God Created the Human Body to Be His Dwelling Place

“For as God created the sky and the earth as a dwelling place for man, so he also created man’s body and soul as a fit dwelling for himself to dwell in and take pleasure in the body, having for a beautiful bride the beloved soul, made according to his own image.” (PSEUDO-MACARIUS: THE 50 SPIRITUAL HOMILIES, p 243)

The monk known as Pseudo-Macarius writes in the 4th Century, however the idea that God created the human in order to dwell or tabernacle in humanity is well attested in the First Century.  In the Didache, we find this as part of the Eucharistic prayer:

“And after you are filled, give thanks thus:

We give you thanks, Holy Father, for your holy name, which you made to tabernacle in our hearts, and for the knowledge, faith and immortality which you have made known to us through your servant Jesus.”  (Louis Bouyer, EUCHARIST, p 116)

Astronomically Speaking: What Are Humans?

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars that you have established;
what are human beings that you are mindful of them,
mortals that you care for them?
Yet you have made them a little lower than God,
and crowned them with glory and honor.
You have given them dominion over the works of your hands;
you have put all things under their feet,
all sheep and oxen,

and also the beasts of the field,
the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea,
whatever passes along the paths of the seas.
O LORD, our Sovereign,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!

(Psalm 8:3-9)

Astrophysicist Carl Sagan waxes eloquently on the same topic – how grand the universe and how tiny we humans are on that grand scale of things:

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”  (THE OXFORD BOOK OF MODERN SCIENCE WRITING, p 395)

I suppose Carl Sagan would roll over in his grave if he knew his writings was going to be used positively in a religious context – but then he didn’t believe in an afterlife, so I guess he won’t be rolling anywhere.  But his beautiful prose seemed to go well with the poem, “God”, written by Gavriil Derzhavin in 1784:

If all this mass of earth and sky,
This universe that we can see,
Is but a drop dropped in a sea,
Then what, compared to you, am I?
And if I saw not just this one
But five score times a million
Worlds, and if then I dared compare
Them to you, they would seem a dot
Tossed on an ample sea of air.

NASA Hubble Photo

I, too, next to you, am but naught.
Nothing!—and yet you shine within me
With magnanimity of virtue,
Your holy image etched upon me,
Like the sun on a drop of water.
Nothing!—yet, filled with breath of life,
Moved by a spiritual strife
And thirst, my soul flies up to you
And, in a state of high elation
And concentrated meditation,
It knows: if I am, you are too!

(THE WHEEL Issue 19 Fall 2019, p 43)

The vastness of space –  the size of the  known universe – defies human comprehension.  Poets, scientists and the Psalmist all have marveled at the universe and the human role in it.  The bigger the universe – or at least our understanding of it – the more distant God can seem.  And yet the witness of Scripture is that God is not far away, but always close to us, even dwelling in our hearts.  “... they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel after him and find him. Yet he is not far from each one of us, for ‘In him we live and move and have our being‘” (Acts 17:27-28).

Additionally, each human is created as a microcosm of the universe, and God dwells in each of us.

“You must understand that you are another world in miniature, and that there is in you sun and moon and stars.  …  Hear something else that the Lord says to his disciples: ‘You are the light of the world‘ (Mt 5:14).  Do you still doubt that there is sun and moon in you, you to whom is said that you are the ‘light of the world’?  Do you want to hear still more about yourself, lest perhance by thinking small and humbly of yourself you might neglect your life as of little worth?  This world has its own governor, it has someone who rules it and lives in it, the almighty God, as he himself says through the prophet: ‘Do I not fill heaven and earth? says the Lord‘ (Jer 23:24).

Listen to what the almighty God also says about you, that is about human beings: ‘I will live in them,’ he says, ‘and move among them‘ (2 Cor 6:16). … This world possesses the Son of God, it possesses the Holy Spirit, as the prophet says: ‘By the WORD of the Lord the heavens were made, and all their host by the breath of his mouth‘ (Ps 33:6).”  (Origen, SPIRIT AND FIRE, pp 40-41)

The Body and Christmas: Coming in the Flesh

There has been a great deal written in recent years about ancient Syrian Christianity as a form of the Church distinct from the Greek or Latin Churches.  Syrian Christianity had its own language and thus a different way to frame theological ideas while participating in the controversies and councils of the early Church.   Even Orthodox scholars today believe that Syriac Christianity preserved some ancient ideas and expressions that would disappear from Greek/Hellenistic Orthodoxy; the rediscovery of  Syrian Christian tradition enriches our understanding of the theology of the early Church.  Byzantine scholar Hannah Hunt writes about the Syrian Christian understanding of the human body:

“Whatever variations there are in the Syrian understanding of the integrity of the human person, underlying them is the Semitic concept of the heart as the centre of the human person: ‘the heart of the inner man is also the heart of the outer man; neither heart can function properly without the other’.  This is rooted in a biblical rather than a Hellenistic concept, in which the heart ‘denotes the seat, not just of the emotions, but also of the intellectual faculties as well’. Because of this integration of feelings and thoughts, seeing the heart as the spiritual centre of the human person means that there is ‘no dichotomy between the heart and the mind’.

Over-simplistic antithesis between heart and mind, affective and noetic spirituality, may be something which is erroneously read back into the early Syrian context through the lens of the later Hesychast movement, which also insisted on the prayer of the heart as a key mode of spiritual practise.  As we have seen, the early Syrian context is affirming of the integrity of all parts of the human person, as a mirror of the perfect unity of two natures in Christ. Human salvation is shown by Syrian writers to depend on Christ’s salvific death on the one hand and on human integrity on the other. Adam can only re-enter Paradise when he is complete and whole.  Redemption cannot exclude the bodily; it has to embrace it to bring the whole person before God.”  (Clothed in the Body: Asceticism, the Body and the Spiritual in the Late Antique Era, Kindle Loc Location 3081-3094)

Christmas is the Orthodox Feast of God in the flesh – God became human to unite humanity to God.  The body, flesh, is not evil but all is being saved by God in and through the incarnation, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ.  Hunt points out that Hellenistic Orthodoxy in its hesychast expression sometimes denies the body or acts as if the body has to be overcome through prayer.  Prayer and fasting are emphasized suggesting one is to minimize the body in order to be spiritual.   Syrian Christianity can help remind us of the true nature of the incarnation and salvation.  The human body is essential to salvation which is why Christ became incarnate.  A spirituality which denies the body also forgets St John’s admonition:  “For many deceivers have gone out into the world, men who will not acknowledge the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh; such a one is the deceiver and the antichrist”  (2 John 7).

Today, there is a popular idea that hesychasm was the only form of monasticism in Orthodoxy, but this is simply false.  Many monks in Orthodoxy were not hesychasts, and not because they failed in their efforts.  One can see in Orthodox history whole monasteries and some saints challenged and even opposed hesychasm – even monks from Mt Athos.  There were centuries in which one could hardly find any hesychasts among Orthodox monks.  Syrian Christianity is a form of ancient Eastern Christian monasticism which held to theological and anthropological ideas that hesychasm does not accept.  But it is true that hesychast writers often adopted Syrian Christian writers, reinterpreting their ideas from a hesychast point of view.

Racism and the Church

I was at the Cincinnati Art Museum and saw their exhibit Women Breaking Boundaries.  In the exhibit I saw a sculpture of Phillis Wheatley  (1753-1784) who was the first Black poet published in America.  She was captured as a young girl in Africa and brought to America as a slave.  She eventually attained her manumission.   I do not remember ever learning about her, so decided to read her poetry.  It amazes me that someone can master a foreign language so well as to become a poet in that language  – and she really did excel in the King’s English.  More amazing she was able to do this despite spending much of her life as a slave and then dying at age 31.  She must have had great language skills.   She does not excessively focus on her experience as a slave, but did become a fierce defender of Christian Trinitarian theology, even though it was Christian people who enslaved her.  She had to remind her white Christian fellow believers that Blacks are humans, that Christ died for them as well because Black lives matter to the Savior.  In Christ God became human so that humans might become god – that is a Christian truth for every human being.

Here is a poem she wrote at about age 16:

“On Being Brought from Africa to America”

‘Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,

Taught my benighted soul to understand

That there’s a God, that there’s a Savior too:

Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.

Some view our sable race with scornful eye,

“Their color is a diabolic die.”

Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain,

May be refin’d, and join the angelic train.

A good reminder to all of us to see beyond the color of the skin to see the image of God in each person.

I was struck in her poetry how little she identified herself as a slave or African and how she did identify herself as a member of His Majesty’s colonies – she was a loyalist who became an American as our country was born and she embraced the ideals of freedom.  She lived through 1776 and the American revolution.

