Forgiveness is not an emotion or a single action. It is rather a change in your ontological* orientation towards the forgiven person, removing them from the category of "enemy". Like love, forgiveness is a lifelong commitment. When you forgive someone you commit to carrying the burden of treating them as if the wrongs they have done you are wiped away.
You can forgive someone and still feel angry or hurt. Forgiveness doesn't depend on our feelings. We do not control our feelings but we always have freedom to forgive. What is required of us by forgiveness is that we do not allow ourselves to be motivated by the negative emotions we feel towards the person who has wronged us. And while we can't make our emotional pain disappear, we can try not to dwell on it.
Forgiveness is an asceticism. Like fasting or abstinence, forgiveness requires the repeated renunciation of desire. The impulse to lash out or complain about the person may arise 10,000 times, and 10,000 times you let it go.
Forgiveness is also a lot like "agape" love. It is not just an emotion or a simple action. You can love someone through having a wide array of emotions towards them. No one action fulfills the duty of love. Rather, love is a change in your ontological orientation towards someone, seeing their being as part of yours, and committing that you will act for their benefit as if it were your own.
Forgiveness is the sibling of love.
I had a hard time forgiving a person because I couldn't stop feeling hurt and angry. I wanted to forgive them but for a long time I couldn't figure out how to do it. Driving my car home today, these thoughts came to me, and I realize that now I can. Hurt and anger may still linger. But the choice to change my orientation towards the person to a forgiven one is entirely within my control.
I felt freedom when I had these thoughts. I laughed out loud in my apartment, astonished that the Nativity Fast had taught me the key to forgiveness of all things.
* I debated using a five-dollar word where a nickel would do. What do I mean by "change in ontological orientation"? An ontology is the map of concepts that one uses to make sense of the world. When someone has a change in ontological status to your eyes, you see them as a different sort of being. It is a kind of revelation. One example is the marriage sacrament in the Orthodox Church. In the sacrament "the two become one flesh" in the eyes of the church, the eyes of the couple, and in the eyes of God. That's a change in ontological status (2 singles, to 1 married couple).
Here I use the word "ontological" to imply the same kind of realness to the conceptual shift.
I love the smell of frankincense in the morning. The sense of smell is the most primordial. It is said to have the strongest link to memory. Perhaps the smell of our mothers is the first memory we ever make.
In the morning I burn frankincense on my prayer altar at home, and it reminds me of church. My prayer corner is a little bubble of church. I sit down in front of it and I am no longer mentally in my apartment. I am not thinking my usual job and errand shaped thoughts. My eyes are drawn to the eyes of the icons. I sit in the gaze of Christ.
I am an impulsive person and I have a hard time keeping a routine. Many times I have failed to stick to a goal of daily prayer or meditation. But I love to light the incense and the candles. Instead of forcing myself into the routine, I am drawn into it by my sense of delight. When I used to be a Buddhist, my longest streak of daily meditation coincided with the period when I had built a similar altar with a statue of Buddha replacing the icon of Christ.
Growing up in a church tradition with "four bare walls and a sermon", who would have thought that frankincense or myrrh were real things? I remember reading the words in the Bible, describing the gifts the magi made to the child Christ. But there was always this unbridgeable gulf between the present and the past. The past had temples and gold and incense and priests. We had cheap carpet, low-slung ceilings, business suits, and boring sermons. Our aesthetic universe was 1950s Americana. I would not have thought to question that it could be otherwise.
But in Orthodoxy there is no break between past and present. The church grows forward through time like a tree rooted in the ancient world. If you dropped a modern orthodox in a church service in the imperial heart of Constantinople in 400 A.D., he would follow along without missing a beat. He would be delighted to see the liturgy celebrated by Archbishop John Chrysostom, a gifted homilist who wrote the liturgy we still use today. The roots of church practices stretch even deeper - drawing inspiration from ancient Jewish liturgies. That same orthodox time-traveler would not feel completely lost in a Jewish temple service, though he might draw puzzled looks if he reflexively made the sign of the cross.
