and All Saints is that part of the service of the Saints is intercessory prayer on behalf of the Church on earth. The veil between the worlds is thin indeed; thinner than we are ever aware.

Our part in this relationship with the Saints in heaven is, as shown by the Postcommunion Collect for All Saints which I have taken as my text, to offer “veneration” to the Saints. The veneration of the Saints is something very often misunderstood by those outside of the Church. The word “veneration” is used to translate the Greek word δουλια, by which is meant a special kind of honor. Veneration is carefully distinguished from that worship and adoration which is due to God only, and which is designated by the Greek word λατρεια. The Seventh Ecumenical Council decreed that Christians should give worship and adoration designated by the word λατρεια only to God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, but that the Saints and their icons should be accorded δουλια, or honor.

The veneration of the Saints takes nothing away from the worship due to God, for it is precisely because of what God has done in their lives that we give honor to the Saints, and insofar as we honor their holiness and openness to God, we give honor to God who did the work in their lives. It can accurately be said that the veneration of the Saints is the honoring of God in their lives, or honoring God through them. The veneration of the Saints is merely an acknowledgment that God made of their lives a miracle, and an acknowledgment that where they have gone we are meant to go, and an acknowledgment that they continue to assist and support us as we walk the paths that they have trod.

I often tell friends who ask if we “worship” Saints or pray to Saints that we all ask our friends to pray for us, and the greater the reputation for holiness a person has, the greater our desire to have that person pray for us. The Saints have no further sins or other hindrances to their prayers, and so it is perfectly natural for us to ask them to pray for us, which is what we do. You’ll notice if you pay attention that during the Mass we never pray to a particular Saint; we ask for the prayers of the Saint on our behalf, just as at the offertory we ask one another for prayers for those on our Parish prayer list.

Our pre-Christian forebears had it right: there is a wistful quality about autumn that makes us mindful of the passing of things, and that reminds us that there are relationships which are stronger and more enduring than death. The good news of the feast of All Saints is that, in the Church, we are given hope by the example of the Saints who, beset by the same sins and infirmities as we are, were made righteous by God and now enjoy Him forever. The good news of the feast of All Saints is that, even when the daylight wanes and darkness seems to gather, we are bound as brothers and sisters to those who live where no shadow comes, and they aid us by their prayers and wait in joyful expectation for the fullness of time in which we all, by the mercy of God, may come where nothing passes, nothing wanes, and all is made whole in Heaven’s high summer.

“Grant, O Lord, we pray thee : that thy faithful people may evermore rejoice in the veneration of all thy Saints; and be defended by their perpetual intercession.”

Liturgy and Mortification: Metaphysical Therapy

Individualism creates a sort of false self, an ego-centric collection of attachments and desires that covers up the person within. A caution is in order, however. Thomas Merton popularized for Christianity the dichotomy between the “false self” and the “true self”, but it is not completely clear that Merton was really expounding a Christian viewpoint. I’m sure that there are others who can explain Merton’s writings on the self, and can reconcile him with Orthodox Catholicism, but caution is still in order. Mahayana Buddhism, especially Zen Buddhism, contains a teaching on the true self which posits, in brief, that the “true self” is the Buddha-nature, utterly unrestricted and uncreated, hidden as it were within the maze of illusions which those enmeshed in samsara call the soul, the atman. Merton seems to indicate (especially in his later writings) that the “true self” is pure and unalloyed, and that it is naturally capable of making itself amenable to contact with God. If the “true self” is taken to be something uncreated and ideal, then the idea is certainly not Christian.

There are, however, Christian writers who use similar language but with different basic assumptions. Evelyn Underhill writes in Mysticism of the “superficial self” and contrasts it with the inner faculties of the soul which are capable of communion with God. The difference is that, for Christians, the inner or true self is itself contingent and corrupt: it is, in fact the same as the false self, but unlike the false self created by individualism, the true self of personhood recognizes its created, dependent, and fallen state and forsakes illusion and attachment in order to make itself amenable to grace. The true self only becomes true when, by virtue of prevenient grace, it sees itself as it is, bemoans its miserable and blinded state, and cries out to God for mercy. An individual, bent upon the task of self-definition and self-creation, doing the work of dominion, cannot cry out to God, for he sees himself as self-sufficient and central to the human drama. A person, having identified himself with the wounds of human nature, realizing his contingency and radical dependency, reaches out simultaneously toward God in contrition and repentance and toward other persons in sympathy and mercy.

