Orthodox Theology and Quantum Theory (III)

This is the 3^rd and final post in this series building on the ideas that John Breck put into his book, BEYOND THESE HORIZONS: QUANTUM THEORY AND CHRISTIAN FAITH.  Breck begins a much needed dialogue between Orthodox theology, quantum theory and a theory of consciousness, attempting to fill a void that exists between Orthodox theology and modern science and philosophy.  The previous post is Quantum Theory and Orthodox Theology (II).   Quantum physics presents to us truth about the empirical world which may open a door for a dialogue between scientific theory and Orthodox theology by adding a dimension to Orthodox thinking.  Orthodoxy historically formed a great synthesis between theology and the dominant ideas from Hellenic culture.  Now Orthodoxy begins to speak to the world of scientific materialism by using concepts which quantum thinking has brought to light about the material world.

Breck points out that physicists recognize that “…two entangled photons behave as a single unity…. the interaction between the two renders them independent of time and free from the influence of ‘local’ or immediately surrounding conditions.” (BTH, p 122)   If physical reality can be free of time and locality, why is it impossible to accept a being, namely God, which is also free of these constraints?  It seems to me that quantum discoveries have opened a door to allow scientists to accept an immaterial/spiritual world since immaterial ‘things’ exist in the materialistic world of science!  The material world at the quantum level reveals that it behaves both like matter and like a wave.  Fields underlie the existence of everything, indicating an immaterial basis for reality.  This opens the possibility of bringing quantum physics to bear upon spiritual topics.

For example, if one wonders how the person of Jesus can somehow miraculously convey salvation to all, we can think about entanglement in the quantum world.  “Entanglement permits the instantaneous communication of information from one quantum element to another…” (BTH, p 122).   Salvation can be understood as information that is being conveyed from the incarnate Christ to all of the other elements of the universe.  Our bodies share a common existence with the rest of the universe and salvation is a cosmic event touching all that exists.  It turns out that the entire cosmos is entangled with the Creator and Savior God.  God shows that divinity can become incarnate (God becomes “not God”) as creation and Creator interface and blur all lines of separation.   The concept of theosis shows creation is capable of being united to divinity.

Breck himself takes this notion of the shared common existence of all things and sees the hologram as offering a scientific paradigm or even an explanation for several theological claims.  The way in which a hologram works is already present in the universe as understood by Orthodox theology.  “The world is a Whole; everything is interconnected.  Like a hologram, every part and aspect of the world contains the whole of everything”  (BTH, p 93).  This becomes obvious in the writings of St Maximus the Confessor for whom both “…Scripture and the universe should be contemplated as a [hu]man ” (Lars Thunberg, MAN AND THE COSMOS, p 74).   The whole is contained in the part and the part in the whole, this is how the hologram forms its image.  The human is a microcosm of the universe.  So, if we come to understand the human we can come to understand the universe, but not only the universe but also the Scriptures, for each contains the other and is interconnected.

Lars Thunberg explains: “Here the Pauline trichotomy (St Paul speaks of man as consisting of body, soul, and spirit) is also inscribed in the system.  This means that the Church as a building is now seen as divided into three parts, organized according to their sacredness: to the spirit corresponds the altar, to the soul the sanctuary, and to the body the nave.  But what is important for Maximus is precisely the reciprocity between them: the Church reflects man in his constitution as the latter reflects and represents the Church in man.  Man is in fact a church in the world, and the Church is universal Man, what Maximus calls the makranthropos.” (MAN AND THE COSMOS, p 122)  If we look at the universe/Cosmos as a whole we will see how it reveals the human to us, and so too the human reveals the cosmos.  The Church also reflects the human and the human the church.  All are interconnected, revealing each other and each containing a revelation about the other.  This is where quantum physics opens the Church to science and the scientific way of understanding the world.  The quantum world and the experienced world come together in Christ.  The science of the hologram makes the theological claims of Maximus even more clear to us.