Some might feel that she somehow fails to take up the Black cause.  But I think what is true of her is that she saw herself first and foremost as a human being, not as an African or African American or Negro or Black or slave or former slave.  She was human forcibly brought to an English colony which became the United States of America.  Her identity was not the color of her skin or place of origin but her humanity.  She  was African, British or American – it was of no matter because it was her humanity which she shared with those around her which was her self understanding.   That is how she was able to so readily identify with her fellow humans and was not separated from them by slavery, by race or nationality.

Each of us is created in God’s image and likeness.  She was able to see beyond the externals right to the heart of the matter.  One needs eyes to see what was obvious to her, despite how other treated her.

Life

According to Plato,  Socrates at the end of his life said, “The unexamined life is not worth living” (Ancient Greek: ὁ … ἀνεξέταστος βίος οὐ βιωτς ἀνθρώπῳ).   Or perhaps his statement can be translated as the unexamined life is not a fully human life, for we humans have been gifted with wisdom, consciousness and conscience.  To not use these gifts to look at one’s life is to fail to be human.    But what constitutes life?  For the modern American it is consumerism and the accumulation of wealth and things.  American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar who grew up American in a different age and experienced that time as a Black American also saw that life could be quite simple and yet still valued, valued enough to be examined which he did in his poetry.

 

Paul Laurence Dunbar kitchen table

He wrote in his poem “LIFE” –

A crust of bread and a corner to sleep in,

A minute to smile and an hour to weep in,

A pint of joy to a peck of trouble,

And never a laugh but the moans come double;

And that is life!

 

Paul Laurence Dunbar bedroom

A crust and a corner that love makes precious,

With a smile to warm and the tears to refresh us;

And joy seems sweeter when cares come after,

And a moan is the finest of foils for laughter;

And that is life!

(The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar, Kindle Location 877-883)

Life lived and experienced is more precious than things accumulated.  Joy and love are invaluable commodities that do not use up the earth’s resources.   As one old friend once said to me, “In the old days, it used to be that we loved people and used things, now in the modern world we love things and use people.”  How do we rekindle our humanity?

As Jesus warned:

For what will it profit a man, if he gains the whole world and forfeits his life? Or what shall a man give in return for his life? For the Son of man is to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay every man for what he has done.  (Matthew 16:26-27)

What Does God Ask of us?

This is the 6^th and final post in this blog series meditating on Psalm 51 and the nature of repentance.  The previous post is The Prayer of Manasseh .

So, what repentance looks like is for humans to be what God intended for us from the beginning.  It is not so much remorse and contrition or thinking of one’s self as a worm wallowing in mire.   Rather, it is recognizing God as Lord, and giving thanks for that truth to God.  The change of heart and mind in repentance is making the effort to be the human that God wants us to be.  We are to accept that God is the Lord, which means I am not.  It means accepting my role and place in God’s creation, rather than trying to establish my role as I see fit.  It means being a creature of thanksgiving for blessings received.

There is another prayer of repentance frequently used in Orthodoxy which expresses this same sense that what is asked of us is to stand before God and acknowledge who God and who we are.  That prayer begins:

Have mercy on us, O Lord, have mercy on us;
for laying aside all excuse, we sinners offer to You,
as to our Master, this supplication: have mercy on us.

It is a prayer which makes it clear that we understand God is merciful and for this reason alone we approach God in prayer seeking God’s mercy.  We acknowledge our sins and sinfulness and take full responsibility for them.  We don’t give excuse for our sinfulness – bad genes, bad parents, poverty, the fallen world, suffering, lack of education, poor opportunities, fears, peers, enemies, abuse, mistakes, misfortune.  We lay all that aside and admit we do sin.  And we own our sin because we also know God is love, God is merciful, and we trust God to be God.  The prayer then goes on:

O Lord, have mercy on us, for in You have we put our trust.
Do not be angry with us, nor remember our iniquities,
but look down on us even now, since You are compassionate,
and deliver us from our enemies. For You are our God,
and we are Your people; we are all the work of Your hands,
and we call upon Your Name.

It is much in the spirit of Psalm 51.  We recognize we need God to be God for that is our only hope in God’s creation.  It is a mystical vision which all humans are capable of having.