Contemporary forms of Christianity, however, do very little to awaken their adherents to these realities. In fact, both conservative evangelicalism and liberal mainline protestantism in their own ways reinforce individualism. Both tend to favor subjective experience over objective orthodoxy, and both are uncomfortable with the strictures and discipline of a visible hierarchy dispensing an authoritative interpretation of Scripture. The means of grace are either denied as legalistic externals (nature being wholly depraved) or deemed superfluous in light of a sort of neo-pantheism (nature being divine in its own right). Both groups wind up reinforcing the surrounding cultures norms regarding the self and its prerogatives. One visible result of this tendency is the absence, in either camp, of any serious and coherent teaching on mortification.

Mortification is the ascetic practice, required of all Christians, by which the soul is weaned away from sinful habits and dispositions and made capable of cooperating with grace in the acquisition of virtuous habits and dispositions. There is a kind of natural mortification by which natural virtues may be acquired and which can be achieved without the help of grace, but mortification in the Christian sense requires and depends upon the action of grace in the soul. This is why Christian mortification is not legalism, but part of the therapeutic cure of the soul. Just as patients undergo physical therapy to retrain injured or afflicted limbs, mortification is metaphysical therapy to retrain body and soul in the ways of grace. In the context of our discussion of individualism and personhood, mortification is the method by which God strips away the illusions and attachments of the individual and nurtures in their place the attributes of true personhood.

There are many forms of mortification, but something often overlooked is that the Liturgy and liturgical prayer are themselves tools of mortification. Remember that mortification is not essentially negative, but essentially positive and life-giving: we mortify in order to be fully healed; we mortify in order to move from death to life. “For if ye live after the flesh,” St. Paul tells us, “ye shall die: but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live” (Romans 8:13). The Liturgy and liturgical prayer do the work of mortification by taking us out of ourselves and placing us in the larger context of the worshipping Church through time. This action takes us not only out of ourselves individually, removing us from our private inclinations and prejudices, but also corporately, removing us as a body from our collective and cultural inclinations and prejudices. Any “worship” which does not at least attempt this action of removal isn’t worthy of the name.

This, of course, is the problem of “contemporary worship”, an oxymoron if ever there were one. Contemporary worship immerses the congregation in the cultural ethos of its own time and destroys universality. When a “worship committee” dictates the content of the service, it is likely to be even more idiosyncratic, and immersing the congregation in the inclinations and prejudices of a few individuals. Add church-shopping to the mix, and you wind up with congregations hermetically sealed off from the permanent shape of Christianity, doing just what they like and just what makes them comfortable.

One of the virtues of liturgical prayer is that it gets us around our tendency to pray what we feel, rather than praying what we ought to feel. Most of us don’t realize the depth of our spiritual sickness, and so most of us, outside of the Liturgy, don’t pray with this realization. Liturgical prayer puts in our mouths the words that ought to be there, but so often aren’t. And these aren’t just words of contrition, but words of hope: Not just, “Lord I am not worthy” but also “but speak the word only and my soul shall be healed”. We have cause to bewail our condition, but at the same time we have cause to rejoice because God continually seeks us out, continually stands at the door and knocks, continually waits for our return. Left to ourselves, we tend to bounce between elation and despair, and often we’re at the wrong place at the wrong time. Liturgical prayer lifts us out of the cave of our own experience and allows us a larger experience than we could ever have on our own: that of the whole Church worshipping together through time. To modify an illustration I heard from my Archbishop, a Christian with a time machine ought to be able to walk into a church at any time and any place and recognize the same liturgical action. That time-traveling worshipper could stop in at Constantinople in the 6th century, at Rome in the 12th century, at London in the 16th century, and the language might be strange, but the acts and intentions, the shape of the worship, would be immediately recognizable. Immersion in the liturgical life of the Church sets forward the mortification of individuality and the healthy growth of personhood.

