2014 Pan-Orthodox Clergy Retreat

. . . through the lens of a ‘newbie’ to these events.
 
November 10-12, the fifth annual Pan Orthodox Clergy Retreat was held at St. Nicholas Ranch & the Life Giving Spring Greek Orthodox Monastery. Of the 80 + attendees, about 20 clergy from the DOW, along with Archbishop Benjamin, participated in this inspired gathering of brothers in the ministry. The keynote speaker was Father Maximos, of Simonopetra Monastery, Mount Athos – presenting the theme of Holiness. [Please note that I have added my own emphasis by using bold italics for certain phases and while having to condense 60-90 minutes of lecture for each session into the following short summaries.]
 
SESSION ONE
Fr Maximos opened with some thoughts to put us on track for our contemplation of Holiness: the commonly shared feeling that we are in the late stage of western culture or civilization as we have known it. Some of the observations are: people more corrupted and cynical these days, there is a broadly experienced loss of faith, Christianity is painted as the great oppressor (while Buddhism, African cults, or anything else is listened to). It has become extremely difficult to communicate the Christian Faith to people  – as if words have lost their power (or maybe it is our ability to use them). We can say “God is Love”, but if it is not a reality for me, transforming my life in some way, then the words are empty phrases.

Our situation today gives us a theme of Holiness, to remind us about our calling “you shall be Holy, for I am Holy” (from 1 Peter). Fr Maximos bids us to look at the experience of the saints of the Church; not their Holiness, but at their lives and what happens when they lose the presence of God. English speakers are at a disadvantage, but in most languages there is a connection between the terms HOLY and SAINT.

What is a holy person? Someone who has been stricken by Divine Beauty. The question follows: What happens when the feeling is lost, the loss of being ‘connected’, a sense of abandonment? Saints separated by geography and a thousand years seem to experience the same things – experiences of God, desire of God, then the dereliction of these experiences. These experiences are meant for all of us, not just monks and nuns. We should be neither resentful nor suspicious of the saints who present a witness of lives touched by God.

Ss. Simeon the New Theologian and Silouan the Athonite had similar experiences/visions of God as uncreated light and what follows: over time the experience withdraws and there is an unquenchable longing for its return. The experience of that which is Holy (in their cases direct experience of Uncreated Light) makes it possible to know the depths of our separation – self-knowledge of our true state. To what is the purpose? St Silouan sees abandonment as the way that God chooses for one to be purified and grow in spiritual knowledge, educating the soul in humility, to know the absolute gratuitous nature of Grace and misery and emptiness without God.

Our experience of dereliction can take many forms. But the gift of encountering God ‘early’ in our life serves as a way to stimulate the search for God so we can spend our life attaining God. Something like a Baker giving out free samples to draw us into the shop.
 
SESSION TWO
1 Peter 1:16  ”  . .  be [you shall be] Holy, for I am Holy”
Referencing Holy Scripture, Fr Maximos points us to how we are to relate to what we read by referring to St. John Chrysostom’s commentary that goes something like this [note: summarized here without benefit of the source]: It would have been a good thing had we no need of the written scriptures, but instead had the Holy Spirit living within our heart. . . . how bad are you if you, having lost the Holy Spirit, do not read the Holy Scripture!

1 Peter is one of the Catholic or ‘general’ Epistles, not as well-known as there are not many commentaries it is not much used in the Church’s lectionary. All general Epistles have strong parallels between them. Origen, Augustine and others focused on these to counterbalance the liberal interpretation of Paul. St Nicodemus (1806) published a commentary on the Catholic Epistles, enriched with the commentaries of others (Ss. Basil, Cyril, John of Damascus, etc.).

1 Peter 1: 10-11  tells us of the prophets desire for searching out the salvation that was to come.  And St. Maximos says  the questing or desiring, that occurs in the believer, is the operation of the Holy Spirit. The letter itself is addressed to exiles – we all are exiles, minorities, societal outsiders, margins of society, etc. being persecuted. St. Peter’s aim in his letter is to encourage them with theological reasons – not just empty encouragement. He does it by identifying their sufferings with the sufferings of Christ. Moreover their lives are an ongoing entry into the experience of baptism, a dying and rising with Christ. Baptism becomes the mode of life by which we order and understand our life in Christ. Baptism comes a unwavering commitment to Holiness. Leviticus gives us ‘holiness codes’ and the first generation readers of his epistles understand them in this context. A context which contains the themes of a people of Exile, Holiness, and Eschatology.

