Selections from Seminary

The "Prologue" of the Gospel of John employs a chiastic structure. Indeed, biblical writers of the Old and New Testaments used this structure to help lead our attention to their main point. The only problem is that we moderns are almost completely unacquainted with "chiasmus". "Chiasmus" is named for the Greek letter X (chi). To help explain, here is an example from 1John 4:7-8 (an example borrowed from the The Shape of Biblical Language by John Breck): A: for love  is of God ,    B: and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.    B': The one who does not love does not know God, A': for God  is love. A and A' relate to each other, and B and B' relate to each other. If there were more phrases, the order would be something like A, B, C, D, E, D', C', B', A', working toward the center and then working back out from it, with similarities in D and D', the C and C', and so on. Maybe you can see why the X is us...

Finding some good lenten reading is always a good idea. It is always during Clean Week, that the kids start asking what we are going to read this year. So, here we are, dinner on the first day of Clean Week, and they started asking. Our trouble this year was that two of the books we love reading and seem perfectly fitted for reading with the family, we have already used twice each for other lenten seasons. We cannot recommend them highly enough, especially because they are so well written and clearly convey Orthodox life lived out. Everyday Saints and Other Stories is one of our favorites. The children enjoyed this so much that the two older ones have read through it a time or two on their own. In it, you will gain a much broader view of what "Orthodox life" looks like, which is helpful both for the convert that just has not lived a long life within Orthodoxy yet, and also for the cradle Orthodox who needs to see Orthodoxy outside of their own particular context. In other wo...

Not too many years ago a book, Heaven Is for Real, came out about a three-year-old boy dying, going to heaven, and coming back to life. It certainly generated quite a lot of interest and has been widely read (and viewed, after being adapted into a movie). The story, retold by the boy’s father from what he gathered in conversations with his son, has received mixed reception. From my own perspective, it seems most folks are ready to receive it as a genuine experience, especially with some excellent proofs, like the boy seeing his mother and father in separate hospital rooms as he was dying on the surgical table, talking to a miscarried sister that his parents had never told him about, and recognizing a mid-life photo of his grandfather. (The soul looking on the situation of its own body immediately after death, is a very common thread...even in the story of a friend of my own.) A few folks, however, are quite vocal about their denouncements of the boy’s experience in heaven, mainly based...

"Once Elder Nektary of Optina was asked: Should an elder take upon himself the sufferings and sins of those who come to him? He answered, 'You can't help them any other way.'" This is from a wonderful book on the life of Elder Vitaly of Tbilisi . Elder Vitaly would often fulfill the penance of others. This was especially true when the penance for a particular sin would have been too much for the repentant. But it was not just others' penance that he would take upon himself, but also, as that quote said, "their sufferings"... "When he would find out from the 'Nightly News' that a disaster had occurred somewhere, or that an accident had taken away human lives, he would write down the number of the dead and light candles for the repose of these people he didn't even know. He made a full prostration for each person." Communion with Christ is necessarily a step away from the individual and toward the communal. This is a beautiful e...

In the introduction to The Life in Christ , Boris Bobrinskoy repeatedly claims that Cabasilas sees the Eucharistic communion as the layman’s communion in Christ. I had an immediate and negative reaction to such statements due to my aversion to the false dichotomy between “lay” and monastic spirituality, but especially in the current climate of quarantine at home and isolation from the parish and Eucharistic communion, a time of sharpened attention to communion and what that means when we do not have the Eucharistic communion. I will admit that I attempted to prove Bobrinskoy wrong and to find references from Cabasilas that would also support communion with Christ in other ways outside of the Eucharist. Certainly, Cabasilas speaks of union with Christ in our heart, but I will have to concede that the Eucharist is his focal point: “So perfect is this Mystery [the Eucharist], so far does it excel every other sacred rite that it leads to the very summit of good things. Here also is the...

