What Is Beauty?

"Presented for your consideration" (as Rod Serling would say):  photo of what some would say was a beautiful woman.  The woman in question is Lady Diana Mitford, and Mr. James Lees-Milne, who was a friend of the family, said of her, "She was the nearest thing to Botticelli's Venus that I have ever seen".  Looking at her, I am reminded of the country music lyric, "She's not pretty; she just looks that way."  For Lady Diana was the wife of Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists.  More importantly, she was an admiring friend of Adolf Hitler, for whom she acquired (and retained to the end of her life) a profound admiration--indeed, she married Oswald in Joseph Goebbel's drawing room.  Like Hitler and his crowd, she was a confirmed anti-semite.  When interviewed by the BBC in 1989, she described her old friend Hitler as "fascinating", and when asked, "What about the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis?", she replied, "Oh no, I don't think it was that many."  Like the song said, "not pretty".                                                                        
    The example of Lady Diana brings into sharp focus the question "what is beauty?"  In particular, does it consist essentially of the flawless features of a Venus?  Or does it consist essentially of what St. Peter called "the hidden person of the heart" (1 Pt. 3:4)? Our own culture opts unabashedly for the first view, and glorifies outer beauty.  An entire industry has developed to secure and preserve such beauty--creams like "Oil of Olay" which promise unfading allure, surgical nips and tucks, face lifts for the elimination of wrinkles, Botox injections for a more classical face, breast implants.  In the Hollywood culture, all this warfare against the appearance of aging is not called "surgery"; it is merely called, "having some work done", as if such radical procedures were all in a day's work, like giving the car a tune-up before a trip                                        
       As the disciples of Jesus Christ, we are called to opt for the view advanced by St. Peter, and recognize true beauty when we encounter it.  Oils and Botox and surgeries notwithstanding, we are all of us hurtling headlong toward death and disintegration, and whatever cosmetic help we avail ourselves of along the way will not save us.  Lady Diana did indeed look beautiful in her early photos, like that presented above.  Should we look on her exhumed outer form now (not to put too fine a point on it) she would look rather less ravishing than before.  All outer beauty fades; the true beauty does not.  "The imperishable quality of a gentle and quiet spirit" mentioned by St. Peter survives the ravages of time, and the inexorable grave.  It is to this beauty that God calls all of us.  And it is this beauty which calls forth the admiration of our heavenly Bridegroom:  in the Song of Songs, He speaks to His bride and says,  "You are altogether beautiful, my love, and there is no flaw in you" (Songs 4:7). As members of the Bride of Christ, it is this beauty for which we should strive.