Personhood, Therapy, and Theosis

Individualism has taken over from personhood in American Christianity. The push to make the Church “relevant”, the jettisoning of doctrine and theology in favor of experience-delivery, and the anti-traditional ecumenism which are the hallmarks of American religion are all signs that the surrounding culture has dangerously infected the Christian mind. These developments are signs that Christianity in America has lost the idea of personhood, of a common, immutable human nature, of received religion, and has put in their place the idea of individuality, of idiosyncratic and malleable human nature, and of customizable religion.

The difficulty with this replacement is that it has hampered the cure of souls. The Church has from the beginning, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, proclaimed itself to be the inn of the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:30-35), the hospital of souls. The aim of Christianity isn’t primarily enlightenment or inspiration (though it can and does provide these), but the cure of the moral illness of sin. The Church’s mission is primarily therapeutic: to tell the sick and dying that they are sick and dying and to bring them into the inn where they can have their wounds washed clean and anointed with oil, where they can receive the Medicine of Immortality, and where they can restored when they have inevitable relapses. Both the proclamation of illness and the method of cure come down to us as the gift of the Church to each generation. Because we share a common human nature, and a common human illness, the method of our cure remains constant for all people at all times and in all places. Personhood is the sharing in the common illness, but because the Word was made flesh “for us men and for our salvation”, it is also the sharing in the common cure.

The rejection of personhood in favor of individualism is the refusal to recognize the illness, and the refusal to participate in the cure. The work of dominion is a symptom of our disease, and those who immerse themselves in that work cannot undertake the cure, which requires of us the renunciation of dominion in every area. The frenzy to have some kind of “worship experience” is just as much the work of dominion as is the frenzy to have fulfillment through acquisition of things. The pick-and-choose mentality of American religion, which takes the traditional bad news about the illness and good news about the cure and selectively adapts parts to suit its own ego-centric views -- this mentality is nothing more than the exercise of dominion even into the realm of the cure.

It is as if a patient in a hospital said, “I’m in pain. You tell me that it’s because of my broken hip, but I just don’t believe that. I think I’m in pain because I’m not self-fulfilled. So instead of having my hip replaced, which is a gross invasion of my privacy, I’m checking myself out, buying a sportscar, and getting a new lover”. We’d laugh at such a person, or perhaps order up a mental evaluation, but the same thing goes on daily, not just in the culture at large, but in Christian congregations. In those congregations, the monologue might sound more like this: “Of course I need my hip replaced. It’s broken, and I can’t walk. But once I have the surgery, I’m checking myself out and not doing any aftercare or physical therapy. After all, the problem has been cured once and for all by the surgery, right? This stuff about aftercare and therapy is just legalism. In fact, if I come back to the hospital at all, it’ll be to thank the surgeon and to hang out with the patients I met while I was admitted. It won’t be for therapy. So I don’t want the hospital to look like a hospital: after all, my broken hip was painful, and so was my surgery, and I don’t really want to be reminded of all that. It’s not relevant to where I am today. So I’d like the hospital to be re-made to look more like a shopping mall, which is the kind of place I and my cultural compatriots have good times, and it’d be more relevant to us. And if I look like I’m limping and dragging one useless leg along, well, that’s just because you have a pessimistic outlook. Once operated upon, always healthy.”

The Faith is not experimental. It is not customizable. It is not relevant at all within the worldview of the individualist, and to try and make it so is to impair its therapeutic, salvific value. It is the individualist worldview which must be remade; it is the individualist who must be un-conformed to the spirit of the age, and conformed to the mind of Christ expressed in the Church. The Gospel is foolish and scandal to the self-deluded individual, but to the person being saved it is life and health and peace. The end of the Church’s therapy is not the return of the person to the status quo ante, but the transformation of the person into one who is able to respond in love to the ultimate vision of God vouchsafed to the blessed. Theoria and theosis are the ends of the Church’s therapy, and the utter or piecemeal rejection of the method of cure puts these ends in jeopardy.