The genius of the Peter’s letter is that this ‘exile’ is nothing to be surprised at. He writes from a position that it is an essential idea of their identity. As a people in exile from the world, they received a new birth that re-orders their place in the world, different from the societal order of things. Their social identity in the world has been replaced by a new identity, a new mode of existence through the mystery of Grace; a new sense of belonging to God and the being the people of God. What began as a societal stigma becomes a defining mode of Christian life. We are to have no hostility against the world, rather we are simply being called out of it by God. This is often misunderstood, but we are not running from the world, any more than marriage is based on running away from other women.

The goal of human life is Holiness, and without it we are like a flower with no blossom. Holiness is not inherent in me, but I  have the potential to generate within myself the image of God. However, this is NOT human nature… nature is created. Holiness is outside human nature and is in fact uncreated. If we need, on a physical level, to take in things to live i(.e., food, water, air, etc.), how much more it is true in relationship with God, the Grace of God, and Holiness. Nothing about us and our call to Holiness works without what comes to us from outside us. St Maximos the Confessor says that the eternal Word seeks to be born and be embodied in every Christian. What took place with  the Theotokos, is the same for us . . . where Christ is a living reality within each of us. (St Paul)
 
SESSION THREE
Exile is a major theme in the spiritual life, beginning with Adam. It is also the third step in the Ladder of Divine Ascent. It is the normal state of our existence. Unhappiness happens when we try to find our home and meaning in the place we are exiled: this world. The ‘world’ does not mean, nature, creation or fellow man. It means the worldly mind, mind of the flesh and passions. When we come to know Christ we naturally and spontaneously reject the world, just as light illumines the darkness. We must definitively and decisively abandon the world and not live a double life.

Often we judge things in the church based on the wrong assumptions and criteria, and not on what we should: on faith, on the quality and experience of Holiness of the saints, on the mind of the saints, and on the work of the saints. Remember, the work of the saints was not to ‘do’ or produce anything, rather to sanctify themselves and thus all of human life – the whole of the world. To God they are all the same – not based on what they produced. We often judge wrongly on what they did rather than on what they became. We cannot replace sanctification with productivity. Human value is not judged by works, nor by their social utility, nor by what they produce. And the Church is not reduced to social work. As shown in Matthew 25, Christ does not judge on activities, but on the inner man and how he responds to the world.

How can we be one with our fellow man and the world, if we are not first one with Christ? It is His Grace and prayer that unites us to others. Without these all we see are their passions, without love. We need to not see the faults, weakness, passions in others, rather set them free of these. Love is voluntary blindness – we choose to not see the faults of others. We need to see their sin, joy, faults, and pain as ours. We are called to have the heart and mind of Christ.

All humans get a taste of Grace, but few remain with the struggle, giving up before the gift becomes a permanent state within us. At first we were joyful, it was easy to fast, our minds became still, the attacks of the devil cease, and everything was the way it should be. After a time our zeal wanes, our appetite for prayer diminishes, we get pains standing, Grace seems to be draining , we feel heaviness, fall into darkness, old passions return worse than before, minds are full of dark negative thoughts, we deny the possibility of salvation, then we  deny the existence of God and lose all connection. This is perfectly normal and should not be surprising  – this is the way Grace operates.

When we lose the spiritual life we get filled with darkness and death. It is necessary for us to drink from this bitter cup, so we know we are nothing without God’s Grace. We need to cultivate the right presuppositions, accepting our weakness to acquire humility. We cannot wish this state of humility – or wishfully pray to the saints. Grace that is easy to get from a book or singing in Church is easy to lose. Real changes comes from suffering and failure. It teaches us that God alone can bring changes to us. In every man there is a huge struggle, no one’s life is easy. Only God knows what it is.

Had God not given St Silouan the Grace at first, he would not have survived. We do not have the ability to take up the real struggle without the experience of the Grace. We are told to keep our mind in Hell and wait on the Lord. That our mind is in hell is clear: we live in ignorance, in a culture empty of God or that denies God. Having our mind there is relatively easy. Be there and do not despair – have faith in Christ who conquered death. This leads us to Holiness
 
ENDING?
To be fair, there was not real ending or conclusion presented. We simply stopped, left in an ongoing contemplation of the wonder of the work of Holiness in us and the people we serve. Fr Maximos warned us that this talk was a work in progress, not a finished course. In being such, it was my experience that it allowed us to enter into the internal dialogue that would otherwise been his alone. We took what was presented into further discussions as we broke into sessions with the hierarchs, giving us the opportunity to explore together how we struggle to find Holiness in our lives. The sharing of our hierarchs, as well as the spirit and demeanor and clergy throughout the conference, was a breath of fresh air to this first time attendee. I am especially thankful to see the collegiality and have gained a new level of trust that on the grassroots level and on the front lines we can all work together as one witness to Orthodoxy in the West and that in the end we are truly one Church.

Priest Damian Kuolt