The End of Desire and Fear

The word faith (pistis) is used in Orthodox terminology to denote two specific meanings. The first is strictly objective. It concerns the facts of faith and its creeds as they are expressed in the Bible and literally recorded by the canons of the Church. Here, faith is stated in fixed, unalterable expressions and technical terms set by the authority of the church councils and the opinions of distinguished theologians. In this objective sense of faith, divine truth and reason cannot cohere except by the intervention of grace.

The second sense of faith is totally subjective. It concerns the ability of one’s heart to respond directly to God in person, but only in conformity with the creeds of faith. In this subjective meaning of faith, man submits his whole being to God, and therefore to all his commandments. 

This is to be done in love and obedience and not by reason or logic. Reason and logic may enter afterward as servants to love and obedience but not as initiators or authorities: ‘Faith works through love’ (Gal 5:6).

From these two definitions of faith we can infer that objective faith needs the riches of man’s thought, reason, logic, and study. However, he can never reach the stage of belief except by grace. As for subjective faith, it needs love, obedience and personal intimacy. A profound relationship with God is composed of fidelity and absolute confidence in God in all affairs, conditions, or situations. This will result in total reliance on him and absolute surrender to his will, no matter how such fidelity may collide with so-called reality or reason.

Hence, the Orthodox Church maintains that in both its objective and subjective senses, faith is a gift of grace. Objective faith depends on the incarnation and the resurrection, both of which are supernatural works. Equally the demands of subjective faith also require a supernatural bent of mind. For he who believes in God is required neither to covet nor to fear anything, and both of these proscriptions are requirements that surpass the laws of nature: ‘Apart from me, you can do nothing’ (Jn 15:5).

Matthew the Poor, Orthodox Prayer Life

Reflection – This is Orthodoxy week on Ten Thousand Places, and today we have the sublime contemporary Coptic Orthodox monk from Egypt, Matthew the Poor. It is lovely to see that on this point of the nature of faith there is no difference at all between the Orthodox tradition and the Catholic.

Abba Matthew here is neatly describing the distinction between the fides quam and the fides qua of our Latin theology—the faith we believe, and the faith by which we believe. Faith has content—creeds, facts, definitions; faith also is an attitude of heart, of loving obedience to God. And the two are one reality—the loving obedience of our hearts by which (qua) we believe requires the submission of our minds to the facts and creeds, to the quam that we believe.

He is very strong here on the totally supernatural nature of both species of faith. The facts of our faith—the incarnation and the resurrection centrally—are supernatural events by definition, and cannot be strictly reasoned towards. The attitude of faith of the heart is utterly beyond us, too. ‘He who believes in God is required neither to fear nor to covet anything’. That is a sentence worth pondering for some time. Like, a lifetime, perhaps.

It is unassailable on pure logical grounds, of course. If we believe in God, and understand even dimly what that means, then all covetousness must wither away like the dead thing it is. ‘Who possesses God wants for nothing,’ Teresa of Avila tells us.

And fear is a direct result of covetousness, if you think about it. Fear comes because we may lose something that is precious to us—our own life or health, the life or health of one we love, our possessions and material security. But if we believe in God, then all of that falls away in that faith—our own life, the lives of those we love and certainly the things we surround ourselves with, all are disposed in the loving will of God. If you really have faith, the only thing you ‘want’ is that God’s will be done each day, and since that is precisely what happens, fear has no purchase in our minds and hearts.

But of course, for us poor humans of flesh and blood it is impossible to free ourselves from desire and from fear. So it is all grace—toute est grâce, St. Therese of Lisieux tells us. And it all flows from Christ Himself – the man Jesus is the source of our faith, and the one who brings it to perfection (Heb 12:2). It is all, always, about personal relationship and personal communion with this man who brings us into this impossible degree of faith and trust in God. So, let’s seek the Lord today, and confide our lives to Him, so He can free us, gradually and as He wishes, from all covetousness, all fear, and anything else that binds and hinders us in living a life of faith, hope, and love.

We Don't Know How

Extempore prayer, to the Fathers, was tinged with a purely biblical color. Their hearts were replete with God’s word to the point of overflowing. Extempore prayers, which ‘man himself fits together’, in the words of St Isaac the Syrian, are nothing but a coherent and integrated recital of God’s memorized word. They express the condition of the human soul when moved and impressed by his word and will.

It is thus that meditation becomes closely linked to prayer in its first formal degree. When man applies it, he grows before God in all confidence and safety, since it is a prayer that proceeds from the core of the Bible. It is henceforth able to transform and renew man’s emotional makeup, his thought and his expression, in a radical way.

Extempore prayer, in Orthodox tradition, cannot therefore be counted as prayer unless man is imbued with the word of God. He has to be well trained in correct meditation. Otherwise, his words come forth unbiblically, and his ideas will falls short of expressing the will of God and his thought.

Matthew the Poor, Orthodox Prayer Life

Reflection – One last day on Abba Matthew and meditation, and then we’ll move on to something else. ‘Extempore’ prayer, here, is what in the Western tradition we call mental prayer, generally in the sense of conversing with God in one’s own words.