An individualistic approach to Christianity is therefore not an option. It is simply one more act of dominion, one more step away from true personhood, and therefore one more step away from theoria and theosis.

Individualism and Personhood: The Exercise of Dominion

The individualism I’ve written about in some recent posts, and which I’ve claimed has infected some of mainstream evangelicalism, has historically fit in very well with the American identity. This is no surprise since, much as there are those who’d like to deny it, American identity has itself been bound up with the ideas of protestantism. The American polity has been a juggernaut of “rugged individualism”, both in public and in private life, and has walked hand-in-hand with evangelicalism to create a sphere of private, personal experience and aspiration from which all others may rightfully be excluded. This sphere has come to be known as the “right to privacy”, or more recently, as the “right to self-definition”.

According to the zeitgeist, no one -- not parents, not children, not spouses, friends, priests, policemen -- may rightfully interfere with the individual’s exercise of dominion over his own sphere of privacy or self-definition. For most people, and even for a growing number of Christians, God may rightfully be excluded as well, at least when “God” is defined as someone or something external to the self which makes objective demands and places objective responsibilities upon the self, over which the self has no legitimate right of control or even objection. But from the founding days of the Reformation, there has been a way of identifying “God” with the internal, subjective devices and desires of the self, and the surrounding culture has picked up on this and has run with it. Any external manifestations of God, whether these be in ritual, ecclesiastical authority, or doctrinal content, are up for grabs as the individual cuts himself off from everything but his own feelings and desires.

We are encouraged, from within our individual sphere of private self-definition, to exercise dominion over everything (except -- and this requires a real sleight of hand -- other individuals). Our dominion moves outward as we grow older, gradually including not just our own bodies, minds, and spirits, but our living environment (extended into our cars, of course), our circle of friendship and acquaintance, our jobs, our bank accounts, first homes, second homes, investments, extra vehicles, stuff, stuff, stuff… We build little (or large) empires of dominion and we exercise (or attempt to exercise) total control over every aspect. Certain strains of Christianity walk hand-in-hand with this individualism, telling us that we should name and claim any kind of prosperity we desire, any kind of health we desire (as if covetousness of a good thing were something other than covetousness), and that good experiences are God’s thing. In fact, a large segment of contemporary Christians seems to have no other creed than “God wants us to have good experiences”. These Christians are politically liberal and politically conservative; they attend every kind of Catholic and protestant church; they represent all parts of the economic spectrum. And they are infected with an idea which is utterly foreign to the Faith they claim to hold: the exercise of individual dominion. The only difference between these Christians and their utterly materialist counterparts is that these Christians call upon God to do the work of their dominion for them, to be their Agent as they “name and claim” their way to individualistic dominion.

The exercise of dominion not only excludes the overt Christian teachings on self-loss and self-surrender -- the exercise of dominion necessarily excludes the essential mystery which is at the most basic level of life. We are not, in the final analysis, in charge of reality and we never can be. There are forces at work in the world, both personal and impersonal, which are larger and more primal than we are, and against the scale of which we are quite diminished. Of course, mankind is a special creation, spanning both the physical and the spiritual worlds, and we are personally known and loved by the Creator. But the appropriate reaction to the greatness of the scene into which we find ourselves placed, as well as to the great blessings bestowed upon mankind, is humility and wonder. This is the beginning of all religion at its most basic and primitive level, and a familiarity with the Psalter will show that the Judeo-Christian tradition has never moved far from this appropriate response to reality, and from the acknowledgment of mystery.

Stress results when dominion meets mystery. Perhaps the greatest mystery and the greatest interruption we meet is suffering. We go to very great lengths -- some of them justifiable -- to prevent and avoid suffering, but suffering is another reminder of mystery, and of our lack of mastery, and of our need to fall back continually upon God in humility and wonder.

