Suffering Towards Stillness

Been thinking recently about the concept of apatheia--or passionlessness, as it's known in English-speaking Orthodox circles--and how it's ultimately the goal of each Christian striving towards theosis. Also on my mind is the unfortunate contemporary connotation surrounding the Greek word's English cognate: apathy.

Apathy is defined as a "lack of feeling or emotion" or a "lack of interest or concern." Understandable, then, are the raised eyebrows that respond to one who is said to be "striving for apatheia." The Greek word, however, is very different, for it calls us not to turtle-shell, shoe-staring introspection, not to reclusion from the world--though some have felt the call to flee for the sake of their own souls--but rather to a steadfastness, an immovablity within a person. This hearkens back to the likes of St. Ireneaus and his contemporaries, who said that the immutablity of God is one of His greatest, most lauded qualities--for in it lies His utter dependability and changelessness--and it is also one for which Christians should strive most diligently.

Again, I speak not of indifference to others' lives and sorrows, but to our own selves, our so-called "rights," our runaway-train impulses. When insulted, we bear no malice, desire no revenge. When tempted, we feel no pull, no conflict. Apatheia, then, is not a matter of simply "doing the right thing and not doing the wrong thing," but rather a matter of having our very nature tranformed--or, better yet, transfigured--so that we are healed from being vulnerable to these weaknesses. We stand strong and still because God has made us so.

This, however, requires effort, an effort of the heart and mind--for our natural tendency is not to act from within, but simply to react to stimuli from without--and we truly do have little, in and of ourselves, that is capable of moving in the sovereign freedom of God that St. Gregory of Nyssa talked about.

Funny thing, though: the Christian perfection that we are called to--to the point where, as I said earlier, "when tempted, we feel no pull, no conflict"--is not arrived at easily or soon, or, for most, at all in this life. St. Antony, the father of monasticism himself, has said that we are to expect temptation to our last breath. There is no "absolute zero" of the soul, as it were, no total stillness to be found--rather, when one ceases to give oneself "over to every evil desire [and be] a slave to passion" in a certain area (when one has borne his or her cross and successfully died to passion X, in other words)--one can consider himself healed, but healed only to bear more crosses. This suffering towards stillness--and it can only be this way, for in the Cross' humility Christ finds glory and secures our race's salvation--is what St. Paul means when he says that "we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as by the Spirit of the Lord" (2 Cor. 3:18).

May we all "stand still, and see the salvation of the LORD" (Ex. 14:13).

Quiet, Meek Brilliance

The theme of "storied" existence is being examined over at Father Stephen's blog--that is, that we often, in our culture, live as though the heavens and the earth occupy two mutually exclusive arenas of existence. Our challenge, then, is to experience the epiphany (and abide in said epiphanic existence) that the two are not separate but united, yet without confusion; in other words, what has been accomplished in the span of a God-Man's transfigured body has also been applied to the whole of the cosmos.

What is maddening to me is the refusal of God to break in, angel choirs blaring, and announce this triumphantly and in unignorable fashion to folks other than those already willing and capable of bearing it...and, often, those who experience Tabor experience more light and stillness than sound and fury, the latter being the M.O. to which this world is addicted and which, so it would try to convince us, is the only reliable way to make an impact. Squeaky wheels and pushy, slick sales pitches -- from the boardroom to the evangelist -- are seen to be the only way to get one's message across to its intended audience. One must, after all, compete with all the noise coming from all the competition.

Our passions feed us the same lie, only internally. There the promise of sweetness, of fulfillment, of recognition, of praise, of (vain)glory -- all this is trumpeted loudly, yet all we are offered by God, in contrast, is hidden in Sinai's cleft and Tabor's quiet, bright mount. When we desire a divine scream that will silence all carnal appetite, what we are given, rather, is a command to be still when we feel like stripping a gear. We're told to be small -- to be weak in the world's eyes and bury our faces in our cloaks -- when we feel like standing up for "rights" that vanish in the light of the realization that all of life is love of other. We're told to be light when we'd rather be heat -- the difference is that of a candle versus a flamethrower -- and we see our God to be a Fire who will consume yet forbears now so that not even a tiny bush is consumed in order that a young, fugitive shepherd might get the sober, simple message.

We attend services till we can no longer stand. We join every activity at Church (assuming we are blessed enough to be at a parish with a sufficiently developed sense of community to accommodate this) until we have no more time for anything else. We may even fill our time with so much online Orthodoxy that we don't have to deal with our own parish or our own selves. All of these movements, these sounds, these flashing, neon lies we deal ourselves not only will not substitute for stillness, smallness, and genuine light in our own lives, but are answered, not in kind by our Lord (nor by our Lady), but are largely ignored by them, really, and the humble, steady, peaceful light streaming from radiant flesh is shown only to those who have eyes to see and ears to hear.

It's been said by many of us impatient types that "relationship evangelism"--a phrase usually associated, through crudely and unfortunately so, w/St. Seraphim's injunction to "acquire the spirit of peace and thousands around you will be saved" -- is really a "cop-out" compared to the more aggressive, confrontational brands of reaching the masses, for one can simply claim to be acquiring said Spirit while actually engaging in spiritual apathy. Meanwhile, "results" are not seen and the world is not converted. What's frustrating is that the genuine answer to this accusation provides neither comfort nor a solution to the aggressive soulwinner's burden, for rampant buttonholing and (apparent) decision-making do not (usually) equate to genuine spiritual fruit, nor does genuine, humble acquisition of holiness (always) differ in appearance from those whose silence springs from indifference, so the false security we usually try to derive from watching for "results" is usually ill-founded, for we expect fruit in days or months which takes years to cultivate. Yet it is this silent, light, and sober joy which will allure those who seek to live in a world free from the need to muster up all our own clamorous, pretentious glory.

Those who have that quiet, meek brilliance are the only ones, it seems, that the Lord tells us to listen to. Would that it were as easy to obtain it as it is to write about it.