What Good is the Holy Fire?

The so-called “Holy Fire” is the name given to the fire that appears on ends of the candles of the Patriarch of Jerusalem and others every Holy Saturday.  The Patriarch, accompanied by a church crammed filled with others, awaits for the annual miracle every Holy Saturday.  On that day the Patriarch strips himself of his holy robes and enters the Tomb of Christ with a bundle of unlit tapers, says certain prayers, and then awaits for his tapers to be miraculously lit from heaven.  He is not disappointed:  his tapers are miraculously lit every year and he emerges from the Tomb with the flame to the tumultuous shouting of everyone in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.  The light is shared with everyone there, and then taken to others who transport it back to their homes, sometimes in far countries.  This year the Holy Fire and miraculous light has been carried back to those in North America.  My own little parish of St. Herman’s in Langley, B.C. received the light from our neighbouring parish across the border in the State of Washington on a Saturday night, and we shared it with our own parishioners the following Sunday morning.  As I write the fire remains burning in our family icon corner, and in the icon corners of many in our parish.  Some may ask the question, “What good is the Holy Fire?  How does it help anyone?  What’s the point?” 

            I am not here concerned to answer those who deny the miraculous nature of the original gift every Holy Saturday.  Those who like to read may refer to such volumes as Holy Fire by Haris Skarlakidis.  Others may Google the event and witness it on Youtube as they wish.  I have seen on Facebook (that faithful oracle) a video debunking the miracle in which the debunkers produce fire without the aid of a lighter, and this, they assert, is how the fraud is accomplished every year.  Since the Holy Fire has been filmed as not singeing hair during the first fifteen minutes of its miraculous existence, I invite the debunkers to reproduce this experience also, and subject their facial hair to the same treatment of washing in their newly-produced non-miraculous flame so that we may observe the results.  If their own hair does not burn (as the hair first subjected to the Holy Fire does not burn) I will be interested.  And greatly surprised.

            My focus here is on not the sceptics who doubt the miraculous nature of the Holy Fire.  My focus rather is on the significance of the miracle itself, and I address the question, “What good is the Holy Fire?”  That significance, I suggest, is two-fold.

            The first is that the Holy Fire witnesses to the miraculous nature of the Christian Faith itself.  Many New Testament scholars since the time of David Strauss (d. 1874) have assumed the principle that the miraculous does not exist, but they are fools—highly educated and perhaps smarter than you and I, but still fools nonetheless.  In fact the ministry of Jesus was attended by a multitude of miracles (acknowledged even by His enemies, though they attributed these miracles to the power of the devil), and His life culminated in the miracle of His resurrection from the dead.  That miracle was quickly succeeded by the miracle of Pentecost and other miracles done by the hands of the apostles.  Miracles have abounded and still abound in the Church, which is miraculous throughout.  

In fact in every generation the Church survives by new miracles, such as the miracle of the new birth and the transformation of bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ.  The official name for such a regular supply of miracles is “sacraments”.  One may also mention other miracles such as miracles of healing through the hands of the clergy and the relics of saints, but that hardly matters.  The main miracle is that of the new birth, whereby sinners are re-created as the children of God and the co-heirs of Christ.  This reveals that Christianity is not a philosophy, but the presence of the living Christ in our midst.  Dead philosophers do not work miracles; a living Saviour does.  The fact that the Holy Fire comes as a miracle from heaven every year expresses and confirms the miraculous nature of the Christian Faith.  Miracles, of course, come when they are needed, and it seems that the Holy Fire first came when it was needed most—during the time of the Islamic oppression of the Church, when the Christians suffering under the yoke of Muhammad most needed confirmation that their faith in the crucified and risen Christ was true. 

