Seminary: The most difficult thing would be to change ourselves

Sydney-Gerringong

“All will be well, and go have a cup of tea.” (Saint Sophrony Sakharov)

In Sydney this morning I had an interesting encounter with a young person at a bookstore when the conversation for one reason turned to seminaries (from the Latin seminarium for “seed plot”). Chance meetings can prove a catalyst to go back into past stories of our lives. I hope one day that I might be able to write down my own seminary experience, the place where some of us go that we might receive an education in theology. It is only afterwards we learn those places are in reality but a training ground for spiritual survival. Even now and after almost four decades, it is not an easy thing for me to revisit this period of my life. Allow me, if you will, to share but a small reflection going back to those times.

This college is unique—and it belongs to all of us. It could be said that it has an Australian body, a Greek mind, a bilingual tongue, and a heart that is distinctively Orthodox. (Dimitri Kepreotes, SAGOTC Students Yearbook, 1988)

Following the final address of our Archbishop Stylianos, His Eminence Metropolitan Maximos read a warm message from His Holiness Patriarch Demetrios. This concluded the official opening and dedication of our new College; the dream was over and the reality of it all was just about to begin. (Spiros Haralambous, SAGOTC Students Yearbook, 1986)

Around fourteen young men of different dispositions and backgrounds started out in our first year of seminary in 1986 as the inaugural class of this new theological school in Australia (being an Eastern Orthodox institution and an accredited member of the Sydney College of Divinity SCD it was the first of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere). Some of us believed we were going to change the world. No more than a few weeks had passed and then there were nine. The “Messiah Complex” which afflicts a large number of seminarians did not last long. We were enthusiastic but hugely foolhardy in our aspirations. Those of us left after that initial loss of numbers were compelled to lower our original enthusiasm and expectations. Now it was a far more simpler thing, or so we thought, how are we going to change the already compressing atmosphere of our new place of learning. Surely, we could at least do this—could we not? No, not even this. It is true I also discovered, what a discerning soul once said about seminaries, that they will (as a rule) “relegate Jesus to the background.” Not too many more weeks would pass and then we were down to seven.

Finally, let it be said that nothing good comes easy: should you be sincere in studying a “faithful theology” be prepared to carry thy cross. (M. G. Michael (Ed.), SAGOTC Students Yearbook, 1986)

We have triumphed in that we have grown and learnt to accept not only our responsibilities, but our limitations as well, to be more sensitive to our brother’s needs, to realize the importance of study—more importantly, to kneel in prayer. We have failed in that we could have been less assertive, less demanding, slower to anger and reprove, more humble. (Fr. Jeremiah Michael (Ed.), SAGOTC Students Yearbook 1988)

At the start of the second year two more of the younger seminarians would leave. We were now officially down to the “pioneering five”, as our little group would come to be known. As time progressed and each one of us would do battle with their own particular demons and personal disappointments, we arrived at the hardest and most difficult realization of them all—the most difficult thing would be to change ourselves. Metanoia does not play games. I should have known better. I was one of the older seminarians, a former police officer and already a graduate of another academic institution. I was twenty-five years old. Yet, even I would fall into these deep traps. Now, almost forty years later, I continue to fight with the last of these admissions—that indeed, the road to the restoration of the self is not only arduous but also long-lasting. Which, I must confess, has not become any easier and not for any lack of belief. Unless we learn to forgive but more importantly ask to be forgiven, we will not make spiritual progress. Human nature is terribly complex and we can be deceived even by the noblest of our ideals and intentions. So, please, give each other the room and space to grow and to evolve. Who among us has not been broken? The Japanese art of kintsugi has a great deal to teach us. We cannot ever fully know the background story of another soul’s journey or how our actions might adversely hurt them. These things, as well, you learn in a seminary. To teach the Divine Word, and to preach the Gospel, the “Good News”, is not to be taken lightly:

Not many of you should become teachers, my fellow believers, because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly. (Jm. 3:1)

