+ Dostoevsky

Reflection:

“If only God would perform enough miracles, belief in him would become unavoidable.” This thought has crossed my mind more times than I would care to admit.

Which was precisely why I found Dostoevsky’s observation above to be profound: it reverses the modern assumption that faith is the product of sufficient evidence. I must say though, Saint Paul said this 1800 years before Dostoevsky, “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”¹ Faith is not born from miracles; rather, miracles are recognized through faith.

However bold of a statement this may be, which I think it is not, faith is woven into the very fabric of human existence. Human life itself is sustained by acts of trust. Every day we entrust ourselves to realities we cannot absolutely prove. When we rise from bed, we do not first conduct an investigation to determine whether the floor remains beneath our feet. We do not run a diagnostic on our lungs before taking the next breath, trusting that they will simply do what they have always done.

The question, then, is not whether man has faith, but where he places it.

Dostoevsky’s “realist” is not one who denies reality but one who understands he does not have the fullness of reality but strives to know it. If such a man encounters the miraculous, he cannot simply dismiss it because it violates his expectations. A true realist must be willing to admit all of reality, including those aspects that transcend ordinary experience. To reject the miraculous a priori is to decide beforehand what reality is allowed to contain.

This helps explain why miracles alone rarely produce faith. The problem is often not the absence of evidence but the disposition of the heart. A person determined not to believe will always discover another reason to withhold assent. Christ met this very disposition in His own day, and His answer cuts to the same root.

“A wicked and adulterous generation seeks after a sign, and no sign shall be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah.” ² The issue was never a lack of signs but a refusal to receive them.

The man of faith does not invent another world beyond this one but learns to perceive that this world is deeper than it appears. He sees that creation is not a closed system exhausted by what can be measured and analyzed. Rather, the visible world is continually pointing beyond itself toward the invisible and the intangible.

The tragedy of unbelief is not merely the rejection of God but the gradual reduction of reality itself. Yet the man of faith discovers that reality is richer than he imagined, that the visible and invisible are intertwined, and that miracles are revelations of Truth, which is reality, which is Christ.

“The fool has said in his heart, ‘There is no God,’” ³ the fool also says he knows reality.

My Lord and my God.

1. Hebrews 11:1 (NKJV)

2. Matthew 16:4 (NKJV)

3. Psalm 14:1 (NKJV)

For most of my life, I read the command in Genesis to “be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth” (Gen. 1:28) as pertaining almost entirely to the flesh. I considered it primarily a mandate of numeric increase, the spreading of human life across the face of a waiting world. It seemed self-explanatory. God spoke these words to Adam and Eve in the garden, the same blessing He had already spoken to the fish and the birds (Gen. 1:22), and so I took it to mean exactly what it appeared to mean: go, grow and spread.

I was not entirely wrong. But I was missing an important perspective.

Basil the Great, in his homily on the origin of humanity, makes a distinction that completely reorients the command. He notes that these same words, having been spoken both to irrational creatures and to man, must necessarily carry a different weight when applied to the one creature made according to the image of God. For if filling the earth by multiplication alone were the fullness of the command, then the irrational animals have already fulfilled it and surpassed us. They multiply according to nature and, in doing so, arrive at the telos appointed for them.

But man was created for participation, for partaking of the divine nature, as Saint Peter says. Through the ordering of the self towards God, this partaking is enacted in embodied life. Basil writes that man is called not only to fill the earth with bodies, but to fill it with good works, to multiply in virtue also. The filling of the earth with good works is form of the priestly vocation of offering the world back to her Creator.

The heart is the first earth, and perhaps the earth most in need of cultivation. Left untended, the heart becomes overgrown by whatever weeds the world casts into it. And a heart that is not rightly ordered eventually produces disordered works as well.

The command to fill the earth, then, is first spoken to the inner man. Before man fills the world around him rightly, the soil of the inner life must first be broken open, cultivated, planted, and watered. “Let every usage of your limbs be filled with actions according to the commandments. This is to fill the earth.”¹ The right ordering of the heart slowly becomes the right ordering of the members. The eye was created to behold the face of God in our neighbor (Matt. 25:40). The hand was created to give. It reaches toward the poor, the sick, the stranger, the forgotten. The feet were made to journey toward what is good. “How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the gospel of peace” (Rom. 10:15).

We also know, both from Scripture and from experience, that whatever is genuinely filled eventually overflows. Christ says that rivers of living water flow from within the one united to Him (John 7:38). Divine life is never self-contained. The one who has cultivated peace within himself inevitably becomes peace for others. The one who has learned mercy begins to extend mercy. The one whose eyes have been purified helps others begin to see rightly as well.

The saints become living springs. And what flows from a source finds the low places, the dry ground, the cracked and waiting earth, and softens it. Perhaps this is the deepest meaning of the command in Genesis, the filling and subduing of creation with the likeness of God.