As St Maximus says:

“The Logos, God by essence, became man and messenger of the divine will.  He let the most intimate ground of the goodness of the Father appear, if one may say so, and showed in Himself the goal for which created beings were created.  For it is for Christ, i.e. for the Christic mystery, that all time and all that is in time has received in Christ its beginning and its end.  The union between the determined and the indetermined, the finite and the infinite, the limited and the non-limited, and also between Creator and creature, between rest and movement was conceived before the times.” (Maximus in MAN AND THE COSMOS, p 79)

For Christians, it is in Christ that the quantum world and the experienced world interface and are united.  In Christ the beginning and the end, the spiritual and the physical, heaven and earth, the living and the dead, the finite and infinite, divinity and humanity, Creator and creation are united and understood.  The theory of everything so sought out by science will fall short until it recognizes something beyond mathematics unites all things.

Orthodox Theology and Quantum Physics (II)

John Breck in his book, BEYOND THESE HORIZONS: QUANTUM THEORY AND CHRISTIAN FAITH, makes an effort to form a synthesis between Orthodox theology, quantum theory and a theory of human consciousness.  This is the 2^nd post in a series building upon his book to give further thought to how theology and scientific theory are related.  The 1^st post in the series is Quantum Theory and Orthodox Theology.  In that post I suggest that quantum theory actually gives support to an idea not only of consciousness (the observer) but of free will.

Dealing with another of the surprising aspects of the quantum world, Breck notes that humans as observers of the quantum world affect the results of what we are observing.  “Only when we pin down a wave function through observation—that is, measurement—does it ‘reduce or ‘collapse’ to become an actual particle with a specific location on momentum.” (BTH, p 11)   This is one of the stranger aspects of quantum mechanics – at the quantum level ‘things’ have both the properties of a wave or a particle, and our observation of them or our measurements of them, determine what they appear to be – in effect observation determines reality.

Since the universe was unfolding billions of years before there were humans, theists have no problem understanding how God influences the created order on the quantum level.  God is the universal observer watching the entire cosmos unfold.  So there always was an observer watching the quantum world, from the beginning.

But this aspect of quantum thinking also provides an answer to another question raised by both ‘faithists’ and agnostics.  That question is how it is possible that some see a miracle while others see an event as having a natural explanation, some observe spiritual events while others deny they ever happen.  Is there objective reality or is it all subjective experience?  Or as one of the apostles quizzed Jesus:  “Lord, how is it that you will manifest yourself to us, and not to the world?”  (John 14:22).  There is a quantum answer to this – it depends on what the observer is looking for.

Pseudo-Dionyius (6^th Century) describes why it is that different people can come to different conclusions while observing the same event: “For as our sun, through no choice or deliberation , but by the very fact of its existence, gives light to all those things which have any inherent power of sharing its illumination, even so the Good … sends forth upon all things according to their receptive powers, the rays of its undivided Goodness” (THE DIVINE NAMES, p 87, emphases not in the original text).  What one sees, even in relation to something as big as the sun depends on the observer’s receptive powers.   What is the observer capable of seeing or understanding?  What is the observer looking for?  What does the observer believe he or she is looking at?   The observer effects what is seen or understood just like in quantum mechanics.  St Maximus the Confessor (d. 662AD) also accepted this as a fact of life.  “This fact is indeed of great importance, since for Maximus the Trinity remains a mystery, opening itself only to the believer” (Lars Thunberg, MAN AND THE COSMOS, p 33).   How is it that believers can see the hand of God while non-believers see no sign from God while observing the same event?   It is related to the fact that the observer effects what is seen, what is manifested.  It no doubt explains how a saint can perform a miracle – the events are shaped by what the saint is able to observe even when others can’t observe it.

Continuing with the more mysterious characteristics of the quantum world, Breck writes: “Qunatum superposition entails the linear combination or sum of two or more physical states that produce another quantum state … the duality that marks quanta enables an electron to act as either a particle or a wave” (BTH, p 122).  Such a superposition might be an explanation for John 20:19 in which Jesus seems capable of entering a room despite the doors being closed and locked.  “On the evening of that day, the first day of the week, the doors being shut where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said to them, ‘Peace be with you.’”  The resurrected Jesus appears to His disciples both showing He is physically present and yet somehow despite having a material body appears not to be limited by the laws of physics.   He seems to be in two states of existence at once.  At the time of the disciples, no one knew the science to understand how this is possible, but now physics offers a scientific way to understand a ‘miracle.’