I find the ancient church to be surprising and delightful. It is like living in a 2,000 year old treehouse. The history of the church is inscribed on the walls, in the icons and architecture. A natural question, "who is in that icon?" leads to a chapter of the story of the church in the world or a lesson in theology. My interest in reading icons has led me to learn the Greek and Cyrillic alphabets (invented by our Saints Cyril and Methodius, the "Apostles to the Slavs" in the 800s AD).
For most of my life I didn't even know that this kind of church was an option. In America, it seems to be a secret. And yet something like it was the norm for the majority of Christian history.
In my childhood religious experience, I was starved of beauty. Beauty was a factor that once drew me to Tibetan Buddhism. As an orthodox, I feel like a starving man who has been invited into a banquet.
I've been meaning to write and talk about my journey to Christianity over the past 18 months or so. Converting to Christianity is a strange thing to do for a modern man, especially one in my social circles (Buddhist, hippie, techie, San Franciscan). I hope some readers might be inspired by my journey. And I know some people will judge me to be stupid or deluded. I accept that.
The journey had an intellectual and an emotional component. It is a continuing journey of discovery that I suspect has no end. The emotional piece felt like falling in love. I fell in love with many facets of the church - the monastics, the historic continuity, the mystical theology. And one of the things I fell in love with was the sensuality of the church. My love, she is beautiful.
II.
I remember the first time I saw someone prostrating, that is kneeling down and touching his head to the ground. He was a monk in long black robes and it was during a pre-dawn, candlelit service at the moment of the consecration of the Eucharist. I wanted to try it, but I felt too awkward. My mental habits were still too modern. After being around people prostrating enough times I worked up the courage to try it. When the initial awkwardness passed, I felt a sense of peace. In prostrating to God my body is implicitly teaching me about God and my relationship to him. Perhaps the peace I felt is because I had found a God worth prostrating to.
Orthodox worship emphasizes the majesty of God. The pageantry, the bowing, the kneeling, and etc. feels strange to a modern American. But a medieval peasant would recognize immediately the aesthetic universe that we are in - this is how you act in front of a monarch. The words we use in worship are applied to monarchs; "your majesty", "your grace" and "your worship" were forms of address for one. The design of the Orthodox church and its liturgy is to place us in the throne room of God with the Trinity enthroned as the monarch of the universe.
In this world of flattened hierarchies, there is a relief to finding something majestic and worthy of worship. It might even be a necessity for a good life. From a secular and symbolic perspective, Jordan Peterson identifies the concept of God with a person's highest human ideal. One could argue that everybody has a God, whether they know it or not.
I imagine the objection of some readers. Isn't it shallow to focus on aesthetics? Isn't the core of religion an intellectual activity? Isn't it about belief and instruction?
First, much of the aesthetics of the church are also instructional. In the early days of the church, most laity were illiterate Roman citizens and slaves, and the icons and hymns were used as teaching aids to instruct people in the Bible and church history.
But the ritual practices are not primarily for instructing the mind. Their purpose is to instruct the heart.
III.
I read a book recently by James K.A. Smith about the power of habit and repeated activities to shape our desires ("You Are What You Love"). The main thrust of the book is that repeated activities that shape our desires are called "liturgies", and our life is full of liturgies, conscious and unconscious. Checking twitter is a liturgy. I'm on a twitter fast, and I intensely feel how twitter usage has shaped my desire.
There is a vein of Christianity that rejects ritual practices that do not directly instruct the conscious mind, cutting out anything other than preaching, praying, and singing. It judges these other practices as unnecessary vain repetitions or superstitions. I grew up in one such church. This kind of church life carries with it an implicit model of what a human being is. The human is primarily a mind, and so religion is about putting the right things in that mind.
This is the dominant kind of thinking that shaped American culture and our view of religion. We think that if you want to know a religion, the most important thing is to study its beliefs. That's certainly how I was trained to see the world.
James K.A. Smith is a different kind of protestant, the kind that calls himself a small-c "catholic" and sees value in re-embracing some liturgical practices of big-C Catholicism and older brands of Protestantism. He's even favorable to incense use in church! In focusing too much on the mind, he estimates that many churches miss the role of liturgical repetition in shaping the heart. Given all the secular and commercial liturgies we are exposed to, it is necessary to fill our lives with counter-liturgies to bring us back to God. It seems to me that he's on the right track.