Fundamentalism and the Psychology of Violence

       Recently I began what I hoped would become a dialogue with a fundamentalist. That is, I asked on-line for a free copy of the Quran, and in due time it arrived in the mail. After a decent delay, the people who kindly supplied it to me emailed me to ask what I thought of it. It was, of course, not so much an interested query as an attempt at conversion, but that was fair enough, and politely asked, and completely expected.
       In a similar spirit of brotherly conversation between two men of good will, I replied that I had read the Quran in its entirety, and had a couple of questions. One was how in the surah “The Story” the Old Testament figures Pharaoh and Haman were portrayed as contemporaries, since Pharaoh was an Egyptian (dating from ca. 1400 B.C., and Haman was a Persian, dating from ca. 500 B.C. (Their stories are found in the Biblical books of Exodus and Esther respectively.) The surah in question portrayed them as speaking with one another. How could this be, I asked, since they were separated one from another by hundreds of miles and about 900 years? I also asked how in the surah “Women” it was denied that Jesus of Nazareth was crucified and a look-alike killed in his place, since all reputable scholars and historians accept the Crucifixion as an historical fact.
       My Muslim friend replied at great and generous (and courteous) length. Most of his reply consisted of an argument that Jesus was not crucified, arguing from, of all things, the Letter to the Hebrews. (For those unfamiliar with this New Testament letter, the self-offering of Jesus on the Cross is its center-piece and main theme.) He didn’t spend much time on my first query about Pharaoh and Haman, but disposed of my objection by simply asserting that the Haman with whom Pharaoh spoke was his “prime minister who happened to have the same name of that person who lived in Persia; it is just the same name and not the same person”. That was the sum total of his reply.
        Here, I submit, is the voice of fundamentalism. The scenario my Muslim friend is suggesting is rather like that of a school boy writing an historical paper and asserting in it that Napoleon once had a conversation with Mao-Tse-Tung, and when being told that this was impossible, replying that “of course it was entirely different Mao-Tse-Tung”. No educated person would give this serious consideration. If it was an educated historian who suggested such a thing, there might be a further request for sources. But a school boy, without prior historical credentials, would correctly be written off as not knowing what he was talking about.
     The Quran is, I believe, similarly lacking in historical credentials: it mistakes the son bound by Abraham in Genesis 22 as Ishmael when it was Isaac; it mistakes the woman who found Moses in the bulrushes as Pharaoh’s wife, when the Exodus account says it was his daughter. And, of course, it manages to deny altogether the historicity of Jesus’ crucifixion. These elementary errors of historical fact do nothing to establish the Quran’s historical reliability. It seems clear that it was written by a brilliant story-teller who had only a passing and inaccurate knowledge of Jewish and Christian traditions. The conversation of Pharaoh with Haman clearly is one such anachronistic inaccuracy. The Quran’s author had obviously heard from Jewish sources of two villains who persecuted the Jews, Pharaoh and Haman, and assumed that one worked for the other. To try to deny this by saying “of course it was an entirely different Haman” is fundamentalism. (I thought of asking my Muslim friend how an Egyptian prime minister came to have a Persian name, but decided against it.)
       I have met many fundamentalists in my time—Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, even some Christians. All have the same characteristic. For them, outer fact is determined in advance by their dogma, and no argument is allowed to dislodge this priority. That is, their dogma or belief is the prism through which they view and judge all of the real world around them. If their dogma says “Elvis is alive and living in Oregon”, then Elvis is alive, regardless of what any exhumation in Graceland may prove. If it says, “There is a Jesuit conspiracy running and corrupting the Protestant seminaries”, then there is such a conspiracy, and no amount of argumentation or accumulation of facts will prove otherwise. (This last example is a real one, odd as that sounds.) If it says, “The sky is not blue, but green”, then the sky is green. All the world but them may see it differently, but will be written off as colour-blind, for the sky must be green. When dealing with the fundamentalist, argument is unavailing.
       This means that for the fundamentalist, at least when he is arguing his case, the opponent is not fully real. He is not a three-dimensional person, with all the credibility real persons bring with them. He is one-dimensional, and therefore not fully human. The one arguing with the fundamentalist that there is, in fact, no Jesuit conspiracy corrupting Protestant seminaries is written off as simply a dupe. He is to be discounted, given no weight. That is why the argument goes nowhere, because the fundamentalist is not really listening. It is not actually a dialogue, but a monologue. The person with whom the fundamentalist is arguing is not really a person, he is “the Other”, the unbeliever, the infidel. He is part of Babylon, of the Dar al-Harb, the “house of war”. He exists not to be listened to but to be converted.
       It is just here, I suggest, that all fundamentalism carries within it an inner psychology of violence, whether or no this latent psychology and tendency produces bodily violence. It is not that fundamentalists are necessarily violent or aggressive persons. That depends entirely on the fundamentalist, and it is not my point. My point is that all fundamentalism tends to see the neighbour not as a real person, but as a target, a threat, something to eliminate—either by conversion, refutation, or by other means—if he threatens the dogma or world-view. Most people see their neighbours as other people like themselves—real persons with likes and dislikes, persons to be agreed or disagreed with, persons who share the same transit system, whose children share the same schools. They cheer for the same national hockey team in the Olympics as we do, and grumble under the same federal taxes. They are like us. But for the fundamentalist, the neighbour is not like himself, for he defines himself over against his neighbour, and as radically unlike him.
       This is the psychology of violence. If we fail to see our neighbour (that basic Biblical category) as like ourselves, we leave ourselves open to the possibility of doing him violence. That is why in any war the enemy to be killed must be first dehumanized. The Germans in the second world war were thus not like us. The German was “the kraut”. The Japanese were “the japs”. The Vietnamese were “the gooks”. In each case we refuse to see the Germans, the Japanese, the Vietnamese as basically like ourselves, with families and loved ones, with hopes and fears, with strengths and weaknesses. All the humanity of the neighbour has been stripped away; he is simply “the enemy”. That is why the higher ups on both sides in the first world war objected to the now-famous game of football with the “enemy” between the trenches on Christmas Eve. It was difficult to ask men to kill each after they had played together and shared tokens and showed each other pictures of their girl-friends and families. The men across No Man’s Land were no longer “the enemy”. Now they all had faces and names. They were no longer the Dar al-Harb. Now they were persons.
       People of different faiths will have conflicting dogmas and beliefs. But it is important that in our conversations with those of differing faiths that we maintain a dialogue, and not let it degenerate into a monologue. It is our neighbour to whom we called to offer our witness, not “the enemy”. As Orthodox Christians, we are called to faith, not to fundamentalism.