Existing in two separate states of being at once is not just a quantum thought but a theological concept as well which was contemplated by the Patristic theologians.  As Lars Thunberg queries in his book on St Maximus the Confessor referring to the logoi (that aspect of God which is in all created things):   “Are the logoi transcendent or immanent, are they created or noncreated?  … In a certain way they are, both transcendent and immanent.  Yet, this immanence does not invite us to conclude that they are created.  … As realized in the existence of things, they materialize in the created order.  Yet they are certainly not themselves created or part of that created order in the sense that they are bound by its material appearance or actual realization”  (MAN AND THE COSMOS, p 138).  Many of the mysteries related to the incarnation of God in Christian Trinitarian theology require ‘things’ to exist simultaneously in two different states.  St Maximus himself stated: “Indeed, the scientific research of what is really true will have its forces weakened and its procedure embarrassed, if the mind cannot comprehend how God is in the logos of every special thing and likewise in all the logoi according to which all things exist…”  (MAN AND THE COSMOS, p 140).  Divinity is in everything and yet everything is not divinity.  All of creation participates in divinity and yet has a nature different than that of divinity.   Both the concepts of incarnation and theosis require a superposition of ‘state.’

The theology required to understand the Trinity and the incarnation is helped by quantum thinking as the world is not as ‘black and white’ as physics once imagined it to be.  Reality is full of mystery which is supported by the best of science today.

Breck also noted that some of Orthodox theology seems to provide a bridge to scientific thinking enabling us to better understand Patristic theology.  “In classic Christian terms, that divine Force or Power which issues from the Godhead can be thought of as ‘divine energies’ that are manifested in time and space by the Persons of the Son and the Holy Spirit” (BTH, p 62).  In my my reading of this, ‘fields’ and ‘waves’ which the physicist’s say underlie all that exist also are the very place in which the non-physical and physical interact – the interface between the immaterial and the empirical of the created cosmos.   Fields and waves are not particles but are an immaterial reality (belonging to the created order) which we can detect and account for by mathematics.  It seems to me that it should not be a problem for physicists to imagine an immaterial reality or to know it can exist.  They will no doubt still see this in scientific terms as waves and fields, but for theists it is an easy step to accepting that there are not only inanimate forces but also forces based in a consciousness, forces that are part of a being, which are personal not just mathematical and whose mystery or unpredictability is because they are from a personal immaterial being.  All that theism allows is that besides a created immaterial order, there is an uncreated/eternal order which is the source of all that exists.  Quantum physics is showing us that particles (empirical reality) emerges from fields (immaterial reality).  Theism acknowledges this and sees the created immaterial reality as then being the interface with the uncreated immaterial reality known to us as God.

Next:   Quantum Theory and Orthodox Theology (III)

God Makes the World Make Itself

“When we contemplate the physical creation, we see an unimaginable complex, organized on many planes one above another; atomic, molecular, cellular; vegetable, animal, social. And the marvel of it is that at every level the constituent elements run themselves, and, by their mutual interaction, run the world. God not only makes the world, he makes it make itself; or rather, he causes its innumerable constituents to make it. And this in spite of the fact that the constituents are not for the most part intelligent. They cannot enter into the creative purposes they serve. They cannot see beyond the tip of their noses; they have, indeed, no noses not to see beyond, nor any eyes with which to fail in the attempt.

All they can do is blind away at being themselves, and fulfil the repetitive pattern of their existence. When you contemplate this amazing structure, do you wonder that it should be full of flaws, breaks, accidents, collisions, and disasters? Will you not be more inclined to wonder why chaos does not triumph; how higher forms of organization should ever arise, or, having arisen, maintain and perpetuate themselves?

Though a thousand species have perished with the mammoth and the dodo, and though all species, perhaps, must perish at the last, it is a sort of miracle that the species there are should have established themselves. And how have they established themselves? Science studies the pattern, but theology assigns the cause: that imperceptible persuasion exercised by creative Will on the chaos of natural forces, setting a bias on the positive and achieving creatures.”

