Meditation 3: Avarice

It's the typical American urban story: Keeping up with the Joneses. We believe we are entitled to all that the riches of the world has to offer us, and still we want more-the best car, the biggest house on the cul-de-sac, the most amount of money in our savings, investment portfolios, and cash deposits.

Not that any of these things is bad in and of themselves. Security and well-being are basic needs in life. But the above scenario goes beyond these basic needs. It is actually a disease that affects our relationships on all fronts-personal, family, and community. Avarice kills our souls, and every relationship that is important to us.

St. John Cassian calls this sin a disease of the soul, and thus does not originate in the body. We feel hunger so we feed ourselves. Hunger is natural to the body, and so feeding ourselves is a right and proper response to this bodily need.Gluttony happens when we seek to satisfy our appetite beyond the body's need. We fall in love, and we seek to marry the one who has won our affections, and have conjugal relations with her/him, and as a result of this act of love a child is conceived and brought to into the world. The bodily urge to mate has its end-to bring new life into this world in a covenanted communion of love. Lust happens when we seek to satisfy these urges for their own sakes, and outside of the sacrament of marriage.

But avarice is different. It comes from outside of us, and in one sense, it is easier to ward off than gluttony and lust, which manipulate legitimate needs of the body. On the other hand, it is the hardest to eliminate once it has found a home in our hearts. St. Cassian calls it a passion not deriving from nature, but from the evil use of our free wills. All sins, of course, are consented to by our free wills, but avarice, being outside of the scope of our bodily passions, has to be invited in. Once it has taken residence, it begins its work in making the avaricious soul start to seek value in the amassing greater wealth and power, and greater lordship over others. St. Theodoros the Great Ascetic (9th century?) agrees with this assessment of avarice when he says that "love of praise and love of material wealth must not be regarded as pertaining to the body. Only the love of sensual pleasure pertains to the body. The fitting remedy for this is bodily hardship. Love of praise and love of material wealth are the progeny of ignorance. Having no experience of of true blessings and no knowledge of noetic realities, the soul has adopted such bastard offspring, thinking that riches can supply its needs." (Theoretikon, in Philokalia, vol. 2, p. 46)

We can see now that there is an even deeper issue involved in our first parents' temptation in the Garden than food. It was the lust for power over themselves, independent of God, who had given them their being, that motivated this defiance. And what did this give them? As the Spanish philosopher and social critic once observed, man is in the kind of predicament where he is "lord of all things", but not lord of himself. How ironic. In an attempt to be lord of himself, the avaricious soul has enslaved himself to the amassing of wealth and power, to no end but the satisfaction of his lust for power. Charlie Sheen's character, Bud Fox, in the film Wall Street comes to mind, as he surveys all that he has gained: a spacious Manhattan penthouse, the top position in the stock exchange firm, and a model-like girlfriend. But he is empty. What's all this for?

We find ourselves victims of our own desires, our private hell. This is the futility to which the avaricious are forever consinged to in the fourth circle of hell, the circle of the hoarders and spendthrifts. They are forever condemned to a futile form of competition, which gets them no where, "bump(ing) together, and where they bump, wheel right 'round, and return, trundling their loads again, shouting, 'Why chuck away?' 'Why grab so tight?'" (Inferno, Divine Comedy, p. 111) Both are the result of the disease of avarice.

This is why St. Paul calls avarice (i.e. the "love of money") the root of all evil. Notice that it is not money in and of itself that is the problem. It is the avaricious use of money that is at the root of many of the evils that strain relationships, wars and oppressions. Wealth in and of itself is not the problem. The problem comes when we acquire it in less than honest ways, and use it for our own selfish desires.

St. Cassian gives this dire warning to his monks: remember Annanias and Sapphira, Gehazi, and Judas Iscariot. The love of money caused Annanias and Sapphira to lie to the Apostles, thus bringing about their deaths. The love of money caused Gehazi in 2 Kings 4 to break out in leprosy as a divine judgement for his greed. The worst fate came upon Judas, who for the love of money betrayed his Lord. These are all cautionary tales of what happens to our souls when it is afflicted with the disease of avarice. For St. Cassian, pondering these fates should have a salutary effect on his monks, so that they do not abandon their high calling of ascetic struggle for the fleeting pleasures of wealth and gain. This ascetic struggle is one we are all called upon to engage in, and it begins with guarding our thoughts from the love of gain and wealth, bearing in mind the true and lasting wealth that the deifying grace of God affords us, a wealth that no moth or rust can corrupt, and that no theif can ever steal from us.