Outside some of the basics which we were able to collect over the four years of study (alas to afterwards even mangle many of those lessons), there remain two enduringly meaningful compensations from that time. First, we have the spirit within us to endure through almost anything so long as we have a reason, that is, a “meaningfulness” to persevere. Second, the most beautiful gift we can offer the other is compassion, that is, to “suffer with the other”—and that any pastoral theology however impressive in its exposition bereft of this charism is entirely, and absolutely without meaning. Lest, I have discouraged any soul from attending seminary (and this is certainly not my intention) there will be great days of spiritual delight, too, when you will believe with all of your heart and mind that here in this place—the sometimes “furnace”—is precisely where you had to come. You will learn to pray if indeed this is the desire of your heart and you will fall to your knees in earnest supplication. Studying theology is good. Practising the content of theology is even better. My only purpose here to forewarn you it is an arena where you must be well prepared to engage in spiritual warfare, at times brutal, with the self and the “bad” side of the ego. Pressures will arrive from every side. You will in all likelihood lose friends. You will be betrayed by some in whom you have placed your trust and perhaps had even loved. Your passions will surely be magnified. We come to seminaries wanting to be a Bonhoeffer or a Spurgeon or a Saint Maximus the Confessor, and then reality hits home hard. Above all let us work diligently on our own piece of clay and where we can help the other to do the same. For this is our lifelong task. Along the lines of what Carl Jung termed, “individuation” (the process of self-realization). We are made in the “image” but we forever work towards the “likeness”. I have thought of Christ’s “forty days and forty nights” (Matt. 4:1-11) in the desert as an analogy in some ways to the seminarian’s own testing—and especially if it leads to the priesthood.

All five who remained were ordained. Of these five, one would later ask to be relieved of their Holy Orders. This fellow was me. A decision, I must also confess, one cannot ever rightly find peace with. Particularly, if you belong to a believing community with entrenched religio-cultural values which are parts of each other. Yet, there is no escaping the fact that I took my hand off the plough and I will one day have to give an account to my Lord. Though I have referred to myself as a theologian, I do not wish to be known as one. The word alone, theologos (“one who speaks of God”), terrifies me for its implications and for the truth that I have every day fallen short of the mark. I am, indeed, the very least of the brethren. It is more than enough to ponder on the grace and mercies of our Creator. To be occasionally filled with an overwhelming awe—and to find opportunities to share this awe of the “tremendous mystery” with our neighbour. During our long walks down by the edge of the Pacific, that I might keep in practice, our beautiful husky, Mishka, will listen patiently as I ‘sermonize’ to her on the vitalness of endurance. Other times I will preach to the fish and the rocks and the trees, for all things are moving towards their transfiguration. This has now been my ‘captive’ congregation since the time of my exile. The photo which I have posted here after much toing and froing, I had not been able to hold for a long time. It is fine now. I have come to be grateful for that hour. I have understood a lot more of that journey in the ensuing years. And why it was necessary for me to cross this path. In spite of that, good things are never too far away for as the Scriptures say: “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose” (Rom. 8:28).

MG Michael Family Archives

Saint Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City, 1987

September 25th 2010

Gerringong, NSW

Caption: The con-celebration in Rome was preceded with a meeting in 1979 between the two Primates held in the Fener.

There are moments in our lives which leave us with such a strong impression that the picture will fade little with the passing of time. One of these instances I experienced in Rome, in December of 1987. I was twenty-seven years old, recently ordained into the holy diaconate of the Eastern Orthodox Church, yet here I was about to witness one of the most significant events in the relations between the two great churches since the “official” schism of 1054.[1] I had been travelling through Switzerland and was in Zermatt where I had decided to stop for a few days, but was able to make some fast changes to my travel itinerary hop on an express train and make it to the Eternal City. It would be just in time for the highly controversial con-celebration in Saint Peter’s Basilica between Pope John Paul II and Patriarch Demetrios I of Constantinople. Some days earlier the two religious leaders issued a joint-declaration from the Vatican stressing “the fraternal spirit between the churches.”[2] This meeting would also coincide with the anniversary of 1200 years from the convening of the 7th Ecumenical Council in Nicaea in 787.[3] In a solemn ceremony, in a place of worship where soaring architecture and astonishing art alone could strike you speechless, the Primates of West and East together recited in Greek the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed as originally put down in 381 AD:[4] without the filioque [“and from the Son”].[5] From that hour ecumenism careered into a new dimension and we would in the following decades become witness to the extreme articulations of both ‘liberals’ and ‘die-hard’ fundamentalists.[6] I believe, the implications of that great moment were not fully seized or realized. Even so, the foundation stone, directly implied in Ephesians 4:1-16 [‘the unity of the church’], has been forever put in place. 