(Austin Farrer, from The Time of the Spirit, p. 6)

St Thomas: Faith and Seeing

“Origen reminds his readers that doubting Thomas is not the only model of faith in the Scriptures. Faith is more than believing what was not seen with the eyes. Jesus said to his disciples, ‘Happy are your eyes for they see and your ears for they hear‘ (Matt. 13:16). His saying suggests that those who have seen with the eyes are happy, not just those who believed without seeing. Was not Simeon happy, asks Origen, when he saw the Christ child and “held God’s salvation in his arms.” Did he not say, ‘Lord, now let your servant depart in peace for my eyes have seen your salvation’ (Luke 2:29-30). Origen concludes that ‘faith complemented by vision is far superior to faith through a mirror.’ The disciples who saw Jesus alive after his death knew him by faith even though they could see him with their eyes.”  (Robert Louis Wilken, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought, p. 179)

“The physical evidence that Thomas is invited to inspect is only a beginning, but, in human terms, perhaps an essential beginning for many on the road to faith. St. John the Theologian begins his first epistle by restating this evidence and its ultimate purpose: ‘That which was from the beginning, which we heard, which we saw with our eyes, which we observed, and which our hands touched, concerning the Word of Life…what we saw and heard we announced to you so that you might have fellowship with us as we have fellowship with the Father and his Son Jesus Christ’ (I Jn. 1.1-3), author’s translation).

The faith of Thomas was not born from a purely objective examination of empirical evidence. It could only emerge from the interface between a conscious acknowledgement of the evidence and an interaction between persons made initially possible through the senses. For the faith spoken so eloquently in Thomas’s declaration to Christ is not the affirmation of an idea or a fact, but a commitment of absolute trust in a Person. It is the necessary element, the sine qua non, for the journey toward union with the unknowable God, who yet through a relationship with his incarnate Word can be known.” (Daniel B. Hinshaw, Touch and the Healing of the World, p. 111)

Math, God and Man

“God made the natural numbers,” the nineteenth-century algebraist Leopold Kronecker famously said, “and all the rest is the work of man.”  (Jordan Ellenberg,  How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking, p 104)

Mathematics is one way that we can approach the universe around us – a way to know reality.  It is also an interpretation of reality – for math says reality can be known and predicted and described by formulas.  Math says there are patterns to be recognized everywhere in the cosmos, and that the entire cosmos can even be understood as a relationship of numbers and formulas.

We recognize the truth about mathematics and science in the Akathist Hymn, “Glory to God for All Things.”  There we sing:

In the wondrous blending of sounds, it is your call we hear. In the harmony of many voices, in the sublime beauty of music, in the glory of the works of great composers, you lead us to the threshold of paradise to come, and to the choirs of angels. All true beauty has the power to draw the soul towards you and make it sing in ecstasy: Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!  

 The breath of your Holy Spirit inspires artists, poets, scientists.  The power of your supreme knowledge makes them prophets and interpreters of your laws, who reveal the depths of your creative wisdom. Their works speak unwittingly of you. How great are you in your creation! How great are you in man!

Glory to You, showing your unsurpassable power in the laws of the universe.

Glory to You, for all nature is filled with your laws.

Glory to You for what you have revealed to us in your mercy.

Glory to You for what you have hidden from us in your wisdom.

Glory to You for the inventiveness of the human mind.

Glory to You for the dignity of man’s labor.

Glory to You for the tongues of fire that bring inspiration.

Glory to You, O God, from age to age.

Music is another part of the universe which is very mathematical.  Anything with patterns is mathematical as well.  That is why beauty is said to be mathematical – what we see or hear as beautiful is often patterned and thus can be described by mathematics.  The patterns and order of the universe are all describable by math.  And in Orthodoxy we recognize God the Trinity as the Creator of all the order in the universe.

Faith and Reason

Though opposing faith against reason seems to be a modern issue resulting from a scientific mindset opposing faith, the difference between faith and reason has been long understood in the Church, centuries before the modern scientific age.   St. Isaac the Syrian for example sees faith as greater than reason/knowledge because knowledge really deals only with the things of this world while faith deals with things beyond this world.  Knowledge is thus limited to the study of nature, but then there exists the world beyond nature – divinity, spiritual beings, heaven, the soul.  The natural world has its edges and limits, and thus knowledge is bound and limited.  The life beyond nature is an existence which might be boundless, and thus is greater than nature itself.