I wish him luck in shaping a movement of more powerful and rooted churches. Secular modernity is waxing and the church is waning. Now is the time to grow our roots deep.
In reading Smith's book I reflected on just how many physical, repetitive and embodied practices we have in the Orthodox church to shape our minds and desires.
When we kiss the icons, we teach ourselves that Christ and the saints are precious things
When we cross ourselves, we remember that we are marked people of God
The liturgical calendar reminds us annually of the important events of our faith. The 12 major feast days and the many minor ones mark the passage of time. Time itself is inscribed in the life of Christ.
The human brain has special structures dedicated to facial recognition and processing. Seeing the faces of holy people in icons brings them to life and our minds build a relationship with them.
Lighting candles teaches us that we can pray even when we don't have words
Bowing, kneeling, and prostrating teach us the majesty of God
Incense during worship produces an instant visceral portal back into the mental space of holiness and provides a demarkation between the sacred and the profane. Sacred music does the same thing.
When we fast, we learn how to control our desires, and that small sacrifices are not to be feared. "It is not a sin not to fast, but fasting teaches us how not to sin."
Fasting together creates a shared bond as a congregation... as does feasting together at the end of a fast.
In answer to the more severe kinds of Christian that might criticize these tools and practices as unnecessary, I would agree with them. They aren't strictly necessary. Christ was a wandering rabbi, and his followers were mostly poor. The early Christians met in secret in underground graves, not in grand temples. However, though they are not necessary, they are useful. The practices and tools of ancient Christianity are an inheritance that has been built over time and passed down to us. Shouldn't we be grateful for the full inheritance and put it to use? Some of those pieces don't fit modern tastes, but should we change our practices to fit in?
I am 36 years old and I am not that great at being me. But I am better than I was. As I learn to navigate myself, I am learning the importance of my body. It has a strong hand on the rudder, to the frequent consternation of my mind. I am trying to live a good life one day at a time. And each of those days start with the smell of incense.
About me: I'm just a beginner, a recently baptized member of the Eastern Church. I'm pretty excited about it at the moment, and I like to share things I like. Please forgive me if I unintentionally say anything that misleads or offends.
The modern world ain't so good for your psyche. It's easy to get strung out, anxious as a wildebeast in a lion convention, with thoughts looping through your mind like a roller coaster.
Eastern religions have a bunch of techniques for developing peace of mind, colloquially referred to as "mindfulness". They generally involve directing your attention away from your thoughts and into something else, like your breath. This has useful side effects for defusing negative emotions like stress and training the purposeful direction of your attention.
Mindfulness has gone mainstream as a therapeutic and self-help practice in the West. The monks and yogis (and nuns and yoginis) of the East did these practices as preparation for contemplation of Ultimate Reality. Westerners use them to run a dual-income household under the demands of modern capitalism without drowning in a pool of tears. Either way, they do a lot of good.
So Christian and post-Christian society has looked to Buddhism and Hinduism for mental tools to cope with an often unpleasant reality. What is missed is that Christianity itself has a long tradition of similar mental tools for calming the mind and directing attention, that also help to grow in the Christian faith. It's overlooked because these techniques come from Eastern Christianity, which is unfamiliar in Western society. However, as far as I can tell there is no dogmatic incompatibility which would prevent a Western Protestant from using the mental tools of the Eastern Church.
The most powerful tool in the pocket of every Eastern Christian is known as "The Jesus Prayer". It has a few different forms, but I prefer the middle-length[0] form which is regularly spoken in church services:
"Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me".
This is used as a mantra, repeated over and over. It can be used in times of stress, to short-circuit anger or racing thoughts, or just when you feel bad and don't know what to pray. Like Buddhists, Eastern Christians identify uncontrolled thoughts and desires as a major source of unnecessary suffering, and they prescribe the Jesus Prayer as medicine.
