Initiation, not information. Worship, not belief.

   

I think therefore I am ? I believe Christ is God, therefore I am a Christian ?

Well, as St James says, even the demons believe. Indeed, they have a perfect theology.

"What if, instead of starting from the assumption that human beings are thinking things, we started from the conviction that human beings are first and foremost lovers?”

From James K.A. Smith's book "You Are What You Love"

"The key is to know that love is a habit, not merely a choice. ... Learning to love God is like learning to play Bach: it requires daily immersion in habits and practices that train the 'muscles' of my heart to desire, and thus do, what it ought."

Gracey Olmstead adds in her review.

Georges Florovsky writes, 

“From the very beginning Christianity was not primarily a doctrine, but exactly a community. There was not only a Message to be proclaimed and delivered, and Good News to be declared. There was precisely a New Community, distinct and peculiar, in the process of growth and formation, to which members were called and recruited."

Florovsky's assessment highlights the priority of the ecclesial body over its own message and doctrine. The goal of early Christian preaching was not to establish and defend doctrine, but to inaugurate and develop a community of disciples.

As Francis Young points out, "religion" was not about doctrines or dogma's, but ritual. You shared a meal with your god, there was a communion, a give and take, perhaps even an exchange of life - bios, biological life, from flesh and blood, exchanged for the life of God, to ZOE, spiritual life.

His life for mine.

It is about initiation, not information.

Orthodoxy, as McGuckin writes, is not a “system of doctrines. . . . Orthodoxy is the living mystery of Christ’s pres­ ence in the world: a resurrectional power of life. It cannot be understood, except by being fully lived out.” He continues: “Our God is the One Who Is. When the disciple is in ontological harmony with this God, the disci­ ple also comes into life.”

Religion is a habitus, a disposition of the soul to be in the world a certain way.

The grammar of God is spoken in communal performance of song, praise, and thanksgiving.

James KA Smith says,

“Discipleship, becoming Christ-like, empowered by the Spirit to image God to the world is not magic. Nor is it merely intellectual. It’s a matter of re-forming our loves, re-narrativing our identities, re-habituating our virtue. And that is centered in the practices of the people of God gathered by the Spirit around Christ’s Word and the table.

Love takes practice. Worship is our gymnasium. . . .”

In liturgy, we are immersed in a narrative that shapes and forms the way we inhabit our lives.

James KA Smith ends with this :

That's why the Triune God doesn't just send us an "objective" Word; he sends his Son who, upon his ascension, imparts the Spirit who gives birth to a community of practice to enable us to read his world.

He doesn't just send us a message;he enfolds us into his body. And that body is the community of practice in which we learn to mean the world—the context in which we learn what the world is for.

Our seeing the world as a gift to be used is relative to our immersion in the Story in which that makes sense. The church is the language-game in which we learn to read the world aright.

The church is that"conventional"community in which the Spirit trains us to know the real world.

Metropolitan Jonah Paffhausen tells us :

“There is a temptation to reduce Orthodoxy, especially among young male converts, to a rational system of doctrines and dogmas, canons and rituals....

 
All these things, doctrines, dogmas, canons and so forth, are there in order to support one primary purpose: the transformation of our souls in theosis, in short, salvation. 

Just because you have the right doctrine, pure dogmas and strict observance of the canons does not mean that you are deified. In fact, the great spiritual fathers all say that knowledge puffs up, inflates our ego, and inflames our passions. These things will not save you. They are the context for the spiritual struggle but are not its content....

The Fathers tell us, over and over, that until we have achieved a substantial degree of purification from the passions, we must not touch theology. In the early Church, the three year period of catechesis was primarily devoted to moral teaching from the Old Testament. You have to live Orthodox to understand the Faith.”

Is God enough ? Adam needed Eve.

                                   

The Orthodox Nun and therapist Katherine Weston in her book Loneliness or Fruitful Longing remarks that though Adam walked with God, it was not enough. He needed Eve. He needed community.

With God, but without others, without a life progressing toward some value, we remain crippled.

The Fathers tell us, look towards self, and it’s hell, towards others, and we find paradise. But it’s difficult to practice self-forgetting when we are alone.

As Prof.Kenneth Seeskin in his essay on Adam and Eve says, HERE,

"Human perfection cannot be achieved only through intellectual and spiritual development, but requires companionship and physical intimacy."

Personhood requires love, which requires relationship, doesn't it ?

What about all those imprisoned ? Victor Frankl, the Jewish psychologist, or Father Arseny, the Orthodox priest imprisoned in Soviet Russia ? Did not God suffice for them ?

That is different.

First, they were afforded the opportunity to set value upon their lives - they helped others, in a kind of community. Their lives had meaning.

But, more than this, they had no choice. I have been to prison. There is freedom there.

A man today thinks, if only he could figure out a way, try harder, he could get the girl, or promotion, or life change that would create a life of meaning.