Individuals are angry at interruptions and perceived invasions of privacy because these are affronts to the exercise of dominion. One of the results of our focus on individualism is that we overlook the basic mystery of different persons as essentially “other”: as essentially mysterious and alien to the exercise of dominion. Our search for love and friendship is not a search open to the mystery and wonder of an Other, but for sameness, likeness, and compatibility. This is why marriages break up, relationships fall apart, and so on. We are looking for ourselves in everything we meet, and in everything we seek, including God and other people. The discipline of contemplative prayer, properly understood, is a great remedy against this false ideal, as is traditional liturgical worship.

The exercise of dominion requires “individuals”: an “individual” in this sense is one in whom a claim is made to a singular or idiosyncratic exercise of human nature. The “individual self” consists of an ego-centric collection of many parts -- many “lives” -- with the result that the sum of these parts is supposed to be a unique individual for whom even reality may be said to be exclusive. The individual has a social life, a spiritual life, a sex life, a family life, a work life, and all are supposedly chosen, exercised, and controlled by a unique self which exercises an idiosyncratic instance of human nature. The interesting and consistently-overlooked result is that this “unique” amalgamation in reality creates consistently-classifiable types who seek not Otherness, not true uniqueness, not mystery, but similarity, likeness, and compatibility and who consistently run through, try out, and reject relationships (and religions, and churches) in the relentless search for “compatibility”. These “individuals” want nothing more than to be around others who are like them. There are groups for all types, and all types -- even “loners” -- seek others of their type. This syndrome, imported into Christianity, is one reason why there are tens of thousands of protestant denominations, and one reason why there is an indefatigable search for “relevance”. As philosopher Roger Scruton observed in a different context(1), “relevance” means “relevance” to the individual, and if we extend this argument, we see that if individuals believe themselves to be unique and idiosyncratic instances of human nature, the search for relevance is futile, because true uniqueness makes relevance among individuals impossible. What is not part of the individual dominion is irrelevant.

As Vladimir Lossky noted in The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, real human uniqueness is found, not in an “individual” who is an amalgamation of self-chosen attributes and interests (which really mirrors the attributes and interests of many, many, others), but in a person who exercises, not a unique instance of human nature, but common human nature, and whose quiddity is much more than the sum of the parts. One could list every supposedly-distinctive attribute of an individual and still not explain why that particular person is not another. The individual is at base a statistical unit, attributes and interests mainly chosen from a known group of available options. The person is at base a mystery.

A “person” in this sense cannot do the work of dominion because a person realizes that, at base, there is a mystery at the center of who he is, at the center of who everyone else is, at the center of creation itself, and in the many and ineffable circumstances of life. The proper life of personhood is not illustrated by rugged individualism (though a person may paradoxically be less dependent upon the opinion and approval of others) or by dominion, but by the Sermon on the Mount. The consideration of the lilies takes the place of strategizing the expanse and protection of dominion. The God who wants us to have good experiences is seen for the idol, the self-reflection he is, and is supplanted by the God who made us, and who is the source of our personhood, the source of our being, and our proper end. Mystery is permitted, and the possibilities of theosis are opened before us.

(1) Roger Scruton, Culture Counts: Faith and Feeling in a World Beseiged.

The Cult of Personality and The Cure of Souls

One of the final characteristics of the megachurch which calls for comment is that of the charismatic personality at the center. It is the lack of such “strong charismatic senior ministers” that the Hartford Institute for Religion Research cited as among the chief reasons that Catholic parishes don’t fit the megachurch mold. In fact, the strong charismatic minister is the first criterion listed by the HIRR study.

And it seems that megachurches do require such personalities as the focus for and driving force behind their multitude of programs, activities, and ministries. The individual megachurch congregations tend to become completely identified with the personality of the main guy (or woman -- megachurches tend to ignore I Timothy 2:12, but that’s a post in and of itself), and the main guy tends to use the megachurch as a platform for boosting his strong charismatic personality.