Outside in Saint Peter’s Square among the throng of thousands happy enough to witness the momentous event on the giant monitors, another much smaller act was about to unfold. Entry into the Basilica on that day was by a special ticket, though it was plain enough to see that it was still hugely overcrowded. I was thinking how memorable it would be to witness it all from the inside. To be part of this historic occasion as it actually happened. It was then that I was approached by a nun who appeared to have been the superior of a small group of religious in her company. I could not rightly guess her age on account of her veil, but her face though visibly pale, was strikingly handsome. She smiled with the expected reserve of an experienced religious and promptly introduced herself, “Good morning Father, I am Sister Benedicta.” All the while during this short exchange Sister ‘Benedicta’ kept her hands clasped in front of her blue habit. A rosary with a pearl crucifix was intertwined between her fingers. She asked whether I would accept the biglietto of one of her group who at the last minute could not be there. It would still prove a challenge to make my way to the entrance, let alone get in. I thanked her and took the ticket.

I would have liked to talk to this softly-spoken woman, whose accent betrayed a French background, to have asked something of her life, but before I could rightly thank her, she and her little troop disappeared into the growing mass of people. Many years later in Bucharest when I had similarly lost the “old man” in the maddening rush of afternoon traffic, I would once more remember losing her, too, in the crowd. I reflect as I write this entry many years later, if I really did ‘lose’ them or if [for some reason] it was an unconscious act which I willed to happen: “[a]nd this that you call solitude is in fact a big crowd.” These disarming words from the Serbian poet Dejan Stojanovic challenge me more regularly as time flashes past and I do further battle with the twin concepts of ‘community’ and ‘solitude’.

I pushed and shoved through this great sea of animated bodies to get to my destination. At last after showing my ticket to the officials I was treated with new found respect and escorted to the front of Saint Peter’s Basilica. My seat was only a few rows behind the impressive congregation of VIPs. The sister’s friend must have been somebody quite important to have been allotted a seat this close to the historic proceedings. Whose place did I take? And why in that mass of people did she choose me? There in the company of cardinals and bishops, and of politicians and celebrities, I became increasingly agitated. At the end of these solemn proceedings together with the other clergy in those front rows, this little boy with the peculiar name from Newtown would meet the Pope. As for the genial Patriarch of the Eastern Orthodox [“the first amongst equals”] I would meet again in the Fener during a Christmas liturgy at the Church of Saint George in Istanbul. I felt my chest puff up and my head begin to spin. Clichés are not altogether redundant. One moment I wanted it all and knew that I could make it happen. For such are the deadly games which the ego, or better still ‘the id’ can play on us, to fuel us with a heightened sense of self-importance. Much of the ‘hard work’ I had reasoned was already done. All the big boxes [education and network] were ticked. A few minutes later I was deeply sickened by what I was feeling and realized that such high-places were not meant for me. I was possessed with too much ‘bad’ pride which I could feel running through me like the foreboding sense of mortality, and I would need to fight against it for the remainder of my life. From that time onwards whenever such opportunities might again present themselves to me, I would have to make sure to ‘uproot’ myself. And flee into the darkness in search of the ‘compensation’. This I would do more than once. I do not wish to pretend it was easy.

It never was. This need to recognize my voice.

[1] https://www.patriarchate.org/meetings-between-ecumenical-patriarchs-and-popes-of-rome-through-history

[2] https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/joint-declaration-8155

[3] https://www.apostolicpilgrimage.org/meetings-of-popes-patriarchs

[4] https://orthodoxwiki.org/Nicene-Constantinopolitan_Creed

[5] http://www.usccb.org/beliefs-and-teachings/ecumenical-and-interreligious/ecumenical/orthodox/filioque-church-dividing-issue-english.cfm 

[6] http://www.orthodoxresearchinstitute.org/articles/ecumenical/hallam_orthodoxy_ecumenism.html

Random Thoughts

In the first instance some random thoughts to myself:

Oh sweetest Jesus to exist in that moment when we act and are moved by selfless love alone.