And sometimes that’s right. In prison, however, that burden is taken away.

You would think the number would be zero, but many remark at how many of the Dalit’s, the “untouchables”, in India are seen smiling, despite living with their family in desolate shacks, pulling a rickshaw for 12 hrs a day. But this is the wisdom of the caste system, they have accomplished all that they might within the possibilities laid down from society.

A fine mechanic might have his conscience, or wife or father, always whispering to him - you could do better, own your own shop perhaps...You can fix your life !

Those at the bottom in America are not the backbone of society, they are the losers. The message is - they ought to, and still can, do and be better.

The Aristotelian model of suffering & well-being identifies a set of baseline conditions and virtues for human happiness, with suffering being due to deviations from these conditions. Modern psychology and psychiatry are tacitly built on this model, with one popular version being Seligman’s PERMA Model: P – Positive Emotion; E – Engagement; R – Relationships; M – Meaning; A – Accomplishments. 

Jordan Peterson, despite his various short-comings, in an able psychologist, he says,

“We experience much of our positive emotion in relation to goals. We are not happy, technically speaking, unless we see ourselves progressing—and the very idea of progression implies value. Worse yet is the fact that the meaning of life without positive value is not simply neutral. Because we are vulnerable and mortal, pain and anxiety are an integral part of human existence.

We must have something to set against the suffering that is intrinsic to Being. We must have the meaning inherent in a profound system of value or the horror of existence rapidly becomes paramount. Then, nihilism beckons, with its hopelessness and despair.”

He’s right.

First, there is brain chemistry. For the depressed it is crucial they be put on some kind of anti-depressant.

AFTER that, what causes depression ?

Johann Hari, in his best-selling book Lost Connections, identifies 7 kinds social causes, disconnection from:

Meaningful Work

Other People

Meaningful Values

Childhood Trauma

Status and Respect

Natural World

Hopeful and Secure Future (faith)

He writes HERE,

“Everyone knows human beings have natural physical needs,” he added. “Well, there’s equally good evidence that we have innate psychological needs. We need to feel we belong to a group; we need to feel we have a stable future; we need to feel that we are valued; we need to feel we have meaning and purpose in our lives.”

Yes, a psychologist will first ask - do you have a significant other ? A job ? A friend ? A reason to live - something you can make progress at ?

You need at least 3 out of Hari's 7 as foundations, 4 or more and you can get better. Less than 3 and you're heading for suicide, even with a firm belief in God.

Unfortunately, our Churches often teach a kind of passivity, waiting on God, and giving of oneself when one has nothing to give. You must acquire love before it's given, as a result, much moral damage is done. 

For my own experience, and a free PDF of the book that most helped me, go HERE 

               

For most psychologists, there are the six basic human needs :

Love and connection
Significance
Variety
Certainty
Growth
Contribution

Laurence Heller’s groundbreaking NARM modality lists five core needs and their associated core capacities :

1) Connection

Capacity to be in touch with our body and our emotions Capacity to be in connection with others

2) Attunement

Capacity to attune to our needs and emotions

3) Trust

Capacity to recognize, reach out for, and take in physical and emotional nourishment

4) Autonomy

Capacity to set appropriate boundaries

Capacity to say no and set limits

Capacity to speak our minds without guilt or fear

5) Love-Sexuality

Capacity to live with an open heart

Capacity to integrate a loving relationship with a vital sexuality

Secular Reason in the Public Sphere - a Ruse of Power

 

  

As Stanley Fish puts it HERE : There are no such thing as “secular reasons.”

He writes, "the professor of law Steven Smith does in his new book, “The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse,” that there are no secular reasons, at least not reasons of the kind that could justify a decision to take one course of action rather than another.

Secular reason can’t do its own self-assigned job — of describing the world in ways that allow us to move forward in our projects — without importing, but not acknowledging, the very perspectives it pushes away in disdain.

Insofar as modern liberal discourse rests on a distinction between reasons that emerge in the course of disinterested observation — secular reasons — and reasons that flow from a prior metaphysical commitment, it hasn’t got a leg to stand on."

Of course, liberalism simply smuggles in its metaphysics under vague abstractions like "equality" and "freedom" that it pretends are just concrete objective facts floating out there without need of context or metaphysical presuppositions.

Liberalism only allows for secular reason to "count" in the public sphere, claiming it to be neutral and accessible to all.

But there is no such thing as an unbiased, neutral, objective standpoint. What people call 'reason' is based on a set of prior commitments. It is based on a belief system.

And what counts as knowledge is not neutrally determined, but constituted within networks of power— social, political, and economic.

SO, if the fundamentalist secularist get to bring in their fundamental beliefs and commitments and pretend that they are rational and objective, then why can’t religious ?

What is outside liberalism is then viewed not as reason, but irrationality, most especially the irrationality of faith. 

In claiming the realm of reason, liberalism also claims the realm of public space, which is precisely the space that is ruled by the rules of reason, which liberalism has laid down.