And yet the command still remains unfinished. Creation still groans, as St. Paul says, awaiting its final renewal (Rom. 8:22–23). The full realization of the command awaits the restoration of all things, when every faculty of human life finally finds its proper end in the unobstructed vision of God. When the eye sees Him face to face (1 Cor. 13:12). When the feet walk in the city that needs no lamp.

The work towards joining that kingdom of God for which blessed Paul says creation groans in anticipation begins now. It begins with asking what our inner earth has been filled with and the repeated offering of the will back to God.

Perhaps learning to cultivate the small patch of earth we have been given is where the command begins for most of us. The ground of our hearts. The movements of the body. The neighbor before us.

And from there, the earth begins to fill.

1. Basil the Great, On the Human Condition, trans. Nonna Verna Harrison (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 2005), 39.

Side note: As I am still new to this platform, please excuse the lack of art in my use of it.

anyways, below is one such reflection.

+++

"Remember the day of your death. See then what the death of your body will be... Remember also what happens in hell and think about the state of the souls down there... But keep the day of resurrection and of presentation to God in remembrance also."

+ Abba Evagrius (Sayings of the Desert Fathers)

The Fathers return to this theme again and again because few things expose our delusions more quickly than the remembrance of death. Much of what occupies our attention derives its importance from an unspoken assumption of permanence.

Every passion feeds upon this forgetfulness. We sin as though there will always be another tomorrow to repent. I find it strange how often I live this contradiction. When I want to eat, I eat as though there is no tomorrow. When I seek comfort, I seek it immediately. Yet when it comes to the struggle for virtue, tomorrow suddenly feels guaranteed. I can always begin later. I act as though death is near when it comes to satisfying my desires, and impossibly distant when it comes to preparing my soul.

This is why the remembrance of death is such a powerful weapon against the passions. It shatters the illusion that there will always be more time and reminds us that the only moment in which we can love God is the present one.

“Dust art thou and to dust thou shall return”

Ultimately, the remembrance of death is not about death itself, but about learning to see clearly: that we are dust, that our days are few, and that our accomplishments pass away. And having seen this, to seek first the life that does not end.

These markers were not shaped by any real understanding of the flow of the Liturgy; Sarah did not even know the difference between the Liturgy of the Word and the Liturgy of the Faithful. Instead, her sense of where the liturgy was “headed” mostly came from shifts in her mother’s posture. She noticed how her mother would swiftly straighten her back and stretch out her hands toward the altar as soon as she heard the priest sing Habene, and over time, that gesture itself became a signal that the end was approaching.

Yet something had shifted since the day Sarah asked the Lord to teach her how to lift her heart.

Week after week, she found herself repeating the same petitions, and week after week, they began to press more deeply into her.

“ሀበነ ንኅበር በዘዚአከ መንፈስ ቅዱስ”
Grant us to be united through Your Holy Spirit.

Who am I asking to be united to? She would ask. And the Lord being the father of wisdom that illumines the hearts that seek Him, always found a way to teach Sarah. 

Over time Sarah learned that this was a plea for God to keep alive the gift that had already been given to her at baptism. Sarah never really thought of the gift of the Holy Spirit that way before, as something that could be rekindled or quenched. 

The spirit is quenched when the heart ceases to turn back toward God, when grace is treated as something static. In such a state, the Spirit remains present, but His life-giving work bears little fruit. Rekindling, however, is always possible, because the gift itself has never been withdrawn. Scripture speaks of this as fanning into flame what has already been given. The Church understands this rekindling as a reordering of one’s life toward attentiveness and communion.

Sarah therefore slowly understood that to pray for unity through the Holy Spirit was to ask to be gathered into the Church, into the Body of Christ, into a communion of love that is not to be entered alone. The One she was being united to was a living Body, the ecclesia.  It was the same Body gathered around the altar, praying with her, receiving the same offering. This Body stretches beyond the walls of the church, joining her to the saints who came before her and the one standing with her, all held together in love by the Holy Spirit.

Habene was immediately followed by the next petition: 

“ወፈውሰነ በዝንቱ ጵርስፎራ ከመ ብከ ንሕየው ዘለኩሉ ዓለም ወለዓለመ ዓለም”
And heal us by this oblation (prosphora), that we may live in You forever.

The unity asked for in Habene is fulfilled by participation in the prosphora–Greek for the bread of life, the Eucharist. One cannot ask to be made one in Christ and then turn away from the very act by which that unity is given.

For a long time, Sarah’s understanding of the Eucharist had been narrow. She had viewed it as something reserved for the spiritually “clean.” And cleanliness, in her mind, was something achieved much later in life when one was less likely to sin. Not because the passions had been healed or mastered, but because the body and mind no longer possessed the strength to act on them. This logically translates to a dangerous assumption that Holiness is arrived at by exhaustion rather than by transformation.