Pure self-love is to practise compassion on your dying self.

Pure selfless love is difficult to practise because like light it reveals all which is not clean in our hearts. For a season this divine disclosure can hurt more than physical pain.

We shall be given a second chance to embrace the magnificence of humility as our death draws near. Let us hope our deaths are not sudden.

Few things are more beneficial for the soul than to pray for our adversaries that they might outlive and outshine us, but it is not easy and the revelation of that hour might disappear for many years.

We cannot practise love or any of the virtues outside our encounter with the other. Your spouse, your neighbour, the brother or sister at the check-out counter, the cook in the café, and particularly those who might will us harm.

Vengeance clouds the mind and is a sure step to a catastrophe. It has nothing to do with justice.

It is oftentimes more difficult to forgive ourselves than to forgive those who have trespassed against us. Outside our Creator nobody knows the depth and extent of our transgressions better than I who has committed them. So we continue to unnecessarily punish ourselves and without mercy.

It is a temptation which goes under many names, to dismiss the spiritual insights of those outside our own community of believers, but in so doing we would hold to no account the beckoning call of the Holy Ghost to all His children.

If we cannot acknowledge the Creator in the presence of our brother and sister through acts of charity and mercy, we would have accomplished nothing even if we should have gained the whole world.

Hold no high expectations from people, and particularly from those nearest to you, for similarly to you they are struggling and fighting to survive. This is one of the surest ways to peace, to recollect and to reflect upon our shared moral infirmity. To meditate upon our common brokenness.

It is important to remember the distinction between solitude [which is good] and isolation [which is bad]. Such is the difference as is between angels and demons. There can be community in solitude, but not in isolation.

Do not be deceived by those sleek presentations which promise fast paths to ‘inner knowledge’. In the beginning the path to inner knowledge is strewn with difficulties and it can be offending and brutal. At the start it is not at all comely to look at. Few would want to have anything to do with it.

The search for truth does not end, it starts afresh from a higher vantage point as revelation increases. We must be careful that ‘truth’ does not become our comfortable resting bed.

Belief comes before faith, like prayer comes before the heart which doubts.

Philosophy cannot teach us how to pray or to offer up ourselves as a living sacrifice. But prayer can reveal the truth of philosophy to us.

Truth and interior silence are synonyms. Noise is the great enemy.

Ego and pride will be the last to go. “Who am I?” When you are gone the world will go on without you. Who will weep for you?

Hope is not an illusion or a fantasy. I can place my trust in hope but not in an illusion or a fantasy.

The most useful tears are those that dry like herbs.

Despair, too, like all things, it will pass. It is not who you are, it is a response to those painful things which presently surround you. 

To practise discernment is to recognise that alongside the dumbfounding beauty of the world there also exists dreadful wickedness. And then to be able to judge well between the two.

To contemplate upon the great mystery of existence, and to look inwardly to discover that Creation has not stopped. You are aflame with stardust.

Compassion is the key to unlocking the deeper mysteries of love.

Gift your neighbour the benefit of the doubt and a thousand lives will be saved.

MGM

The realms of unconditional love

Gerringong, NSW

I was fortunate that this truth stumbled upon me when I was broken enough to receive it. Pride is a barrier to all things really important and is never wholly defeated. One of the most difficult and ‘objectionable’ of prayers aimed directly at the ego: Lord, I pray for anonymity.[1] Had I been a younger man when I feigned to be inclusive of my heterodox brethren and when in reality I was fundamentalist almost to the core, I would have been too proud or too arrogant, probably both, to get off the high-horse and see past my own life-legend.[2] This truth which presses on us is amazingly straightforward yet one of the hardest challenges to a member of a believing community, in particular to a believer who has invested years in the building and defending of their life-legend. This is not difficult to understand.