St. Patrick, Enlighterner of the Irish

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11554a.htm

A blessed St. Patrick's Day to all my Irish brethren, and to my brethren who are Irish at heart on this day. Remember his contribution to the cause of Christian faith in Ireland, and how in turn that God-protected land was instrumental in spreading forth the light of Christ to much of northern Europe.

Almighty and everlasting God, we thank thee for thy bishop and confessor Patrick, whom thou didst call to preach the Gospel to the Irish people. Raise up, we beseech thee, in this and every land evangelists and heralds of thy kingdom, that thy Church may proclaim the unsearchable riches of our Saviour Jesus Christ; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end. Amen.

Happy Ides of March

http://www.infoplease.com/spot/ides1.html

Islamic Calvinism!

So you say Islam needs a "Reformation", a "Luther" and "Calvin"? In Turkey, this is exactly what seems to be emerging in the Turkish city of Kayseri. All it means is this: the marriage between Islamic faith and free market economics. Here's the story:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4788712.stm

A Note to the Christian Right and Left...

from our Father among the Saints, St. Jerome:

"If anyone stray even a little from the straight and narrow way, it is a small matter whether he wander to the right hand or to the left. The great matter is that he hath lost the right way." "Liber I Comment. in cap 5 et 6 Matt.", from The Anglican Breviary

Second Meditation: On Lust

+In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

"Our second struggle is against the demon of unchastity and the desire of the flesh, a desire that begins to trouble man from the time of his youth. This harsh struggle has to be fought in both soul and body, and not simply in the soul, as is the case with other faults. We therefore have to fight it on two fronts." St. John Cassian, "On the Eight Vices," Philokalia: The Complete Text Compiled by St Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain and St. Makarios of Corinth (trans. G.E.H. Palmer et al). London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1979 Vol. I

A man is driving on a typically crowded L.A. freeway sytem, thinking about a business meeting, or an errand that he has to accomplish that day. His mind is thinking about so many different things at once: work, home, the great big parking lot called an L.A. freeway he is stuck on. All of a sudden, something in the distance grabs a hold of his attention. Moving with the traffic, the object comes into sharper focus. It looms larger and larger, until it is quite clear what has caught his attention-a billboard portraying a scantily-clad woman, selling, well, who knows-A brand of cheap beer? A line of barely visible clothing? A "Gentleman's Club"? What is being advertised takes a back seat to what readily begins to go on in this fellow's mind. "Wow, if only my wife/girlfriend looked like that!!!" What goes on in his mind begins to affect him physically, and before he knows it, the thought becomes desire, and the rest...well, you know how it will turn out.

St. Cassian hits us hard with the nature of this vice, and is uncompromising in the way that it is to be fought against: on the level of both body and soul. It is a two-front war that he invites us to engage in, continuing his theme of watchfulness against that most distracting and "delicious" of temptations. It is fought on the level of the body by physically refraining from sensual activities that lead to sin, such as watching sexually-charged movies, reading pornographic material, and putting ourselves in circumstances that contribute to sexual sin.

But this is the easy part. There is an even more intense struggle, one that takes place in our soul. St. Cassian exhorts us to "guard the heart from base thoughts," because "out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, unchastity." (Matthew 15:19) Lust is a perversion of love, its misdirection which turns it from God and the good of the other as its proper focus to the self as the primary object of fulfillment. There is an inherent selfishness in a lustful thought (though not totally, as I will explain below), because the object is not necessarily to seek the other's good, but to satisfy our own base desires. Fighting these thoughts becomes the most intense and rigorous part of our struggle.

But St. Cassian also knows that ascetic struggle alone is insufficient to fight this battle. He specifically enjoins his monks first "not to trust our own strength and ascetic practices," but to trust "in the help of God, our Master."