            The second thing to note about the Holy Fire is that it witnesses to the way that Christianity is spread—i.e. from person to person, just as the flame is spread from person to person, beginning at its epicenter in Jerusalem.  We note a kind of recapitulation of the original spread of the Gospel:  the Gospel spread from the upper room in Jerusalem, then to Judea, then to Samaria, then to the ends of the earth, even as the Lord had said (Acts 1:8).  That is, it spread from person to person, as each one spoke the Word and gossiped to his neighbour what he or she had heard about Jesus.  Like the flame spreading from candle to candle, so the Word of the Gospel spread from person to person.  That new Gospel reality not only spread geographically, but also temporally, so that the same Gospel message spread from person to person across the globe, and also from decade to decade and across the centuries.  The shorthand for such a method of transmission is called “Holy Tradition”.  Just as the one Gospel was once spread throughout the centuries from apostolic Jerusalem and reached as far as our own parish in Langley, so the same flame is now transferred from candle to candle, beginning in Jerusalem and eventually even reaching the west coast of British Columbia.  The flame now burning in my icon-corner is the same flame which the Patriarch of Jerusalem first received on a recent Holy Saturday, and the faith we confess in our parish is the same faith which the apostles confessed in Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost, when another miraculous fire descended upon their heads.

            It is true, of course, that having the Holy Fire in our icon-corners does not provide any shortcut to sanctity, much less any substitute for it.  Whether or not we have the Holy Fire we still need to strive mightily for holiness and pray and fast and read our Bibles and go to Church.  If we do not do these essential things, it will matter little whether or not we have the Holy Fire burning in our icon-corners.  But though it does not provide a substitute for holiness, it does provide an expression of our own inter-connectedness with those other Orthodox who have accepted the Holy Fire with gratitude and of our place within the communion of saints generally.  We are not alone, though the walk of faith can sometimes feel very lonely.  When I look at the flame burning upon my own little icon-corner, I cannot help but think of all the multitude of my brothers and sisters who have also received that miraculous gift, and who are perhaps thinking of people like me.  We are all one, united within the same fire of faith, a flame first kindled two millennia ago in Jerusalem.

            

Part Two: Of Homosexual Christians and their Struggle

In a recent blog piece I looked at the issue of gay Orthodox Christians who embraced and celebrated their homosexuality and who were sexually active and who received Holy Communion in Orthodox churches.  In this piece I would like to look at the issue of homosexual Orthodox Christians who embrace the teaching of their Church that homosexual desires are disordered and who struggle against giving in to those desires through sexual activity.  I will not deal here with the question of whether or not one is “born” with such an orientation or the question of whether or not such an orientation can be overcome.  I will look rather at the question of what the path might be for a gay Orthodox Christian as he or she strives to please God in an Orthodox Christian parish.

In all instances, a Christian (and especially a pastor) must embrace the homosexual with love, even if the gay person is not yet ready to repent and strive for wholeness.  I remember one person in an Orthodox community in the American mid-west.  He shared with the priest that he wanted to join the Orthodox Church, but said that he was gay and asked if this was a problem.  The priest replied, “No, not at all, but you would have to repent of homosexual activity and embrace chastity.”  The person responded that he was not ready to do that, since he was currently in love with his boyfriend.  After much conversation and listening, the priest and the inquirer prayed together, embraced, and parted as friends.  When later the young man got a tattoo, he came straight back to the priest the same day and asked him to bless his new tattoo.  The priest was happy to do so.  The man knew that the Church could not change its dogmas or alter its standards for him, but he still felt loved and not condemned. He was welcome to attend worship, though he could not become a catechumen.  I am told that he still regularly visits the Church for Liturgy and enjoys the warm loving atmosphere found in the parish.

What about homosexual Christians who have repented and who struggle to embrace chastity?  Their way is a hard and heroic one, for they sometimes find themselves vilified by Christians who reject them simply for having homosexual desires as well as by those in the gay community who vilify them for refusing to celebrate and express their homosexual desires.  Thus, adding to the burden of embracing chastity is the added burden of loneliness.  That is why (to quote from 1992 OCA episcopal encyclical Synodal Affirmations on Marriage, Family, Sexuality and the Sanctity of Life), they are “to be helped to admit these feelings to themselves and to others who will not reject or harm them”. 