That's the trick, a liberal asks for a justification, but when given a religious reasoning, will simply dismiss it as not "real" reasons.

Only liberal-approved reasoning, with its own faith commitments, is allowed in the Public sphere.

“The ambition of the liberal political philosopher,” writes Paul Kahn (Putting Liberalism in its Place, 120), is to find that set of arguments that is so compelling that every individual, not corrupted by the illogic of interest, would necessarily affirm those reasons as his own.” Because it assumes the mantle of reason, it has “its own imperial ambitions” and can conceive of “no legitimate opposition because it has preempted the entire domain of public values by making an exhaustive claim to reason.”

Why go to church ? Because you become what you worship.

                                 

You become what you love, not what you think.

Practice, not belief, is primary - our doings precede our thinkings.

A religion is essentially bound up with the communal form of its practices : the material practices shape the subjectivity of adherents, making it possible to experience and construe the world in certain ways.

After all, Christ did not come to bring us doctrines, but His body, the Church, which enfolds us into its economy of life, shapes how we receive, and think of, the world , scripture, and God.

By participating in the rhythms of religious ritual we order our modes of perception to receive the world as sacrament.

Georges Florovsky wrote

“From the very beginning Christianity was not primarily a doctrine, but exactly a community. There was not only a Message to be proclaimed and delivered, and Good News to be declared. There was precisely a New Community, distinct and peculiar, in the process of growth and formation, to which members were called and recruited."

Florovsky's assessment highlights the priority of the ecclesial body over its own message and doctrine. The goal of early Christian preaching was not to establish and defend doctrine, but to inaugurate and develop a community of disciples.

As Francis Young points out, "religion" was not about doctrines or dogma's, but ritual. You shared a meal with your god, there was a communion, a give and take, perhaps even an exchange of life.

It was about initiation, not information.

Religion is a habitus, a disposition of the soul to be in the world a certain way.

Living liturgically is not optional. 

Our present cultural liturgies shape our perception to occlude the presence of wonder and the Divine.

The things of God are not obvious or clear to a darkened heart.

Faith is a means of perception that requires a change in the agent of perception. 

By participating in the rhythms of religious ritual we order our modes of perception to receive the world as sacrament.

RR Reno remarks, 

One of our great temptations in the modern era has been to evade responsibility for the proper formation of our prejudices. We seek fact-based truths, a mode of knowing that we imagine is secure against our vices…

As Newman put it, we hope that knowledge does not require preparation of our hearts. 

Thus the quintessential modern presupposition: “Truth is to be approached without homage.”

In this personal engagement with truth, a man’s moral character is as decisive as his native intelligence.”

You must take responsibility for the types of beliefs you wish to hold.

Knowledge requires preparation of the heart, which is just as decisive as intelligence.

The type of person you are, how you live, will determine the kinds of things you will know.

In general, people know what they want to know, hence educating desire is imperative.

Asad, in his Genealogies of Religion writes :

"The formation/transformation of moral dispositions ... required a particular program of disciplinary practices. 

The rites that were prescribed by that program did not simply evoke or release universal emotions, they aimed to construct and reorganize distinctive emotions 

– desire (cupiditas/carita ), humility (humilitas), remorse (contritio) –on which the central Christian virtue of obedience to God depended. 

This point must be stressed, because the emotions mentioned here are not universal human feelings, not ‘powerful drives and emotions associated with human physiology 

They are historically specific emotions that are structured internally and related to each other in historically determined ways.

And they are the product not of mere readings of symbols but of processes of power."

James KA Smith on the difference between the cold abstraction of ideology and proper religious *living :

“The sacramental imagination begins from the assumption that our discipleship depends not only—not even primarily—on the conveyance of ideas into our minds, but on our immersion in embodied practices and rituals that form us into the kind of people God calls us to be. 

…worship stages a recovery of the aesthetic aspects of the Christian tradition as a crucial means for redirecting our imagination in community—a means for reordering our love.

We were created for stories, not propositions; for drama, not bullet points. 

…worship resists such reductionism by reclaiming the holistic, full-orbed materiality of liturgical worship that activates all the senses: hearing (not just “messages” but the poetry of the preached Word), sight (with a renewed appreciation for the visual arts, iconicity, and the architectural space of worship), touch (in communal engagement, but also touching the bread that is Christ’s body), taste (the body and blood), and even smell (of wine in the cup of the new covenant but also the fragrance of worship in candles and incense).

…..in the rhythms and cadences of full-orbed Christian worship, we learn something about the gospel that we couldn’t learn in any other way—and might not even be able to put into words. 

Carried in the practices of Christian worship is an understanding of God that we “know” on a register deeper than the intellect, an understanding of the gospel on the level of the imagination that changes how we comport ourselves in the world, even if we can never quite articulate it in beliefs or doctrines or a Christian worldview.”

Yes, we are moved more than we are convinced.