Secondly, St. Cassian highlights another essential weapon in this struggle-self restraint. This means, on the level of the body, not readily gratifying our desire for pleasure (as with gluttony). On the level of the soul, this means, again, to guard our thoughts. St. Cassian even goes so far as to suggest to his monastic charges that they refrain thinking about all women, even their mothers!

Avoidance of lustful thoughts may not require such draconian measures for those of us living in the world. However, there is a lesson to be learned here. For St. Cassian, this is a war, a spritual war. He goes quickly from physical to spiritual struggle when he says that "virginity (chastity) is achieved not so much by abstaining from intersourse with women as by holiness and purity of soul." This level of spritual warfare requires nothing less than contrition of heart, prayer and repentance. The purpose is always the healing of our base desires so that we can rightly direct the heart to God, thereby turning our lusts into love.

St. Maximus the Confessor sheds light on the nature of lust (and other vices)when he calls it "the wrong use of our conceptual images of things, which leads us to misuse the things themselves." Sexual intercourse, when performed in a loving relationship between a husband and a wife, is good and proper. And for St. Maximus, as for the Fathers in general, there is a primary purpose to it: the beggeting of children. Like eating, which is undertaken for the primary purpose of sustaining life, so with sexual intersourse. A misuse of food leads to gluttony, and a misuse of sex brings about incontinence.

In Dante's Inferno, the Circle of the Incontinent is the second circle, just below Limbo (the Circle of the Righteous Pagans). Here they are carried away by a black wind, forever adrift in a torment of endless futility. The lovers who in life were carried away by their lustful passions now experience these passions for what they really are, without the illusion of pleasure (See D. Sayers' note to Canto V of Inferno). This is the tragedy of the lovers Paolo and Francesca. Francesca da Rimini explains their predicament, capturing in truth this fundamental reality about lust:

Love, that so soon takes hold in the gentle breast,
Took this lad with the lovely body they tore
From me; the way of it leaves me still distressed.

Love, that to no loved heart remits love's score,
Took me with such great joy of him, that see!
It holds me yet and never shall leave me more.

At first it may seem that this is a nice romantic image, but there is a more fundamental truth here. You see, what Paolo and Francesca experience now is the effects of lustful passion, and what they mistakenly call "love" turns out to be a whirlwind of unfulfilled desire and yearning. There is no hope for Paolo and Francesca to ever truly be united in true love. They simply drift. As Sayers notes, in hell, the sin, which in life is so delicious, is now seen for what it truly is, stripped of its cosiness.

And yet, this sin, for Dante, is only the beginning. Though St. Cassian ranks unchastity above gluttony in his catalog of vices, still it is not the worst of sins. After the conquest of lust, for St. Cassian, there is a yet greater strugglein which we are to be engaged. There are as yet more powerful demons to fight. That is why lust is ranked so low on the scale of vices. Dorothy Sayers illuminates truth by saying that lust is "a type of shared sin...there is mutuality in it,", and therefore it is not WHOLLY selfish. This is important to keep in mind, because the Church has never taught that lust is the worst of all sins. Again, there are more powerful demons against which we are to fight. Let us not deceive ourselves into thinking that once we have conquered lust, we are now home-free. This is only the beginning.

How many times do we allow our eyes to "wander"? A thought enters. We can do either two things-repel it, or harbor it, allowing to descend into our hearts. We try to do the former, but find ourselves succumbing to the latter. Thought becomes desire. Desire becomes a movement to gratify passion, and this leads to action. Action leads to habit. Sinful habit leads to a hell-bent life. Therefore, says St. Cassian, cut lustful passion at the very beginning, in your thoughts. Replace this vice with chastity, which brings with it a singleness of purpose-the very life of the Holy Trinity, and the joys of "Deep Heaven."

First Meditation: On Gluttony

"I shall speak first about control of the stomach, the opposite of gluttony, and about how to fast and what and how much to eat. I shall say nothing on my own account, but only what I have received from the Holy Fathers. They have given us only a single rule for fasting or a single standard and measure for eating, because not everyone has the same strength ; age, illness or delicacy of body create differences. But they have given us all a single goal: to avoid overeating and the filling of our bellies." St. John Cassian, "On the Eight Vices," Philokalia (ed. Ware et al).

