Asceticism and the Replacement Talk
It’s that overcoming of that secularization which is inherent in our culture. Now I think one of the things that is very important for us (and I am going to be getting to the whole consumerism and asceticism thing) because this is the foundation. Because what is secular inside [us] is the root of consumerism. And it is precisely what we have to fight against with asceticism. Secularism I believe comes from the loss of communion with God. It comes from the loss of our awareness of God. What were created for in the beginning was to be in an intuitive communion, an intuitive awareness of God and his will. Right? Just look at Genesis 1. And 2. An intuitive awareness of God. Just like Jesus had. And in our brokenness, in our fallenness, we lost that intuitive awareness of God. An according to the Fathers of the Eastern Church, what we did we put in its place? Rationalism. Now, God gave us our reason. He created it as something exquisite, as an image of his own. But we take that, for us to operate in that authentic humanity, and that authentically rational mode of being, it has to be informed, and the Eastern fathers would say “governed by”, our spiritual intuition. Our intuitive awareness of God and his will, and of his presence. The more that we ignore God, and I don’t know about you, but I am frequently [guilty?] of that, the more we ignore God, the more disintegrated our minds and our hearts are. The more we are thrown back purely onto our very broken and flawed reasonings – one of the prayers of our tradition, a prayer after communion, says “save me from the vanity of my own reasonings”—because unless they are informed by that living experience of communion, which is the very definition of what the Faith is, they’re just going to lead us around and around and around in a circle. Actually, what it’s like is…I like to use the analogy, remember those graphite toys, where you turn the little knobs, and you saw everything in two-dimensional surface? What were they called, an Etch-A-Sketch or something like that? That’s life in a two-dimensional universe. Life without God, life led in obliviousness to God – what St Isaac calls the second [level?] of consciousness – is like living in a two-dimensional world. Very informed condition by your senses, by your desires, by your lusts, your passions – passion not in the sense of what you love, but in the sense of what controls you – your anger, your regret, and your bitterness and hatred, and all these other passions, the seven deadly sins … and you can’t see out of it.
How many times, especially those enrolled at secular colleges, [say] I don’t believe anything that I can’t measure, that I can’t understand, that I can’t touch, or that I can’t find. I hear that a lot from college students. That’s being trapped in a two-dimensional world. I liken it to the Flat Earth Society, because once God touches our hearts, and illumines our hearts with the knowledge of his existence, with the awareness of his presence, not just knowledge about God, because knowledge about God, there are endless theological bookstores with knowledge about God, will not save you. It’s only knowledge of God, as a person, that saves us.
And so, when God touches our hearts and illumines us, and calls us to himself, and calls us to knowledge of him, we can’t live in that little two-dimensional world any more. Our whole paradigm is shattered, because now I am in a new three-dimensional world and that third dimension in God. And we can no longer imagine what it’s like to be trapped in a two-dimensional world. There’s a little book out, from a priest in Tennessee, Father Stephen Freeman, that talks about a two-story world. Where, even if we are so often profess belief in God, but it’s like God lives “upstairs”, and we never go upstairs. But God is up there for sure, we think. But we just continue to live our life on our first floor, and we think that God is up there and is just waiting for us to maybe show up and maybe not. But how often do we live that kind of compartmentalized life. To think that God is “out there” someplace? That, rather than the most important and critical thing for us to understand, as Christians, is that God is present everywhere, filling all things, all the time. That we live in the context of God.
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