perfidy

I have been, as is my wont, supremely lax in posting.  This despite my setting up an automated process to post.  So there you go.

I would say that the spirit moved me to the post this, but that would not be true.  Even without the spirit motivation, Bruce Charleton has had some very interesting posts over the last little while.  The one that caused me to actually pull the trigger on this post is this one:

Pagan missionaries?

Charleton's knife of insight is sharp, here.  If a modern St. Patrick were sent to us by real Christians from some parallel world, maybe from a Patriarch of Constantinople who didn't live in Istanbul, what would he think of us?  I imagine that this hypothetical Apostle to the Americans would see us in our secular glory rather like the Conquistadors saw the Aztecs.  With horror.

What common ground could our St. Patrick find with us when the core assumptions of our daily life are so far removed from what, historically, people have always believed?  Oh sure, we don't put people on altars and rip their hearts out.  Yet.  But at least the Aztecs believed in the divine.

I have what others have described as an interesting relationship with Christianity.  (And there's a draft post that needs finished...)  I find that I need a Pagan Missionary, really.

Then we have this:

Therefore deification does not mean the “actualization” or “realization” of one’s latent divinity, a belief that is less Christian than monistic or pantheistic.

Actualization is a fingernails on blackboards kind of word for me.  It makes me want to punch somebody.  Kind of like the feeling I get when I see someone wearing a Che tshirt.  It is indicative of the depths to which we have sunk that even the people pretending to traditional faith still feel that it's all about them, and not, you know, God or something.

And finally this:

But in Orthodoxy (so far as I see it, not far) there is not the same sense of trying to reach an intellectually coherent and satisfying answer as there is with Western Catholicism.

For the Orthodox there are these parable-like narrative theological explanations, mostly comprehensible to the common man - and beyond these simple explanations there is mystery.

If you want to go further, the path is spiritual not philosophical. The understanding aimed-at, therefore, is not more complex or logical, but (presumably) an understanding which comes directly by revelation, and is not (perhaps) communicable to those of lower levels of holiness.

This is the one thing in Orthodoxy that most appealed to me, when long ago I formally converted. I was raised in a particularly dry and dusty sort of Lutheranism. A comfortable enough community, in its way, especially if you can't sing and like potluck dinners. Which, as it happens, is me all the way. However, the efforts of our Pastor to explain to me the passion and mystery of Christ, redemption, and the like fell a little flat. Largely because it sounded like he was relating to me the minutes of the local Rotary club. Of which he was a member. Look at the benefits that accrue, to you - the local business man, if you become a Rotarian!

Exciting.

And the Roman Catholic hyper legalism is just as annoying. But here's these guys, the Orthodox, with a rich, nay, baroque iconography, beautiful liturgical music, they don't do any of that. They go up to a certain point, stop, and say, "It's a mystery." I like that. I may not have the spiritual development to understand. Might not ever. But at least I'm not treated like a prospective Chamber of Commerce supporter, or bedeviled with hair-splitting exegesis.