In this they are in principle no different from anyone else in the church community who struggles with addictions and sinful desires (an addiction to pornography comes to mind).  In striving for victory over these desires, they should seek help through prayer, confession, weekly Holy Communion, and perhaps the encouragement of close friends whose love they trust.  They need not feel that they are left alone in their struggle, since in Christ everyone must help bear the burdens of the others.  It may be helpful to point out that the homosexual Christian who has committed to a life of chastity and celibacy deals with the same or similar struggles as a heterosexual single Christian does.  Though the single heterosexual Christian may one day marry, while their singleness lasts, the struggle for celibacy is also a burden sometimes hard to bear.

In that encyclical mentioned above, one also finds the words, “Men and women with homosexual feelings and emotions are to be treated with the understanding, acceptance, love, justice and mercy due to all human beings… Assistance is to be given to those who deal with persons of homosexual orientation in order to help them with their thoughts, feelings and actions in regard to homosexuality”.  This assumes (correctly) that homosexual desires are not sinful in themselves, any more than a heterosexual desire for fornication is sinful in itself.  Rather it is the fulfillment of such desires through action that alone is sinful.  The homosexual Christian is primarily a brother or sister in Christ, and must be treated as such.  He or she is defined by that commitment to Christ and their communicant status, not by their homosexual desires.  Their homosexual desires constitute part of their brokenness, but in fact every communicant in broken in some way.  As long as one renounces one’s sin and strives against it in a struggle for wholeness and holiness, that brokenness is not a barrier to communion with Christ. 

It also should not be a barrier to normal relationships in the parish.  There is no reason why a homosexual man (or woman) should not run the Sunday School or the Youth Group or sit on Parish Council or read liturgically or serve in the altar.  Like anyone else in the parish they should be included in the day-to-day sharing of social life, lunches, and parish events.  Their inner struggles and temptations should have no bearing upon their place in the Church, any more than the struggles of anyone else should.  After all, they are communed with the same formula as anyone else.  When they stand before the Chalice, the priest does not say, “The homosexual N. partakes of the precious and holy Body and Blood”, but rather, “The servant of God N. partakes of the precious and holy Body and Blood”.  Life is more than sexual orientation, and our life and ministry in the Church cannot be defined by orientation or ascetical struggle.   

The current western battle for the full legitimation of homosexuality, often pursued with draconian fervour, has become perhaps the issue of our age, and the sounds of battle can sometimes deafen us to other noises—noises such as the song of the coming Kingdom.  Now is the time for struggle, as faithful Orthodox homosexual Christians struggle for sanctity, other faithful Orthodox singles struggle to preserve chastity, and all faithful Orthodox struggle to survive the deluge of lies which inundate us all.  But a time is coming when such struggles will be a thing of the past, when we will step into the calm and sunlit meadow of the age to come to sing a song which knows no ending and enjoy a day which will know no evening.  Then all our struggles will find their full and true reward, and sanctity will come as effortlessly as breathing.  Even now we stand on tip-toe and await that day.  We can struggle knowing our painful podvigs will not last forever.  The cry of all Christians, homosexual or straight, married or single, is Maranatha!  The Lord is coming, and He is bringing our eternal reward.                                                                  

           

Sanfilippo’s “Conjugal Friendship”

Recently the Public Orthodoxy site has published a piece by Giacomo Sanfilippo under the title “Conjugal Friendship”.  In it Sanfilippo writes, “To the question, ‘Can two persons of the same gender ‘have sex’ with each other?’ we hear from Holy Tradition a resounding no. Yet if we ask, ‘Can two persons of the same gender form a bond in which ‘the two become one?’ the scales begin to fall from our eyes. Holy Tradition possesses in germinal form everything necessary to articulate, thoughtfully and cautiously, an Orthodox theology and spirituality of what we now call same-sex love, adequate to the pastoral needs of the 21^st century”.  Like all liberals and heretics of every age, of course the claim is made that the new heresy is actually just the old Orthodoxy dressed in modern garb.  Those who have been following the LGBQT debate until now will recognize that by the “the pastoral needs of the 21^st century” is meant simply conformity to the worldly spirit of our age and the insistent demands of secular western culture.