+In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

Few things bring such a sense of sensual pleasure than a good meal. It is attended with such conviviality, with celebrations such as weddings, birthdays and even funerals. Whatever the event, we can usually count on a generous provision of food. Food seems to make its way even into some of the less social aspects of our daily lives-somehow a movie or a show is enjoyed much more with a sandwich or some other snack.

St. John Cassian points us to the true and most essential aspect of food. Like other things, it is directed towards a goal-the nourishment of the body. But gluttony, by its very nature, subverts this purpose. Instead of nourishing and strengthening him for the service of God, food, through gluttony, is turned to other purposes-the gratifying of the flesh, and what the Apostle calls the "pride of life."

Dante's Divine Comedy reveals the true essence of this sin, as those lost souls in the circle of the gluttons partake of a cold mouthfull of mud and muck. In Dante's hell, this sin is devoid of all the conviviality that attends it in this life, and all we are left with is what Dame Dorothy Sayers called a "cold sensuality, a sodden and filthy spiritual wretchedness." The images of the three-headed dog Cerberus, ravenously eating the miry much that Dante's guide, Virgil, throws at him, and the unfortunate character Ciacco, condemned to this state for eternity, drive home to us the animal-like nature of this vice. In hell, gluttony is no longer fun.

St. John Cassian gives the remedy-the holy discipline of fasting. He is careful, of course, to point out that there is no "single rule" for everyone, thus revealing the reasonableness of the patristic genius. There is, however, one goal to our fasting, which our holy father St. John Cassian lays down as "do not be deceived by the filling of the belly." The identification of gluttony with deception is quite intruiging here. Ultimately, gluttony is a deceives us into thinking that we need sensual stimulation and satisfaction as replacements for our one true need-God.

Often I must ask myself whether or not I need what I want to eat. But this is a question I often don't want to ask myself. Why, after all, ask probing questions about my motivations that will simply "rain on my parade," and a good feast? St. John Cassian gives a sober answer-THAT YOU BE NOT DECEIVED!

Perhaps when we engage in gluttonous activities, we are open to a great deal of other passions, which derail us from our main goal of uniting ourselves to Him who is our ultimate source of being, the One who wishes to bring us to a higher realm of complete humanity and fulfillment that comes only through sanctification (theosis). Instead, we are deceived into thinking that nothing is higher than our own sensual pleasures and desires. The gluttonous spirit is nothing else than the spirit of self-indulgence, the root of which goes back to the sin of our first parents. It is no accident, I think, that the first sin involved food.

But our deification also involves food-bread and wine, transformed into the body, blood, soul and divinity of the God-Man Christ, who is our bread of life. As Fr. Alexander Schmemann, rightly observed, man needs many things, but his first and primary need is for God. Fasting brings about self-control, and helps us to see that behind all our hungers, there is a deeper hunger still-the hunger for God.

Beer: The Perfect Lenten Meal

A bit of pre-lenten levity.
William Hogarth's Beer Street
Beer! happy produce of our isle,
Can sinewy strength impart,
And wearied with fatigue and toil,
Can cheer each manly heart.
Labour and art upheld by thee,
Successfully advance,
We quaff thy balmy juice with glee,
And water leave to France.
Genius of Health! thy grateful tasteRivals the cup of Jove,
And warms each English generous breast
With liberty and love.

St. John Cassian's On the Eight Vices: A Series of Lenten Meditations

With all the festivities of Shrove Tuesday (for those Orthodox Christians following the Western Rite), I am reminded of that late medieval Spanish ditty composed for that day: Hoy comamos y bebamos porque manana ayunaremos (Today let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we fast). Of course, you Russians have your blini fests (birreta tip to Huw Raphael).

Thinking ahead, of course, I ponder upon my lenten discipline-spiritual readings, meditations on Scripture and the Fathers, fasting, giving more towards efforts to feed the hungry and clothe the naked, etc.-in essence, living as we should live throughout the year. A fair amount of that time is ususally given over to what we should get rid of from our lives, i.e. a spiritual spring cleaning.