In this mystical vision of humanity, it turns out we humans are the place where God dwells on earth.  The mystical vision is not looking for heaven out there or trying to figure out how to get to heaven.   We ourselves are to be the “holy of holies” for God to dwell in so that the rest of the cosmos can also have its proper relationship to God.  God created the cosmos to be God’s temple, but created humans to be the place within the temple where God completely interfaces with creation.  God became human so that we humans might become god.   God’s plan is and always was to abide in us.  God is not trying to establish something outside the human to dwell in – a temple, a bible, a shrine.  Those things are merely shadows of God’s intention which is to dwell in us.   We are the ones who create all these religious sites to keep God at a distance.

And this vision of being human is for everyone, not just for monks, mystics or ascetics.  It is for moms and dads and grandparents and children, friends and neighbors.  No need to go to a monastery to find it, nor on a pilgrimage to a holy place, for the Kingdom of heaven is within each of us.  The Lord Jesus said: “The kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed; nor will they say, ‘Lo, here it is!’ or ‘There!’ for behold, the kingdom of God is in the midst of you”  (Luke 17:20-21).

We all are to live up to our God-given potential as beings created by God to be in God’s image and likeness.  We do find this simple vision in the Bible, for example in Deuteronomy 10:12-22, which some consider a summary of Torah –

“And now, Israel, what does the LORD your God require of you, but to fear the LORD your God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and to keep the commandments and statutes of the LORD, which I command you this day for your good?”

Repentance means getting back to doing this very thing that God commanded.  It requires humility – recognition that God is the Lord and we are God’s creatures and servants.  Repentance isn’t sorrowing for our failures, but deciding to live up to what God wants for us and from us.  It is the way that Christ describes to us:  “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light”  (Matthew 11:28-30).   We can uncomplicate our lives by following the way of repentance.   It is the notion of “what you see is what you get” – no lies, deception, hiding, excuses, blaming.  It is the freedom of being able to stand in God’s presence knowing who I am and who God is.  The Deuteronomist continues:

“Behold, to the LORD your God belong heaven and the heaven of heavens, the earth with all that is in it; yet the LORD set his heart in love upon your fathers and chose their descendants after them, you above all peoples, as at this day.”

However vast and grand heaven is, God still sets His heart upon people.  Heaven may be where God’s will is done, yet God still favors human beings and God’s intent is to dwell in humanity.  We are to become God’s heaven and we see this already accomplished in the Theotokos who is more glorious than heaven.  Heaven is where God dwells and God desires to dwell in us.  God created us to be heaven.

Repentance is thus nothing  more than our being human:

“Circumcise therefore the foreskin of your heart, and be no longer stubborn. For the LORD your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great, the mighty, and the terrible God, who is not partial and takes no bribe. He executes justice for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing. Love the sojourner therefore; for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt. You shall fear the LORD your God; you shall serve him and cleave to him, and by his name you shall swear. He is your praise; he is your God, who has done for you these great and terrible things which your eyes have seen. Your fathers went down to Egypt seventy persons; and now the LORD your God has made you as the stars of heaven for multitude.”

Repentance leads us to giving thanks to God and praising God, because in repentance we recognize God’s lordship in our life and what we are to be.  We realize God’s will.  Repentance leads us to the Liturgy where we give thanksgiving to God for all that God intends for us, does for us, gives to us, and accomplishes with, in and for us.  Repentance leads to our showing mercy to all those around us including the stranger.  Repentance means we:

Rejoice always, pray constantly, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.   (1 Thessalonians 5:16-18)

Blessed Matrimony

St. John Chrysostom writing on marriage says that marriage when it functions as it is designed to do restores humans to a paradisaical state.  Chrysostom seems to understand that the first humans were made complete, having both a male and female nature:

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.  (Genesis 1:27)

Among the divisions and separations caused by the fall were the separating out of male and female.  In marriage, where the two become one flesh, we have the ‘recreation’ of a whole human being – a human who is created male and female.  In Genesis 2 God creates the female out of the male but shows in this their interdependency – the two were created out of one flesh (Adam’s).   Marriage thus heals one of the wounds caused by sin.  Marriage is God joining together or reuniting the male and female which had become separated through the fall.   Chrysostom writes:

This love [eros] is deeply implanted within our inmost being. Unnoticed by us, it attracts the bodies of men and women to each other, because in the beginning woman came forth from man, and from man and woman other men and women proceed. Can you see now how close this union is, and how God providentially created it from a single nature? . . . He made the one man Adam to be the origin of all mankind, both male and female, and made it impossible for men and women to be self-sufficient. (Sermon 20, on Ephesians 5:22–33)

The love of husband and wife is the force that welds society together. (Sermon 20, on Ephesians 5:22–33)

Chrysostom believes marriage is based in love.  No partner in marriage should live in fear of the other for it is love that binds them together.  If either spouse tries to dominate the other and make them afraid through threats or abuse, it is sinful and not Christian marriage.