            Sanfilippo is quite right in pointing out that in previous ages, the “ideal of friendship as constitutive of ‘one soul in two bodies’” has a long and venerable history.  He cites the writings of Plato and Aristotle, and the examples of David and Jonathan.  (Making Christ and John another example is pushing it, to say the least, and “Christ and John’s embrace in icons of the Mystical Supper”--picture above--is simply disturbing visual trash.)  He might also have added as a champion of the glory of Philia the writings of C. S. Lewis, especially in his book The Four Loves.  In it, Lewis opined that friendship was a virtue under-valued in his day because it was so little experienced in his day. 

Of course Lewis’ day is not our day (he died in 1963), and the disease of sexualizing everything which was seizing western culture by the throat in Lewis’ day has progressed far and has thoroughly throttled our own culture today.  Even then Lewis gave fair warning, cautioning against the idea that “every firm and serious friendship is really homosexual”.  In fairness to Sanfilippo, his paper stops short of suggesting that all deep same-sex friendships are at base covertly homosexual.  But Sanfilippo does make clear that by “conjugal friendship” he means what we would identify as gay marriage.

            There several problems with the details in his presentation.  By saying that the monastic/ liturgical rite of “brother-making” (Greek adelphopoiesis) “precedes by a century or two that of marriage”, he gives the impression that somehow the late Byzantine rite of “brother-making”—i.e. sanctifying a deep bond between friends for a specific purpose—somehow shares some sort of ontological parity with marriage.  (Shades of John Boswell!)  Otherwise why mention the timing at all?  In fact of course marriage itself did not arise after brother-making, but in the Garden.  But the fact that the current rite of marriage in its Byzantine liturgical form continued to evolve after the form of brother-making ceased evolving is irrelevant.  If anything it shows the shortened shelf-life of the form of brother-making and its limited use.  The rite of adelphopoiesis did not continue to evolve liturgically because the need for it ceased to be felt.

            Sanfilippo also says that the term “sexual orientation” is modern, and its use “as a marker of personal identity” was unknown to the ancients.  That is true, but that does not mean that the ancients felt no such desires, or that their words condemning homosexual activity no longer apply to us today.  It simply means that they did not share our own modern obsession with personal identity.

            Also problematic is his anachronistic identification of certain details of friendship as suggesting a sexual component to the friendship.  Mentions of “patristic encomiums to friendship that have an almost romantic quality about them”, or an icon which “depicts SS. Theodore of Tyre and Theodore Stratelates in military attire holding hands like any modern couple” are misleading in the extreme. Again, Lewis could have warned him.  “Kisses, tears and embraces are not in themselves evidence of homosexuality” he wrote.  They are only evidence that all ancient friendships had a physical component to them, and that the modern disease of sexualizing everything, including friendship, had not taken hold of the ancients.   Hard as it may be for some today to believe, a friendship could be physical, and still not sexual. 

            The main problems with Sanfilippo’s thesis are twofold.  First, he fails to see that friendship need not be confined to two persons.  His relentless pairing of friends and talk about “one soul in two bodies” fails to see that friendship need not be so confined.  Again Lewis:  “Two, far from being the necessary number for Friendship, is not even the best...True friendship is the least jealous of loves.  Two friends delight to be joined by a third, and three by a fourth…They can then say, as the blessed souls say in Dante, ‘Here comes one who will augment our loves…’”  Sanfilippo’s insistence on regarding friendship as consisting of two persons when real friendship does not so confine itself reveals his secret agenda.  Friendship is not necessarily the exclusive union of two that he would make it.  He is not in fact talking about Friendship and Philia, but about Marriage and Eros.  For Eros is exclusively and jealously about two persons, as the Song of Solomon shows.  By focusing relentlessly upon friendship as pairing (e.g. talk of “the two becom[ing] more perfectly a single I”) he distorts the true nature of friendship.