For this purpose, I will be posting a number of meditations on St. John Cassian's On the Eight Vices, from his Spiritual Conferences, beginning tomorrow (Ash Wednesday). I will make a few forays into Dante's Divine Comedy and St. Maximus the Confessor. Stay tuned!

Jephthah Holley, +Requiescat in Pace

Around 5am this morning, Jeph Holley, the son of Deacon Stephen Holley of St. Michael Orthodox Church, Whittier, was found dead in his bathroom by his 7 year-old daughter. He had had a heart transplant two years ago, and recently had double pneumonia. Of your charity pray for his soul, and for the Deacon and his whole family.

O God, whose mercies cannot be numbered; Accept our prayers on behalf of the soul of thy servant departed, and grant him an entrance into the land of light and joy, in the fellowship of thy saints; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

NCC's "Sua Culpa"

Here they go again! The National Council of Churches, faced with dwindling numbers of congregants, are nonetheless hell-bent (I mean this in every possible way) on their own downhill-slide to permanent irrelevance. And of course, whose sins are they confessing? Not their own, but George W. Bush's. Who is leading this "litany"? I'm ashamed to say, it is a member of my own communion, Fr. Leonid Kishkovsky, of the Orthodox Church in America (OCA). A humble request to the OCA: Please follow us Antiochians out of this Babylon.

Here's the scoop from Alan Wisdom on OrthodoxyToday.org: http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/articles6/WisdomNCC.php

Militant Islam the New Communism?

This is perhaps one of the most significant statements coming from moderate Muslim writers and intellectuals. This should teach us not to paint Muslims with such a broad brush, as well as to drive home the fact that militant fundamentalist Islam is not good for Muslims either. God bless these good souls. Story from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4763520.stm:


Writers issue cartoon row warning

The cartoons provoked outrage across the Muslim worldSalman Rushdie is among a dozen writers to have put their names to a statement in a French weekly paper warning against Islamic "totalitarianism".
The writers say the violence sparked by the publication of cartoons satirising the Prophet Muhammad shows the need to fight for secular values and freedom.
The statement is published in Charlie Hebdo, one of several European papers to reprint the caricatures.
The images, first published in Denmark, have angered Muslims across the world.
One showed the Prophet Muhammad, whose depiction is banned in Islam, as a terrorist bomber.
Many newspapers defended their decision to reprint the cartoons on the grounds of freedom of expression.
'Global threat'
Almost all of those who have signed the statement have experienced difficulties with Islamic militancy first-hand, says the BBC's Caroline Wyatt in Paris.
They include Dutch MP and filmmaker Ayaan Hirsi Ali and exiled Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen.
Philippe Val - director of Charlie Hebdo"After having overcome fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, the world now faces a new global threat: Islamism," the manifesto says.
"We, writers, journalists, intellectuals, call for resistance to religious totalitarianism and for the promotion of freedom, equal opportunity and secular values for all."
The clashes over the cartoons "revealed the necessity of the struggle for these universal values," the statement continues.
"It is not a clash of civilisations nor an antagonism of West and East that we are witnessing, but a global struggle that confronts democrats and theocrats."
The writers said they refused to accept that Muslim men and women "should be deprived of their rights to equality, liberty or secularity in the name of respect for culture or tradition".
They also said they would not give up their critical spirit out of fear of being accused of Islamophobia.
"Islamism is a reactionary ideology which kills equality, freedom and secularism wherever it is present," the writers added, saying it is nurtured by fears and frustrations.

STATEMENT SIGNATORIES
Salman Rushdie - Indian-born British writer with fatwa issued ordering his execution for The Satanic Verses
Ayaan Hirsi Ali - Somali-born Dutch MP
Taslima Nasreen - exiled Bangladeshi writer, with fatwa issued ordering her execution
Bernard-Henri Levy - French philosopher
Chahla Chafiq - Iranian writer exiled in France
Caroline Fourest - French writer
Irshad Manji - Ugandan refugee and writer living in Canada
Mehdi Mozaffari - Iranian academic exiled in Denmark
Maryam Namazie - Iranian writer living in Britain
Antoine Sfeir - director of French review examining Middle East
Ibn Warraq - US academic of Indian/Pakistani origin