Aliens

The Church has classically been described by four adjectives: one, holy, catholic and apostolic. If I were looking for a more concise way to sum up these attributes, I would choose one word: alien.

            The on-line Oxford dictionary describes “alien” as, “belonging to a foreign country”, “unfamiliar and disturbing or distasteful” and “supposedly from another world, extraterrestrial” (I imagine this final definition is of more recent vintage, and presupposes the world of Science-Fiction, E.T., War of the Worlds and the mother-ship.) I am happy with all of these definitions, for they all describe, in one way or another, the Church of God sojourning in this world. We do indeed belong to a foreign and heavenly country. The World indeed regards us as disturbing and distasteful. And the Kingdom is, by definition, another world.

This alien element in our ecclesiastical existence goes back to our Lord Himself. He said to His disciples, “Because you are not of this world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.” (Jn. 15:19). This was no accidental utterance, but is foundational to our identity as Christians, so that the Lord repeated it in His final prayer to the Father before His arrest and crucifixion: “Father…I have given them (the disciples) Your Word, and the world has hated them because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.” (Jn. 17:14). To be a disciple of Jesus, therefore, is to be no longer of the world. The world, with its deep-seated and fallen xenophobia, instinctively recognizes this, and reacts with persecution. That accounts for the persecution of the Christians soon after the Day of Pentecost, and in almost all ages of the Church, including our own (Byzantium was a blip), and for what the ever-quotable G.K. Chesterton once described as “the halo of hatred around the Church of God”.

Since we do not (presently) live in a land governed by sharia law, the persecution today is mostly cultural. We do not live in the expectation that armed men will bang on our doors and haul us and our loved ones away to judicial prosecution or mob violence. But those who hold to the Faith are held up to ridicule, denunciation and subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) social ostracism.

There is one way, of course, that we can avoid such unpleasantness: we can soften the Lord’s words, demands and standards so that they are more in line with what the World will accept. In areas of conflict where Christ’s other-worldly ways collide with accepted social norms, we can decide to chill out and stand down (the current flash points in North America are homosexual life-style, the normalization of fornication, women’s ordination, and an appreciation of Islam). We can speak with great sophistication about how complex all these issue are, about the values of diversity. We can find pleasant and articulate proponents of homosexual life-style to speak with, we can interview with appreciation smart and famous feminists, we can dialogue with very nice Muslims. Dialogue is good. I like dialogue; it’s almost as much fun as blogging. But the pleasures of dialogue with pleasant and articulate people must not tempt us to sell out the words of Christ. In our dialogue, we must listen attentively, and then very respectfully offer the timeless teaching of Christ which the World regards as alien. This might result in a shortened dialogue, and will certainly result in fewer invitations to take part in dialogues in the secular media. But dialogue isn’t everything. At the Judgment at the Last Day, there will be very little dialogue.