Just to be clear, by “charismatic” I don’t mean (and it’s obvious that the HIRR study authors didn’t mean) “having charismatic gifts of the Holy Ghost”, but rather, “exercising a compelling charm that inspires devotion in others” (New Oxford American Dictionary). It’s a horrifying fact of the modern “charismatic” movement in all of its iterations that these definitions have become confused and that the presence of the second is invariably taken as evidence of the presence of the first. Perhaps this is because we live in the age of Drab Democracy, and the only flamboyant and noticeable personalities we tolerate, in general, are on the moral fringe of Hollywood celebrity. Gone are the days of learned wit, charming conversation, and the chasseur’s easy grace. Any people for whom the terms “modern” (or, worse, “post-modern”), “contemporary”, and “relevant” have become watchwords have become unmoored from the mainstream of human history and are probably doomed to drabness. No wonder they’re drawn to charismatic personalities: they’ve probably never met anyone more interesting than Monty Python’s stereotypical Chartered Accountant.

And worse, they’ve probably never been exposed to the quiet drama that is the spiritual ascesis of Catholic Orthodoxy: they’ve looked for the whirlwind, the earthquake, and the tongue of fire, but have overlooked the still, small voice, which doesn’t come across well through amplifiers and big-screen TVs. In fact, the model for leadership in Catholic Orthodoxy is the man who stills himself to listen in quiet, who would be horrified to see himself on a stadium-sized screen, and who rigorously keeps his personality in check. The model is the priest, who wants people to look at him and see, no his charismatic personality, but Christ.

This is one of the many reasons why priests spend so much of their time in church with their backs turned to the congregation: the priest is standing in the place of Christ, doing the work of Christ, and on this most important liturgical act his personality or lack thereof has no bearing. It’s useful for the priest to be a good public speaker, to be a convincing and authoritative teacher, but these things don’t really matter in the most important work of the priest, which is administering the Sacraments in the place of the Bishop, in the Name of Christ.

In fact, the Church has employed certain methods of repressing the individual personality of the priest, at least in the exercise of his priestly office. The most obvious is the adoption of distinctive clerical dress: black with a white collar. This is the extra-liturgical uniform of the clergy, and like all uniforms, is meant to emphasize, well, uniformity. It’s the same with liturgical vestments. When the priest is vested for the Liturgy, he’s in effect saying, “I may be Fr. Joe, but I’m not acting on my own behalf right now: I’m acting as an icon of Christ, in the Bishop’s stead, on behalf of the Church”. (This is also the reason that judges wear robes, and the penchant for judges to eschew their robes is a sign of the degradation of the judicial office into the mere exercise of personal authority… just as has happened with the ministry in congregational churches.) In short, he’s exercising, not his own office, but that of another. His authority is not native, but derived, and his personality is in the background, not in the foreground. “Charisma”, in the second sense noted above, doesn’t matter one bit in this exercise of the office of priesthood.

But in the first (and for Christians, the primary) sense, “charisma” matters extremely for priests: not in the sense that they need to display extraordinary gifts, but in the sense that they remain faithful to the ordinary operations of the Holy Ghost in Scripture, Holy Tradition, and in the resulting sacramental ministry. These are men who need first and foremost to learn to be still and to know God in the still, small voice, so that they may lead their congregations in humility and with an eye toward their first charge, the cure of souls.

The cure of souls is an idea that’s been lost in the protestant world, and it would be hard-pressed to find a place in the literal arena of liturgitainment. But the consistent teaching of the Church through time has been that Christian souls are in the process of a cure from the sickness of sin. This cure requires constant oversight and close attention by one who knows the methods of the cure, and who may lawfully and validly administer the Medicine of Immortality. A good bedside manner is a bonus, but when the personality of the physician takes precedence over the medicine administered, the health of the body declines.

Pentecost

Acts 2:4: And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost.

We are in the season of Pentecost, which, as the Prayer Book tells us, is commonly called Whitsunday. “Pentecost” means “fiftieth” in Greek; Pentecost is the 50th day after Easter. Pentecost ranks with Christmas and Easter as one of the three great Feasts of the Church year, and liturgically it has much in common with Easter. If you have a Missal, you have only to look at the mass for the Vigil of Pentecost to see that it looks like a compressed version of the Great Easter Vigil. The Easter Vigil has as one of its major features the blessing of the baptismal font, preceded by the reading of twelve prophecies, and followed by the chanting of the Litany. The Vigil of Pentecost also has a blessing of the baptismal font, preceded by the reading of six prophecies (the text of each of which is taken from one of the Holy Saturday prophecies), also followed by the chanting of the Litany.