What kind of marriage can there be when the wife is afraid of her husband? (Sermon 20, on Ephesians 5:22–33)

How difficult it is to have harmony when husband and wife are not bound together by the power of love! Fear is no substitute for this. (Sermon 20, on Ephesians 5:22–33)

How foolish are those who belittle marriage! If marriage were something to be condemned, Paul would never call Christ a Bridegroom and the Church a bride. (Sermon 20, on Ephesians 5:22–33).”

(A Patristic Treasury: Early Church Wisdom for Today, Kindle Loc. 4682-90)

In the end Chrysostom argues that the very reason St Paul can use marriage as a metaphor or image  of the the relationship between Christ and the Church is because marriage is supposed to reflect perfect love.  Marriage becomes a means for us to live godlike love which is self sacrificing and works always for the good of the other.  Marriage is the right metaphor for the Christian’s relationship with Christ because we become one flesh with Christ in the Church through baptism and the eucharist, becoming one body in the Church.

The Human, The Male, The Theotokos

Man is called not to the implementation of rules but to the miracle of life. Family is a miracle. Creative work is a miracle. The Kingdom of God is a miracle. 

The Mother of God does not “fit” into any rules. But in Her, and not in canons, is the truth about the Church.

Inasmuch as a man is only a man, he is, above all, boring, full of principles, virile, decent, logical, cold-blooded, useful; he becomes interesting only when he outgrows his rather humorous virility. A man is interesting as a boy or an old man, and is almost scary as an adult; at the top of his manhood, of his male power.

A man’s holiness and a man’s creativity are, above all, the refusal, the denial of the specifically “male” in him.

In holiness, man is least of all a male. 

Christ is the boy, the only-begotten Son, the Child of Mary. In Him is absent the main emphasis, the main idol of the man – his autonomy. The icon of the infant Christ on His Mother’s lap is not simply the icon of the Incarnation. It is the icon of the essence of Christ. 

One must know and feel all this when discussing the issue of women in the Church. The Church rejects man in his self-sufficiency, strength, self-assertion. Christ proclaims: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9).

(Fr. Alexander Schmemann, The Journals of Father Alexander Schmemann, p. 272)

Overcoming Addiction

Repeated sins and compensations sought out in order to avoid being present, when repeated enough, become deeply rooted to the point that they take the heart captive so you cannot not do them. As we become aware of this condition and begin to struggle, it causes a lament to build in the heart like St. Paul: “The good I would do I do not and the evil I would not do that I do! Who will free me from this body of death?” (Rom. 7:19). Fortunately, God’s love is just the reverse of addiction. God refuses to take captive our freedom to resist him. God is without compulsion. At its most extreme, captivity to a passion seems all powerful and God utterly helpless, abandoning. Unavailable. We are alone with our suffering and the sea of human misery.

Freedom, on the other hand, is found in the mystery of Christ freely assuming human nature and the cross and when he seemed most vulnerable, most overpowered, he was actually opening up the possibility of humanity freely responding to God’s love. Choosing to turn and let ourselves be loved by God in the abandoned places and at the moments we feel most compulsively unable to and most unworthy of love is paradoxically the first step toward freedom to love. According to St. Isaac the Syrian, “nothing is stronger than despair, for it is then that we discover God’s strength and grace, not in comfort.”

(Stephen Muse, When Hearts Become Flame, p. 240)

Freedom: To Love as God Loves

A man is truly free when he exists as God exists; and this way of being is relational. In the words of Metropolitan John Zizioulas, it “is a way of relationship with the Word, with other people and with God, an event of communion, and that is why it cannot be realized as this achievement of an individual, but only as an ecclesial fact.” Communion makes beings “be” and freedom constitutes true being. True freedom does not lie in our ability to make choices – this only manifests the dilemma of necessity – but in our ability, by grace, to love as God does unconditionally, to overcome the fears, anxieties and limitations of our mortal biological existence, and to conquer death. (Alkiviadis C. Calivas, Essays in Theology and Liturgy, p. 78)