Our contemporary and urgent task, therefore, is to lovingly and humbly hold to the Faith once for all delivered to the saints (Jude 3) and to be content to be regarded by the World as aliens. Like all aliens, we will pay the price, and be told that we are simplifying complex issues, that we are fundamentalists, that we are intolerant. Our fellow-Christians who have decided to ease up on being aliens will add that we are un-Christ-like, unloving, uncompassionate, driving people from the Church, and generally responsible for the fact that the world is not beating a path to the Church’s door. (This ignores that fact that when Christians did act more like the world, the world did not beat a path to their door, but ignored them as charmingly irrelevant. That is why the words “church growth” and “the United Church of Canada” are rarely used in the same sentence.) None of this negative reinforcement should count with us. We have been warned in advance by our Lord to expect it. And there are hints that when the Antichrist comes, such negative reinforcement will become more negative yet. Our task, in all ages, remains the same.

Remembering Bishop Short

The man to the left is the late Anglican Bishop, H.V.R. Short, formerly bishop of the Diocese of Saskatchewan.  It was under Bishop Short that I served my two parishes as an Anglican priest.  I came to him as a deacon, and he ordained me priest several months later in 1979.  He was always kind to me, with the heart of a true bishop and father.  When I first met him in his office before continuing my trek out to my first parish, he said something I shall never forget:  "I'm not asking you to be successful; I am asking you to be faithful.  St. Paul said that it was required of stewards that they be found faithful, and that is all that is required of us."  That is, I think, good advice, and not just for clergy.  We may not set the world ablaze, or leave our mark.  In fact for most of us, it is a certainty that within a hundred years of our death, after our children and grandchildren have also died, it will be as if we had never existed, and we will be completely forgotten by the world.  That is okay; what matters is that God keeps us in His eternal memory.  And when we finally stand before Him to be judged, He will not ask how successful we were.  He will ask if we were faithful.  Thank you, Bishop Short.  May your memory also be eternal.

The Ascension and the Glorification of Man

           In contemporary Orthodoxy, we are accustomed to referring to Christ as one of the Holy Trinity.  He is usually referred to as “Christ our true God”, and the Gospel of John, which stresses His divine status, is, I would suggest, our favourite of the four Gospels.  When announcing the reading from (say) Matthew’s Gospel, the deacon says, “Bless master him who proclaims the good tidings of the holy apostle and evangelist Matthew”, but when he announces a reading from John’s Gospel, he says, “Bless master him who proclaims the good tidings of the holy apostle and evangelist John the Theologian”.  The other evangelists are honoured, but only John receives the title “the Theologian” (an epithet shared only by St. Gregory Nazianzus and St. Simeon, sometimes called “the New Theologian”).  Like I said:  John is our favourite.

            Looking at church history, one can see why.  Starting early on and heating up dramatically in the fourth century, the Church was swamped with rival and alternative views of who Jesus of Nazareth was.  Arius made headlines in the fourth century by suggesting that Jesus was a creature, like all the other creatures made by God, only perhaps a bit more exalted, like an angel on steroids (my description not his).  For Arius, Jesus was only divine in an honorary sense, like a citizen being made “King for a day”.  In dealing with the distortions of Arius, the Church turned with gratitude to the emphatic clarity of John’s Gospel.  That Gospel opens with a ringing assertion of Christ’s divinity (“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”), and climaxes with a confession of the same (as Thomas falls down before Jesus, crying out, “My Lord and my God!”)  From the fourth century on, the primacy of John’s Gospel was assured.  Faced with the swarming multitude of heresies, the Church would continue to declare the divinity of its Saviour, and refer to Him almost reflexively as “Christ our true God”.

            This is good.  But it should not make us to miss the significance of Him being “Christ the true man” as well.  Orthodox theology, formed by its response to the challenges and heresies it faced, takes a theological approach to Jesus:  we think of Him primarily as the pre-eternal and divine Word who later became a man for our sake.  But the earliest disciples did not begin that way.  They began with a phenomenological approach to Him.  That is, they first knew Him as a man like them, truly and completely human, and (what’s more) authentically Jewish.  For like His first disciples, Jesus referred to the God of Israel as His God (compare His cry from the cross in Mk. 15:34 and His post-resurrection reference to His God in Jn. 20:17).  He prayed to God as all His fellow Jews did, and taught that the Law’s greatest commandment was to love the God of Israel (Mk. 12:29-30).  They went to on discover and proclaim that this Man was also divine.