The similarity is due to the fact that Pentecost in the Western Church very early became a secondary date for baptisms, perhaps because the weather in England and northern Europe was more favorable at Pentecost than at Easter for baptisms. Like at Easter, the newly-baptized wore white garments, and it is from these garments that Pentecost became known in northern Europe as “White Sunday”, or “Whitsunday”.

As you can see from the Lesson from Acts, however, Pentecost was a feast of the Jewish calendar before it was taken up by the Church. Pentecost was the fiftieth day following Passover, “Pentecost” being the Greek title for the Jewish Feast of Weeks, which was a feast of thanksgiving for the grain harvest established in Deuteronomy and Leviticus. By the time of Christ, the feast was also used to commemorate the giving of the Law to Moses. In other words, it was a feast of the founding of the Jewish religion: a sort of “birthday” of Judaism.

That it was an important feast accounts for the fact that we are told in the Lesson today that “there were dwelling at Jerusalem Jews, devout men, out of every nation under heaven” (Acts 2:5). It is no accident, then, that God used this auspicious occasion as the birthday of the Church, at a time when the phenomena associated with the descent of the Holy Ghost could be displayed to maximum effect. We are told just a few verses later in Acts that three thousand souls were added to the Church on Pentecost.

As the Law was given in wind and fire, the new Covenant was ratified in wind and fire, and the men of all nations who had journeyed to Jerusalem to celebrate the giving of the Law were witnesses to the birth of the Church, which inherited and fulfilled the promises given to the people of the Law. The new Israel was born on the birthday of the old, the old covenant having been given in tables of law graven in stone, and the new covenant having been given by the outpouring of the Holy Ghost, to write God’s law of love in the hearts of men.

The Old Covenant was an imperfect precursor of the New, and the action of the Holy Ghost in the Old Testament is depicted as unpredictable, seeming to come and go. There is a sense in which the whole of the Old Testament, beginning with the Fall of Man in Genesis, is a quest by God’s people for the presence and power of the Holy Ghost, for this presence and this power is nothing other than a sharing in the life of God. The joyful and confident passages in the Old Testament are celebrations of this sharing in the life of God, and the sorrowful and despondent passages are all mourning for a disruption in this sharing and longing for its restoration.

The amazing thing about Pentecost is that this indomitable power of God, the having of which is joy and the loss of which is cause for despair, this wild, untamed vitality which in the divine economy is the presence and action of the Third Person of the Holy Trinity, has become permanently resident in the Church. The Tabernacle and the Temple could be only temporary dwellings for the glory of the Lord, which was the presence of the Holy Ghost, and these temporary dwellings passed away. They were succeeded by the Church, which will not pass away, and against which the gates of Hell shall not prevail. It is in the Church that the prophecy of Joel, quoted by St. Peter in his Pentecost oration, is to be fulfilled: “And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh” (Acts 2:17). What had been unpredictable and unchannelled has now become available to all mankind, reliably, in the Sacraments of the Church. This is the joyful mystery of Pentecost, that through the power of the Holy Ghost, the Church is made the habitation of God, and Christians sharers in the very life of God. What Christ won for us on the cross and by his Resurrection, what he made accessible to us by his Ascension, the Holy Ghost bestows upon us at Pentecost.

