ECSTASY AS SOLACE: I really liked this quote from Fr. Alexander Schmemann, found via Wesley Hill:

Secularism is a religion because it has a faith, it has its own eschatology and its own ethics. And it “works” and it “helps.” Quite frankly, if “help” were the criterion, one would have to admit that life-centered secularism helps actually more than religion. To compete with it, religion has to present itself as “adjustment to life,” “counselling,” “enrichment,” it has to be publicized on subways and buses as a valuable addition to “your friendly bank” and all other “friendly dealers”: try it, it helps! And the religious success of secularism is so great that it leads some Christian theologians to “give up” the very category of “transcendence,” or in much simpler words, the very idea of “God.” This is the price we must pay if we want to be “understood” and “accepted” by modern man, proclaim the Gnostics of the twentieth century.

For it is here that we reach the heart of the matter. For Christianity, help is not the criterion. Truth is the criterion. The purpose of Christianity is not to help poeple by reconciling them with death, but to reveal the Truth about life and death i order that people may be saved by this Truth. Salvation, however, is not only not identical with help, but is, in fact, opposed to it. Christianity quarrels with religion and secularism not because they offer “insufficient help,” but precisely because they “suffice,” because the “satisfy” the needs of men. If the purpose of Christianity were to take away from man the fear of death, to reconcile him with death, there would be no need for Christianity, for other religions have done this, indeed, better than Christianity. And secularism is about to produce men who will gladly and corporately die — and not just live — for the triumph of the Cause, whatever it may be.

Christianity is not reconciliation with death. It is the revelation of death, and it reveals death because it is the revelation of Life. Christ is this Life. And only if Christ is Life is death what Christianity proclaims it to be, namely an enemy to be destroyed, and not a “mystery” to be explained.

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So here are some random thoughts prompted by this quotation. Take home what resonates with you and discard the rest as the styrofoam peanuts of my stupidity!

One thing I like about this quote–I like a lot of things about it, but this is one–is that it may seem to contradict Augustine’s famous line about how “our hearts are restless ’til we rest in Thee,” and yet I really don’t think it does. Just as the Desert Fathers often seem to contradict themselves (let alone one another!) because they’re addressing very different seekers with radically divergent needs, weaknesses, and longings, so I think Schmemann is simply not addressing the same kind of person Augustine is. I suspect each of us is a Schmemann-addressee some of the time and an Augustine-addressee some of the time, although we’ll sway more toward one end or the other (I’m much more an A-a, I think), so here are some scattered thoughts about Christ as comforter and as troubler of the waters.

First, Christ always stands against contentment. If you’re satisfied you aren’t a philosopher, let alone a Christian. Christ, like the James Bond franchise, tells us that The World Is Not Enough.

Sometimes we really need to hear that! Sometimes we are content to cultivate our gardens, to love the people we want to love and turn away from the shadow of death. An immense amount of basic, boring, necessary good gets done in the world by people who are contented… and yet that should never be enough for us.

Then there are those of us for whom the inadequacy of immanent beauty and everyday love is all too obvious. We’re like the people in the AA slogan, for whom “one drink is too many and a hundred isn’t enough.” We’re like the people in Chesterton’s punchline, which was instrumental in my conversion: “The man who enters the whorehouse is seeking God.” We’re like the Bagthorpes, in Helen Cresswell’s terrifically sardonic children’s series, whose family motto might be Too Much Is Never Enough.

It’s easy for those who can suffice themselves on the incredible loveliness of this life to look down on those of us who can’t. They can accuse us of ingratitude and of pretension; who promised us a life in capital letters? And so they can remain where they are.

And it’s easy for those of us who do feel that both ourselves and the world are radically insufficient to make do with “cheap grace,” in the form of politics or alcohol or art or psychoanalysis, all of which are well enough in their own right and legitimate sources of insight and/or ekstasis but none of which are as big as the need. All of these possibilities are erotic in some sense, but none are as erotic as religious devotion. (But then, what is?) And so we, too, find a million ways to remain where we are.

Or to summarize this entire post in two sentences: A life without unconditional surrender is banal. Only in devotion to God can the ecstasy of surrender marry the solace of ethical love.