            We do well to remember this, because often we tend to secretly embrace a kind of crypto-docetism.  (“Docetism” is the name given to the view that Jesus was not truly human, but that He only seemed—Greek dokeō—to be so.)  We Orthodox Christians today easily remember that Jesus is divine.  We remember less easily that He is also completely human.  It is as if Christ assumed our humanity at Bethlehem, and then left it behind like a used suit of clothes at His Ascension.  It is not so:  the humanity which He assumed for our sake at His Nativity, He keeps forever. 

            It is especially important to remember this at the Feast of the Ascension, for the Ascension is not only the triumph of God, but even more the triumph of Man.  We do not glorify God by belittling man and denying humanity its proper glory.  Humanism, with its emphasis on the splendour of the human person, at least gets that right.  Man is glorious, and splendid, and worthy of praise.  He has debased himself through sin and selfishness, but the glory remains, like gold that is covered over with a layer of dirt.  This is the point of the psalmist in Psalm 8:  “What is man, that You remember him, and the son of man, that You care for him?  You have made him a little lower than God, and crown him with glory and majesty”.  The glory of man remains, whether or not one translates the Hebrew elohim in this passage as “God” or “the angels”.  Man retains his kingly position in earthly creation either way, and stands just slightly lower than those in heaven, because God “has put all things under his feet”. 

            The Church has always proclaimed that Man’s ultimate glory and destiny find fulfillment in Jesus.  He is the Son of Man to whom God subjects all things, putting them under His feet. He is the One whom God crowned with glory and honour (see Heb. 2:6-9), the true and representative Man ruling over all creation. And the moment of this crowning, this final and supreme exaltation, was the Ascension.

            That is the true meaning of the Ascension, and why the Ascension represents the triumph of man.  In Jesus, Man assumes the throne God prepared for him, reigning finally and truly as king over the rest of creation.   In the ascended Christ, sitting at God’s right hand to rule the cosmos with Him, Mankind finds its true destiny and glory and goal.

The Ascension however also reveals that this true glory comes from submitting to God’s will.  Humanism rightly sees that man is a glorious being, but it errs in supposing that man can be glorious while rebelling against God.  Secular humanism (there have been many varieties of humanism throughout the years) even declares that man’s glory consists in rebelling against God.  All this is futile.  Man finds his true dignity while kneeling before God; his true calling in gratefully adoring Him. 

Psalm 8 reveals this, as does the example of Jesus.  In Psalm 8, we see that it was God who “made man a little lower than elohim” (v. 5); it was God who made him rule over the works of His hands, and put all things under his feet” (v.6).  Man did not attain to such heights by his own effort, by a kind of “triumph of the will” (to quote an old and horrifying documentary).  Man does not glorify himself by pulling himself up by his Pelagian bootstraps (it was Pelagius who seemed to downplay our need for God).  It is God who glorifies him, as His gift, as man submits in love to His will.

The life of Jesus reveals this also.  Christ the Man always did the will of His Father, even though it cost Him His sweat and blood in the Garden of Gethsemane and on the Cross.  In obedience “He offered up both prayers and supplications to Him who was able to save Him from death, and was heard because of His piety” (Heb. 5:7).  It was because of this obedience and humility before the divine will, this saving self-emptying, that “God highly exalted Him and bestowed on Him the Name which is above every name” (Phil. 2:8-9).  First came the Cross, and only then, the Crown; first the kneeling tears in the Garden, and only after that, the sitting at the Right Hand.  Christ’s glory was the fruit of His humility, and of His obedience to the Father’s will.  He proved Himself true Man when He knelt and prayed; He proved Himself true Man when He turned from His own will to the Father’s.  And because of this human obedience, God exalted Him, raising Him from the dead and bringing Him to His right hand in glory.