The actions of the Holy Ghost are, however, always ultimately mysterious. The Holy Ghost does not cast light upon Himself, does not speak of Himself, but speaks of the Son and illuminates us with the light of Christ. This is a point which is often misunderstood, and such misunderstanding leads to a couple of errors regarding the person and work of the Holy Ghost. The first error is to look at Him through the lens of contemporary culture, and to find Him somewhat antiquated and perhaps embarrassing. Those who want to use the Church as a safe harbor for their own passions and prejudices, as a shrine to the values of the surrounding culture, are justly uncomfortable with the idea that it is the Holy Spirit Who leads the Church into all truth, who convicts, leads to repentance, and illuminates. Faced with such a power, it is very difficult to see how one’s own agenda can be set forward. In fact, the Holy Spirit always speaks of Christ, and always leads through Christ to the Father, and this speaking and this leading tends to be destructive of personal agendas. The first error, then, sees the narrative of Pentecost as a superstitious description of an antique worldview, useful perhaps in a mythological or symbolical sense, but essentially unconnected from our lives. It is this error, I think, that gives rise to the popularity of the term “people of faith”, for “people of faith” are not people of any particular faith, let alone people of the Faith inspired and taught by the Holy Ghost.

The other error is to see in the Pentecost narrative a set of phenomena necessary for the Christian life at all times and in all places. This error is much closer to the truth, for, as I noted above, the Holy Ghost is the very life of the Church. But Pentecost was the starting-place, and the Church, under the guidance of the same Holy Ghost, has grown in her understanding of the faith proclaimed at Pentecost without ever departing from it. “Pentecostalism” takes the particular indicia of the first-century Pentecost and makes it normative: Christians, it teaches, must come under the sway of a charismatic and enthusiastic spiritual experience, and must speak in tongues. I remember a conversation I had with a Pentecostal friend when I lived in Baton Rouge. She told me that I could never be spiritually mature until I spoke in tongues. This, she declared, was the sure and infallible sign of the presence of the Holy Ghost.

The problem with this view, aside from the fact that ecstatic spiritual experiences are so easily counterfeited, is that it confuses the extraordinary actions of the Holy Ghost with His ordinary actions in the Church. Of course, it’s always dangerous to use the word “ordinary” when speaking of God, but “ordinary” in this sense means “regular” or “covenanted” – “channeled”, if you will. The ordinary actions of the Holy Ghost are, most characteristically, the leading to conversion, the illumination of soul with the truths of the Catholic Faith, and the provision of grace in the Sacraments for our sanctification. These “ordinary” actions are, of course, wonderful, miraculous, and, in the world’s eyes, most extra-ordinary, but we may, because of God’s unfathomable condescension, rely upon them ordinarily. The extraordinary actions of the Holy Ghost in Acts chapter 2 are tailored to the initial strengthening and confirmation of the Church. They may, of course, be used again at any time in the wisdom of God, and I believe that these gifts are always present, but they are not the normal fare of the Christian life. The rejection of the ordinary means of grace in favor of the extraordinary phenomena is caused by a desire for novelty and by a failure to understand the miraculous nature of the ordinary life of the Church.

Avoiding both errors, we should always try and recollect for ourselves the wonders of Pentecost, and its wonderful result, for in it the life of God became available always and everywhere to one and all in the Church. Familiarity does indeed breed contempt, or at least indifference, and the results of familiarity can lead to either of the two errors I’ve described. What we must never forget is that we live, and move, and have our being as Christians in the very real power of Pentecost, and that it is the same Holy Ghost who moves among us, sustaining, strengthening, and leading into all truth. The Church provides for us, through the power of the Holy Ghost, the near approach to the unapproachable God and the very life of God. Our Old-Testament predecessors longed for the presence and power of the Holy Ghost; it is available to us in the Church. For most of us, our experience of the Church isn’t as dramatic as it was on the first Whitsunday. Elijah thought to find God in the storm, in the earthquake, and in the whirlwind, but encountered Him instead in the still, small voice. God condescends at Pentecost to make his dwelling-place in the temple of the Church, from which His glory never shall depart, and we shouldn’t complain if he puts aside the voice of thunder and fire and speaks in a register we can hear, uses words we can understand, and ministers to us with elements we can touch.

He does this because Pentecost is ultimately about love: the love of the Father, who provides for our salvation in means readily accessible to us; the love of the Son, who gave himself for us and who ascended into heaven to give us his resurrected life in the Spirit; and the love of the Holy Ghost, who came at Pentecost to give the life of God to men.