The Church, however, has never understood holiness as a condition required before approaching the Eucharist, but as the very goal toward which the Eucharist leads. Our fathers teach us that the Eucharist is not given as a reward for those who have succeeded in holiness but as medicine for the faithful who approach in a state of repentance. To be healed by the oblation is to be healed by Christ Himself. The Body and Blood offered upon the altar heal the soul, inclining what has been distorted back toward the image of God in which it was created.

Just as salvation is something to be worked out, so healing unfolds slowly through repetition, through return, through faithful presence. Week after week, the same offering is given. Week after week, the faithful ask for union and healing and to be gathered and kept within His Body.

Sarah now understands that, 

To ask for healing by the oblation

is to ask to be kept within Him.

And to be kept within Him

is to learn, slowly,

what it means to abide in God

and for God to abide in us.

 For weeks, Sarah’s answer had been an easy “yes” to appease her pious parents. But even when she was there, she wasn’t present. She stood, she crossed herself, she mouthed the prayers, yet her heart remained distant from the Lord. To Sarah, liturgy was just a long service that seemed to repeat itself week after week, recited in an ancient tongue that hovered above her like the incense smoke. What was the incense for, even? 

That day, Sarah made it right before the liturgy started. She stood at her usual spot in front of the screen, failing to gather her disparate thoughts away from the chaos of the world. Though physically present, she was everywhere but in front of the altar.  If only her heart knew that she was standing before the throne of Christ…

As she battled  with her roaming mind, the priest sang “አልዕሉ አልባቢክሙ — Let us lift up our hearts.” She instinctively responded loudly with the congregation: “ብነ ኅበ እግዚአብሔር አምላክነ — We have lifted them up unto the Lord.” 

But as the words left her mouth, something inside her whispered back: What do I mean? Do I even know how to lift my heart up at all? The truth of her own helplessness brushed against her, and like a child reaching for a parent’s hand, an unplanned prayer escaped her lips: “Lord, teach this heavy heart how to lift itself up to you!”

In that brief moment, something within her heart changed. It was the smallest shift, almost unnoticeable, yet it was the beginning of something. Her heart was not where it was a moment ago. The chant she had always heard like background noise suddenly had texture. The incense rose up, as if carrying her question with it…Aha, maybe that is what it was for, she thought. 

The church fathers call this an example of synergy: the cooperation of God’s grace and Sarah’s effort, albeit feeble. The answer to her request didn’t come to her through emotion or sudden clarity. It came in the form of a humble invitation to realize the magnitude of the Holy Liturgy and participate more deeply in it. Therein lied her answer. 

This moment opened Sarah's eyes to the realization that the liturgy touches all of the senses. According to neuroscience, the brain reorganizes itself based on what we consistently experience with our senses, reinforcing our neural circuits over time. So experiencing something good over and over again can, quite literally, redefine who we are for the better. 

The liturgy, as a multi sensory experience, gives the mind and heart the same divine pattern each week, so that, if we are willing, our inner life is gradually rewired toward Christ. As the church fathers tell us, Christian transformation begins with the smallest turning of the heart. Whenever even a little space is made for Christ, He fills it; whenever the smallest desire to know Him is present, He grows it. The work of grace, in as much as we allow it, slowly softens the heart, purifies it, circumcises what is hard, and teaches it to love what is good.

After that moment, Sarah found herself listening more carefully to the dialogue between the celebrant and the congregation. Or rather, heaven and earth. Little by little, she began to see how the whole liturgy walks the faithful through the life of Christ: His birth, His death, His resurrection, His ascension. For the first time, she sensed that she was not just attending another service but entering into a life shared by all who stood there with her.

The word liturgy comes from the Greek leitourgia to mean, “the people’s work.” In essence, all of the faithful are becoming together what none could be on his or her own. To celebrate the liturgy as a community is to stand side by side with those who bring their own weaknesses, wandering minds, tired bodies, and wounds, and yet all are equally invited into the same sacred mystery. Together we lift our hearts. Together we give thanks. Together we receive Him. 

And with that, Sarah’s posture changed. 

“Dear Lord, what will You reveal to me today?” This was the attitude she  carried every Sunday as she walked in to celebrate the liturgy. 

Because where else can a disciple learn about Christ other than the very altar where He is offered up? Where else can He reveal His love so plainly? 

What better place to learn how to lift the heart than at the very table where He lifts Himself for the life of the world?

So, now Sarah goes to church not to appease anyone but because she knows Who meets her there.

The One who calls us to lift our hearts is the One who knows how to lift it.

And that was enough for Sarah to keep coming,

to keep asking,

to keep learning,

Sunday to Sunday. A liturgical life.