Christ’s ascended glory therefore points the way home for us as well.  The glory that Christ was given by the throne of His Father is the same glory that He will share with us (see Rev. 3:21).  But we must follow in the footsteps of His humility if we would arrive finally at His glorious goal.  The Ascension calls us to be authentically human, to fulfill our destiny by serving and loving God.  The Man Christ Jesus has not only revealed the glory of the Father.  He also revealed the true glory of humanity as well.

Ecclesiastical Nostalgia

             If one is the type that is easily discouraged, one can find today much that is discouraging—secularism is making inroads, even in the Orthodox Church, men of power scorn and minimize the insights proffered by Christians, the Church makes up a small fraction of society, and our bishops are sometimes not up to meeting the multitude of challenges faced by the Church.  The temptation for those easily discouraged is to look back fondly and nostalgically to an imagined Golden Age for the Church.  There are a number of contenders for this Golden Age.  One of the most enticing contenders is the fourth century.  After all, this century saw two ecumenical councils (Nicea in 325 and Constantinople in 381), as well as the ministries of Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory the Theologian, and John Chrysostom.  Surely if any period of church history could lay claim to being a golden age, especially as far as bishops were concerned, it would be the fourth century.  That was the time to be an Orthodox Christian!  If only we could have lived then!  If only our bishops now could be more like bishops then!

            One of the salutary effects of scholarship and of reading church history is to disabuse one of such facile notions.  Books such as Renouncing the World Yet Leading the Church, by Andrea Sterk, examine the episcopate of the fourth century, and paint a different and more nuanced picture.  Gregory of Nyssa, for example, wrote much of what the ideal bishop looked like, largely because such an ideal bishop was hard to find.  The revolution begun by Constantine, with all the tremendous advantages and opportunities it opened for the Church, also brought with it a flood of candidates for the episcopate who were less than ideal.  Gregory of Nyssa, for example, in his Life of Moses, wrote of men with selfish ambition and arrogance, men who “thrust themselves into the honour of the priesthood and contentiously thrust out those who had obtained this ministry from God”, men who “fatten themselves at rich tables, and who drink pure wine, and anoint themselves with the best myrrh, and who make use of whatever seems pleasant to those who have a taste for a life of luxury”.  Sterk wrote that “political manoeuvring was not unusual for the attainment of positions in both the civil and ecclesiastical hierarchies of the fourth century” (op. cit., p.113).  The office of bishop was a plum, a way for social and financial advancement, and many men sought the office for precisely this reason.  And their flocks did not object, or see anything wrong with this.  Most of the people wanted and demanded for their bishops men who were rich, aristocratic, and esteemed in the eyes of the world, preferring them to men who were holy, yet poor. As Gregory the Theologian said in his Oration 42, the people “seek not for priests, but for orators, not for stewards of souls, but for treasurers of money, not for pure offerers of the sacrifice, but for powerful patrons.”   The supposed golden age was not that golden. 

            Compare this with our current situation.  The bishops I know (admittedly, mostly from afar) are men of faith, men who accepted the episcopal office not because they hungered for social prestige and riches.  They did not sidle up to the Emperor (or President or Prime Minister) and jockey for episcopal preferment.  There are things to criticize in the bishops, of course—just as there are things to criticise in the presbyters, the deacons, the readers, and the rest of the laity.  But over all, our North American bishops seem to have their eyes on the Lord, not on the Emperor or their bank accounts.  This is a welcome change from the fourth century.

            Indeed, the marginalization of the Church which some find discouraging is actually a reason to be encouraged.  There is no social advantage any more to becoming a Christian.  Rather, professing faith in Christ is more likely to garner criticism and social disadvantage.  This is all to the good, for it increasingly means that those who live their lives in the Church are truly dedicated to Christ.  The Church does not need multitudes to do its job, only dedicated souls willing to serve Him and die for Him.  Better a small and dedicated church, than multitudes of merely nominal believers. Better bishops who serve the Church despite the fact that it brings no smile from the Emperor, than episcopal time-servers and men-pleasers.  Better twelve men filled with the Pentecostal Spirit, than a thousand without zeal for God.  Of the thousands that flocked around Christ when He did miracles and healed their sick, only a few stayed faithful to Him after the Cross.  Of those thousands, only a hundred and twenty were found in Jerusalem’s upper room at the end.  But these one hundred and twenty had hearts that burned with love for Jesus.  And that was enough.