“For knowledge is opposed to faith; but faith, in all that pertains to it, demolishes laws of knowledge—we do not, however, speak here of spiritual knowledge. For this is the  definition of knowledge: that without investigation and examination it has no authority to do anything, but must investigate whether that which it considers and desires is possible… but faith requires a mode of thinking that is single, limpidly pure, and simple, far removed from any deviousness. See how faith and knowledge are opposed to one another! The home of faith is a childlike thought and a simple heart… But knowledge conspires against and opposes both these qualities. Knowledge in all its paths keeps within the boundaries of nature. But faith makes its journey above nature.”  (The Spiritual World of St. Isaac the Syrian, page 257)

Becoming Little Children

“Then Jesus called a little child to Him, set him in the midst of them,and said, ‘Assuredly, I say to you, unless you are converted and become as little children, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven.  Therefore whoever humbles himself as this little child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.'”   (Matthew 18:2-4)

Christ’s words that we are to become as little children, or else we cannot enter the kingdom of heaven, have at times been a puzzle to me.   I’ve wondered, what was it about children that Christ believed to make this statement?  Look at any books of theology and mysticism, they are anything but child like.

In my parish, some might think, “like children?”   You mean …  disruptive, noisy, restless, misbehaving, distracting?

“Like children,” the Lord Jesus Christ says.

Probably one of the best explanations I’ve ever read illuminating Christ’s teaching, comes from a most unlikely source.   I’m a fan of  humorist and fiction author Douglas Adams, who was not a believer and certainly not trying to understand the Gospel.   In his book, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish,  Adams has the character Wonko the Sane say:

“I’m a scientist and I know what constitutes proof. But the reason I call myself by my childhood name is to remind myself that a scientist must also be absolutely like a child. If he sees a thing, he must say that he sees it, whether it was what he thought he was going to see or not. See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting.”

A child sees things and is not troubled by whether it is believable or not, whether it makes sense or not, whether it is logical or not, whether it conforms to reality or not.  The child sees first, and may not make proper sense of what he or she sees, but the vision is clear – innocent, unspoiled, not jaded or cynical.

I remember once hearing an aviation investigator say that some of the most reliable witnesses of a plane crash are children.  They tend to report what they saw without trying to interpret or make sense of what they saw.   The more a person knows about aviation, the more they try to make sense of what they were viewing as the plane goes down.  They don’t report what they saw but what they thought must be happening – what makes sense to them, rather than what they saw that didn’t make sense.

A child experiences, even before understanding.  Logic and reason can cause some things we see to disappear or fade away. To understand fully, we must be clairvoyant – we must see clearly and see all that is, not just that which makes sense to us, or reinforces what we think or agrees with what we think.  If we see only what we are expecting, we conform reality to ourselves, rather than experiencing all that is there.

As one sage said, “if we only read those parts 0f scripture with which we agree, then we are not listening to God, but only to ourselves.”

Wonko the Sane continues:

“But always see first. Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting.Most scientists forget that. I’ll show you something to demonstrate that later. So, the other reason I call myself Wonko the Sane is so that people will think I am a fool. That allows me to say what I see when I see it. You can’t possibly be a scientist if you mind people thinking that you’re a fool.”  ( The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,  Kindle Location 10562-10567)

A truth teller always risks sounding like a fool to some because he or she may be the first to see something or may see that which others cannot see ever.   Sounds a great deal like a “fool for Christ” or a prophet.   Or perhaps returning to becoming like a child, it reminds me of the children’s story by Hans Christian Andersen, “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”

The Mystery which binds Science and Religion

Pure atheistic materialists would claim that nothing exists beyond the empirical reality we encounter through our senses.  They endeavor to explain everything in the universe by causal relations with the rest of the empirical universe.  It is a self-contained system.  Sometimes discoveries emerge which cause the materialists to admit that there may be more to the empirical universe than previously acknowledged.  So their sense of the material universe does grow to include dark matter, dark energy, parallel universes, bubble universes and the like.   Theory or experience may lead to the conjecture about these unobservable aspects of the universe which remain beyond our direct observation but are suggested because current theory and knowledge cannot fully account for the known universe (as it turns out 70% of the universe is dark energy and 25% is dark matter while the to us observable universe is only about 5% of all that exists).

