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

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.