6-9-23 Bulletin

We human beings hunger for eternity more than anything else. While animals are happy to live in a state of contentment, doing by nature (instinct) what God created them to do, we humans live our lives, in this world, in a state of deep existential anxiety. Because no matter how healthy or wealthy or settled and secure we may pretend to be, there is always a hidden but unmistakable uneasiness about the way we experience and interpret our human “condition.” The poets and artists express this “existential angst” the best—that something has gone awry with “being” human or, more succinctly, that we are experiencing an acute sense of loneliness and emptiness deep down inside. As in T.S. Elliot’s poem The Hollow Men: “We are the hollow men, We are the stuffed men, Leaning together, Headpiece filled with straw…” As Orthodox Christians, we are not surprised that we experience this deeper anxiety and unease. We know that as long as we are “in this world” we are alienated from the Kingdom of God. We know what it means to be lost and lonely, and we know that this is the result of having lost touch with our souls. For it is only from the soul that we can find peace, rest, and joy. Thus, while the world goes about its business, which is meant to “help” distract people from this basic truth that life can only be lived from the depths of one’s soul, we as believers strive to recover our souls so that we might experience the eternity for which we were made.

Eternity is here and now and not only at the “end of time.” Indeed, the fundamental purpose of the human soul is to manifest the mystery by which the timelessness of God enters into our being and suffuses it with the uncreated light.  Contrarily, human beings who no longer have a soul that is alive and filled with the grace of God are doomed to a living death, to what the Czech writer Milan Kundera calls, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.”

Our salvation in Christ can thereby be understood as the reversal of a fundamental existential priority. The “fall” of our human race in the Garden of Eden brought about a way of living that prioritized materiality, worldliness, and the “pleasures of the flesh.” Because of this, we human beings experience only “the outside of life,” having lost the deeper understanding of “the inside of life” which emanates from the hidden powers of the soul. And because we are dead on the inside, we “default” to the fleshly passions (food, drink, sex) which can only give a brief semblance of a happy and blessed life. It is not for nothing that we live in a country that has such a “high quality of living” and yet where so many people portray shallowness, sadness, and regret.

Now this reversal of the fall, which is a moving from the “outside of life” to the “inside of life,” is not something we can do as human beings on our own. It cannot be affected by reading a book, or by a “program” of spirituality. For the basic message of the gospel is that only Christ can bestow upon us the healing and transformation needed in order to restore the soul to its proper preeminence, so that we might truly recover the “inside of life.” Liturgy and sacraments are necessary medicine for this change to take place. It is a life-long endeavor.

But more than anything else, by God’s grace the only way for us to recover our souls is to practice both solitude and stillness. Solitude is our temporary removal from the society of men, from the rush and hustle of the world, from vain talk, and especially from the exterior “racket” that surrounds us on all sides. For as long as we are being flooded by the busy-ness and noise of the world, it will be impossible to discover that there is a depth to our human experience that transcends external feelings and thoughts. And this is just what the devil wants. Satan’s goal is self-alienation, which is the outcome of our separation from God. For if we are alienated from God, it will necessarily follow that we will not only be alienated from others but even from ourselves, from a deeper knowledge that it is the soul that reveals to us the mystery of who we truly are in the eyes of God and that we are loved by Him in a way that is beyond human comprehension.

What is salvation? Salvation is the way we overcome the inner death, which is the death of the human soul while still in this world. We accomplish this by becoming one with Christ and through a life-long endeavor of prayer and solitude.

Fr. Paul Jannakos