For example, physicists puzzle over why gravity is such a feeble force.  As noted in the July 2012 issue of DISCOVER MAGAZINE, it is not easy to explain how a small “magnet can pick up a paper clip even though the gravitational force of the entire earth is pulling the clip down.”   This led to speculation that perhaps there are other spatial dimensions, so far unknown to us, that affect the force of gravity.  Dr. Eric Adelberger of the University of Washington and colleagues have invented a pendulum, a torsion balance, which would be able to detect whether on some micro scale gravity breaks down.  So far they have not detected any unusual results in how gravity works.

Another scientist who acknowledged that there are things science cannot explain is Sir Andrew Huxley   who died in May of this year.  Huxley was a   neurophysiologist who was responsible for discovering how a nerve impulses work which opened the door for much of modern neuroscience.  Sir Andrew considered himself an agnostic and admitted “that there is no scientific explanation for the fact that we are conscious.”   That fact plays a significant role in Raymond Tallis’  APING MANKIND:NEUROMANIA, DARWINITIS AND THE MISREPRESENTATION OF HUMANITY.  Tallis, though an atheist himself, is not shaken by the fact that there are some things in the universe which science cannot yet explain.  He is willing to acknowledge that there are some things we do not know, and may never know.  His book is  a rebuttal to the claims that some atheists make about neuroscience proving there is no free will.  His take on the world is that realism demands even materialists to acknowledge that currently our state of understanding certain realities is incomplete and we in fact cannot explain everything purely from materialism.  It is dishonest to contrive theories denying for example, free will, just to maintain an atheistic belief.

As I was thinking about the above two points, I read with great interest an article by Fr. John Breck in the Number 4, 2011 issue of ST. VLADIMIR’S THEOLOGICAL QUARTERLY, entitled “God in a Quantum World.”  Fr. Breck explores some of the new science that is emerging which challenges long held beliefs by scientists; some of these beliefs were thought to be certain and non-negotiable.  The marvel of science is of course that new evidence requires new theories, and so “scientific truth” is something that becomes modified over time as new evidence demands new theories.  Breck says that especially in France new questions are being asked by scientists which challenge the established order of things in physics, evolution and the neuroscience of consciousness.  He offers a list of ideas that are being challenged in science today, but I’ll jump to his concluding comments for the sake of brevity.

“If a person cannot accept an ‘apophatic” approach to reality, declaring what it is not before seeking to affirm what it is, then there is little way of dealing with the givens of quantum mechanics and general relativity.”

Some of what the new scientific discoveries are showing is that there is built in the physics of the universe some indeterminacy or uncertainty.  There actually are things we cannot know – not because we lack the instruments but because of the very way things are.

One of the mysteries at the quantum level of the universe is that the conscious observer is needed for certain events to take place – they remain in an indeterminate state until observed.  Breck writes:

“On the quantum level, consciousness is also required  to ‘bring into existence’ elementary particles and, variously, to determine their mass, location and velocity.  This is scientific fact, demonstrated experimentally and repeatedly over the course of the last century.”

Here we enter into a most marvelous mystery of the universe: if a conscious observer is needed for certain things to exist on the quantum level, then in fact we humans as observers also are creating or bringing into existence things which before were not.   This means two important things: 1) we actually are co-creators with God in the world, and  2) absolute determinacy, which so many atheists materialist rely on as the basis of their own epistemology, is simply false.  At the quantum level at least determinacy makes no sense.  There is mystery in the universe, and free will is quite possible.  Strangely, even before we understood the laws of quantum mechanics, we were observing the quantum universe and thus bringing things into existence, even though we were unaware that it was our conscious observation that was making certain things exist.

“If we have the capacity to bring elementary particles into physical existence by the sheer act of observation, then perhaps something analogous occurs in the realm of God’s own being and activity . . . God, who creates not by modeling clay from a riverbed or from some pre-existing, unformed matter, but rather by an act of conscious perception that looks upon the world and ‘sees that it is good’ (cf. Genesis 1).

It might well be, then, that God creates ex nihilo and sustains the creation by employing the very quantum laws that he himself devised.”