It's a simple practice, but the history and use of it runs deep. Its earliest recorded origin dates to the 5th century founders of Christian monasticism in the Sinai desert. The Jesus Prayer is the monastic's single most powerful tool in his or her quest to dwell in God. In the beginning stages, it clears the mind and the heart of passions and focuses the attention. There are also further stages that monks write about that are hard for me to comprehend. Eventually, monks seek to have this prayer constantly running in their hearts under its own power, every second of their lives[1].
Christian monks and nuns use the Jesus Prayer for contemplation of Ultimate Reality. But lay people use it for every circumstance, which includes running a dual-income household under the demands of modern capitalism without drowning in a pool of tears. The Jesus Prayer is their constant companion in traffic, at work, and when relating to others.
I once dated a girl that was a Buddhist. She carried around prayer beads and used them to count mantras. She liked to recite them silently to herself when sitting on a bus or a train as a substitute for checking social media on her phone. She found it left her in a better mood. Similarly, Eastern Christians often carry around prayer ropes and use them to recite the Jesus Prayer. They are a wonderful replacement for checking Twitter or Instagram.
If you're a Protestant Christian, you probably pray free-form prayers at specific times and when you feel you need it. But it is useful to have a little short invocation that you don't have to think about. The Jesus prayer teaches us to rely on Christ, and not on our own intellects. There is no demand on us to come up with the correct words, or to petition God in just the right way when we are distressed. Instead we just invoke the name of Christ, constantly, and trust in him. We run to him like little children and count on him to do what is right for us.
Elder Porphyrios of the Greek church says that it is not necessary for us to fight the darkness within us. Instead, we only need to open a little window to let the light in. The Jesus Prayer is that little window. The most tiny, minimal effort of turning towards God leaves us open to welcome his grace.
In this post I have drawn parallels between Eastern Christianity and other non-Christian religions. It would be irresponsible for me to not mention that elders in the Eastern church often resist this comparison[2]. In particular, they point out that Christian mental practices are relational toolsfor contemplation of an ultimate reality that is personal. In Buddhism ultimate reality is impersonal. So I hope I've done my duty by stating that caveat.
What unites the Christian and non-Christian takes on mindfulness is that they both encourage explicit awareness of our thoughts. Instead of identifying with our thoughts and thinking of them as what we are, we view the thoughts as something that happens. And that disidentification then allows us some amount of control to shape them and to improve our existence.
There are many more uses of the Jesus prayer, but this post is intended as an introduction. If you are a Christian looking for a more Christian practice of mindfulness, try incorporating this into your prayer life. You might start with saying it a fixed number of times in the morning and evening to get used to it. A prayer rope is useful, but not necessary. Try to focus on the meaning of the words - who Jesus Christ is, what it means to call him "Lord", and what his mercy looks like. Then you can take it out into the world and have Christ as your constant companion.
Brothers and sisters of all faiths, may we survive life in this hectic world together, with the help God's grace.
About me: I'm just a beginner, a catechumen in the Eastern Church. I'm pretty pumped about it at the moment, and I like to share things I like. Please forgive me if I unintentionally say anything that misleads or offends.
[0] The shorter form is "Lord, have mercy" and the longer form is "Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner".
[1] See this 60 minutes special on the monastics of Mt. Athos, the holiest site in Eastern Christianity. Be sure to watch part 2!
[2] See Father Sophrony's writings on the Jesus Prayer. He was once a serious Buddhist before coming back to Eastern Christianity.
Poor-fear-ee-ohs
Who ever thought I would love someone with such a name?
But as I get to know it, it plays on the tongue
like a whiskey and cigar
What a blessed man! To be God’s puppy dog.
You decided you deserved nothing,
begged,
wagged your tail.
When he closed his door you did not go away
until one night he took you into his house.
You say this is the easy way,
Don’t you see how hard it is?
To be so utterly unsophisticated.
I have an 8th ex-girlfriend
and a 3rd career
envy my coworkers that have more shares than me
resent my government
have kinks
and daydream about sex, sometimes, in church.
How could I ever be a puppy?
Maybe I could be a smelly beggar outside God’s door
whom he slips a buck every now and then
out of pity.
But oh, Porphyrios!
You have shown the way.
It is never too late to grow in trust and simplicity,
wag more, whine less,
and maybe one day I will nip at your ear in the lap of God.