            The second and most fundamental error in Sanfilippo’s message is the sexualisation of Friendship.  Friendship may be conjugal, if one marries one’s friend and soul-mate.  But most friendships are not conjugal—that is, they are not sexual.   The fact that healthy friendship is not exclusive, jealous, or confined to two persons reveals this.  One may have four friends or more, but (in Christian thought) only one spouse.  Conjugal union is, by definition, a union of two and only two, because it is sexual.  Friends stand symbolically side by side; spouses, face to face.  The face to face posture of spouses expresses, both symbolically and physically, the sexuality of their union, and its essential difference from Friendship.  Sanfilippo’s talk of “two persons of the same gender form[ing] a bond in which ‘the two become one’” deliberately sexualizes a non-sexual bond.  Two persons of the same gender can indeed have a friendship and form a bond.  But Sanfilippo’s use of the phrase “the two become one” (from the Biblical description of marriage) introduces an alien element into the bond.   He is not helping scales to fall from our eyes, but simply our minds to become confused.  That confusion, part of a modern secular sexualisation of practically everything in our culture, is typical of homosexual concerns.  It is also characteristic of Public Orthodoxy, and Fordham University.

Part One: Of Gay Sex and Leaven

What does the Orthodox Church think about gay sex?  The official answer is not hard to find.  The Orthodox Church has always condemned gay sex as sinful and as something therefore not allowed to Christians.  The case of gay sex is not much different from that of fornication (i.e. illicit “straight” sex)—fornication has also been condemned as sinful and is also not allowed to Christians.  If a Christian man is a fornicator (i.e. one who routinely and without repentance has sex with a person to whom he is not married), then that person may not receive Holy Communion until he has repented and gone to Confession.  It’s as simple as that.  That is the teaching of Church, however much it may be currently unpopular and however much some pastors may shrink from proclaiming and enforcing it. 

            Confirmation of Orthodoxy’s condemnation of gay sex may be found in several places.  In the OCA’s 1992 Synodal Affirmations on Marriage, Family, Sexuality, and the Sanctity of Life, for example, the section on homosexuality teaches that  “Homosexuality is to be approached as the result of humanity’s rebellion against God, and so against its own nature and well-being.  It is not to be taken as a way of living and acting for men and women made in God’s image and likeness…Those instructed and counseled in Orthodox Christian doctrine and ascetical life who still want to justify their behavior may not participate in the Church’s sacramental mysteries, since to do so would not help, but harm them.”  The section goes on to say that persons with homosexual feelings are to be treated with understanding, and that Orthodox Christians who struggle with such feelings and who nonetheless strive to live according to the Orthodox way of life may receive Holy Communion—in the same way as any person struggling to overcome a sinful passion must be welcomed.  But the basic message is clear enough:  homosexual practice is sinful and thus incompatible with life as an Orthodox communicant.

            In today’s western culture where the aggressive promotion and celebration of gay sexuality is everywhere in the forefront and where refusal to celebrate it is deemed reprehensible, it takes courage to proclaim the Church’s teaching.  Indeed some Orthodox not only shrink from doing so due to lack of courage, but also inwardly dissent from that teaching themselves.  It is not because the teaching is not rooted in the Scriptures and the Fathers.  The Scriptures and the Fathers clearly condemn homosexual practice, and the dissenters do not usually say, “Well who cares?  Let’s junk the Scriptures and the Fathers.”  Orthodoxy is the Church of the Fathers par excellence, and such a wholesale and full-throated rejection will simply not sell.  They are other, more subtle ways of throwing the Scriptures and the Fathers into the ash-can.  One can disingenuously ask questions (“Don’t get upset; I’m only asking the question!”) which suggest that the Scriptures and the Fathers do not condemn homosexual practice in itself, but only when done promiscuously. 

