But what, one might ask, does all this have to do with
us, who are trying to lead, as best we can, a sober Orthodox Christian life? It
has a lot to do with it. We have to realize that the life around us, abnormal
though it is, is the place where we begin our own Christian life.
Whatever we make of our life, whatever truly Christian content we give it, it
still has something of the stamp of the "me generation" on it, and we
have to be humble enough to see this. This is where we begin.
There are two false approaches to the life around us that
many often make today, thinking that somehow this is what Orthodox Christians
should be doing. One approach—the most common one—is simply to go along with
the times: adapt yourself to rock music, modern fashions and tastes, and
the whole rhythm of our jazzed-up modern life. Often the more old-fashioned
parents will have little contact with this life and will live their own life
more or less separately, but they will smile to see their children follow after
its latest craze and think that this is something harmless.
This path is total disaster for the Christian life; it is
the death of the soul. Some can still lead an outwardly respectable life
without struggling against the spirit of the times, but inwardly they are dead
or dying; and—the saddest thing of all—their children will pay the price in
various psychic and spiritual disorders and sicknesses which become more and more
common. One of the leading members of the suicide cult that ended so
spectacularly in Jonestown four years ago was the young daughter of a Greek
Orthodox priest; satanic rock groups like Kiss—"Kids in Satan's
Service"—are made up of ex-Russian Orthodox young people; the largest part
of the membership of the temple of satan in San Francisco, according to a
recent sociological survey—is made up of Orthodox boys. These are only a few
striking cases; most Orthodox young people don't go so far astray—they just
blend in with the anti-Christian world around them and cease to be examples of
any kind of Christianity for those around them.
This is wrong. The Christian must be different from the
world, above all from today's weird, abnormal world, and this must be one oft
he basic things he knows as part of his Christian upbringing. Otherwise there
is no point in calling ourselves Christian—much less Orthodox
Christians.
The false approach at the opposite extreme is one that one
might call false spirituality. As translations of Orthodox books on the
spiritual life become more widely available, an the Orthodox vocabulary of
spiritual struggle is placed more and more in the air, one finds an increasing
number of people talking about hesychasm, the Jesus Prayer, the ascetic life,
exalted states of prayer, and the most exalted Holy Fathers like St. Symeon the
New Theologian, St. Gregory Palamas, and St. Gregory the Sianite. It is all
very well to be aware of this truly exalted side of Orthodox spiritual life and
to have reverence for the great saints who have actually lived it; but unless
we have a very realistic and very humble awareness of how far
away all of us today are from the life of hesychasm and how little prepared we
are even to approach it, our interest in it will be only one more expression of
our self-centered, plastic universe. "The me-generation goes
hesychast!"—that is what some are trying to do today; but in actuality
they are only adding a new game called "hesychasm" to the attractions
of Disneyland.
There are books on this subject now that are very popular.
In fact, Roman Catholics are going in very big for this kind of thing under
Orthodox influence and themselves influencing other Orthodox people. For
example, there is a Jesuit priest, Fr. George Maloney, who writes all kinds of
books on this subject and translates St. Macarius the Great and St. Symeon the
New Theologian and tries to get people in everyday life to be hesychasts. They
have all kinds of retreats, usually "charismatic"; people are
inspired by the Holy Spirit, supposedly, and undertake all types of these
disciplines which we get from the Holy Fathers, and which are far beyond the
level at which we are today. It is a very unserious thing. There is also a
lady, Catherine de Hueck Doherty (in fact, she was born in Russia and became a
Roman Catholic), who writes books about Poustinia, the desert life, and Molchanie,
the silent life, and all these things which she tries to put into life like you
would have some fashion for a new candy. This, of course, is very unserious and
is a very tragic sign of our times. These kind of exalted things are being used
by people who have no idea of what they are about. For some people it is only a
habit or a pastime; for others who take it seriously, it can be a great
tragedy. They think they are leading some kind of exalted life and really they
have not come to terms with their own problems inside of them.
Let me re-emphasize that both of these extremes are
to be avoided—both worldliness and super-spirituality—but this does not mean
that we should not have a realistic awareness of the legitimate demands which
the world makes upon us, or that we should cease respecting and taking sound
instruction from the great hesychast Fathers and using the Jesus prayer
ourselves, according to our own circumstances and capacity. It just has to be
on our level, down to earth. The point is—and it is a point that is absolutely
necessary for our survival as Orthodox Christians today—we must realize our
situation as Orthodox Christians today; we must realize deeply what times we
live in, how little we actually know and feel our Orthodoxy, how far we are not
just from the saints of ancient times, but even from the ordinary Orthodox
Christians of a hundred years or even a generation ago, and how much we must
humble ourselves just to survive as Orthodox Christians today.
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