Stalking God
The Great Effort Required in Becoming a Christian
Page 4 of 4
Essay Posted June 19, 2007 by James E. Nelson
INDEX:
Page 1, State of Being and Relationship
Page 2, Muskrat Love
Page 3, The Work of Losing Myself
Page 4, Perfection (this page)
Perfection
The Orthodox faithful are taught that they can achieve perfection, and that is a patently offensive idea to the average Western mind. But the offense goes back to the difference between “state of being” and “relationship” that we began with so many pages ago. From the “state of being” perspective, once I have achieved perfection I will remain perfect. Sanctification, in this perspective, is like a stair-step and perfection is the plateau, the goal. The idea that we could achieve this plateau, this ultimate state of being, in this life is unthinkable.
And rightly so.
Such a perception inserts the divine attribute of unchangeableness into the scriptural call to perfection; it assumes that the divine attribute of unchangeableness is a necessary part of perfection. It is a subtle idolatry to think that we can become unchangeably perfect, and thus achieve God’s very essence.
Perfection, in the Orthodox view, grows out of our relationship rather than our state of being. We are called to be perfectly in relationship with God so that God’s righteousness may perfectly flow into our perfectly emptied being, perfectly transforming us into that which God intended us to be. And on certain days, the spiritual athlete will enter into such a relationship and it will change him forever.
St. Silouan the Athonite had just such an experience as a relatively young man. He met Jesus Christ in a manner profound beyond words. At that moment his perfect emptiness, his purity of heart, allowed God’s perfect love flow into him and he saw God. Following the event he slowly fell into despair. His despair grew out of the same false impression that Annie Dillard had when she first saw her muskrat: “It was a once-in-a-lifetime thing, and you’ve had your once.” But slowly Silouan returned to is disciplines, his “work,” the task of losing self, and on occasions he again was given the gift of perfection and sublime vision of seeing God.
One might think Silouan lucky to be given such a grand gift. He himself saw it rather differently, closer to curse than blessing. Once you have witnessed the unsurpassable beauty of God, the world remains dull and flat. Once you have been momentarily given the fullness of the joy of the kingdom, the world becomes a place of sorrow and longing. Once you have been given the gift of purity of heart and have seen God, every other day of fellowship is experienced as Divine absence. Even God’s blessed gifts are experienced as a sort of Divine denial because they are not experienced in their fulness.
But that sounds too harsh. For the denial leads to longing, which leads to an inexpressible joy in the knowledge of the beatific nature of God’s goodness and the hope that you will participate in it eternally. And it leads to even greater effort and desire to serve this good God and the good creation which he graciously gave us.
But Annie Dillard says it far better than I can.
Moses said to God, “I beseech thee, shew me thy glory.” And God said, “Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live.” But he added, “There is a place by me, and thou shalt stand upon a rock: and it shall come to pass, while my glory passeth by, that I will put thee in a clift of the rock, and will cover thee with my hand while I pass by: And I will take away mine hand, and thou shalt see my back parts: But my face shall not be seen.” So Moses went up on Mount Sinai, waited still in a clift of the rock, and saw the back parts of God. Forty years later he went up on Mount Pisgah, and saw the promised land across the Jordan, which he was to die without ever being permitted to enter.
Just a glimpse, Moses: a clift in the rock here, a mountaintop there, and the rest is denial and longing. You have to stalk everything. Everything scatters and gathers; everything comes and goes like fish under a bridge. You have to stalk the spirit, too. You can wait forgetful anywhere, for anywhere is the way of his fleet passage, and hope to catch him by the tail and shout something in his ear before he wrests away. Or you can pursue him wherever you dare, risking the shrunken sinew in the hollow of the thigh; you can bang at the door all night till the innkeeper relents, if he ever relents; and you can wail till you’re hoarse or worse the cry for incarnation always in John Knoepfle’s poem: “and christ is red rover . . . and the children are calling/come over come over.” I sit on a bridge as on Pisgah or Sinai, and I am both waiting becalmed in a clift of the rock and banging with all my will, calling like a child beating on a door: Come on out! . . . I know you’re there.
And occasionally the mountains part. The tree with the lights in it appears, the mockingbird falls, and time unfurls across space like an oriflamme. Now we rejoice. The news, after all, is not that muskrats are wary, but that they can be seen. [pp 204f]
[The falling of the mockingbird refers to another remarkable story she tells earlier in the book, which I will not recount here.]
And this is the “great effort” of the Orthodox manner of salvation. We can easily reduce it to little things: Doing good works, saying good prayers, thinking good thoughts, living a good life. But such little things diminish salvation unspeakably. We can also easily turn it into a story about me, my efforts, my prayer, my thoughts, my life. But only when I am truly absent and God’s grace and presence truly becomes everything, do I glimpse who I truly am. And I recognize that who I truly am is purely gift, purely grace, and because it comes from God himself, purely glory.
This “great effort” to which we are called is great. It is a big thing. It is a hard thing, and sadly, precisely because it is hard, and precisely because we are prone to sloth, we settle for little graces which God leaves about like grandma’s candy plate, which we can pick up and pop in our mouth as we pass her reading chair, her kitchen counter, her table by the entry door. We confuse these little graces freely offered with God’s great sacrament of love. And we are poorer for it.
Thomas Merton wrote, “There is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues.” There is always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end. It is so self-conscious, so apparently moral, simply to step aside from the gaps where the creeks and winds pour down, saying, I never merited this grace quite rightly, and then to sulk along the rest of your days on the edge of rage. I won’t have it. The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus.
Ezekiel excoriates false prophets as those who have “not gone up into the gaps.” The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit’s one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself for the first time like a once-blind man unbound. The gaps are the clifts in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are the fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fiords splitting the cliffs of mystery. Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock—more than a maple—a universe. This is how you spend this afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you. [pp 268f]
Annie Dillard. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Harper's Magazine Press (Published in Association with Harper & Row, New York). 1974.
Ideas for this essay were also generated by Robert C. Koons, “A Lutheran's Case for Roman Catholicism,” found at http://www.utexas.edu/cola/depts/philosophy/faculty/koons/case_for_catholicism.pdf
INDEX:
Page 1, State of Being and Relationship
Page 2, Muskrat Love
Page 3, The Work of Losing Myself
Page 4, Perfection (this page)
Copyright © 2007 James E. Nelson (Just Another Jim). All Rights Reserved.
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