Not to set up Schmemann’s work for rejection again, but his language about our salvation is exactly what I was just mentioning as fadish among Orthodox—he is not at all wrong and can say these things with the full weight of the Fathers behind him—salvation is a healing, or in this case, restoration of our nature: “It is Paradise, not sin, that reveals the true nature of man; it is to Paradise and to his true nature, to his primordial vestment of glory, that man returns in Baptism.” And also, “Christ came not to replace ‘natural’ matter with some ‘supernatural’ and sacred matter, but to restore it and to fulfill it as the means of communion with God.” That is all true, and Orthodoxically beautiful to say, but notice Cabasilas’s language on the same topic, mentioning not only “uniting our nature to Himself”, but also “paid the penalty”, a phrase rarely heard in today’s Orthodox dialect: “By this He paid the penalty for the sins which we had audaciously committed; then, because of tha...

There are some spots where it is helpful to have a man from our own times speaking on Baptism. Schmemann, writing on the tail of the greatest wave of cultural change in America, the tumultuous 60s, can speak to our mixed up, modern confusion...in this case, about death. “Seemingly, from a modern perspective, nothing has happened to biological death with Christ’s death, because we still all die,” runs the thinking of a modern atheist looking at Christianity. He is able to respond to this confusion with the fundamental Christian vision of death: it is that death “in which the ‘biological’ or physical death is not the whole death, not even its ultimate essence. For in this Christian vision, death is above all a spiritual reality, of which one can partake while being alive, from which one can be free while lying in the grave.” Cabasilas rightly speaks of this spiritual death in Baptism by saying that “in the sacred mysteries, then, we depict His burial and proclaim His death. By them we ...

Fr. Alexander made a good point, but a point that was so good it almost undercut his entire book in my mind. He posed this question: “Are we not somewhat restoring, even though restoring is always artificial”, and emphasizing his own point, “all restorations are always artificial”. He argues long and hard for faithfulness to the original services of Baptism and Chrismation, to make sure we are serving them as they were written to be served. And that would...or could be artificial, even in his own estimation. Therefore, it is essential to keep in mind when reading Fr. Alexander’s book, that it is not for some romantic or “archeological” love of the past or to see a perfect historical restoration of the services, “but because of our certitude that only within this original structure can the full meaning of Baptism be grasped and understood.” That I understand: if we cut out chunks of the service we lose meaning. Clear. Later, though, it feels as though the tentative understanding we ju...

This is an absolutely unfair and completely biased and subjective opinion—I think my emphasis is quite clear in saying how the following probably should not be said in a proper and balanced evaluation of these two books, but will be anyway, for I think it is helpful to the reader in determining how to interpret my thoughts on these two books—but Schmemann’s book seems too theologically “uppity”, where Cabasilas is more like hearing wise thoughts that may be partially over the listener’s head, but the understood pieces become pearls to cherish. [ This is where you choose to read any of the following articles or not. I am not anti-Schmemann; I loved the book, but this work, and I am assuming others of his as well, are written "higher" than necessary. ] St. Nicholas’s book, for all of its distance from us in time and geography and culture, seems to treat Baptism in a way that hits our modern context more directly than Fr. Alexander's book. It is not better, and Fr. Alexa...

Fr. Alexander Schmemann starts off his book with a lamentation about our need to understand Baptism. That clearly reveals his intended audience: Orthodox Christians. Over and over throughout his book, he finds every exhortation, every inspirational liturgical detail, every symbol lost on the modern ear to help reconnect modern Orthodox Christians with the richness of Baptism, Chrismation, and the Eucharist. And that is a message that needs to be heard, especially in the 1970s when he wrote it. He makes references to abbreviation or outright removal of seemingly redundant, meaningless, or outdated parts of the baptismal service, which to him is particularly abhorrent because such changes usually proceed from ignorance of the sacrament. St. Nicholas Cabasilas seems to have had a different audience in mind. On the surface, he, too, is speaking to Orthodox Christians, though it is difficult to say if that be to his own flock, because there is much uncertainty as to whether he ended his l...