Good religious people with sincere and honest intentions want for their ‘Myth’ to be the right one,[3] for this will validate their life and give reason and meaning to the suffering and to the wounds along the way. It has been correctly pointed out for instance, that if we are to look for the unifying theme in the writings of Dostoyevsky, it is his exploration of the human condition centred about the need to be sure of at least one thing. Kierkegaard before him would ask a similar question of his readers, do we will the one thing and what is this one thing? And yet a believer need not abandon the consolation of their spiritual home to concede that others may make comparable claims as to the comprehension of the Right Way. Here is found the delicious irony: the truer and more profound one’s own religious experience within the believing community, that is for instance, the ‘more’ Christian, or Jewish, or Muslim… the more humble and cognizant one is of their own lowly position before the Almighty Creator. Some like the German-Swiss philosopher Frithjof Schuon have spoken of that which underlies religion, the religio perennis, or the religion of the heart, the religio cordis. 

Within this atmosphere of the mutual understanding of the uniqueness and preciousness of our neighbour, the more tender and compassionate does the heart become in acknowledging the right of the other to exist and to explore and to love. At its crux, terrorism has nothing to do with the practice of religion but is a movement of violence which makes use of and exploits both religious rhetoric and sacred paradigms. This is exactly what the ‘anti-theists’ have not been able or have not wanted to understand. Cultural Marxism (at least in the West and certainly post 1920’s) has played a big part in the establishment of the “religion is violent” narrative. Diving deeper into the Divine (or into “the Aleph” as some mystics might say) takes you further into the realms of unconditional Love and into the opposite direction of the bomb makers whatever their stripe. Ultimately, the greatest force for change on earth which neither yields nor breaks and is ancient even beyond the oldest stars, is that energy which has its source in the Light. Let us then not underestimate our own possibilities, for light  too we have learnt, can be reflected from dust.

One of the great joys in my teaching life was when one of my under-graduate students at the University of Wollongong (UOW) came to my office to thank me for re-igniting the religious zeal in her heart. I was surprised but more so very deeply moved. This student was a Muslim and I her teacher a Christian. This gifted young lady would go on to earn a highly commended doctorate and inspired both Katina and myself, her two thesis supervisors, in equal measure. The busier we are trying to live and to work out our own religion, the less time we will have to bury our neighbour’s. On the problematical question of religious plurality or ‘Ecumenism’ I am in free-fall somewhere between Karl Rahner’s “Anonymous Christian”, and John Hick’s “mutually inclusive inclusivism”. For many years I have held to the Apokatastasis.[4] Not as a dogma, but as a theologoumenon which is a theological opinion. Nowhere am I suggesting that doctrine is not important. Precisely because it is that we should not spend our time fighting over it, but rather we should be immersing ourselves in the understanding of its eschatological and soteriological implications.

There is an extraordinarily beautiful and telling admonition aimed at Peter by Jesus in the last chapter in the Gospel of John which proved defining for me as I battled with issues of my own faith and ministry. Peter, pointing to the younger disciple John and curious as to his future, asks Christ, “But Lord, what about this man?” Jesus said to him, “If I will that he remain till I come, what is that to you? You follow me” (Jn 21:21-22). In other words: mind your own business, and go about your work.

George, Eleni, and Jeremy, my three beautiful children, should you ever read these little reflections from your dad when you are grown up, this is all that I would want for you to take away: hold fast onto the faith you have received and exchange it for nothing of the world and for nil of its promises; at the same time do not close your ears or limit your wonder to the unique stories of others who have gone on a different journey nor shut your eyes or your heart to the divine presence in the other who is standing before you; and be the first to offer to fill your neighbour’s cup with cool water. This alone would have made my life worth living.

[1] This little prayer uttered by an idealistic young clergyman in a hotel room in Athens one evening, might be better understood nowadays given the internet and the rise of social media, as more of a condition of the spirit and state of mind rather than an actuality or a possibility.

[2] By life-legend I simply want to term the story we write for ourselves to describe and to justify our decision making and personal history. That is, all of that which goes into the creation and development of our identity and world-view.  

[3] I will normally use myth close to the intentions of Carl Jung for whom “mythmaking” was a pathway for the unconscious part of our psyche to express itself. It is one of the ways of how the collective unconscious strives to become conscious.

[4] For an excellent summary of this theological opinion held by a number of the Church Fathers, see Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Church, (Penguin Books: London, 1993), 261-263.