For believers all of this means that we do not have to choose between science and religion, or between faith and reason.  For what may be emerging is that science is recognizing that mystery is part of the universe, and that there may be more to the universe than we can measure or observe or test in experimentation.

A Fusion of Prayer and Medicine

Tomorrow morning, June 7, I will be undergoing surgery on my lumbar spine intended to correct some problems that have been worsening as I have aged.

Following the six hour surgery and time in recovery, at some point I will be challenged with the words,

“Get up and walk.”

I hope in that moment to hear the voice of Christ and not just the nurse.  I will need Him  as Peter needed Him when he began to sink beneath the waves.   It will be a moment of synergy – the surgeon will have done his part, Christ will do his part, and I will have to do my part.   A good friend, Dr. N. Eike, says the surgeon’s job is to remove those things which are preventing healing from taking place: a wonderful perspective.

I will not be posting any blogs for a few days as I convalesce.  I have been working on a blog series which I hope to begin in a week or so on PRAYER.

It is something I will be relying on and wrestling with in the next few weeks as my activities will be curtailed for at least one month.  A measure of how well I am recovering might be how soon I am able to resume posting blogs.  I’ve been told for the next 30 days there will be very limited activity, so I’m not sure what to expect in the recuperation process.

Meanwhile, I ask for your prayers.

Let me hear joy and gladness;

let the bones that you have crushed rejoice.

(Psalms 51:8)

I am hoping that my bones will be rejoicing after surgery!  The Psalmist is both bold and hopeful.  He boldly expresses his belief that it is God who has crushed his bones – he is not blaming God but acknowledging God’s will in the world.  The Psalmist then asks in hope that God will now allow his crushed bones to rejoice.  It calls to mind the Book of Job the Long-Suffering:

And Job said, “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return; the LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.”  In all this Job did not sin or charge God with wrong.  (Job 1:21-22)

As I prepare myself for surgery, offer up holy words from  THE WISDOM OF ST ISAAC OF NINEVEH:

“Before you fall ill, search out a doctor for yourself.  Before difficulties come upon you, pray; then, when the time of distress comes, you will discover prayer, and it will provide an answer for you.”

“When you are ill, say ‘Blessed are those who discover the purpose set by God in the things that God brings upon us for our advantage.  God is bringing this sickness for the sake of the soul’s good health.’”

“If you believe firmly that God cares for you, then you do not need to worry about the body, nor need you be concerned about discovering ways how to conduct your life.  If, however, you doubt God’s care, and want to look after yourself without God, then you are the most miserable person imaginable.”

I have lived and wanted to live in such a way as to look after myself and not to be looking for or dependent on God’s care.  Now I am to submit my body and soul into His hands and trust in His care.  It is a step of faith.

“Into your hands, O Lord, do I commend my spirit,

bless me, have mercy on me, and give me eternal life.”

Christ the Physician of Soul and Body

(The above icon was done by the hand of Daryl Cochran.  He gave it to me as a gift in preparation for my surgery.)

Free Will and Tradition

3 Holy Hierarchs

“But I must explain myself a little more clearly. A good many men do not draw their conclusions from the very nature of reality, but merely consider the way men have lived before them; and so they fall completely short of an accurate judgment about reality, and they take, as their criterion of what is good, irrational custom instead of sober reason. Hence they force their way into political office and power, they make a good deal of merely external show since they are unaware of the fact that all this will come to an end after this life. For custom is no sure guarantee for the future, for very often this may lead us to the goats and not to the flock of sheep. My meaning will become clear if you will consider the words of the Gospel. If you consider that which is proper to man, that is, his reason, you will despise the force of custom as irrational, and you will never choose as good that which brings no advantage to the soul. We must not then seriously consider the footprints of those who have gone before us like so many cattle leaving their trace upon the world. For what is best to choose is not clear from sense phenomena – nor shall it be until we depart from this life; then we will know whom we have followed. The man then who merely follows in the tracks of those who have lived before, and takes the custom of this world as his guide in life, and does not distinguish good from evil on the basis of actual reality, very often makes a mistake, and in the day of that just Judgment he becomes a goat instead of a sheep.” (Gregory of Nyssa, From Glory to Glory, pg. 161)