We see, though, the wisdom of this Eastern sense that mental prayer must flow from meditation and interiorization of God’s word, or it is not only inadequate but in fact not really prayer. I don’t think this is such a strange idea to those of us have some experience of the practice of prayer.

Who among us has not felt at times very hampered in mental prayer, very inadequate, very much not knowing what really to say to God. I mean, we have our grocery list of prayer intentions, ever growing, and we can always lapse back into verbal prayers like the rosary if we really get stuck, but I think most of us experience fairly quickly that just talking to God is not such a simple easy thing.

The fact is, this is quite proper and a sign that we really are in the divine presence. Of course we get tongue-tied in the presence of such majesty and grandeur, even if we are not particularly aware on the level of the senses of any such thing. Our spirits know that God is not simply to be chatted up as if He were the next door neighbour or Joe the bartender.

Our own human ideas and words and thoughts are woefully short of the mark when it comes to true prayer to God. And so it is God’s word, God’s ideas and God’s thoughts that are the only true and sure way to shape our own prayers to make them real.  Meditation on God’s word teaches us how to pray, gives us the right words that become our words, then, and can come out to God as the authentic sincere prayer of our own hearts.

There is much to ponder here. One thing, for example, is that this corrects somewhat a slightly exaggerated tendency today to stress personal authenticity or originality to an extreme. The most important thing is that its your creation, your words, your own original authentic production—that can be the general thought, and indeed general counsel about prayer or about lots of other things. I may even be guilty of having counselled people in that way.

We see here that, while our prayer should be certainly be our own, and in fact must be lest it become just lip service, the content of the prayer really needs to be taught to us by God. We don’t know how to pray – the Lord does need to give us the words and the attitudes of mind and heart that are adequate for that activity.

There is a whole theological anthropology, a whole understanding of the divine origin and destiny and shaping of human life, that emerges from this one simple statement, ‘Lord, teach us to pray.’ There is a privileging of receptivity over initiative, of passive contemplation over active intellection that we learn in a natural way simply by the fact that meditation on God’s word precedes mental prayer and shapes it.

It is all very Marian, very much connected to the Woman who received the Word of God into her womb, and only then could pray her great Magnificat of praise and exultation. Mary is the pattern here, and so on this first of May, Mary’s month, I leave you with her example as the great orans, the woman of prayer and receptivity who can teach us to meditate, to receive the word, and then bring forth God’s word and not our own empty words, for the hungry world.

Like Fine Wine

In patristic tradition, the usage of the word meditation was confined to the ways in which the mind and heart were diligently handed over to the word of God. This was done to renew the mind and heart through that word. The fathers maintain that it is not proper for man to engage in meditating on anything other than the written word of God, that is, the Bible. For inward meditation can imprint its impression on the emotional and intellectual makeup of man. Man, therefore, should not be so stamped except by the holy word of God, which accords with God’s will and mind…

According to patristic tradition, the first degree of meditation begins with reading the words slowly, relishing them, and repeating them in an audible voice. Reading, to the fathers, always meant doing so in an audible voice and relished in our inner consciousness. In this manner, it can find rest in our innermost recesses. Reiteration here is like rumination. After a while the words actually become one’s own words. Man, then, becomes a faithful storehouse for the word of God. His heart becomes a divine treasure for it… This is what is originally means by ‘keeping the gospel’ or ‘keeping the word.’

Matthew the Poor, Orthodox Prayer Life

Reflection – OK, just a couple more days with Matthew the Poor and meditation. Seriously, though, I am increasingly convinced that the lack of meditation on God’s word underlies a great deal of our spiritual malaise in the Church and (a fortiori) in society at large.

Some may object that meditation leaves them feeling a bit dry, that it can become too easily just another head trip, an intellectual exercise that goes nowhere in particular fast. While this is understandable, I think that reflects a certain lack of understanding of the process of meditation as traditionally understood in the Church.

We may think that the idea in general is to read a Scripture passage and then think about it and draw some helpful conclusion about it. That’s not quite it, and Matthew the Poor is helpful here. The above description makes it sound like ‘reading’ and then ‘thinking’ (which for us North Americans too quickly turns into ‘analysing’ or ‘dissecting’ which is useless for Scriptural prayer) are parallel, that we read so as to move on to the analysis.

No. No way. Never. Absolutely not. (Stop that right this instant!). First comes reading. Second comes reading. Third comes… reading. Fourth comes (wait for it!) reading. Meditation is first and foremost and above all a putting oneself in the presence of God in his inspired living word. Before our ‘rational’ brain kicks in, before we start pulling it to pieces and figuring out the difficult bits and all that useless stuff, we have to bask, to soak, to savor the word, to roll it around in our mouths like a fine wine, to revel in the very cadence of the syllables, to spell it out, practically, letter by letter.