            There is no need to be nostalgic for the long dead past.  The golden dedication which we seek is not the possession of any single age, century, or epoch.  The gold is found in the hearts of all who love Jesus with all their might, in whatever age they live. 

Life Is Good

           I offer the observation in the title defiantly, because there is much evidence to the contrary.  Admittedly, I am a happy camper—more or less healthy, my extended family happy and doing well, blessed with a wonderful parish and a good bishop.  Even my cat is contented.  But I am aware that many people in the world are not happy campers, that suffering and sickness abound, that poverty and war mar the lives of many innocent people, that children across the globe go to bed hungry, while their parents can only weep and extend their empty hands.  Many in the world would contend that life is not good.

            That is why I offer the sentiment defiantly.  We must, of course, do what we can to feed the hungry, to strive to heal the sick, to dry the tears of the suffering, to comfort the children.  There are many opportunities to do this (one thinks, for example, of the work of IOCC), and our Lord commands that we use these opportunities according to our ability.   Affirming that life is good does not involve stopping up our ears so that we cannot hear the cries for help of the needy. 

            But it does involve living with sensitivity to all the gifts which God daily showers upon us.  Our temptation is to continue with insensitivity to these gifts.  And let’s be honest:  if we do not feel that life is good, it is not usually because we are haunted by the sufferings of others, but because we are too self-absorbed.  Fallen creatures that we are, we find it easy to focus on the petty slights of others, the minor disappointments of the day, the stresses and strains that come with living.  It is as if we are on a long hike through the mountains in springtime, and can think only of how tired our feet are.  We miss the view, the shining, wet, loud, radiant world that crowds around us, that shouts at all our senses, telling us that the whole world is filled with God’s glory.   We are insensitive to this.  All we notice is the fact that our feet hurt. 

            Orthodoxy challenges us to live sacramentally, to receive each day as an unmerited gift from God, to lose our sense of entitlement, and recover a sense of wonder at how strange and beautiful is the world  God made and the life He has given us.  It will all be over soon enough.  Like the country song says, “You get one time around, one roll of the dice, one walk through the garden, one quick look at life.”  All the more reason to notice every flower in the garden, every smile, to enjoy every chocolate, to savour every sip of wine.  As well as a theology of asceticism, we almost need also a theology of pleasure, recognizing all the pleasures which God packs into His world for us to enjoy. 

C.S. Lewis knew this well:  in his famous Screwtape Letters, the demon Screwtape observes of God, “He’s a hedonist at heart.  All those fasts and vigils and stakes and crosses are only a façade.  Or only like foam on the sea shore.  Out at sea, out in His sea, there is pleasure, and more pleasure.  He makes no secret of it; at His right hand are ‘pleasures for evermore’...He has filled the world with pleasures...Everything has to be twisted before it’s of any use to us.” (Screwtape, ch. XXII).  Calling asceticism “a façade” is perhaps not quite it, but the point Lewis makes in Screwtape’s indignant demonic rigorism is that joy is the final goal, and asceticism is merely the means to achieve it.  God likes pleasure; that is why He made it.  All the pleasures God made, small and great, are His gifts to us.  We don’t deserve any of them, and yet God continues daily to pour out His evidently endless cascade of blessing and beauty.  And all of it free.

            Well, maybe not quite free.  Though He needs nothing from us or from any, He does ask something in return—that we say “Thank you”, that we eat to our fill and then bless Him for it.  This response is not meant to be like the sullen and mechanical “Thank you” wrung from a child in obedience to the prompting of a parent.  It is meant to be the natural and spontaneous overflow of a full heart when we truly see with open eyes all that God does for us.  No doubt we often fail to show such gratitude.  I remember as if it were my own confession of sin the words of Garrison Keillor, in his anthology, Leaving Home:  “Thank you, dear God, for this good life and forgive us if we do not love it enough.”  Keillor is right.  Life is good.