Thus, though St. Paul condemned homosexual acts in Romans 1 as “contrary to nature” (Greek para physin), these revisionists suggest that it was only the case of men promiscuously using boys for recreational sex that Paul objected to and that he would’ve had no problem with the case of two homosexual men living together in faithful monogamy.  It is an astonishing thing to say about Paul, who was after all a first-century Jew, but it does show the desperation of their exegesis.  Or one can talk in the social media about “a new anthropology” using many long words in an attempt to dazzle the simple, when in fact what we have here is not a new anthropology, but only a novel interpretation of the old texts.  What is new is not the anthropology, but the anthropologists, the sight of Christians openly contradicting their own received Tradition. 

Or, perhaps most easily, while not openly condemning the Church’s official teaching, one can refuse to enforce it.  That is, one can knowingly allow men or women who are actively homosexual to stand in the Communion line and knowingly given them Holy Communion.  If anyone objects, one can respond with a barrage of fine words about love, acceptance, the fact that we are all sinners, the dangers of Phariseeism, and Christ’s universal love.  Or, perhaps better yet, one can respond by not saying anything, and pretending that the split between what we say and what we practice does not actually exist.

There is, however, a problem with this even apart from the breath-taking hypocrisy of those giving Holy Communion to unrepentant homosexuals despite the clear teaching of the Church about the sinfulness of homosexuality.  It is the problem of leaven.

St. Paul warns the people of Corinth that they must not ignore unrepentant sinners in their community and continue to commune them as if their sin did not exist because such sin would work in their church community the same way that leaven (or yeast) works in a lump of dough.  That is, just as leaven eventually effects everything in the lump, so such sin grows and effects everything in the church.  He used the example of leaven; in our modern culture where each household no longer bakes its own bread, perhaps the example of cancer might have more resonance.  If cancer is allowed to stay in the body, it will spread and will eventually effect everything, with death as the final result.  St. Paul’s solution and order:  “Drive out the wicked person from among you.”  The issue is not just the sinner’s individual fate, but the fate of the entire community.  The unrepentant sinner must be expelled lest the health and spiritual life of the entire community be imperilled.  “What have I,” said Paul, “to do with judging outsiders?  Is it not those inside the church whom you are to judge?” (1 Corinthians 6:12-13).  And of course by “driving out”, Paul does not mean running them out of town on a rail, but simply depriving them of the Eucharist.  Such excommunication is consistent with love and sensitive pastoral care.  It is in fact rooted in concern for the person’s soul, and aims ultimately at the person’s repentance.

That is the problem today of allowing unrepentant practising homosexuals to receive the Eucharist.  It imperils the health of the entire Church, giving everyone the idea that the Church now accepts as its own the shifting standards of the World.  For of course most people in the Church are not well-read in the Scriptures and the Fathers, and are even less likely to read the encyclicals of bishops.  But they do know what they see happening before their eyes every Sunday.  They know that Joe and John or Susan and Stephanie are living together in homosexual union and are still being given the Eucharist.  What else can the faithful conclude but that the Church has somehow changed its position on this issue?  This therefore now becomes the New Normal.  We will have indeed embraced “a new anthropology”, not as the fruit of considered theological re-evaluation, but simply through worldly praxis and lack of courage to protest it.  If it is true, as our bishops once said, that the Faith is preserved by the mass of the faithful and not by bishops alone, it is the task of the faithful to protest whenever they see the Tradition being trampled.  Otherwise we will not really be Orthodox followers of the Fathers, but simply worldlings with a Byzantine flavour.

Next week:  Part Two:  Of Gay Christians and their Struggle