Only after a good long time of that should our minds offer any kind of suggestion or reflection. And even then, the thought process should be dialogic, a prayer, a conversation with God: ‘Gee, Lord, I guess you really do like to heal blind people! Wonder where I’m blind? What don’t I see here and now in my life? Maybe I don’t see my own royal dignity, or your love, or the goodness of your creation or… OK, Son of David, have mercy on me, and heal my blindness.’ That kind of thing, not some dreadful dull sterile chain of thought which too often is quite literally a chain.

God’s word is a living word, you see, and when we bring ourselves into contact with it as I and Matthew are trying to describe we are not simply doing an intellectual exercise. We are in the presence of a Person, and that Person can act, then, our keeping of the Word opening the door for that action and that movement.

Anyhow, it’s all in John 14:21-26, which is the passage Abba Matthew cites. But I do know that we need to hold this word of God in our minds and hearts more fully and deeply and allow it to have its way with us. It is a transformative word, and unless we allow it to do its unique transforming work we are left with our own ideas, attitudes, beliefs, patterns of thought and behaviour. So, open up your bibles, folks, and read them. Plant that seed in the soil of your hearts, and trust that God knows how to make it blossom.

Let's Get Biblical (Biblical!)

Meditation is an old, traditional term closely linked to profound and heartfelt Bible reading. Such reading leaves an indelible impression upon one’s memory, emotions, and tongue.

According to patristic tradition, meditation is the key to all graces. It makes him who practices it biblical in every thought, word, and feeling. He also becomes advanced in every gift and full of divine understanding.

When he opens his mouth, the words of the Bible flow spontaneously from his lips without embellishments. Divine thoughts proceed from his mouth in amazing succession. They are like waves of light that submerge the hearer’s mind in the light of divine knowledge. They stir his heart and set aflame his emotions.

The word meditation in its Hebrew origin is hagig, and in its Greek is meleti. The verb is meletao, which indicates studying and delving deep into meanings, together with mental and inner exercise. Meditating on wisdom (meletao sofian), then, means studying it in depth and with diligence as well as putting it into practice.

Matthew the Poor, Orthodox Prayer Life

Reflection – I want to spend a few days looking at some of Abba Matthew’s thoughts on meditation. For those who may have missed my previous reference to this writer, he is a contemporary Egyptian Coptic monk who is at the heart of a renewal of Egyptian monasticism, a new flowering of the desert for that persecuted church. His writings draw on the spiritual tradition of both Eastern and Western Christianity and flow from his own direct experience of God in prayer.

The reason I want to highlight this section is that I have been, well, meditating on meditation quite a bit lately. The subject seems to keep coming up with my directees and others. The key and crucial role of Scripture study is something Catholics still tend to underrate, I think, at least based on my unscientific sampling of the population.

The rosary and the liturgy – check! Mental prayer, the Jesus Prayer, devotional prayers – check! Intercessory prayer – check, check, check! Even silent contemplative prayer – check!

But I find that we tend, still, to neglect or at least underrate praying with Scripture. But this cannot be – it is far too important in a rightly ordered spiritual life. Matthew the Poor puts it so well: ‘it makes him who practices it biblical in every thought, word, and feeling.

The truth is, from earliest childhood – even earlier, from the very womb – we are being formed in patterns of ‘thought, word, and feeling’ that may not be quite, exactly, precisely biblical. All sorts of human words are presented to us as the truth which may not be entirely true. All sorts of thoughts can start rolling around in our heads from as soon as we have heads that may or not reflect the Thought of God which is Jesus Christ. And those words and those thoughts can create a whole host of feelings and passions that can lead us into sin and away from God and into perdition.

There is a great inner purification that needs to happen on the level of the mind, a purification of error and illusion. And it is the Word of God that achieves this in us, when we study it and act on it. But studying comes first: how can we act on it if we haven’t learned it?

So, meditation. The slow, careful, repetitive reading of the Scriptures. Just to take a little passage – one parable, or one bit of the Sermon on the Mount, or one healing miracle, say, and read it, read it, read it. Read it three or four times. Read it out loud, to make the words your own. Read it slowwwwwwwly. 

Memorize it, if you can, although this will just happen naturally if you do all of the above. And then, only after reading it like that, slowly, carefully, repeatedly—think about it. Whassitmean? What’s going on in your life that this passage speaks to? Do you believe this? Are their attitudes or opinions or ideas in your little brain (or my little brain!) that contradict this passage. If so, which will you choose, God’s word or yours? And then, is there some action you can take to practice faith in this passage?

That’s meditation, and that’s how our inner minds, our hearts get evangelized, penetrated, transformed by the Word of God. As long as this is not happening, the Gospel remains at the surface of our lives – nice ideas that our Lord Jesus tells us, but we have our own thoughts about things. It is meditation that interiorizes God’s thoughts and makes them our own thoughts, so that we become living Gospels for others.

And this is utterly crucial if we are to ourselves be evangelized in full and in depth, and if we in turn are to evangelize this crazy, mixed-up world of ours. Can’t give what we don’t have!